by Drury, Bob
In November a small party of Brules from Conquering Bear’s clan did in fact attack a mail coach on the Oregon Trail south of Fort Laramie. The raiders were led by a half-Brule warrior named Spotted Tail, a famous fighter who, though two years younger than Red Cloud, led his band’s akicita and was said to have already taken more than a hundred scalps. Spotted Tail ordered the two coach drivers and a luckless passenger killed and mutilated, and a strongbox containing $20,000 in gold coins was taken. (This incident, four score and nine years later, gave the writer Ernest Haycox and director John Ford the germ of an idea for a movie about an embezzling banker’s stagecoach being stalked by hostile Indians.)
Later that winter Spotted Tail sent out emissaries carrying the war pipe. Some Miniconjous and Hunkpapas, including Sitting Bull’s clan, were receptive. But on the whole the outriders returned frustrated. Most of Conquering Bear’s Brule kinsmen and nearly all of the Oglalas, including Red Cloud and the Bad Faces, considered the fight with Grattan a one-off affair in which revenge had been taken. The Indians’ considerations, however, as usual mattered little. Calls to avenge the “murders” of young Grattan and his men spread like ripples on a lake all the way to the Capitol, where the causes, and repercussions, of their deaths were debated in Congress. Moreover, the St. Louis shipping companies, spooked by the mail coach raid and the missing strongbox cache, used the atrocities to lobby politicians and reporters for more federal troops to clean out the “savage” menace. Indian agents, silent at first but now sensing their gravy train departing, protested. It was too late. The government’s hand had been forced.
11
A LONE STRANGER
A sense of foreboding spread across the High Plains in the wake of the Grattan affair just as, in the early summer of 1855, Red Cloud was granted the highest social and political honor extended to a Sioux warrior. After long years of striving he was finally asked to become a part of what passed for the aboriginal Lakota aristocracy, in an elaborate public “Pipe Dance” ritual called the hunka. The ceremony was attended by all the Oglala bands save one, Whirlwind’s Kiyuska, reaffirming their reputation as the “Cutoffs.” Though Old Smoke was still alive and hearty, this was the clearest signal yet that the tribe considered Red Cloud a future Head Man. Ironically, the ceremony did not occur before an embarrassing military setback.
Following the spring buffalo hunt the Bad Faces had staked camp in northern Nebraska along the Niobrara, a shallow, braided river that meanders across willowed sandbars snagged with driftwood to its confluence with the Missouri. The men of the village, as usual, lounged around the cook fires fashioning new bow staves and arrows or dozing in the shade of lean-tos attached to their lodgepoles while women and girls repaired tools, butchered meat, and tanned buffalo robes. One day a party of their old enemies the Poncas swept through the camp, killed two Sioux, and escaped unscathed with a number of ponies. The Poncas, a small, agricultural tribe even in their heyday, had been pushed out of the Ohio River Valley more than 150 years earlier by the Iroquois, and in their much diminished condition had laid claim to the nearly 600 miles of the Niobrara River corridor as their new territory—until the Western Sioux descended on them and overwhelmed them in a short war in the early 1800s. Since that defeat the Poncas, their strength recorded by Lewis and Clark (and probably undercounted) at less than 200 men, women, and children, had been further reduced by a smallpox epidemic. By the mid-nineteenth century they were bottled up on a small piece of land where the Niobrara empties into the Missouri, tending tiny plots of maize and other vegetable gardens. That they had dared to raid the Bad Faces and succeeded was not only a wonder but an embarrassment, exacerbated when the small group of pursuing akicita led by Red Cloud failed to find them.
It was therefore a chastened band of Bad Faces who broke camp soon after and moved north toward the White River in South Dakota where the hunka ceremony was to be held. But the incident with the Poncas was soon forgotten as they joined the entire Oglala tribe on rolling bluestem grassland along the banks of the White in preparation for the Pipe Dance. In essence, the ritual that followed, while not officially anointing Red Cloud as Old Smoke’s successor, certainly made him eligible. Given his modest heritage, even a few decades earlier this would have seemed impossible. But these were desperate times for the Western Sioux, and Red Cloud’s martial prowess and wealth of horses allowed for such an exception. It was a good political start for the thirty-four-year-old blotahunka, and the pageant itself offers a rare insight into the similarities between the Sioux religious liturgy and allegedly more civilized Christian rites.
After several days of feasting, tribal elders planted a three-foot-wide tree stump gilded with gypsum, a sacred mineral, in the center of the vast area to serve as an “altar.” The Oglalas—men, women, and children—encircled this holy table, leaving openings on opposite ends. Through the eastern portal marched the tribe’s Head Men and shamans adorned in their most lavish finery, feathers, and paint. Simultaneously, a procession of supplicants, including Red Cloud, entered from the west, naked except for small breechcloths. At a signal from a sacred drum the Head Men, according to seniority, peeled off from the shamans and formed a line that wound past the altar and in front of the candidates. Each Head Man placed his palm on each applicant’s forehead as a symbol of his worthiness and submission to the Great Spirit. Then, still in single file, the older men returned to the east side of the altar, took up a gourd of water, and again approached the applicants, one standing before each applicant to wash first his face, then his hands, then his feet.
When the Head Men had returned to their original positions the shamans stepped forward, one by one, performing ancient, elaborate dance steps and flourishing a single eagle feather in the direction of the four compass points. Each laid his right palm flat on the symbolic stump, and with his left hand pointed to the sun while vowing to the Great Spirit that his heart was pure. He emphasized that he had never lied to injure his people, nor ever spilled the blood of any tribesman. He intoned that he expected the same from the men who were about to join the leadership class. This shaman then moved to the other side of the altar, removed a small bag of paint from his belt, and proceeded to daub the face of the first candidate. While that was occurring, another shaman moved to the stump in the same manner and made the same vows; and by the time the first had moved on to paint the next face, the second was painting the first candidate’s hands and arms.
And so it went with a third shaman, who spread paint over the legs of the applicants from knees to feet. A fourth shaman followed, anointing each candidate’s face and head with holy oil. Finally, the tribe’s most celebrated priest stepped forward. After making the by-now familiar vows at the altar, he swept his hands over the heads of the acolytes and in a voice that all the tribe could hear issued a sermon driving home the great duties and responsibilities the electees owed to the Siouan peoples by virtue of their new, exalted position.
When these ministrations were complete, the Head Men took their new brethren by the hands and led them into a semicircle on the east side of the altar. The high priest then removed from his pouch a handful of downy eagle feathers, which had been plucked from the underside of the bird’s wing, and attached one to each man’s head. The ceremony was complete; the men had been elevated to the chieftain class. As the tribe’s best dancers burst from the crowd to gyrate around the holy tree stump, another round of feasting began.
When Red Cloud later recounted this ceremony, he described it as one of the proudest moments of his life. Yet his joy, he wrote, was not for himself. Not only had the ritual promoted individual warriors into an elevated class; it also redounded to their male children. This meant that his only son, Jack Red Cloud—the fourth of five children he would sire with Pretty Owl—would not have to suffer the hereditary prejudices that had stood in his own path to leadership. Of course, if the whites had their way in that summer of 1855, his hopes and dreams for his son would be of no consequence.
• • •
Twiss, a lean, ambitious West Point honors graduate, had been personally recruited for this position by the veteran Indian fighter Colonel William Selby Harney. Harney, with his plump cheeks and snowy whiskers, resembled a uniformed Father Christmas. But his jolly countenance was deceiving. He had once been chased out of St. Louis by a mob after he’d beaten to death a female slave who had lost his house keys. And he hated Indians and enjoyed killing them, either in the field or at the end of a rope on the gallows. He had led troops against the Sauk in the Black Hawk War and against the Seminoles during Andrew Jackson’s Everglades campaign—where his buffoonish negligence resulted in the massacre of an entire detachment of dragoons. He himself had escaped by capering through the Florida bush wearing only his underwear. The resultant embarrassment increased Harney’s fervor to slay red people; and during the Mexican War his overzealous pursuit of the Comanche—as opposed to engaging Santa Anna’s troops—enraged the commander of the U.S. forces, General Winfield Scott, who relieved him of command. But the Harneys were Tennessee neighbors of the family of President James K. Polk, who reinstated the colonel. Now the War Department decided that Harney and his agent Twiss were just the men to put down an as-yet-nonexistent Sioux uprising in the High Plains.
Twiss’s first official proclamation was to declare the nearby North Platte a literal “deadline.” He dispatched riders to inform the Lakota and their allies that any Indians found north of the winding tributary would be considered hostile and killed on the spot. Though this applied to much of the prime buffalo range, many Brules and almost all the Oglalas rode south and made camp near the post. In his typical coy fashion, Red Cloud never mentions in his memoir whether he obeyed Twiss’s order, and there are no witnesses to his presence at Fort Laramie that summer. He does hint throughout his book, however, that in a pinch he often found it convenient to be off hunting or raiding in the no-man’s-land west of the fort, and it is not difficult to imagine him, at this stage in his life, thumbing his nose at the Indian agent’s proclamation by doing just that.
The tribes and bands of Oglalas and Brules who did “come in” initially staked separate camps on either side of Fort Laramie, but Twiss eventually forced them to combine their 400 lodges into one huge village thirty-five miles north of the stockade. When the Indian agent felt he had a quorum he rode out to address the Head Men. He told them that he knew the names of the Brules who had attacked the mail coach and promised that they would face swift and certain justice, as would any Indian who left this safe harbor and recrossed the North Platte. As Twiss spoke, Colonel Harney’s combined column of 600 infantry and cavalry troops had already begun a stealthy march out of Fort Leavenworth in eastern Kansas, bound for Sioux territory.
This turn of events spelled disaster for a Brule band led by a Head Man named Little Thunder. Though of the same tribe as Conquering Bear, Little Thunder was not overtly associated with Spotted Tail or the slain chief’s clan. He had even taken the French trader Bordeaux’s side against attacking Fort Laramie after the fight with Grattan. Bordeaux now tried to return the favor by sending runners to Little Thunder’s camp, urging him to return before Harney’s force found him. But Little Thunder was overconfident about his friendship with the whites—it is what had led him to disregarded Twiss’s edict in the first place. Moreover, his buffalo hunt along Blue Water Creek, not far from where Red Cloud was born, was proving a spectacular success. He told Bordeaux’s messengers that his people were still following the herd across the vast corduroy plain in order to lay in winter meat. When the hunt was complete, he added, he would come in.
In late August Little Thunder’s sparse band was joined by an even smaller group of Oglalas that included Crazy Horse’s family. All told, about 250 Indians had made camp in a narrow swale along Blue Water Creek—which the whites called Ash Creek—several miles north of the North Platte. Some of the boys, including Crazy Horse, were out scouting the droves, but Little Thunder had posted no sentries in the juniper-flecked hills that overlooked his encampment. He was not hard to find, and on September 2, one of Harney’s Pawnee scouts found him. The colonel arranged his line of attack by sundown, and at dawn marched his infantry through the tall saw grass lining the natural defilade carved by the stream. His final instructions to his men were to spare not “one of those damned red sons of bitches.” By the time the Indians spotted them it was too late.
Little Thunder and several warriors rode out, unarmed, to parley. The Head Man signed this intention to Harney’s scout. But it was an old Indian trick for a leader to buy time while his people broke down their lodges and slipped away. On the colonel’s command the infantrymen shouldered their rifles and advanced in a quick march. The Indians turned and galloped off, only to run headlong into Harney’s cavalry sweeping down the creek. What ensued became known as the Battle of Ash Creek.
It was a mad scene. The Army pincers closed, regimental bugles blared, and battle guidons snapped as bullets and arrows flew. Cavalry horses panted and snorted, and booming howitzers sent grapeshot ripping through tepees. Braves taken by surprise picked up tomahawks, spears, and war clubs and shrieked as they threw themselves at the American lines. They were cut down by rifle fire. Women and children screamed, dogs yelped, and the hooves of racing Indian ponies echoed from bare ocher buttes and cracked, dusty coulees soon pocked with scarlet pools of blood. The running fight, if it can be called that, covered five miles before it was over. One of Harney’s company commanders noted drily in his journal, “There was much slaughter in the pursuit.” And the young topographical engineer Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who was riding with the troop—and who would be better known in later years as the Union general who arranged the last-minute defense of Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg—recorded “the heart-rending sight—wounded women and children crying and moaning, horribly mangled by the bullets.”
Eighty-six Lakota men, women, and children were killed. The soldiers, bent on revenge for Grattan, scalped most of the bodies and mutilated the pubic areas of the women, whose vaginas were hacked out as trophies. Another seventy women and children were captured. Harney’s losses were negligible—four killed and seven wounded. When the abandoned Indian campsite was searched, soldiers found papers taken from the mail coach (but not the gold coins), the scalps of two white women, and clothing identified as belonging to Grattan’s troops. Although a popular Army marching song1 celebrating Little Thunder’s death was composed soon afterward, the Brule Head Man had in fact escaped. (He was, ironically, killed by his own people ten years later for fraternizing with whites.)
After the Battle of Ash Creek the Lakota called Harney “Women Killer.” (While technically correct, this seems a bit precious given the Sioux’s own r
ules of engagement.) After Harney had force-marched his captives to Fort Laramie, the officers were allowed to select the prettiest for themselves, with the rest “shared out among the soldiers.” A year later half-breed “war orphans” ran thick at the fort, including an infant girl alleged to have been fathered by Harney himself. Between amorous interludes the colonel rode out to the Lakota camp and demanded the surrender of Spotted Tail and the others who had raided the mail coach. In what would have been an unthinkable act prior to Ash Creek, several Head Men persuaded the responsible Brules to turn themselves in for the good of the tribe. Spotted Tail and his retinue arrived at the fort the next day, unarmed, in their finest battle raiment, singing their death songs. Watching closely as they surrendered was the young Crazy Horse. He knew Spotted Tail well. His father was married to two of the great warrior’s sisters.
Inexplicably, instead of being hanged, Spotted Tail and the rest were taken in chains to Fort Kearney on the Lower Platte, where for two years they were employed as scouts. The Lakota, Red Cloud in particular, were astounded. Friendly Indians had been slaughtered while hostile braves were housed and fed. The whites seemed truly crazy—but they also possessed overpowering strength of arms, and Harney made certain the Indians recognized it. He established Fort Grattan at the mouth of Ash Creek and garrisoned it with a company of the 6th Infantry. He then spent most of the autumn of 1855 on a leisurely march through the heart of Western Sioux territory, from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre on the Upper Missouri. It was an affront, a challenge to any and all to come out and fight. No one dared. A year later, testifying at a government hearing investigating the Blue Water Creek engagement, Harney apologized to the panel (but, notably, not to the Indians) for his attack on Little Thunder’s people. He stated that when he moved up the “Glory Road” that September he had been “very mad,” and anxious to strike the first camp of Indians he could find on the wrong side of the North Platte.
