The Heart of Everything That Is

by Drury, Bob; Clavin, Tom;

  The national conscience, troubled since Sand Creek, was assuaged, and newspaper headlines declared peace with the Sioux while eastern reporters and editors, unaware that “the Sioux” came in many variations, wrote that the Bozeman Trail was now safe for travel. The government was apparently equally delusional in its belief that a similar pact could be signed with Red Cloud and his followers. Indian agents sent runners into the Powder River Country to announce that come spring the United States was willing to offer even better terms in the form of exclusive rights to the game-laden territory lying between the Black Hills, the Bighorns, and the Yellowstone in exchange for the mere right of passage along the Bozeman Trail. There was no mention of farming. The message from Washington was clear: avoid war at all costs.

  The politicians and Indian agents who promoted and fostered these peace offerings had many agendas, but most were spurred by one obvious and overriding fact—the Army was small and the Plains were enormous. The generals apparently disagreed.

  • • •

  The political struggle for control of Indian affairs had been raging, intermittently, since 1849, two years before the Horse Creek Treaty, when tribal oversight was transferred from the War Department to the Office of Indian Affairs. The Army (correctly) considered the politicians dishonest and corrupt; the politicians (equally correctly) deemed the Army bloodthirsty and shortsighted. One proof of the latter belief had been General Connor’s disastrous campaign. By rights, the bureaucrats pointed out, it should have taught the military some basic lessons, the foremost being that for all of America’s industrial might, great winding columns of Bluecoats blundering across the prairie on futile search-and-destroy missions would play into the hands of a mobile, cunning enemy who knew every butte, hollow, creek, and pasture. General Sherman himself admitted that finding hostile Indians “was rather like looking for a flea in a large clover field.” Yet despite his new authority as commanding general of the Army, even Grant could not alter the institutionalized hubris and Indian-hating of the War Department. By the spring of 1866 the department—as was said of the Bourbons on their return to power—had apparently learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

  A year before General Grant plucked him out of obscurity, General Pope had published in the influential Army and Navy Gazette an indictment of what he considered America’s accommodationist policy toward the High Plains tribes. This approach to the “Indian Problem” had the matter backward, he wrote. Instead of offering treaties and bribing the Natives with gifts and annuities, Pope advocated placing the burden of peace on the Indians. Were he in command of national Indian policy, he concluded, he would give the tribes a choice, take it or leave it: “an explicit understanding with the Indians that so long as they keep the peace the United States will also keep it. But as soon as they commit hostilities the military forces will attack them, march through their country, [and] establish military posts in it.”

  Now Pope was in command of the Department of the Missouri. In March 1866 he issued General Order No. 33, which instituted yet another Army “District,” the “Mountain District.” It included the route from the old Camp Connor (since renamed Fort Reno), northwest to Virginia City via the Bighorn and Yellowstone Rivers—in other words, the Bozeman Trail. The order also assigned Colonel Carrington’s 18th Infantry Regiment the task of reopening and protecting the route. In order to facilitate this assignment, Carrington would need to construct a string of forts through the heart of the Powder River Country, permanent structures replacing the mule-driven supply lines that had failed so miserably in the past. For a striking illustration of the haphazard state of the postwar Army, one need look no further than the fact that on the very day General Pope issued Order No. 33, Generals Grant and Sherman decided to relieve him of command.

  Grant had placed Sherman in charge of all western defenses, and he was also close to appointing a fifty-six-year-old brigadier general, Philip St. George Cooke, to succeed Pope as head of the Department of the Missouri. Sherman suggested that the role called for a younger, more vigorous general, who might actually get out into the territory to experience personally the difficulties the troops and their officers faced on the frontier. He was afraid General Cooke would be content to lead from behind, in Omaha, and he was correct. But Grant was fond of Cooke, his old Virginia dragoon who had fought so admirably against Black Hawk, against the Mexicans, and against the Mormons. (Grant may have also wanted to reward Cooke for remaining loyal to the Union when his son, his nephew, and his famous son-in-law J. E. B. Stuart went over to the Confederacy.) Grant of course prevailed, and in March Cooke assumed command.

  Amid this bureaucratic confusion, Pope’s General Order No. 33 stood. This meant that by virtue of the political and social contacts that had secured him command of the 18th Infantry Regiment, the obscure Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington, with no fighting experience and an attorney’s approach to most military hurdles, remained in charge of the Army’s most ambitious undertaking on the western frontier—the defeat of Red Cloud, the mightiest warrior chief of the mightiest tribe on the Plains. A plan to endow such an officer with the authority to build and maintain outposts throughout the very wilderness that had been ceded time and again to the Lakota by government treaty appeared not only duplicitous but idiotic. It is not known if Colonel Carrington had any idea that he was to be used merely as a placeholder, a competent fort builder who was expected to defend those outposts with untested infantrymen until a real fighter at the head of well-trained troops could complete the extermination of the western tribes. As Sherman wrote to Grant’s chief of staff in the summer of 1866, “All I ask is comparative quiet this year, for by next year we can have the new cavalry enlisted, equipped, and mounted, ready to go and visit these Indians where they live.” Apparently, he assumed that the Sioux would wait.

  • • •

  Judging from his official reports and dispatches, Colonel Carrington may have suspected that his position was tenuous when he and his battalion departed Fort Leavenworth for Nebraska’s Fort Kearney. It must also have crossed his mind that the tasks lying ahead might be easier if he had a fighting cock like Fetterman at his side. Not that the 18th did not contain its share of serious soldiers. The outfit’s quartermaster was a balding, brawling bachelor, Captain Frederick Brown—a hard-drinking thirty-five-year-old who during the Civil War had earned a reputation as a place where trouble started. Though both teetotalers, the Carringtons were initially fond of Brown, although it is doubtful that the colonel was aware of Brown’s habit of slipping Fort Kearney’s Pawnee scouts extra rations in exchange for lessons on how to skin a buffalo and scalp a man.

  The officer who was to become Brown’s sidekick was the battalion adjutant Lieutenant William Bisbee, battle-scarred beyond his twenty-six years. Bisbee was a city boy from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who had enlisted in the Army of the Republic at age twenty-two and was almost immediately commissioned as a lieutenant. He shared a tent and fought side by side with Fetterman from Corinth to Atlanta, and he was devoted to the captain. Like Carrington, Bisbee brought his family—his young wife and infant son—west with him, and at first the two clans became close. But their personal friendship did not last. Carrington was appalled when he observed Bisbee’s abusive behavior and language toward the enlisted men, and threatened several times to discipline him. Bisbee, who would rise through the ranks to general officer, never lost his contempt for his commander, and years later was to have his revenge.

  Carrington’s junior officer corps also included Captains Henry Haymond and Tenedor Ten Eyck, both hard-bitten veterans. Haymond had commanded the 2nd Battalion of the 18th through some of its hardest fighting. The laconic Dutchman Ten Eyck, whose lazy right eye lent him the appearance of a professional gunfighter, was another soldier who liked his whiskey (he would later be cited repeatedly for public intoxication). He was one of the few college-educated officers on Carrington’s staff, and prior to the Civil War he had worked as a surveyor and lumberjack before catching gold fever. H
e was mining in Denver when the war broke out, and despite being over forty he returned to Wisconsin and enlisted as a private. Within six months he was commissioned as a captain in the 18th, and soon thereafter he was captured at Chickamauga. Tough enough to survive a bout of dysentery during the year he spent in a Confederate prison near Richmond, Ten Eyck was liberated in a prisoner exchange and returned to Wisconsin, where he had left his wife and five children when he joined the Carrington expedition.

  Colonel Carrington’s staff officers, well acquainted with Army routine, understood the official reasons for his absence from the front during the war. That did not mean they had to respect those reasons, or even the punctilious man himself—an attitude that the colonel would only gradually come to understand. As it was, for now he was content to spend the winter of 1865–66 at Fort Kearney, a mere 194 miles west of Omaha, and it was from there that he wrote to General Cooke that he had acquired 200 “excellent” horses from Iowa and Nebraska cavalry volunteers mustering out of Civil War service as well as scores of freight wagons with which to haul sacks of seed potatoes and onion bulbs, surveying tools, and the construction equipment for his blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and carpenters. These included hay mowers, brick- and shingle-making machines, window sashes, locks, and nails by the barrelful.

  Despite this wealth of fine building materials, Carrington’s unit remained woefully short of modern weaponry. The officers and sergeants had been issued Colt revolvers, but the enlisted men still carried obsolete, muzzle-loading Springfield rifles remaindered from the Civil War. These guns were in such poor condition that many would not even fire. The War Department claimed that the single-shot Springfields cut down on ammunition wasted by soldiers carrying repeating rifles, but this was nonsense. It was an open secret in Washington that kickbacks to politicians by contractors from the Springfield armory kept the guns in circulation well past their effectiveness. Carrington undoubtedly was aware of this—he was, after all, an administrator at heart—but he certainly could not voice such a complaint in his dispatches. The best he could do was hint that his mission was compromised without more men and better guns, and until they arrived he decided to wait the situation out through the harsh Nebraska winter.

  From Fort Kearney Carrington also issued his own General Order No. 1, requesting from Cooke’s warehouses “commissary and quartermaster supplies for one year . . . and fifty percent additional for wastage and contingencies.” In spite of his inherent cautiousness, Carrington was nothing if not optimistic, as indicated by his further submission for such delicacies as canned fruit and vegetables, sewing machines, rocking chairs, and butter churns that his wife, Margaret, believed would add “a domestic cast” to their impending journey. Heading into hostile Sioux territory, he was literally trading guns for butter.

  * * *

  1. This was a bizarre attempt by a small group of rebels led by the Confederate spy Thomas Henry Hines to sneak into the United States via Canada, free southern prisoners of war near Chicago, and start an insurrection.

  23

  BIG BELLIES AND SHIRT WEARERS

  In the autumn of 1865, at about the same time that government agents were finalizing their treaty with the more pliant Missouri River tribes, Lakota Head Men and warriors were convening in the foothills seventy miles northwest of Fort Laramie to revive a decades-old system of governance. It had its origins in the turn of the century, when the Western Sioux were just beginning to drive the Pawnee, Kiowa, and Crows from the High Plains. It called for seven veteran chiefs to act as an advisory war council for the tribe, concentrating on battle tactics and strategy. On the banks of an unnamed creek over a feast of buffalo tongue and boiled dog, Red Cloud was selected as the “first among equals” of these Tezi Tanka, or “Big Bellies”—the wise heads who would guide the tribes through what all believed was inevitable war with the whites. Notable by his absence was the belligerent Hunkpapa Sitting Bull. He was waging his own harassment campaign against the Army in eastern Montana, and whether he was envious of Red Cloud’s ascendancy or preoccupied by his own battles against both the Americans and the Flathead tribe, Sitting Bull was never to be a factor in the fights for control of the Powder River Country.

  It was at the Big Belly convocation that Red Cloud officially declared the 1865 fighting season over, and the Lakota agreed to reassemble for a war council in the spring. Perhaps they would even accept the white man’s invitation to come to Fort Laramie for treaty talks. After all, Red Cloud reasoned, what better way to size up an enemy than to meet him in person? Before the gathering disbanded, however, he and the six other Big Bellies chose four young men to act as ceremonial “Shirt Wearers” who would keep discipline among the wild braves and lead the war parties into battle.1 Among these were Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses and Crazy Horse. Red Cloud had begun to take a serious interest in Crazy Horse, the pale young warrior with the indefinable panache. He recognized in the young tribesman all the qualities required of a tactical field general. Even his name swaggered.

  Now twenty-five, Crazy Horse had acquired the physical stature and mannerisms that would characterize him for life. He was slender and sinewy even for an Indian, and his lightness of carriage often left the impression than he was slighter than his five feet, nine inches. His ethereal quality was enhanced by his wavy hair, now waist length and usually plaited into two braids that framed his narrow face and his unusually delicate nose, which observers described variously as “straight and thin” and “sharp and aquiline.” Whites who met him over the years were usually struck most by his penetrating hazel eyes. One American newspaperman described them as “exceedingly restless,” and Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun, the half-Brule daughter of the trader James Bordeaux, noted that Crazy Horse was a master of the sidelong glance. She wrote that he “hardly ever looked straight at a man, but didn’t miss much that was going on all the same.” In addition, Crazy Horse also exuded a natural melancholia, as if the humiliations and defeats he’d witnessed as a child—from Horse Creek to Harney’s massacre to the defeat of the Cheyenne on the Solomon River—had scarred his psyche. It was generally assumed that if Crazy Horse could indeed make magic, some of it was black.

  Red Cloud may have felt that he needed such magic. Although either unwilling or unable to articulate it, much less understand the reasons for it, he and most of his cohort sensed a subtle change in the land of their youth. Droughts lasted longer, grasslands had become more sparse, and even the hardy wild mustang herds, like the buffalo droves, appeared to be thinning. In fact, the middle of the nineteenth century did mark the end of a 300-year neo-boreal cooling period known as the Little Ice Age, and this was about to have a greater impact on the American West than all the Indian wars combined.

  Starting around 1550, falling temperatures in the northern hemisphere had produced snowstorms in Portugal, flooding in Timbukto, and had destroyed centuries-old citrus groves in eastern China. Three centuries later, at the end of the Little Ice Age, Mary Mapes Dodge would be inspired to create a fictional character, Hans Brinker, whose silver skates carried him along frozen Dutch canals that would never again ice over. In North America the most severe repercussion from this meteorological anomaly was the desertification of buffalo ranges from the Canadian Plains to Texas. Yet the Powder River basin, because of its location between two mountain ranges and its many bountiful aquifers, escaped the environmental degradation affecting vast tracts of the West. Game proliferated in the area, cool breezes still wafted down from the mountains, and lush sweet grass scented the air. This alone made the country worth fighting for. But arguably it was not this alone for which Red Cloud fought: if he and his people had lived in the Mojave, or on a polar ice cap, and someone had tried to take it away, his reaction would have been the same. “If white men come into my country again, I will punish them again,” he promised his tribesmen.

  All of Red Cloud’s plans were of a single piece—to close down the pathway into his people’s verdant country, forever. He saw the world in primary colors, a
nd if need be, he was willing to paint John Bozeman’s trail blood red.

  • • •

  A trail becomes a Trail when it avoids alkaline flats or impassable ravines on either flank and instead meanders past water holes and through pasturage hardy enough to nourish stock; when it finds a way for wagons to wend through broken buttes and mesas while avoiding cutbanks so steep the bleached bones of buffalo litter the bottom; when it leads to fords in wild rivers where a prairie schooner carrying an entire lifetime of possessions can safely cross. Such was the nation’s last great overland Trail, which John Bozeman and John Jacobs had nearly died blazing in the spring of 1863.

  Before their discovery, thousands of miners had trekked west toward the Montana gold camps via two primary routes. Both were considerably roundabout. The first followed a perilous stretch of the Missouri by way of Fort Benton in north-central Montana that creased directly through Sitting Bull’s territory. The second passed by Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail before climbing through the South Pass of the Rockies at the southern end of the Wind River range. There the more traveled route to the West Coast turned southwest toward Salt Lake, forcing the Montana-bound to make a hard trek north across a vast high-country desert dotted with alkaline puddles before doubling back across the Continental Divide over even higher peaks. Game was scarce in this country, but so were Indians, and this was the route for which Jim Bridger would advocate his entire life.