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

by Drury, Bob

  The men on the ridge, like Fetterman’s soldiers, had been butchered, but cavalrymen in the detail recognized infantry insignia mixed among the dead. One horseman, John Guthrie, noted, “Some had crosses cut on their breasts, faces to the sky, some crosses on the back, faces to the ground. . . . We walked on top of internals and did not know it in the high grass. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldier they belonged to, so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man’s gutts [sic] and an infantry man got a cavalry man’s gutts.”

  From the ridgeline the wagons rolled slowly down to Peno Creek, where Lieutenant Grummond and Sergeant Augustus Lang were discovered. Grummond’s head had been severed and his body had suffered the usual mutilations. Not far away from him lay the frozen hulk of Jimmy Carrington’s pony, Calico. The horse, too, had been scalped. Someone remarked that such was the Indians’ contempt for the quartermaster Captain Brown that they had even scalped his horse. A few hundred yards down the creek bed lay the bodies of James Wheatley, Isaac Fisher, “and four or five of the old long-tried and experienced soldiers.” Piles of spent Henry rifle cartridges littered the little ring created by their slain horses and an additional ten dead ponies. Outside the defensive circle a soldier counted sixty-five smudges of dark, clotted blood, perhaps indicating where an Indian had fallen.

  It was dark before the column moved back over the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge. Excited word was passed from front to back that the white lantern still swung from the top of the flagstaff. Back inside the fort Colonel Carrington handed Frances Grummond a sealed envelope containing a lock of her husband’s hair. Not long afterward, the blizzard that had threatened all day began. The temperature dropped to twenty below and by daylight on December 23 snowdrifts had crested so high against the west wall of the stockade that guards could walk over it. Bridger assured Colonel Carrington that not even Red Cloud was bold or crazy enough to attack in such weather. Even so, all through the day before Christmas Fort Phil Kearny was tense. A triple guard remained at every loophole.

  If any scintilla of holiday spirit still breathed it was smothered by the steady whine of handsaws and a clanging of hammers on nails as carpenters worked around the clock constructing pine coffins—two men to a coffin except for the dead officers. Captain Fetterman, Lieutenant Grummond, and Captain Brown had separate caskets. The coffins were numbered to identify each occupant, and Colonel Carrington dispatched a grave-digging detail to break the frozen earth beneath Pilot Knob. He hoped for a solemn Christmas Day service. But even continuous half-hour work shifts could not accomplish that. The snow was too high, the ground was too hard, and the threat of another attack was too overwhelming to spare enough men. So a day late, on December 26, forty-two pine boxes were hurriedly interred in a shallow fifty-foot-long trench. No words were spoken over the graves.

  Following the somber ceremony there was nothing to do but batten down Fort Phil Kearny and wait. For what, only God and Red Cloud knew.

  • • •

  The blizzard gave the Indians time to mourn. For three days the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters in the great village on the Tongue made their way to the bluffs to cut their fingers and arms and chop their hair in memory of the dead. Snowdrifts five and six feet deep ran with blood. And then, on the fourth day, the victory dances commenced to celebrate the fight the Indians would call—referring to the half-man’s augury—the “Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands.”

  Paeans were composed to Yellow Eagle for leading the raids on the wood road, and decoys such as Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses and American Horse, Fetterman’s slayer, were feted at feasts. A wan Crazy Horse was dragged into the firelight and for once not allowed to back away. To him were rendered honors for his deft disciplining of the decoy party, and old men sang of the fearlessness he had shown while standing unflinching against the American guns. It was a turning point in Crazy Horse’s life. Never again would he be able to remain silently aloof in the shadows of the council fires, a lone-wolf warrior-hunter responsible to no one but himself. Like his friend Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses, he would now be groomed for tribal leadership, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho as well as the Lakota would look to, and depend on, his wisdom in both war and peace. Given their familiarity with the ways of the whites, however, there were few on the Tongue in the last week of December 1866 who believed that peace had been achieved.

  And then there was Red Cloud. To him went “all the honor” for the stunning victory. His strategic planning, so often questioned, had proved a masterstroke—everything he had foreseen, from the victory at Bridge Station to the warnings that accompanied his verbal explosion at Fort Laramie, had indeed occurred. He had held together his Indian coalition while balancing older, more experienced voices urging accommodation with the whites against young warriors too eager to strike too soon. His forward thinking and his keen military judgment in choosing lieutenants such as Crazy Horse had inspired the disparate tribes with a sense of unity. He had told his people that their cause, his cause, was just, and that “The Heart of Everything That Is” was worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for. Best of all, in the end it was the Bluecoats who had done the dying.

  At the grand celebrations that followed the Peno Creek fight Red Cloud’s political rivals, Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses in particular, deferred to him. He graciously returned their praise while modestly accepting the accolades. If he seemed subdued, there was good reason. He fretted that his warriors had failed to destroy the despised fort between the Pineys. And he knew that this war was far from over. The Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands had been a fine start, perhaps even a signal to the Americans that they should leave the Powder River Country and never return. It was what he hoped, but Red Cloud could hardly have believed it. He knew his enemy. The Americans would be back, and he would fight them again—and only on his terms. But he also understood the ways of his own people and the allied tribes. Despite the victory, it would be difficult to rally them again so soon. His braves needed time to fill their bellies over warm winter fires while the war ponies recovered their strength. It would be a short cold season, and when the new grass sprouted from the prairie he would reveal his next step.

  To that end he had decided that the Lakota bands would forgo their annual trek east to stake individual winter camps near the Black Hills. Instead they would move west en masse into the old Crow lands in the valley of the Little Bighorn to prepare for a spring offensive. He was certain that warriors from other bands would seek him out to swell his fighting force. He would use these numbers wisely; the Americans would not know what hit them. Already the details were forming in his mind, like a set of tumblers clicking into place. First he would simultaneously attack the two most northern garrisons, Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith, and kill everyone in them. That would leave Reno Station isolated, and either the Army would abandon it or he would burn it. This was an audacious plan, but Red Cloud was certain it would work.

  What to do about Fort Laramie, Red Cloud was not certain. By then the Americans might well have left the territory forever. Of this eventual outcome he was certain. Then, after it was all over, after the Indians had won his war, he would find rest in his lodge.

  • • •

  Portugee Phillips was half dead, and his mount was in even worse shape. He rode by night and hid by day through one of the most vicious northers ever recorded on the High Plains. He rationed his hardtack and supplemented his horse feed with the odd tuft of prairie grass dug out from under thigh-deep snow. He reached the Horseshoe Station telegraph office late Christmas morning. Somewhere along the trail he had met up with William Bailey and George Dillon, and the three arrived together, exhausted, hungry, and freezing, Bailey and Dillon too spent to go on.

  John Friend, the telegraph operator, tapped out a synopsis of Colonel Carrington’s dispatches. But he told the three that he had received no messages that day, and he feared that either the storm or the Indians had cut the line. Without saying a word Phillips began rebinding
his legs with burlap sacks. Bailey and Dillon, collapsed in a heap by the fire, begged Phillips not to risk it. He ignored them, threw on his buffalo coat and beaver cap, saddled his horse, and rode. By noon the blizzard had blown north, behind him, and he traveled all afternoon across a landscape so white that by dusk he was snow-blind. Sunset brought relief but also the arrival of another storm. He rode by feel, always tracking south, the new sheets of snow thicker with his mount’s every footfall.

  The temperature was twenty-five degrees below zero when Phillips reeled through the main gate of Fort Laramie late on Christmas night, his mount drawn as a moth to flame by the lighted and gaily decorated windows of the main officers’ quarters. A full-dress garrison ball was in progress, and the strains of the band wafted over his head as he slumped in his saddle and fell from his horse. Snow and ice matted his pointy black beard. Icicles hung from his coat and hat. The officer of the guard, a young lieutenant, rushed from his sentry box and helped him to his feet. Phillips was too weak to walk by himself, and his vocal cords were so frozen that his voice was a tinny croak when he said he needed to see the post’s commanding officer.

  The lieutenant slung Phillips’s arm over his shoulders and half-carried him to the ballroom, where the officers were about to select partners for the next dance. People gasped when he staggered through the door. The band fell silent and Lieutenant Colonel Innis Palmer, Fort Laramie’s commanding officer, rushed to his side. Earlier that afternoon Palmer had received a telegram from Horseshoe Station reporting an Indian massacre. But the communication was so garbled and incomplete—it did not say who had been massacred, or where the incident had occurred—that he took it as just another of the many rumors that flew across the High Plains.

  Now Phillips reached under his buffalo coat and woolen shirts and pulled out Colonel Carrington’s dispatches. Lieutenant Colonel Palmer’s face whitened as he read them. He looked at Phillips, who had just ridden 236 miles in four days through raging blizzards—a feat that would become equal in western lore to Paul Revere’s famous ride. Palmer turned back to the cold papers in his hands. He was wearing white kid gloves. He handed the messages to an aide, who ran to the post’s telegraph office, and directed two soldiers to carry Phillips to the post infirmary. On the way they passed Colonel Carrington’s white Kentucky thoroughbred charger, lying dead on the parade ground.

  • • •

  The Fort Laramie telegraph operator relayed the dispatches word for word to both General Cooke in Omaha and General Grant in Washington. It was 3:15 p.m. on December 26, 1866, when Grant and the War Department received the first news about what would soon be known nationwide as the “Fetterman Massacre.”

  The next morning the New York Times provided brief details of the “horrid massacre” in the distant Dakota Territory, noting that it accounted for 8 percent of all Army deaths in half a century of Indian fighting west of the Mississippi. And though what would later be referred to as “Red Cloud’s War” was far from over, this was the moment when Grant came to the realization that the United States had been defeated for the first time by an Indian opponent.

  • • •

  Red Cloud never spoke to any whites of his great victory, so we are left to imagine his thoughts as the Bad Faces led the Lakota push west into the Bighorn Valley. Perhaps he recalled his orphaned childhood, or his first lethal coup against the Pawnees, or even the suicide of the tragic Pine Leaf. What we do know is that the boy shunned by so many and the man feared by all had accomplished what no other Indian ever had before.

  The son of an alcoholic Brule had taught himself to lead, to suppress his snarl and his personal rage and remain still when he wanted to strike out. He had developed a steely self-discipline, and it had enabled him to become the first warrior chief to transfigure an Indian military culture that had stood for centuries, if not millennia. He had not only united the fractious Lakota, enticing Oglalas, Brules, Miniconjous, and Sans Arcs to fight as one, but had also drawn to his banner the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Nez Percé, and Shoshones. It was the only way, he knew from the beginning, to defeat the Americans, to humble a people so strong, so numerous, so intent on taking his land when they already had so much of their own. And he had shown the United States; he had achieved, in a sense, what more exalted generals such as Cornwallis and Lee had been unable to do.

  The irony, of course, lay in the fact that Red Cloud did not even know who those men were.

  Epilogue

  The white man made me a lot of promises, and they only kept one. They promised to take my land, and they took it.

  —Red Cloud

  If Red Cloud’s fame was not already established in America—though it certainly was among whites on the frontier—the Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands secured it. “Red Cloud’s War” would go on for more than another year before the United States would admit it was beaten and sue for peace—for the first time on Indian terms.

  Following the Fetterman fight Red Cloud allowed the remainder of the winter of 1866–67 to pass uneventfully, helping to ensure the survival of those who remained at Fort Phil Kearny. But his harassment of the three American forts in the Powder River Country began anew as soon as the first spring grass of 1867 began to renourish Indian ponies. In August, the “Moon of Black Cherries,” the powerful Lakota war chief’s alliance launched its next full-scale attack. That battle, on August 2, came to be known as the Wagon Box Fight. It would prove to be significant for both the Oglala Head Man and the U.S. government—but for completely different reasons.

  • • •

  The first reinforcements arrived at Fort Phil Kearny on December 27, 1866, five days after the victorious Indians had begun moving west toward winter camp. The detail consisted of twenty-five men commanded by Captain George B. Dandy, who pushed through the snow after word of the disaster reached Reno Station. Dandy and his men marched into a demoralized and frightened post that was still waiting for the next arrows to fall.

  As the news of Fetterman’s defeat spread east from Wyoming, the U.S. military and political bureaucracy was set into motion. After digesting Colonel Carrington’s dispatch, General Cooke wrote to General Grant that given “the completeness of the massacre,” it was probable that there had been 3,000 Indians involved. Cooke also reported that he was about to relieve Colonel Carrington of the command of Fort Phil Kearny and order him to Fort McPherson in Nebraska, where the new 18th Regiment was to be headquartered. He then asked Grant’s permission to name Colonel Henry W. Wessells as the garrison commander at Fort Phil Kearny. Grant agreed.

  The next day General Sherman, writing from St. Louis, reiterated to Grant, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing less will reach the root of this case.” For weeks afterward telegrams and letters flew among Grant, Sherman, officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and congressional leaders. General Cooke was quietly “retired” as Senate hearings were opened and an Army commission was formed to officially investigate the disaster. Unofficially, the politicians and the generals were looking for scapegoats. Carrington, who in mid-January 1867 bade farewell to the tidy fort he had built in the heart of the Powder River Country, was naturally called to testify before both the Senate hearings and the Army commission. The Little White Chief would spend the rest of his life defending his actions and, with the aid of his first and second wives, shifting the blame for the Fetterman Massacre to the man whose name it bore.

  When Carrington departed the post between the Piney Creeks and retraced the trek he had taken the previous spring he was accompanied by his wife, Margaret, and by Frances Grummond, who had agreed to the arduous journey in a jolting wagon despite her pregnancy. She traveled with a pine box containing the remains of her husband, exhumed from the trench. It was not an easy trip. Snowdrifts and below-zero temperatures made for slow going, and several members of the escort detail suffered from frostbite that later necessitated the amputation of their hands and feet. On the route
between Reno Station and Fort Laramie, Carrington’s revolver misfired, shooting a bullet into his thigh. When he arrived at Fort McPherson to reassume command of the reconstituted 18th Infantry, he was in an ambulance.

  After picking up details of the battle from smaller newspapers throughout Montana and Nebraska, reporters and editors from St. Louis to the Eastern Seaboard presented to their shocked readers lurid and often erroneous reports of the fight and its aftermath. On March 14, 1867, the Montana Post reported, “Eighteen hundred lodges of Sioux, numbering three warriors in each lodge, under the Chiefs Red Cloud, Iron Plate and White Young Bull, are encamped on the Big Horn River, about thirty-five miles from Fort Smith. The Crows, Bloods, Peguins, Grosentres [sic] and Sioux have made peace among themselves in league against the whites. About 800 lodges are yet north of the Missouri River, but will cross over and camp near Muscle Shell River as soon as Spring opens, and after concentrating their forces the confederation will wage war against the whites.”

  This, though far from accurate, got the Army’s attention. In his annual report to Grant regarding “operations within my command,” Sherman lamented that the army had failed “to follow the savages and take a just vengeance” for the Fetterman massacre. He added that he had personally “passed over 455 miles of finished railroad west of Omaha,” and that the laying of track was proceeding apace. Sherman was slow to recognize that the progress of civilization would be more effective in subduing Indians than any act of war. In any event, newspaper readers and politicians alike remained confused as the spring thaw brought no further news of grand battles with this large Indian force. Behind the scenes, however, officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs were already putting out treaty feelers to Red Cloud through more manageable Lakota like Spotted Tail. They were met with silence.