Here is one they did not teach us in school,as go against the Queen's narrative it does...
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
PAHA
SAPA
The Bluecoats, many of them
veterans of the Civil War, had
survived the most brutal
deprivations—the “Hornet’s
Nest” at Shiloh, Stonewall
Jackson’s “River of Death”
on the banks of the
Chickahominy, the bloody
Sunken Road at Antietam.
They had held firm to cover
the retreat at Bull Run and
stood with Kit Carson at
Valverde Ford. But the onset
of the winter of 1866 was
introducing them to a new
kind of hardship as they
broke trail through the rugged
Powder River Country, the
only sounds the creak of their
frozen tack and the moan of
the north wind as it tore
through the stunted branches
of scrub oak that choked the
river corridors.
It was November 2, and it
had taken the sixty-three
officers and enlisted men of
Company C of the 2nd U.S.
Cavalry more than a month to
traverse the nearly 700 miles
from the flatlands of eastern
Nebraska to the head of the
Bozeman Trail in south central Wyoming. They had
traced the great bend of the
North Platte across gale scoured plains, climbed onto
mile-high prairie whose
altitude made their lungs
wheeze and their heads ache,
and forded more than two
dozen ice-crusted rivers and
streams.
Now, veering west
from the South Powder, they
disappeared into the rolling
buttes that buckled and folded
to the northern horizon. The
riders were still a day’s
journey from their
destination, the isolated Fort
Phil Kearny, a seventeen-acre
redoubt on the fork of Little
Piney Creek and Big Piney
Creek just shy of the Montana
border. With their black
woolen sack coats cinched
tight and their greasy kepis
and Hardees pulled low
against their foreheads, from
a twilit distance the party
could well have been
mistaken for a column of
wizened buffalo picking its
way through the rugged
Dakota Territory.
1
Along the
trail they had passed a great
many grave sites holding the
remains of white men and
women murdered by Indians.
The soldiers,
reinforcements from the East,
were unaccustomed to the
ferocity of the poudrerie
whiteouts that funneled down
from the Canadian Plains.
Though the biting northers
had left the tops of the
surrounding foothills and
tabletops bald and brown,
Company C’s horses and
wagon mules pushed through
creek bottoms and coulees
piled high with snowdrifts
that sometimes reached their
withers. That night they
bivouacked in a narrow
gulch, where a spinney of
bare serviceberry trees
formed a windbreak. Above
them loomed the east face of
the Bighorn Mountains, a
12,000-foot fortress of granite
that few whites had ever seen.
Platoon sergeants hobbled
horses, posted pickets, and
passed the word that fires
could be lit for cooking. The
men huddled close to the
flames and methodically
spooned up a supper of beans,
coffee, molar-cracking
hardtack, and sowbelly
remaindered from the Civil
War. Company C was
nominally under the
command of Lieutenant
Horatio Stowe Bingham, a
gaunt, hawk-nosed Québécois
who had fought with the 1st
Minnesota Volunteers from
Bull Run to Antietam, where
he had been wounded. But
every enlisted man
recognized that the most
senior officer accompanying
them, the coal-eyed Captain
William Judd Fetterman, was
the man who would lead them
on their paramount mission:
to find, capture, or kill the
great Oglala Sioux warrior
chief Red Cloud.
For more than a year Red
Cloud had directed an army
of over 3,000 Sioux, Northern
Cheyenne, and Arapaho
warriors on a campaign
across a territory that spanned
a swath of land twice the size
of Texas. It was the first time
the United States had been
confronted by an enemy
using the kind of guerrilla
warfare that had helped
secure its own existence a
century earlier, although this
irony went largely
unappreciated in dusty
western duty barracks or
eastern boardrooms where
railroad barons, mining
magnates, and ambitious
politicians plotted to create an
empire. Red Cloud’s fighters
had ambushed and burned
wagon trains, killed and
mutilated civilians, and
outwitted and outfought
government troops in a series
of bloody raids that had
shaken the U.S. Army’s
general command.
The fact
that a heathen “headman” had
rallied and coordinated so
large a multi tribal force was
in itself a surprise to the
Americans, whose racial
prejudices were emblematic
of the era. But that Red Cloud
had managed to wield enough
strength of purpose to
maintain authority over his
squabbling warriors and
notoriously ill-disciplined
fighters came as an even
greater shock.
As was the white man’s
wont since the annihilation of
the Indian confederacies and
nations east of the
Mississippi, when he could
not acquire Native lands
through fraud and bribery, he
relied on force. Thus at the
first sign of hostilities on the
Northern Plains the powers in
Washington had authorized
the Army to crush the
hostiles. If that did not work,
it was to buy them off. One
year earlier, in the summer of
1865, government negotiators
had followed up a failed
punitive expedition against
Red Cloud and his allies with
the offer of yet another in a
succession of treaties, this
one ceding the vast Powder
River Country as inviolable
Indian land. Yet again gifts of
blankets, sugar, tobacco, and
coffee were proffered while
promises of independence
were read aloud. In exchange
the whites had asked—again
—only for unimpeded
passage along the wagon trail
that veined the dun-colored
prairie. Many chiefs and
sub chiefs had “touched the
pen” at a ceremony on the
same grasslands of southern
Wyoming where, fourteen
years earlier, the United
States had signed its first
formal pact with the Western
Sioux. Now, as he had in
1851, Red Cloud refused. He
argued at council fires that to
allow “this dangerous snake
in our midst . . . and give up
our sacred graves to be
plowed under for corn”
would lead to the destruction
of his people.
“The White Man lies and
steals,
” the Oglala warrior
chief warned his Indian
brethren, and he was not
wrong. “My lodges were
many, but now they are few.
The White Man wants all.
The White Man must fight,
and the Indian will die where
his fathers died.”
By November 1866 the forty-five-year-old Red Cloud was at the pinnacle of his considerable power, and the war parties he recruited were driven by equal measures of desperation, revenge, and over inflated self-confidence in their military mastery of the High Plains. The nomadic lifestyle they had followed for centuries was being inexorably altered by the white invasion, and they sensed that their only salvation was to make a stand here, now; otherwise, they would be doomed to extermination. Red Cloud’s warnings would prove prescient: the mid-1860s were a psychological turning point in white-Indian relations in the nation’s midsection.
Earlier European colonialism had involved not only the destruction of Native peoples, but also a paternalistic veneration—partly influenced by James Fenimore Cooper— of the cultures of the “Noble Savages . . . their fate decreed by a heartless federal government whose deliberate policy was to kill as many as possible in needless wars.”
By November 1866 the forty-five-year-old Red Cloud was at the pinnacle of his considerable power, and the war parties he recruited were driven by equal measures of desperation, revenge, and over inflated self-confidence in their military mastery of the High Plains. The nomadic lifestyle they had followed for centuries was being inexorably altered by the white invasion, and they sensed that their only salvation was to make a stand here, now; otherwise, they would be doomed to extermination. Red Cloud’s warnings would prove prescient: the mid-1860s were a psychological turning point in white-Indian relations in the nation’s midsection.
Earlier European colonialism had involved not only the destruction of Native peoples, but also a paternalistic veneration—partly influenced by James Fenimore Cooper— of the cultures of the “Noble Savages . . . their fate decreed by a heartless federal government whose deliberate policy was to kill as many as possible in needless wars.”
Now, however, Cooper’s
romanticism was a receding
memory, a newly muscular
America replacing it with a
post–Civil War vision of
Manifest Destiny. The old
attitudes were reconfigured
with cruel clarity, particularly
among westerners. Even
whites who had once
considered Indians the
equivalent of wayward
children—naifs like Thomas
Gainsborough’s English
rustics, to be “civilized” with
Bibles and plows—were
beginning to view them as a
subhuman race to be
exterminated or swept onto
reservations by the tide of
progress.
By the summer of 1866 the United States had broken the previous year’s flimsy treaty and constructed three forts along the 535-mile Bozeman Trail, which bisected the rich Powder River basin—an area delineated by the Platte River in the south, the Bighorns to the west, the wild Yellowstone River in the north, and, in the east, the sacred Black Hills: to the Sioux, Paha Sapa, “The Heart of Everything That Is.”
Moreover, a much more immediate motivation for what newspapers would soon refer to as Red Cloud’s War propelled the politicians in Washington. Four years earlier, in 1862, gold had been discovered in great quantities in the craggy mountain canyons of western Montana—gold now needed to fund Reconstruction and pay down the skyrocketing interest on the national debt. Nearly half a decade of civil war had left the Union on the verge of bankruptcy, and the government depended on the thousands of placermen and panners who had already made their way to the shanty boomtowns of Montana’s “Fourteen-Mile City” via a serpentine route that skirted the western flank of the Bighorns and Sioux territory.
But the most direct path to the fields ran directly through Red Cloud’s land, which had been ceded to his people by treaty.
Small trains of miners and emigrants had already begun picking their way through this country, pioneers with hard bark who had no use for either American treaties or Indian traditions. Facing persistent attack, they were not shy in their disdain for laws that blocked their passage. The gold hand Frank Elliott spoke for most when he wrote to his father back east, “They will make many a poor white man bite the dust since they spare neither women or children. Something has to be done immediately. I tell you we are getting hostile. The Indians have to be chastised & we are going to give them the best in the shop.”
Federal officials wrung their hands over such attitudes, claiming that they lacked sufficient military force to rein in the white interlopers. Few politicians, however, had any real desire to do so. As a result, any treaty boundary lines that existed on paper dissolved on the ground.
This enormous pressure created tension from saloons to statehouses and forced General of the Army Ulysses S. Grant to send troops to reopen the Bozeman Trail. The wagon route, whose wheel ruts are still visible in places today, had been blazed in 1863 by the adventurers John Bozeman and John Jacobs and traced ancient buffalo and Indian paths. It angled north by northwest from the long-established Oregon Trail, and coursed directly through the heart of hallowed Indian hunting grounds teeming with fat prairie chickens, grouse, and quail; with wolves and grizzlies; and with great herds of elk, mule deer, and pronghorn antelope.
The land was bountiful to the tribes. But above all, this was one of the last redoubts of the great northern herd of the sacred buffalo, millions upon millions of which migrated through the territory. It was the buffalo—the animal itself and what it represented to Indian culture—for which Red Cloud fought. And no American statesman or soldier had counted on the cunning and flint of the elusive Sioux chief in defense of his people’s culture. In just a few months in the summer and fall of 1866 Red Cloud had proved the equal of history’s great guerrilla tacticians.
By the summer of 1866 the United States had broken the previous year’s flimsy treaty and constructed three forts along the 535-mile Bozeman Trail, which bisected the rich Powder River basin—an area delineated by the Platte River in the south, the Bighorns to the west, the wild Yellowstone River in the north, and, in the east, the sacred Black Hills: to the Sioux, Paha Sapa, “The Heart of Everything That Is.”
Moreover, a much more immediate motivation for what newspapers would soon refer to as Red Cloud’s War propelled the politicians in Washington. Four years earlier, in 1862, gold had been discovered in great quantities in the craggy mountain canyons of western Montana—gold now needed to fund Reconstruction and pay down the skyrocketing interest on the national debt. Nearly half a decade of civil war had left the Union on the verge of bankruptcy, and the government depended on the thousands of placermen and panners who had already made their way to the shanty boomtowns of Montana’s “Fourteen-Mile City” via a serpentine route that skirted the western flank of the Bighorns and Sioux territory.
But the most direct path to the fields ran directly through Red Cloud’s land, which had been ceded to his people by treaty.
Small trains of miners and emigrants had already begun picking their way through this country, pioneers with hard bark who had no use for either American treaties or Indian traditions. Facing persistent attack, they were not shy in their disdain for laws that blocked their passage. The gold hand Frank Elliott spoke for most when he wrote to his father back east, “They will make many a poor white man bite the dust since they spare neither women or children. Something has to be done immediately. I tell you we are getting hostile. The Indians have to be chastised & we are going to give them the best in the shop.”
Federal officials wrung their hands over such attitudes, claiming that they lacked sufficient military force to rein in the white interlopers. Few politicians, however, had any real desire to do so. As a result, any treaty boundary lines that existed on paper dissolved on the ground.
This enormous pressure created tension from saloons to statehouses and forced General of the Army Ulysses S. Grant to send troops to reopen the Bozeman Trail. The wagon route, whose wheel ruts are still visible in places today, had been blazed in 1863 by the adventurers John Bozeman and John Jacobs and traced ancient buffalo and Indian paths. It angled north by northwest from the long-established Oregon Trail, and coursed directly through the heart of hallowed Indian hunting grounds teeming with fat prairie chickens, grouse, and quail; with wolves and grizzlies; and with great herds of elk, mule deer, and pronghorn antelope.
The land was bountiful to the tribes. But above all, this was one of the last redoubts of the great northern herd of the sacred buffalo, millions upon millions of which migrated through the territory. It was the buffalo—the animal itself and what it represented to Indian culture—for which Red Cloud fought. And no American statesman or soldier had counted on the cunning and flint of the elusive Sioux chief in defense of his people’s culture. In just a few months in the summer and fall of 1866 Red Cloud had proved the equal of history’s great guerrilla tacticians.
From literally the first day
European emigrants set foot
on the New World’s fatal
shores,
2 whites and Indians
had engaged in bloody, one sided, and near-constant
combat. Four centuries of
these wars of conquest had
combined with starvation and
disease to result in the
relocation, if not the
extinction, of perhaps half of
North America’s pre-Columbian population. Gone
or penned up on hard land
were the Pequots and the
Cherokee, the Iroquois and
Choctaw, the Delaware and
Seminoles and Hurons and
Shawnee.
With few exceptions the newcomers accomplished this with such relative ease that by the mid-nineteenth century a flabby complacency toward fighting the Indians had set in. This arrogance was exacerbated in the post–Civil War era. As the historian Christopher Morton notes, “Imagine: soldiers who had recently outfought Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and the great Robert E. Lee are shipped west. It is described to them that they’ll see a few Indians here, a few Indians there. Scraggly. Lice-ridden. Bows and arrows against rifles. Naturally they have no idea what they’re getting into.”
Thus from the outset of Red Cloud’s War the U.S. Army’s field commanders failed to recognize that this was a new kind of Indian conflict. For all their historic ruthlessness, the tribes had always lacked long-range planning, and their habitual reluctance to press a military advantage had ultimately led to their defeat and subjugation. Yet here was a military campaign, as described by the historian Grace Raymond Hebard, led by “a strategic chief who was learning to follow up a victory, an art heretofore unknown to the red men.” It was not unusual for Red Cloud to confound his pursuers by planning and executing simultaneous attacks on civilian wagon trains and Army supply columns separated by hundreds of miles. Nor was Red Cloud afraid to confront U.S. soldiers—and their deafening mountain howitzer, “the gun that shoots twice”, within shouting distance of their isolated stockades.
Sioux braves slithering on their bellies through the saltbush and silver sage came within a few yards of sentries in guard towers before shooting them off their posts; soldiers assigned to hunt, fetch water, and chop wood were harassed almost daily by hails of arrows fired from sheer cutbanks and hidden glens; dispatch riders simply disappeared into the emptiness of the rolling prairie with alarming regularity. It was like a fatal game, and thus by ones and twos the bulk of the undermanned and outgunned 2nd Battalion of the 18th U.S. Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Phil Kearny was depleted. The cavalry of Company C was riding to their rescue.
The infantry battalion— eight companies of approximately 100 men each spread among three Bozeman Trail forts—was under the command of the forty-two year-old Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington, a politically connected midwesterner who through four bloody years of civil war had never fired a shot in anger. His stooped posture and graying hair betrayed the vestiges of a sickly youth; his deep-set rheumy eyes appeared to be permanently weeping; Red Cloud and the Plains Indians had taken to referring to him derisively as the “Little White Chief.” Carrington had chosen as his headquarters Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming, about midway between Reno Station, sixty miles to the south, and Fort C. F. Smith, a further ninety miles to the northwest across the Montana border.
He had begun construction on the post in July 1866, and during the compound’s first six months of existence he recorded over fifty “hostile demonstrations, ” resulting in the deaths of 154 soldiers, scouts, settlers, and miners, as well as the theft of 800 head of livestock. Carrington’s impotence in the face of this creeping if deadly harassment —“Scarcely a day or night passes without attempts to steal stock or surprise pickets” was typical of the tone of his pleading dispatches—led to constant requests for more soldiers, better mounts, and modern, breech-loading rifles to replace his troop’s cumbersome, antiquated muzzle-loaders. For various reasons his petitions went largely unheeded.
Yet, surprisingly, in neither his official reports nor his personal journals did Carrington much note the devastating psychological toll Indian warfare was taking on his troops. The Natives’ astonishing capacity for cruelty was like nothing the whites had ever experienced. The Plains Indians had honed their war ethic for centuries, and their martial logic was not only fairly straightforward, but accepted by all tribes without challenge—no quarter asked, none given; to every enemy, death, the slower and more excruciating the better. A defeated Crow, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Shoshone, or Sioux not immediately killed in battle would be subjected to unimaginable torments for as long as he could stand the pain. Women of all ages were tortured to death, but not before being raped—unless they were young enough to be raped and then taken as captive slaves or hostages to be traded for trinkets, whiskey, or guns. Crying babies were a burden on the trail, so they were summarily killed, by spear, by war club, or by banging their soft skulls against rocks or trees so as not to waste arrows. On occasion, in order to replenish their gene pool—or particularly after the tribes recognized the value of white hostages—preteens of both sexes were spared execution, if not pitiless treatment. This was merely the way of life and death to the Indian: vae victis, woe to the conquered. All expected similar treatment should they fall. But it was incomprehensibly immoral to the Anglo European soldiers and settlers for whom memories of the Roman Colosseum, the barbarities of the Crusades, and the dungeons of the Inquisition had long since faded.
Even Carrington’s most hardened veterans, their steel forged in the carnage of the Civil War, were literally sickened by what newspapers from New York to San Francisco euphemistically referred to as Indian “atrocities” and, in the case of women, “depredations.” Captured whites were scalped, skinned, and roasted alive over their own campfires, shrieking in agony as Indians yelped and danced about them like the bloody eyed Achilles celebrating over the fallen Hector. Men’s penises were hacked off and shoved down their throats and women were flogged with deer-hide quirts while being gang-raped. Afterward their breasts, vaginas, and even pregnant wombs were sliced away and laid out on the buffalo grass. Carrington’s patrols rode often to the rescue, but almost always too late, finding victims whose eyeballs had been gouged out and left perched on rocks, or the burned carcasses of men and women bound together by their own steaming entrails ripped from their insides while they were still conscious. The Indians, inured to this torture ethos, naturally fought one another to their last breath. The whites were at first astonished by this persistence, and most of the soldiers of the 18th Infantry had long since made unofficial pacts never to be taken alive.
Captain Fetterman, the relentless and adaptive Civil War hero, was charged with ending this Hobbesian dystopia. The Army’s general staff considered Fetterman a new breed of Indian fighter, and as such he carried orders to Fort Phil Kearny installing him as second in command to Carrington, his old regimental commander. The final instructions he received before his departure from Omaha had been terse: “Indian warfare in the Powder River Country can be successfully ended once and for all by engaging in open battle with the Indians during the winter.” These orders underlined the War Department’s undisguised position that previous campaigns against Red Cloud, if indeed they could be called such, had stalled owing to a combination of incompetence and the American field commanders’ aversion to cold-weather combat. In truth, even newcomers to the frontier such as Carrington soon learned that giving chase with horses, infantry, and supply trains consistently bogged down in deep snow was fruitless. But the eastern generals, who had conducted the majority of their Civil War marches in the South, were ignorant of Plains weather, and Washington expected the Army to drain this blood-soaked western swamp.
In the summer of 1866 the new commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, General William Tecumseh Sherman, undertook two long inspection tours of his vast western defenses. On the trail he became even more convinced that his troops’ failure to apprehend or kill Red Cloud stemmed from reluctance to meet savagery with savagery. The craggy forty-six-year-old Sherman was already an expert on human misery, and he held no illusions that peace between the white and red races could be achieved. In his typical brusque view, all Indians should be either killed outright or confined to reservations of the Army’s choosing. He had an eye toward the transcontinental railroad—whose tracks already extended 100 miles west of Omaha—and his genocidal judgments were succinct. “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop progress, ” he wrote to his old commander General Grant. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination— men, women and children.”
Sherman recognized that the piecemeal destruction of the eastern tribes had been a centuries-long process, and was still continuing to some extent. He also understood that this slow, systematic eradication would not work in a West bursting with natural resources the United States needed immediately. The raw frontier he was charged with taming was too vast, and on his circuitous inspection tours he spent long, gritty days in the saddle, traveling (it seemed to him) to Creation and back. Wherever he rode he had been made to feel like a visitor, or worse, an interloper, by warriors who shadowed his every move, just out of rifle range, over hills, through ravines, and along alkaline creek beds. Finally, during a brief two day stopover at Nebraska’s Fort Kearney, 3 Carrington informed him, with no apparent attempt at irony, “Where you have been, General, is only a fraction of Red Cloud’s country.”
This caught Sherman’s attention. Red Cloud’s country? Over the past four years so many good men, in President Lincoln’s words, gave the last full measure of devotion to preserve the Union. And a heathen considered this land his country? Carrington’s choice of words was just another manifestation of the white-red cultural divide, however. Red Cloud no more considered the Powder River territory “his country, ” in the American sense of the phrase, than he would claim ownership of the moon and the stars. At best he was fighting to preserve a country that the Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, had provided for Indians’ use. That Washington had deigned to cede to his tribe the right to occupy it in a succession of treaties and “friendship pacts” dating to 1825 only proved how confused these whites were about the grand scheme of the universe. Unlike the conciliatory Indian headmen who a year earlier were willing to cease hostilities in exchange for “protection” and “trade rights, ” Red Cloud was making war to halt the increasing intrusion of whites into Sioux hunting grounds— no more, no less.
The simplicity of this oft stated purpose eluded Sherman. The general was a manic-depressive whose mental illness had forced him to temporarily relieve himself of command in the early stages of the Civil War—this relief, when discovered by the wire services, had prompted the headline “General William T. Sherman Insane.” Now his inner demons were made terrifyingly manifest by a scalping, torturing tribe of “savages” his troops could not even find, much less kill. It came as a further blow to his fragile ego when, during a stopover at Fort Laramie, an officer produced a primitive map that displayed all the territory Red Cloud and the Western Sioux had secured over the past two decades. This largely uncharted expanse of primeval forests, undulating prairie, sun-baked tableland, cloud-shrouded peaks, and ice-blue kettle lakes encompassed 740,000 square miles, extending south from the Canadian border into Colorado and Nebraska, and west from the Minnesota frontier to the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It was bisected by over a dozen major rivers and numberless creeks and streams flowing out of the Rockies and Black Hills, and was home to an abundance of tribes that the Sioux had either conquered or reduced to vassal status.
In all, this cruel and mysterious territory of far horizons accounted for one fifth of what would one day become the contiguous United States. No one tribe had ever before or would ever again reign over so much open country. It was not long after seeing the map that Sherman ordered his subordinates in Omaha to put this house in order. They, in turn, summoned Captain Fetterman. It was an obvious selection.
While Colonel Carrington had been the nominal commander of Ohio’s 18th Regiment during the war, it was the robust Fetterman who had earned the unit’s battle honors and field promotions. He was an enigmatic man whose wild, dark muttonchops and smoldering glare belied a graceful and refined sociability, and there was no questioning Fetterman’s bravery. He had been cited for his leadership during the storming of Corinth, at “Hell’s Half Acre” at Stones River, and at the fiery siege of Atlanta, and he was an officer who inspired lifelong loyalty in his troops. Carrington, on the other hand, was an administrator at heart, and not unaware of the snide comparisons with Fetterman whispered by both his superiors and his hot-blooded junior officers. “Few came [to Fort Phil Kearny] from Omaha or Laramie without prejudice, believing I was not doing enough fighting, ” he was to testify before a congressional commission investigating the failures of Red Cloud’s War. Yet as confident as Sherman and his generals were that Fetterman would bring the fight to the enemy, Carrington believed that he had learned all too well in his six months among the Sioux that the strategies and tactics of Manassas and Bull Run would not apply to the far West.
The Indians were too clever for that. Despite the Army’s overwhelming numbers, massed formations and set-piece engagements were simply foreign to the tribal mind-set of raid, feint, and parry. In Fetterman, Carrington sensed an officer too enamored of what one longtime frontier scout dismissed as “these damn paper-collar soldiers.” Given the eventual outcome (and a mighty public relations campaign), Carrington’s discretion was considered the more sound policy well into the twentieth century, while Grant’s, Sherman’s, and particularly Fetterman’s strategy was judged as lacking. Despite his gleaming Civil War record, Fetterman was soon enough to be vilified as too clever by half: the wrong man at the wrong place in the wrong job. He was, it would be said in hindsight, a soldier who understood little about Red Cloud and less about Indian warfare, and a conventional wisdom developed that attributed his spectacular downfall to his hubris.
This counterfactual locomotive would be stoked by the memoirs of Carrington’s successive wives, each of whom exalted and exonerated her husband at the expense of Fetterman. Carrington himself, who lived long enough into the Gilded Age to attend memorial anniversaries of Red Cloud’s War, was also so keen to rehabilitate his public image that he must shoulder blame for the vilification of his subordinate. But if, as is said, survivors write history, it was primarily the Carrington women—aided and abetted by a lingering Victorian reluctance to call a lady a liar —who painted Fetterman as “an arrogant fool blindly leading his men to their deaths.”
As it was, in that first week of November 1866, on the same night that Captain Fetterman and Company C of the 2nd Battalion bedded down in a snowbound gulch one day’s ride from Fort Phil Kearny, eighty miles to the north thousands of hostiles from over 1,800 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho lodges had come together for a war council. There, on the sandy banks of Goose Creek where it flowed into the icy Tongue, Red Cloud gathered his warrior societies about him to finalize his plans to drive the white man from the Powder River Country and defeat the mighty United States in the only war the nation would ever lose to an Indian army. The great chief summoned the spirits of his dead forefathers to weave a tale of Indian survival, of Indian hope, of Indian victory. He insisted that the red man had been granted this land by the Great Spirit, as a birthright that had been theirs forever and would be theirs forevermore, in this life or the next. When he finished his speech more Indians spoke, and the campfires were banked before the pipe was passed and the war dance begun. And then, through billows of blue tobacco haze, Red Cloud retired to a warrior lodge erected in a copse of cedars along the river’s edge. There he laid out for his battle commanders his strategy for the final destruction of the white interlopers and their forts in the Powder River Country. So it occurred that preconceived history was bent, that the United States would lose a war, and that the fate of Captain Fetterman and the Bluecoats of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army was sealed.
In the first week of September 1851, the largest gathering of Indians ever assembled descended on the lush grasslands on the outskirts of Fort Laramie in present-day southeastern Wyoming. They arrived from every compass point: Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne from the North Platte and South Platte corridors; Arikara, Assiniboin, Mandan, and Minnitarees riding southwest from the far reaches of the Upper Missouri; Blackfeet and Shoshones from deep in the Rockies, the latter escorted down onto the flatlands under a white flag of truce held aloft by the mountain man Jim Bridger; and finally the stately Crows, completing an 800-mile trek from the buckling Yellowstone bluffs. All together more than 10,000 men, women, and children from more than a dozen sovereign tribes were represented—allies, vassals, mortal enemies. Clad in their most ornamental buckskins and blankets, riding their finest warhorses, ribbons and feathers flying, they had arrived to hear representatives from the Great Father in Washington make the case for peace—peace not only between the red man and the encroaching whites, but among the Indians themselves.
The environs of the weathered stockade on the eastern slope of the Rockies were a natural setting for such a powwow, a council that the United States deemed crucial to its westward expansion. Fort Laramie, established seventeen years earlier as a lonely vanguard post in the center of the vast wilderness, bisected what was to become known as the Oregon Trail. Over those years it had evolved from an isolated trading post into a lively marketplace that attracted fur traders and whiskey peddlers from St. Louis; Indians from across the Plains hawking buffalo robes; and horse traders like the legendary Kit Carson, who drove herds of New Mexican ponies up from the Arkansas River to sell at auction. Two years earlier, in 1849, the Army had purchased the dilapidated fort from the American Fur Company for $4,000, renamed and refurbished it, and installed within its log and adobe walls a small company of mounted riflemen—between 20 and 100 men, depending on the season and the whim of the general staff—as a way of regulating and protecting the increased flow of miners, homesteaders, and entrepreneurs westering through the Powder River Country.
The trails opened by the first frontier explorers in the 1820s and 1830s had initially drawn scientists, missionaries, and even wealthy sportsmen to the pristine territory on the far side of the Missouri River. On their return to the East these men spun beautiful, if fabulous, tales about the glories of the new Eden beyond the Big Muddy. Their stories were lapped up by newspapermen. In 1846 one New York City penny paper, noting the arrival in Manhattan of two British aristocrats recently returned from an “extended buffalo hunting tour in Oregon and the Wild West, ” used the terms “wonders, ” “agreeable, ” “grand, ” “glowing, ” and “magnificent” in one paragraph alone to describe the wild country. “The fisheries are spoken of as the best in the country, ” the article concluded, “and only equaled by the rare facilities for agriculture.” This sort of breathless advertising naturally roiled the imagination of thousands of small farmers and urban dwellers who were eager to begin life anew in paradise— provided a family or its extended clan could scrape together the $400 needed to outfit a wagon with stock and provisions. Many could. The general course of the Oregon Trail, a new wagon road branching off from the older, more established Santa Fe Trail in Kansas, had been mapped and described by the explorer John Frémont in 1842. The rutted route worked its way northwest over the Rockies at the South Pass, and it soon surpassed the Santa Fe Trail as a symbol of the nation’s expansion.
Emigrant traffic was unobtrusive at first. For most of the 1840s the High Plains tribes remained too busy warring against one another to bother to molest the small caravans of prairie schooners that snaked across the Plains making twenty miles a day. These wagons, much smaller and lighter than those depicted in Hollywood films, had hickory bows positioned across hardwood frames that supported their cloth canopies. And, again, unlike the wagons in movies, they were pulled not by horses, but by stronger, sturdier oxen— and by mules, the more sure footed, though sterile, offspring of a jackass and a horse mare. On the occasions when the wagons did arouse Indians’ curiosity, their owners could usually pass freely after paying a small tariff of coffee or refined sugar, which the Indians considered a particular delicacy.
Still, to the Sioux in particular, the white travelers were an odd lot, “totally out of their element; bewildered and amazed, like a troop of schoolboys lost in the woods, ” wrote Francis Parkman, the explorer who traveled west from New England in the 1840s to live among the tribes. Not all were as naive, or unlucky, as the ill-fated Donner Party, destined to be trapped in the killing snowdrifts of the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47. Yet in his later years Red Cloud recalled watching in befuddlement as the hapless pioneers—blithely overconfident if underoutfitted and pathetically unprepared for the harsh, treeless prairie—burned expensive steamer trunks, chiffoniers, and even an occasional pipe organ for cook fires and littered the wheatgrass and fox sedge with goose-feather mattresses, grandfather clocks, and portable sawmills, in belated attempts to lighten the load on axles made from young, green wood that too often snapped hauling such extravagances.
Prior to the purchase of Fort Laramie what little policing was called for across the uncharted western territories was carried out by a small battalion of Missouri mounted volunteers who were stationed at Fort Kearney in the Nebraska Territory, 400 miles east of the Wyoming border. With the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848, however, what had begun as a trickle swelled to a torrent. In 1850 alone an estimated 55,000 California-bound forty-niners and Mormons seeking refuge in Utah formed a nearly endless chain of wagons trespassing across Indian lands. They killed buffalo, fouled scarce water holes, denuded pasturage, and, most distressingly, spread diseases such as cholera, “the killing bile scourge, ” from which the Indians had no immunity.
This increased traffic resulted in so many Indian attacks that by 1851 westward travelers were literally passing the skulls and bones of their predecessors. In a diary entry, one teenage girl describes burying her murdered father on the banks of the Green River in a coffin dug out of the trunk of a western river birch. “But next year emigrants found his bleaching bones, as the Indians had disinterred the remains.” A conservative estimate of trailside deaths for 1850 alone is 5,000, meaning that among the optimistic souls departing St. Louis to start a new and better life, one in eleven never made it past the Rockies. Such numbers drew Washington’s attention, and the government found it necessary to reach out to the tribes, dominated by the Sioux, to come to some agreement regarding right of passage, for by the mid- nineteenth century the Sioux’s jurisdiction and power were spreading like an oil slick across the Northern Plains.
In hindsight it seems inevitable that the most feared tribe in the territory would soon enough bump up against the continent’s other burgeoning empire, the United States. The Western Sioux, however, had little comprehension of the enormous number of whites living east of the Mississippi, and considered themselves on an equal footing. This would soon enough change, but for now the Indian agent Thomas Fitzpatrick spent the summer crisscrossing the Plains from the Arkansas to the Yellowstone, spreading word of a grand treaty council, to be held near Fort Laramie in September, that would bring peace to the country once and for all.
It was not an easy sell. The western tribes had spent the better part of five decades raiding and fighting one another, and their running battles and blood feuds had altered the mosaic of the land. Rees hated Sioux, Sioux hated Shoshones, Shoshones hated Cheyenne, Cheyenne hated Pawnee. Almost everyone hated the Crows. Now they were being asked to suspend that history, to sit together and pass the pipe, to work out boundary agreements set by strange intruders from the East who spoke to them as if they were children. But Fitzpatrick, a former trapper and mountain man familiar with Native customs and mores, was respected among the clans. A tall, lanky Irishman with a halo of thick, prematurely white hair, Fitzpatrick was an anomaly on the prairie: the intense Roman Catholic education he had received in County Cavan had made him something of a man of letters. But if the whites were impressed with his prose, it was his fighting ability that caught the Indians’ attention. Called “Broken Hand” by nearly all the tribes, he had earned the sobriquet in a running battle with the Blackfeet during which he’d plunged his horse off a forty foot cliff into the Yellowstone, shattered his left wrist when his rifle misfired, and still managed to kill several of his pursuers.
The Indians would listen to such a fighter—it was reported that shaking Fitzpatrick’s good right hand was like grabbing a hickory stick wrapped in sandpaper— and in time he persuaded nearly every Head Man to at least hear out the government’s plan. The Pawnee, by now living in mortal fear of the Sioux, were the only major tribe that refused to participate. The fact that Fitzpatrick also let it be known that he was in possession of $100,000 allotted by the U.S. Congress to procure gifts for any band willing to attend the council surely complemented his powers of persuasion. An additional enticement was the promised presence of the superintendent of Indian Affairs, Colonel David D. Mitchell, who, like Fitzpatrick, shared a long history with the Indians west of the Mississippi as a fur trapper and trader. Mitchell had served in his present position for a decade, and the Indians knew him and, somewhat, trusted him.
The Sioux were the first to arrive, their Head Men and warriors in full feathered headdresses according to their station and wealth, their vermilion-streaked cheeks a gaudy splash of color in the dusty flats. They were followed by younger braves arrayed in columns, and behind them the women and girls, bedecked in their best beads and shell-pendant earrings, with intricate porcupine quill work adorning their buckskin dresses. The women led the packhorses, which were dragging travois piled high with lodge skins, tepee poles, and small children. Among the Lakota bands was a twenty-year-old Hunkpapa from the Missouri River tribes named Sitting Bull, a fierce and outspoken leader of an elite warrior society, who, though still an obscure figure beyond his own tribe, was already warning against his people’s growing dependence on the white man’s trinkets and beads. Accounts differ, but some say that also present was the eleven-year-old son of an Oglala medicine man, later described by one biographer as “a bashful, girlish looking boy” so pale he was often mistaken for a white captive. His formal name was His Horse Stands In Sight, but he was usually called Pehin Yuhana, “Curly Hair, ” for the wavy locks he had inherited from his beautiful Miniconjou mother. He was still five years away from taking his nom de guerre, Crazy Horse. And astride a painted mustang was the most renowned warrior on the High Plains, the thirty-year old Red Cloud.
At six feet, Red Cloud was tall for a Sioux, if not for most men of his era. His slender face was dominated by a beaked nose and a broad forehead, and the leathery skin around his ravaged brown eyes was prematurely creased, as if by parentheses, with age lines. Fond of accessories such as eagle feathers and ribbons, he carried himself with an erect, regal mien; and at such formal ceremonies his long, coarse black hair was almost always bear-greased and plaited around the wing bone of an eagle to signify elegance and propriety. A good, new rifle usually rested across his saddle pommel. On the whole he projected an aura of quiet dignity with an undercurrent of physical menace.
Red Cloud had been born nearby, just across present day Wyoming’s border with Nebraska, and he was familiar with the mesas, coulees, and streams surrounding Fort Laramie. His childhood had coincided with the beginnings of the seasonal Oglala migration south from the Black Hills after his people discovered the plentiful buffalo herds roaming the Republican River corridor, and he had helped drive out rival tribes who’d called the land home for generations, particularly the hated Kiowa. His Oglala band, the notorious and feared Bad Faces, was led by a venerable Head Man named Old Smoke, who had over the years become partial to the dry goods on offer at the white man’s trading post— luxuries such as ribbons, combs, and mirrors that insinuated themselves into the Indian lifestyle. What cultural understanding the teenage Red Cloud gleaned from these light-skinned newcomers in their strange garments certainly came from these annual pilgrimages to what was then called Fort John. Now he had returned in quite a different capacity.
By this point in his life Red Cloud had served for almost a decade as the Bad Face blotahunka, a title bestowed on each band’s head warrior. He was a combination of battle leader and police commissioner, and he commanded a select male society of soldiers and marshals known as akicita. Although the whites from the East probably had no idea that such a revered fighter was in their midst, most if not all of the Indians attending the council knew, respected, and feared him. It may be a stretch to say that Red Cloud was personally responsible for the rejection by the Pawnee of the Indian agent Fitzpatrick’s invitation, but perhaps not too great a stretch, as Red Cloud had sent so many Pawnee to the Happy Hunting Ground. He had also slaughtered Crows, disemboweled Shoshones, and scalped Arikara, to the point where he and his Bad Faces were a sort of beacon for Lakota from other bands, who sought him out for the honor of riding and raiding with him. This was fairly unprecedented in Sioux culture. And though he had yet to do battle with whites, it is safe to assume that, given his innate intelligence, leadership, and farsightedness, rather than be intimidated by the 200 Bluecoats parading in their strange squares with modern Hawken rifles and mountain howitzers, Red Cloud was more likely studying this “great medicine.” Again.
Six years earlier Red Cloud had attended another, smaller council on the Laramie Fork convened by the U.S. Army after a war had broken out between rival fur trapping outfits vying to sell liquor to the Indians. The white man’s “spirituous water, ” as the Indians called it, had then flooded the Powder River basin, and resulted in not only a flurry of attacks on emigrant wagon trains but an alarming series of deadly brawls among the Lakota themselves. The Army did not care much if Indians killed each other. But the raids on white trains could not be allowed. Colonel Stephen W. Kearny had cleaned out the whiskey sellers and parleyed for peace with the Sioux, although Kearny negotiated predominantly with a separate band called the Brules. This had left the young Red Cloud and his Oglala akicita free to study the martial drills that Kearny’s commanders put their soldiers through every morning in an attempt to intimidate the Indians. And, now, here they were again, this time with a cannon. Red Cloud was glad to have the opportunity. He undoubtedly observed that though one shot from the big gun could tear up the earth and shatter trees, in the time it took the artillerymen to clean the barrel and reload, a small group of warriors on fast horses could wipe them all out.
The Sioux had been followed into Fort Laramie by the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and as the three tribes were allies they staked their lodges together and mingled freely. The whites grew tense on the second day of the council, however, when word reached the fort that the Sioux’s ancient enemies the Shoshones were nearing the post. With each dust cloud that billowed over the horizon an Army bugler was ordered to sound “Boots and Saddles, ” and dragoons were put on alert to watch for any insult or affront that might spark a fight. Amazingly, there were no major incidents, although emotions ran high because of an incident that had occurred only days earlier.
It had happened before the trapper Bridger had met the main body of Shoshones to escort them into the camp. A small band of Shoshones, who were also known as the Snakes, had been attacked by the Cheyenne, who took two of their scalps. Though Sioux and Cheyenne leaders at Fort Laramie had given their word to refrain from violence during the treaty negotiations, Bridger remained leery. He was partial to the Snakes, having married into the tribe and lived with them on and off for some twenty years, and after the scalpings he had personally equipped their Head Man and some of his warriors with new rifles and ammunition. Despite the guns, the Shoshones approached the fort cautiously, Bridger and their chief riding a bit out in front of the slow-moving party. A ripple of excitement spread through the other Indian camps as they neared, and Sioux and Cheyenne women who had lost fathers, husbands, or sons in battles with the mountain Indians began to keen the shrill, broken tremolos of their death songs.
The Shoshones were right to be cautious. As the keening reached an eerie peak a young Sioux brave armed with a bow and a quiver of arrows leaped onto his pony and laid on the lash, spurring it to a gallop. He made for the Shoshone Head Man, who had apparently killed his father sometime before. Bridger had warned his corps of interpreters to be on the lookout for just such an act, and before the lone Sioux could get far he was intercepted, yanked from his saddle, and disarmed by a French-Canadian scout. Later that night Bridger held court at the fort’s sutler’s store (as was his wont), suggesting to off-duty soldiers in a language “very graphic and descriptive” that the Sioux were in fact lucky to escape a tussle.
“My chief would’er killed him quick, ” the mountain man said of the Sioux brave. “And then the fool Sioux would’er got their backs up, and there wouldn’t have been room to camp ’round here for dead Sioux. You Dragoons acted nice, but you wouldn’t have had no show if the fight had commenced. And I’ll tell you another thing. The Sioux ain’t gonna try it again. They see how the Snakes are armed. I got them guns for them, and they are good ones. Uncle Sam told ’um to come down here and they’d be safe. But they ain’t takin’ his word for it altogether.”
Bridger was right; there would be no more incidents. The next day the entire Indian assembly and the various white commissioners and agents moved about thirty five miles southeast of the fort to better pasturage near the confluence of the shallow Horse Creek and the North Platte. The Head Men rode with decorum, “while braves and boys dashed about, displaying their horsemanship and working off their surplus energy, ” according to one observer. All the while the companies of troopers positioned themselves between the traveling Sioux and Shoshones. The treaty council was scheduled to commence officially the next morning. It must have been a sight. Army engineers had erected a canvas-covered wooden amphitheater in rich bottomland twinkling with fireweed and silver sagebrush, and toward dusk a column of 1,000 Sioux warriors, four abreast on their war ponies, rode in shouting and singing. The confident Sioux then shocked the assemblage by inviting the Shoshones to a great feast of boiled dog. After the meal the two tribes were joined by the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and all danced and sang until dawn. There was no alcohol available; no one was killed.
The next morning tribal elders, conspicuously unarmed and clad in their finest ceremonial bighorn sheepskins and elk hides, approached a giant flagpole that the soldiers had improvised by lashing together the trunks of three lodgepole pines. The whites looked on as each elder in turn performed a sacred song and dance beneath the fluttering Stars and Stripes. The amphitheater had been left open facing east, and after the Head Men took their assigned seats the Indian agent Fitzpatrick had the awkward duty of informing the guests that the supply train hauling presents of tobacco, sugar, coffee, blankets, butcher knives, and bolts of cloth had been delayed leaving St. Louis. (He did not mention that the Army had misplaced the goods on a Missouri River steamboat landing.) There was some grumbling, but all in all the Indians took it well. No bands departed, and a large calumet of red pipestone with a three-foot stem was lighted and passed. As each Indian inhaled the mixture of Plains tobacco and bearberry kinnikinnick, he offered elaborate hand signals designed to pay homage to the Great Spirit and to attest that his heart was free from deceit.
Meanwhile, the vast prairie beyond this semicircle was a riot of activity. Indian women, naturally curious, made ceremonious trading visits to their tribal enemies’ camps, while young braves staged manic horse races, gambled on archery and knife-throwing contests, and flirted with maidens wearing their most colorful toggery. Reported a correspondent for the Missouri Republican in the stilted journalese of the era, “The belles (and there are Indian as well as civilized belles) were out in all they could raise in finery and costume. And the way they flaunted, tittered, talked and made efforts to show off to the best advantage before the bucks justly entitled them to the civilized appellation we have given them.”
Farther off, on the lush grasslands past the hundreds of lodges that had blossomed like prairie chickweed, preteen boys from each tribe stood sentry over herds of mustangs stretching to the horizon. They eyed one another warily, no doubt recognizing ponies stolen over the years. There were perhaps 2 million wild mustangs loose on the Great Plains at the time, and most tribes were adept at rounding them up and breaking them. Yet the Indians had an extraordinary facility for horse theft, so they preferred to increase their herds by means of raids, and this set off a roundelay of horseflesh in which it was not unusual for a remuda to pass from Sioux to Crows to Blackfeet to Nez Percé and back to the Sioux. Often an Indian would end up stealing a horse that had been stolen from him months or even years earlier.
On the morning of September 8, a Monday, the tribal leaders were invited to the center of the circle, where the formal treaty ceremonies were to take place. What followed was “a sight presented of most thrilling interest, ” according to B. G. Brown, one of the secretaries at the conference. “Each nation approached with its own peculiar song or demonstration, and such a combination of rude, wild, and fantastic manners and dresses, never was witnessed. It is not probable that an opportunity will again be presented of seeing so many tribes assembled together displaying all the peculiarities of features, dress, equipment, and horses, and everything else, exhibiting their wild notions of elegance and propriety.”
After this welcoming ceremony, Fitzpatrick strode to the center of the semicircle. He introduced a host of government commissioners, including Colonel Mitchell, who now lived in St. Louis and had traveled partway by steamboat up the Missouri. Framed by the Laramie Mountains scraping the western sky, Mitchell stated his purpose in clipped and concise sentences. Yes, he acknowledged, it was true that the white emigrants passing over Indian lands were thinning the buffalo droves. And, yes, their oxen and cattle were indeed consuming the grasses. For this, he said, the Great Father in Washington was prepared to make annual restitution in the form of hardware, foodstuffs, domestic animals, and agricultural equipment to the Indians, $50,000 worth for each of the next fifty years. But both sides would have to bend, he emphasized, and in exchange for this the tribes must grant future travelers right of passage across the territory as well as allow the U.S. Army to erect way stations along the trails west. Finally, he said, the white man was here to help the Indians delineate, and learn to respect, sovereign territorial boundaries. Civilization was upon them whether they liked it or not, and the constant intertribal slaughter must cease. To that end Mitchell urged each nation to select one great chief with whom the United States could negotiate these terms.
As the interpreters relayed these proposals, it is not difficult to imagine the bemusement with which they were greeted by warriors like Red Cloud, who possessed a judicious sense of what not to believe. Why did these confused whites not just tell the wind to stop blowing, the rivers to cease flowing? Red Cloud, the Sioux, and all the western tribes were accustomed to going where they wanted when they wanted, and taking what they wanted on the strength of their courage and cunning. And though perhaps unaware of the vast number of Americans living far to the east, Red Cloud and the rest were more than familiar with the promises broken over and over by the white leaders in Washington. They had only to look south, where the dispossessed peoples from beyond the Mississippi had been forcibly transported to an official Indian Territory in what was now Oklahoma. These forlorn tribes lived in a squalid homeland of the uprooted, scratching out a living on hard dirt, awaiting government handouts like beggars. Worse, the handouts rarely came. This was the future that the Great Father envisioned for the proud Sioux? These naive whites were funny, if nothing else.
The topper was their final demand. The idea that any one Head Man, no matter how well regarded by the tribe, could speak for every brave in every band was incomprehensible to the Sioux. For centuries their culture had consisted of fluid, haphazard tribal groups further splintered by the overlapping structures of extended families, warrior societies, and clans. Only in buffalo hunts and formal warfare could leaders impose any kind of discipline on their followers, and even then only rarely. How could the whites not see that one “chief, ” or two, or even a dozen could not possibly rule these tangled relationships? Why not appoint a king of the world?
Even the men—and they were always men—looked on as leaders were never granted absolute authority, most especially over the warrior class, the akicita. The Sioux political ethos, with its extreme family loyalties, worked naturally against any one man’s rising to authoritarian tribal status. Eighteen hundred years earlier Plutarch had described the Greek concept of democratic government as the individual being responsible to the group, and the group responsible to its core principles. This would have struck a nineteenth-century Native American as lunacy, as culturally foreign as the frenzied Sun Dance or the art of scalp-taking would have been in Buckingham Palace or the court at Versailles. So despite the whites’ determination to designate a succession of notable Indians as “tribal chiefs” with whom the United States could negotiate treaties, the point was academic. Besides, most white soldiers and frontiersmen had a difficult enough time physically distinguishing a hostile Sioux from, say, a friendly Delaware. To delineate the subtle power shifts of the Indians’ political, religious, and military societies was beyond their capacity. Nor did they much try.
Nonetheless, when Mitchell nominated a compliant Head Man with whom he had once traded extensively and peaceably, the Indians essentially shrugged and played along, anxious for their gifts. Given past experience, they were also fairly certain that the white men had no intention of keeping their promises. So as they awaited the wagon train from St. Louis they held councils of their own and devised entertainments. One of these included a demonstration few whites had ever seen and lived to tell about.
On the afternoon of the fourth day a troop of about 100 Cheyenne Dog Soldiers armed with guns, lances, and bows and arrows rode onto the treaty grounds to reenact a battle charge. The braves, wearing only loincloths and parfleche moccasins, were painted in their fiercest war colors, and their horses’ manes and tails were dusted and beribboned. On the animals’ flanks, etched in red ocher, were symbols enumerating each fighter’s coups—enemies killed, scalps taken, horses stolen. What at first appeared to the whites as nothing more than a haphazard, if clumsy, stampede evolved as if by magic into a disciplined martial drill, with the Cheyenne horsemen dismounting and remounting efficiently and precisely as they circled and charged. The white onlookers, the soldiers in particular, were stunned— and apprehensive. These warriors had been bested by the Sioux? It was a lesson the next generation of Army Indian fighters would forget at their peril.
More than a week was spent on such entertainments and continuous feasts as the Indians awaited the wakpamni—the great distribution of bribes. There were a few surprises. At one shared meal the Cheyenne atoned for the recent killing of the two Shoshones by returning the scalps to the brothers of the victims, along with gifts of knives, blankets, and pieces of colored cloth. And the famous Belgian Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet wandered through the camps proselytizing, offering Mass, and, he claimed, baptizing 894 Indians and 61 “half-bloods.” One of the bands he preached to was Red Cloud’s. And though Father De Smet failed to convert the Bad Face blotahunka, Red Cloud was known for the rest of his life to “spout bits of Christian doctrine.” It was from this gathering that De Smet bequeathed to us one of the more droll descriptions of the Indian love of boiled dog. “No epoch in Indian annals, ” he wrote, “shows a greater massacre of the canine race.”
Meanwhile, as the days wore on, the grass for miles in every direction was clipped clean by the thousands of Indian ponies and the banks of Horse Creek and the North Platte were turned into stinking midden heaps. There was so much human waste that the Army troop moved its encampment two miles upriver to escape a stench one soldier described as “almost visible.” When messengers finally brought news that the gift-laden caravan was a day away, Fitzpatrick and the superintendent of Indian Affairs, Mitchell, reassembled the tribal elders to ask if they had chosen chiefs to represent them. The Indians were sly. They had ridden hundreds of miles and delayed the fall buffalo hunt to receive presents. They were not going to depart empty-handed, even if avoiding it meant participating in a sham. They told the whites they had indeed selected emissaries, and several men from various tribes stepped forward. After the conditions of the original treaty terms were again read aloud and translated— including the unthinkable demand that the Sioux cede to the Crows the territory on either side of the Powder as it flowed north into the Yellowstone—a clever Arapaho Head Man named Cut Nose more or less spoke for all the tribes when he announced, “I would be glad if the whites would pick out a place for themselves and not come into our grounds. But if they must pass through our country, they should give us game for what they drive off.”
The government delegates took such cryptic comments as acquiescence in all their demands. Though the savvy Plains veteran Fitzpatrick must have known better, he stood mute while the designated “chiefs” approached a table set up in the amphitheater. Like most Indians, the Sioux could neither read nor write, and so could not sign or print their own names. The government had obligingly worked out a practice for them: when a Head Man agreed to a treaty, he would step up to a table where a scribe sat, accept a token blanket or string of glass beads, and with one or two fingers touch the top of an offered fountain pen. The scribe would then add the name of the Indian to the document. It was a useless ceremony, as the Indians had no real understanding of what they were agreeing to or, more accurately, giving away. In any case the U.S. government usually had no intention of living up to its end of the bargain. Nevertheless, one by one they made their marks next to their names. Of the two Sioux “chiefs” who touched the pen, neither was from the Oglala tribe, let alone from Red Cloud’s Bad Face band. One was from the Brule band of the Lakota—a strong, pioneering people, but martially no match for the Oglalas. The other represented a small contingent of the Missouri River Sioux. Although we cannot guess at what went through Red Cloud’s mind as he and Old Smoke stood and watched, both knew that real power flowed not from an inkwell, but from an otter skin quiver or, better yet, from the muzzle of a gun.
So on the final day of the council what was known to history as the Horse Creek Treaty was signed to ensure a “lasting peace on the Plains forevermore.” After the signing ceremony the wagon train pulled into camp and formed a corral, and a final grand feast followed the distribution of gifts. Besides the usual allotments of coffee, sugar, and tobacco, sheets of thin brass were distributed; the Sioux, ever vain, liked to cut these into doubloon-sized ovals and weave them through their hair. Head Men and esteemed braves were also presented with commemorative medals featuring a likeness of the Great Father, President Millard Fillmore; and with U.S. Army general officers’ uniforms, including ceremonial swords and red sashes. Many Indians wore these uniforms the next day— this was probably their first encounter with pants—as the tribes dispersed to the four corners of the territory from which they had arrived.
The 1851 Horse Creek agreement was the most sweeping official treaty the Western Sioux had ever signed with representatives of the United States. It would, perforce, also be the first to be broken. Luckily for historians, a long-lost autobiography that Red Cloud dictated in his old age supplies a rare look into this era from the Sioux perspective. Even so late in his life, long past the era of the great Indian wars, Red Cloud seemed to fear some form of retribution, and his book barely touches on his interactions with the whites; when it does, the few passages are so opaque as to render his true feelings nearly impenetrable. Regarding the Horse Creek council, however, he does hint that some of the older (and weaker) Head Men who camped that September on the North Platte were intrigued by the idea of the white and red man bound forever in peace. What can definitely be inferred from Red Cloud’s writings, however, is that he had no intention of abiding by the treaty. The Lakota were the strongest and most feared tribe on the High Plains. And within the Lakota, Red Cloud’s Oglalas vied for primacy.
In interpreting Red Cloud’s life and times in the context of the Horse Creek Treaty, one might—might— grant that he could have lived without actively attacking the emigrant trains and provoking war with the United States, at least for the moment (but subsequent events make this a ticklish argument). One could even make the case that despite his peoples’ deep political tradition of near fanatical individualism, he may have even acceded to the concept of a single Sioux “chief, ” most likely because it would have been himself.
But no one, certainly not Red Cloud, could possibly have imagined him a bottled spider confined to a specific territory, no matter how large or how bountiful. The idea of Red Cloud prohibited from leading raids, from stealing horses, from taking scalps— the very exploits for which he was already renowned—was inimical to his nature. Such adventures had been the essence of the Sioux ethos since time immemorial. And if Red Cloud was anything, he was a creature of the myths and legends of his forebears, connected to those ghosts by what a future American president, on whom he would one day wage war, referred to as the mystic chords of memory.
With few exceptions the newcomers accomplished this with such relative ease that by the mid-nineteenth century a flabby complacency toward fighting the Indians had set in. This arrogance was exacerbated in the post–Civil War era. As the historian Christopher Morton notes, “Imagine: soldiers who had recently outfought Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and the great Robert E. Lee are shipped west. It is described to them that they’ll see a few Indians here, a few Indians there. Scraggly. Lice-ridden. Bows and arrows against rifles. Naturally they have no idea what they’re getting into.”
Thus from the outset of Red Cloud’s War the U.S. Army’s field commanders failed to recognize that this was a new kind of Indian conflict. For all their historic ruthlessness, the tribes had always lacked long-range planning, and their habitual reluctance to press a military advantage had ultimately led to their defeat and subjugation. Yet here was a military campaign, as described by the historian Grace Raymond Hebard, led by “a strategic chief who was learning to follow up a victory, an art heretofore unknown to the red men.” It was not unusual for Red Cloud to confound his pursuers by planning and executing simultaneous attacks on civilian wagon trains and Army supply columns separated by hundreds of miles. Nor was Red Cloud afraid to confront U.S. soldiers—and their deafening mountain howitzer, “the gun that shoots twice”, within shouting distance of their isolated stockades.
Sioux braves slithering on their bellies through the saltbush and silver sage came within a few yards of sentries in guard towers before shooting them off their posts; soldiers assigned to hunt, fetch water, and chop wood were harassed almost daily by hails of arrows fired from sheer cutbanks and hidden glens; dispatch riders simply disappeared into the emptiness of the rolling prairie with alarming regularity. It was like a fatal game, and thus by ones and twos the bulk of the undermanned and outgunned 2nd Battalion of the 18th U.S. Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Phil Kearny was depleted. The cavalry of Company C was riding to their rescue.
The infantry battalion— eight companies of approximately 100 men each spread among three Bozeman Trail forts—was under the command of the forty-two year-old Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington, a politically connected midwesterner who through four bloody years of civil war had never fired a shot in anger. His stooped posture and graying hair betrayed the vestiges of a sickly youth; his deep-set rheumy eyes appeared to be permanently weeping; Red Cloud and the Plains Indians had taken to referring to him derisively as the “Little White Chief.” Carrington had chosen as his headquarters Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming, about midway between Reno Station, sixty miles to the south, and Fort C. F. Smith, a further ninety miles to the northwest across the Montana border.
He had begun construction on the post in July 1866, and during the compound’s first six months of existence he recorded over fifty “hostile demonstrations, ” resulting in the deaths of 154 soldiers, scouts, settlers, and miners, as well as the theft of 800 head of livestock. Carrington’s impotence in the face of this creeping if deadly harassment —“Scarcely a day or night passes without attempts to steal stock or surprise pickets” was typical of the tone of his pleading dispatches—led to constant requests for more soldiers, better mounts, and modern, breech-loading rifles to replace his troop’s cumbersome, antiquated muzzle-loaders. For various reasons his petitions went largely unheeded.
Yet, surprisingly, in neither his official reports nor his personal journals did Carrington much note the devastating psychological toll Indian warfare was taking on his troops. The Natives’ astonishing capacity for cruelty was like nothing the whites had ever experienced. The Plains Indians had honed their war ethic for centuries, and their martial logic was not only fairly straightforward, but accepted by all tribes without challenge—no quarter asked, none given; to every enemy, death, the slower and more excruciating the better. A defeated Crow, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Shoshone, or Sioux not immediately killed in battle would be subjected to unimaginable torments for as long as he could stand the pain. Women of all ages were tortured to death, but not before being raped—unless they were young enough to be raped and then taken as captive slaves or hostages to be traded for trinkets, whiskey, or guns. Crying babies were a burden on the trail, so they were summarily killed, by spear, by war club, or by banging their soft skulls against rocks or trees so as not to waste arrows. On occasion, in order to replenish their gene pool—or particularly after the tribes recognized the value of white hostages—preteens of both sexes were spared execution, if not pitiless treatment. This was merely the way of life and death to the Indian: vae victis, woe to the conquered. All expected similar treatment should they fall. But it was incomprehensibly immoral to the Anglo European soldiers and settlers for whom memories of the Roman Colosseum, the barbarities of the Crusades, and the dungeons of the Inquisition had long since faded.
Even Carrington’s most hardened veterans, their steel forged in the carnage of the Civil War, were literally sickened by what newspapers from New York to San Francisco euphemistically referred to as Indian “atrocities” and, in the case of women, “depredations.” Captured whites were scalped, skinned, and roasted alive over their own campfires, shrieking in agony as Indians yelped and danced about them like the bloody eyed Achilles celebrating over the fallen Hector. Men’s penises were hacked off and shoved down their throats and women were flogged with deer-hide quirts while being gang-raped. Afterward their breasts, vaginas, and even pregnant wombs were sliced away and laid out on the buffalo grass. Carrington’s patrols rode often to the rescue, but almost always too late, finding victims whose eyeballs had been gouged out and left perched on rocks, or the burned carcasses of men and women bound together by their own steaming entrails ripped from their insides while they were still conscious. The Indians, inured to this torture ethos, naturally fought one another to their last breath. The whites were at first astonished by this persistence, and most of the soldiers of the 18th Infantry had long since made unofficial pacts never to be taken alive.
Captain Fetterman, the relentless and adaptive Civil War hero, was charged with ending this Hobbesian dystopia. The Army’s general staff considered Fetterman a new breed of Indian fighter, and as such he carried orders to Fort Phil Kearny installing him as second in command to Carrington, his old regimental commander. The final instructions he received before his departure from Omaha had been terse: “Indian warfare in the Powder River Country can be successfully ended once and for all by engaging in open battle with the Indians during the winter.” These orders underlined the War Department’s undisguised position that previous campaigns against Red Cloud, if indeed they could be called such, had stalled owing to a combination of incompetence and the American field commanders’ aversion to cold-weather combat. In truth, even newcomers to the frontier such as Carrington soon learned that giving chase with horses, infantry, and supply trains consistently bogged down in deep snow was fruitless. But the eastern generals, who had conducted the majority of their Civil War marches in the South, were ignorant of Plains weather, and Washington expected the Army to drain this blood-soaked western swamp.
In the summer of 1866 the new commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, General William Tecumseh Sherman, undertook two long inspection tours of his vast western defenses. On the trail he became even more convinced that his troops’ failure to apprehend or kill Red Cloud stemmed from reluctance to meet savagery with savagery. The craggy forty-six-year-old Sherman was already an expert on human misery, and he held no illusions that peace between the white and red races could be achieved. In his typical brusque view, all Indians should be either killed outright or confined to reservations of the Army’s choosing. He had an eye toward the transcontinental railroad—whose tracks already extended 100 miles west of Omaha—and his genocidal judgments were succinct. “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop progress, ” he wrote to his old commander General Grant. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination— men, women and children.”
Sherman recognized that the piecemeal destruction of the eastern tribes had been a centuries-long process, and was still continuing to some extent. He also understood that this slow, systematic eradication would not work in a West bursting with natural resources the United States needed immediately. The raw frontier he was charged with taming was too vast, and on his circuitous inspection tours he spent long, gritty days in the saddle, traveling (it seemed to him) to Creation and back. Wherever he rode he had been made to feel like a visitor, or worse, an interloper, by warriors who shadowed his every move, just out of rifle range, over hills, through ravines, and along alkaline creek beds. Finally, during a brief two day stopover at Nebraska’s Fort Kearney, 3 Carrington informed him, with no apparent attempt at irony, “Where you have been, General, is only a fraction of Red Cloud’s country.”
This caught Sherman’s attention. Red Cloud’s country? Over the past four years so many good men, in President Lincoln’s words, gave the last full measure of devotion to preserve the Union. And a heathen considered this land his country? Carrington’s choice of words was just another manifestation of the white-red cultural divide, however. Red Cloud no more considered the Powder River territory “his country, ” in the American sense of the phrase, than he would claim ownership of the moon and the stars. At best he was fighting to preserve a country that the Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, had provided for Indians’ use. That Washington had deigned to cede to his tribe the right to occupy it in a succession of treaties and “friendship pacts” dating to 1825 only proved how confused these whites were about the grand scheme of the universe. Unlike the conciliatory Indian headmen who a year earlier were willing to cease hostilities in exchange for “protection” and “trade rights, ” Red Cloud was making war to halt the increasing intrusion of whites into Sioux hunting grounds— no more, no less.
The simplicity of this oft stated purpose eluded Sherman. The general was a manic-depressive whose mental illness had forced him to temporarily relieve himself of command in the early stages of the Civil War—this relief, when discovered by the wire services, had prompted the headline “General William T. Sherman Insane.” Now his inner demons were made terrifyingly manifest by a scalping, torturing tribe of “savages” his troops could not even find, much less kill. It came as a further blow to his fragile ego when, during a stopover at Fort Laramie, an officer produced a primitive map that displayed all the territory Red Cloud and the Western Sioux had secured over the past two decades. This largely uncharted expanse of primeval forests, undulating prairie, sun-baked tableland, cloud-shrouded peaks, and ice-blue kettle lakes encompassed 740,000 square miles, extending south from the Canadian border into Colorado and Nebraska, and west from the Minnesota frontier to the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It was bisected by over a dozen major rivers and numberless creeks and streams flowing out of the Rockies and Black Hills, and was home to an abundance of tribes that the Sioux had either conquered or reduced to vassal status.
In all, this cruel and mysterious territory of far horizons accounted for one fifth of what would one day become the contiguous United States. No one tribe had ever before or would ever again reign over so much open country. It was not long after seeing the map that Sherman ordered his subordinates in Omaha to put this house in order. They, in turn, summoned Captain Fetterman. It was an obvious selection.
While Colonel Carrington had been the nominal commander of Ohio’s 18th Regiment during the war, it was the robust Fetterman who had earned the unit’s battle honors and field promotions. He was an enigmatic man whose wild, dark muttonchops and smoldering glare belied a graceful and refined sociability, and there was no questioning Fetterman’s bravery. He had been cited for his leadership during the storming of Corinth, at “Hell’s Half Acre” at Stones River, and at the fiery siege of Atlanta, and he was an officer who inspired lifelong loyalty in his troops. Carrington, on the other hand, was an administrator at heart, and not unaware of the snide comparisons with Fetterman whispered by both his superiors and his hot-blooded junior officers. “Few came [to Fort Phil Kearny] from Omaha or Laramie without prejudice, believing I was not doing enough fighting, ” he was to testify before a congressional commission investigating the failures of Red Cloud’s War. Yet as confident as Sherman and his generals were that Fetterman would bring the fight to the enemy, Carrington believed that he had learned all too well in his six months among the Sioux that the strategies and tactics of Manassas and Bull Run would not apply to the far West.
The Indians were too clever for that. Despite the Army’s overwhelming numbers, massed formations and set-piece engagements were simply foreign to the tribal mind-set of raid, feint, and parry. In Fetterman, Carrington sensed an officer too enamored of what one longtime frontier scout dismissed as “these damn paper-collar soldiers.” Given the eventual outcome (and a mighty public relations campaign), Carrington’s discretion was considered the more sound policy well into the twentieth century, while Grant’s, Sherman’s, and particularly Fetterman’s strategy was judged as lacking. Despite his gleaming Civil War record, Fetterman was soon enough to be vilified as too clever by half: the wrong man at the wrong place in the wrong job. He was, it would be said in hindsight, a soldier who understood little about Red Cloud and less about Indian warfare, and a conventional wisdom developed that attributed his spectacular downfall to his hubris.
This counterfactual locomotive would be stoked by the memoirs of Carrington’s successive wives, each of whom exalted and exonerated her husband at the expense of Fetterman. Carrington himself, who lived long enough into the Gilded Age to attend memorial anniversaries of Red Cloud’s War, was also so keen to rehabilitate his public image that he must shoulder blame for the vilification of his subordinate. But if, as is said, survivors write history, it was primarily the Carrington women—aided and abetted by a lingering Victorian reluctance to call a lady a liar —who painted Fetterman as “an arrogant fool blindly leading his men to their deaths.”
As it was, in that first week of November 1866, on the same night that Captain Fetterman and Company C of the 2nd Battalion bedded down in a snowbound gulch one day’s ride from Fort Phil Kearny, eighty miles to the north thousands of hostiles from over 1,800 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho lodges had come together for a war council. There, on the sandy banks of Goose Creek where it flowed into the icy Tongue, Red Cloud gathered his warrior societies about him to finalize his plans to drive the white man from the Powder River Country and defeat the mighty United States in the only war the nation would ever lose to an Indian army. The great chief summoned the spirits of his dead forefathers to weave a tale of Indian survival, of Indian hope, of Indian victory. He insisted that the red man had been granted this land by the Great Spirit, as a birthright that had been theirs forever and would be theirs forevermore, in this life or the next. When he finished his speech more Indians spoke, and the campfires were banked before the pipe was passed and the war dance begun. And then, through billows of blue tobacco haze, Red Cloud retired to a warrior lodge erected in a copse of cedars along the river’s edge. There he laid out for his battle commanders his strategy for the final destruction of the white interlopers and their forts in the Powder River Country. So it occurred that preconceived history was bent, that the United States would lose a war, and that the fate of Captain Fetterman and the Bluecoats of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army was sealed.
Part 1
THE
PRAIRIE
East of the Mississippi
civilization stood on three
legs—land, water and timber.
West of the Mississippi not
one but two of those legs
were withdrawn—water and
timber. Civilization was left
on one leg—land. It is a
small wonder that it toppled
over in temporary failure.
—Walter Prescott Webb, The Great
Plains
1
FIRST
CONTACT
It was a pageant unlike
anything seen before in the
West. In the first week of September 1851, the largest gathering of Indians ever assembled descended on the lush grasslands on the outskirts of Fort Laramie in present-day southeastern Wyoming. They arrived from every compass point: Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne from the North Platte and South Platte corridors; Arikara, Assiniboin, Mandan, and Minnitarees riding southwest from the far reaches of the Upper Missouri; Blackfeet and Shoshones from deep in the Rockies, the latter escorted down onto the flatlands under a white flag of truce held aloft by the mountain man Jim Bridger; and finally the stately Crows, completing an 800-mile trek from the buckling Yellowstone bluffs. All together more than 10,000 men, women, and children from more than a dozen sovereign tribes were represented—allies, vassals, mortal enemies. Clad in their most ornamental buckskins and blankets, riding their finest warhorses, ribbons and feathers flying, they had arrived to hear representatives from the Great Father in Washington make the case for peace—peace not only between the red man and the encroaching whites, but among the Indians themselves.
The environs of the weathered stockade on the eastern slope of the Rockies were a natural setting for such a powwow, a council that the United States deemed crucial to its westward expansion. Fort Laramie, established seventeen years earlier as a lonely vanguard post in the center of the vast wilderness, bisected what was to become known as the Oregon Trail. Over those years it had evolved from an isolated trading post into a lively marketplace that attracted fur traders and whiskey peddlers from St. Louis; Indians from across the Plains hawking buffalo robes; and horse traders like the legendary Kit Carson, who drove herds of New Mexican ponies up from the Arkansas River to sell at auction. Two years earlier, in 1849, the Army had purchased the dilapidated fort from the American Fur Company for $4,000, renamed and refurbished it, and installed within its log and adobe walls a small company of mounted riflemen—between 20 and 100 men, depending on the season and the whim of the general staff—as a way of regulating and protecting the increased flow of miners, homesteaders, and entrepreneurs westering through the Powder River Country.
The trails opened by the first frontier explorers in the 1820s and 1830s had initially drawn scientists, missionaries, and even wealthy sportsmen to the pristine territory on the far side of the Missouri River. On their return to the East these men spun beautiful, if fabulous, tales about the glories of the new Eden beyond the Big Muddy. Their stories were lapped up by newspapermen. In 1846 one New York City penny paper, noting the arrival in Manhattan of two British aristocrats recently returned from an “extended buffalo hunting tour in Oregon and the Wild West, ” used the terms “wonders, ” “agreeable, ” “grand, ” “glowing, ” and “magnificent” in one paragraph alone to describe the wild country. “The fisheries are spoken of as the best in the country, ” the article concluded, “and only equaled by the rare facilities for agriculture.” This sort of breathless advertising naturally roiled the imagination of thousands of small farmers and urban dwellers who were eager to begin life anew in paradise— provided a family or its extended clan could scrape together the $400 needed to outfit a wagon with stock and provisions. Many could. The general course of the Oregon Trail, a new wagon road branching off from the older, more established Santa Fe Trail in Kansas, had been mapped and described by the explorer John Frémont in 1842. The rutted route worked its way northwest over the Rockies at the South Pass, and it soon surpassed the Santa Fe Trail as a symbol of the nation’s expansion.
Emigrant traffic was unobtrusive at first. For most of the 1840s the High Plains tribes remained too busy warring against one another to bother to molest the small caravans of prairie schooners that snaked across the Plains making twenty miles a day. These wagons, much smaller and lighter than those depicted in Hollywood films, had hickory bows positioned across hardwood frames that supported their cloth canopies. And, again, unlike the wagons in movies, they were pulled not by horses, but by stronger, sturdier oxen— and by mules, the more sure footed, though sterile, offspring of a jackass and a horse mare. On the occasions when the wagons did arouse Indians’ curiosity, their owners could usually pass freely after paying a small tariff of coffee or refined sugar, which the Indians considered a particular delicacy.
Still, to the Sioux in particular, the white travelers were an odd lot, “totally out of their element; bewildered and amazed, like a troop of schoolboys lost in the woods, ” wrote Francis Parkman, the explorer who traveled west from New England in the 1840s to live among the tribes. Not all were as naive, or unlucky, as the ill-fated Donner Party, destined to be trapped in the killing snowdrifts of the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47. Yet in his later years Red Cloud recalled watching in befuddlement as the hapless pioneers—blithely overconfident if underoutfitted and pathetically unprepared for the harsh, treeless prairie—burned expensive steamer trunks, chiffoniers, and even an occasional pipe organ for cook fires and littered the wheatgrass and fox sedge with goose-feather mattresses, grandfather clocks, and portable sawmills, in belated attempts to lighten the load on axles made from young, green wood that too often snapped hauling such extravagances.
Prior to the purchase of Fort Laramie what little policing was called for across the uncharted western territories was carried out by a small battalion of Missouri mounted volunteers who were stationed at Fort Kearney in the Nebraska Territory, 400 miles east of the Wyoming border. With the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848, however, what had begun as a trickle swelled to a torrent. In 1850 alone an estimated 55,000 California-bound forty-niners and Mormons seeking refuge in Utah formed a nearly endless chain of wagons trespassing across Indian lands. They killed buffalo, fouled scarce water holes, denuded pasturage, and, most distressingly, spread diseases such as cholera, “the killing bile scourge, ” from which the Indians had no immunity.
This increased traffic resulted in so many Indian attacks that by 1851 westward travelers were literally passing the skulls and bones of their predecessors. In a diary entry, one teenage girl describes burying her murdered father on the banks of the Green River in a coffin dug out of the trunk of a western river birch. “But next year emigrants found his bleaching bones, as the Indians had disinterred the remains.” A conservative estimate of trailside deaths for 1850 alone is 5,000, meaning that among the optimistic souls departing St. Louis to start a new and better life, one in eleven never made it past the Rockies. Such numbers drew Washington’s attention, and the government found it necessary to reach out to the tribes, dominated by the Sioux, to come to some agreement regarding right of passage, for by the mid- nineteenth century the Sioux’s jurisdiction and power were spreading like an oil slick across the Northern Plains.
In hindsight it seems inevitable that the most feared tribe in the territory would soon enough bump up against the continent’s other burgeoning empire, the United States. The Western Sioux, however, had little comprehension of the enormous number of whites living east of the Mississippi, and considered themselves on an equal footing. This would soon enough change, but for now the Indian agent Thomas Fitzpatrick spent the summer crisscrossing the Plains from the Arkansas to the Yellowstone, spreading word of a grand treaty council, to be held near Fort Laramie in September, that would bring peace to the country once and for all.
It was not an easy sell. The western tribes had spent the better part of five decades raiding and fighting one another, and their running battles and blood feuds had altered the mosaic of the land. Rees hated Sioux, Sioux hated Shoshones, Shoshones hated Cheyenne, Cheyenne hated Pawnee. Almost everyone hated the Crows. Now they were being asked to suspend that history, to sit together and pass the pipe, to work out boundary agreements set by strange intruders from the East who spoke to them as if they were children. But Fitzpatrick, a former trapper and mountain man familiar with Native customs and mores, was respected among the clans. A tall, lanky Irishman with a halo of thick, prematurely white hair, Fitzpatrick was an anomaly on the prairie: the intense Roman Catholic education he had received in County Cavan had made him something of a man of letters. But if the whites were impressed with his prose, it was his fighting ability that caught the Indians’ attention. Called “Broken Hand” by nearly all the tribes, he had earned the sobriquet in a running battle with the Blackfeet during which he’d plunged his horse off a forty foot cliff into the Yellowstone, shattered his left wrist when his rifle misfired, and still managed to kill several of his pursuers.
The Indians would listen to such a fighter—it was reported that shaking Fitzpatrick’s good right hand was like grabbing a hickory stick wrapped in sandpaper— and in time he persuaded nearly every Head Man to at least hear out the government’s plan. The Pawnee, by now living in mortal fear of the Sioux, were the only major tribe that refused to participate. The fact that Fitzpatrick also let it be known that he was in possession of $100,000 allotted by the U.S. Congress to procure gifts for any band willing to attend the council surely complemented his powers of persuasion. An additional enticement was the promised presence of the superintendent of Indian Affairs, Colonel David D. Mitchell, who, like Fitzpatrick, shared a long history with the Indians west of the Mississippi as a fur trapper and trader. Mitchell had served in his present position for a decade, and the Indians knew him and, somewhat, trusted him.
The Sioux were the first to arrive, their Head Men and warriors in full feathered headdresses according to their station and wealth, their vermilion-streaked cheeks a gaudy splash of color in the dusty flats. They were followed by younger braves arrayed in columns, and behind them the women and girls, bedecked in their best beads and shell-pendant earrings, with intricate porcupine quill work adorning their buckskin dresses. The women led the packhorses, which were dragging travois piled high with lodge skins, tepee poles, and small children. Among the Lakota bands was a twenty-year-old Hunkpapa from the Missouri River tribes named Sitting Bull, a fierce and outspoken leader of an elite warrior society, who, though still an obscure figure beyond his own tribe, was already warning against his people’s growing dependence on the white man’s trinkets and beads. Accounts differ, but some say that also present was the eleven-year-old son of an Oglala medicine man, later described by one biographer as “a bashful, girlish looking boy” so pale he was often mistaken for a white captive. His formal name was His Horse Stands In Sight, but he was usually called Pehin Yuhana, “Curly Hair, ” for the wavy locks he had inherited from his beautiful Miniconjou mother. He was still five years away from taking his nom de guerre, Crazy Horse. And astride a painted mustang was the most renowned warrior on the High Plains, the thirty-year old Red Cloud.
At six feet, Red Cloud was tall for a Sioux, if not for most men of his era. His slender face was dominated by a beaked nose and a broad forehead, and the leathery skin around his ravaged brown eyes was prematurely creased, as if by parentheses, with age lines. Fond of accessories such as eagle feathers and ribbons, he carried himself with an erect, regal mien; and at such formal ceremonies his long, coarse black hair was almost always bear-greased and plaited around the wing bone of an eagle to signify elegance and propriety. A good, new rifle usually rested across his saddle pommel. On the whole he projected an aura of quiet dignity with an undercurrent of physical menace.
Red Cloud had been born nearby, just across present day Wyoming’s border with Nebraska, and he was familiar with the mesas, coulees, and streams surrounding Fort Laramie. His childhood had coincided with the beginnings of the seasonal Oglala migration south from the Black Hills after his people discovered the plentiful buffalo herds roaming the Republican River corridor, and he had helped drive out rival tribes who’d called the land home for generations, particularly the hated Kiowa. His Oglala band, the notorious and feared Bad Faces, was led by a venerable Head Man named Old Smoke, who had over the years become partial to the dry goods on offer at the white man’s trading post— luxuries such as ribbons, combs, and mirrors that insinuated themselves into the Indian lifestyle. What cultural understanding the teenage Red Cloud gleaned from these light-skinned newcomers in their strange garments certainly came from these annual pilgrimages to what was then called Fort John. Now he had returned in quite a different capacity.
By this point in his life Red Cloud had served for almost a decade as the Bad Face blotahunka, a title bestowed on each band’s head warrior. He was a combination of battle leader and police commissioner, and he commanded a select male society of soldiers and marshals known as akicita. Although the whites from the East probably had no idea that such a revered fighter was in their midst, most if not all of the Indians attending the council knew, respected, and feared him. It may be a stretch to say that Red Cloud was personally responsible for the rejection by the Pawnee of the Indian agent Fitzpatrick’s invitation, but perhaps not too great a stretch, as Red Cloud had sent so many Pawnee to the Happy Hunting Ground. He had also slaughtered Crows, disemboweled Shoshones, and scalped Arikara, to the point where he and his Bad Faces were a sort of beacon for Lakota from other bands, who sought him out for the honor of riding and raiding with him. This was fairly unprecedented in Sioux culture. And though he had yet to do battle with whites, it is safe to assume that, given his innate intelligence, leadership, and farsightedness, rather than be intimidated by the 200 Bluecoats parading in their strange squares with modern Hawken rifles and mountain howitzers, Red Cloud was more likely studying this “great medicine.” Again.
Six years earlier Red Cloud had attended another, smaller council on the Laramie Fork convened by the U.S. Army after a war had broken out between rival fur trapping outfits vying to sell liquor to the Indians. The white man’s “spirituous water, ” as the Indians called it, had then flooded the Powder River basin, and resulted in not only a flurry of attacks on emigrant wagon trains but an alarming series of deadly brawls among the Lakota themselves. The Army did not care much if Indians killed each other. But the raids on white trains could not be allowed. Colonel Stephen W. Kearny had cleaned out the whiskey sellers and parleyed for peace with the Sioux, although Kearny negotiated predominantly with a separate band called the Brules. This had left the young Red Cloud and his Oglala akicita free to study the martial drills that Kearny’s commanders put their soldiers through every morning in an attempt to intimidate the Indians. And, now, here they were again, this time with a cannon. Red Cloud was glad to have the opportunity. He undoubtedly observed that though one shot from the big gun could tear up the earth and shatter trees, in the time it took the artillerymen to clean the barrel and reload, a small group of warriors on fast horses could wipe them all out.
The Sioux had been followed into Fort Laramie by the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and as the three tribes were allies they staked their lodges together and mingled freely. The whites grew tense on the second day of the council, however, when word reached the fort that the Sioux’s ancient enemies the Shoshones were nearing the post. With each dust cloud that billowed over the horizon an Army bugler was ordered to sound “Boots and Saddles, ” and dragoons were put on alert to watch for any insult or affront that might spark a fight. Amazingly, there were no major incidents, although emotions ran high because of an incident that had occurred only days earlier.
It had happened before the trapper Bridger had met the main body of Shoshones to escort them into the camp. A small band of Shoshones, who were also known as the Snakes, had been attacked by the Cheyenne, who took two of their scalps. Though Sioux and Cheyenne leaders at Fort Laramie had given their word to refrain from violence during the treaty negotiations, Bridger remained leery. He was partial to the Snakes, having married into the tribe and lived with them on and off for some twenty years, and after the scalpings he had personally equipped their Head Man and some of his warriors with new rifles and ammunition. Despite the guns, the Shoshones approached the fort cautiously, Bridger and their chief riding a bit out in front of the slow-moving party. A ripple of excitement spread through the other Indian camps as they neared, and Sioux and Cheyenne women who had lost fathers, husbands, or sons in battles with the mountain Indians began to keen the shrill, broken tremolos of their death songs.
The Shoshones were right to be cautious. As the keening reached an eerie peak a young Sioux brave armed with a bow and a quiver of arrows leaped onto his pony and laid on the lash, spurring it to a gallop. He made for the Shoshone Head Man, who had apparently killed his father sometime before. Bridger had warned his corps of interpreters to be on the lookout for just such an act, and before the lone Sioux could get far he was intercepted, yanked from his saddle, and disarmed by a French-Canadian scout. Later that night Bridger held court at the fort’s sutler’s store (as was his wont), suggesting to off-duty soldiers in a language “very graphic and descriptive” that the Sioux were in fact lucky to escape a tussle.
“My chief would’er killed him quick, ” the mountain man said of the Sioux brave. “And then the fool Sioux would’er got their backs up, and there wouldn’t have been room to camp ’round here for dead Sioux. You Dragoons acted nice, but you wouldn’t have had no show if the fight had commenced. And I’ll tell you another thing. The Sioux ain’t gonna try it again. They see how the Snakes are armed. I got them guns for them, and they are good ones. Uncle Sam told ’um to come down here and they’d be safe. But they ain’t takin’ his word for it altogether.”
Bridger was right; there would be no more incidents. The next day the entire Indian assembly and the various white commissioners and agents moved about thirty five miles southeast of the fort to better pasturage near the confluence of the shallow Horse Creek and the North Platte. The Head Men rode with decorum, “while braves and boys dashed about, displaying their horsemanship and working off their surplus energy, ” according to one observer. All the while the companies of troopers positioned themselves between the traveling Sioux and Shoshones. The treaty council was scheduled to commence officially the next morning. It must have been a sight. Army engineers had erected a canvas-covered wooden amphitheater in rich bottomland twinkling with fireweed and silver sagebrush, and toward dusk a column of 1,000 Sioux warriors, four abreast on their war ponies, rode in shouting and singing. The confident Sioux then shocked the assemblage by inviting the Shoshones to a great feast of boiled dog. After the meal the two tribes were joined by the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and all danced and sang until dawn. There was no alcohol available; no one was killed.
The next morning tribal elders, conspicuously unarmed and clad in their finest ceremonial bighorn sheepskins and elk hides, approached a giant flagpole that the soldiers had improvised by lashing together the trunks of three lodgepole pines. The whites looked on as each elder in turn performed a sacred song and dance beneath the fluttering Stars and Stripes. The amphitheater had been left open facing east, and after the Head Men took their assigned seats the Indian agent Fitzpatrick had the awkward duty of informing the guests that the supply train hauling presents of tobacco, sugar, coffee, blankets, butcher knives, and bolts of cloth had been delayed leaving St. Louis. (He did not mention that the Army had misplaced the goods on a Missouri River steamboat landing.) There was some grumbling, but all in all the Indians took it well. No bands departed, and a large calumet of red pipestone with a three-foot stem was lighted and passed. As each Indian inhaled the mixture of Plains tobacco and bearberry kinnikinnick, he offered elaborate hand signals designed to pay homage to the Great Spirit and to attest that his heart was free from deceit.
Meanwhile, the vast prairie beyond this semicircle was a riot of activity. Indian women, naturally curious, made ceremonious trading visits to their tribal enemies’ camps, while young braves staged manic horse races, gambled on archery and knife-throwing contests, and flirted with maidens wearing their most colorful toggery. Reported a correspondent for the Missouri Republican in the stilted journalese of the era, “The belles (and there are Indian as well as civilized belles) were out in all they could raise in finery and costume. And the way they flaunted, tittered, talked and made efforts to show off to the best advantage before the bucks justly entitled them to the civilized appellation we have given them.”
Farther off, on the lush grasslands past the hundreds of lodges that had blossomed like prairie chickweed, preteen boys from each tribe stood sentry over herds of mustangs stretching to the horizon. They eyed one another warily, no doubt recognizing ponies stolen over the years. There were perhaps 2 million wild mustangs loose on the Great Plains at the time, and most tribes were adept at rounding them up and breaking them. Yet the Indians had an extraordinary facility for horse theft, so they preferred to increase their herds by means of raids, and this set off a roundelay of horseflesh in which it was not unusual for a remuda to pass from Sioux to Crows to Blackfeet to Nez Percé and back to the Sioux. Often an Indian would end up stealing a horse that had been stolen from him months or even years earlier.
On the morning of September 8, a Monday, the tribal leaders were invited to the center of the circle, where the formal treaty ceremonies were to take place. What followed was “a sight presented of most thrilling interest, ” according to B. G. Brown, one of the secretaries at the conference. “Each nation approached with its own peculiar song or demonstration, and such a combination of rude, wild, and fantastic manners and dresses, never was witnessed. It is not probable that an opportunity will again be presented of seeing so many tribes assembled together displaying all the peculiarities of features, dress, equipment, and horses, and everything else, exhibiting their wild notions of elegance and propriety.”
After this welcoming ceremony, Fitzpatrick strode to the center of the semicircle. He introduced a host of government commissioners, including Colonel Mitchell, who now lived in St. Louis and had traveled partway by steamboat up the Missouri. Framed by the Laramie Mountains scraping the western sky, Mitchell stated his purpose in clipped and concise sentences. Yes, he acknowledged, it was true that the white emigrants passing over Indian lands were thinning the buffalo droves. And, yes, their oxen and cattle were indeed consuming the grasses. For this, he said, the Great Father in Washington was prepared to make annual restitution in the form of hardware, foodstuffs, domestic animals, and agricultural equipment to the Indians, $50,000 worth for each of the next fifty years. But both sides would have to bend, he emphasized, and in exchange for this the tribes must grant future travelers right of passage across the territory as well as allow the U.S. Army to erect way stations along the trails west. Finally, he said, the white man was here to help the Indians delineate, and learn to respect, sovereign territorial boundaries. Civilization was upon them whether they liked it or not, and the constant intertribal slaughter must cease. To that end Mitchell urged each nation to select one great chief with whom the United States could negotiate these terms.
As the interpreters relayed these proposals, it is not difficult to imagine the bemusement with which they were greeted by warriors like Red Cloud, who possessed a judicious sense of what not to believe. Why did these confused whites not just tell the wind to stop blowing, the rivers to cease flowing? Red Cloud, the Sioux, and all the western tribes were accustomed to going where they wanted when they wanted, and taking what they wanted on the strength of their courage and cunning. And though perhaps unaware of the vast number of Americans living far to the east, Red Cloud and the rest were more than familiar with the promises broken over and over by the white leaders in Washington. They had only to look south, where the dispossessed peoples from beyond the Mississippi had been forcibly transported to an official Indian Territory in what was now Oklahoma. These forlorn tribes lived in a squalid homeland of the uprooted, scratching out a living on hard dirt, awaiting government handouts like beggars. Worse, the handouts rarely came. This was the future that the Great Father envisioned for the proud Sioux? These naive whites were funny, if nothing else.
The topper was their final demand. The idea that any one Head Man, no matter how well regarded by the tribe, could speak for every brave in every band was incomprehensible to the Sioux. For centuries their culture had consisted of fluid, haphazard tribal groups further splintered by the overlapping structures of extended families, warrior societies, and clans. Only in buffalo hunts and formal warfare could leaders impose any kind of discipline on their followers, and even then only rarely. How could the whites not see that one “chief, ” or two, or even a dozen could not possibly rule these tangled relationships? Why not appoint a king of the world?
Even the men—and they were always men—looked on as leaders were never granted absolute authority, most especially over the warrior class, the akicita. The Sioux political ethos, with its extreme family loyalties, worked naturally against any one man’s rising to authoritarian tribal status. Eighteen hundred years earlier Plutarch had described the Greek concept of democratic government as the individual being responsible to the group, and the group responsible to its core principles. This would have struck a nineteenth-century Native American as lunacy, as culturally foreign as the frenzied Sun Dance or the art of scalp-taking would have been in Buckingham Palace or the court at Versailles. So despite the whites’ determination to designate a succession of notable Indians as “tribal chiefs” with whom the United States could negotiate treaties, the point was academic. Besides, most white soldiers and frontiersmen had a difficult enough time physically distinguishing a hostile Sioux from, say, a friendly Delaware. To delineate the subtle power shifts of the Indians’ political, religious, and military societies was beyond their capacity. Nor did they much try.
Nonetheless, when Mitchell nominated a compliant Head Man with whom he had once traded extensively and peaceably, the Indians essentially shrugged and played along, anxious for their gifts. Given past experience, they were also fairly certain that the white men had no intention of keeping their promises. So as they awaited the wagon train from St. Louis they held councils of their own and devised entertainments. One of these included a demonstration few whites had ever seen and lived to tell about.
On the afternoon of the fourth day a troop of about 100 Cheyenne Dog Soldiers armed with guns, lances, and bows and arrows rode onto the treaty grounds to reenact a battle charge. The braves, wearing only loincloths and parfleche moccasins, were painted in their fiercest war colors, and their horses’ manes and tails were dusted and beribboned. On the animals’ flanks, etched in red ocher, were symbols enumerating each fighter’s coups—enemies killed, scalps taken, horses stolen. What at first appeared to the whites as nothing more than a haphazard, if clumsy, stampede evolved as if by magic into a disciplined martial drill, with the Cheyenne horsemen dismounting and remounting efficiently and precisely as they circled and charged. The white onlookers, the soldiers in particular, were stunned— and apprehensive. These warriors had been bested by the Sioux? It was a lesson the next generation of Army Indian fighters would forget at their peril.
More than a week was spent on such entertainments and continuous feasts as the Indians awaited the wakpamni—the great distribution of bribes. There were a few surprises. At one shared meal the Cheyenne atoned for the recent killing of the two Shoshones by returning the scalps to the brothers of the victims, along with gifts of knives, blankets, and pieces of colored cloth. And the famous Belgian Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet wandered through the camps proselytizing, offering Mass, and, he claimed, baptizing 894 Indians and 61 “half-bloods.” One of the bands he preached to was Red Cloud’s. And though Father De Smet failed to convert the Bad Face blotahunka, Red Cloud was known for the rest of his life to “spout bits of Christian doctrine.” It was from this gathering that De Smet bequeathed to us one of the more droll descriptions of the Indian love of boiled dog. “No epoch in Indian annals, ” he wrote, “shows a greater massacre of the canine race.”
Meanwhile, as the days wore on, the grass for miles in every direction was clipped clean by the thousands of Indian ponies and the banks of Horse Creek and the North Platte were turned into stinking midden heaps. There was so much human waste that the Army troop moved its encampment two miles upriver to escape a stench one soldier described as “almost visible.” When messengers finally brought news that the gift-laden caravan was a day away, Fitzpatrick and the superintendent of Indian Affairs, Mitchell, reassembled the tribal elders to ask if they had chosen chiefs to represent them. The Indians were sly. They had ridden hundreds of miles and delayed the fall buffalo hunt to receive presents. They were not going to depart empty-handed, even if avoiding it meant participating in a sham. They told the whites they had indeed selected emissaries, and several men from various tribes stepped forward. After the conditions of the original treaty terms were again read aloud and translated— including the unthinkable demand that the Sioux cede to the Crows the territory on either side of the Powder as it flowed north into the Yellowstone—a clever Arapaho Head Man named Cut Nose more or less spoke for all the tribes when he announced, “I would be glad if the whites would pick out a place for themselves and not come into our grounds. But if they must pass through our country, they should give us game for what they drive off.”
The government delegates took such cryptic comments as acquiescence in all their demands. Though the savvy Plains veteran Fitzpatrick must have known better, he stood mute while the designated “chiefs” approached a table set up in the amphitheater. Like most Indians, the Sioux could neither read nor write, and so could not sign or print their own names. The government had obligingly worked out a practice for them: when a Head Man agreed to a treaty, he would step up to a table where a scribe sat, accept a token blanket or string of glass beads, and with one or two fingers touch the top of an offered fountain pen. The scribe would then add the name of the Indian to the document. It was a useless ceremony, as the Indians had no real understanding of what they were agreeing to or, more accurately, giving away. In any case the U.S. government usually had no intention of living up to its end of the bargain. Nevertheless, one by one they made their marks next to their names. Of the two Sioux “chiefs” who touched the pen, neither was from the Oglala tribe, let alone from Red Cloud’s Bad Face band. One was from the Brule band of the Lakota—a strong, pioneering people, but martially no match for the Oglalas. The other represented a small contingent of the Missouri River Sioux. Although we cannot guess at what went through Red Cloud’s mind as he and Old Smoke stood and watched, both knew that real power flowed not from an inkwell, but from an otter skin quiver or, better yet, from the muzzle of a gun.
So on the final day of the council what was known to history as the Horse Creek Treaty was signed to ensure a “lasting peace on the Plains forevermore.” After the signing ceremony the wagon train pulled into camp and formed a corral, and a final grand feast followed the distribution of gifts. Besides the usual allotments of coffee, sugar, and tobacco, sheets of thin brass were distributed; the Sioux, ever vain, liked to cut these into doubloon-sized ovals and weave them through their hair. Head Men and esteemed braves were also presented with commemorative medals featuring a likeness of the Great Father, President Millard Fillmore; and with U.S. Army general officers’ uniforms, including ceremonial swords and red sashes. Many Indians wore these uniforms the next day— this was probably their first encounter with pants—as the tribes dispersed to the four corners of the territory from which they had arrived.
The 1851 Horse Creek agreement was the most sweeping official treaty the Western Sioux had ever signed with representatives of the United States. It would, perforce, also be the first to be broken. Luckily for historians, a long-lost autobiography that Red Cloud dictated in his old age supplies a rare look into this era from the Sioux perspective. Even so late in his life, long past the era of the great Indian wars, Red Cloud seemed to fear some form of retribution, and his book barely touches on his interactions with the whites; when it does, the few passages are so opaque as to render his true feelings nearly impenetrable. Regarding the Horse Creek council, however, he does hint that some of the older (and weaker) Head Men who camped that September on the North Platte were intrigued by the idea of the white and red man bound forever in peace. What can definitely be inferred from Red Cloud’s writings, however, is that he had no intention of abiding by the treaty. The Lakota were the strongest and most feared tribe on the High Plains. And within the Lakota, Red Cloud’s Oglalas vied for primacy.
In interpreting Red Cloud’s life and times in the context of the Horse Creek Treaty, one might—might— grant that he could have lived without actively attacking the emigrant trains and provoking war with the United States, at least for the moment (but subsequent events make this a ticklish argument). One could even make the case that despite his peoples’ deep political tradition of near fanatical individualism, he may have even acceded to the concept of a single Sioux “chief, ” most likely because it would have been himself.
But no one, certainly not Red Cloud, could possibly have imagined him a bottled spider confined to a specific territory, no matter how large or how bountiful. The idea of Red Cloud prohibited from leading raids, from stealing horses, from taking scalps— the very exploits for which he was already renowned—was inimical to his nature. Such adventures had been the essence of the Sioux ethos since time immemorial. And if Red Cloud was anything, he was a creature of the myths and legends of his forebears, connected to those ghosts by what a future American president, on whom he would one day wage war, referred to as the mystic chords of memory.
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GUNS AND BADLANDS
Notes Prologue
1. The word “buffalo,” a bastardization, was applied to the immense herds of “boeufs” first encountered by French trappers on the North American Plains, around 1635. In 1774 the animals were officially classified as “American bison” in order to taxonomically distinguish them from African and Asian buffalo species. Because across the prairies of the old West American bison were referred to as buffalo, that is the designation we have chosen for this book.
2. On April 21, 1607, Captain Christopher Newport led about twenty of the first permanent English settlers ashore near what was to become Virginia’s Jamestown colony. They explored for nearly eight hours without seeing another human being. On their way back to the boat that had taken them ashore they were ambushed, with two men wounded by arrows. The incident is described on page 135 of a book edited by Colonel Matthew Moten, Between War and Peace.
3. Fort Kearney, in south-central Nebraska, was named for the Mexican War hero General Stephen W. Kearny. Its name was misspelled with an extra “e” in so many official government documents that this became recognized as the standard spelling. Fort Phil Kearny along the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming was named after the Civil War general Philip Kearny, Stephen Kearny’s nephew.
GUNS AND BADLANDS
Notes Prologue
1. The word “buffalo,” a bastardization, was applied to the immense herds of “boeufs” first encountered by French trappers on the North American Plains, around 1635. In 1774 the animals were officially classified as “American bison” in order to taxonomically distinguish them from African and Asian buffalo species. Because across the prairies of the old West American bison were referred to as buffalo, that is the designation we have chosen for this book.
2. On April 21, 1607, Captain Christopher Newport led about twenty of the first permanent English settlers ashore near what was to become Virginia’s Jamestown colony. They explored for nearly eight hours without seeing another human being. On their way back to the boat that had taken them ashore they were ambushed, with two men wounded by arrows. The incident is described on page 135 of a book edited by Colonel Matthew Moten, Between War and Peace.
3. Fort Kearney, in south-central Nebraska, was named for the Mexican War hero General Stephen W. Kearny. Its name was misspelled with an extra “e” in so many official government documents that this became recognized as the standard spelling. Fort Phil Kearny along the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming was named after the Civil War general Philip Kearny, Stephen Kearny’s nephew.
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