It was made.

Red Cloud and the allied coalition made it, through two years of sustained effort and effective strategy.

The U.S. government unmade part of it, eight years later, through different decisions in different circumstances.

Both sets of choices were made by specific people in specific situations.

Neither was inevitable.

History is the product of those choices, and understanding them clearly — without the retrospective teleology that makes everything seem foreordained — is essential to understanding what actually happened and why.

The United States lost Red Cloud’s War.