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

by Drury, Bob

  As with any long and involved writing project, this book benefitted by the authors having the encouragement and support of family and friends. Our gratitude goes to Denise McDonald and Leslie Reingold; Michael Gambino, David Hughes, and Bobby Kelly; and our children, Brendan Clavin, Kathryn Clavin, and Liam-Antoine DeBusschere-Drury.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  BOB DRURY is the author/coauthor/editor of nine books, the last three in collaboration with Tom Clavin. His last solo book, The Rescue Season, was adapted into a documentary by the History Channel. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Men’s Journal, and GQ. He is currently a contributing editor and foreign correspondent for Men’s Health magazine, and has reported from Iraq, Darfur, Liberia, Afghanistan, Sarajevo, and Belfast. He lives in Manasquan, New Jersey.

  TOM CLAVIN is the author or coauthor of sixteen books. For fifteen years he wrote for The New York Times, and he has contributed articles to many magazines, including Golf, Men’s Journal, Parade, Reader’s Digest, and Smithsonian. He is currently the investigative features correspondent for Manhattan Magazine. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  DISCOVER MORE GREAT BOOKS AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Bob-Drury

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Tom-Clavin

  ALSO BY THE AUTHORS

  Halsey’s Typhoon

  The Last Stand of Fox Company

  Last Men Out

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The names Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse rank with Smith and Wesson as symbols of adversity and calamity in the old West. Red Cloud may have been more feared than either, but it did not benefit his historical or popular reputation that the majority of his victorious raids, fights, and battles took place against fellow Indians and went, for the most part, unrecorded. Moreover, when Red Cloud did defeat American soldiers—in particular Captain Fetterman’s command—in most of these cases none were left alive to testify to his military prowess. So the fact that Red Cloud was credited with an astonishing eighty coups during his fighting career—Sitting Bull claimed forty-five—would probably have been lost to history if not for the re-rediscovery of his little-known autobiography. It allows us to add flesh, bone, and blood to a mythic shadow.

  In fact, it is something of a miracle—or more precisely, a series of small miracles—that an autobiography of Red Cloud actually exists. The narrative of the twists and turns the manuscript took before its publication rivals any switchback mountain trail Red Cloud ever rode. It is because of this rare look into the opening of the West from the Sioux point of view that one does not have to guess at heretofore hidden Indian motivations. In this overlooked journal Red Cloud presents his appraisal of daily Indian life, his intimate descriptions of battle tactics and strategies in a succession of intertribal wars, and his brutal account of his time on the prairie.

  The story of the “lost memoir” begins in the spring of 1893, when the old trader Sam Deon and the newspaperman Charles Wesley Allen, the newly appointed postmaster for the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, hatched a plan to bring Red Cloud’s life and times to the page. Red Cloud, who was seventy-two, had known Deon for four decades and was related to him by marriage; and the editor Allen, originally from Indiana, had also married a mixed-blood Lakota woman with whom he fathered nine children. This made his presence on the Pine Ridge Reservation more palatable to the Oglala chief.

  By the 1890s all three men were living on the “rez,” and Deon had fallen into the daily habit of accompanying Red Cloud to the post office to pick up his mail. The two old friends would afterward repair to a bench outside the building, sit in the sun, and swap stories. It occurred to Allen that this was a perfect opportunity to record a swath of history before it disappeared forever, and he prepped Deon with leading questions about Red Cloud’s life before the arrival of the whites. The wise warrior chief was reluctant to address his battles against the United States. Despite the passage of nearly three decades, such reminiscences could still get him killed. But he was open about all other aspects of life on the High Plains, and each day after their talks Red Cloud would walk home while Deon relayed the old Head Man’s recollections as best he could to Allen, who hand-copied them into a ledger. As the concept of an “as told to” Indian autobiography was still in its developing stages, Allen wrote in the third person. (A translator had published the memoirs of the Sauk chief Black Hawk half a century earlier, but it would be twelve and forty years, respectively, before Geronimo and Black Elk would write best sellers.)

  As the summer days of 1893 shortened into autumn, Allen considered the narrative complete enough to publish. But Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, more recently at the center of the news for the Battle of the Little Bighorn, had eclipsed Red Cloud’s fame. There was little interest in the work. A South Dakota literary magazine excerpted portions of “Life of Red Cloud,” but book publishers passed it up. After several futile attempts to self-publish the book, Allen swallowed his pride and appealed to a former rival newspaper editor, Addison Sheldon, who had since been elected a Nebraska state legislator. Sheldon, who would soon become the head of the Nebraska State Historical Society, agreed to look at the material. Allen turned it over. The proposed book then vanished.

  Apparently Sheldon was initially intent on incorporating Allen’s work into a broader biography of Red Cloud. But he never got around to this. The manuscript was stuck in a drawer and forgotten. Then, in 1932, the work was rediscovered and Allen’s handwritten narrative was typed up. Allen and Sheldon both died before anything more came of the project, and once again the Red Cloud manuscript—now a 134-page, double-spaced typescript—languished at the Nebraska State Historical Society. There it was unearthed in the 1990s by the historian R. Eli Paul, who added introductory overviews to each of Red Cloud’s tales and eventually published an annotated version. The manuscript is recognized by scholars of the American West as a significant historical document containing details about Sioux life, in particular that of the tribe’s greatest warrior chief, never before known. Its reappearance is better late than never.

  Similarly, we are also grateful to the late-in-life decision by the descendants of Crazy Horse to speak publicly about their famous forefather’s life in general, and in particular his role in the Fetterman Massacre. Previously published accounts of the event by respected historians and authors such as John D. McDermott, George Hyde, and Shannon Smith place Crazy Horse at the scene in the position of the lead decoy who set the battle events in motion.

  On a trip to the site of the fight in northeast Wyoming, we were fortunate to meet with Christopher Morton, a National Parks Department historian who is also on the board of the Fort Phil Kearny National Historical Site. Morton directed us to the little-known DVD titled The Autobiography of Crazy Horse and His Family, which contains interviews with Floyd Clowe Crazy Horse, Don Red Thunder Crazy Horse, and Doug War Eagle Crazy Horse, the grandsons of Crazy Horse’s half-sister, Iron Cedar. Moreover, Morton recalled, only months earlier the three men had visited with Morton at the battle site. When they reached Lodge Trail Ridge they all described how their grand-uncle—whom they referred to as “Grandfather”—finally lured Fetterman over the ridge by mooning him. While some academics might not consider this information sufficiently scholarly, we think it would be wrong to discount, or disrespect, the strong oral history tradition of the Crazy Horse family.

  • • •

  It is said that history is fable agreed on. And Henry Beebee Carrington, who outlived William Judd Fetterman by forty-six years, certainly worke
d hard to gain agreement for his side of the story. The primary conduit for his public relations campaign was the memoir by his first wife, Margaret, who published Absaraka: Home of the Crows in 1868. For years the book was a bible for historians and western writers chronicling Red Cloud’s War. In quite a few passages a reader detects not only the hidden hand of her husband, Henry, but perhaps also that of Captain Tenedor Ten Eyck. The Carringtons were friends of Ten Eyck, who had little use for his contemporary officers Fetterman, George Grummond, and Frederick Brown. Many of Mrs. Carrington’s anecdotes—Quartermaster Brown vowing to personally take Red Cloud’s scalp, for instance—would logically seem to have come from a “source” aside from her husband and outside her small social circle at Fort Phil Kearny. Ten Eyck, who quit the Army after being accused of dereliction of duty and cowardice by fellow officers for his delay in reaching the Fetterman battlefield and who spent his final years in an alcoholic haze, is a very likely candidate. Further, throughout her book Mrs. Carrington stresses, contra much evidence, Fetterman’s impatience to “summarily” punish Indians. “He permitted this feeling and contempt of the enemy to drive him to hopeless ruin,” she writes, “where a simple deference to the orders and known policy of the commander”—who just happened to be her husband—“would have brought no loss of life whatever.”

  Whatever Margaret Carrington’s motives—and it is fairly obvious that she was essentially deflecting criticism away from Henry Carrington—the smear campaign worked. The influential writer Dee Brown, for one, is squarely in Colonel Carrington’s corner. In his book The Fetterman Massacre, he lumped Mrs. Carrington’s gossip and hearsay together in a litany of “reckless boasts” that she (or her husband, or Ten Eyck) allegedly overheard being made by Carrington’s junior officers. “A single company of regulars could whip a thousand Indians” is one example. “A full regiment would whip the entire array of hostile tribes” is another.

  Brown concluded the list with Fetterman’s famous, if dubious, declaration that “with eighty men I could ride through the whole Sioux nation.” It is hard to believe that an author as judicious as Brown was unaware that grandiosity and boastfulness were fairly common personal traits among the United States’ aristocratic nineteenth-century officer corps. Yet his conclusion belies this fact. “This was the beginning of a schism between Carrington and his officers which would grow deeper and more dangerous with each passing week,” he wrote.

  Only in recent years, thanks to the efforts of scholars including Shannon Smith and John Monnett, has a more accurate and balanced view of Fetterman been presented, overturning the familiar portrait of the arrogant fire-eater contemptuous of the Indians’ fighting ability. Monnett notes that Fetterman’s bravura statement about riding through the entire Sioux nation with eighty men—conveniently, the exact number of soldiers who died with him—did not appear in Margaret Carrington’s memoir, or anywhere in print, until 1904, “38 years after it was allegedly uttered.” And even if Fetterman had made such a boast, Monnett contends, in this “golden age of windbags,” particularly those who had yet to encounter Indians in battle, it was quite natural for Civil War veterans to engage in what he calls “parlor bluster.”

  Moreover, given the racial attitudes of the era, few of Fetterman’s contemporary detractors bothered to factor Red Cloud into their equations. The idea that a mere savage could have outsmarted and outfought an officer of the U.S. Army was too great a leap. Thus biased authors such as Margaret Carrington and, later, Frances Grummond Carrington in My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearny Massacre attempt to pin responsibility solely on Fetterman. Luckily, for them, Red Cloud could not read.

  • • •

  Finally, a personal note about the delightful habit of nineteenth-century letter-writing and journal-keeping as well as our methodology in using such research materials: it was not just the Army officers, their wives, and the upper classes of the 1800s who remarked incessantly upon the vicissitudes of life on the prairie with evocative diary entries. In our previous book collaborations, writing about conflicts from World War II to Vietnam, we had the good fortune to supplement our research with interviews with the men, and sometimes women, who had lived through the events we chronicled. In this case, we were astounded by the detailed journals and diaries kept, it almost seemed to us, by every other teamster’s wife and preserved across the West by university libraries and state historical societies. In some cases we were not even allowed to physically handle these frayed and fragile journals; instead they were presented to us by friendly librarians and state historians in Plexiglas cases, and we could only turn the pages with tong-like implements lest the oil from a human hand further degrade them.

  With this plethora of research—the entire narrative, in essence, constructed of information found in books, letters, journal and diary entries, and contemporaneous newspaper and magazine accounts—we found that nearly every sentence of the book could have been sourced. Since we are primarily interested in telling a good yarn, however, and did not want cumbersome sourcing to get in the way of the story, we decided to use “trailing phrases” rather than footnoted numbers in the text, and to list specific sources only when we quote from a letter, journal, or another author, or took his or her words as an indisputable “fact.” Anything that is not cited specifically in the Notes comes from the sources listed in the Selected Bibliography that follows the Notes. That said, as always the responsibility for any inaccuracies herein is ours and ours alone.

  NOTES

  Prologue: Paha Sapa

  Company C was nominally: Monnett, Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed, p. 96.

  “this dangerous snake”: Red Cloud, speech to government treaty negotiators at Fort Laramie, June 1865.

  “The White Man lies”: Ibid.

  “Noble Savages”: Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise, p. 129.

  “They will make many a poor white man”: Letter from Frank Elliott to his father, May 1867, Frank Elliott Papers.

  “Imagine: soldiers who had recently outfought”: Christopher Morton interview.

  “a strategic chief”: Hebard and Brininstool, The Bozeman Trail, Vol. 2, p. 121.

  Sioux braves slithering: F. Carrington, My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearny Massacre, p. 214.

  “Scarcely a day or night passes”: Letter written by Henry Beebee Carrington, July 30, 1866, Henry B. Carrington Papers.

  “Indian warfare in the Powder River Country”: National Archives and Records Administration, letter written by General Philip St. George Cooke.

  “We are not going to let”: Papers of General William T. Sherman, University of Notre Dame.

  “Where you have been, General”: Ibid.

  He had been cited for his leadership: U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, Official Records, Ser. 1, Vol. 38, Part 1, 94, 527, 586–88.

  “Few came [to Fort Phil Kearny] from Omaha”: Indian Hostilities, Executive Document No. 33, 1.

  “an arrogant fool”: Smith, Give Me Eighty Men, p. 198.

  Part I: The Prairie

  Chapter One: First Contact

  “The fisheries are spoken of”: Parkman, The Oregon Trail, pp. 108–9.

  “totally out of their element”: Ibid., p. 103.

  In 1850 alone an estimated 55,000 California-bound: Hafen and Young, Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West, p. 164.

  A conservative estimate of trailside deaths: Mattes, “Platte River Narratives,” p. 3.

  Called “Broken Hand” by nearly all the tribes: Jefferson (Missouri) Inquirer, December 25, 1847.

  Among the Lakota bands: Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer, p. 17.

  also present was the eleven-year-old: Bray, Crazy Horse, p. 80.

  His formal name was: Ibid., p. 2.

  On the whole he projected: Franklin Welles Calkins, Weekly Review 3, No. 14 (1905).

  And though he had yet to do battle: Parker, “Journal of an Exploring Tour,” p. 99.

  He undoubtedly observed: Marshall, The Journey of Cr
azy Horse, p. 35.

  “very graphic and descriptive”: Hafen and Young, p. 177.

  “My chief would ’er killed him”: Lowe, “Five Years a Dragoon,” pp. 79–81.

  “while braves and boys dashed about”: Hafen and Young, p. 183.

  Reported a correspondent for the Missouri Republican: Ibid., p. 182.

  There were perhaps 2 million wild mustangs: Dobie, The Mustangs, pp. 108–09.

  “Each nation approached”: Correspondence of B. G. Brown, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

  Even the men—and they were: Paul, Autobiography of Red Cloud, p. 147.

  More than a week was spent: T. Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse, p. 112.

  And the famous Belgian Jesuit priest: Hafen and Young, p. 192.

  “spout bits of Christian doctrine”: Robinson, “The Education of Red Cloud,” p. 162.

  “No epoch in Indian annals”: Ibid., p. 194.

  “I would be glad if the whites would pick”: Hafen and Young, p. 190.

  “lasting peace on the Plains forevermore”: Algier, The Crow and the Eagle, p. 136.

  Chapter Two: Guns and Badlands

  Later, when he handed the scalp: Hassrick, The Sioux, p. 99.

  The Sioux referred to themselves: W. K. Powers, Oglala Religion, pp. 3–16.

  The Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie: Alexander Mackenzie, Journals: Exploring Across Canada in 1789 and 1793, p. 89.

  the pioneering Brules and Oglalas: Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, p. 8.

  Nearly every tribe called itself “The People”: Moten, Between War and Peace, p. 135.

  Three great epidemics: Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, p. 17.

  The Indians would merely cut: Calkins, Weekly Review.