The Sioux reported that they had lost eleven hundred and thirty-five warriors. Red Cloud's nephew was sorely wounded in the charge. Captain Fetterman's loss was Lieutenant Jenness and two men killed, two men wounded. He said that when the reinforcements, with the cannon, arrived from Fort Kearney, while the Sioux were removing their dead, he was in despair. Another charge or two and he would have been wiped out.
But the road remained closed. Red Cloud remained in the path. This fall the Government decided that, after all, it had no right to open the road. In April of the next year, 1868, another treaty was signed with the Sioux and the Cheyennes, by which the United States gave up any claim to the Powder River and Big Horn country, and the Indians promised to let the Union Pacific Railroad alone.
Red Cloud did not sign. "The white men are liars," he insisted; and he waited until the three forts, Smith and Kearney and Reno, were abandoned. Then, in November, after his warriors had burned them, and all the soldiers were gone out of the country, he put his name to the treaty.
Thus he won out. He had said that he would close the road, and he had done it.
Through the following years he remained quiet. He had had his fill of fighting. His name was great. He was head chief of the Red Cloud agency, later called Pine Ridge. Spotted Tail of the Brulés controlled the other agency, later called Rosebud.
Red Cloud always closely watched the whites. He was at peace, but suspicious. When the Black Hills were finally demanded by the United States, he sent out men to count the buffalo. The number in sight was too small. Some day, soon, the Indians would have no meat on their hunting grounds. Therefore Red Cloud decided that the red men must begin to live by aid of the white man; and he favored the reservations—even the sale of the Black Hills so that his people would be made rich enough to settle down.
He was looked up to as a warrior and a councillor, but the United States did not trust him; and after a time, put Spotted Tail over him, in charge of the two agencies. This made bad feeling, and Red Cloud and Spotted Tail did not speak to each other. However, his own people, who rose under Sitting Bull, urged him to join with them, in vain.
Red Cloud lived to be a very old man. He became almost blind, and partly paralyzed. He stuck to his one wife. They were together for many years.
He died in December, 1909, in a two-story house built for him by the Government on the Pine Ridge agency in South Dakota. He was aged eighty-seven. Five years before he had given his chief-ship over to his son, young Red Cloud, who carried the name. It is a name that will never be forgotten.