honorable teaching of our old men? Shall we permit ourselves to be
driven to and fro -- to be herded like the cattle of the white man?"

His next speech that has been remembered was made in 1866,
just before the attack on Fort Phil Kearny. The tension of feeling
against the invaders had now reached its height. There was no
dissenting voice in the council upon the Powder River, when it was
decided to oppose to the uttermost the evident purpose of the
government. Red Cloud was not altogether ignorant of the numerical
strength and the resourcefulness of the white man, but he was
determined to face any odds rather than submit.

"Hear ye, Dakotas!" he exclaimed. "When the Great Father at
Washington sent us his chief soldier [General Harney] to ask for a
path through our hunting grounds, a way for his iron road to the
mountains and the western sea, we were told that they wished merely
to pass through our country, not to tarry among us, but to seek for
gold in the far west. Our old chiefs thought to show their
friendship and good will, when they allowed this dangerous snake in
our midst. They promised to protect the wayfarers.

"Yet before the ashes of the council fire are cold, the Great
Father is building his forts among us. You have heard the sound of
the white soldier's ax upon the Little Piney. His presence here is
an insult and a threat. It is an insult to the spirits of our
ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be plowed
for corn? Dakotas, I am for war!"

In less than a week after this speech, the Sioux advanced upon
Fort Phil Kearny, the new sentinel that had just taken her place