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

by Drury, Bob

  As he had planned all along, Red Cloud returned to the environs of Fort Phil Kearny in June 1867 to begin a series of vicious skirmishes with Colonel Wessells’s troops. The post had been resupplied and there were fresh herds of cattle and horses to raid. The attacks became so intense that by July, Wessells, fully comprehending Carrington’s predicament of a year earlier, was forced to assign entire companies to guard the woodcutters and hay mowers. All this was a prologue to the events of the first week of August.

  In late July the war chiefs from the tribal alliance had again convened on the Tongue, and Red Cloud and the other Big Bellies laid plans to attack two of the white man’s forts almost simultaneously. On the morning of August 1 a large war party of Cheyenne led by Dull Knife and Two Moons surrounded a civilian hay-cutting detail protected by nineteen soldiers about two miles from Montana’s Fort C. F. Smith. Two troopers and a civilian were killed as the beleaguered Americans, holed up in a makeshift corral, withstood a daylong assault. It was only when howitzers from the post arrived near dusk that the Cheyenne melted away with the captured Army mounts.

  The next morning, August 2, a loaded wood train and its Army escort set off from Piney Island for Fort Phil Kearny, and at about the same time an empty wood train consisting of fourteen wagons left the post for the pinery. Among the civilians working in the latter detail was Portugee Phillips. All of the soldiers in the field were under the command of Captain James Powell, who, along with Captain Tenedor Ten Eyck, was a holdover from Carrington’s command. Once again Red Cloud, leading about 1,000 Oglala and Miniconjou warriors, climbed a high hill west of the fort to observe the action. Once again Crazy Horse and the Miniconjou warrior High Backbone were his field commanders. However, Red Cloud was unaware that only a few weeks earlier the garrison at Fort Phil Kearny had received a shipment of 700 new Springfield-Allin conversion rifles with trapdoor breechloaders, along with 100,000 rounds of .50-70-450 Martin bar-anvil, center-fire primed cartridges. The guns and ammunition had been delivered by a reinforcement company of the 27th Infantry. This time, the Indians would not be fighting soldiers who had only outdated muzzle-loaders.

  At 9 a.m., as the two wood trains were about to converge three miles from the fort, troopers spotted the Indians. Powell immediately ordered the fourteen empty wagons to form an oval. This could not be readily done with the incoming train, which was laden with logs and planks, and the Sioux fell on it and burned every wagon. They then regrouped to attack the oval of empty wagons. In overwhelming numbers they charged the makeshift corral on horseback and on foot; this was perhaps the only time in the history of the West that an Indian offensive involved sacrificing a large number of lives in order to take a position. They absorbed the volley they were expecting and assumed they had the usual thirty seconds to swoop in while soldiers reloaded. Instead they were shocked and repelled by steady fire from the Springfield-Allins.

  For the next five hours they came in waves, but they never breached the American defenses. Six soldiers were killed, including Captain Powell’s second in command, Lieutenant John Jenness. Jenness had been warned to keep low behind cover. He had shouted back, “I know how to fight Indians.” Then he rose to fire and was shot through the head. Indian losses were much more severe, Powell claimed: about 60 dead and over 100 wounded. In this case the Army estimates do not appear to be exaggerated. Red Cloud had seen the future, and it was shaped by a Springfield-Allin.

  But the U.S. government lacked this foresight. To the Americans the synchronized incidents on the outskirts of two forts ninety miles apart burnished Red Cloud’s reputation as the leader of a large hostile force to be reckoned with. That his imposing personality had held together a large intertribal alliance for over two seasons of hard fighting was literally awesome, and his influence showed no signs of abating. His overall leadership, his organizing genius, and his ability to persuade contentious tribes to band together and direct their hatred against the whites had enabled perhaps the most impressive campaign in the annals of Indian warfare. One general ominously informed the War Department that he would need 20,000 soldiers to defeat Red Cloud’s forces. This perceived siege of the mighty United States of America was what forced the country to the negotiating table.

  • • •

  The first step took place in October 1867, when Captain Dandy, now the quartermaster at Fort Phil Kearny, held a meeting within sight of the post’s bastions with representatives from the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. They conveyed Red Cloud’s insistence that the Bozeman Trail be closed forever and the three forts built along it abandoned before he would even consider peace. The Army was staggered by Red Cloud’s effrontery. But in Washington the Reconstruction of the South and the protection and completion of the Union Pacific were deemed higher priorities than control of the Powder River Country.

  It was not until April 1868 that another peace commission arrived at Fort Laramie. Red Cloud would not legitimize the council by his presence and instead sent a message reiterating his original message: begone. A month later the concessions were agreed to. Major General Christopher C. Auger, representing General Sherman on the commission, ordered the Bozeman Trail closed to all emigrants and miners, and issued a proclamation to abandon “the military posts of C. F. Smith, Phil Kearny and Reno, on what is known as the Powder River route.”

  Still Red Cloud waited. He had heard too many white promises in his lifetime. This time he intended to see the results before signing anything. Thus it was with a sense of grim finality that the contents of Fort C. F. Smith were sold to a Montana freighting company, and anything that could be hauled from the two lower outposts was loaded onto wagons bound for Fort Laramie. In the final weeks of August the last train rolled out of Reno Station and Fort Phil Kearny. Whether the departing troops felt anger or relief as they struck the colors from the latter’s towering flagpole for the final time is unrecorded. An eerie silence fell over the little plateau between the two Piney Creeks, broken the following dawn when Red Cloud led his warriors down from the hills and burned the forts to the ground.

  On November 6, 1868—after making the increasingly nervous white commissioners and Army officers wait until the conclusion of the autumn buffalo hunt—the forty-seven-year-old Bad Face warrior chief rode into Fort Laramie and triumphantly signed the treaty whereby the United States conceded to him and his people the territory from the Bighorns eastward to the Missouri River, and from the forty-sixth parallel south to the Dakota-Nebraska boundary. It was understood, at least by the whites, that the Indians would live in the eastern section and reserve the western section, the Powder River Country, as hunting grounds open to all tribes and bands. In the center of this tract, like a glittering jewel, lay the Black Hills. Paha Sapa. The Heart of Everything That Is.

  It was the proudest moment of Red Cloud’s life. That sentiment lasted a mere twelve months. For the Lakota were not finished dying.

  • • •

  In the fall of 1868, from the far side of the Black Hills, Sitting Bull sent word to both Red Cloud and the American peace commission that he would have nothing to do with, nor would he abide by, any treaty with the United States. Though the concessions Red Cloud was able to wring from the government were “unprecedented in the history of Indian Wars,” the Hunkpapas and their dwindling Dakota allies would continue to wage war. Even some of the younger, more militant faction of Red Cloud’s own Oglalas, most notably Crazy Horse, would later ride east to join the fight.

  Meanwhile, the man whom General Sherman appointed to oversee the High Plains, the Civil War hero General Philip Sheridan, viewed the latest Fort Laramie peace pact as an opportunity. One of its seventeen articles contained a nebulously worded clause requiring the disparate tribes to live, and remain, on specified pieces of land anchored by Bureau of Indian Affairs trading posts. Red Cloud quite naturally interpreted this as referring to the entire Powder River Country, the Black Hills, and the western swath of present-day South Dakota for which he had just fought, and won, a war. If the whites
wanted to keep tabs on him, and if the whites offered guns and ammunition, he would be more than happy to resume trading at Fort Laramie.

  General Sheridan saw it differently, and began to formulate a long-range plan that would force the Indians, particularly the Lakota, onto reservations well east of the Powder River Country. This would serve the dual purpose of keeping the enemy under observation as well as gradually making him more reliant on government goods and services. Whereas Red Cloud was thinking of weapons, Sheridan was thinking of plows. As part of his strategy Sheridan closed Fort Laramie to Indian trading. The Lakota were told that if they wished to trade, they were free to do business at Fort Randall on the Missouri in distant southeast South Dakota, about as far from Paha Sapa as one can travel and still be in the state. To salt the wound, Sheridan placed none other than the retired General Harney, the presumed “hero” of the fight at Blue Water Creek, in charge of the post. Red Cloud was insulted and said that he and his people would have nothing to do with the vicious old “Mad Bear.”

  With their trading post closed, the Laramie Loafers had no choice but to relocate to Fort Randall. But Red Cloud and his followers stubbornly resisted all government efforts to move them closer to the Missouri. And though Red Cloud stopped short of declaring war, he could not contain his more militant braves—no Indian chief could do that. Skirmishes between Army units and Sioux and Cheyenne warriors broke out, particularly on Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa lands on the Upper Missouri and in the Republican River basin to the south of the Oregon Trail. And though Red Cloud does not seem to have taken an active part in the fights, at one point he sent word to the whites that if they refused to reopen Fort Laramie as an Indian trading post, it should be closed altogether, just as the Army had abandoned the Upper Powder forts. When the Army ignored this veiled threat, Red Cloud appeared unexpectedly one morning in March 1869 before Fort Laramie’s gates at the head of 1,000 mounted warriors. It was a political show. Instead of attacking, his party slowly rode off to hunt in the Wind River country. He did, however, leave lobbyists behind in the form of mixed-blood traders to argue his cause.

  The generals running the U.S. Army could be as headstrong as any Indian warrior chief. When Red Cloud, ever the politician, recognized this, instead of starting a new war he decided to take his arguments directly to the top. In June 1870, he and Spotted Tail accepted a long-standing invitation to visit Washington, D.C., and traveled east at the head of a delegation of Oglalas and Brules. There they were given tours of the Capitol and Army and Navy facilities, with special emphasis on the War Department’s arsenal, where huge coastal cannons and howitzers were lathed and stored. For the first time Red Cloud saw the true military might of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant, who had been elected president two years earlier, gave a reception for him and the others at the White House. There and in subsequent meetings with government officials the provisions of the treaty were debated, with the plain-spoken Red Cloud acting as lead negotiator. “As a consequence,” wrote R. Eli Paul, the editor of Red Cloud’s memoirs, “he became stunningly famous. The head-warrior-turned-statesman and his entourage took the country by storm. Newspapers recounted his every word and deed, and large crowds of onlookers gathered at every public sighting of the celebrated group.”

  The adulation continued in New York City when the Indian delegation arrived there later in the month. Thousands of people lined Fifth Avenue to catch a glimpse of the celebrated warrior chief who had bested the U.S. Army, and Red Cloud was invited to deliver a speech at the Cooper Institute in Manhattan. In it he reiterated his belief that the treaty he signed protected the territory he had fought for. “No one who listened to Red Cloud’s speech yesterday can doubt that he is a man of great talents,” wrote the editors of the New York Times, describing him as “a man of brains, a good ruler, an eloquent speaker, an able general and a fair diplomat.” This did not mean that those in power were prepared to meet his demands.

  It was during this journey that Red Cloud, a quick learner, ultimately realized the futility of his aspirations. Though he managed to wrangle minor concessions from the government—a new trading post forty miles north of Fort Laramie was promised, for instance—and he may have considered himself the equal of any white man he encountered on his trip east, he had finally recognized the limitations of the Western Sioux nation as an entity. As he told Secretary of the Interior Joseph P. Cox, “Now we are melting like snow on the hillside, while you are growing like spring grass.” Or, as one still militant Lakota warrior put it on his return, “Red Cloud saw too much.”

  The beginning of the end for Red Cloud’s Lakota, and all Plains Indians, had actually arrived one year earlier, in 1869, when the Union Pacific Railroad was completed across southern Wyoming and northern Utah, with a spur line running north to the western Montana goldfields. Once the final spike was driven the old overland trails—the Oregon and the Mormon, the Santa Fe and the Bozeman—were obsolete. And with the railroad arrived an army of buffalo hunters, whose deadly accurate .50-caliber Sharps rifles would soon wipe the prairie clean and do what no battle commander had ever been able to accomplish—drive the starving, destitute Lakota onto the white man’s reservations.

  On his return from the East, Red Cloud and his Bad Faces continued to roam the Powder River Country, but the end of their lifestyle was as inevitable as the end of the buffalo. Using the last of his dwindling influence, in early 1872 Red Cloud again traveled to Washington and persuaded the government to set aside a rolling swath of land along the White River in northwestern Nebraska as a new “Red Cloud Agency,” the first version of which had briefly been located on the North Platte. The site was visually breathtaking, a partially wooded tract marked by high bluffs that overlooked a green, rolling prairie veined with streams and creeks. Red Cloud, who had played his last card, moved there that same year. He was fifty-one. From this new home, he declared, “I shall not go to war any more with whites.”

  • • •

  In 1874 gold was discovered in the Black Hills. That Paha Sapa had been guaranteed to the tribes was of little consequence to the whites. After the financial Panic of 1873, extracting the gold became a national priority. As usual, Washington concocted a rationalization for violating a treaty and taking Indian land. The Grant administration decided that it would no longer block miners from entering the Black Hills, and that the Lakota and Cheyenne still roaming freely on both sides of the range would have to be forced onto reservations, ostensibly for their own safety. Runners were sent out that winter to inform the Indians of this decision, made over 1,600 miles away. It was little more than political cover. Both sides recognized that no such directives would or could be obeyed, and an American military campaign was already being planned. This suited the cantankerous, hard-drinking General Sheridan.

  “Little Phil,” who stood barely five feet, five inches, had come out of the Civil War with a reputation for courage, daring, and a propensity to employ the new “scorched earth” battle tactics that were coming into use around the world. To him, and to his equation of good Indians with dead Indians, we owe perhaps our most often quoted line from the decades of Indian wars. Sheridan’s main target was Sitting Bull, who was amassing his own intertribal force to defend the territory. For all his hatred of the red man, however, Sheridan, unlike Carrington and so many officers whose thinking was influenced by racial prejudice, did not hesitate to employ Native allies. The Crows, Shoshones, Rees, Pawnee, and Ute, trampled beneath Sioux hegemony for decades, eagerly signed up to fight for the Americans.

  When Sitting Bull’s agitators approached Red Cloud, he stuck to his promise. Like a surgeon who had grown weary of blood, he saw no point in shedding more of it. Taking to the warpath against the United States, he knew, would lead to a grimly waged campaign of attrition that would wear down the Indians day after insufferable day. The white soldiers who saw no evil in exterminating his people regardless of age or gender would never give them rest, and their territory would shrink until they were boxed in a
nd forced to choose annihilation or surrender.

  General George Armstrong Custer’s blunder into the large Lakota and Northern Cheyenne camp on the Little Bighorn in June 1876—the Indians called it the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and one that his Crow scouts had warned Custer against—was the Sioux’s last hurrah. The shocking slaughter of Custer’s entire immediate command intensified the national fervor to eradicate the Northern Plains tribes. Ironically, what the Indians lacked was a strategist on the order of Red Cloud to follow up their great tactical victory at the Little Bighorn. America struck back hard, and the Army’s mopping-up operations continued through the spring of 1877, when even Crazy Horse recognized the futility of the fight and turned himself in to soldiers at the Red Cloud Agency. Four months later Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death by a guard at the agency while allegedly trying to escape from so-called protective custody. Controversy still surrounds his death.

  With Crazy Horse dead and Sitting Bull a fugitive in Canada, what was left of the hostile tribes became resigned to their fate: on the reservation. Once again, sadly, Red Cloud had been prescient. In 1878 the Red Cloud Agency, Red Cloud along with it, was relocated to southwest South Dakota and renamed the Pine Ridge Reservation.

  Few men have the ability to completely deviate from their life’s philosophy, particularly in old age. Red Cloud was one of them. His attitude toward the reservation, once the symbol of a caged life unworthy of living, altered once he was established at Pine Ridge. He would adhere to the white man’s lifestyle, live in a house, wear a white man’s clothes, engage in white people’s commercial activities, and send his children to their schools. He had once been a man of a certain place and time; now he was a man of another place and time. His political gifts were numerous and ingrained, and he wielded them to remain the physical and spiritual leader of the Oglalas. Red Cloud had not changed, but he had adapted, and unlike Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the others who fought on, he had seen his people’s future. He understood that he, and they, had been overcome by historical forces.