The next morning, amid more feasting, a tall medicine pole was erected in the center of the camp, and at dusk ceremonial fires were lit in a circle around it. When the sun had set, a drumbeat announced the victory dance. For the next two days and nights the warriors danced without stopping; should one drop from exhaustion, another would take his place. Those like Red Cloud who had killed an enemy used a tincture that was ground from manganese oxide to paint themselves black from head to toe as a show of menace. But the most important ceremony was saved for the end of the dance. It was then that the distribution of the Pawnee horses took place. Most were kept by their captors, but some were given to the tribe’s old, poor, and infirm, and even to the winkte, the transvestites who had opted out of male Lakota society and lived on the edge of camp with the band’s other dispossessed. That day Red Cloud proudly gave away the one pony he had made off with. Alas, he never mentioned the recipient. More important, he also learned a great lesson. He had witnessed this ceremony many times, but he now felt a true understanding of the Sioux concept of martial honor. Someone, for the first time, was in his debt.
After his first killing Red Cloud noted another important lesson—warriors who had physically struck an enemy without killing him, or “counted coup,” were accorded the tribe’s highest respect, more so than those who had taken scalps. Among the western tribes it was understood that the greatest courage was displayed by coming close enough to smell a man’s hot breath while striking, or “quirting,” him and allowing him to live. The theory was that in so doing a brave took a greater chance of being killed himself. Such was Red Cloud’s intuitive intellect that as a teenager he was beginning to comprehend how the ancient customs could be used, even by a fatherless boy, to accrue power. It was the opening of Red Cloud’s strategic and tactical mind, and he stored this memory for use during the rest of his life, beginning with an incident only a few months later.
* * *
1. “Dragoon” was derived from the “dragon guns” carried by legendary French mounted forces.
5
COUNTING COUP
It was the winter after Red Cloud’s first kill, and Old Smoke’s Bad Faces had staked camp in a small cottonwood valley close to where the Laramie flows into the North Platte near the Nebraska-Wyoming border. Though the season was waning, it had been an unusually severe March, with successive storms rolling down from the north. Under the cover of one of these spring blizzards a raiding party of fourteen Crows, on foot and far from their Montana homeland, had closed to within about ten miles of the Sioux pony herd when they were spotted by a lone Oglala brave out hunting deer. Their plan had been good. The Crows were just unlucky. And now they were doomed.
The mounted Sioux hunter raced back to camp, and that night a party of fifty to sixty braves, including Red Cloud, rode out to ambush them. They circled around behind the Crows, and by dawn they had the raiders, still unaware of their predicament, trapped near the mouth of a tight canyon. The Sioux charged, their gunshots and battle cries echoing off the defile’s granite walls. The Crows, weak from their trek, outnumbered, and caught completely by surprise, recognized at once their hopeless situation. They knelt in the snow, drew their blankets over their heads, and sang their death songs. Red Cloud, the first of the attackers to reach them, drew his bow, slowed his horse, and ostentatiously struck three of the Crows in the back of the head. He then rode off a bit and turned to watch his tribesmen annihilate the intruders.
The victory banquet that night was a muted affair. The Bad Faces well understood that little glory had been achieved by massacring enemies who refused to fight back. Only one young brave was singled out to be celebrated, for he had struck the Crows while they were still alive and armed. As Red Cloud had anticipated, his stature within the tribe soared that night. He was a quick learner, and the Crow coup notwithstanding, a quicker killer.
In later years, when old Sioux who had ridden with Red Cloud reminisced, they invariably recalled three traits the young brave always exhibited. The first, surprisingly, was his grace. He rode, walked, and stalked like a panther, his every action shorn of extraneous movements. The second was his brutality; he was like flint, they said, hard and easily sparked. On one occasion he killed a Crow boy who was guarding a herd of ponies, and the next day he waited in ambush for the pursuing Crow chief, the boy’s father, to kill him, too. On another he took obvious joy in jumping into a river to save a floundering Ute from drowning, only to drag him up onto the bank, knife him to death, and scalp him. The third trait was his arrogance, essential to any Sioux leader and exemplified by a famous story about the one and only time he allowed a captured enemy to live.
It occurred while Red Cloud was leading a horse raid against the Crows. Before reaching their camp he and his braves ambushed a small party of Blackfeet who had gotten there first. As the Blackfeet were escaping with a remuda of mustangs, the Oglalas captured one brave. They brought him to Red Cloud, who told the man that if he could withstand what would come next without uttering a single sound, he would live to see his family again. Red Cloud then handed his knife to his best friend, a Lakota brave named White Horse, who had recently lost a cousin in battle. He told White Horse to scalp the man alive. Two Lakota took hold of the Blackfoot’s arms as Red Cloud stood before him, his heavy war club raised. White Horse walked behind the Blackfoot, grabbed his braid, and took the scalp at its roots. The Indian, his body trembling, blood running down his face, never made a noise. Red Cloud, true to his word, told him to return to his village and tell his people that it was the Lakota warrior Red Cloud who had done this to him. Red Cloud had intuited that the Blackfoot would withstand the agony in silence, and as much as he coveted an enemy’s scalp, it was more important at this stage that rival tribes learned, and feared, his name.
By the time Red Cloud reached his late teens his fighting qualities—reckless bravery, stealth, strength, and imperviousness to personal danger—had been established and were merely being honed and perfected. He once single-handedly killed four Pawnee in battle, and his ruthless massacres of men and boys—Arikara, Snakes, Gros Ventres, and Crows—were becoming legendary. He was a living embodiment of the maxim that war is the best teacher of war; in his case, too much was never enough. Moreover, as a striving young brave he did not spare himself the self-inflicted pain common in Sioux warrior culture. There were numerous self-torture and vision-fasting purification rites that Lakota fighting men undertook, but none was as notorious—or as fearsome and unfathomable to whites—as the annual Sun Dance ceremony.
In the Sioux ethos this fortnight-long ritual, usually held in July before the late-summer raiding season—the “Moon of the Ripening Chokecherries”—offered the penultimate physical sacrifice to the “great mystery” of the universe; and it is likely that Red Cloud performed his own Sun Dance purification around this time. Sioux braves (and, in a few rare cases, women) believed that only by subjecting the body to excruciating physical suffering could an individual release the spirit imprisoned in the flesh and come to understand the true meaning of life. This was no mere quest for spiritual enlightenment. It was the key, the Sioux believed, to gaining a physical edge, to avoiding bad luck and illness, and to ensuring success during the hunt and in battle. Warriors like Red Cloud felt that the Sun Dance ceremony made them much harder to kill. Some whites who observed or heard of the ceremony judged the tribe to be “masochists.” But to all the participants the rituals of the Sun Dance celebration were the price paid by those who hoped to become tribal leaders.
The Sun Dance was always voluntary, and whenever possible it was performed in the shadow of Mato Paha: Bear Butte, the majestic 1,200-foot stone edifice in present-day western South Dakota long revered as a holy place by both the Lakota and the Cheyenne. The ceremony was initiated by a warrior through a simple vow to a celestial deity to exchange his suffering for heavenly protection. Much as modern prizefighters have seconds, a young Lakota, typically in his late teens or early twenties, would approach older men who had undergone the ordea
l to help guide him through it. The dance was generally held in public, sometimes in a specific lodge set up for the occasion, but more often in the center of the village. There a painted pole made from the trunk of a forked cottonwood, representing the Tree of Life, was erected beneath an arbor. The acolyte believed that this symbolic tree connected him to his creator. The older men would pierce either side of the Sun Dancer’s breasts, and sometimes the back flesh near the wing bones, and push wooden skewers through the cuts. Then they looped rawhide thongs over the exposed ends of the skewers and tied the free ends of the lines to the center pole. In extreme cases heavy buffalo skulls would be hung from the incisions in the back.
As medicine men uttered prayers and female relatives trilled and wailed to a steady drumbeat, the Sun Dancer gyrated around the pole, going through a series of ancient dance steps, for twenty-four hours. The ceremony ended in one of two ways. Either the dancer would fling himself backward from the pole, ripping his own flesh, or his older mentors would seize him and yank him back hard. In either instance the result was the same. The skewers would burst from his chest and back and the odd, ragged bits of flesh would be trimmed away with a ceremonial knife and laid at the foot of the pole as an offering to the sun.
For Red Cloud, the Sun Dance had multiple purposes. The most fundamental was that as a Sioux warrior he needed all the celestial help he could get. But he also saw the sacrifice as another rung on the ladder to tribal acceptance and prominence, for aside from his fighting skills he was also beginning to exhibit cunning resourcefulness. This pragmatism may have been innate, or the young brave may have gone out of his way to demonstrate it to his peers as a sign that he was capable of one day becoming their chief. What was becoming undeniable, however, was that he had the best qualities of a warrior chief.
Once, while still a teenager, Red Cloud joined a large party on a raid into Crow lands. Resting by day and riding by night, traversing only the rugged ravines and wooded creek bottoms that provided cover in enemy territory, the Sioux took twice the usual time to cover the distance. After two weeks of riding they reached a spot close to where Rosebud Creek empties into the Yellowstone. Red Cloud, impatient with the cautious pace set by the expedition’s leaders—two prominent warriors named Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses1 and Brave Bear—diplomatically suggested that they were in fact much closer to the Crow encampment than they realized. The two elder men disagreed, and Red Cloud did not argue. He was learning to control his temper, to refrain from blurting out an insult that might make him an enemy for life. Instead, he waited for his tribesmen to retire for a rare night’s rest, then donned a thick pair of moccasins and sneaked away on foot with a trusted friend.
The two walked for ten miles, picking their way through thick copses of lodgepole pine and blue spruce, before they heard a faint sound, perhaps a horse’s whinny. They settled on a ridgeline to await the dawn. At the first streaks of light in the east they saw below them a herd of fifty Crow mustangs quietly feeding on a small, grassy plateau. The remuda was guarded by a lone sentry who was sleeping with his back against a tree. There was no Crow village in sight. They crawled down to the herd, caught two fine horses, and mounted. Red Cloud signaled to his friend to lead the herd in the direction of the Bad Face camp, and rode his own horse toward the sleeping Crow. When he was only a few yards from the sentry he raised his war club and broke into a gallop. The horse’s pounding hooves awakened the Crow, who ducked seconds before Red Cloud’s club slammed into the tree where the man’s head had been.
The terrified Crow took off at a sprint. Red Cloud, still mounted, calmly retrieved an arrow from his quiver, nocked it, and sent it into the man’s back. He trotted up to the writhing body, dismounted, grabbed the victim’s own knife from his belt, and stabbed him to death before scalping him.
The ride back to the Sioux camp was far from triumphant. Red Cloud warned his companion that they might be in trouble and were likely to be subjected to the whipping that usually accompanied the “soldiering of a delinquent.” When they were met on the trail by the Lakota raiding party, several akicita indeed charged them, with quirts raised. But at commands from Brave Bear and Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses they halted, and Red Cloud (who was obviously the instigator) was ordered to state his case. He related his adventure and showed them the scalp. He said that he would never have risked his tribesmen’s lives if the Crow horses had been tethered near an enemy camp where warning cries could have been raised. He added that, judging by the horse tracks he had seen, he could indicate where the Crows kept an even larger herd. The two elders sent Red Cloud and his friend back to the temporary camp, deciding to reserve judgment, and punishment, until they followed up on this intelligence.
The next day, when the party returned with another 250 stolen mustangs that had been captured in a dawn raid on the Crow village—located exactly where Red Cloud had guessed—he was forgiven. He was also awarded half of the fifty horses he had taken. His fellow warriors took approving note. As a bonus, he was now a rich man.
• • •
It was not long after this episode that Red Cloud’s uncle White Hawk, the Bad Faces’ blotahunka, was killed—some say by the embittered Bull Bear—and his charismatic young nephew inherited the bleached white bull-hide buffalo shield signifying his rank. Red Cloud now commanded a select society charged with not only protecting the band from outside enemies but, as they had demonstrated during the Crow raid, acting as a sort of police force to maintain tribal discipline during buffalo hunts and amid the controlled chaos when the village moved from one pasturage to another. One autumn, while the band was camped in a timbered thicket on the Clear Fork of the Powder, Red Cloud led a party of about forty hunters out onto the buffalo grass to stock their winter larders. These hunts could be monthlong affairs, with the Indians moving every two or three days from one temporary campsite to the next as they followed the herd and burdened their packhorses with piles of hides and dried meat. On this occasion they were joined by a party of Cheyenne, who accompanied them back to the Clear Fork and staked their own winter camp about a mile away.
The next day a sobbing Bad Face woman came to the new blotahunka and told him that while gathering water she had been molested by a Cheyenne brave. Red Cloud questioned her, realized he knew who the man was, and gathered seven of his akicita to ride on the Cheyenne village. Aside from his gun, bow, and quiver of arrows, he also carried an old Spanish saber. What happened next was nearly unprecedented on the Plains. On reaching the village he ordered his men to form a circle around the Cheyenne brave’s lodge, stepped inside alone, and began to club the man with the flat of the steel blade. The Cheyenne’s howls and yelps, not to mention the presence of “foreign” warriors in the camp, naturally attracted attention. Soon a large group of armed Cheyenne had surrounded the Sioux. The akicita signed that Red Cloud was inside redressing a grievance, and that all should stand back. Astonishingly, the Cheyenne obeyed. Soon enough the cries from the tepee turned to whimpers, and Red Cloud stepped out. He wordlessly signaled his men to mount and led them out of the camp at a gallop.
This episode was extraordinary on several levels. As a general rule of the era, when Indians were angry enough to fight, they were angry enough to kill en masse; fistfights or gunfights between individuals from separate tribes were rare. And the fact that Red Cloud, of all people, had left the Cheyenne man alive seemed to run against the grain of his warrior’s nature. But what is almost beyond comprehension is the fact that a band of Cheyenne, known for their courage as well as for their hair-trigger tempers, did not retaliate when a small party of Sioux rode into their camp and formed a human chain around one of their lodges while, inside, their tribesman was being beaten to a bloody pulp.
The only explanation was that the man executing the rough justice was Red Cloud, whose fame by now preceded him throughout the Powder River basin and beyond.
* * *
1. Whites sometimes translated this name as “Man Even Whose Horses Are Feared.” Yet given the S
ioux’s subtle humor and their habit of passing names from fathers to sons, it is more likely that the name Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses was bestowed on a grandfather in the late eighteenth century, when the tribe was acquiring its first wild mustangs and just learning, sometimes awkwardly, how to break them.
6
“PRINT THE LEGEND”
Large raiding parties consisting of scores, and in some cases hundreds, of braves like the one that fell on the Crow village had been the modus operandi for excursions since the Sioux had walked out of the Minnesota forests. But by the early 1840s a new weapon, the Hawken rifle, had been introduced to the Plains, and it was rapidly changing the military equation among the tribes. Red Cloud was one of the first to recognize, and put to use, the gun’s several advantages over the cumbersome Kentucky rifle, which had been in use since the Revolutionary War. The Hawken was light enough to carry easily whether one was on a horse or on foot; it fired a larger-caliber ball; and it was accurate to 400 yards—about four times the distance of the black-powder, muzzle-loading long rifle. Also, its firing mechanism had been tempered to avoid “flashes in the pan”—which occurred when the small charge of gunpowder in the priming pan failed to pass through the touch-hole and ignite the main, propelling charge, and which was a frustrating and often deadly characteristic of the older guns.
The Hawken, equipped with a rear “set trigger” and a front “hair trigger,” had been manufactured in St. Louis by the German immigrant brothers Jacob and Samuel Hawken for over twenty years, and Indian fighters and mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jim Bridger had long carried it through the Rockies. There was even a rumor that toward the end of his life Daniel Boone, who admired the gun’s curved maple cheek piece, had put away his famous Kentucky rifle in favor of an early version of the Hawken. But it had taken the increased trade between white pioneers and settlers traversing the Oregon and Mormon Trails for the gun to reach the Lakota.
The Heart of Everything That Is Page 9