The Bonanza or Bozeman Trail

In the early 1860s there wasn’t a ranch in this country from Bismarck to Bozeman and from the Platte River to Canada. To non-Indians it was land considered “fit only to raise Indians” and while some of them were hoping for a crop failure, the majority were indifferent. They didn’t care how much the tribes fought amongst themselves. They were like the old-timer whose wife was battling a grizzly bear. He said he never had seen a fight where he took so little interest in the outcome. Then greed asserted itself and John Bozeman blazed a shortcut from the Oregon Trail at Laramie, Wyoming, to the gold diggin’s of southwestern Montana in 1863. The Bonanza or Bozeman Trail across the last great Indian hunting grounds forded the Yellowstone River near here, coming from the southeast. It was a trail soaked with the blood of warriors, soldiers, and immigrants. Thousands of Lakota warriors, primarily under Red Cloud, bolstered by hundreds of Northern Cheyennes and some Arapahos, fought against the trail for five years and forced its closure by the military in 1868, a rare victory of the tribes over the US Government.