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

by Drury, Bob

  That treaty, which cleaved Mexico nearly in half and added 1.2 million square miles of new land to the United States, was signed just before John Sutter lifted several flakes of gold from the mountain stream over which he was constructing a sawmill. America’s victory in its first war of foreign intervention meant that no longer would the nation’s vast, barren midsection need to serve as a convenient buffer—a perpetual wilderness designated as the “Permanent Indian Frontier”—to hold off foreign powers such as Russia, Great Britain, or Mexico; and settlers from the East and miners from the West began to fill the Great Plains and the intermountain West. The void on the nation’s map was taking shape. Indians, meanwhile, sensed a gradual invasion of their territory that gave no indication of ebbing.

  What had begun as a trickle turned into a wave of homesteaders bound for Oregon’s lush Willamette River Valley; miners bound for the gold fields of California; and, after the murder of Joseph Smith, Mormons bound for the sweeping vistas that wound down into the Salt Lake country. When Smith’s successor Brigham Young decided to flee west with his flock, the first Mormon wagon train moved up the Platte in the spring of 1847 on the parallel Mormon Trail, a route that merged with the Oregon Trail at Fort John before crossing the mountains. By late summer of that year the broad, harsh Salt Lake Valley was already being irrigated, fenced, and farmed despite the fact that the land was still technically, if precariously, a part of Mexico. The next season three more Mormon trains of nearly 800 wagons, with Young himself in the van of the slow procession, transported 2,400 Latter-day Saints from Nebraska to Utah.

  The Lakota, in particular the Oglalas, were initially helpless in the face of this onslaught. Red Cloud’s killing of Bull Bear had divided the tribe physically as well as emotionally, and those who were now called the “Bear People” had drifted southeast to Nebraska to hunt with the Southern Cheyenne while the “Smoke People” generally staked camps farther north on the Clear Fork of the Powder, and often as far east as the White. When bands from either faction made the trek to what they had known as Fort William, they were shocked by its transformation. A company of the 6th U.S. Infantry consisting of about fifty officers and enlisted men was now permanently bivouacked at Campbell’s and Sublette’s once-sleepy trading post. Before the Indians’ eyes Fort Laramie had become the Bluecoats’ main command and logistics center in the West, an oasis within which travelers could resupply, find decent medical care, purchase fresh horses, and hire scouts to guide them over the Rockies. When the soldiers—“Walk a Heaps,” to the Lakota—were not drilling or taking target practice, they enlarged the fort’s kitchens, warehouses, and corrals; added enlisted men’s and officers’ quarters; and even constructed a schoolhouse and a wooden bridge spanning the Laramie River, a mud wallow for most of the year but an unfordable torrent of mountain melt in the spring. From 1849 to 1851 more than 20,000 wagons trailing over 140,000 head of livestock passed through Fort Laramie, an “Ellis Island of the West” in the center of Lakota land. The Indians seethed.

  To the Mormons and homesteaders, who had dubbed the Oregon Trail the “Glory Road,” the route may have been a godsend: a pathway across the High Plains that led to the promised land. But to the Indians it was a trail rife with pestilence. They believed that these insolent Meneaska were infecting their country not only spiritually, but also—by intention—with actual, fatal diseases. The Indians’ anger and bloodshed spiked, and emigrants’ journals from the era are filled with entries describing all manner of “provocations,” from stolen oxen to gruesome killings. Even intertribal fights occasionally spilled over. On May 18, 1849, a newspaper, the St. Louis Republican, printed a letter from a gold miner whose wagon train had been intercepted by a small band of Pawnee fleeing a larger party of Sioux. The Pawnee begged for sanctuary. The whites refused and stood by, watching as the Sioux killed and scalped every Pawnee save one squaw and her young son.

  The sullen “savages,” another emigrant wrote, were now “foes on every hand, subtle as the devil himself.” Sioux braves lurked in butte breaks and amid the papery leaves of thick stands of cottonwoods and gambel oaks, from which they rode down on small parties unlucky enough to have been separated from the main wagon train. At night they sneaked into white camps to drive off horses and cows and steal metal cookware. They were constantly on the lookout for any pioneer too careless with his weapon. Should he lay his rifle down for even a moment to hitch his oxen team, or to fill his water barrel from a stream, the rifle would be gone, and perhaps him with it if no one stood lookout. And so ended the days of informal tolls of sugar and coffee in exchange for unmolested passage across the prairie.

  Though Red Cloud never admitted making any of these early raids on the emigrant trains—and historians generally take him at his word—tension was nearing the breaking point. Oddly, the last people to notice this were the soldiers deployed to Fort Laramie, who remained rather oblivious of the Indians’ growing rancor. The enlisted men’s biggest complaint was the mind-numbing monotony of their daily routines such as putting up hay and chopping firewood in blowtorch summer winds, and cutting tons of ice blocks from the North Platte and Laramie and hauling them to the post’s icehouse through the raw Plains winter. The only diversion was dropping by the sutler’s store, which was run by former trappers, in hopes of meeting civilians laying in provisions and bearing news from the East. A highlight was the arrival of a mountain man wintering over before finding work as a scout in the spring. To sit by a roaring fire, whiskey jar in hand, and listen to the likes of Jim Bridger or Tom Fitzpatrick spin yarns of taking down an angry grizzly or escaping a Nez Percé ambush was tantamount, on the frontier, to attending a performance at the Royal Albert Hall by the “Swedish nightingale,” Jenny Lind. The adventure stories of derring-do over high passes, through deep canyons, and across sere deserts might as well have been tales from another planet to the Bluecoats, almost all of them easterners and many of them European-born. (There was a distinct whiff of the peat bog among the enlistees; company rosters were larded with names such as McQuiery, Condon, Doyle, Grady, and Haggerty.)

  But for the most part deployment to the fort was a monotonous, backbreaking grind, and the soldiers would do almost anything to have their names dropped from the daily rolls of wood-chopping and ice-cutting: “fatigue work” assigned by the sergeants. This included volunteering for field service, which meant accompanying Army freight and mail wagons across the prairie. In the early days of Fort Laramie the notion of an Indian attack on a well-armed Army unit, no matter how small, seemed almost absurd. Soon enough, however, the same soldiers who had once angled for escort duties would yearn for the carefree days of wielding axes and ice cutters. They would also have their own war stories to swap with the likes of “Broken Hand” and “Old Gabe.”

  9

  PRETTY OWL AND PINE LEAF

  The four pillars of Sioux leadership—acknowledged by the tribe to this day—are bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom. Time and again Red Cloud exhibited each. Yet, traditionally, the Lakota also considered lesser factors when weighing the attributes of an aspiring Head Man. One was the patronage of important religious medicine men. Red Cloud was a crafty enough politician to recognize this, and his gifts of horses to the shamans and vision diviners as well as the lavish piles of meat his hunting forays provided to the entire band—with holy men usually receiving the choicest cuts—were more than enough to sway ecumenical opinion.

  The second factor was a trickier business. It involved paternal lineage and prestige, specifically the membership of a man’s father in important fraternal societies. In The Sioux, Hassrick notes Red Cloud’s “unexcelled” war record, “unparalleled” brilliance as a leader, and unequalled diplomatic “finesse,” only to conclude, trenchantly, that in spite of these qualities, Red Cloud “was never able to command the kind of reverence among the Sioux which someone from an important family might have received.” Among the Oglalas, even Red Cloud’s strong maternal bloodline could not completely erase the memor
y of his alcoholic Brule father. He would always lack the cachet of a Head Man like Whirlwind, son of Bull Bear.

  A stoic, Red Cloud faced and accepted this prejudice while doing his best to overcome it. He joined numerous warrior societies, and went out of his way to aid the weak, the poor, and the old among his band in particular and the tribe in general. Around 1850, as he turned twenty-nine, he also calculated the advantage of marrying into the right family in order to seal power alliances, even if it meant abandoning his one true love—to her tragedy and his horror.

  A Sioux man could take as many wives as he could afford—the bride price, a kind of reverse dowry, always involved the transfer of property, usually horses. Aside from his Brule lineage, Red Cloud’s desirability as a son-in-law was manifest, and the parents of the tribe’s most eligible maidens knew it. He was also in love with two women whom he intended to marry. The only question was which he would wed first. It was a social formality among the Lakota that a man wait at least a month or two before marrying again, which meant that the first wife would always hold a slight edge in status. Red Cloud had set his sights on two women from within his Bad Face band. He was more attracted to a girl named Pine Leaf—and events would prove that she was hopelessly in love with him as well—but Pine Leaf’s family did not have the prestige of another young Oglala woman, Pretty Owl. In the end, he chose Pretty Owl to become his first wife, with every intention of bringing Pine Leaf into his tepee when the proper amount of time had passed.

  Red Cloud’s courtship of Pretty Owl was the talk of the camp. While his mother, sister, and aunts began construction of a honeymoon lodge sewn from tanned elk skins, his older male relatives entered into negotiations with Pretty Owl’s father. As a result of these negotiations, Red Cloud tethered four fine mustangs to Pretty Owl’s lodge early one spring morning. The horses were a splendid matrimonial gift, and the people of the camp gathered about waiting for Pretty Owl and her father to come out and inspect them, as was the custom. When, by noon, no one from her family had so much as pulled back the flap of their tepee, Red Cloud arrived with four more ponies, all better than the first. He left the eight horses for review.

  Eight beautiful mounts were a grand—actually an excessive—bride price, even for a family as well connected as Pretty Owl’s. By late afternoon, however, they remained unaccepted. The crowd began to buzz over the rejection. Some thought Red Cloud a fool, whose obvious desperation to climb the social ladder led him to waste his resources on such a fickle family. Others whispered that Pretty Owl was behind the public humiliation; she knew that Red Cloud’s heart favored Pine Leaf, and this was her way of making him pay. There was a puzzled murmur when Red Cloud arrived for a third time, with four more ponies. These included a mustang everyone knew to be his favorite racing horse. He tethered them and left. And there the twelve animals stood until sundown, when a glowing Pretty Owl, a spot of vermilion on each cheek, came out of the tepee beside her father. He looked over the ponies casually and nodded to his daughter, who began to untie them. This signaled acceptance, and the crowd erupted in whoops and hollers.

  Two days of feasting and dancing ensued. The Bad Face village was enthralled by the pageantry—but there was at least one exception. Several times during the festivities Red Cloud caught glimpses of a subdued Pine Leaf lurking in the flickering shadows beyond the bonfire. He vowed to himself to slip away and tell her that he loved her, and that he would soon take her as his second bride. The opportunity never arrived. On the second night of feasting Pretty Owl’s father led her to the center of the camp. She was clad in a tunic of brushed deerskin that had been bleached white by a scouring with prairie clay. A medicine man presided over the ceremony: Red Cloud pledged his troth by withdrawing the ramrod from his Hawken and tapping it on Pretty Owl’s shoulder, symbolically counting coup. “You are mine,” he told his new wife. The two retired to their lodge in the shadow of a large tree, set a little apart from the village on a rolling swale carpeted by threadleaf sedge and wild blue flax.

  The next morning at dawn the groom stepped from his tepee into a gray mist. He carried a rawhide lariat, intending to ride into the surrounding hills to gather his horses. When he passed the single tree near his honeymoon lodge he froze. Hanging from a low branch, a rope around her neck, was Pine Leaf. Her face was bloated and distorted; her bulging eyes were open. She seemed to stare accusingly at the man who had thrown her over. For perhaps the only time in his life, Red Cloud fell into shock. He mechanically threw his blanket over Pine Leaf’s head and walked to her father’s lodge to inform him. Then he returned to his mother’s tepee; lowered himself into her bed, facedown; and did not move.

  Pretty Owl fled to her father’s tepee and was not present when Pine Leaf’s family arrived to cut her down. Wails and moans echoed through the village, gradually superseded by the angry cries of Pine Leaf’s male relatives as they slashed Red Cloud’s honeymoon lodge to pieces. Still he did not stir from his mother’s bed. None of his friends moved to stop the razing of his tepee, although a few did surreptitiously retrieve his rifle and bow. Soon the torn elk skins littered the sedge, and the small mob’s energy was spent. That afternoon Red Cloud and Pretty Owl watched from a respectful distance as Pine Leaf’s body was carried on a travois to the top of a boulder-crowned butte and lifted onto a scaffold. Plates of food and a jug of water were laid by her side, and her favorite pony was shot and arranged beneath her to accompany her into the afterlife. A large quilt of tanned skins was draped over the grave site.

  A short time later, their grief assuaged, Pine Leaf’s clan apologized to Red Cloud and Pretty Owl for having been impetuous and repaid them with gifts of horses. The clan even built them another elk skin tepee. But the incident left a deep impression. Red Cloud fathered five children with Pretty Owl—and probably more with other Sioux women—but he always insisted that he remained “monogamous” for the rest of his life, an oddity in Sioux culture, in fealty to the tragic memory of his first love, Pine Leaf.

  • • •

  Whether Red Cloud was unlucky in love is debatable; he and Pretty Owl remained married for fifty-nine years, and she was present at his deathbed. More important, despite now being in league with her powerful relatives, he was fortunate in another matter, one over which he had no control—specifically, to have been born at the right moment in Sioux history. The mid-nineteenth century was an opportune time for a striving Oglala brave from the wrong family to buck the ancient traditions. The Western Sioux had put up a putative united front at the Horse Creek Council, largely for the benefit of their white audience. But the Lakota were in fact facing their greatest existential crisis since stepping out onto the prairie. The buffalo herds were shrinking, the Army presence on their lands was multiplying, and the emigrant trains were transmitting diseases that felled entire villages. The Oglalas in particular were so splintered that the northern “Smoke People” and the “Bear People,” now hunting as far south as the Arkansas, were nearly separate tribes. The growing autonomy of each served only to weaken the other.

  From the white point of view—which was always confused, at best, by the dizzying particulars of Indian hierarchy—Red Cloud was too young and obscure to be considered a “chief” as long as stalwarts like Old Smoke, Whirlwind, and Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses still held that position. The Indians, however, looked at tribal leadership more obliquely. Red Cloud was undoubtedly the most feared warrior on the High Plains. And though his rank as a blotahunka was, officially, below that of Old Smoke or Whirlwind, in troubled times a warrior’s prominence was elevated, in spirit if not in fact. The U.S. government, through a process of natural selection, would one day recognize Red Cloud as “chief” of the Lakota. But long before that, there was a sense among his people that he was their spiritual and martial leader.

  And if Red Cloud literally had to fight to maintain that position, he would happily do so. There were certainly enough opportunities for a man with his wolfish ambition, as the worsening scarcity of the buffalo led to even
more competition between the western nations. It also did not hurt that he had acquired a reputation for supernatural powers. The truth was that Red Cloud worked hard to hone his craft as warrior, hunter, and scout. He taught himself to cut trails by prowling alone, barefoot, over the trackless western prairie through pitch-dark nights, the better to “feel” where an enemy might have trod. And he became so attuned to natural phenomena that he could “smell” water from even the tiniest shift in wind currents. These were talents few white men ever acquired.

  There had been minor roadblocks, both emotional and physical, to his growing legend. Close friends noticed that Pine Leaf’s suicide had smothered any vestigial joy in his already somewhat dour personality. And, during a horse raid, not long after the killing of Bull Bear, he had taken a Pawnee arrow that passed clean through his body. But he had recovered swiftly from that wound, and this was much remarked on by friend and foe alike, as was the general good health and good fortune of those who rode with him. And because of his prowess at finding game it was rumored that he could talk to animals, and sometimes even take their form. Most amazingly, simultaneous Red Cloud “sightings” at impossible distances led to reports that he could either fly or be present in two places at once. Whether or not he cultivated this mystique, it elevated his prestige among a people who set great store by charms, spells, omens, and dreams, and who envisioned only a diaphanous curtain separating the human and spirit worlds. The Crows, perhaps the most superstitious tribe in the West, certainly believed in this Sioux warrior’s mystical powers.