The Lakota and allied coalition did not capture the forts or defeat the garrison in pitched battle.

What they accomplished was more sophisticated and ultimately more durable: they made the entire enterprise so costly, so dangerous, and so economically unproductive that the United States government concluded it was better to negotiate a withdrawal than to continue an expensive and failing campaign.

That outcome — the formal abandonment of military posts and the closure of a major transportation route under a ratified treaty — was genuinely extraordinary in the history of American-Indian relations.

It reflected both the military and political sophistication of the resistance leadership and the specific circumstances of the 1866-68 period that made the American government willing to accept a concession it would not have made before and would not make again.