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

by Drury, Bob

  As word of Harney’s testimony circulated among the Lakota they gave him a new nickname—“Mad Bear.” The Indians suffered another indignity in March 1856 when Harney summoned the Lakota Head Men from their winter camps to a council. He demanded that they return any property and livestock stolen from whites and end all harassment of emigrants along the Oregon Trail—a virtual surrender of the once buffalo-rich Platte River Valley—and added that the United States now also officially considered the path of Harney’s diagonal march from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre as inviolable American land. He promised that the same consequences that had befallen Little Thunder would be meted out to any Indian harassing travelers along this new road. And there, in an unmarked grave, the skeletal remains of the Horse Creek Treaty were buried.

  It was as if a veil had fallen from the eyes of the Lakota. Why it had taken so long is impossible to say. For nearly four decades they had put up with traders, trappers, soldiers, and emigrants trespassing on their lands. They had been literally sickened to death by white interlopers, and when they protested they had been given promises that the whites never intended to keep. They had watched the buffalo herds recede as homesteaders advanced along the Missouri. They had seen the whites turn on a Head Man they themselves had appointed and kill him over an old cow, friendly tribes attacked by soldiers, and their women and children murdered, captured, and raped. The trapper-trader Edwin Denig, traveling among the Lakota at the time and not particularly favorably inclined toward the “heathens,” nonetheless feared their imminent destruction. “They are split into different factions following different leaders, and through want of game and unity of purpose are fast verging toward dissolution,” he wrote in 1856. “Their ultimate destination will no doubt be to become a set of outlaws, hanging around the emigrant road, stealing horses, killing stragglers and committing other depredations until the Government is obliged to use measures for their entire extermination. It cannot be otherwise. It is the fate of circumstances which, however to be regretted, will become unavoidable.”

  Denig may have overestimated the disastrous effects American guns and germs had on the Indians—he put the entire Oglala population in 1856 at somewhat less than 700, but just a year earlier the Indian agent Twiss had counted 450 Oglala lodges with a population closer to 2,000. Denig’s prophecy would also prove faulty—the Lakota may have been down, but they were not out. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that a stray cow would become the impetus for a series of events that tipped the High Plains toward three decades of conflict. Yet there it was. Something big, the Western Sioux had finally recognized, something momentous never before considered, must be done.

  • • •

  Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-year-old Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen-year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental note to keep tabs on this one.

  All is well for the moment in Red Cloud’s small world. But as he strolls through the village he spots movement atop a distant sandstone mesa. He catches a glint of the sun’s last rays reflected, he knows, by a saddle pommel plated with Mexican silver, and he understands that the horse’s owner is an Indian. Gradually the dark speck comes into focus, a single approaching rider, and Red Cloud recognizes the distinctive raised cantle and raven-feathered arrow fletchings—three at the top, three at the bottom, tied with sinew—favored by the Brules. Within moments the lone visitor dismounts before Old Smoke’s lodge, and Red Cloud joins his tribesmen already gathered as the Head Man pulls back the flap of his tepee and signals them to enter.

  Inside, seated by a wood fire, the Brule stranger eagerly accepts a bowl of dog stew seasoned with prairie turnip and wild artichoke and wordlessly consumes his meal before pulling from his buckskin blouse a long object wrapped in a wolf’s pelt. It is a pipe, as Red Cloud knows before it is even unwrapped. But it is not the war pipe he is anticipating. This sacred pipe indicates a greater matter, one that Red Cloud has never before encountered. Enjoy your winter camp, the messenger reports, and make your spring buffalo hunt. But come the next summer hard decisions must be made.

  As the stranger continues Red Cloud realizes that, for the first time in his life, for the first time since the Western Sioux ventured out onto the High Plains, all the Lakota have been summoned to a grand tribal council. It is there that they will formulate a united resistance against the mounting white threat.

  * * *

  1. We did not make a blunder,

  We rubbed out Little Thunder,

  And we sent him to the other side of Jordan.

  12

  SAMUEL COLT’S INVENTION

  In August 1857 more Lakota congregated along the placid Belle Fourche River than had attended the Horse Creek Treaty Council six years earlier. For 10,000 years bands of indigenous North Americans had made pilgrimages to this holy ground in present-day western South Dakota where the stark Bear Butte loomed high over the riverbanks. To the Cheyenne this igneous rock was the sacred “Giving Hill,” the height from which the Great Spirit had imparted the “sweet medicine” of life to the tribe; and this belief influenced later Sioux arrivals, who considered remains of an ancient volcanic eruption a holy place of meditation despite placing their own origin myth farther south, in the Black Hills. But never before had the Western Sioux come together at Bear Butte, or anywhere on the Plains, as a single people.

  To this gathering had arrived not only Oglalas, Miniconjous, and Brules but the wild northern tribes—the Sans Arcs, Blackfeet Sioux, Two Kettles, and Hunkpapas—who set a tone of defiance. By some estimates as many as 10,000 Indians were present, more than three-quarters of the total population of Western Sioux, convened under a domed blue sky to fashion a “national” policy for dealing with the American aggressors. The Lakota had finally recognized their mistake in not challenging General Harney when he invaded their country, and they vowed that this would be the last in a half century’s worth of accommodations.

  The lodges were arranged in a huge oval around the southern rim of the barren stone tower, and as young men raced horses, gambled, and purified themselves in preparation for a multitribal Sun Dance, women gossiped and girls preened for boys running among tepees gawking at heroes they knew only from legend. Here was the fierce Hump, the mighty Blackfoot whose future was said to have been foretold when as a boy he strayed into a cave and stared down a great gray wolf. Hump was conferring with his handsome tribesman Long Mandan, whose clear, wide-set eyes sparkled above scythe-like cheekbones. Young and old alike tilted their heads to gawk at the seven-foot Miniconjou fighter Touch The Clouds, who walked in the manner of a praying mantis, lifting his legs so high that he appeared to be using them as feelers. Packs of snapping dogs followed the fierce Hunkpapa “shirt wearer,” Four Horns, who wore a necklace of raw meat strung across his hair-fringed tunic and was accompanied nearly everywhere he went by his nephew Sitting Bull. In each lodge they visited, these two proselytized for war against the whites.

  Revered members of the western Oglala bands such as Red Cloud and the father and son Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses and Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses—the father striding through the camps with a regal mien befitting a man acknowledged by many as the successor to the slain Conquering Bear—introduced themselves to eastern counterparts such as the seasoned fighter Crow Feather of the Sans Arcs. And Crazy Horse, now nearly seventeen, was reunited with his family, including his younger half bro
ther Little Hawk, whose adventuresome raids on the Crows had already inspired jubilant brave-heart songs. It was reported that of all the maidens vying to catch the eye of Crazy Horse, he was most attracted to a raven-haired beauty named Black Buffalo Woman, niece of Pretty Owl and Red Cloud. This infatuation would not end well.

  Over many council fires and private feasts the Americans were, figuratively, put on trial. Militants like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull lobbied separately and together for immediate raids against Army detachments and emigrant wagon trains. Moderates such as Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses and a Hunkpapa Head Man named Bears Ribs urged forbearance, arguing that the whites seemed content to have secured their “holy road.” The moderates would fight if they must, they said, but why disturb a hornet’s nest? Red Cloud and his allies countered that it was only a matter of time before these white wasps again flew as a swarm in search of larger Indian orchards. When had the Indian, Red Cloud asked, ever known the whites to be satisfied with the lands that they already possessed?

  Despite these tactical disagreements, one unifying strategic goal did emerge—continued protection, by force if necessary, of the sanctity of the most sacred Black Hills. Oaths were sworn to defend the cherished Paha Sapa from all white intrusions; and the festivities remained generally upbeat and positive, the only shadow cast by the pale boy with the curly hair—the precocious Crazy Horse. He had spent the spring and early summer wandering from Montana to Kansas with his best friend, Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses. They had visited bands from numerous tribes, and at the Bear Butte Council Crazy Horse told a disheartening tale.

  A month earlier he had joined a Cheyenne camp staked well below the Platte, on the banks of the Smoky Hill River south of the Republican—coincidentally, this would be the site of General George Armstrong Custer’s first Indian campaign a decade later. There he was befriended by a medicine man called Ice. It was from Ice, he said, that he began to learn the ways of the Cheyenne, who, if possible, hated the whites even more than the Sioux did. Ice’s people had carried out several successful raids on small detachments of soldiers crossing the Kansas Plains, but had been taken aback by the small guns the Bluecoats now carried that fired multiple rounds without having to be reloaded after each shot. These were the revolvers Red Cloud had seen at Horse Creek. But neither he nor any of the other Indians present at Bear Butte that summer were aware that their world was in the process of an irrevocable evolution, and that a driving force behind this change was emanating from, of all places, an industrial city far to the east in a state called Connecticut.

  The inventor of these mysterious weapons, Samuel Colt, had taken a roundabout journey to fame. Colt’s fascination with guns began when he was a child living in Hartford and his maternal grandfather, a former officer in the Continental Army, bequeathed him a flintlock pistol. As Colt grew older he became familiar with a cumbersome multibarreled handgun called a “pepperbox revolver,” which required the shooter to manually rotate its cylinder, like a pepper grinder, after each discharge. Then, when he went to sea in 1830 at the age of sixteen, on a brig bound for Calcutta, he observed that the spokes in the ship’s wheel, no matter in what direction it was spun, always synchronized with a clutch to hold the wheel in place. He became transfixed by the idea of applying that technology to a handgun. Using scraps from the ship’s store, he built a wooden model of a five-shot revolver based on the movement of the brig’s wheel: a cocking hammer would rotate the cylinder, and a pawl would lock it in place on the tooth of a circular gear.

  Back in the United States two years later, Colt secured American and European patents for his invention, founded the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, and set about raising funds. He was spectacularly inept. He toured the eastern United States and Canada with what can best be described as a carnival act: his demonstrations incorporated nitrous oxide, wax sculptures, and fireworks. He presented theatrical speeches and gave elaborate dinner parties awash in alcohol to which he invited wealthy businessmen and military officers in hopes of luring investors and securing Army contracts. Colt’s problem was that he usually ended up outdrinking them all. Although his sales spiked briefly when the Army ordered a consignment of five-shot Colts during the Second Seminole War, it was not enough to keep the firm afloat. In 1842, the assets of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company were sold at public auction in New York City.

  Colt tried his hand at other inventions—underwater electrical detonators and, in partnership with Samuel Morse, a cable waterproofing company to run undersea telegraph lines. But their genius was ahead of its time, and Colt returned to his revolver. While tinkering with its original design he scraped together the money to hire a New York gunsmith to begin a limited production run—and then lightning struck in the form of a veteran of the Seminole War named Samuel Walker. One day Walker knocked on Colt’s door with an order for 1,000 guns. Walker had recently been promoted to captain in the Texas Rangers, and his Ranger company had used the five-shot Patent Colt with great success against marauding Comanche. Now he proposed adding a sixth round to the cylinder. Their collaboration produced the Walker Colt, the template for a generation of western handguns.

  At the urging of General Sam Houston, President James Polk approved succeeding versions of Colt’s handgun, most famously the Navy Revolver, as the official sidearm of the U.S. Army. It would be said after the Civil War that “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” By then, Colt and Walker were both dead—Walker was killed in a skirmish during the Mexican War, in 1847; and Colt, wealthy beyond description, died of gout in 1862 at only forty-seven. But their revolver lived on, and Red Cloud, always enamored of new weapons, took a particular interest as Crazy Horse continued his story of the white soldiers and the magic guns.

  Not long after one of their raids, the boy said, the Cheyenne learned that the Bluecoats were assembling a large retaliatory force to ride on their camp along the Smoky Hill. There was much debate among the Dog Soldiers about how best to face these new weapons until the medicine man Ice gathered the band’s warriors and led them to a small lake near the village. The Cheyenne set even more store by charms and omens than did the Sioux, and Crazy Horse had watched as Ice taught the braves his medicine songs and told them to immerse their hands in the lake water while they sang and he danced. Satisfied with the ritual, he instructed a few of the cleansed Dog Soldiers to extend their arms, palms out. He then handed a rifle to another brave and ordered him to shoot. The bullets bounced off their hands.1 The Cheyenne, mystically inured against the white man’s balls and bullets, were now not only eager but frenzied for a fight.

  Soon enough, in mid-July, they got their wish when about 300 Dog Soldiers rode out to face an equal number of Bluecoats of the 1st U.S. Cavalry under the command of Colonel E. V. “Bull Head” Sumner. It was an extraordinary scene, possibly the only classic “European” battle formation the Indians ever displayed on the American Plains. They rode from the west into a tight valley bounded by the Solomon River to the north and a string of high bluffs to the south. Sumner must have been shocked. The Indians’ martial attributes—their speed, their stealth, their ability to surprise—were considered skulking and sneaky by American Army officers. Yet here was an enemy line as worthy of attack as any Hussar light cavalry. Sumner ordered his mounted skirmishers into three rows and cantered up the valley from the east. The Cheyenne raced their horses wildly in circles in order to give them a second wind, and then re-formed and loped easily toward the Americans.

  Now the U.S. cavalrymen became confused. The few Indians who had long rifles held them at their sides, barrels pointed to the ground, while the rest kept their arrows in their quivers. At Ice’s signal the Cheyenne horsemen extended their arms, palms out, and awaited the usual fusillade. But no guns sounded. Sumner had inexplicably ordered his troops to sling their carbines and unsheathe their three-foot-long “Old Wristbreaker” sabers. Sumner’s instructions were pure chance. Never before or afterward was a saber charge reco
rded in the long history of the Indian wars. At the sight of the long knives descending on them the Cheyenne panicked. Their medicine had not prepared them for swords. Some turned and fled, while others dashed toward the river or up into the bluffs. It was a demoralizing rout. Only four braves were killed, and the women and children managed to flee, but the Americans captured the entire Cheyenne camp as well as the Indians’ herd of packhorses and mules. On the American side, the “battle” was notable for drawing first blood from the young Lieutenant James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, who suffered a slight wound from a bullet to his chest.

  The memory of the defeat, Crazy Horse told his Sioux brethren, had rested heavily on his mind since the day after the fight, when he and Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses packed up and rode north toward Bear Butte. Now he vowed, along with many others, to avenge it. To Red Cloud this account of the guns that fired six times must have seemed ominous. Whatever trepidation he felt, however, may have been overridden by the decisions made by the Lakota Head Men at Bear Butte. By the time the thousands of Indian ponies had reduced the prairie grass to nubs in all directions it was decided that each tribe would stake out its own, new hunting ground to develop and defend. “Thus,” writes the Sioux historian Robert W. Larson, “those Oglalas who had followed Old Smoke chose the Powder River.”