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

by Drury, Bob

  Chivington’s booming, baritone sermons landed on his listeners like cannon fire, and although he had founded Denver’s first Sunday School, the angles of his racist zeal were too sharp for even his tough frontier flock, who (as the church phrased it) “located” him into early retirement soon after he arrived. “Mr. Chivington was not as steady in his demeanor as becomes a man called of God to the work of the ministry,” the religious historian James Haynes tactfully put it. But he was perfect for the job of murdering infidel Indians, and he went about it with brio. Following the incident at Camp Sanborn the settlers, emigrants, and miners along the South Platte were encouraged not to bury murdered whites and instead were asked to transport whatever remained of the mutilated corpses “stretched in the stiffness of death” to Denver. There they were put on public display, usually on the muddy wooden boardwalks that fronted saloons. One exhibition included the scalped wife and children of a slain ranch manager, Nathan Hungate. Predictably, alcohol fueled the spectators’ passions. The Rocky Mountain News called for “a few months of active extermination against the red devils,” and the Denver Commonwealth for the perpetrators of “such unnatural, brutal butchery to be hunted to the farthest bounds of these broad plains and burned at the stake alive.” In response, the territorial governor ordered all able-bodied men to meet for military drills every morning. The governor also issued a proclamation instructing all citizens, “either individually, or in such parties as they may organize, to kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found, all such hostile Indians.” Colonel Chivington eagerly answered the call to vigilantism.

  The Civil War had forced Congress to reorganize the western Army into three distinct services, and regulars found themselves on equal footing with state or territorial volunteers as well as local militiamen. Many of these latter “one hundred days men” who took up the governor’s challenge—including cardsharps, gunfighters, drunks, and pimps—were of the opinion that any and every Indian was fit for a shroud. Since no one at the War Department, which was vexed by more immediate problems, exerted a moderating influence on these avenging crusaders, militia commanders like Chivington operated with extraordinary freedom. The “Fighting Parson” instructed his Colorado volunteers that total war was the order of the day, every day, and his detachments galloped along the South Platte and Republican annihilating whatever small bands of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota they could catch. The unlucky Indians passing through these free-fire zones were usually the peaceable, the old, and the infirm. The more agile hostiles, mounted on fast ponies, were much too savvy to face Chivington’s guns head-on.

  White reprisals lessened during the summer of 1862 when Colonel Chivington’s Colorado volunteers were ordered south to head off a Confederate army advancing up from Texas through New Mexico. (There, these volunteers would strike a decisive blow at the Battle of Glorieta by capturing and torching a rebel supply train after which Chivington ordered the execution, by bayonet, of 500 to 600 enemy horses and mules.) The Indians took advantage of the Colorado volunteers’ absence to form their largest war parties to date and to soak the Leavenworth-Denver turnpike with blood. By the autumn of 1864 the split between the tribal militants and the pacifist faction had widened to a chasm. When, at the belated urging of Washington, Colorado’s territorial governor offered sanctuary to any Indians “should they repair at once to the nearest military post,” two Cheyenne bands struck out for Fort Lyon on the territory’s southeastern plain. One was led by the chief Black Kettle, the other by White Antelope, and they were joined by a few followers of the Arapaho Head Man Left Hand. When they reached the fort in mid-autumn they were ordered to surrender their weapons in exchange for daily food rations. By this time Colonel Chivington had returned to Denver.

  Fort Lyon’s new commander, Major Edward Wynkoop, was a friend of Chivington’s, and far less disposed than his predecessor toward differentiating between antagonistic and friendly tribes. He looked for any excuse to declare Black Kettle and White Antelope hostiles, and when he found none he simply refused their people food; returned their old muskets, bows, arrows, and knives; and ordered them off the premises. They were, he said, free to hunt in a limited territory bordering a stream called Sand Creek that fed into the Smoky Hill River about thirty-five miles northwest of the fort. The Cheyenne sensed a trap, but they were reassured that as long as Black Kettle flew the white flag of truce above his lodge next to an old American flag the Head Man had once received as a gift, no harm would come to them.

  Two days after the Indians departed, on November 28, Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon with two field cannons and 700 men of the 3rd Colorado Volunteer Cavalry. He took every precaution to keep his presence secret, throwing a ring of guards around the post to prevent anyone from leaving. That night he and the volunteers, swollen by an additional 125 Regular Army troops, rode for Sand Creek. At just past daybreak the next morning they climbed a ridge overlooking the Indian camp. Most of the warriors were absent, hunting to the east. Of the 500 to 600 Indians remaining, more than half were sleeping women and children. Chivington ordered the Indian pony herd driven off. Then his howitzers erupted and the whites charged.

  Black Kettle frantically raised the two flags over his tepee as his people fell around him—including White Antelope, whose death song was silenced by a bullet to the throat. It was a slaughter. The immediate survivors staggered to the nearby frozen creek bed, where women and children huddled beneath the high banks, and the few braves who were present gouged the earth with knives and tomahawks in an attempt to dig shooting pits. They were soon surrounded, and for more than two hours Chivington’s volunteers picked them off like targets in a carnival game. Afterward the colonel and his officers stood by as the usual atrocities ensued. Infants and children were butchered like veal calves—“Nits breed lice” was a saying of Chivington’s—and the soldiers devoted extra attention to slicing off penises, scrotum sacks, and pudenda, which when stretched and cured would be fashioned into tobacco pouches and purses. “Barbarity of the most revolting character,” an investigative committee of the U.S. House of Representatives termed it. “Such, it is to be hoped, has never before disgraced the acts of men claiming to be civilized.”

  The soldiers departed at dusk—Chivington had lost ten men, with another thirty-eight wounded—and as night fell the Indian survivors crawled out from beneath the dead. All told, close to 200 were murdered along Sand Creek that day, three-quarters of them women and children. Those who escaped, Black Kettle among them, spent the next several days tramping across the frozen earth toward the warriors’ hunting camp on the Smoky Hill. When they reached the site, one of his band’s first acts was to banish Black Kettle and his family, who eventually moved to the country south of the Arkansas. Then the survivors plotted their revenge.

  18

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  More than any other incident in the long and bloody history of red-white relations, Colonel Chivington’s merciless attack at Sand Creek did more to unite the Plains tribes against the United States. While the hills were still echoing with the wails of mourning mothers, wives, and daughters, Cheyenne runners with war pipes were sent out to Lakota camped on the Solomon Fork and to Arapaho on the Republican. War councils were convened, and in preparation for an unprecedented winter campaign the Head Men of the three tribes selected nearly 1,000 braves to move on the closest Army barracks, a contingent of infantry at Fort Rankin on the South Platte in the northeast corner of Colorado. The Indians rode in formal battle columns, the Sioux warriors in the van. A place of honor was reserved for the once-pacifist Spotted Tail.

  At dawn on January 7, while the main body of warriors hid behind a row of rolling sand hills south of the Army stockade, seven painted decoys descended from the snow-covered heights and paraded before the post. Predictably, a column of about fifty volunteer cavalry, strengthened by a nearly equal number of civilians from the nearby hamlet of Julesburg, poured out in pursuit. But before they could ride into the trap, some
overanxious braves broke from concealment and charged. The whites recognized the ambush, turned, and fled as cannons from the fort bombarded their pursuers. They reached the post, but not before losing fourteen cavalrymen and four civilians. The enraged Head Men ordered the offending braves quirted by the akicita, the ultimate humiliation, and led the war party one mile east to plunder the now abandoned stage station and warehouses at Julesburg.

  Over the next month the southern Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho cut a bloody swath through Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, finally circling back to again sack Julesburg, this time with the assistance of a party of northern Strong Hearts led by Crazy Horse. Again the garrison at Fort Rankin could do nothing but watch the rebuilt stock station burn. But now the Indians recognized that time was running out. Although Colonel Chivington had resigned his commission in the face of a pending court-martial, Army troops from Denver, Nebraska’s Fort Kearney, and Wyoming’s Fort Laramie were already mobilizing. With certain retaliation awaiting them on three compass points, there was no other direction for the southern tribes to ride but north into the Powder River Country. No soldiers would dare follow them into the great warrior chief Red Cloud’s territory.

  • • •

  One would expect that a plodding diaspora of nearly 4,000 Indian men, women, and children freighted with nearly 900 lodges and hauling tons of provisions and equipment through a Plains winter would be easy to locate. Amazingly, no. In moving through the densely patrolled Platte River Valley, the combined tribal force—riding in three loose parallel columns, with scouts fanned out to the front and on either side—crossed the South Platte above Julesburg without incident. A few travelers reported spotting thousands of distant campfires, or hearing the beat of war drums for miles. Yet the Army could not find them.

  As they headed north the Indians looted and burned farms, ranches, and stagecoach relay stations. Precious telegraph poles, hauled to the treeless prairie and pounded into the ground four years earlier, were hacked down; their annealed wires were spooled and stolen. Supply wagons carrying food to Denver were stopped and destroyed, and the few late-starting emigrant wagon trains hoping to winter over at Fort Laramie were plundered and torched. That year the frozen carcasses of white men and women littered the “Glory Road” from eastern Nebraska to central Colorado, providing rare winter sustenance for wolves and coyotes while the citizens of Denver faced severe food shortages.

  The Indian columns, swollen with herds of captured cattle as well as packhorses and mules piled with plunder, stuck to well-worn trails and buffalo fords. Yet Major General Grenville Dodge, the new Army commander of the region, was bewildered as to their whereabouts. Dodge had assumed responsibility for the Oregon Trail when the War Department, pressured by overland stage and railroad executives, finally recognized that local volunteers and militias were as much of a hindrance to progress as the hostiles. Dodge was a railroad engineer by profession and a booster of the Union Pacific, and his primary assignment was to clear and hold the North Platte corridor for the future laying of tracks toward the Rockies. In the wake of the attack at Julesburg, Dodge ordered his field commander to ride south to the Republican to punish the Indians. How the two forces moving in opposite directions across the snow-blanketed Plains managed to miss each other remains a puzzle. But the cavalry’s circuitous wild-goose chase across 300 miles of empty country left the entire Platte River Valley open.

  When a disgusted General Dodge finally received word that the Indians were fleeing north, he summoned to Wyoming an ambitious Indian fighter, General Patrick Connor, to finish the job. Connor was a veteran of the Indian wars in Texas and California, and had secured his reputation two years earlier when he fell on a Shoshone camp on the Bear River in Utah and slaughtered 278 men, women, and children. He would find fighting Lakota Bad Faces and Cheyenne Dog Soldiers quite another matter.

  In the meantime the southern tribes crossed the frozen North Platte above Mud Springs, Nebraska, strewing shelled corn from the looted Julesburg warehouses to steady their ponies’ footing on the ice. Mud Springs was the site of a telegraph station set in a bowl-shaped dell, and the Indians robbed the lightly defended outpost of its horses and a large herd of beef cattle. Before they could cut the telegraph lines, however, an operator managed to tap out a call for help. And despite the tribes’ overwhelming numbers, the dozen or so whites firing from loopholes bored into the station’s thick adobe walls managed to hold out. Over the next twenty-four hours 170 men from the 11th Ohio Cavalry arrived from forts on either side of the boggy swale. Many were clad in their finest “Bridger buckskins” and mounted on Indian ponies.

  This suited the Indians fine; they wanted a fight, anticipating even more scalps, guns, and horses to add to their growing collection. But the officer in command of the rescue party prudently sized up their strength and instead had his troopers dig rifle pits in which to wait them out. He was a frontier veteran, and had apparently learned that this was never a bad strategy with the impatient Plains tribes. Despite a hide-and-seek skirmish that lasted for the better part of two days and nights, the braves soon grew bored. On the second night, under cover of darkness, the caravan slipped away into Nebraska’s Sand Hills and resumed its trek north toward Red Cloud’s country.

  When the Indian columns reached the Black Hills the Arapaho broke off toward the southwest while the majority of Cheyenne and Lakota circled north of the range and rode for the Powder. The exceptions were Spotted Tail and his band. The mercurial Brule, having undergone yet another change of heart, vowed never again to fight the Americans, and took his people east to the White River, beneath the Badlands, where, aside from occasional treks to Fort Laramie, he would remain for the rest of his life. The three columns had traversed more than 400 miles of bitter winter landscape, with the United States government having little idea of their whereabouts for most of the journey. They had also killed more soldiers, emigrants, teamsters, and ranchers than the number of Cheyenne murdered at Sand Creek.

  The enraged General Dodge responded by ordering all-out war on any Indians, with no consideration given to the geographic boundaries offered by the Indian agent Thomas Twiss ten years earlier. Any red man was fair game, and a deep hole dug beneath hastily erected gallows just beyond Fort Laramie’s walls began to fill with corpses. In his journal the young Second Lieutenant James Regan described watching three Lakota hanged from the crude wooden structure, “in a most barbarous manner by means of coarse chains around their necks, and heavy chains and iron balls attached to the lower part of the naked limbs to keep them down. There was no drop. They were allowed to writhe and strangle to death. . . . Their lifeless bodies, swayed by every passing breeze, were permitted to dangle from the cross-piece until they rotted and dropped to the ground. We could see their bones protruding from the common grave under the gallows.”

  Among those hanged and left to decompose were a luckless group of Laramie Loafers who were accused of riding on Fort Rankin with the southern hostiles but whose true crime may have been skinning and barbecuing a number of the post’s feral cats that the quartermaster valued as mousers and ratters. Not long afterward two Lakota Head Men arrived with a white female prisoner they had purchased from a band of wild Cheyenne. Their intention was to curry favor with the whites by returning her to her people, and they assumed that this show of good faith would stand them in good stead with the soldiers. Instead the hysterical white woman accused them of rape. They were led to the scaffold by the fort’s temporary commander, Colonel Thomas Moonlight, and after their execution they hung in artillery trace chains and leg irons until the putrid flesh peeled from their skeletons.

  The great group of southern hostiles finally reached the Upper Powder in March 1865. Prior to their arrival the Bad Faces had passed an uneventful season; the highlight, as recorded by the Winter Count, was the capture and killing of four Crows attempting to steal horses. Now came this great group of fugitives trailing large herds of stolen cattle and packhorses and travois piled high with looted
sacks of flour, cornmeal, rice, sugar, and more. The northerners gathered goggle-eyed around strange bolts of multicolored cloth, and more than a few became nauseated after feasting on a mixture of tinned oysters, ketchup, and candied fruit. But most alluring were the repeating rifles and ammunition taken from the torched ranches and mail stations. Red Cloud’s warriors and most other fighters and hunters on the Upper Powder still relied primarily on bows and arrows, and the rush to trade for these new, prized weapons was loud and raucous.

  It was initially a hesitant reunion, however, despite the air of excitement. There were many northern Oglalas, not least among them Red Cloud, who remembered well the insults that had fired the decades-long feud between the Smoke People and the Bear People. And though the Cheyenne had no such divisions, the years apart had exacerbated cultural differences between the northern and southern branches. The Northern Cheyenne, clad in rough buffalo robes and with red-painted buckskin strips plaited through crow feathers entwined in their hair, barely recognized their southern cousins, who wore cloth leggings and wool serapes. The two branches even had some trouble communicating, as the Northern Cheyenne had adopted many words from the Sioux dialect. In the end, however, turning away the ragged widows and bewildered orphans of Sand Creek would have been unthinkable. Soon enough their dramatic stories set the Bad Faces’ blood boiling. The southerners described the outrage at Sand Creek in all its wretched detail, and told of the persecution of the docile Loafers as well as the hanging of the Lakota Head Men. Crazy Horse in particular was reported to have reacted to these tales of betrayal and brutality with an unconcealed rage for blood vengeance.