As Ogalala Sioux war chief Red Cloud watched from a distance, U.S. soldiers packed up and left Fort C.F. Smith, beginning the abandonment of military posts along the Bozeman Trail.
Early the next day, Red Cloud and his warriors swooped down on the fort and burned it in celebration. For two years they’d resisted construction of Fort Smith and two other posts designed to guard the shortcut established by John Bozeman from the Powder River to the Montana gold fields. Fort Smith was the northernmost of the three and the only one in Montana Territory.
November the chief signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which created the Sioux Reservation in western South Dakota and officially ended what came to be called the Red Cloud War. He was the only Indian leader to win a significant war against the United States.
Fort C.F. Smith was built about 500 yards east of the Bighorn River south of Hardin. Vestiges of one of its two adobe sides remain four miles north of the town of Fort Smith, a popular jumping-off point for fishermen to the blue-ribbon trout waters below Yellowtail Dam.
Aug. 1, 1903
Calamity Jane died at 5 p.m. in a rented hotel room in Terry, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Martha Jane Cannary had lived 55 years, but she was much older, and her legend is ageless.
An inflammation of the bowels and/or pneumonia finally got her. Jane’s dying request was to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickock in Deadwood. While her body lay in state there, a wire screen was placed over Jane’s head to thwart those who would lop off a lock of hair or a ribbon for a souvenir.
Calamity Jane began dressing in man’s clothing while serving with the Army as a scout. A crack shot, bull-whacker, tobacco chewer, nurse, sideshow attraction, alleged prostitute and known drunk, she lived some of her later years in Montana. A photograph can be found online of a dress-clad woman said to be Jane drinking with Teddy Blue Abbott in front of a saloon in Gilt Edge west of Lewistown. Abbott, one of Montana’s most colorful cowboys, is wearing her flowered bonnet.
Calamity Jane’s fame reached its peak years after her death, thanks to dime store novels and movies starring the likes of Jean Arthur and Jane Russell.
Aug. 4, 1873
Nearly three years before his demise on the Little Big Horn, Lieutenant Col. George Armstrong Custer and some 90 soldiers barely avoided a fatal ambush on the Yellowstone, opposite present-day Miles City.
Custer and company were scouting for a Northern Pacific Railway survey party when six Sioux warriors lured them toward a grove of timber. More than 300 Indians charged from the trees, but the soldiers had time to fall back and regroup.
The attackers were held off for nearly four hours before dispersing in the face of a determined charge by the cavalrymen. An estimated 45 Indians and two whites lost their lives in the furious skirmish, and the survey continued up the Yellowstone. Actual construction of the railroad into Montana was postponed that same year for a decade by a financial crisis.
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