by Drury, Bob
The topper was their final demand. The idea that any one Head Man, no matter how well regarded by the tribe, could speak for every brave in every band was incomprehensible to the Sioux. For centuries their culture had consisted of fluid, haphazard tribal groups further splintered by the overlapping structures of extended families, warrior societies, and clans. Only in buffalo hunts and formal warfare could leaders impose any kind of discipline on their followers, and even then only rarely. How could the whites not see that one “chief,” or two, or even a dozen could not possibly rule these tangled relationships? Why not appoint a king of the world?
Even the men—and they were always men—looked on as leaders were never granted absolute authority, most especially over the warrior class, the akicita. The Sioux political ethos, with its extreme family loyalties, worked naturally against any one man’s rising to authoritarian tribal status. Eighteen hundred years earlier Plutarch had described the Greek concept of democratic government as the individual being responsible to the group, and the group responsible to its core principles. This would have struck a nineteenth-century Native American as lunacy, as culturally foreign as the frenzied Sun Dance or the art of scalp-taking would have been in Buckingham Palace or the court at Versailles. So despite the whites’ determination to designate a succession of notable Indians as “tribal chiefs” with whom the United States could negotiate treaties, the point was academic. Besides, most white soldiers and frontiersmen had a difficult enough time physically distinguishing a hostile Sioux from, say, a friendly Delaware. To delineate the subtle power shifts of the Indians’ political, religious, and military societies was beyond their capacity. Nor did they much try.
Nonetheless, when Mitchell nominated a compliant Head Man with whom he had once traded extensively and peaceably, the Indians essentially shrugged and played along, anxious for their gifts. Given past experience, they were also fairly certain that the white men had no intention of keeping their promises. So as they awaited the wagon train from St. Louis they held councils of their own and devised entertainments. One of these included a demonstration few whites had ever seen and lived to tell about.
On the afternoon of the fourth day a troop of about 100 Cheyenne Dog Soldiers armed with guns, lances, and bows and arrows rode onto the treaty grounds to reenact a battle charge. The braves, wearing only loincloths and parfleche moccasins, were painted in their fiercest war colors, and their horses’ manes and tails were dusted and beribboned. On the animals’ flanks, etched in red ocher, were symbols enumerating each fighter’s coups—enemies killed, scalps taken, horses stolen. What at first appeared to the whites as nothing more than a haphazard, if clumsy, stampede evolved as if by magic into a disciplined martial drill, with the Cheyenne horsemen dismounting and remounting efficiently and precisely as they circled and charged. The white onlookers, the soldiers in particular, were stunned—and apprehensive. These warriors had been bested by the Sioux? It was a lesson the next generation of Army Indian fighters would forget at their peril.
More than a week was spent on such entertainments and continuous feasts as the Indians awaited the wakpamni—the great distribution of bribes. There were a few surprises. At one shared meal the Cheyenne atoned for the recent killing of the two Shoshones by returning the scalps to the brothers of the victims, along with gifts of knives, blankets, and pieces of colored cloth. And the famous Belgian Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet wandered through the camps proselytizing, offering Mass, and, he claimed, baptizing 894 Indians and 61 “half-bloods.” One of the bands he preached to was Red Cloud’s. And though Father De Smet failed to convert the Bad Face blotahunka, Red Cloud was known for the rest of his life to “spout bits of Christian doctrine.” It was from this gathering that De Smet bequeathed to us one of the more droll descriptions of the Indian love of boiled dog. “No epoch in Indian annals,” he wrote, “shows a greater massacre of the canine race.”
Meanwhile, as the days wore on, the grass for miles in every direction was clipped clean by the thousands of Indian ponies and the banks of Horse Creek and the North Platte were turned into stinking midden heaps. There was so much human waste that the Army troop moved its encampment two miles upriver to escape a stench one soldier described as “almost visible.” When messengers finally brought news that the gift-laden caravan was a day away, Fitzpatrick and the superintendent of Indian Affairs, Mitchell, reassembled the tribal elders to ask if they had chosen chiefs to represent them. The Indians were sly. They had ridden hundreds of miles and delayed the fall buffalo hunt to receive presents. They were not going to depart empty-handed, even if avoiding it meant participating in a sham. They told the whites they had indeed selected emissaries, and several men from various tribes stepped forward. After the conditions of the original treaty terms were again read aloud and translated—including the unthinkable demand that the Sioux cede to the Crows the territory on either side of the Powder as it flowed north into the Yellowstone—a clever Arapaho Head Man named Cut Nose more or less spoke for all the tribes when he announced, “I would be glad if the whites would pick out a place for themselves and not come into our grounds. But if they must pass through our country, they should give us game for what they drive off.”
The government delegates took such cryptic comments as acquiescence in all their demands. Though the savvy Plains veteran Fitzpatrick must have known better, he stood mute while the designated “chiefs” approached a table set up in the amphitheater. Like most Indians, the Sioux could neither read nor write, and so could not sign or print their own names. The government had obligingly worked out a practice for them: when a Head Man agreed to a treaty, he would step up to a table where a scribe sat, accept a token blanket or string of glass beads, and with one or two fingers touch the top of an offered fountain pen. The scribe would then add the name of the Indian to the document. It was a useless ceremony, as the Indians had no real understanding of what they were agreeing to or, more accurately, giving away. In any case the U.S. government usually had no intention of living up to its end of the bargain. Nevertheless, one by one they made their marks next to their names. Of the two Sioux “chiefs” who touched the pen, neither was from the Oglala tribe, let alone from Red Cloud’s Bad Face band. One was from the Brule band of the Lakota—a strong, pioneering people, but martially no match for the Oglalas. The other represented a small contingent of the Missouri River Sioux. Although we cannot guess at what went through Red Cloud’s mind as he and Old Smoke stood and watched, both knew that real power flowed not from an inkwell, but from an otter-skin quiver or, better yet, from the muzzle of a gun.
So on the final day of the council what was known to history as the Horse Creek Treaty was signed to ensure a “lasting peace on the Plains forevermore.” After the signing ceremony the wagon train pulled into camp and formed a corral, and a final grand feast followed the distribution of gifts. Besides the usual allotments of coffee, sugar, and tobacco, sheets of thin brass were distributed; the Sioux, ever vain, liked to cut these into doubloon-sized ovals and weave them through their hair. Head Men and esteemed braves were also presented with commemorative medals featuring a likeness of the Great Father, President Millard Fillmore; and with U.S. Army general officers’ uniforms, including ceremonial swords and red sashes. Many Indians wore these uniforms the next day—this was probably their first encounter with pants—as the tribes dispersed to the four corners of the territory from which they had arrived.
The 1851 Horse Creek agreement was the most sweeping official treaty the Western Sioux had ever signed with representatives of the United States. It would, perforce, also be the first to be broken. Luckily for historians, a long-lost autobiography that Red Cloud dictated in his old age supplies a rare look into this era from the Sioux perspective. Even so late in his life, long past the era of the great Indian wars, Red Cloud seemed to fear some form of retribution, and his book barely touches on his interactions with the whites; when it does, the few passages are so opaque as to render his true feelings nearly im
penetrable. Regarding the Horse Creek council, however, he does hint that some of the older (and weaker) Head Men who camped that September on the North Platte were intrigued by the idea of the white and red man bound forever in peace. What can definitely be inferred from Red Cloud’s writings, however, is that he had no intention of abiding by the treaty. The Lakota were the strongest and most feared tribe on the High Plains. And within the Lakota, Red Cloud’s Oglalas vied for primacy.
In interpreting Red Cloud’s life and times in the context of the Horse Creek Treaty, one might—might—grant that he could have lived without actively attacking the emigrant trains and provoking war with the United States, at least for the moment (but subsequent events make this a ticklish argument). One could even make the case that despite his peoples’ deep political tradition of near-fanatical individualism, he may have even acceded to the concept of a single Sioux “chief,” most likely because it would have been himself.
But no one, certainly not Red Cloud, could possibly have imagined him a bottled spider confined to a specific territory, no matter how large or how bountiful. The idea of Red Cloud prohibited from leading raids, from stealing horses, from taking scalps—the very exploits for which he was already renowned—was inimical to his nature. Such adventures had been the essence of the Sioux ethos since time immemorial. And if Red Cloud was anything, he was a creature of the myths and legends of his forebears, connected to those ghosts by what a future American president, on whom he would one day wage war, referred to as the mystic chords of memory.
2
GUNS AND BADLANDS
The first French explorers to make contact with the Sioux in the mid-1600s noted with not a little horror the tribe’s fierce and utter barbarism. The Europeans had long since adapted and reconciled themselves to the New World’s Stone Age cultures. But the Sioux’s vicious raids on their Algonquin neighbors to the north and east—and the sheer joy the Sioux took in tearing their enemies limb from limb with rocks, clubs, sharpened sticks, and flint knives—called to mind nothing so much as Dark Age memories of Norse berserks or marauding Huns. Watching these battles as spectators, the European newcomers had no idea that the savagery was actually a finely tuned conceit. To the Sioux, war was the reason for living, and though their raids and ambushes were of course made to establish territory and gain booty, more important was the chance for an individual warrior to give vent, in public, to an aggressiveness prized by the tribe’s ethos.
A Sioux brave would wager his last breath against the most courageous adversaries, and no matter the outcome, he won. A good death did honor to an entire life, and thus on the battlefield and afterward he was an exhibitionist with no sense of modesty. When he took a scalp, hacked off a hand, gouged out an eye, or severed a penis, he screamed at the top of his lungs to proclaim his own greatness. Later, when he handed the scalp to his woman, she too sang his glory while dancing with the bloody skull piece suspended from a pole.
Such behavior was alien enough to baffle seventeenth-century Europeans. Whites observed a tribe that hunted and grubbed for a living with flint arrows and stone tools and exhibited no artistic tendencies other than painting their bodies and faces with hideous designs in preparation for battle. The Sioux did not weave baskets or fabrics, bake pottery, or make jewelry. They disdained farming and constructed no permanent lodges. And with no pack animals available on the continent—unlike the horse, mule, camel, or ox, the buffalo could not be bred to be harnessed or yoked—Native American animal husbandry had lagged about four millennia behind the rest of the world. Also, as other tribes took their first, tentative steps into modernity, this cultural leap seemed impossible for the hunter-gatherer Sioux. Had some of their historical contemporaries—the imperious Aztecs, the sophisticated Cherokee, the politically savvy Iroquois—been aware of their existence, they would probably have considered the Sioux laughable or subhuman. But the Sioux could fight, and the fires of their blood-feud memories were banked and stoked until the day they died.
The Sioux, like all American Indians, are descendents of Asian nomads who crossed the thousand-mile Bering Land Bridge in various migrations between 16,500 and 5,000 BC. There is archaeological evidence to suggest that the first pre-Columbian peoples to strike south from Beringia and into what is now the great, grassy, Northern Plains of the United States did so about 12,000 years ago, trailing and stalking the migratory routes of the great herds of mastodons, woolly mammoths, and a giant form of bison that had gone extinct by the time the Europeans arrived. These hunters, who devised their first bows and arrows around the time Jesus was preaching in Judaea, rapidly spread east and west to the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, through Central America, and across the Isthmus of Panama. Linguists hypothesize that the wandering proto-Sioux bands originated somewhere in the southeastern United States, perhaps in the Carolinas or near the Gulf of Mexico.
By the 1500s the Sioux were again on the move, pushing up the Mississippi River Valley and settling near the river’s headwaters in the forests of northern Minnesota. At the time, as today, the region was laced by a network of intersecting streams, marshes, and lakes, and the development of the birch bark canoe allowed separate bands not only to gather and consume wild rice from still waters, but to stake out individual territories.
Theirs was a patriarchal society with tribal affiliation passed from father to son, a simple solution for men fathering children with multiple wives from different bands. Leaders—called “Head Men” and “Big Bellies”—were for the most part chosen on merit. In some cases a chief would create an inside track for his favorite son, but even then the inheritor would have to earn the band’s loyalty on the strength of his wisdom, his personality, and above all his martial ability. And if an ordinary brave was not pleased with a new chief, he had the option of persuading any followers to strike out with him and form a new band with himself as Head Man.
Perhaps influenced by the seven stars of the Big Dipper—the “Carrier” that conveyed the souls of the dead to the Milky Way, which the Sioux called the “Road of the Spirits”—the tribe attributed mystical qualities to the number seven. It was the hostile Chippewa who dubbed these peoples “Sioux,” or “Little Snakes.” The Sioux referred to themselves as Otchenti Chakowin, the “People of the Seven Council Fires,” those tribes being the Sissetons, Yanktons, Yanktonais, Santees, Leaf Santees, Blewakantonwans, and Lakota/Dakotas.1 Each tribe in turn usually consisted of seven bands, and with minor dialectical differences they all spoke the same language. The seven council fires thus served to validate the cohesion of the peoples as a single, united nation.
Early New France officials and traders valued the North American Indians’ hides and pelts, and pursued a social policy of benign neglect toward the tribes. Though the Europeans would occasionally attempt to agitate the Indians as a buffer against probes from the nascent Spanish empire far to the southwest, for the most part they left the “nations” to their own political and military customs. As a result, for over a century the savage Sioux generally had their way with their Algonquin neighbors. That balance of power shifted abruptly around 1660, when English trading ships sailed into Hudson Bay offering muzzle-loading, smoothbore flintlock muskets and steel knives in exchange for furs. The bay bordered the homeland of the Cree, an Algonquin people, and they were the first Native Americans to obtain this new weaponry. The journals of British sailors record great numbers of Cree paddling out to their flotillas in canoes piled high with furs and skins; the braves returned to the Cree villages bearing crates of guns, powder, and ball.
With the aid of their Algonquin cousins the Chippewa as well as a renegade band of Sioux called the Assiniboines, the newly armed Cree took bloody revenge on the People of the Seven Council Fires, who had terrorized them for generations. They drove the Sioux from their forested hunting grounds into swampy wastelands, where they could only grub for acorns, roots, and edible plants. And still the Algonquins hunted them like small game. The Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who was knig
hted for being the first man to traverse Canada to the Pacific Ocean, remarked that these forlorn Sioux were so skittish that the mere sight of strange spires of campfire smoke would drive them deeper into the swamps and marshes.
As best historians, ethnologists, and paleoanthropologists can tell, the Indians who would eventually become known as the Western Sioux split from their woodland eastern cousins sometime around 1700. These breakaway tribes subsequently splintered into many smaller bands as they conquered or subjugated a host of peoples during their migration west by southwest onto the buffalo ranges. Of course, the Sioux were not alone in these territorial shifts; the European invasion and subsequent expansion sparked chain-reaction movements all over the continent, and tribal borders were in a state of flux. A few years earlier the powerful Iroquois had overrun the Ohio Valley and did much the same, first to the Hurons and then to the Eries, driving them farther and farther west. And, now, tribe by tribe, the Algonquins with their modern weapons were in turn forcing the Sioux out of their fetid marshlands and onto the tall-grass prairies west of the Mississippi. French trappers and voyageurs were virtually the only chroniclers of these great migratory shifts, and they recorded that the Yanktonais tribe of Sioux moved west first, followed by the Lakota faction of the Tetons, who were in turn trailed by the Yanktons.