The Heart of Everything That Is

by Drury, Bob; Clavin, Tom;

  The surprise factor gave the Bad Faces a tentative head start, but from the higher limestone bluffs they could see that a large party of Crows, too many to take on, had wrangled spare horses and were flying after them. It was in such situations that the genius of Red Cloud—and perhaps his renown as a flying shape-shifter—blossomed. At dusk the Sioux reached a tableland scarred by a maze of crooked double-back trails. Red Cloud instructed six of his warriors to keep the stolen herd moving east at a leisurely gait while he and the rest laid false tracks through the breaks. He also turned over his headdress to one of the departing Bad Faces. As he expected, when the Crows reached a high point leading into the tableland they spotted the remuda moving slowly across the distant prairie, escorted by only a few riders—one of whom, judging by his feathers, was Red Cloud. But given the unhurried pace and the confusing tracks, they suspected an ambush. They proceeded warily.

  While they picked their way through the rocky goosenecks, expecting a surprise attack around every outcropping, Red Cloud and his braves caught up to the herd and helped drive them back to the Little Missouri. He suggested to Old Smoke that they dismantle the lodges and disperse. But first he instructed the band to gather all the old and lame horses destined to be “given to the moon.” Having rounded up fifty or so of these animals, he gathered them into a small valley and had a sort of Potemkin Village of tattered lodges skins erected to give the impression that someone was guarding them. Then he and a small party again rode west, careful to avoid the oncoming Crows.

  The Crows reached the decoy village that night and crept past the tepees, not realizing that these were unoccupied. Then they spotted the animals. They took the bait, stampeding the ponies and riding breakneck through the dark. It was only at dawn that they realized the herd they had stolen back consisted of old, worthless horseflesh. A few had even died from exhaustion during the escape. When the humiliated Crows gazed up at an eastern height they were greeted by the sight of Red Cloud and his Bad Faces framed by the rising sun, mooning them in mockery.

  Red Cloud did not go out of his way to suppress the rumors of his preternatural capabilities, because if such a reputation aided him in his battles against enemies, and in accruing even greater honors, such was the way of the Sacred Hoop. On the other hand, not every fight he picked was intended as a strategic maneuver to enhance his tribal standing. Sometimes it just felt good and natural to go out and steal horses. If he took some scalps in the process, so much the better.

  Thus one midsummer day when life in the Bad Face camp grew too monotonous for the blotahunka and a group of restless warriors, they decided that it had been far too long since they had raided the Arikara. Red Cloud and twenty-three braves rode off toward the faraway Upper Missouri. By the 1850s nothing was left of the once mighty Arikara except a pathetic tribe in a single earth-lodge village abutting the Missouri in a forlorn corner of present-day North Dakota. Red Cloud’s raiding party traversed over 150 miles before reaching the big river, where they spied a cluster of tepees set in a stand of willow extending down to the water’s pebbly banks. The Bad Faces recognized the lodges as belonging to Gros Ventres, usually a much hardier foe than the Arikara. But a Sioux brave could resist anything except temptation, and the sight of a large pony herd feeding along the braided streambeds emptying into the river determined their decision. Moreover, these were not the mighty Gros Ventres of the mountains, but merely their river-dwelling cousins. The prairie-hardened Lakota looked down on such bottom-dwelling “mosquito eaters” with a contempt customarily reserved for cowards and whites. They counted the lodges, and estimated between thirty and forty fighting men—versus twenty-four Oglala warriors. On its face, a Sioux rout.

  It took the Bad Faces several hours to creep through a marshy gully until they were behind the village. At noon they charged, on foot, screaming, eagle feathers streaming. The barrels of their Hawkens blew fire, and arrows whistled. But these mosquito eaters could fight. They streamed from their lodges and formed a skirmish line that not only held but repulsed the Bad Faces, driving them north against the river. There they mustered again and charged at a full run. Once more the Gros Ventres stood their ground, their long rifles and arrows knocking down four Oglala braves. On the next retreat Red Cloud’s party managed to cut 100 or so ponies from the enemy herd. One Oglala had been killed, three more had been slightly wounded, and a healthy remuda was in their possession. They counted it a good day’s work, found a ford, crossed the river, and rode south.

  That night Red Cloud, satisfied that they were not being pursued, laid his dead compatriot to rest in the branches of a large elm and split his command. Ten braves, including the three wounded, were sent to escort the stolen herd back to Old Smoke’s summer camp on Heart Creek. The remaining thirteen would follow Red Cloud south along the Missouri until they came on their original target, the Arikara village. They found it the next afternoon, nestled between an overhanging shale promontory and the river. They climbed the escarpment to scout their attack.

  Hollywood movies have not accustomed us to envision Indians, particularly western Indians, living in houses. But as the Sioux peered down on the Arikara village the tableau resembled a medieval European hamlet more closely than what we have come to expect of a North American Indian camp. The Arikara lived in round lodges constructed from woven and plaited willow branches anchored by thick cottonwood beams. Over this infrastructure was daubed, inside and out, a wet, mortar-like mixture of prairie grass and mud that dried into effective weather stripping. A single opening not far up the oval roof served as both chimney and window, and larger structures were often divided into family living quarters and indoor stables for cherished mounts. Unlike the majority of western tribes, the Arikara also built corrals to pen their ponies at night. In spite of their recent hard times, the tribe had always been, and remained, good horsemen. This accounted for the Sioux’s interest. The Arikara were also known for their strange little boats—made of buffalo bull hides stretched tight over rounded frameworks of willow branches—that they sailed in lieu of canoes. They were expert at navigating these unstable tubs across rivers and surging creeks. From his perch on the butte Red Cloud could see a small flotilla of the craft beached on a sandy shoal at the far end of the camp.

  The Arikara village conformed to the mud-yellow river flats in two elongated crescents, with an open space, like a main street, running between them. A good-size corral made from interlaced sagebrush protruded from one end. The effect was that of a series of giant anthills girding a dusty town square. Nothing seemed amiss or suspicious as dusk deepened into night and the Rees brought in their herd. Still, as a precaution the Sioux waited until midnight before mounting and moving out. Crouched low in their saddles, they dropped down the butte in single file, Red Cloud in the lead. The plan, which indicates that they were not looking for a fight, was to smash open the Arikara corral and stampede the horses. Once again in defiance of our cinematic preconceptions, rarely did Indians fight from horseback; even on the vast Plains they preferred to sneak up on an enemy on foot. The Bad Faces moved to within an arrow’s flight of the corral when two rows of Rees rose from the tall grass on either side of their column and opened fire with rifles and bows.

  Red Cloud realized immediately that the Rees had been alerted to their presence by the Gros Ventres. In the pandemonium he and the brave behind him lost control of their mounts, which bolted down the corridor and through an opening in the Arikara corral. The two men dropped to the ground and mixed with the herd. But the volleys of gunshots had agitated the remuda, and several of the horses were rearing and bucking. The last Red Cloud saw of his companion, the brave was clutching the tail of a horse that broke through the sage fence and galloped downriver.

  Within moments the gunfire behind Red Cloud subsided, the rifle reports becoming more spaced. He could sense that the fight had moved from the river and up onto the bluffs. The Arikara did not know he was here. It would not be long, however, before they returned to check on their herd. Now or
never. Red Cloud squatted low, dipping beneath the mustangs’ bellies and crawling around the skittering hooves until he reached the corner of the corral closest to the village. He pinned his rifle against his leg, threw his blanket over his head, and stepped boldly into the main thoroughfare that ran between the earth mounds. There was no moon, and lights from the chimney-windows cast eerie shadows as he walked toward the water. He passed several people, including men with weapons, who took no notice. Once, a woman carrying water addressed him in the Arikara tongue, which he did not understand. He grunted in response. The smell of the rushing river in the night air, thrillingly sweet and fresh, filled his nostrils. He was a few yards away from the bank. He forced himself not to run.

  He scrambled down the crumbling bank and was about to swim for it when he remembered the boats. He made for them, cut one loose, pushed it out into the current, and tumbled inside. It was like riding a teacup circling a bathtub drain. The shooting had stopped completely now, and he could see torches nearing the spot on the riverbank where the tribe moored their craft. But they must not have missed the boat he stole. No one followed him.

  There was a single paddle in the boat, and he used it to propel himself down the main channel and push off from shoals. He drifted all night on the swift current and at dawn steered into a narrow creek on the west side of the river shaded by dusky box elders. The stream fed down from a pocket ravine enclosed by walls of fine-grained yellow sandstone. He was hungry, and he took a chance, tying up and exploring the valley floor. There was no game, but he spooked a small flock of prairie chickens and shot one off a tree branch. He plucked its feathers with rough abandon, as if killing it for a second time; sliced out the entrails; and ate the bird raw. He crawled into the brush beside the boat and lay flat. He was certain his friends were dead.

  When Red Cloud awoke it was nearly sundown. He pushed back into the river and for four days repeated this pattern: drifting by night and hunting, eating, and sleeping by day. Early on the fourth night he thought he heard drumbeats carrying up the river corridor. He paddled to the bank and moved cautiously, grabbing overhanging reeds and tree roots hand over hand to slow his progress against the rough current. He heard a dog bark, then another. He tied up and crawled to the edge of an Indian camp. He burrowed into a nook of butterfly weeds just outside the firelight to listen for voices coming from the tepees. Presently he heard one, an old man haranguing a woman. He was speaking the Sioux tongue. Red Cloud stood and strode into the open. He assumed he had found a band of eastern Lakota: Hunkpapas or Miniconjous, perhaps even an adventuresome Yankton clan that ordinarily roamed farther to the east. He was instead surprised to find himself surrounded by Brules, their astonishment at the sight of the mighty Red Cloud in their midst equal to his own relief and delight.

  For days the Brules feted Red Cloud as he told and retold the story of the fight with the Gros Ventres, the trap set by the Arikara, and his miraculous escape by the river. Finally they supplied him with horses and provisions, and selected two young braves to escort him home. Five days later he rode into Old Smoke’s camp, to the shock and jubilation of Pretty Owl and the Bad Faces, who had supposed him dead. Of the fourteen warriors who had been ambushed by the Arikara, he was the seventh to straggle in. Although two more survivors arrived the following day, one died almost immediately from his wounds. No more followed. The brave Red Cloud had last seen gripping the tail of the runaway Arikara horse did not return. Red Cloud himself had suffered no visible injury. His legend grew.

  • • •

  Few of these constant intertribal raids and fights were ever reported to eastern authorities, although government Indian agents in the West knew full well that the Indians’ adherence to the articles of the Horse Creek Treaty had lasted about as long as it took for the ink to dry. But the agents stood to lose too much power and wealth if Washington were to understand this. In some cases the Lakota even implored the Indian agents to inform the Great Father that they no longer wished to be held to the pact, that they neither wanted nor needed the American gifts if accepting them meant having to cease their raids on the Arikara and Pawnee or, more gallingly, ceding any land to the hated Crows. The Hunkpapas, a tribe being squeezed by sodbusters pushing up the Missouri and egged on to retaliate by the charismatic young warrior-mystic Sitting Bull, were most adamant in this regard. They refused to have anything to do with the Indian agent assigned to their tribe, and warned him to stay out of their territory if he valued his scalp.

  In their reports to St. Louis and Washington, however, the agents never mentioned any of this. Instead they found more tractable, mostly alcoholic Head Men loosely associated with the Hunkpapas to sign the receipts for any commodities delivered according to the treaty—but not without first taking their own hefty cut of the grain, cattle, and tools. Unlike Sitting Bull’s people far to the northeast, Red Cloud continued the ancient warring rituals without much government interference, although he and Old Smoke could not completely disentangle the Bad Faces from the growing white presence clogging the Oregon Trail. The Oglalas continued to be mesmerized by the mysterious lure of these queer strangers with their funny clothes, odd body odors, and bald, vulture-like heads.1 Whether or not the Indians connected the cross-cultural pollination that accompanied these interactions with the ravaging diseases and cheap whiskey carried by the newcomers, it was happening, and there was no stopping it.

  Old Smoke and Red Cloud had for the most part managed to keep their band as far north on both sides of the Black Hills as possible during the worst of the cholera, measles, and smallpox outbreaks. But many other Sioux bands were decimated, particularly those roaming west of Fort Laramie, where word of the rampant epidemics was slower to arrive. On one of his surveying expeditions, the same Captain Stansbury who had sought Jim Bridger’s assistance in laying out the railroad route observed lodge after lodge filled with Lakota corpses lying in their own watery bile. Red Cloud is reported to have personally devised a remedy for cholera, a concoction of boiled red cedar leaves that apparently had some effect on the dehydrated and dying, although not nearly enough. Evidently there were Bad Faces who had become too dependent not only on the white man’s liquor, gleaming metal cook pots, tobacco, and glass beads, but also, now, on his medicine. They were left to beg for such goods by the side of the increasingly rutted “Glory Road,” usually to no avail.

  These outbreaks were one reason the Western Sioux initially welcomed the arrival of U.S. troops at Fort Laramie. The Indians believed (insanely, in hindsight) that the soldiers had been dispatched to police and control, if not curtail altogether, the prairie schooners slithering through their country like a long white snake. They ultimately realized, with astonishment, that the exact opposite was true. The Bluecoats and their officers cared not a whit for the Natives. They were there to serve the emigrants, at any cost. In this they were complicit with the traders in requiring trumped-up Head Men with whom they could do business. And if a true leader such as Red Cloud refused to allow his people to visit the Army-backed trading posts, they could easily find another, more pliable “chief.”

  Few details from the Indian perspective have emerged about the hazy years immediately prior to and after the Horse Creek Treaty Council. What is known is that at some point—no one is certain precisely when—the Army selected an elderly, obscure Brule Head Man named Conquering Bear to represent the Lakota as just such a “chief.” The decision was undoubtedly a sop to the trading post operators, as Conquering Bear and his band were regular visitors to the private stores and warehouses that had begun to bloom like sage stalks around the soldiers’ stockade. Conquering Bear’s elevation, however, further divided the Western Sioux. As always, the Indians could not conceive of a single man making decisions for all seven Lakota tribes. And even if the idea had any validity—which it did not—if there was going to be a single Head Man to represent the Western Sioux, why choose one so far past his fighting prime?

  The eastern Lakota—the Miniconjous, Hunkpapas, Sans Arcs, Tw
o Kettles, and Blackfeet Sioux—for the most part ignored Conquering Bear’s appointment, or saw it as a good joke on the crazy whites. But the Oglalas, in closer contact with the Americans, were astounded and angry. This was more than just an insult; it was a clear erosion of their autonomy. Whirlwind, Head Man of the Oglala Bear People, had inherited many of his father’s bullying and obnoxious traits, and he nearly sparked an intertribal war by initially refusing to recognize Conquering Bear’s chieftaincy. He eventually thought better of alienating the more numerous Brules, however, and relented. And Red Cloud, despite his reputation, was not yet even thirty years old and could not have expected to be handed so lofty a position. Still, this second snub to his mentor Old Smoke—first by the Oglala council of elders after the killing of Bull Bear, and now by the heedless whites—sat in his stomach like broken glass. By now Old Smoke was in his early seventies, but unlike the old women of his tribe—“ugly as Macbeth’s witches,” according to the historian Francis Parkman, who visited the tribe around this time—the Head Man of the Bad Faces was by all accounts still large, strong, and wily.

  Conquering Bear, however, remained a “chief” in name only among most Brules, further proof to the tribes that accommodation with the United States was a fool’s game. The newcomers took, and took, and then demanded more. As the Lakota-born historian Joseph M. Marshall III wryly notes, “The whites had one truth and the Lakotas another.” Further hostilities, if not all-out war, with the land-grabbing whites must have seemed inevitable to the Western Sioux. For the astute Red Cloud it was merely a question of when and how. It would take a concerted strategy—never an Indian strong point—to defeat these invaders, as well as a true sense of unity among the squabbling tribes. This, too, was a doubtful proposition. Thus it no doubt occurred to Red Cloud that his best strategy was to stall for time. He was still young and held no official tribal leadership position. If the goal was to check the American flood tide, there was no way, right now, that the Indians could challenge the might of the U.S. Army. He knew well that aside from his own relatively well armed akicita, perhaps one in a hundred Sioux braves owned a gun that worked. As it turned out, when the first deadly shots were loosed in what would become the decades-long Indian wars on the High Plains, it was the soldiers who fired them.