The Battle of Cedar Creek occurred on October 21, 1876, during the Great Sioux War of 1876, a conflict arising from the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne's major victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn earlier that summer. Colonel Nelson A. Miles led the 5th United States Infantry Regiment from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, traveling up the Missouri River by paddlewheel boat to help subdue the Native American forces. The battle broke out after negotiations between Colonel Miles and Chief Sitting Bull failed to produce a peaceful resolution.
The engagement involved Colonel Nelson A. Miles commanding the 5th United States Infantry Regiment against a force of Lakota Sioux warriors. Miles had joined General Alfred Terry on Rosebud Creek in autumn and marched with him up the Rosebud to meet with General Crook. The combined commands moved east, crossed the Tongue River, and reached the mouth of the Powder River, where they separated with different objectives—General Crook moved south and east toward the Black Hills while a detachment under Captain Anson Mills engaged the Native American forces at Cedar Creek.
The battle concluded with a decisive outcome for the United States military. Approximately 2,000 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children representing 400 lodges surrendered to Colonel Miles just six days after the initial engagement on October 21, 1876. This surrender effectively ended this phase of Native American resistance during the Great Sioux War of 1876, demonstrating the military pressure exerted by the coordinated operations of Miles, Terry, and Crook against the Sioux and Cheyenne forces.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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