The sustained attrition campaign that was Red Cloud’s actual strategic instrument doesn’t lend itself as easily to the visual storytelling of documentary or film.

And there is the silence of the victor.

Red Cloud continued to speak and advocate throughout his long post-war life, but his statements were filtered through the American press, which characterized them according to the interests and assumptions of American readers.

His advocacy for treaty rights was covered as the demands of a defeated chief seeking handouts rather than as the legal claims of a leader whose treaty rights had been violated.

The result is a story that was always there — in the treaty records, in the military reports, in the congressional testimony, in Red Cloud’s own extensive public statements — but that never quite made it into the popular historical consciousness.