Whether you like history or not, if you care about bravery, wisdom, passion, larger than life characters and some of the most emotionally intense moments, in human experience, you have come to the right place.

Danielle Bellelli is a university history professor, writer and martial artist, and he shall be your guide in a journey to the place where history and epic collide.

This is the second in a multi-par series dedicated to the life of Lakota Leader Crazy Horse in specific, and the conflict between the US and tribes on the Great Plains in general.

It's probably a wise idea to check out the previous episode before you get started on this one, so that the events narrated here will make more sense.

As I mentioned also in my first episode of this series, this whole series is dedicated to the memory of my friend James Weddle from the Youngton Zoo tribe.

Without further ado, let's go to the history of fire.

Following the 1864 Sandcreek Massacre, the Lakota in Cheyenne were out for blood, revenge was on everybody's mind.

There are quite a few Lakota Cheyenne and Ivana Rapa, who were living in the southern plains, who decided to post Sandcreek to rejoin their northern relatives in order to form a united front,

in fighting against the United States.

The American army tried to stop, this southern tribesmen from joining their northern kin, but they were hopelessly outmatched when it came to their maneuvering, and they managed to somehow miss thousands of them moving across the plains until they eventually did rejoin.

Right after this, the raids began, in Wyoming, in parts of the Dakotas, who hovered in the northern plains, Lakota Cheyenne and the Rapa warriors will lounge, a series of attacks in what the first salvo in what some historians referred to as the Red Cloud War, which went from roughly 1865 to 1868.

Where does this name come from? Red Cloud is where going to see it's going to be an extremely important character, not just in this episode, but during the entire, really during all of the episodes that we're going to be doing about Crazy Horse.

He's going to be there from this point forward, playing a fairly important role in multiple junctures.

In some ways, this cold-linned discomfort, the Red Cloud War, is a really a mistake, it's historians kind of over-histimating the importance that Red Cloud does.

I mean, said that, this is not to say that Red Cloud was not an extremely important leader in this conflict.

He was one of the key chiefs, who will play a leading role during this conflict with the United States in the mid-to-late 1860s.

Red Cloud had a bit of a controversial past, and as we will see in the upcoming episodes, he also has a bit of a controversial future.

He was born in the early 1820s, and he had become famous not only due to his skills as a warrior in the tribal warfare, but also as a result of an ugly episode that had peaked Wakota against Wakota.

There were two rival leaders, one named Smoke, and the other one named Bulbear, and Red Cloud was a follower of Smoke.

During the conflict between them, he had walked up to Bulbear during a fight that had broken out between the two bands and shot him in the head.

Usually, somebody was responsible for the killing of another tribal member within the same tribe.

There are usually repercussions that go with it.

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