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

by Drury, Bob

  August 7: Indians made their first concerted attack on the wood train on the road from Piney Island, killing one teamster.

  August 12: Indians raided a civilian train near the Powder, running off a large stock of cattle and horses.

  August 13: Indians attacked the Piney Island wood train again; no casualties were sustained.

  August 14: Indians killed two civilians less than a mile from Reno Station.

  August 17: An Indian raiding party entered Reno Station’s corral and stole seventeen mules and seven of the garrison’s twenty-two horses.

  September 8: Under cover of lashing rain, Indians stampeded twenty horses and mules that belonged to a civilian contractor who was delivering barrels of ham, bacon, hardtack, soap, flour, sugar, and coffee to Fort Phil Kearny.

  September 10: Indians returned and made off with another forty-two mules belonging to the same contractor. While the raiders led an Army patrol on a futile chase, another band took advantage of the post’s weakened defenses to fall on the battalion’s herd a mile from the stockade and sweep away thirty-three horses and seventy-eight more mules.

  September 12: An Indian war party ambushed a hay-mowing detail, killing three and wounding six.

  September 13: A combined Lakota-Arapaho raiding party, several hundred braves in total, stampeded a buffalo drove into the post’s cattle herd grazing near Peno Creek. Two pickets were wounded; 209 head of cattle were lost in the buffalo run.

  September 14: Two privates were killed by Indians, one while attempting to desert and the other after riding too far ahead of a hay train. Wolves made off with both bodies. Two hay-mowing machines were destroyed, and a large quantity of baled hay was burned.

  September 22: The scalped, stripped, and mutilated bodies of three civilian freighters returning from Montana were discovered eleven miles from the post.

  This went on through October and November until it was evident even to the Army leadership that in Red Cloud the Indians had finally found a war chief who could coordinate and sustain an effective military campaign—“a strategic chief,” in the words of the historian Grace Raymond Hebard, “who was learning to follow up a victory, an art heretofore unknown to the red men.” Moreover, the Bozeman Trail was an extraordinarily vulnerable supply line; every few miles offered an ideal ridgeline, draw, or mesa from which a small, swift war party could harass a cumbersome wagon train with deadly accuracy. The Indians’ knowledge of the terrain was such that when Army patrols were assembled to chase them they would vanish into countless coulees and breaks. And when parties of mounted Bluecoats did cut off a large body of hostiles, the engagement left their supply wagons vulnerable to secondary attacks, a tactic that Red Cloud perfected.

  As tales of the lawless, bloody Bozeman trickled back east, newspapers from St. Louis to New York eagerly published the stories. Yet still the settlers and miners came—individuals, families, entire clans—drawn by the vast swaths of free land, by the mountains veined with minerals, by the same spirit of freedom that had drawn their ancestors from the sclerotic kingdoms of Europe to the shores of the New World. August 1866 was the high point of emigration on the Oregon Trail, with at least one wagon train arriving per day at Fort Phil Kearny; in a single day the post’s adjutant registered 979 men, 32 women, and 26 children passing through, while traveler upon traveler noted in journals surprise and delight at hearing the opening strains of the regimental band’s martial songs amid the harsh, deadly environment. Many emigrants were also gratified to find women and children living at the post. Families meant civilization, if only its razor-thin edge.

  Yet despite the modicum of familiarity, nothing could prepare the easterners for the difficulties of life at Fort Phil Kearny. Unlike older and more established posts such as Fort Laramie—which boasted a circulating library, a regular amateur theater, and an occasional white-gloved ball—Fort Phil Kearny was “roughing it” in the true sense of the phrase. Under the broiling summer sun the stench of human and animal sweat and dung hung over the post like an illness. And with the exception of noncommissioned officers, who were granted their own small rooms within the barracks, all enlisted men lived in an open bay heated in the winter with cast-iron stoves. The fort’s buildings were stifling in summer and “breezy in winter,” owing to their construction of green pine logs. As the logs and boards shrank the gaps were stuffed with sod, which was blown away by a good wind, and rain and snow—either falling through the cracks or dragged in on boots—turned the dirt floors to carpets of mud.

  The officers considered their individual quarters something of a step up, although these quarters were likely to horrify any women who made the grueling trek west. Along with Margaret Carrington, ten other Army wives had braved the journey to the Powder River Country. As the historian Shannon Smith notes, it was they, and in particular the officers’ wives (assumed to be more educated and refined), who often set the “civil” tone for the small, isolated outpost. Although this was her first garrison, thirty-four-year-old Margaret Carrington seemed “to have been ideally suited for the task of shaping the community into a proper Victorian settlement.” She exuded a “commanding presence, dignified in deportment,” and was respected and well liked by the other women. The eldest of seven children, she tended to treat the other wives more as daughters than as friends, organizing sewing circles to fashion dresses and coats from calico, flannel, and linsey-woolsey—a coarse twill with a linen warp and woolen weft—purchased from the sutler’s store. Nor were the troopers themselves immune to her enchantment, and they presented her with little gifts of wildflower bouquets, armloads of extra firewood, and plump rabbits for stewing. She was the first to inquire about the health of soldiers’ families if word reached her that someone back east had fallen ill, and almost every night she read to the post’s children (and to Old Gabe when he was on the site).

  Margaret Carrington was also the fort’s social matron, and before attacks on the wood trains became a daily occurrence she organized a picnic on Piney Island in celebration of the arrival of a new sutler hauling fresh vegetables “most precious and rare.” It was a grand affair, with fresh elk steaks and salmon, canned lobster, and tinned oysters garnished with pineapples, tomatoes, sweet corn, peas, and pickles. Doughnuts, gingerbread, and plum cakes were served for dessert, followed by Havana cigars for the men and “Madame Clicquot” for those who imbibed. It was the last such affair. Soon enough Colonel Carrington ordered the closing of all gates to anyone without specific orders to venture outside, and the women became virtual prisoners in the stockade. Margaret Carrington and the others nonetheless attempted to impart whatever small “domestic casts” were practical.

  She showed the wives along Officers’ Row how to stretch canvas tarps across the underside of their sod-packed roofs as a screen against infiltrating snakes and mice, and how to sew burlap gunny sacks together to create crude carpets. She even suggested that the weeks-old, and sometimes months-old, newspapers left behind by passing emigrant trains could be hung above unglazed windows as shades—after they were passed around and read. A few of the women hired off-duty soldiers with carpentry experience to fashion double bedsteads out of pine and spruce boards, which they fitted with mattresses that were stuffed with dried prairie grass. Even these homey touches failed to overcome the maddening isolation and confinement, particularly for the eleven rambunctious children. But as every adult at the fort recognized, this situation was far preferable to the alternative.

  29

  A THIN BLUE LINE

  While Fort Phil Kearny may have been gaining families, it was fast losing men. In the first week of August Colonel Carrington finally gave in to the War Department’s increasingly insistent dispatches and sent two companies north to scout positions for a fort on the Bighorn. It would be named in honor of the Mexican War hero General C. F. Smith. Bridger went along to guide the expedition, but was instructed to return as soon as a suitable site was found. Another scout-interpreter, Jim Beckwourth, also rode with the detail.


  Beckwourth, the son of a Virginia slaveholder and his mulatto mistress, had come west with his master in the early 1800s, was granted his freedom around the beginning of the beaver-trapping frenzy, and became one of the first mountain men to scale the Rockies. Since quitting the trapping business he had worked on and off for the Army, and he may or may not have been present at the Sand Creek massacre. He boasted that he had at least two Crow wives somewhere up in the ranges, and that the tribe treated him as a chief. Though Carrington suspected there was more rooster than Crow in Beckwourth’s tall tales, he reasoned that if even a portion of what the man said was true, his in-laws might have valuable information about Red Cloud’s location and plans. Other than the bits of intelligence gleaned from the Cheyenne Black Bear weeks earlier, the colonel had no clue as to the Bad Face chief’s disposition.

  Not long after his two companies marched north—leading a long line of civilian trains that had been awaiting an escort into Montana—the battalion was depleted of even more troops when Colonel Carrington was forced to supply a personal bodyguard to a visiting brigadier general. The general had been sent from Omaha with a small cavalry detail to inspect Army installations along the Oregon and Bozeman Trails, and he arrived at Fort Phil Kearny on August 27. Carrington was in no position to deny his request for an escort to the nearly completed Fort C. F. Smith, ninety-two miles away on the Bighorn. Two days later twenty-seven of Carrington’s best mounted infantry rode out as his escort. Before departing the general assured Carrington that two companies of the 2nd Cavalry were en route from Kansas to reinforce his shrinking garrison. Whether he was mistaken or misinformed, they never arrived, although a smaller detachment of the 2nd did show up on September 4 as escort for an Army commissary train.

  By early autumn the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment was stretched to its limit. The wood trains to and from Piney Island required constant security details, and continuous daylight lookouts were stationed on top of the Sullivant Hills and Pilot Knob. These were in addition to regular distress calls from emigrant trains under attack. Colonel Carrington was like a chess player forced to begin his match with only eight pieces. His rolls at the fort were down to just under 350 officers and men—a fact he was certain Red Cloud knew as well as he. A few Crow Head Men had offered to lend braves to the Army to help kill their hereditary enemies, but Carrington was leery of their true intentions. Despite the successes of the Pawnee scout corps, like most officers of the era he felt that relying on Plains Indians to fight other Plains Indians would reflect negatively on his own capability. Instead he finally petitioned General Cooke to allow him to reraise the company of Winnebago scouts the Army had recalled to Omaha earlier in the spring. Their dispersal, after all, had been a sop to Sioux sensibilities. That was now pointless.

  While Carrington awaited Cooke’s reply he gladly hired on at Army base pay any civilians passing through the territory who asked for work. One such man was a Nebraskan, James Wheatley, traveling with his nineteen-year-old wife, Elisabeth, and two young sons. Wheatley feared that the High Plains winter would close in on his family before they could reach the Montana gold fields and requested permission to open a civilian mess outside the post’s front gates. Carrington quickly agreed, and even supplied the lumber for the crude restaurant. Wheatley owned a seven-shot Spencer repeating rifle; he proved a crack shot and his wife a wonderful cook. Their wayfarers’ inn with its nightly dinners of fresh antelope, buffalo, and venison steaks became a kind of clubhouse for the civilian scouts, laborers, and teamsters, who remained after dinner to nibble cheese and crackers, drink whiskey, and trade “vile jokes and curses so gloriously profane that awed bystanders gazed upward, expecting the heavens to crack open.”

  The Wheatleys’ clientele grew when a party of forty gold miners arrived one day from Virginia City. Their leader was a frontiersman with nearly two decades of experience in the West who told Colonel Carrington that the Montana lodes were playing out. He and his men had decided to explore richer prospects along the Bighorn. But they were harassed by hostiles throughout their journey south—only two days earlier two of their number had been killed in an ambush on the Tongue—and they now wished to winter over at Fort Phil Kearny while contemplating their next move. Carrington welcomed them with open arms. Forty rugged and well-armed men with their own horses constituted nearly the equivalent of a trained cavalry company, a rarity on the frontier.1

  The miners pitched a tent city just across Big Piney Creek and the next morning reported to the quartermaster, Captain Brown, for work assignments. They proved their worth almost immediately. Four days later, dawn’s first light streaking Pilot Knob to the east threw into relief a war party of 200 mounted Indians on the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge. The warriors bellowed, brandished their spears and war clubs, and charged down the slope toward the miners’ camp. An officer’s wife, watching from the post’s battlements, recorded the fight in her diary: “Hardly three minutes had elapsed after they came into view before the smoke and crack of the miners’ rifles, out from the cottonwood brush that lined the banks of the creek, had emptied half a dozen warriors’ [saddles] and brought down three times as many ponies.” Colonel Carrington was so excited he ordered the regimental band rushed to the parade ground to strike up a rousing battle hymn as soldiers cheered the fighting miners from the fort’s walls.

  The engagement was one of two that season that the colonel recorded as “victories.” The other occurred about a week later when a breathless rider galloped into the stockade shouting that his wagon train was under attack not far down the trail. Carrington, following an instinct, had begun saddling and bridling the best horses at reveille each morning. The forethought now paid off. A relief detail led by Captain Brown and Lieutenant Bisbee was out of the quartermaster’s gate within moments, joined by half a dozen miners. The Indians dispersed at the sight of the rescue party but not before stampeding the train’s cattle. Brown and his men chased the Indians and longhorns for ten miles before overtaking them. Perhaps valuing the beef more than their lives, for once the Indians stood and fought. Brown’s party dismounted, formed a skirmish line, and withstood three mounted charges. Before the Indians withdrew, the soldiers and miners killed at least five of them and wounded sixteen more. The detail, with one trooper nicked by an arrow, also recovered all of the wagon train’s stock.

  The small victory was noteworthy in another way. For months the prairie had rippled with rumors of white men, old mountain men, fighting alongside the Indians. The gnarled trappers, apparently as troubled as the Natives by “civilization” seeping through the Powder River Country and climbing their beloved Rockies, were even said to have planned and led attacks on the civilian trains. After this particular skirmish Captain Brown reported to Colonel Carrington that the Indian charges on his lines appeared to have been orchestrated by a white man. He was dressed in Lakota garb and was missing several fingers on his right hand, and he had ridden down on the soldiers screaming curses in English. In the final foray he was shot off his horse, but two braves scooped up his limp body. Carrington put this together with an earlier report about a “white Indian” with missing fingers—Captain Bob North—heading raids on emigrant trains. In his official dispatch to Omaha he reported the death of this Captain North.2

  While the colonel reported these “significant blows,” General Sherman was midway through his second tour of the frontier. The general’s mood had swung again, thanks to Red Cloud, and cold fury replaced the amiable disposition he had shown four months earlier in Nebraska. During a layover at Fort Laramie he parleyed with several of the Sioux subchiefs who had signed the previous spring’s treaty. When they admitted that they could not always restrain their rash young braves from joining raiding parties, Sherman’s famous temper flared, his red whiskers seeming to bristle. He had heard too much of this excuse. Turning to his interpreters but pointing dramatically toward the Indians, he said, “Tell the rascals so are mine; and if another white man is scalped in all this region, it will be
impossible to hold mine in.”

  Sherman then penned a letter to Colonel Carrington making his instructions clear. “We must try to distinguish friendly from hostile and kill the latter. But if you or other commanding officers strike a blow I will approve, for it seems impossible to tell the true from the false.” Carrington barely had to read between the lines. The second-highest-ranking officer in the United States Army had just declared open season on all High Plains Indians, friend or foe. Such was the temper of his own troops that the order was hardly necessary.

  A few days later three Piney Island woodcutters were ambushed in a thick section of forest. Two of the enlisted men escaped to the island’s blockhouse with minor wounds. They told of watching their fallen comrade, Private Patrick Smith, shot through with arrows and scalped. Incredibly, Smith had not been killed, and he crawled half a mile back to the American lines leaving a trail of blood behind him. He was rushed by ambulance to the fort, where he died. That night at mess, graphic stories spread of Smith’s death. Scalped alive. Left for dead with the skin hanging in strips from his forehead. Arrows deliberately aimed to wound rather than to kill. It was unusually bad timing when nine Cheyenne, professing friendship, rode up to the fort near twilight and Colonel Carrington granted them permission to camp on the Little Piney. Someone started a rumor that they were the same Indians who had killed Pat Smith. It spread rapidly through the barracks, with the troopers expressing the same conviction as Sherman: It is impossible to tell the true from the false.

  The American conspirators waited until midnight before some ninety men crept from their bunks and scaled the post’s walls. But the same chaplain who had made the heroic ride from Crazy Woman Fork got wind of the lynching party and woke Colonel Carrington. Carrington roused Captain Ten Eyck, who in turn gathered an armed guard. They arrived just in time to prevent the massacre. The mob tried to scatter, but two shots from Carrington’s Colt froze them. The colonel and Captain Ten Eyck recognized among the crowd some of their best fighting men. They took a moment to confer and concluded that they could not afford to make any examples. To take the Indians’ side and risk alienating the troops was too risky. The post’s tiny guardhouse already held twenty-four prisoners, most of them caught deserting. The battalion was in fact averaging a desertion every other day, and harsh discipline meted out here would only spur more “gold runners.” Carrington ordered the Cheyenne away, gathered the angry soldiers, and settled for a “brief tongue lashing” before marching them back to their quarters. It must have crossed Colonel Carrington’s mind that had the decision to stop the killings been Sherman’s, the general may not have been so quick to intervene.