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

by Drury, Bob

  When Fetterman was promoted to captain, given command of the 18th’s 100-man Company A, and ordered to the front in November 1861, Carrington remained at his desk in Ohio. In 1862, Fetterman led the company during its suicidal bayonet charge at Corinth, and soon thereafter he fought in the Battle of Stones River, a medieval slugfest that produced the highest percentage of casualties in the entire Civil War. It was noted in his record that he stood in the front lines alongside his enlisted men for the duration of this thirty-six-hour engagement. And though the regiment suffered over 50 percent casualties during the fight, Fetterman emerged without a wound.

  Meanwhile, Carrington’s knack for recruiting kept him in charge of training depots in Ohio and, later, Indiana, while Fetterman, serving under General Sherman throughout the Georgia campaign of 1864, was promoted to battalion commander. The 18th performed admirably during engagements at Kennesaw Mountain, at Peach Tree Creek, and at Jonesboro—despite suffering more casualties than any other regiment in the Regular Army—and Fetterman’s official record began to include adjectives such as “courageous,” “daring,” and “relentless.” During the siege of Atlanta he was cited for “great gallantry and spirit,” and a fellow officer reported being surrounded by Confederate troops and escaping with his life only when “Captain Fetterman’s command marched to my assistance with great promptness.” For his contributions to the Atlanta campaign, Fetterman, along with hundreds of Union officers, received another brevet appointment, to lieutenant colonel.

  By the war’s end in 1865 Fetterman would decide to make the military his career, and it was with a supreme confidence that he prepared to set off for the frontier. But this was still more than a year away, and in the interim the Army was forced to overcome various blundering missteps, attributable to postwar politics, that continually impeded its Indian campaigns on the High Plains.

  • • •

  While the war continued and Lieutenant Colonel Fetterman was making a name for himself in the field, Lincoln and his War Department finally began to turn serious attention to the West. After General Sully’s victory over Sitting Bull, the president dispatched additional columns of state volunteers from across the Midwest to man key crossings along the Missouri, Platte, and Arkansas Rivers. The Minnesota Uprising may have been the root of the Indian wars that would engulf the High Plains for most of the next decade, but those wars were also impelled by a series of almost unbelievably dunderheaded appointments of general officers on the other side of the Mississippi. Perhaps not until Vietnam 100 years hence would political and military leaders so totally misread a situation on the ground. Zachary Taylor’s earlier vision of an American soldier implementing “the ax, pick, saw, and trowel” to tame the West became a blurred memory as cannons, muskets, and swords were hauled from eastern battlefields, crated, and shipped west by the ton.

  Historians generally attribute this state of affairs to (or blame it on) the exigencies of the Confederate rebellion. But while it was true that the most accomplished officers were needed in the East, the Army of the Republic had undergone a subtle reconfiguration well prior to Fort Sumter. The Founding Fathers, citing ancient Rome and contemporary Europe, were convinced that a ginned-up “defence agst. foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” as James Madison wrote. Madison added that standing armies “kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” The Founders instead envisioned, and implemented, a “multipurpose army designed for a wide variety of functions beyond combat.” Among the purposes were felling trees, building schools, delivering mail, offering medical care, and erecting hospitals and lighthouses. It was an army of surveyors and engineers—dredging canals, constructing bridges, and, by 1830, laying over 1,900 miles of road. The West Point curriculum of the early nineteenth century leaned heavily toward such skills, and the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers “became a major focus of American science . . . collecting flora, fauna, and geological specimens, and publishing their findings in prestigious journals.”

  However, by the late 1840s, with Europe set ablaze by revolutions, with the victory over Mexico still burnishing reputations, and with Manifest Destiny enthralling the officer class, the curriculum at the Military Academy underwent an overhaul. Imperialism and colonialism now steered the governmental policies of America’s rivals, and at West Point pure science took a backseat to the study of night marches and artillery duels, of sieges and ambuscades. Nearly six decades earlier President Thomas Jefferson had warned, “Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible on our horizon, we should never be without them.” But young, eager officers like Lieutenants Fleming and Grattan lived, and sometimes died, for such specks of war. For all their wrongheaded racial attitudes, the earlier generation of engineer-soldiers had attempted to administer a modicum of justice to the West’s Native peoples. The officers now deployed to the frontier not only included those the War Department could spare from more important engagements against the South, but also men imbued with a sense of martial superiority, and anxious to substantiate it. They ranged from naive to obtuse to hateful, with personalities unencumbered with charisma and minds unclouded by thought.

  One frontier general, for instance, was notorious for habitually confusing the names and locations of supposedly hostile tribes, and in one official dispatch he reported Indian raids west of Fort Laramie as having been carried out by the “Winnibigoshish Sioux,” somehow conjuring a tribe from the name of a lake in north-central Minnesota. Another blithely admitted that he knew nothing about Indians and did not care to learn anything, and it was not unusual for his artillery batteries to conduct target practice on passing, peaceful Indian bands, or for his jumpy junior officers to order attacks on their own uniformed Pawnee scouts.1 Nearly to a man these generals and their staffs showed no ability to control their raw troops, and rivalries between state volunteers threatened to escalate from fistfights into gunfights. The eastern recruits also had a farcical proclivity to go native—as would be dramatized 140 years later in the movie Dances with Wolves.

  Perhaps inevitably, when the doomed Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s company of Ohio cavalry reached Fort Laramie, its members were so influenced by the Indian-fighting tales of their Colorado and California counterparts that many began to imagine themselves frontiersmen. The transformation was hastened by the arrival of Jim Bridger, lured from his Missouri farm to become the Frontier Army’s chief scout at $10 a day, more than most officers were paid. Some thought that the sixty-year-old Bridger was finally showing his age. When he was young his standard meal might include an entire side of buffalo rib. Now he was content with a jackrabbit and an eighteen-inch trout roasted on spits over a campfire and a quart of coffee to wash them down. Nonetheless officers and enlisted men alike were in awe of the mountain man’s eccentric skills. He could find fresh water on the driest of alkaline flats, build and stoke a fire in a hellish winter whiteout, and safely guide a wagon team across a quicksand-laden river. He also showed the newcomers an old Indian trick: ridding their clothing of ever-present fleas and lice by spreading the garments over anthills.

  On one occasion Bridger led a troop to the site of an attack on an emigrant wagon near the South Pass through the Rockies. A father and son had been killed and butchered, their bodies left splayed across the buffalo grass near a copse of box elders. Inexplicably, the attackers had not taken the younger man’s Navy Colt. Bridger dismounted and examined the mutilated corpses, which were pierced by arrows that he identified by their fletchings as Cheyenne and Arapaho. He pried the revolver, its chamber empty, from the son’s hand, and walked slowly in ever-expanding circles. Soon, with a flourish, he snapped off a branch of sagebrush. There was a speck of blood on it. Bridger beamed. “The boy hit one of the scamps, anyway,” he said. The dime novelist Ned Buntline could not have written a better scene.

  It did not take long for somewhat of a cult to grow around “Major” Bridger and a few other former mountain men who passed through Fort Laramie. On
e of Lieutenant Collins’s letters to his mother describes Bridger and the others in their “big white hats with beaver around it; a loose white coat of buck or antelope skins, trimmed fantastically with beaver fur; buffalo breeches, with strings hanging from ornaments along the sides; a Mexican saddle, moccasins, and spurs with rowels two inches long, which jingle as they ride. They have bridles with ten dollars’ worth of silver ornaments on; Indian ponies, a heavy rifle, a Navy revolver, a hatchet and a Bowie knife.” It was no wonder that many of the young enlisted men in Collins’s company soon discarded their blue woolens in favor of buckskins and Spanish spurs, and purchased hardy Indian ponies out of their own base pay of $14 a month.

  But something other than eastern troopers playing dress-up would constitute one of the first troubling omens for the Lakota way of life. In 1863 a single wagon train veered north off the Oregon Trail and rolled up the center of the Powder River Country. Lakota and Cheyenne scouts posted on the pine-studded foothills of the Bighorns halted the line of prairie schooners and signed a demand to speak to its leader. A tall, lanky twenty-eight-year-old and his Mexican interpreter rode out to meet them. The interpreter introduced the wagon master as “Captain” John Bozeman. Bozeman doffed his hat, revealing a thick blond mane, and told the Indians that he did not intend to settle their land but merely to pass through it en route to the new diggings beyond the mountains in western Montana. The Lakota emphatically refused. “You are going into our country where we hunt,” an old chief said. “You people have taken the rest. Along the great road to the south, white men have driven away all the buffalo and antelope. We won’t let you do that here. If you go into our hunting country our people will wipe you out.”

  Bozeman returned to the train and urged the emigrants to call the Indians’ bluff, but the travelers were wary. They argued for ten days over whether or not to proceed. In the end they voted to turn back and instead follow the uncontested, if longer and more difficult, route to Montana that snaked west of the mountains. As the Indians watched the train disappear over the southern horizon, they could not have known that Bozeman, a failed gold miner from Georgia, had just taken the first step in his plan to “mine the miners” as an expedition guide along the shortened route to the gold camps. Four months earlier he and a crusty frontiersman named John Jacobs had journeyed south and east from Virginia City along this route, nearly killing themselves in the process. Bozeman was a persistent man, and not easily dissuaded by the threat of losing his handsome blond hair. The insouciance of the Lakota in dealing with him that July day would return to haunt them. From the faint wheel ruts dug by that first train would grow a beaten path known as the Bozeman Trail.

  * * *

  1. One unintended consequence of the Civil War was less federal protection for the harried, dwindling Pawnee. Ironically, the tribe began to see its future as lying with the whites, and many of its warriors—as much for revenge on the Sioux and Cheyenne as out of necessity—jumped at the chance to join the Army’s new Pawnee scout corps.

  17

  BLOOD ON THE ICE

  Red Cloud’s Oglalas may have been oblivious of the knife edge on which they walked, but south of the Oregon Trail the Indian situation was worsening. By the mid-1860s the traditional buffalo ranges along the Republican River were already dwindling, not least because of the first white hunting parties converging on the droves from new settlements in Missouri, Kansas, and eastern Nebraska. A solitary hunter equipped with an accurate large-bore Sharps rifle could fell up to 100 buffalo in a single stand, and this technology marked the beginning of a Plains-wide slaughter that within four decades would reduce an estimated 30 million animals to less than 1,000. It was the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in human history, far worse than what the world’s whaling fleets had already accomplished, and as Sitting Bull was to lament years later, “A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell. A death wind for my people.”

  When whites killed the buffalo, the animals were skinned where they fell, everything but their hides and tongues left to rot on the prairie. The hunters considered the meat worthless, but to the tribes this was not only a criminal physical waste, but a blasphemous affront to the animals’ spirits, to Mother Earth, to the Sacred Hoop of life itself. When white buffalo hunters made camp, for instance, it was a common practice to slaughter a mule some distance away to attract wolves and then spread strychnine over the carcass. The hunters never bothered to bury the poison before they moved on, which resulted in the agonizing deaths of already decimated Indian pony herds later grazing in the area. The hunters, unaware of their insult, wondered what they had done to provoke retaliation.

  Meanwhile, for several years the southern branches of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota had found themselves virtually fenced in by the Oregon Trail to the north and the Santa Fe Trail to the south. This territory was further constrained by a new branch of the overland stage that connected the East to the booming gold camps around Denver—the line’s relay stations at intervals of every twenty to twenty-five miles establishing a thin ribbon of American civilization across land promised to the Indians. By the conclusion of the Civil War the tribes were forced to share even this tiny swath of territory with small regiments of buffalo hunters and with stagecoach stock competing for pasturage. Among these put-upon Oglala bands were the Bear people and the followers of Little Thunder and Spotted Tail.

  By this time Spotted Tail was a changed man. He had always been an astute observer, but the sheer number of whites he had encountered during his two-year “imprisonment” as a scout at Fort Leavenworth had transformed him from fire-eater to pacifist. Fort Leavenworth was a steamboat hub on the Lower Missouri, and during those months he watched thousands of well-armed Bluecoats pass through. These were, he came to understand, just the tip of the American Army’s spear. At tribal councils and in private conversations during the seven years since his return, he had urged accommodation with the Americans, citing what his Minnesota cousin Little Crow had characterized as an enemy “as numerous as the leaves in the forest.”

  Spotted Tail’s was not a lone voice. His words were echoed by Little Thunder, gun-shy since his own encounter with Harney at the Battle of Blue Water Creek. Little Thunder foresaw nothing but calamity for his people should they take up arms against the United States. And both Lakota Head Men noted that the Ute and the Shoshones had recently signed peace pacts with the Americans. Spotted Tail and Little Thunder conveniently omitted the fact that few homesteaders or ranchers cared to settle in the Ute or Shoshone mountain realms. But in any case their arguments for moderation were mostly ignored by younger braves who viewed the older men’s attitude as capitulation, if not treason. Some Dog Soldiers also had reason to suspect that Spotted Tail and other former Lakota prisoners had taken part in reprisals against Cheyenne raiders while serving as Army scouts. The most serious of these involved the execution of half a dozen Southern Cheyennes on Grand Island in southeastern Nebraska after they had thrown down their weapons in surrender.

  Alone and adrift, Spotted Tail, Little Thunder, and a few other southern Lakota and Cheyenne Head Men finally acquiesced in a one-sided “treaty” forced on them by the Army. It confined their bands to an even smaller reserve between the North Platte and South Platte, and did little to stem the escalating bloodshed that by 1864 had become more brazen. Indian raids on the stage line and the lumbering emigrant and supply wagon trains traversing the corridor to the Colorado gold camps had become a regular occurrence. Over three days in early August a string of ranches along the South Platte were attacked and thirty-eight settlers were killed, nine wounded, and five captured. At the same time, farther west, the Cheyenne fell on two emigrant trains, killing another thirteen and kidnapping a girl and a boy. The raids continued throughout the fall, and one freight outfit was ambushed and burned only a few miles from Denver, the territorial capital, which now contained over 100,000 miners and attendant entrepreneurs—more people than all the Plains tribes combined. The resu
lt was a virtual closing of the Leavenworth-Denver road; all mail bound for California was rerouted across the Isthmus of Panama.

  The last straw was the rout of a detachment of cavalry dispatched from Camp Sanborn, northeast of Denver. Dog Soldiers ambushed the troop and, perhaps as a retort to General Sully, beheaded the young lieutenant leading them. Rumors circulated that his head was later used in ball games at the Cheyenne camp; and hearing these rumors, the general in charge of the territory ordered a Colorado volunteer brevet colonel, the fire-breathing Methodist minister John Milton Chivington, to run the hostiles to ground.

  The Army had chosen well. Colonel Chivington despised Indians. Despite a bout with smallpox in his youth, the forty-four-year-old Chivington was physically robust: he stood six feet, five inches and carried his 260 pounds with the grace of an antelope. His broad, round face was shadowed by a scraggly black beard and punctuated by a set of tiny brooding eyes disconcertingly disproportionate to his looming bulk. In his official portrait his barrel chest seems about to burst from a blue tunic sporting two rows of brass buttons shined to a glint; he resembles a meaner Ulysses S. Grant. Chivington was born in Ohio, the son of a veteran Army officer, and he had settled in Colorado following a stint on the Ohio-Illinois preachers’ circuit. He had also spent time at tribal missionary posts in Kansas and Nebraska, where his low opinion of the Native inhabitants hardened. He exemplified a new breed of westerner who took a simple view of the Indian problem: in any dispute, the red man was wrong. Lost in the mists of time were the gentle persuasions of “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.