The Army’s attempts to develop effective counter-guerrilla tactics were only partially successful, and the debates about what worked and what didn’t would continue for years.

General Sherman’s aggressive approach — which ultimately produced the brutal campaigns of the early 1870s on the southern plains, including the destruction of villages and the slaughter of horses — was one response to the tactical problem.

It was effective in a brutal sense: destroying the material base of resistance communities broke the resistance, eventually.

But it required a level of violence against civilian populations that was hard to sustain politically and that produced its own backlash.

The specific failure of the Bozeman Trail military approach — the inability to secure a trail through contested territory with a garrison that couldn’t project power beyond its walls — was not fully integrated into Army doctrine.