Sixteen on the Bozeman Trail — Hollow Horn Bear and the Fetterman Fight (1866)

By his mid-teens, Hollow Horn Bear was riding with his father Iron Shell's warriors in the raids across Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. In 1866 the army built forts along the Bozeman Trail through the Powder River country — the last great Lakota hunting grounds — and Red Cloud's War began. On December 21, 1866, near Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming, a decoy party led warriors under Captain William J. Fetterman over Lodge Trail Ridge and into one of the most complete defeats the army ever suffered on the plains: Fetterman and all eighty of his men were killed in less than an hour. The Lakota remember it as the Battle of the Hundred in the Hands. Hollow Horn Bear was about sixteen years old that winter, and Lakota accounts place him among the young Sicangu warriors of that war. In later years his part in the Bozeman Trail fighting became part of his renown — some accounts went so far as to name him among those credited with Fetterman's defeat, though the fight belonged to many bands and many leaders, Oglala, Minneconjou, Cheyenne, and Sicangu together. Two years later the army abandoned the forts and burned them behind it, and the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 recognized the Great Sioux Reservation — including the sacred He Sapa, the Black Hills, forever. Hollow Horn Bear spent the rest of his life holding the United States to the words of that treaty. ——— CREDITS & SOURCES About: Chief Hollow Horn Bear (Matȟó Héȟloǧeča), Sicangu Lakota, 1850–1913. This is a compiled account, drawn from the sources below — not a first-person telling. His exact role in the Fetterman Fight is told differently in different sources; what is certain is that he came of age as a warrior in Red Cloud's War. Sources: "Hollow Horn Bear," American National Biography (2000), by Duane Hollow Horn Bear; Edward S. Curtis, "The North American Indian," vol. 3 (1908), p. 186; Wikipedia, "Hollow Horn Bear" and "Fetterman Fight" (with full citations). Photo: Hollow Horn Bear, Bain News Service, 1913, Library of Congress (public domain). Shared in honor of Chief Hollow Horn Bear and his descendants.