The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

by Drury, Bob

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  1. Stephen E. Ambrose, in Crazy Horse and Custer, proposes an explanation of this “miracle”: the shells may have been underloaded with gunpowder, perhaps on Ice’s secret instructions.

  13

  A BRIEF RESPITE

  By mid-century the era of the Oglalas’ annual spring buffalo hunt from the Black Hills east to the Missouri had long ended. White settlers had converted the fertile floodplain along the Big Muddy in the state of Iowa and in the Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota Territories into one long string of farms and small communities, and by 1857 nearly two dozen steamboats were in regular service between St. Louis and Sioux City. With the homesteaders hemming the Lakota in from the east while Army troops stepped up patrols along the Oregon Trail to the south, the Western Sioux had no choice but to forge north and west, deeper into the rich buffalo grounds bordering the Yellowstone and Bighorn ranges on lands held by the Crows, the Shoshones, the Nez Percé, and the northern Arapaho.

  Ironically, despite their haphazard approach to a unified “war” on the whites, in the years following the Bear Butte gathering this migratory shift allowed most of the Oglalas to give the Americans a wide enough berth that their culture experienced a minor but flourishing mini-renaissance, evoking memories of the fat and happy early 1800s. The Powder River Country had the most unspoiled hunting grounds in North America, and as Oglala society grew wealthier and stronger, so too did Red Cloud’s grip on power. Warriors from disparate Oglala bands now vied to ride with him against the Crows and other enemies, and each fighting season he attracted greater numbers of Brules, Miniconjous, and even Sans Arcs and Hunkpapas to join his far-reaching expeditions. These companions included Crazy Horse.

  Because of the new geographic reality, Red Cloud’s martial leadership also took on a new form and function. No longer could he afford to lead a few braves on raids merely for glory and plunder; his war parties for the first time now also hunted for Indian “intruders” to expel from the Western Sioux’s burgeoning empire. This often meant deviating from the traditional Lakota method of prairie warfare on open, flat terrain. On one occasion, for instance, his scouts picked up fresh Shoshone moccasin tracks hugging the base of the Bighorns in northern Wyoming. Red Cloud and about seventy-five braves caught up to the Shoshones and chased them back into the mountains. In the old days, that would have been warning enough. Not now. Red Cloud ordered his Sioux to dismount and hitch their horses, and they pursued the Shoshones on foot up the steep pitch. A running high country battle through thick whitebark pine and blue spruce ensued—a fight a Mohawk, a Choctaw, or even a Minnesota Sioux might have felt more comfortable engaging in than a Plains Lakota. When the Shoshones disappeared behind a circular wall of boulders that formed a natural fortress on top of a rocky promenade, Red Cloud’s braves surrounded them.

  For a day and night the Lakota besieged the Shoshones, feinting, charging, being beaten back, each side’s sharpshooters firing whenever an enemy exposed himself. Occasionally a Sioux arrow would lodge in a Shoshone’s head as it was raised over the top of the wall. For the most part, however, the Shoshones holding the high ground got the better of the fight. One defender in particular seemed to have the best shooting eye—he had killed at least one Bad Face and wounded several others—and Red Cloud, crouched behind a tree perhaps 100 yards downslope, studied the shooter’s pattern. He observed that the enemy would jump onto the stone barricade, aim his long rifle, and fire in a nearly continuous motion before ducking back down for cover. Red Cloud also noticed that the Shoshone shot from behind the same rock each time.

  Red Cloud hatched his plan and signaled to one of his braves to dash for a nearby boulder. As he expected, the sharpshooting Shoshone showed himself. Red Cloud stood, and in an electrifying display of accuracy, shot him dead. The Shoshone toppled forward, outside the fortress, and a shrieking Red Cloud tore up the mountain brandishing his tomahawk. He reached the man, scalped him, and hacked off his right arm at the shoulder. He then crawled to and fro along the outside of the wall, raising the severed arm at intervals and shouting for the cowardly enemies to come out and fight like men.

  But the Bad Faces, still mired in the ways of prairie warfare, failed to press their psychological advantage. So excited were those guarding the rear of the makeshift fort that they abandoned their positions to crowd below Red Cloud and whoop him on. This left open a back door through which most of the Shoshones escaped into the forest. Red Cloud was furious. But all he could do was file away the episode and ensure that it never happened again. The Oglala war party climbed down the mountain, retrieved their horses, and rode back and forth along the foot of the range for three days as a signal to any Indians who might be watching that this was now Lakota land. This, too, was something new.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, far to the south, General Harney’s clearance of the Platte River corridor provided a freeway for the thousands of emigrants still driving west. Among these were motley bands of Mormon “handcart pioneers,” who formed a nearly continuous stream into the Salt Lake Valley. Many of the converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were recent northern European immigrants who could not afford to pay $300 to $500 for a prairie schooner and a mule or oxen team. Those families, disproportionately Danish and Swedish and speaking little or no English, instead loaded up their earthly possessions into pushcarts that could be purchased in Iowa City for as little as $10. These sturdy contraptions—a simple bed of hickory or oak laid over thin iron wheels—could haul up to 500 pounds, and between 1856 and 1860 nearly 3,000 Mormons walked west from the United States into the New Zion, pushing and pulling their humble handcarts.

  Those numbers multiplied nearly exponentially when gold was discovered in 1858 on Cheyenne and southern Arapaho lands along Cherry Creek, the future site of Denver. The area around Pikes Peak came to resemble an ant colony, with 100,000 pitmen and placermen swarming over the hills and dales. So safe had the Oregon Trail become that by 1860 the newly formed Pony Express began carrying mail along a 2,000-mile route between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, completing the circuit in ten days during good weather and fourteen in the dead of winter. The small, wiry Express riders, many of them still in their teens, sparked a trend in publishing circles back east, their roughneck adventures filling “true” dime novels and early pulp magazines. The romance lasted longer than the endeavor. Less than two years later the swashbuckling operation was shut down when the Western Union Telegraph Company finished stringing its lines. The railroad was also coming: industry executives were already dusting off Captain Stansbury’s old surveys in preparation for laying track.

  Most of the Indians these emigrants saw before reaching the Rockies were bands of “tame” Oglalas and Brules—“Laramie Loafers,” the Bluecoats called them with a sneer—who scratched out a living begging and scavenging along the trails west. There was much to scavenge, for it is doubtful that by the early 1860s Red Cloud would have recognized the Platte River Valley of his youth. The route was now littered with broken-down wagons and handcarts, empty food tins, and clothes worn to rags, while the cottonwood and chokecherry trees that had once lined every creek and streambed had been burned for countless cooking fires. The buffalo had disappeared, having lost the battle for the corridor’s already scarce water and vegetation to the 100,000 head of cattle and 50,000 sheep that passed through the territory annually. And the Oregon Trail itself had been transformed into “a swath of stinking refuse,” its very air soured by the rotting carcasses of worn-out horses, mules, oxen, and sheep mixing with the half-buried corpses of humans struck down by heat, exhaustion, or disease, their bones dug up and picked over by gray wolves and coyotes.

  The increased traffic proved beneficial for traders, blacksmiths, innkeepers, hostlers, and even a few professional gamblers who set up shop along the route—as well as for some of the old mountain men whose financial opportunities skyrocketed with the need for guides and scouts. As late as 1852 Jim Bridger had been
sighted still trapping in the Rockies, probably as much for sport as need, since his cedar log fort on the Blacks Fork of the Green River in central Utah was doing a thriving business as a layover near the “California ferry,” which put off at the head of the western trails. But Bridger’s legendary intimacy with the Indians, particularly the Ute and his wife’s Shoshone tribe, made him a marked man.

  Unlike the Lakota, the mountain tribes stood in the way of the Mormons’ expansion. Brigham Young, by now governor of the Utah Territory, had turned the Salt Lake Valley into his own semiautonomous fiefdom, which he named Deseret, and in July 1853 a full-scale war broke out between the Ute and the Latter-day Saints. Both sides committed the usual atrocities and Young, suspicious of Bridger’s loyalties and envious of his real estate holdings, used the bloodletting as an excuse to issue a territorial proclamation forbidding all trade with any of the tribes. The following month at a Mormon town hall meeting Bridger was accused of having “stirred up the Indians to commit depredations upon our people.” It was alleged that he had supplied the Shoshones with powder and lead—the very act with which he had kept the peace, and for which he had been lauded, at the Horse Creek Council two years earlier. “Old Gabe” was tried and found guilty in absentia at a secret hearing, and a posse of 150 “avenging angels” was dispatched from Provo to arrest him. Indians warned him and he eluded the riders, taking his family east to Fort Laramie. When the Mormons reached his stockade they burned his copious stocks of whiskey and rum and seized the fort and livestock. They never returned them.

  From Wyoming, Bridger meandered farther east until finally, after having been away for thirty years, he arrived back home in St. Louis. His fame had preceded him, and he was mobbed by reporters and well-wishers wherever he went. He purchased a large farmstead just outside the city, but plowing, planting, and reaping were not in his blood. Through the remainder of the decade he found steady employment, at $5 a day, guiding various kinds of expeditions. He took part in a congressional scientific survey seeking the source of the Yellowstone, and discovered a mountain pass that shortened the route between Denver and Salt Lake City for the overland mail coach—today’s U.S. Route 40. He achieved some measure of revenge on the Latter-day Saints by guiding 2,500 federal troops into Salt Lake City during the “Mormon War,” fought over Brigham Young’s theocratic rebellion of 1857–58. And in one of the more bizarre chapters of his life he contracted with a wealthy, dissolute Irish peer, Sir St. George Gore, as a scout for Gore’s hunting safari. Bridger spent the better part of two years wandering the High Plains with Gore—the eighth baronet of Manor Gore, near Sligo—mostly trying to prevent his self-indulgent employer and a retinue of beaters, skinners, wranglers, chefs, and sommeliers from wandering into Lakota territory.

  He was not often successful. Gore killed animals on a whim at an astounding pace, and toward the end of his wanton holiday he and Bridger crossed paths with U.S. Army captain Randolph B. Marcy, fresh from his discovery of the headwaters of the Red River. Marcy recorded that among Gore’s voluminous antelope, deer, and elk trophies were the coats of 41 grizzly bears and 2,500 buffalo skins. It took six wagons and twenty-one carts to haul all this. Since Bridger professed to care deeply for the welfare of the Indians, it is difficult to explain why he did not recognize that such indiscriminate slaughter might antagonize the Western Sioux.

  But if Bridger did not notice, Red Cloud surely did. The great blotahunka was now Head Man of the Bad Face Oglalas in all but name, because at age eighty-two, Old Smoke had faded into senescence to enjoy the December of his long life. Though greenhorn Army officers deployed to Fort Laramie after the Mormon War continued to recognize the more pliant Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses as “chief” of the Sioux—Red Cloud’s name had yet to appear in any official government reports—most Lakota, including those from the far Missouri River regions east of the Black Hills, considered Red Cloud their martial and spiritual leader.

  This primacy, however, also carried a heavy responsibility. The history of the white incursion had demonstrated that individual bands could not stand alone against the might of the American Army. But could a multitribal alliance actually be formed to battle the intruders? And if so, what were its chances of prevailing? Of one fact Red Cloud was certain—large-scale engagements against the Bluecoats where the two sides were of equal numbers were essentially suicide missions. The only way to fight them was to gather enough of the squabbling Sioux under one banner and use overwhelming force against any smaller targets that presented themselves. Barring that, or perhaps in addition to that, the Indians would need to rely on stealthy hit-and-run tactics, where the chance of casualties was low. They would use their knowledge of the country to run off Army remudas and beef herds, and starve the Bluecoats out of their isolated forts. It would be a war of decoy and ambush, of fighting from bluff to butte and from coulee to creek bed—in short, a guerrilla war before it was actually known as such. It was, Red Cloud recognized, the Indians’ only recourse.

  Yet how to rouse his disparate peoples, particularly his own tribesmen? Despite the occasional incursions by insatiable white hunters guided by the likes of Bridger, the Lakota cultural and political revival in the years following the Bear Butte assembly had ushered in a period of quiescence. With their enemies, particularly the Crows, cleared from the mile-high Powder River Country, the Lakota were free to roam an immense short-grass prairie bursting with buffalo, antelope, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep and crossed by abundant sources of sweet water flowing out of pine-shrouded ranges. During the broiling summer months cool mountain meadows awash with goldenrod and back-eyed Susans beckoned, and in winter the south face of the Black Hills constituted a gigantic windbreak against the numbing gales freighting down from the Canadian flats.

  Moreover, just as Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses had argued at Bear Butte, the Bluecoats had not strayed far from their line of forts and mail stations along the Oregon Trail since General Harney’s march. Even the secondary road Harney had blazed from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre was now growing over; the ruts from the Army freight wagons were barely visible beneath carpets of white prairie clover and purple asters. Red Cloud still suspected that white expansion was not complete, that the trespassers would once more arrive in greater numbers to steal Lakota lands. Why they had not done so already remained a mystery.

  Given the circumstances, it would be hard to make the case for war on the whites. As it was, Red Cloud and the Western Sioux had no way of knowing that, far to the east, two American armies were already preparing for an epic Civil War that would, at least temporarily, push the “Indian Problem” far down on the government’s list of priorities.

  14

  THE DAKOTAS RISE

  The distant echoes of the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, reverberated well beyond the Mississippi. As one historian noted, “the frontier army suddenly ceased to protect the frontier.” At the start of the hostilities, officers from southern states, who represented nearly a third of the Regular Army’s officer corps, resigned en masse—313 threading home to fight for the Confederacy, including 182 of the Army’s 184 West Point graduates. Most of the noncommissioned officers and enlisted men remained true to the Union, but they, too, rapidly disappeared from the Plains. Even the detachment at Fort Laramie, the western communications hub connecting the coasts, was reduced to a skeleton garrison of about 130 soldiers as battalions and regiments from across the West marched home. Chaos ensued as the sons of Virginia planters, Boston Brahmins, Iron Mountain dirt farmers, and Philadelphia steamfitters enlisted as volunteers and state militiamen trained in haste and then moved like chess pieces across a grand board. The few southern officers who did not relinquish their commissions were viewed with suspicion by the War Department—particularly the Tennesseean General Harney, who remained commander of the Northwest Territories.

  In the years since the fight at Blue Water Creek and his “invasion” of the Lakota lands, Harney’s bungling adventures had continued into the farcical. He s
till hunted Indians, seemingly for sport, but that had never bothered the authorities back east. It was only when, in 1859, he nearly set off a shooting war with Great Britain that his superiors thought to rein him in. This occurred during an inspection tour of the U.S.-Canadian borderlands, when his inept handling of a minor incident involving an “English” hog rooting through an American farmer’s fields resulted in an armed standoff between Harney’s troops and British Royal Marines. Diplomats were roused, cooler heads prevailed, and Harney was shuffled back into the nation’s interior, where it was thought he could do no more lasting damage to either himself or the Union cause. But twelve months into the Civil War he was relieved of command by President Lincoln when rumors surfaced that he was secretly negotiating a western truce with Confederate authorities.

  Harney denied the charge and set off for Washington to defend himself. But he somehow lost his way and made the error of passing through rebel-held territory, where he was captured and presented to General Robert E. Lee. Lee offered him a Confederate commission, which Harney to his credit declined, and he was released and allowed to complete his journey. On reaching Washington, however, Harney was quietly retired and whisked from the national stage.

  Though happy to be rid of the murderous “Mad Bear,” the Western Sioux made no concerted effort to exploit either Harney’s absence or the War Between the States. Nevertheless, those who learned of its particulars took no small satisfaction in the great droves of white men slaughtering each other on faraway battlefields. This absence of tension, however, did not prevent rumors from reaching Washington of Confederate agents fomenting insurrection among the tribes, particularly the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and, farther south, the sullen peoples occupying the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. In keeping with the government’s usual incomprehension of Indian mores, particularly those of the Northern Plains tribes, none of the fearmongers gave a thought to why Indians would ever fight for a slaveholding republic that had facilitated the greatest deportation of Native Americans on the continent. In any case, the South lacked the means to incite such an uprising.