It could launch offensive operations into the surrounding country — but the Lakota and their allies were mobile in ways that the Army’s largely infantry-based forces were not, and the country was vast enough that pursuit operations were difficult and expensive.

It could try to negotiate — which it eventually did.

There was also a political dimension to the problem.

The U.S.

Congress was in the middle of the Reconstruction era, with the enormous political and financial demands of integrating the former Confederate states, managing the aftermath of the Civil War, and developing the political framework for the post-war nation.

Spending large amounts of money and military resources to maintain forts that weren’t serving their stated purpose, on land where the legal title was genuinely contested, in a war that Congress had never formally declared — this was not attractive policy in a period of intense domestic political pressure.

The Politics of a Failing War