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

by Drury, Bob

  The Lakota war chief stood tall, jutted his chin, and pulled his buffalo robe tight about his massive shoulders. “The Great Father sends us presents and wants a new road,” he said, his voice rising to a shout. “But the White Chief already goes with soldiers to steal the road before the Indian says yes or no. I will talk with you no more. I will go now, and I will fight you. As long as I live I will fight you for the last hunting grounds.” His final sentences were nearly drowned out in a welter of hoots and ululations. Carrington tried to answer, shouting over the noise that he indeed intended to build forts along the Bozeman Trail, but only for use as travelers’ way stations. His words were lost in the din. The Indian Affairs superintendent banged his gavel to regain control of the meeting. Only the whites were paying attention.

  As Colonel Carrington walked from the parade ground toward his horse Margaret Carrington spotted Red Cloud and another Indian breaking from the crowd. They seemed to be shadowing her husband, and gradually gaining ground. Red Cloud’s right hand was at his side, his fingers gripping the hilt of a large knife. Even taking into account his not negligible temper, it is highly unlikely that a man as savvy as Red Cloud would have chosen this public moment, inside Fort Laramie, to assassinate a U.S. Army officer. Margaret Carrington’s account, although no doubt accurate in its basics, must be read with caution: she was a newcomer to Indian country, and she was familiar with the era’s rather feverish (and often accurate) accounts of “savage” maliciousness.

  On seeing the big, angry Indian fondling his knife, Margaret shouted a warning to the colonel. Red Cloud was nearly upon him. Carrington slowed and looked sidewise at the Oglala chief, not precisely challenging him, but hitching his holster closer to his hip and resting his palm on the revolver’s handle. His hand remained on his gun as Red Cloud walked past him, as if he were invisible, and continued through the post’s front gates.

  Later that day the commanding officer at Fort Laramie advised the Carringtons to pay no attention to Red Cloud’s “tantrum,” as such things were as common among Indians as with spoiled children. He even intimated that Red Cloud was not as influential a Head Man as some of the others present, including Spotted Tail. Red Cloud, he said, was no more than the leader “of the young men who they called ‘Bad Faces,’ always fighting other tribes and stealing their horses.” Probably he would be back the next day with the rest, begging for presents. Yet when Carrington and Bridger rode back to their camp that night they noticed that Red Cloud’s lodge had been struck, and that the ponies laden with the gunpowder kegs were gone. Red Cloud, observed Margaret Carrington, “in a very few days quite decidedly developed his hate and his schemes of mischief.”

  25

  HERE BE MONSTERS

  The 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment pushed off from Fort Laramie on June 17, 1866, the day before the peace conference formally ended. The conference was “a disgusting farce and disgraceful swindle,” according to J. B. Weston, an attorney who witnessed the ceremony. Weston’s prescient analysis contradicted the official report of the Indian Affairs superintendent, who wrote to Washington, “Satisfactory treaty concluded with the Sioux. Most cordial feeling prevails.” In reality Red Cloud’s explosion left a bitter taste all around. Some Head Men, weary of constant war, had touched the pen; these included most of the southern Lakota from the Republican River corridor. So too had Spotted Tail, who had ridden down from his territory on the White River. But none of the bolder chiefs would do so, and many braves from bands whose leaders did agree to the pact rode north from Fort Laramie with Red Cloud.

  This was what now faced Carrington and his battalion as they set out across the vast hinterland. It was 150 miles to Fort Reno on the Powder, and beyond that the world as the white soldiers knew it would end. The journey through this brink of the American empire would provide Carrington and his men with a greater understanding of just what they were to face in the months ahead.

  The trail to Fort Reno, thick with prickly pear and saltbush, was punctuated by but a few lonely trading posts and ferry crossings, and the troop was watched the entire length of the march by Lakota blending into the willows in shady hollows or, concealed beneath wolf skins, lying on high rimrock. Bridger, who picked up Indian signs each day, reported to Carrington, “They follow ye always. They’ve seen ye, every day. And when you don’t see any of them about, is just the time to look for their devilment.”

  Examples of such devilment were numerous. The column paused at one trading post owned by a Missouri Frenchman, Louis Gazzous, whom Bridger introduced to Carrington as “French Pete.” French Pete, who was married to a Sioux woman, warned the colonel that there was already loud talk in the territory of the scalps and horseflesh of which his column would soon be relieved. At Bridger’s old ferry station, now operated by a man named Mills, the colonel learned that a raiding party had emptied Mills’s corrals just twenty-four hours earlier. Mills, who was also married to an Indian—an Oglala woman—was agitated. Given his wife’s tribal status, he said, he had always been immune to such theft. He considered the action significant, a harbinger of a new kind of bitterness on the High Plains. When Carrington asked Mills if he had any idea who was responsible, he answered immediately: “Red Cloud.” Carrington again ordered security tightened, with particular emphasis on hobbling the stock at night, and pushed on.

  After the experience of Forts Kearney and Laramie, the first glimpse of Fort Reno was sobering. Set on a small rise blanketed with thistle and greasewood hard by the Powder’s north bank, it overlooked a maze of arroyos and low washes, their cracked-mud beds ideal for concealing Indian raiding parties. The outpost itself was a rotting, weatherworn log structure caulked with mud; a dilapidated corral abutted a string of warehouses built into low red-shale hills. Few men or officers from the battalion had ever seen a frontier post constructed to repel a full-frontal Indian attack. This one was dominated by two defensive bastions holding two of the post’s six mountain howitzers, and rifle loopholes had been bored through the adobe walls to accommodate enfilading fire. The place struck the soldiers more as a prison than a military installation. This was apt.

  The previous summer General Connor had left the fort manned by a unit of Winnebago scouts and the two volunteer companies of “galvanized Yankees” that had accompanied the road-building train. The Indian scouts had only recently been ordered back to Illinois as a precaution against further inciting their ancient enemies, the Sioux. The hard winter had combined with a poor diet to leave many of the former Confederates near death from dysentery, pneumonia, and scurvy so severe that their teeth were falling out. They had the emaciated, scraggly look of shipwreck survivors. In a sense, this is what they were.

  The historian Stephen E. Ambrose notes that Indian fighting on the High Plains was more akin to naval warfare than to any other type of battle. The U.S. Army “was lumbering around with battleships and cruisers, chasing pirates in sleek, fast vessels,” and the forts and camps were like home ports to which large ships must return often for supplies. The Indians lived off the land much as the pirates lived off the ocean, and the soldiers deployed to the frontier had no more comprehension of their surroundings than the crews of Columbus or Magellan reading blank charts marked with the warning “Here be monsters.”

  Colonel Carrington, well aware of this, had originally planned to demolish Fort Reno and transport any salvageable food and construction supplies to a site closer to the Black Hills with better access to wood, water, and pasturage. But eleven hard days on the road had changed his mind. Both soldiers and emigrant travelers would need a secure post where they could lay over, and even if the unimpressive pile of wood 150 miles from Fort Laramie did not deserve the appellation “fort,” it would certainly serve as a way station. Thus was “Reno Station” born as a midway stopover for resting weary stock and repairing broken wagons between the Oregon Trail and the new posts Carrington intended to build farther north. He carried with him orders mustering out the irritable “galvanized Yankees”—th
ey immediately disappeared like ghosts in the night—and selected a company of sixty to seventy men from the battalion to permanently garrison the station. Then he and his officers set out to reconnoiter their new possession.

  The warehouses—made of eight-foot cottonwood logs roofed and chinked with mud daub—had been inundated by the winter’s terrible snows, and the thick slabs of bacon stocked within were so rotten that gobs of the greenish, slimy fat were sloughing off the lean meat. An infestation of mice had burrowed a network of tunnels through the flour sacks, whose contents had caked around the droppings and dead rodents. The men improvised a large sieve out of burlap sacks to separate the dead mice and the larger pieces of excrement. What remained of this unappetizing mess was dutifully repackaged and loaded onto wagons.

  Carrington was further astonished to learn that three emigrant trains bound for Montana were camped a few hundred yards away over a nearby ridge, awaiting a military escort up the Bozeman Trail. A fourth train, he was told, had already departed. When he rode out to meet the travelers the following morning, he was appalled. A blinding summer hailstorm—the stones as large as pullet eggs, one trooper recorded in his journal—had transformed the camps into mud sties, and none of the expeditions’ leaders had taken any precaution against Indian raids. The wagons were spread haphazardly across a gorgeous valley flecked with wild rose and pink wintergreen, and the mules and horses roamed free of hobbles or pickets. When Carrington gently chided one wagon master for his lax security, the man scoffed at him: “We’ll never see an Indian unless they come to beg for sugar, flour, or tobacco.”

  On the ride back to Reno Station, Carrington was already formulating a set of regulations to be issued to all civilian trains passing up the Bozeman Trail. Paramount in his mind was instilling a sense of discipline in these wild, independent-minded emigrants. No trains with less than thirty armed men, he decided, would be allowed to move forward. (The number would soon be revised upward, to forty.) And each passenger on any train that did meet this quota would have to sign in at every fort along the route. If a traveler was signed in at one post but failed to appear with the train at the next, the train could not go on until the laggard caught up. This, Carrington hoped, would not only end the “constant separation and scattering of trains pretending to act in concert,” but also eliminate the Indians’ most tempting targets—the stragglers.

  That same afternoon Carrington dropped by the sutler’s rude store just north of Reno Station. It was owned and operated by A. C. Leighton, a trader who had secured a government contract to supply all the forts erected by the 18th Regiment. Before dismounting, the colonel noticed Leighton’s unguarded remuda grazing in a pocket ravine on the other side of the river. Inside the store the trader, a longtime frontiersman, assured him that the animals were in no peril; he and the Lakota had always been on good terms. The words were barely out of his mouth before one of Carrington’s escorts burst in, shouting, “Indians.” The group rushed to the door to watch the last of Leighton’s animals being stampeded over a rise by a Lakota raiding party.

  Carrington’s squad galloped to Reno Station, where the colonel ordered Captain Haymond to form up a party of ninety men. They were mounted and riding within thirty minutes. By midnight the patrol had not returned, and Carrington paced the battlements until, about an hour later, he spotted the exhausted detail straggling back over a dusty butte. He counted no empty saddles, but neither had the troopers recaptured any of Leighton’s stock. Haymond reported that they had ridden fifty miles before losing the Indians; the only animal they could catch was a half-lame Indian pony abandoned during the chase. Carrington and his officers gathered round as Haymond emptied a bulging elk-skin sack tied to the pony’s saddle. It was stuffed with bags of brown sugar and coffee, pouches of navy tobacco, and a folded length of bright calico—gifts from the treaty council.

  The colonel spent nearly two weeks securing Reno Station and making ready for the next stage of his journey. There were only two incidents of note. The first was the disciplining of an infantryman for public drunkenness on Independence Day. The private, who had purchased the whiskey from the sutler Leighton, was staked to the ground, spread-eagle, for six hours as swarms of flies lapped up the alcohol oozing from his pores. The second was the departure of the civilian trains. Their impatient wagon masters decided not to wait for a military escort and formed one large train that rolled north a few days after the battalion’s arrival.

  Eight days later, in the predawn hours of July 16—the hottest day on record across the High Plains in the summer of 1866, with the temperature approaching 111 degrees—seven companies of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th U.S. Infantry bade farewell to the small Reno Station garrison and marched northwest. For all its heat, filth, and squalor, the soldiers would soon enough come to recall the station fondly as their last, tenuous link to civilization. The territory beyond, between the little godforsaken post on the north bank of the Powder and the gold camps of Montana, was as mysterious and terrifying as any uncharted sea.

  26

  THE PERFECT FORT

  The transition, wrote Margaret Carrington, “was like the quick turn of a kaleidoscope.” One day the flat, brown prairie had been hot enough to crack leather boots, swell mules’ tongues out of their mouths, and turn the incessant grasshoppers that blanketed the earth into tiny kindling. Twenty-four hours later chilly mountain breezes forced the women to don shawls, prickly pear was replaced by luxuriant groves of leafy willow and cedar, and the cool water from mountain streams was so clear that the soldiers could count individual fish.

  It took the column four days to reach the long, slim plateau that rises athwart the Bozeman Trail some forty miles south of the present-day Montana border. The grass-covered bench land—5,790 feet above sea level by Colonel Carrington’s calculation—juts from a magnificent valley formed by two parallel creeks called the Little Piney and Big Piney in the shadow of the east face of the snow-crusted Bighorns. John Bozeman’s maps had, of course, not done the site justice. The plentiful fresh water streaming out of the mountains had turned the surrounding acres of lush pasturage that rolled north to Goose Creek into a swaying shamrock sheen too tall and thick for a horse to canter through, and the site was only six miles from slopes covered with forests of pine, hemlock, balsam, fir, and spruce. “At last we had the prospect of finding a home,” wrote Margaret Carrington. Everyone seemed satisfied except Jim Bridger.

  The march from Reno Station to what was to become Fort Phil Kearny1 had been tense. Trouble started a mere twelve hours out, along a nearly dry alkaline creek bed called Crazy Woman Fork. By that point nearly half the column’s wagons were in need of repair, their wooden wheels so irreparably shrunk by the heat that the metal rims wobbled and finally fell off. Axles and spokes were also in poor shape, and Colonel Carrington called a halt while his wheelwrights stoked charcoal bonfires to forge new rims. When the task dragged on longer than expected the colonel marched on, leaving several companies behind under Captain Haymond to complete the work.

  There were two legends regarding the naming of Crazy Woman Fork. According to the more benign story, an old, demented Indian woman had once constructed a semipermanent brush-and-grass tepee, called a wickiup, on the creek and made the site her home. The second, more gruesome, story was that an emigrant family had been ambushed there while watering stock. The husband and children were killed and mutilated before the wife’s eyes, and she had been raped and had gone insane. The Indians, afraid of calling bad medicine down on themselves for killing a madwoman, allowed her to wander off, and it was said she still haunted the vicinity. The soldiers stoking the charcoal pits preferred to believe the former legend.

  Not far past Crazy Woman Fork the trail descended into a long, tight ravine, and before the soldiers even reached it Jim Bridger came racing back to the main column. He and Carrington rode ahead to a spot where Bridger pointed at two small shards of a wooden cracker box, their jagged ends jammed into the dirt at the side of the road. Scrawled a
cross the wood were messages from the consolidated emigrant train reporting that here they had beaten off an attack by Indians but lost some of their horses and oxen. Carrington ordered his pickets doubled that night, but there was no sign of Indians. The next day the column reached the two Piney creeks.

  Though the broken wagons and the eerie warnings had put nerves on edge, the beautiful country at the confluence of Big Piney Creek and Little Piney Creek changed everyone’s mood. And by the time his horse had climbed the small plateau between the two rushing streams, Colonel Carrington was already planning. He envisioned three of his companies garrisoning this post while, the sooner the better, his four remaining companies would continue to strike north by northwest to establish two more permanent camps: one on the Bighorn and, beyond that, another on the upper Yellowstone. Jim Bridger appeared to be the only person unhappy with the arrangement.

  Bridger noted that despite the plateau’s proximity to forest, clean water, and rich pasturage, the site was overlooked on three sides by even taller ridges and hills, heights from which Indians could study the soldiers with impunity. Due west, a long set of foothills—Carrington named them the Sullivant Hills, after his wife’s family—rolled up into the Bighorns. A separate escarpment called Lodge Trail Ridge bent around the plateau north by northeast no more than a mile and a half away. Both were excellent observation points, and Bridger urged Carrington to keep moving north to find a more suitable site somewhere on the Tongue, some fifty miles away. As Carrington led a patrol on a seventy-mile circuit to scout that area, he almost took Bridger’s point. The country between Goose Creek and the Tongue teemed with game, and wild cherries, strawberries, plums, gooseberries, and currants grew in abundance. But the colonel feared that it was too remote from the forested Bighorns to haul wood for construction and winter fires.