From CGI member oldmaninthedesert:

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The more I read of this book,the more my disgust grows with the pond scum of Europe,who,raped,murdered and pillaged their way across the two American continents.I have found that the older I have got(now approaching my mid 60's),the greater my appreciation has become for those era's that came before me,and the human beings within them.The pond scum and their useful idiots are a different story though,their nefarious activities are same today as they were 154 years ago,244 years, or 1986 years ago,always lying,always murdering. You would think,or at least hope,the useful idiots would have caught on my now.Anyhow enough opinion,and a snip below from this entry....

....It is not recorded if, on learning of Caspar Collins’s death, General Connor expressed any remorse over his verbal lashing of the young lieutenant. But it is known that when news reached Connor of the fight at Bridge Station—soon to be renamed Fort Caspar and eventually the site of Wyoming’s state capital—he chafed to ride against the hostiles. The conclusion of the Civil War had finally made this possible. Though not technically a peace treaty, the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865 marked the de facto end of hostilities, and thus of the Confederacy. It also meant that the battered Army of the Republic was able to replace the raw state militias patrolling the west with seasoned troops better capable of confronting the Indians of the Great Plains. South of the Arkansas, this meant eradicating the Kiowa and the Comanche, who were blocking movement along the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. North of the Platte, it meant killing Red Cloud and Sitting Bull.

General Ulysses S. Grant, the Army’s commander in chief, had long planned such a moment. The previous November, the day after the Sand Creek massacre, Grant summoned Major General John Pope to his Virginia headquarters to put such plans in motion. Despite his relative youth, the forty three-year-old Pope was an old-school West Pointer and a topographical engineer surveyor whose star had risen with several early successes on western fronts in the Civil War. It had dimmed just as rapidly when Lincoln placed him in command of the eastern forces; Pope was thoroughly outfoxed by Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope had been effectively exiled to St. Paul, Minnesota, until Grant recalled him to consolidate under one command a confusing array of bureaucratic Army “departments” and “districts” west of St. Louis. Grant named Pope the commanding general of a new Division of the Missouri, into which he enfolded three fractious geographic departments: Northwest, Missouri, and Kansas. This new division was also enlarged to include Utah and parts of the Dakotas. Pope’s mandate was to execute an offensive in the summer of 1865 that would, among its prime objectives, make safe the trail stamped out by John Bozeman.

The new route went by many names: the Bozeman Trail, the Montana Road, the Bozeman Cutoff. But whatever it was called, it was the road to gold in Montana. It broke north from the great Oregon Trail and shortened the journey to the new gold fields in the rugged mountains of western Montana by some 400 weary, plodding miles. Pope had appointed General Dodge as his chief subordinate, and together the two decided on a campaign plan to crush the High Plains tribes with a large-scale pincer movement. General Connor’s forces would march north out of Fort Laramie to face Red Cloud, while General Sully would lead a column northwest from Sioux City to finally finish off Sitting Bull, with whom his cavalry had been skirmishing for the better part of two years.

full text
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/06/part-8-heart-of-everything-that-isthe.html