In the corral Captain Powell had told his twenty-six soldiers and four civilians to fight for their lives. The poor shots were ordered to load guns and pass them as fast as possible to the crack shots.
Red Cloud rallied his whole force, of more than two thousand. He dismounted eight hundred and sent them forward to crawl along the ground, as sharpshooters; they ringed the corral with bullets and arrows.
He himself led twelve hundred, afoot, for a charge. His young nephew was his chief aide--to win the right to be head chief after Red Cloud's death.
But although they tried, in charge after charge, for three hours, they could not enter the little fort. Sometimes they got within ten yards--the soldiers threw augers at them, and they threw the augers back--and back they reeled, themselves. The guns of the little fort never quit!
Red Cloud still could not understand. He called a council. In the opinion of his chiefs and braves, the white soldiers were armed with guns that shot of themselves and did not need reloading.
The squaws on the hills were wailing; his men were discouraged; many had fallen. So finally he ordered that the bodies be saved, and the fight ended. His braves again crawled forward, behind shields, with ropes; tied the ropes to the bodies, in spite of the bullets, and running, snaked the bodies away behind them.
"Some bad god fought against us," complained the Red Cloud people. "The white soldiers had a great medicine. We were burned by fire."
And all the Indians of the plains, hearing about the mystery, when the breech-loading rifles mowed down the Sioux and the Cheyennes, spoke of the bad god fight that defeated Chief Red Cloud.
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.