It occurred to Red Cloud that the Hawken’s lightness and accuracy from a distance—always complemented, of course, by arrows, lances, war clubs, and tomahawks—would make smaller raiding parties of ten to twelve men as effective as the large-scale undertakings of the past. Smaller forays would be able to travel through enemy territory with greater stealth, and they would increase a village’s security by allowing more braves to remain in camp to guard the women, children, and horses. It was said that from the day the Bad Faces acquired a small cache of Hawkens, Red Cloud personally led every raid in this manner. So daring were his new tactics that Lakota from other bands began to arrive in his camp seeking to ride with him.
Yet as his fame among Indians grew—Red Cloud’s name was by now synonymous with success—so too did jealousy and resentment. A particular rival was a Bad Face warrior named Black Eagle. Had Red Cloud been actively looking to secure his reputation, he could not have asked for a more perfect foil than this envious brave. By all accounts Black Eagle was handsome and virile, came from a respected family, and was a renowned tracker and hunter who had acquired numerous scalps and counted many coups. His insides must have twisted when he saw the son of an alcoholic Brule take what he considered his own natural place atop the Oglala pecking order. But Black Eagle bided his time and concealed his intentions until one day he asked to join a small party Red Cloud had personally chosen to lead into the Rocky Mountains on a horse raid against the Shoshones. Red Cloud, unaware of Black Eagle’s simmering resentment, agreed.
The Lakota, so at home on the prairie, had many superstitions about the dark, ominous mountains that formed its western frontier, and it was highly uncomfortable journeying through them. Even the Black Hills were usually entered only for religious and purifying ceremonies, and when bands staked lodges near the sacred Paha Sapa they made certain to keep a respectful distance from the foreboding slopes. One of their favorite camping spots was on the indented oval of red sandstone shale that still circles the Black Hills’ core. According to Indian lore, this slightly indented rock formation was the result of ancient races between huge, fierce Thunderbirds and giant mammals, from whose combined weight the track had sunk, while the land in the middle burst into flames out of which the mountains rose.
Now Red Cloud proposed to go into an even higher mountain range, where an expedition would confront not only attacks by human enemies like the Shoshones but also, perhaps, gargantuan mythical animals and spontaneous combustion. Thus it may have been no surprise to Red Cloud when, about 100 miles into the Bighorn range, one of his trusted lieutenants told him that Black Eagle was fomenting mutiny. Black Eagle grumbled and complained to the other braves that their party was lost and in effect begging to be ambushed. He was agitating for an immediate return to their village, knowing full well that in the Lakota scheme of honor such a retreat would have humiliated Red Cloud.
That night Red Cloud approached his eleven other raiders one by one to determine whom he could trust. When he discovered that Black Eagle had managed to convince only three braves, he gathered his seven loyal tribesmen and concocted a plan. The next morning he invited the entire group to accompany him to the top of a nearby peak, the tallest in the area, for the ostensible purpose of finding their bearings. When they finished the ascent Red Cloud’s loyalists formed a ring around Black Eagle and the three other mutineers. Red Cloud then strode into the circle. He pointed to the east, turned to Black Eagle, and said, “Do you see that high blue ridge away yonder? At the foot of that mountain is our village. There is where the women are. Go. You cannot get lost. You can go back over the same trail you came. There is lots of game. Get some of your party to kill it for you. And when there is another war party to go out, you had better stay at home and send your women.” Red Cloud had thrown down the most insulting gauntlet a Sioux could conceive. Black Eagle said nothing. He was outnumbered, and he knew it. He left with his followers.
The raid against the Shoshones was a wild success. The eight remaining Bad Faces captured sixty horses and Red Cloud added a Shoshone scalp to his growing collection. As the party wound out of the Rockies they also killed enough elk and deer to feed the entire camp. Not even a mountain lion’s attack on one of their packhorses piled high with venison could dim their spirits. A day out of the Bad Face camp an outrider galloped up to them. It was a relieved Big Spider, who said Black Eagle was still spreading rumors: that Red Cloud was lost in the mountains, that he had been ambushed, that he had probably been killed. Red Cloud’s return a day later must have been triumphant, but in his memoirs he records only that on entering the camp he distributed the horses and meat and ordered a giant feast prepared. Oddly, Red Cloud took no punitive action against the traitorous Black Eagle, who, given the outcome of the raid, might have been expected to gather his followers and leave the Bad Face camp to start his own band as Bull Bear had done. Perhaps Red Cloud was content to let Black Eagle stew in his own humiliation; or it may have been that Black Eagle’s influential family intervened. In any case, the fact that Black Eagle suffered no consequences indicates that he and Red Cloud were more or less equal in social stature. And soon thereafter, Black Eagle again attempted to alter the equilibrium.
The new attempt occurred during a hiatus in Red Cloud’s horse theft. The Bad Faces had staked lodges on a broad plateau in southeastern Wyoming among a cluster of rust-colored hills known as the Rawhide Buttes. Over millennia the North Platte had cut a narrow, winding channel through these granite knobs, forming sheer rock walls rising to 100 feet on both banks. At a bend in the river a small valley angled gently from these cliffs, its carpet of wild bluegrass sprinkled with patches of fireweed, sticky geranium, and alpine forget-me-not. It was late summer, game was plentiful, songbirds nested in the saltbush, and soft warm breezes caressed the valley. Red Cloud was understandably loath to stir himself to raid and fight, although he eagerly joined hunting parties riding out for buffalo, elk, and deer. Because of his absence from horse raids, however, the gifts of stolen mustangs he habitually spread around the village had fallen off precipitously. Perhaps valuing this booty more than their pleasant surroundings, his tribesmen had begun to complain.
Black Eagle sensed an opportunity. Determined to emulate Red Cloud’s new, targeted raiding tactics, he recruited eight volunteers to join him and a medicine man priest (as opposed to a medicine man doctor) on an expedition into Crow territory. The priest, however, warned him that the number ten was a bad omen, and Black Eagle spent several days trying to persuade Red Cloud’s old friend White Horse—the brave who had scalped the Blackfoot alive—to join him. White Horse rejected the offers until one night Red Cloud encouraged him to go along as a spy. White Horse rode out with Black Eagle’s expedition the next morning.
Several weeks passed before Black Eagle’s straggling braves were spotted returning through the sun-slant of a late September afternoon. Five were mounted and five were on foot. One was missing. That night they all told a story of having been ambushed by a large war party of Crows, who had killed a Bad Face brave named Red Deer during, they said, a heroic standoff. The Crows had then stolen their horses. Although the raiders were perfunctorily celebrated for their narrow escape, something in their narrative did not ring true. It was as if schoolchildren were reciting a lesson by rote.
Late that night White Horse visited Red Cloud’s lodge and over a pipe related the true story. There was no large mass of Crows, he said; there had been just a small hunting party, which had stumbled on their encampment at night. The Oglalas had stupidly boxed themselves into a narrow gorge ringed by thick growths of bur oak, and the sentries Black Eagle had posted to guard the horses at the mouth of the gorge were either incompetent or asleep. In the mad chase to recover the stolen animals—with everyone on foot except White Horse, who had slept next to his hobbled horse a little apart from the others—someone from their own contingent, no one was certain who, had in the dark mistaken Red Deer for a Crow and shot him dead. His face had been mutilated, and Black Eagle himself
was about to take Red Deer’s scalp before someone recognized that the body was wearing Sioux moccasins. They entombed Red Deer in the crook of a white spruce tree, and all except White Horse, who still had his pony, took turns riding home on four mustangs that belonged to Crow scouts who had picketed their animals unwisely.
Red Cloud took in this information almost wordlessly, speaking only to assure a shaken White Horse that he was not to blame for Red Deer’s death. The next day, as Red Cloud circled through the camp, rumors were already spreading that there was something off about the tale Black Eagle and his party had told. Red Cloud heard whispers, some alleging abject cowardice, that were even more sordid than the truth. Yet instead of confronting Black Eagle and exposing him as a fraud and a liar, Red Cloud found it wiser to let people’s imagination do the job for him. White Horse had also informed him that it was the priest who had concocted the cover story, but now the medicine man was having second thoughts about continuing the lie. Red Cloud quietly pulled the priest aside. What passed between them remains unknown, yet from then on the priest not only said no more about the episode but was seen riding through camp on one of Red Cloud’s finest horses.
This was just another example of how the young man’s political savvy was keeping pace with his image as a warrior. More than 100 years later the Hollywood director John Ford, famous for his panoramic Westerns, articulated a similar strategy for demeaning a rival in his film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For Red Cloud, a variation of this maxim would prove a valuable learning tool on his way to acquiring political power. For Black Eagle, it was the end of his hopes of ever becoming a Head Man.
• • •
Although few whites on the continent were aware of it, a seminal moment in the chronology of the American West occurred on the High Plains sometime in the early 1840s. Red Cloud was either twenty or twenty-one. (The Indians were not sticklers for dates; credible historical sources place the event sometime during the winter of 1841–42.) The Bad Faces had staked winter lodges on the Laramie plain along Chugwater Creek, and camping not far off was Old Smoke’s antagonist Bull Bear and his Kiyuska. Since their contentious split, Bull Bear’s pugnacious reputation had attracted many warriors—more than were drawn to any other band—and a council of Oglala elders had selected him as a sort of Head Man for the entire tribe. The electors respected Old Smoke. In his youth he had been hard as bur oak. But they were hesitant to bestow such an honor, and the challenges that came with it, on a man who was now in his sixties and had grown corpulent and jovial. There was also an ugly memory to consider.
Some years back white traders near Fort Laramie had begun to treat Old Smoke as the “chief” of the Oglalas. This nettled Bull Bear, who had ridden up to Old Smoke’s tepee in the Bad Face camp and challenged him to a fight. When Old Smoke failed to come out of his lodge and meet him, Bull Bear slit the throat of the “chief’s” favorite horse. None of this sat well with Red Cloud. But given Sioux mores and his own lack of stature at the time, there was little he could do about it. Undoubtedly the elders took this into account when they named Bull Bear as their leader.
Now, before hunkering down for that winter of 1841–42, Red Cloud had led a small party on one last autumn raid into Ute country in present-day Utah and western Colorado. On his return to Chugwater—leading a string of stolen ponies, and with the requisite Ute scalp affixed to his lance—he learned that in his absence a Bad Face brave had run off with a Kiyuska girl, and the girl’s father, an ally of Bull Bear’s, was demanding retribution from the Bad Faces. Red Cloud must have thought this rich. “Stealing” a woman was a rather mundane fact of life among the Lakota—particularly if the woman was not averse to being “stolen,” as seemed to be the case here—and the blustery, bellowing Bull Bear was notorious for taking any young maiden that he fancied, with no thought of recompense. Nevertheless, the insolent and more numerous Kiyuska were not in the habit of letting pass what they perceived as an insult, and Bull Bear was certain to view any transgression, however minor, as an attack on his primacy. Red Cloud was told that Bull Bear was personally plotting a showdown.
In theory, the same Lakota council of elders who had chosen Bull Bear as Head Man would rule on disputes such as this. The Kiyuska leader, however, had demonstrated that he was not a man to stand on ceremony. Each band’s warrior class was in effect the essence of its Head Man’s authority, and Bull Bear had formed blood ties to numerous Oglala braves since his split with Old Smoke. Over time he had also developed a dangerous taste for the white man’s alcohol, which occasioned his band’s frequent stopovers at the Fort Laramie trading post. Bull Bear’s well-known affinity is probably the reason white whiskey traders passed near the Kiyuska lodges a few days after Red Cloud’s return from the Ute raid. This accelerated the showdown. Yet again the wheel of fortune was oiled by whiskey.
After draining several jugs of mini wakan, Bull Bear and his braves rode to the Bad Face camp. The first person they encountered was the father of the brave who had run off with the Kiyuska girl. The circumstances are unclear, but the man may have gone out to meet Bull Bear specifically to make amends for his son’s transgression. Bull Bear shot him dead. At the report of the rifle, a dozen Bad Faces, including Red Cloud, poured from the warriors’ lodge. Rifle volleys and arrows were exchanged, and one shot grazed Bull Bear’s leg, knocking him from his saddle. As he sat dazed on the ground, half drunk, blood seeping from his thigh, Red Cloud rushed to him. He shouted, “You are the cause of this,” hefted a rifle, and put a bullet in his brain.
Bull Bear died instantly. His death was an unenviable example and an awful warning. And though it was generally felt that he had improved the world by taking leave of it, after the gun smoke cleared the Oglala elders once again found themselves trying to maintain a fragile peace between the Bad Faces and Kiyuska. In the end the fact that the Kiyuska remained the more numerous tribe swung the selection, and the council elected Bull Bear’s son, who was also named Bull Bear but now took the name Whirlwind, to succeed his father as Head Man.
It was a watershed in Sioux history. Though Whirlwind may have been the titular Head Man, it was evident to all that Red Cloud, barely out of his teens, had become the de facto warrior chief of the Oglala tribe—and, by extension, of the Western Sioux nation.
Part II
THE INVASION
Bring me men to match my mountains
Bring me men to match my plains
Men with empires in their purpose
And new eras in their brains.
—Sam Walter Foss, The Coming American
7
OLD GABE
A charcoal-hued pictograph from the Lakota Winter Count of 1851 is roughly interpreted as meaning “The Big Issue.” This translation surely had more to do with the gifts spread among the Indians at the Horse Creek Council than with the actual treaty signed. Neither side would pay much heed to that. The Army tried to use the pact as a carrot, though with so few troops stationed west of the Missouri its stick was weak and hollow. The Indians, equally cynical, leveraged it to cadge as many more “presents” as possible, including a shipment of cattle, the “spotted buffalo,” delivered as part of the government’s promised annuity. A few Indians developed a taste for the white man’s beef, although most still preferred what they considered the real thing. In reality, both sides recognized the pantomime, as did the United States Congress, which voted soon after to reduce annuity payments from fifty to ten years, with a murky codicil stipulating that, at the discretion of the president, the annuity deliveries could be extended if the tribes behaved.
In his autobiography Red Cloud does not reveal his thoughts as he, Old Smoke, and the Bad Faces rode north from Horse Creek through the lowering haze of that September morning in 1851. Despite the proscriptions in the Horse Creek Treaty, Red Cloud soon enough returned to the lifestyle of all Western Sioux braves intent on earning glory—hunting buffalo, stealing horses, counting coup, warring on ot
her tribes. One suspects that thereafter he gave the grand assembly little more than a passing thought except, perhaps, as a reminder of the plentiful Hawkens and deadly cannons the white soldiers possessed. With his keen eye for weapons, he also surely noticed that a few of the American officers wore a new type of weapon strapped to their legs, a revolver that fired six times without having to be reloaded. Red Cloud possessed forethought unusual in an Indian, and the possibility must have crossed his mind that one day he might have to look down the barrels of those guns.
At the same moment another man, a white man whose actions were more germane to the treaty council, also rode off from Horse Creek. He had no idea that his life was to become intertwined with Red Cloud’s and with the brutal Indian wars destined to reshape the American landscape. This was the mountain man Jim Bridger. It is difficult to fathom why, today, Bridger’s adventures and accomplishments have faded from our national consciousness. For a great portion of the nineteenth century his name was synonymous with the opening of the West—thanks in no small part to a semiaquatic rodent whose pelt, when blocked into a hat, became a de rigueur clothing accessory in European courts, theaters, and gentlemen’s clubs.
• • •
Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the beaver was to European fashion what bread and circuses were to the Roman mob. The wool felt of Castor canadensis so dominated European markets for men’s hats that between 1700 and 1770 English milliners exported over 21 million of these hats to the Continent alone. By 1820 that figure had nearly doubled; the Old World species of the animal had been hunted close to extinction, and its North American cousin, at least east of the Mississippi, had fared little better. Stepping into this commercial vacuum were the many fur companies of the American West.
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