by Drury, Bob
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Temporary winter settlements notwithstanding, the Lakotas rarely maintained residence in any one place, following the game along rivers that acted as natural highways, seeking fresh pasturage for their expanding herds of ponies, and camping along long-trod trails in places that had acquired mystical significance. As these journeys pushed the tribe farther and farther west by southwest out of South Dakota, life on the lush prairie offered Indian men and boys plenty of opportunity for self-reflection and long, metaphysical conversations deep into the night as the camp’s women—closer to slaves than second-class citizens by modern standards of thinking—did most of the hard work. Red Cloud therefore had ample opportunity to absorb his uncles’ wisdom and insights regarding the Sioux philosophy of existence.
The Sioux regarded the universe as a living and breathing—if mysterious—being. And though they recognized the passage of time as measured by the predictable movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars, to their eyes mankind was but a flickering flame in a strong wind; and their concepts of past, present, and future were blurred so that all three existed simultaneously, on separate planes. Whites steeped in Christian culture and Victorian science failed to comprehend this Indian cosmos, and often threw up their hands and resorted to the cliché of Indian spirituality as an amalgam of ignorance and superstition. This also contributed greatly to the white man’s description of Indians as feral and nihilistic people utterly lacking personal discipline. There was, however, a precise structure underpinning Sioux religious beliefs, even if it remained largely unrecognizable to outsiders.
In brief, Sioux religious philosophy flowed from their recognition of what the famous Oglala holy man Black Elk described as the “Sacred Hoop” of life. That hoop consists of a series of concentric circles, divine rings, the smallest of which encompasses one’s immediate family. The hoops then expand outward, growing ever larger to envelop extended clans, bands, tribes, entire peoples, the earth and all its living things, and finally the universe. It is a universe in which everything, from the clouds in the sky to the insects on the ground, is connected as a part of Wakan Tanka. So while whites viewed animals in terms of their usefulness as food or workers, the Sioux saw them as nearly equal, sentient beings. Thus the young Red Cloud learned from his elders, for instance, that running down a stray single buffalo that had escaped from one of their hunts was a question not of greed but of necessity, so the beast would not warn others of its kind away. This was the sort of knowledge and wisdom that dominated conversation in each tepee, and in this regard Red Cloud was fortunate to have Old Smoke as a kinsman.
The section of the Sioux tepee opposite the entrance is called the catku, and it was the place of honor where the head of the family slept, sat, and discussed matters of what can be called philosophy and politics. While the women and infants generally lived on the other side of the fire closer to the lodge’s entrance, the eldest son sat with his father in the catku until about the age of six, learning and observing. The young Red Cloud occupied this position in Old Smoke’s tent. In later years, Red Cloud and his closest kin often told stories about Old Smoke’s habit of treating the boy as his own. It was in Old Smoke’s catku that Red Cloud absorbed his first life lessons.
Given the makeup of Western Sioux bands at the time, Old Smoke’s probably comprised a dozen or so extended families that, in the spirit of the Sacred Hoop, raised their children collectively. Whites were later shocked at the laxity with which the Sioux treated their children, especially their boys. Young males were continually showered with love, did nothing but play games, and were rarely punished for even the most obnoxious transgressions. (The Sioux were equally appalled when they saw white fathers on the emigrant trails beating their children in order to instill discipline.) Not incidentally, all the games Lakota boys played were intended to hone their tracking, hunting, and fighting skills, which provided the only means of social advancement in Sioux society.
Boys and young braves loved to gamble on pastimes involving clubs, sticks, and rocks that often knocked them silly. A version of “king of the hill” was popular—with the “attackers” issued shortened lances to count coup against the “king.” There was one major difference from the game as we know it: Sioux boys played at night, when stealth was crucial. By the age of three or four, boys would be gathered in packs, presented with toy arrows and spears, and told to pick out an object—a rock, a tree—at a short distance and aim for it. The boy who came closest kept all the “weapons.” As the boys grew, so did the distance from the targets until at around the age of twelve they were given otter or dogskin quivers and real bows constructed of strong, dried osage that could propel either flint or iron-tipped arrows completely through a buffalo, or a man.
Red Cloud, blessed with strength and coordination well beyond his contemporaries, excelled in these competitions. Perhaps because he was a child whose father had died not in battle or on the hunt but from whiskey, and he stood just outside the ring of light thrown by the lodge fires of boys with important fathers, it was always Red Cloud who hit hardest with the lance during “king of the hill,” or laughed loudest while confiscating the other boys’ toy weapons. Such was his temper that was he was sometimes warned by his uncles to curb his ruthless streak.
As soon as a Sioux boy was capable of straddling a pony, his father, an older brother, or—as in Red Cloud’s case—an uncle would present him with a colt and its tack. He was instructed in the colt’s care and feeding, and it was made clear to him that the precious horse was now his responsibility. Preteens learned rudimentary horsemanship through pony races—the sight of boys holding tight to reins as 850-pound animals nearly bounced them out of rough saddles was a near-daily occurrence—and as they grew older one of their paramount chores was caring for the family’s herd. When a family was too poor to furnish a son with his own horse, his peers lent him a colt to break. This ensured that each male member of the band grew up with a thorough knowledge of martial horsemanship. The older the boys became, the more closely their horse games simulated raids and buffalo hunts. According to the few surviving accounts of Red Cloud’s boyhood, he took naturally to this horse culture, and especially to the hunt.
The advantages the horse provided the Sioux in both hunting and warfare cannot be overstated. Once mounted, hunting parties could track, out-gallop, and kill buffalo along migratory routes never before accessible. Although the bands still occasionally drove an entire herd over a cliff when the opportunity presented itself, gone were the days when a party of hunters camouflaged in wolf skins were forced on their bellies to approach a single bull or cow, cull it from the herd, and bring it down with a volley of arrows. Now a solitary mounted brave, his pony stretched out and galloping belly low, rider and steed exhibiting an intimate kinetic grace, could do the work of a half-dozen men.
The buffalo hunt did not come naturally to the skittish mustang. A full-grown bull stood six feet tall at its shoulder, and was ten to twelve feet from nose to tail. With an average weight of just under 2,000 pounds—some bulls grew to 3,000—it was not averse to turning, standing, and fighting. The horse and rider who faced these beasts needed heart, agility, and stamina, but above all a reactive instinct acquired by years of practice. From birth a colt was accustomed to the scent of its prey by being smeared with buffalo fat and being swaddled in buffalo robes. When it was old enough to be broken, a snug cord fashioned from buffalo hair would be fitted over its muzzle and attached to leather reins made from buffalo sinews. Its owner would train it to charge by continually riding at full gallop in and among the tribe’s horse herds, running as close astern as possible. When it was deemed ready to hunt, its ear would be split as a sign of respect and importance. Almost every Lakota family had at least one pony that was specifically groomed for buffalo hunting. Such was its worth that on the rare occasion when it was traded, it could bring between ten and thirty common horses in return.
The distribution of the slain buffalo’s component parts also chang
ed with the coming of the horse. Whereas hunting, particularly cliff-driving, had once been a group effort on foot, now the killer of a slain beast could be identified by the distinctive designs and fletching of the arrows that brought the animal down. Although the meat was still shared among the band, the hides were awarded to the clan of the arrows’ owners, and this too marked a subtle change in tribal hierarchy. With individual hunters thus rewarded, competitive boys became even more anxious to prove their mettle, and by the time Sioux boys reached their early teens the most adept of them could bury two dozen arrows into a buffalo’s short ribs with deadly accuracy in the time it took an American dragoon1 to fire and reload his musket. One frontiersman watched an exhibition put on by Lakota boys and noted, “They could hit a button, pencil, or any small article at about thirty yards.” Red Cloud developed this gift.
Early white observers of a Sioux buffalo chase described it as barely controlled chaos, with braves knocking one another out of the saddle helter-skelter. This was taken as just another example of the Indians’ lack of discipline—a mistake, as whites had not been trained to detect the hunt’s formal structure. The action was aggressively policed by akicita outriders, who would bring down any brave who got out ahead of the advancing line of attackers and spooked a drove prematurely. In later years Indians who had grown up riding with Red Cloud said there was nothing in life he enjoyed so much as the spirit and excitement of the buffalo run.
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Where the buffalo ranged, Old Smoke and his band followed, usually breaking and making new summer camps at least once a week in order to find fresh pasturage. In his autobiography Red Cloud had little to report about his early youth. Perhaps he did not think his life important until he became a hunter and warrior. But according to Lakota custom, his uncles and mother undoubtedly steeped him in the topography and plant and animal life of the Powder River Country. Old Smoke’s band would have roamed through all the major river valleys, from the Republican to the Yellowstone to the Missouri, and would have been familiar with the geographic nuances of Nebraska’s Sand Hills, the Black Hills straddling what is today’s South Dakota–Wyoming border, and even the Laramie Range on the eastern face of the Rockies. He would have been taught to recognize plants such as the special riverbank sage that warded off evil spirits, heed signs that buffalo were near, and learn to differentiate scat from a grizzly with a belly full of elk from the scat of a hungry bear that might be on the prowl for a Lakota horse. Becoming one with his physical environment was as natural a part of an Indian child’s education as learning to read and write was to an American boy back east. And although the great American wagon migrations were still a decade off, Red Cloud acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the ways of the whites from Old Smoke’s frequent layovers at the trading post that was to become Fort Laramie.
The mean, small structure, erected in 1834 and initially named Fort William, was the only American trading post west of the Missouri. Situated at the juncture of the Laramie and the North Platte in southeastern Wyoming, about midway between present-day Cheyenne and Casper, it was the brainchild of an Irish-born mountain man, Robert Campbell, and was named after his trigger-happy partner, William Sublette, who was said to have fled the mountains after initiating the slaughter of a band of peaceful Gros Ventres during the annual mountain man rendezvous of 1832. Campbell and Sublette had trapped in the Rockies for over a dozen years, and both recognized by the mid-1830s that the European craze for beaver hats was dying. The new money would be made in buffalo robes, and the two did a thriving business, especially with the Lakota, whose superior tanned hides of buffalo cows were craved by the merchants in St. Louis. (Bull hides were deemed of lesser quality.)
Fort William, protected by a fifteen-foot palisade of cottonwood logs and a cannon mounted in a blockhouse over the front gate, became a regular winter transit point for Indians meandering across the Powder River Country. White-Indian interactions were generally peaceable. Given their isolation and small numbers, the two mountain men and the few teamsters they employed did not have much of a choice. The Indians, meanwhile, not only wanted and needed the dry goods they imported, but saw no glory to be gained by wiping them out. They were, after all, merely whites. The Lakota, in any case, were still busy with the broader pursuits of their Plains expansionism, raiding and fighting the Crows, Ute, Pawnee, and Kiowa at every opportunity.
Once they took a territory, the Sioux patrolled it ruthlessly. This philosophy of security through aggression naturally filtered down to individuals, for whom military glory became a stepping-stone to leadership. It was impossible to become a Sioux leader without also being a distinguished warrior, and no one was more prepared to seize the mantle and the rewards that came with it than Red Cloud. The most important of these rewards was social advancement. “When I was young among our nation, I was poor,” he told Sam Deon. “But from the wars with one nation or another, I raised myself to be a chief.”
A warrior’s vocation was the only path to success and stature for a fatherless boy, even a boy with powerful and respected uncles. Red Cloud was about sixteen years old when he joined his first raiding party. It was sometime in the late 1830s, and the Lakota were waging a war of attrition against the Pawnee, who dwelled in stationary earth lodges and whose territory in east-central Nebraska was dwindling precariously. One day after a rare unsuccessful raid on a Pawnee stronghold along the twisting Platte, word spread through the Oglala camp that Red Cloud’s older cousin had been killed in the fight. The horror of losing a battle to the lowly Pawnee turned to cold fury, and Old Smoke organized an even larger retaliatory force from among several Lakota bands camping nearby. Red Cloud had always, if reluctantly, obeyed the pleas of his mother when she argued that he was too young to take part in these raids. Despite a Sioux woman’s inferior status, Walks As She Thinks did speak with some authority due to her brothers’ standing. But even the respect afforded Old Smoke and White Hawk could not alter the fact that Red Cloud’s absence from the war parties was beginning to be remarked on.
When young warriors painted and dusted themselves and their horses for battle, an unofficial head count circulated through the camp as to who was riding and who was staying behind. Although there were many reasons for a man of fighting age to sit out a raid (usually having to do with omens), any young brave repeatedly failing to participate was said to have had his “heart fail him.” Red Cloud was still on the cusp of war-party age, but perhaps he had heard this insinuation once too often. Or maybe his cousin’s death was the spark. For whatever reason, on this day as the departing braves gathered at one end of the village a shout suddenly rose among the mothers, wives, and sisters gathered about the warriors. “He is coming.”
“Who is coming?” someone called.
“Red Cloud,” called another voice, and the crowd took up a chant. “Red Cloud comes! Red Cloud comes!”
He then appeared on his spotted pony, painted and feathered, leading a spare bay by a rope. Both horses wore ribbons entwined in their manes and tails.
Within moments the scouts had fanned out and the bulk of the party rode east down the North Platte. It took the Sioux ten days to reach the rough sand hills overlooking the Pawnee village. On the eleventh day they charged at dawn. One can imagine the terrifying, primal electricity that accompanied the roaring sound of battle. Elk-bone whistles shrieked. High-pitched war whoops cut the air. Lakota arrows and musket balls ripped through the blankets and skins hanging from the entrances to the earthen Pawnee lodges.
As their women and children fled, Pawnee fighters scrambled from their beds and poured through the camp on foot, loosing their arrows from taut bows and swinging their war clubs wildly above their heads. They made for their pasturage only to discover that Sioux scouts had driven off their horses. Though the Pawnee were known as efficient hand-to-hand fighters, they were now facing a mounted enemy, and the battle looked to be over almost before it began. The Sioux trampled through the camp, crushing men, women, and children under their
horses’ hooves, and it was only the fortuitous arrival of a large Pawnee hunting party that broke off the fighting.
The Sioux gathered up nearly 100 stolen horses and rode off, putting two solid days’ distance between them and a token, weak pursuit. When they neared their own camp women and boys rode out to meet them and escort them into the village. Their ululation reached fever pitch as four warriors paraded from lodge to lodge lofting Pawnee scalps high on their spears. One of the four was Red Cloud. He had made his first kill.
It was a Lakota custom that when warriors returned from battle their closest kinswomen gathered about them, took the reins of their bridles, and led them to their lodges in a fawning procession. For Red Cloud, this task fell to his mother. When he and Walks As She Thinks reached their tepee the boy dismounted, entered, put away his weapons, and waited. Soon enough a young female cousin called at the entrance. She beckoned him to his uncle’s lodge. Red Cloud rose, wrapped himself in a blanket, and strode through the camp. One can only imagine what was going through the young man’s mind as veteran braves grunted and yipped in approval and young women stole peeks at the conquering hero.
When he reached Old Smoke’s tepee he was fed a sumptuous meal and prompted to recount his performance, particularly the circumstances of his scalp-taking. He would tell the story many times that day, including during his first appearance in the soldier lodge, the village’s largest, where warriors spun tales of battle in order that the narratives might become public property. Meanwhile, the fires in the tepees of the men who had not returned were doused, and in the surrounding hills the wails of their women echoed for hours as they cut their hair and flesh in mourning rituals, some even chopping off fingers.