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

by Drury, Bob

  By the early eighteenth century the People of the Seven Council Fires found themselves far to the west and south of their old hunting grounds, and it was here, at the elbow bend of the Minnesota River in southwestern Minnesota—where the watercourse makes a hard northeast turn toward the Mississippi—that a further fragmentation of these tribes took place. As each tribe reached this crucial geographic boundary the same scene was played out. After council parleys that invariably led to squabbles, the elder, more conservative tribal leaders opted to follow the Minnesota River northwest to its headwaters, keeping to the more forested country. Younger clans, meanwhile, forded the river and plunged into the prairie, which seemed endless but eventually rose to the Black Hills and, beyond, the Rockies. Thus was born the Western Sioux nation.

  Modern Americans living in an irrigated and fertilized West would find it difficult to visualize the stark contrast in the early eighteenth century between the green, forested land and what lay beyond when it more or less ceased to exist around the ninety-fifth meridian west—a line running a roughly southerly course from modern-day Minneapolis to San Antonio. The sere, harsh, timberless prairie that stretched westward from that line was as great a barrier as any ocean. Even the grass bending and rising uniformly with the wind gave an impression of waves rolling in from the sea. The country was bisected in places by lonely rivers and creeks, but it had almost no natural lakes and even fewer aquifers, so the land was prone to vast dust storms in summer and blizzards beyond the imagination of most easterners in winter. The decision to venture into this emptiness called for either extreme courage or supreme foolhardiness. The Sioux had ample streaks of both.

  Not long after the Lakota group opted to ford the Minnesota, it fractured naturally into the seemingly requisite seven factions, led by the pioneering Brules and Oglalas,2 the tribe in which Red Cloud would be raised. At around the same time, English traders from the Hudson’s Bay Company were also migrating south to the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, near modern-day Saint Paul. There, beginning in the eighteenth century, they began holding annual trade fairs. This nascent commerce was the start of a cultural entanglement that through disease and alcohol would kill more Plains Indians than all the battles with whites combined. It was also at these fairs that Western Sioux bearing buffalo robes for trade finally began to arm themselves with guns and steel knives. A familiar pattern repeated itself as they moved onto the prairie. Just as the Chippewa and the Cree had pushed the Sioux west, so the Sioux with their muskets would defeat or shoulder aside each successive Plains tribe with which they came into contact.

  Though the Sioux were to become its most vicious practitioners, warfare among Indians was simply a way of life. Nearly every tribe called itself “The People” and harbored deep suspicion and hatred toward outsiders with whom it competed for game and plunders. Death arrived swiftly and often in the violent thrust and parry of aggression and defense, abetted by a culture that revolved around a quest to avenge insults and injuries real and perceived. Yet it was rare for Indians to set out to conquer a territory in the European sense of the idea. The Sioux were that rarity, and as they spread west a northern branch of the Cheyenne was the first to fall. These Cheyenne, having been similarly mauled by armed Cree to their north, packed up and walked west across the Missouri River. This Sioux triumph was followed in rapid succession by the defeat of the weak Iowas and Otoes. Both of these farming tribes retreated farther west in hopes of allying with the more numerous Omaha, who occupied the territory south of the Great Bend of the Missouri. But the Omaha, like the Cheyenne, Otoes, and Iowas before them, lacked firearms. The Sioux slaughtered them at every turn. The survivors of all three tribes fled into the eastern Missouri floodplain, with the savvy Otoes crossing the river to decamp in southern Nebraska.

  Precisely how many years or decades it took the various bands of Western Sioux to reach the Missouri, and in what order they did so, is lost to history. What is known is that before the arrival of the white man, all Eastern Sioux tribes had conducted annual summer hunting parties across the Minnesota River to track the buffalo through the tall grass around what today is the Minnesota–South Dakota border. By 1725, however, these lands were largely denuded of game; this suggests that it was the relocated Western Sioux who had scoured them clean. Further, sometime in the late 1720s or early 1730s reports from French explorers and trappers indicated that the Iowas, Otoes, and Omaha were again on the move, retreating north from their fixed locations in the fertile bottomland of Nebraska and moving up into the inhospitable wastes of the northern Dakota Territory. Although the reason for this migration is unclear, historians reasonably speculate that once again they were fleeing the Western Sioux.

  By the mid-eighteenth century the Oglala and Brule bands of Lakota had tracked the buffalo herds up onto the windswept flatiron plateau that the French called the Coteau des Prairies. This 100-by-200-mile pipestone escarpment, carved by retreating glaciers and rising gradually to 900 feet, is sharply defined on modern satellite imaging maps. Shaped like an arrowhead pointing north, it fans south from North Dakota through South Dakota, through Minnesota, and into northern Iowa. As the Sioux were still without horses, they transported their smallish lodgepoles and tepee skins across these rocky highlands on the backs of their dogs, women, and children—including girls as young as six or seven. Progress was naturally slow, perhaps five to six miles a day, and their westward movement was delayed even more by the annual trek from the treeless Plains back to their old territory to acquire more weapons and ammunition at the English trade fairs, which by now had moved to the wooded headwaters of the Minnesota River.

  Even as the bloody French and Indian War raged along the Atlantic seaboard, the Western Sioux returned to these fairs for guns, allowing the seven Lakota bands to exchange goods and news with their eastern kinsmen. Intermarriage was common among the tribes and bands, as was the baffling swiftness with which each group might change its name. (Thus the people Lewis and Clark chronicled in their journals as the Teton Saone—most likely a collective name bestowed on all Lakota who lagged behind their westward-driving cousins—turn up as the Hunkpapas two decades later.) Most modern historians, for clarity’s sake, have settled on the seven Lakota bands that we noted earlier: the Oglalas, Brules, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs,3 Two Kettles, Hunkpapas, and Blackfoot-Sioux. It was also around this time that the Lakota had their first encounter with Indians who owned horses, the Arikara.

  The Sioux were certainly aware of the existence of the horse. Although they had no formal written tradition, since at least the early seventeenth century various bands had kept and passed down pictographic “Winter Counts,” a sort of snapshot chronicle of the most important events of any given year—eclipses, raids, droughts—etched into a deerskin or buffalo hide. The Lakota Winter Count of 1624 included a rough outline of the mustang that had been introduced to the western hemisphere by the Spanish a century earlier. But the Arikara, or Rees, were the first people the Sioux had ever seen incorporate the animal into their culture.

  The Arikara were a semiagricultural people who lived in fixed villages of earth lodges strung like beads along the Upper Missouri near present-day Pierre, South Dakota. Their compounds were fortified by wide ditches, earthen walls, and in some cases even cedar log stockades. And despite the haughty Sioux’s disdain for these “dirt eaters,” they were a hardy tribe known to ride their tough little ponies on buffalo hunts as far west as the Black Hills, an island of trees in a sea of grass 135 miles away. The Arikara had probably acquired their mounts, as well as some Spanish-made saber blades, in trade with the southern Kiowa, who prized the corn, squash, and beans of the Arikara. And though the Sioux coveted their horses, the Rees had numbers on their side. Their total population of perhaps 20,000, including 4,000 warriors, was nearly double that of all the wandering bands of Lakota put together.

  Apparently sensing that they had nothing to fear from these emaciated newcomers from the east adrift on the High Plains, the Arikara
initially took pity on the Lakota. After all, the Arikara had horses with which to not only ride down buffalo, but also overwhelm slow, pedestrian enemies. They also had attached the Spanish steel blades to the tips of their heavy, fourteen-foot buffalo lances, so no mangy band of itinerants on foot was any match for them. This overconfidence led them to accept some Brules and Oglalas into their villages and, in effect, provide them with handouts of corn, dried pumpkins, and even a few old horses. This was a mistake.

  Despite their strong mounts and steel, the Arikara did not have guns. And though their settlements were too well fortified for the Lakotas to storm, raiding parties of 20 to 100 Sioux began roaming around the edges of their villages, burning their cornfields, and running down and scalping any Rees who ventured beyond the walls and moats. The Sioux also managed to steal a few horses. In the end, however, it was smallpox that doomed the Arikara. Three great epidemics, caused by tainted European blankets, swept through their settlements in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The tribe was so severely weakened that by 1795 even its fortified villages afforded little safety against the marauding Sioux. What was left of the broken tribe fled north, abandoning the Missouri watershed below the river’s Great Bend, virtually beckoning someone to claim the land. The peoples soon to be known as Red Cloud’s Sioux, who to this point, culturally, continued to have at least one foot in Minnesota, happily complied.

  • • •

  In the second half of the eighteenth century sketchy reports began reaching English traders on the Missouri about a tectonic shift in the balance of power on the prairie. The little information we have about this period comes almost exclusively from the Lakota Winter Counts, which allow various interpretations at best, and only wild guesses at worst. In this case they do not help much. It remains a mystery, for example, why the formerly forest-dwelling Oglalas apparently preferred to keep as their base the scrubby country in present-day South Dakota near the brackish water of the aptly named Bad River. Early French trappers, the first whites to set eyes on this landscape, aptly christened it Mauvaises Terres. The Sioux agreed, naming it mako sica, “land bad,” and one wonders what went through their minds as they traversed the most desolate, and weirdest, geographic formation in the United States.

  To call the Badlands a moonscape does an injustice to the moon. Situated in southwestern South Dakota, some forty-five miles due east of present-day Rapid City, this stark, treeless mash-up of slate-gray gullies, buttes, canyons, plateaus, and towering hoodoos was once the westernmost bed of North America’s Great Inland Sea, a shallow body of water that connected the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico 65 million to 80 million years ago and split the continent roughly in half. Millions of years later a dome of molten rock ruptured the earth’s crust on the western edge of this sea and gave rise, first, to the towering granite outcroppings of the Rockies and, later, to the Black Hills. The land to the east of these mountain ranges crumpled and folded in on itself in a chain reaction, and the Inland Sea drained.

  Rivers and creeks streaming out of the mountains spread mud, gravel, and sand across the Badlands, which was transformed over millennia from a lush, semitropical ecosystem into a dry geological wasteland. Northern winds and diminished rainfall combined with frost and flash floods to further erode the soft, sedimentary rock and volcanic ash, leaving exposed in the sharp ridges and nobs the fossil remains of the Inland Sea’s eerie creatures—protoalligators, giant sharks, and predatory marine reptiles such as the toothy mosasaur, which grew up to fifty feet long. What the Sioux made of the petrified bones of these fantastical creatures littering the dynamic sweep and complications of the landscape no one knows.

  The “Badlands Wall,” which runs sixty miles on a rough east-west line, delineates the upper and the lower prairie, and to the naked eye this harsh vista would appear to offer nothing but misery and slow death to any human foolish enough to enter. But the Sioux were no ordinary people. They were quick to recognize that the sixty or more varieties of mixed short grasses growing on the eastern rim of the Badlands were prime fodder for buffalo, antelope, and mule deer (as well as for the millions of prairie dogs that in turn provided food for wolves, foxes, rattlesnakes, coyotes, black-footed ferrets, hawks, and eagles). And though bighorn sheep weighing up to forty pounds would be hunted to extermination there by the mid-1920s (they were reintroduced into Badlands National Park in 1964), these food sources would have been plentiful enough for the Oglalas, who now thought of themselves as a sovereign tribe.

  Before they acquired horses, the Oglalas took advantage of the Badlands’ topography by posting scouts on its high, eerie rock spires to spot buffalo herds drifting like a dark cloud’s shadow across the prairie below. As the animals’ eyesight was poor, a herd could be approached carefully and quietly from downwind, and on a signal from these lookouts a hunting party would form a semicircle behind the buffalo and, whooping and waving blankets, stampede them over a cliff like a stream of water. The men would then sing the buffalo song as the entire band made camp next to the pile of dead and dying creatures. As every American schoolchild has since come to learn, no part of the dead beast was wasted.

  Religious ceremonies were attached to the butchering of each section of the animal, from the skull to the pancreas; and the fatty meat was divided out, usually in accordance with tribal seniority. The savory tongue and liver—sliced warm from the writhing buffalo and flavored with bile dripped from the gallbladder—were awarded to the bravest hunters, and the tanned hides that were not set aside for robes were sewn into buckskins, leggings, and moccasins (and, later, tack and saddles). The horns were used to carry crushed herbal medicines, and the bones were fashioned into tools ranging from sewing needles to war clubs. The coarse, matted hair was twisted into ropes; the bladders were set aside for water storage; the sinews were made into bowstrings; and the inch-thick skin on the side of the buffalo’s neck was set out to bake in the sun before being cut into shields that could stop an arrow and deflect a musket ball. At night, the band would roast a portion of the succulent marrow over fires fueled by bricks of dried buffalo dung, the smoke of which seasoned the meal with a bitter tang. The leaner meat was mixed with marrow grease and seeded chokecherries and pounded into a nutritious concoction called pemmican, a staple of western Indians.

  Back east the buffalo was best known for providing the tens of thousands of lap robes that warmed New Englanders and Midwesterners through sleety winters. The tanning process that created these blankets—always performed by women, who sang their own buffalo song—was backbreaking. First the stinking hides were pinned taut to the ground and thoroughly scraped with flint knives or elk’s antlers to remove the flesh. Then a mixture of jellied buffalo brains and liver was rubbed into the fleshy side until it penetrated the pores. After being left for several days to dry in the sun, the hides were carried to a nearby river or stream and washed until somewhat pliable. They were then tied to poles with rawhide thongs and stretched taut again. Any stray fleck of meat still attached was eliminated by an elk antler or a fleshing flint, and more jellied buffalo brains were rubbed in. After several days, when the gooey brains had been sufficiently absorbed, women or girls would grab either end of the hide and draw it back and forth around a small tree for hours, as if operating a large two-person saw. When the end product was soft enough to fold, it was a buffalo robe.

  The historian Royal Brown Hassrick does not exaggerate when he notes in his classic study, The Sioux, that once the Lakota moved out of the forests and into the heart of the great northern buffalo range, “their way of life burst into magnificence.” And for a brief period in early spring the earth around their camps near the Badlands exploded in a glorious green, and the air was perfumed with clusters of blooming elephant head, larkspur, and wild crocus that lent a magenta-streaked patina to the new buds of dog ash, cottonwood, and river willow sprouting along streambeds roaring with clean, cold snowmelt.

  But the vibrant display was short-lived. By late May streams and creeks wer
e already drying into mud wallows, and the plant life had withered to a dingy brown that provided excellent kindling for the ubiquitous prairie fires ignited by lightning strikes. Yet the Sioux even learned to use this to their advantage. The succession of fires that swept the area left large swaths of the land covered in ash. The Oglalas welcomed these fast-moving walls of flame that danced into and out of sandstone arroyos and consumed the grassy bases of sand hills. The drought-resistant native grasses had roots that grew as deep as twenty-four inches, holding them steady in the soil and allowing for rapid regrowth. Within a few days tender green shoots would push up through the blackened wasteland to attract packs of hungry animals. These included herds of the perpetually astonished-looking pronghorn antelope, the Lakota meat of preference after buffalo. Though these antelope could run at nearly fifty miles per hour and were the fastest animals on the North American continent, they were surprisingly easy to hunt. The Indians would merely cut armfuls of sagebrush, hold the branches before their chests and faces, and slowly walk to within arrow distance before loosing their volleys. Perhaps this accounted for the animals’ apparent astonishment.

  The Oglalas’ chosen territory may have been high, dry, and windswept—they mocked their Brule cousins as Kutawichasha, or soft and indolent “Lowland Folk” who lingered in the more hospitable south—but it provided them with what they needed to fill their bellies and to keep warm in winter. This, in turn, allowed them the luxury of more time to form raiding parties that prowled the prairie in every direction until the “savage” Sioux became known, and feared, across the High Plains. All this fighting, however, was merely a prelude to one overarching aim—control of the isolated, 6,000-square-mile mountain range rising to the west like a giant green fortress, known to all as the Black Hills.