The soldiers were gone.

The forts were empty.

In August 1868, the United States Army marched out of three fortifications it had built in the Powder River Country of what is now Wyoming and Montana.

No battle had driven them out that day.

No enemy stood at the gates demanding their departure.

The Army simply left — and the men who had defended those posts against more than two years of sustained resistance walked away from buildings they had constructed at considerable cost in lives and money.

Within hours of the soldiers’ departure, the forts were burning.

The Lakota people set them on fire.

It was not a gesture of celebration in the theatrical sense.

It was a statement of finality.

These structures — Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, Fort C.F.

Smith — had been built without permission on land that the Lakota and their Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho allies considered their own.

They were not going to stand.

The man most associated with forcing this outcome was Red Cloud, an Oglala Lakota leader who had walked out of a treaty negotiation in 1866 when he understood what the Army was proposing to do, who had then helped organize and sustain a two-year resistance campaign, and who would not sign a new peace agreement until he had personally seen that the forts were gone.

He waited.

The forts were abandoned.

He watched them burn.

Then he signed.