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

by Drury, Bob

  It is difficult to explain what inspired the Western Sioux with such undying hatred for certain tribes, such as the Crows, Pawnee, and Kiowa, while at the same time they made tentative peace with others, such as the Cheyenne. Yet the Lakota seemed to tolerate the tall, stately Cheyenne more than any others despite the fact that the Cheyenne were distant cousins of the same Algonquins who had driven the Lakota out of Minnesota. One likely reason for this friendship was that, like the Lakota, the Cheyenne were fiercely opposed to white emigration. Another, and perhaps more important, reason was their access to horses through a long tradition of trading with tribes to the south, which the Sioux considered enemies. In any case, after a flurry of brutal early battles, the Sioux and Cheyenne settled into a partnership that would continue over the next century.

  Meanwhile, as more of the Minnesota Sioux bands and tribes were drawn onto the Great Plains in the early 1800s by the estimated 60 million buffalo migrating across the prairie—more than eleven times the number of people living in the United States, according to the 1800 census—the Oglalas and Brules continued to lead the march west, their advance scouts sending back word of the rolling paradise of rivers and abundant game that lay on the other side of the Black Hills. According to the Winter Count of 1801, a combined Oglala-Brule raiding party that ventured to the head of the Powder River was set upon by the Crows, who in one of their rare victories killed thirty Sioux braves. Some historians believe that it was around this time that the Sioux collectively decided to abandon the arid, broken land east of the Black Hills and to make their home among the thick grasses and game herds of the Powder River Country of Wyoming and Nebraska.

  This would take some effort. Although thoroughly outgunned, the Crows were richer in horses than the Sioux—a Crow brave was considered poor if he owned fewer than twenty horses, while a Lakota Head Man was considered wealthy if he owned thirty—and Crows were known to be capable of riding forty miles nonstop in twenty-four hours, thus perfecting the art of escape even while carrying captives. In fact, of all the Indians on the Plains, the Crows and their cousins the Gros Ventres were the only tribes who did not routinely torture and kill women and children prisoners. Infant mortality, high among all Plains Indians, was particularly severe among these rugged mountain tribes, and with their population constantly in jeopardy, they made a habit of marrying their female prisoners and adopting the children. Crow warriors, as tall as the Cheyenne, also had a physical trait that distinguished them from just about every other tribe in the West, if not the continent. Given their diet, lifestyle, and, at best, casual hygiene, most adult Indians had teeth like a crazy fence. Contemporaneous accounts, however, describe the Crows’ teeth as invariably straight, gleaming white, and remaining intact in their mouths into old age.

  And while the Sioux were to eventually push these fine-dentured people higher into the forested crags of the Bighorns and beyond, the Crows were also blessed, or cursed, with memories as long as the Sioux’s. Crow fathers passed on to sons a burning hatred of the Sioux (as well as their toadies the Cheyenne), while Sioux fathers instructed their sons in the most excruciating tortures, to be reserved for Crow enemies. A favorite was not only to gouge out a Crow’s eyes and hack off his ears, arms, feet, and penis, but also to punch a hole in his bladder and urinate or defecate into it.

  Indian torture rituals, as inconceivable as they were to most whites, did have a purpose beyond inflicting excruciating pain. The majority of tribes believed that all humans went to the same idyllic afterlife in the exact physical condition in which they had died. This breathtaking arcadia, bursting with ponies and game and populated by unlimited comely maidens, was a literal Happy Hunting Ground. But if the ghostly warrior had no eyes or tongue with which to see this paradise and taste its fatty meat, if he had no feet with which to chase the game, no hands with which to draw back a bowstring, no genitalia with which to satisfy his carnal desires, then one man’s heaven had become another’s hell. This belief was universally accepted among the tribes, although the even more cruel atrocities exchanged between Sioux and Crow were purely malicious.

  For all the wonders of such an afterlife, however, both the Lakota and the Crows recognized that on this earth their continual battles came down to the acquisition and defense of the most desirable hunting grounds. And as much as the Western Sioux hungered for the Crows’ Powder River Country, by the turn of the nineteenth century they were not yet strong enough to take it and hold it. Instead they consolidated in the territory on the buffalo feeding grounds to the east of the Black Hills across present-day South Dakota to such an extent that when Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark led an expedition that ascended the Missouri in the fall of 1804, the American explorers were amazed to find that so few Sioux had managed to amass such vast power and prestige.

  Following a parley with the Oglalas on the Bad River, the Americans recorded in their journals that the entire tribe totaled sixty lodges containing 360 people, 120 of them warriors led by a chief named Stabber. Granted, not all seven of the Oglala bands may have been camped together, and to this day some historians dispute Lewis and Clark’s census, finding it difficult to fathom how such a minuscule armed force could have routed the more numerous Arikara, Kiowa, Omaha, and lesser tribes while simultaneously enfolding the defeated Cheyenne into its orbit. The key word is “armed.” The Sioux had the most, the best, and in some cases the only guns in any fight. And though the disparate Sioux bands and tribes operated as politically distinct entities, their shared language, myths, and culture provided a loose coherence that radiated power in all directions across the Plains.

  To this point the Western Sioux’s contact with whites had been limited to annual swap meets on the Missouri and occasional visits from mountain men. But following the War of 1812, French traders began to reassert themselves along the Big Muddy, establishing permanent posts on its Great Bend to barter with the Arikara and Mandan. The Lakota occasionally lingered along the river after the trading season to ambush French keelboats, and in the summer of 1807 a group of Oglalas fired on a small U.S. Army unit escorting home a Mandan chief who had accompanied Lewis and Clark to Washington. During the shoot-out an Oglala Head Man named Red Shirt was killed by an American ensign. Red Shirt could very well have been the first Sioux to die at the hands of a U.S. soldier. He would be far from the last.

  • • •

  Sometime in 1815 another momentous opportunity fell to the Lakota when the Cheyenne invited them to an annual horse-trading meet held on the North Platte in Nebraska, just south of the Wyoming border. The Cheyenne had been attending these all-Indian exchanges for decades, to acquire not only mustangs but Spanish swords, knives, and bits of conquistador breastplates and helmets from Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Plains Apache up from the Red River. But this was the Sioux’s first venture into the verdant North Platte territory. The visit did not go as peacefully as the Cheyenne had hoped—a Brule brave split open a Kiowa’s skull with his war club, precipitating an all-out battle. But the Lakota liked what they saw of the country. When the Lakota liked what they saw of a country, it was not a good omen for the inhabitants.

  At this time the Northern Plains contained several neutral zones that separated the major hostile tribes from one another. These areas had no fixed boundaries and were subject to continual mutations as the fortunes of war ebbed and flowed. Four of them related to the Western Sioux—the Yellowstone drainage of the Powder and Rosebud Rivers to the northwest, a loose demilitarized zone against the Crows; the western Laramie Plains that kept the Ute at bay; the Republican River country along the Kansas-Nebraska border contested by the Kiowa; and the region between the forks of the South Platte and North Platte, east of which resided the Pawnee. All Indians trod cautiously through these territories, usually only in heavily armed hunting or war parties. So it was a sign of the Sioux’s growing dominance that by the spring of 1821 a band of Brules were confident enough to stake camp on the stubby Nebraska panhandle in the center of the four
th neutral zone, not far from the Colorado border along a tributary of the North Platte called Blue Water Creek.

  Among this band of Brules was a brave called Lone Man, whose Oglala wife, Walks As She Thinks, was pregnant with her first child. In early May some of the Sioux reported seeing a glowing red meteor streak across the night sky above their camp. Several days later Walks As She Thinks spread a brushed deerskin blanket over a bed of sand on the banks of Blue Water Creek and gave birth to her first son. When Lone Man announced to the band that he had named the boy after the strange meteorological occurrence in order to appease the Great Sprit, the Brules agreed that he had done a wise thing. This is how the child came to be called Makhpiya-luta, or Red Cloud.

  4

  “RED CLOUD COMES!”

  In the spring of 1825, four years after Red Cloud’s birth, Brigadier General Henry Atkinson led one of the earliest American military expeditions up the Missouri River. Atkinson, a decorated veteran of the War of 1812, departed St. Louis for the Yellowstone and was charged with securing treaties of “perpetual friendship” with as many of the Northern Plains tribes as possible. The 475 rifle-bearing soldiers from the 1st and 6th U.S. Infantry Regiments who sailed with him were blunt reminders to the Indians of the consequences of failing to grasp the import of this friendship.

  The Sioux, eyeing the gun barrels that lined the deck of Atkinson’s wheelboat, were no fools. When the general reached the Oglala camps in South Dakota they laid out a grand banquet of venison, antelope, and buffalo meat. Atkinson noted their extraordinary good health, and recorded the tribe’s number at nearly 1,500, a fourfold increase from Lewis and Clark’s estimate two decades earlier. This was probably an undercount, given that not every member of each Oglala band was present. A population explosion of such magnitude over so brief a period could be credited to a miscount by Lewis and Clark. More likely it indicated the beneficial influence of the horse. Not only had horses allowed the Indians to range farther after game to prevent winter shortfalls and ward off famine and nutritional diseases, but the packhorses had taken on the physical burdens that previously stunted or damaged the ovaries and wombs of women and girls of childbearing age. In addition, being able to act on their bold wanderlust had allowed them to avoid diseases such as smallpox and cholera, which had begun to afflict Indians living in fixed villages across the nation’s massive midsection.

  A more subtle purpose of Atkinson’s excursion was to bind the tribes to licensed, regulated trade agreements with the burgeoning United States—as if the words “licensed” and “regulated” had any meaning in Native culture. Nevertheless, gifts were proffered and various Western Sioux Head Men—some actually chiefs, others put forward as a kind of joke on the Americans—touched the pen. For example, on July 26, 1825, the Hunkpapas “signed” a treaty that began: “For the purpose of perpetuating the friendship which has heretofore existed, as also to remove all future cause of discussion or dissension, as it respects trade and friendship between the United States and their citizens, and the Hunkpapas band of the Sioux tribe of Indians, the President of the United States of America, by Atkinson, of the United States Army, and Major Benjamin O’Fallon, Indian agent, with full powers and authority, specially appointed for that purpose, of the one part, and the undersigned Chiefs, Headmen, and Warriors of the said Hunkpapas band of Sioux Indians, on behalf of their band, of the other part.” Even the most skilled interpreter could hardly have conveyed the sense of this to the Hunkpapas.

  The United States may have been in its infancy, but even the Indians of the far West had by now heard stories about a government whose customary double standard ignored nearly all Native interests. They accepted General Atkinson’s beads and blankets, nodded at his assurances, slyly inquired if he had guns for sale (he did not), and on his departure continued with their lives as if nothing had changed. They certainly had no idea that 1825 was also the year when Secretary of War James Barbour had begun to act on a concept of the forcible removal of the eastern tribes, first put forth by his predecessor, John C. Calhoun, to an “Indian Country” in modern Oklahoma, where “the future residence of these people will be forever undisturbed.”

  The more salient fact for Red Cloud that year was the death of his father, Lone Man. According to his incomplete autobiography as well as statements he made late in life, the cause of Lone Man’s death was an addiction to what the white man called whiskey but was in reality a shuddering mixture of diluted grain alcohol, molasses, tobacco juice, and crushed red pepper. Red Cloud may have witnessed his father succumb to delirium tremens. Although historians do not take every word of Red Cloud’s memoir as hard truth—his dictated account almost certainly smoothed the sharp edges of his savage youth—this particular assertion about his father’s alcoholism seems reasonable and reliable, not least because the timing coincided with a trade war between Canadian and American merchants, who were flooding the Indian camps along the Missouri with cheap rotgut in order to attract business. Native Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no more immunity to alcohol than to smallpox, and if bringing whiskey to the negotiating table facilitated the one-sided deals, so much the better.

  In any case, Lone Man’s death left an impression. Red Cloud abhorred the distilled mini wakan—“the water that makes men crazy”—and its mongers for the rest of his life. Years later, after he had assumed tribal leadership, a whiskey trader rode into his camp in early April just as his band was breaking winter quarters. Red Cloud was not happy with this disruption, but despite his position as a Head Man he could not forbid his braves to indulge. All he could do was order the trader to set up temporary shop beyond the village boundaries. By early evening many of his men were drunk, and disputes broke out over real and perceived insults, fresh and ancient. Red Cloud bounded around the village extinguishing these small prairie fires until one drunken brave killed an elderly father in an argument over his daughter. Red Cloud exploded, and ordered the trader’s wagon and tent burned and his barrels and kegs emptied onto the flames.

  After Lone Man’s death, Red Cloud’s mother left the Brule camp and took him, his younger brother Big Spider, and an infant sister back to her original Oglala band, which was led by Old Smoke. He recognized her as a “sister,” a term indicating that she was either his true sibling or a close cousin with the same status as a sister. Although he was by then in his early fifties, Old Smoke was still a vibrant war leader; he had been a Head Man for close to two decades, and his band was the largest, strongest, and most influential of all the Oglala tribes, if not of the Sioux nation. His willingness to take in Walks As She Thinks and her family proved most fortunate for her elder son. Fatherless boys, though not explicitly ostracized in the patriarchal Sioux society, nonetheless began life at a distinct social disadvantage. Red Cloud’s burden was further lightened by having not one but two strong uncles who by all accounts cared greatly for him and his mother, brother, and sister.

  Old Smoke’s brother was a warrior named White Hawk, and there is evidence that he may have been the band’s blotahunka, or chief protector. The Sioux set great store by inculcating in their children from infancy a respect for a reserved poise, and apparently White Hawk was crucial in teaching the young Red Cloud to control what he called the “unusually headstrong impulses” that in the future would establish his reputation for heartless cruelty. White Hawk was also responsible, along with Walks As She Thinks, for the child’s education, and before Red Cloud was two years old both his mother and his uncle were interpreting for him the message to be found in every birdsong and the track of every animal, the significance of the eagle feather in a war bonnet, and the natural history of the tribe in relation to its surroundings. By the age of four he was sitting at council fires emulating the gravity of his elders.

  As the Western Sioux’s territorial ambitions expanded, so too had their political traditions, and the concept of tribal leadership had evolved since the bands departed Minnesota. Back in their old homeland along the Mississippi the H
ead Men of the Seven Council Fires were for the most part totemic figures, influential and certainly supported by their kinsmen, but wielding nothing close to absolute power. Since the Missouri crossings, however, a more hierarchical system of social organization had gradually taken hold. This was no doubt partly because of the decisions that needed to be made on a daily basis by a wandering, warlike people no longer tethered to set communities. No Head Man could as yet “order” any braves to obey his commands. (Nor would he ever be able to.) But as authority accrued to the best hunters, trackers, horsemen, and fighters, a sort of natural primacy was accorded certain men that would have been unrecognizable to their distant eastern cousins. Old Smoke was one of these men, and as his power grew so did the ambitions of his rivals.

  When Red Cloud was thirteen years old he watched Old Smoke suppress his cousin Bull Bear’s attempt to usurp his leadership. Bull Bear, by all accounts a canker of a man with a face like a clenched fist, had strength in numbers. But Old Smoke retained the loyalty of his brother White Hawk’s less numerous but better-armed akicita. In the end, Bull Bear’s followers thought better of challenging them. Under Lakota custom and with White Hawk’s braves at his back, Old Smoke could have confiscated Bull Bear’s horses and women as punishment for his mutinous insubordination. Instead he merely banished Bull Bear and his followers, greatly weakening his own band in the process.

  Humiliated, Bull Bear threw dust in Old Smoke’s face before riding out of camp. It was an act of disrespect Red Cloud never forgot. And though numerous explanations have been put forth for how around this time Old Smoke’s people acquired a new name—some said it was because of their sullen, fierce demeanor; others said it was because of their penchant for cheating on their wives—Bull Bear’s intemperate affront is the likely reason they became known as the Ite Sica, or “Bad Faces.” The incident also gave Bull Bear’s new band the name for which it would be known forevermore—the Kiyuska, or “Cutoffs.”