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

by Drury, Bob

  The exception was in Minnesota, where the war did, however tangentially, facilitate a feral Indian conflict in the summer of 1862. It erupted, and was put down, with brutal efficiency, but not before much blood—most of it Indian, and innocent—was spilled.

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  For years small bands of renegade Dakotas—the closest eastern cousins of the Lakota—had mounted scattered attacks on isolated homesteaders in Minnesota. The most notorious occurred in 1857, when a Santee brave named Scarlet Point led a war party that killed at least thirty whites near one of Iowa’s Okoboji lakes. Scarlet Point then crossed the Minnesota border and raided several farmsteads in Jackson County before escaping west. Yet despite the “Spirit Lake Massacre,”1 as the incident came to be known, the better-armed Minnesotans seemed willing to live with this risk as long as the majority of the Indians kept to the reservations. Their attitude changed in 1862.

  The ember that ignited the Minnesota powder keg could be traced back, as usual, to the government’s broken promises. Four years earlier Minnesota had become the thirty-second state admitted into the Union, and in the summer of 1862 it was not lost on the Indians that the already sparse population of just over 170,0002 had been drained of young men, many of whom were off fighting the Confederacy. Washington had signed treaties with the Dakotas in 1851, and again in 1858, whereby the Sioux ceded large blocks of rich bottomland in the southwest part of what was then a territory in exchange for over $1.5 million and an annual allowance of sundry trade goods. In addition, the Dakotas agreed to relocate to two Indian agencies on the Upper Minnesota River; these consisted of a strip of land about 20 miles wide and 150 miles long on either side of the river. Like most of these pacts, the treaty was not worth the ink used to write it.

  The Sioux soon realized they had been duped; they could not exist, let alone thrive, on their new reservations, and the promised government payments were not only smaller than they expected, but usually late—if they arrived at all. Various Dakota Head Men tried every avenue short of war to rectify the injustice, including making a trip to Washington with their Indian agents to plead their cases. This, amazingly, resulted in two more treaties in which the Indians agreed to hand over an additional 1 million acres on the north side of the Minnesota River. Congress authorized a payment of 30 cents an acre for the land but, like the earlier compensations, these funds disappeared. The Sioux were now desperate, and as their plight worsened they enlisted the advocacy of a local Episcopal bishop, the Reverend Henry Whipple, who wrote a heartfelt letter to President Lincoln on their behalf. Whipple denounced the local Indian agents as party hacks and the entire U.S. Indian Office as a congeries of “inefficiency and fraud.” Nothing came of his intervention, and the Indians’ contempt for the white man’s lies and deceit intensified.

  A subsequent series of harsh winters and crop failures left the Dakotas near starvation, and when in June 1862 the promised government annuity failed to arrive, they took advantage of the state militia’s depletion and rose. Nearly 5,000 Sioux descended on Indian agency warehouses on the Upper Minnesota demanding provisions: pork, flour, tobacco, and coffee. The cowed agents agreed, but of course there was not enough to go around. A delegation of Dakotas then asked the local traders to extend them credit based on their government IOUs. A merchant named Andrew Myrick summed up the whites’ reaction, telling friends, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” As would become evident later, the Indians knew of Myrick’s remarks.

  An uneasy month passed in the high north until, around noon on Sunday, August 17, four Dakota hunters who were returning to their lodges on a rutted trail in south-central Minnesota stopped at a combination store, inn, and post office operated by a man named Robinson Jones and his family. One of the braves found a cache of hen eggs, smashed them, and taunted his companions as cowards. Goaded into action, the other three entered the Joneses’ compound and demanded whiskey. Jones was inside with his two adopted children: blond, fifteen-year-old Clara Wilson and her fifteen-month-old half-brother Joshua. His wife was half a mile away, visiting at the home of her son Howard Baker, his wife, Clara, and her two young grandchildren. Also at the Baker homestead that day were a young couple who had stopped on their push west from Wisconsin: Viranus Webster and his wife (she is referred to in the accounts only as Webster’s “new young wife”).

  When Jones refused the demand for liquor the Indians threatened him, and he burst out the back door and ran for the Baker homestead. Just as he was entering the house, the Dakotas caught him and clubbed him and his wife to death. Before Howard Baker and Viranus Webster could reach their rifles they were shot and killed. Their wives somehow managed to gather the two Baker children and escape into the woods. But when the Indians returned to the Jones compound they came upon the teenage Clara Wilson. They raped her and shot her to death. They were apparently unaware of the presence of her sleeping baby half-brother.

  Word of the attack on Clara Wilson rattled the surrounding communities. Some whites, including Bishop Whipple, attempted to stem the reaction, but it was inevitable. The Dakota Sioux had murdered white adults and raped and killed a blond, angelic-looking teenage girl. Such atrocities always evoked hard and swift vengeance. Whipple’s Indian counterpart was a Dakota Head Man named Little Crow, who that very night convened a tribal council and cautioned his people against fighting. Little Crow had been among the Indians who had journeyed to Washington, and he feared for the tribe’s very existence in a war with America. “We are only little herds of buffaloes left scattered,” he told the bands gathered around the council fire that night. “The white men are like locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one, two, ten, as many as the leaves in the forest, and their brothers will not miss them. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.” But Little Crow could not deter his tribesmen, and with weary reluctance he assumed the role of war chief.

  The next day painted war parties descended on white settlements and farms across western Minnesota and overran the government barns and warehouses of the lower Indian agency. The braves killed about twenty whites, including the contemptuous merchant Myrick, who tried to flee his store by jumping from a second-story window. He was run down and scalped before he could reach the forest, and his corpse’s mouth was stuffed with grass. About 100 emboldened warriors next surrounded Fort Ridgely, a rickety log structure in the southwest corner of the state that had been constructed nine years earlier with no forethought of an Indian attack. Over 200 frightened civilians, mostly women and children, were gathered in the stockade, which was defended by a few farmers and twenty-two volunteer soldiers. But they possessed cannons, and even though the fort’s commander, Lieutenant Thomas Gere, was bedridden with mumps, the powerful artillery allowed his troops to hold out for three days until reinforcements arrived.

  It was the beginning of the end. Within weeks a large combined force of 1,500 from the Minnesota militia and the Regular Army—many of them paroled from Confederate prison camps specifically to return to Minnesota to fight Indians—routed the Dakotas at the Battle of Lake Wood. Afterward the soldiers scalped the enemy dead as their commander and the state’s first governor, Colonel Henry Sibley, looked on admiringly. As Little Crow had predicted, the white men with guns were as numerous as the leaves in the forest. The fight went out of the Indians.

  The Dakotas claimed they were promised leniency if they surrendered—“[Sibley] assured us that if we would do this we would only be held as prisoners of war for a short time,” recalled the warrior Big Eagle. And increasingly large numbers turned themselves in, until the Army held 1,250 Indian men and boys in custody. But the military judicial commission appointed to try the Indians either knew nothing about or ignored Sibley’s guaranty. Most of the Sioux were handed long prison terms, and 307 were convicted of murder, rape, or both, and sentenced to be hanged the day after Christmas. These sham proceedings were too much for even some vengeful whites, a
nd several clergymen and muckraking newspaper editors began investigating and reporting the injustices. The din reached all the way to the White House, where President Lincoln commuted the death sentences of 268 men while personally writing on Executive Office stationary the names of the remaining 39 to be hanged. (One of these 39 would be granted a last-minute reprieve.) Little Crow remained at large until the following summer, when he was recognized by a white hunter who collected a bounty by shooting and killing him. His tanned scalp, skull, and wrist bones were put on public exhibition.

  Estimates of the number of white civilians and soldiers killed in the “Dakota War” range as high as 800. Indian dead were undoubtedly much more numerous; no one bothered to count them. The war’s impact on the eastern Sioux, however, went deeper than its death toll. The once mighty Dakotas were now a society in shards, “most of the six thousand former residents of the reservations either forced to flee westward to the plains, incarcerated, or executed,” according to one historian. And as those renegades who did manage to reach the prairie related their stories, the entire bloody business left a palpable foreboding hanging over the Lakota camps of the Upper Missouri and the Powder River Country. The implications were not lost on Sam Deon, the thirty-four-year-old Québécois fur trader, when he arrived at Red Cloud’s winter camp on the Belle Fourche in northern Wyoming on a bitter cold night not long afterward.

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  A short, wiry man who could speak several Sioux dialects fluently, Peter Abraham “Sam” Deon had set out from Montreal fifteen years earlier to make his fortune in the uncharted American West. Arriving in St. Louis via Boston and New Orleans, he found work almost immediately as an agent for the American Fur Company, and had since roamed extensively among the firm’s Upper Missouri trading posts exchanging dry goods, blankets, tinned groceries, and guns for buffalo robes and beaver pelts. The ruddy-faced Deon—described in one Army officer’s journal as “a jolly, royal, generous fellow; happy everywhere, and whom the very fact of existence filled with exuberance and joy”—was quick to accept the manners and psychology of the Sioux. He understood, for instance, that there was no such thing as a homogeneous “Indian,” that each tribe had its own social, political, and martial mores, and that these indigenous people would never comprehend the workings of a capitalist free market. Accordingly, he knew enough to frame his transactions as an exchange of gifts. Moreover, during his High Plains circuits Deon had taken as his wife Red Cloud’s maternal aunt Bega, later known as Mary Highwolf, and camped with her people often. He was as close to the great warrior chief as any white man could be, and over the course of their tentative friendship he had witnessed firsthand the maturation of the strapping young brave from a prideful, ambitious, and arrogant youth into a thoughtful and soft-spoken leader.

  Unlike most whites, Deon understood perfectly the breadth of Red Cloud’s influence not only over his own Oglala Bad Faces, but over all the Western Sioux. On this December night in 1862 he would also learn just how adept Red Cloud could be at sending a veiled message. A week earlier Deon had set out from his base at Fort Laramie, 150 miles to the south, leading a mule train of four high-sided Murphy wagons hauling over 10,000 pounds of trade goods. Like all white traders, Deon had his share of violent run-ins with the Plains peoples; he seemed to consider this the price of doing business. Yet for all his long good-fellowship with Red Cloud, he was savvy enough, after the Minnesota rising, to be wary. Red Cloud was fresh from a final victory over the Crow chief Little Rabbit, whom he had personally killed in a fight that marked the unofficial end of any Crow pretensions to the Powder River Country. The decisive generalship Red Cloud had displayed during the blood-soaked “Crow Wars” in the late 1850s and early 1860s not only added to his prestige among the Lakota, but also served to bring his name to the attention of soldiers still stationed in the West.

  Though remaining proud of his ability to count coup and take scalps, Red Cloud had reached his early forties, an age when the role of leading war parties should naturally be relinquished to younger braves. He also recognized that he could do his people the most good by dedicating himself to formulating strategic tribal aims. He suspected that when the white Civil War ended, whichever side proved victorious would again set its sights on Lakota lands. This apprehension gnawed at him, and manifested itself most obviously in his muted celebration of his victory over the Crows. There was also another reason for the pall that seemed to hang over his village: as Deon’s wagons rolled into view: the thirty-nine Dakota braves still awaited the gallows in a jail in Mankato, Minnesota, and Red Cloud and his people were aware of this. These hard feelings made Deon worried.

  The trader and his teamsters understood just how vulnerable and isolated they were. Two years earlier the census had recorded over 31 million people in the United States, not counting Indians but including nearly 4 million slaves. Ninety percent lived east of the Mississippi. The boomtown of Denver had fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, and there were no white population centers of any significance at all west of the Black Hills until one crossed the Rockies and traveled another 1,000 miles to San Francisco. Moreover, the closest U.S. Army post to Red Cloud’s winter camp—Fort Laramie, with not even 150 soldiers—was a six-day ride.

  Given all this, Deon was not certain what kind of welcome he would receive, and was surprised when Red Cloud invited him and his men into the camp proper instead of ordering them to its edge, as was the usual trading custom. Even more shocking was the feast laid out for the whites—a meal of boiled venison, hominy, and strong roasted coffee. Though the teamsters eased themselves into the firelight as if entering a snake pit, after some friendly trading Deon was beckoned to attend a storytelling session in Red Cloud’s lodge. He sat cross-legged as the great warrior stood to take the floor.

  By all accounts the chief’s heroic tales lacked any subtlety—like his deeds, they were straight to the point. This bluntness did not make them any less riveting. Tonight, perhaps with the fate of his thirty-nine condemned Dakota kin on his mind, he began with a story of once having saved a fellow warrior’s life during a raid on the Omaha.

  It was a long-ago spring morning, Red Cloud began, and he was a young warrior with scant reputation, when Old Smoke’s scouts spotted the gray plumes of many cook fires near the bluffs surrounding Prairie Creek in what is now central Nebraska. Red Cloud was a member of the war party sent out to investigate, and from the summit of a red sand hill they spied several hundred trespassing Omaha engaged in a raucous buffalo-hunt dance around a pole erected in the center of an encampment. From the top of the pole flew an old, tattered Spanish flag. The Sioux charged immediately, their mounts thundering through the village and scattering the dancers. Red Cloud decided that depriving the Omaha of their pennant was more important than killing or counting coup, and he beckoned several Sioux braves to follow him as he broke off from the attack. But by the time he reached the center of the village the Omaha had organized a spirited defense, and what Red Cloud had perceived as a game of capture the flag suddenly turned serious. When he neared the sapling that flew the piece of cloth, arrows and a few balls from ancient muskets cut the air around him. He had raised his tomahawk and was about to hack off the top of the pole when one of his companions was shot. At that instant Red Cloud dropped the tomahawk and caught the brave by one hand before he hit the ground. Then another Sioux warrior grabbed the wounded man’s other arm, and the three rode to safety.

  Approving grunts filled the lodge, and Deon himself nodded in admiration. The white trader was well aware of the great value that all Indians placed on the rescue of a fallen comrade; it was considered the paramount act of bravery. He was looking forward to the probable denouement: perhaps Red Cloud had returned to the Omaha village to skewer and flay an enemy brave, or at least toss a writhing body onto a pile of roasting buffalo chips. Instead, Red Cloud abruptly fell silent and gestured to a very old man seated closest to the lodge fire. Via a series of hand gestures he indicated that he was now anxious for his friend
Deon to hear the tales of the old days and old ways, and encouraged the old man to recount the Sioux origin story, “The Lost Children.” The old man lifted his clay pipe, filled the wooden bowl with dried kinnikinnick, lit it with an ember, and drew in several puffs. He passed the pipe to his west, and began to speak.

  What followed was a riveting tale of revenge, betrayal, heroism, and the sundering of the Sioux Nation into eastern and western branches. It involved mythical ancient battles and a band of Lakota children, mistakenly abandoned, who taught themselves to survive, alone, on the prairie. Although the children were initially angry enough to fight the elder kinsmen who had “lost” them, in the end both sides came to an agreement that if any Sioux tribe ever called for help, every other tribe was duty-bound to answer. And thus it had been, concluded the old man at the lodge fire, that the great Nation of the Seven Council Fires was divided into separate tribes, yet each tribe would forevermore remain loyal to its cousins.

  By this point in time the great, grand oaths sworn at the Bear Butte gathering five years earlier were thought to have been forgotten by the Western Sioux. But this night, left unsaid but hovering over Red Cloud’s lodge like smoke from the fire, was the moral of both stories. Red Cloud had made it clear to Sam Deon how he, his tribesmen, and by extension every Lakota warrior stalking the High Plains felt about the treacherous treatment of the Minnesota Dakotas at the hands of the white man.