Red Cloud's War - Opposing Forces

Opposing Forces

Carrington left Fort Laramie for the Powder River Country on June 17, 1866. With him were 700 soldiers, 300 civilians, including wives, children, and civilian contractors, 226 wagons full of supplies, a 35-man regimental band, and 1,000 head of cattle for fresh meat. The number of soldiers reflected the reductions that had been made in the army since the Civil War. Previous military expeditions against the Sioux by Alfred Sully, Henry Hastings Sibley, and Patrick Edward Connor from 1863 to 1865 had numbered more than 2,000 soldiers.

Five hundred of Carrington's men were new recruits and most were infantry, rather than cavalry. He also had much less ammunition than the 100,000 rounds promised him. Carrington's men were armed with muzzle-loading Springfield rifles from the Civil War rather than new, faster-firing Spencer carbines and breech loading rifles. He had been "equipped with the men, arms, and supplies to build and garrison forts, not to wage war with an active army."

Carrington chose not to employ Indian scouts. Indian scouts would have provided him essential intelligence on his opponents and a mobile search-and-destroy attack force. Nearly all of the meager successes of the Powder River Expedition a year earlier were attributable to the Pawnee and Omaha scouts who had accompanied the expedition. A scout in another Indian war would say of soldiers, "Uncle Sam's boys are too slow for this kind of work." Carrington's guide was the seasoned Mountain man Jim Bridger.

Carrington's opponents, the nomadic hunting societies of the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, had advantages in mobility, horsemanship, knowledge of the country, guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, and the capability of concentrating their forces to achieve numerical superiority. They also had many weaknesses as a fighting force, especially in organization and weapons. During winter and spring scarcity of resources dictated that they live in small, scattered autonomous groups. In late summer and fall they congregated into large encampments for ceremonies and to make political decisions and plan collective action. However, individual Indians felt little obligation to obey group decisions. The Lakota consisted of seven independent bands each made up of numerous sub-bands, all of whom operated independently. The Cheyenne has a more structured and centralized political organization.

Historians have estimated that Red Cloud's warriors numbered up to 4,000 men. That estimate seems exaggerated. The total number of Lakota in 1865 was about 13,860. The Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho numbered about 3,000 adding up to a total of about 17,000 Indian men, women, and children. If one in four were adult males, the total number of warriors would be about 4,000, but thousands of people in all three of those tribes were not in the Powder River country with Red Cloud. Many who were stayed aloof from the war. Thus, it seems likely that Red Cloud had no more than 2,000 warriors and unlikely that he could put even that many men in the field at any given time. Indian men were only part-time warriors. They had to spend much of summer and fall each year hunting buffalo and other game to feed their families. In the late winter and spring they were limited in mobility until the grass turned green and their horses recovered from the severe winters of the northern Great Plains. Indian armies were further diminished in numbers, cohesion, and organization because individual Indians fought only when and how they chose to do so.

The Indians had few guns and little ammunition; only 6 of the 81 soldiers who were later killed in the Fetterman Fight had gunshot wounds, and two of those may have shot themselves. Their basic weapon was the bow and arrow, but the short (usually less the four feet long) and stout Indian bow was designed for short-distance hunting from horseback. Although deadly at short range, it probably had less than one-half the range of the English longbow which was effective to 200 yards (180 mts). Indian warriors lacked the capability to do significant damage to their opponents at ranges of more than 100 yards (90 mts). By contrast the soldier's Springfield Model 1861 muskets had an effective range of 300 yards or more. The Springfield musket, however, had a much lower rate of fire than the bow, offsetting to an extent its range advantage.