The Heart of Everything That Is:
The Untold Story of Red Cloud
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
2
The Untold Story of Red Cloud
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
2
GUNS AND
BADLANDS
The first French explorers to
make contact with the Sioux
in the mid-1600s noted with
not a little horror the tribe’s
fierce and utter barbarism.
The Europeans had long since
adapted and reconciled
themselves to the New
World’s Stone Age cultures.
But the Sioux’s vicious raids
on their Algonquin neighbors
to the north and east—and the
sheer joy the Sioux took in
tearing their enemies limb
from limb with rocks, clubs,
sharpened sticks, and flint
knives—called to mind
nothing so much as Dark Age
memories of Norse berserkers or marauding Huns.
Watching these battles as
spectators, the European
newcomers had no idea that
the savagery was actually a
finely tuned conceit. To the
Sioux, war was the reason for
living, and though their raids
and ambushes were of course
made to establish territory
and gain booty, more
important was the chance for
an individual warrior to give
vent, in public, to an
aggressiveness prized by the
tribe’s ethos.
A Sioux brave would wager his last breath against the most courageous adversaries, and no matter the outcome, he won. A good death did honor to an entire life, and thus on the battlefield and afterward he was an exhibitionist with no sense of modesty. When he took a scalp, hacked off a hand, gouged out an eye, or severed a penis, he screamed at the top of his lungs to proclaim his own greatness. Later, when he handed the scalp to his woman, she too sang his glory while dancing with the bloody skull piece suspended from a pole.
Such behavior was alien enough to baffle seventeenth century Europeans. Whites observed a tribe that hunted and grubbed for a living with flint arrows and stone tools and exhibited no artistic tendencies other than painting their bodies and faces with hideous designs in preparation for battle. The Sioux did not weave baskets or fabrics, bake pottery, or make jewelry. They disdained farming and constructed no permanent lodges. And with no pack animals available on the continent—unlike the horse, mule, camel, or ox, the buffalo could not be bred to be harnessed or yoked— Native American animal husbandry had lagged about four millennia behind the rest of the world. Also, as other tribes took their first, tentative steps into modernity, this cultural leap seemed impossible for the hunter-gatherer Sioux. Had some of their historical contemporaries—the imperious Aztecs, the sophisticated Cherokee, the politically savvy Iroquois— been aware of their existence, they would probably have considered the Sioux laughable or subhuman. But the Sioux could fight, and the fires of their blood-feud memories were banked and stoked until the day they died.
The Sioux, like all American Indians, are descendents of Asian nomads who crossed the thousand mile Bering Land Bridge in various migrations between 16,500 and 5,000 BC. There is archaeological evidence to suggest that the first pre- Columbian peoples to strike south from Beringia and into what is now the great, grassy, Northern Plains of the United States did so about 12,000 years ago, trailing and stalking the migratory routes of the great herds of mastodons, woolly mammoths, and a giant form of bison that had gone extinct by the time the Europeans arrived. These hunters, who devised their first bows and arrows around the time Jesus was preaching in Judea, rapidly spread east and west to the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, through Central America, and across the Isthmus of Panama. Linguists hypothesize that the wandering proto-Sioux bands originated somewhere in the southeastern United States, perhaps in the Carolinas or near the Gulf of Mexico.
By the 1500s the Sioux were again on the move, pushing up the Mississippi River Valley and settling near the river’s headwaters in the forests of northern Minnesota. At the time, as today, the region was laced by a network of intersecting streams, marshes, and lakes, and the development of the birch bark canoe allowed separate bands not only to gather and consume wild rice from still waters, but to stake out individual territories.
Theirs was a patriarchal society with tribal affiliation passed from father to son, a simple solution for men fathering children with multiple wives from different bands. Leaders—called “Head Men” and “Big Bellies”—were for the most part chosen on merit. In some cases a chief would create an inside track for his favorite son, but even then the inheritor would have to earn the band’s loyalty on the strength of his wisdom, his personality, and above all his martial ability. And if an ordinary brave was not pleased with a new chief, he had the option of persuading any followers to strike out with him and form a new band with himself as Head Man.
Perhaps influenced by the seven stars of the Big Dipper —the “Carrier” that conveyed the souls of the dead to the Milky Way, which the Sioux called the “Road of the Spirits”—the tribe attributed mystical qualities to the number seven. It was the hostile Chippewa who dubbed these peoples “Sioux, ” or “Little Snakes.” The Sioux referred to themselves as Otchenti Chakowin, the “People of the Seven Council Fires, ” those tribes being the Sissetons, Yanktons, Yanktonais, Santees, Leaf Santees, Blewakantonwans, and Lakota/Dakotas. 1 Each tribe in turn usually consisted of seven bands, and with minor dialectical differences they all spoke the same language. The seven council fires thus served to validate the cohesion of the peoples as a single, united nation.
Early New France officials and traders valued the North American Indians’ hides and pelts, and pursued a social policy of benign neglect toward the tribes. Though the Europeans would occasionally attempt to agitate the Indians as a buffer against probes from the nascent Spanish empire far to the southwest, for the most part they left the “nations” to their own political and military customs. As a result, for over a century the savage Sioux generally had their way with their Algonquin neighbors. That balance of power shifted abruptly around 1660, when English trading ships sailed into Hudson Bay offering muzzle-loading, smoothbore flintlock muskets and steel knives in exchange for furs. The bay bordered the homeland of the Cree, an Algonquin people, and they were the first Native Americans to obtain this new weaponry. The journals of British sailors record great numbers of Cree paddling out to their flotillas in canoes piled high with furs and skins; the braves returned to the Cree villages bearing crates of guns, powder, and ball.
With the aid of their Algonquin cousins the Chippewa as well as a renegade band of Sioux called the Assiniboines, the newly armed Cree took bloody revenge on the People of the Seven Council Fires, who had terrorized them for generations. They drove the Sioux from their forested hunting grounds into swampy wastelands, where they could only grub for acorns, roots, and edible plants. And still the Algonquins hunted them like small game. The Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who was knighted for being the first man to traverse Canada to the Pacific Ocean, remarked that these forlorn Sioux were so skittish that the mere sight of strange spires of campfire smoke would drive them deeper into the swamps and marshes.
As best historians, ethnologists, and paleoanthropologists can tell, the Indians who would eventually become known as the Western Sioux split from their woodland eastern cousins sometime around 1700. These breakaway tribes subsequently splintered into many smaller bands as they conquered or subjugated a host of peoples during their migration west by southwest onto the buffalo ranges. Of course, the Sioux were not alone in these territorial shifts; the European invasion and subsequent expansion sparked chain-reaction movements all over the continent, and tribal borders were in a state of flux. A few years earlier the powerful Iroquois had overrun the Ohio Valley and did much the same, first to the Hurons and then to the Eries, driving them farther and farther west. And, now, tribe by tribe, the Algonquins with their modern weapons were in turn forcing the Sioux out of their fetid marshlands and onto the tallgrass prairies west of the Mississippi. French trappers and voyageurs were virtually the only chroniclers of these great migratory shifts, and they recorded that the Yanktonais tribe of Sioux moved west first, followed by the Lakota faction of the Tetons, who were in turn trailed by the Yanktons.
By the early eighteenth century the People of the Seven Council Fires found themselves far to the west and south of their old hunting grounds, and it was here, at the elbow bend of the Minnesota River in southwestern Minnesota, where the watercourse makes a hard northeast turn toward the Mississippi, that a further fragmentation of these tribes took place. As each tribe reached this crucial geographic boundary the same scene was played out. After council parleys that invariably led to squabbles, the elder, more conservative tribal leaders opted to follow the Minnesota River northwest to its headwaters, keeping to the more forested country. Younger clans, meanwhile, forded the river and plunged into the prairie, which seemed endless but eventually rose to the Black Hills and, beyond, the Rockies. Thus was born the Western Sioux nation.
Modern Americans living in an irrigated and fertilized West would find it difficult to visualize the stark contrast in the early eighteenth century between the green, forested land and what lay beyond when it more or less ceased to exist around the ninety-fifth meridian west—a line running a roughly southerly course from modern-day Minneapolis to San Antonio. The sere, harsh, timberless prairie that stretched westward from that line was as great a barrier as any ocean. Even the grass bending and rising uniformly with the wind gave an impression of waves rolling in from the sea. The country was bisected in places by lonely rivers and creeks, but it had almost no natural lakes and even fewer aquifers, so the land was prone to vast dust storms in summer and blizzards beyond the imagination of most easterners in winter. The decision to venture into this emptiness called for either extreme courage or supreme foolhardiness. The Sioux had ample streaks of both.
Not long after the Lakota group opted to ford the Minnesota, it fractured naturally into the seemingly requisite seven factions, led by the pioneering Brules and Oglalas, 2 the tribe in which Red Cloud would be raised. At around the same time, English traders from the Hudson’s Bay Company were also migrating south to the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, near modern-day Saint Paul. There, beginning in the eighteenth century, they began holding annual trade fairs. This nascent commerce was the start of a cultural entanglement that through disease and alcohol would kill more Plains Indians than all the battles with whites combined. It was also at these fairs that Western Sioux bearing buffalo robes for trade finally began to arm themselves with guns and steel knives. A familiar pattern repeated itself as they moved onto the prairie. Just as the Chippewa and the Cree had pushed the Sioux west, so the Sioux with their muskets would defeat or shoulder aside each successive Plains tribe with which they came into contact.
Though the Sioux were to become its most vicious practitioners, warfare among Indians was simply a way of life. Nearly every tribe called itself “The People” and harbored deep suspicion and hatred toward outsiders with whom it competed for game and plunders. Death arrived swiftly and often in the violent thrust and parry of aggression and defense, abetted by a culture that revolved around a quest to avenge insults and injuries real and perceived. Yet it was rare for Indians to set out to conquer a territory in the European sense of the idea. The Sioux were that rarity, and as they spread west a northern branch of the Cheyenne was the first to fall. These Cheyenne, having been similarly mauled by armed Cree to their north, packed up and walked west across the Missouri River. This Sioux triumph was followed in rapid succession by the defeat of the weak Iowas and Otoes. Both of these farming tribes retreated farther west in hopes of allying with the more numerous Omaha, who occupied the territory south of the Great Bend of the Missouri. But the Omaha, like the Cheyenne, Otoes, and Iowas before them, lacked firearms. The Sioux slaughtered them at every turn. The survivors of all three tribes fled into the eastern Missouri floodplain, with the savvy Otoes crossing the river to decamp in southern Nebraska.
Precisely how many years or decades it took the various bands of Western Sioux to reach the Missouri, and in what order they did so, is lost to history. What is known is that before the arrival of the white man, all Eastern Sioux tribes had conducted annual summer hunting parties across the Minnesota River to track the buffalo through the tall grass around what today is the Minnesota–South Dakota border. By 1725, however, these lands were largely denuded of game; this suggests that it was the relocated Western Sioux who had scoured them clean. Further, sometime in the late 1720s or early 1730s reports from French explorers and trappers indicated that the Iowas, Otoes, and Omaha were again on the move, retreating north from their fixed locations in the fertile bottomland of Nebraska and moving up into the inhospitable wastes of the northern Dakota Territory. Although the reason for this migration is unclear, historians reasonably speculate that once again they were fleeing the Western Sioux.
By the mid-eighteenth century the Oglala and Brule bands of Lakota had tracked the buffalo herds up onto the windswept flatiron plateau that the French called the Coteau des Prairies. This 100- by-200-mile pipestone escarpment, carved by retreating glaciers and rising gradually to 900 feet, is sharply defined on modern satellite imaging maps. Shaped like an arrowhead pointing north, it fans south from North Dakota through South Dakota, through Minnesota, and into northern Iowa. As the Sioux were still without horses, they transported their smallish lodgepoles and tepee skins across these rocky highlands on the backs of their dogs, women, and children— including girls as young as six or seven. Progress was naturally slow, perhaps five to six miles a day, and their westward movement was delayed even more by the annual trek from the treeless Plains back to their old territory to acquire more weapons and ammunition at the English trade fairs, which by now had moved to the wooded headwaters of the Minnesota River.
Even as the bloody French and Indian War raged along the Atlantic seaboard, the Western Sioux returned to these fairs for guns, allowing the seven Lakota bands to exchange goods and news with their eastern kinsmen. Intermarriage was common among the tribes and bands, as was the baffling swiftness with which each group might change its name. (Thus the people Lewis and Clark chronicled in their journals as the Teton Saone—most likely a collective name bestowed on all Lakota who lagged behind their westward driving cousins—turn up as the Hunk Papas two decades later.) Most modern historians, for clarity’s sake, have settled on the seven Lakota bands that we noted earlier: the Oglalas, Brules, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, 3 Two Kettles, Hunk papas, and Blackfoot-Sioux. It was also around this time that the Lakota had their first encounter with Indians who owned horses, the Arikara.
The Sioux were certainly aware of the existence of the horse. Although they had no formal written tradition, since at least the early seventeenth century various bands had kept and passed down pictographic “Winter Counts,” a sort of snapshot chronicle of the most important events of any given year—eclipses, raids, droughts—etched into a deerskin or buffalo hide. The Lakota Winter Count of 1624 included a rough outline of the mustang that had been introduced to the western hemisphere by the Spanish a century earlier. But the Arikara, or Rees, were the first people the Sioux had ever seen incorporate the animal into their culture.
The Arikara were a semiagricultural people who lived in fixed villages of earth lodges strung like beads along the Upper Missouri near present-day Pierre, South Dakota. Their compounds were fortified by wide ditches, earthen walls, and in some cases even cedar log stockades. And despite the haughty Sioux’s disdain for these “dirt eaters, ” they were a hardy tribe known to ride their tough little ponies on buffalo hunts as far west as the Black Hills, an island of trees in a sea of grass 135 miles away. The Arikara had probably acquired their mounts, as well as some Spanish-made saber blades, in trade with the southern Kiowa, who prized the corn, squash, and beans of the Arikara. And though the Sioux coveted their horses, the Rees had numbers on their side. Their total population of perhaps 20,000, including 4,000 warriors, was nearly double that of all the wandering bands of Lakota put together.
Apparently sensing that they had nothing to fear from these emaciated newcomers from the east adrift on the High Plains, the Arikara initially took pity on the Lakota. After all, the Arikara had horses with which to not only ride down buffalo, but also overwhelm slow, pedestrian enemies. They also had attached the Spanish steel blades to the tips of their heavy, fourteen-foot buffalo lances, so no mangy band of itinerants on foot was any match for them. This overconfidence led them to accept some Brules and Oglalas into their villages and, in effect, provide them with handouts of corn, dried pumpkins, and even a few old horses. This was a mistake.
Despite their strong mounts and steel, the Arikara did not have guns. And though their settlements were too well fortified for the Lakotas to storm, raiding parties of 20 to 100 Sioux began roaming around the edges of their villages, burning their cornfields, and running down and scalping any Rees who ventured beyond the walls and moats. The Sioux also managed to steal a few horses. In the end, however, it was smallpox that doomed the Arikara. Three great epidemics, caused by tainted European blankets, swept through their settlements in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The tribe was so severely weakened that by 1795 even its fortified villages afforded little safety against the marauding Sioux. What was left of the broken tribe fled north, abandoning the Missouri watershed below the river’s Great Bend, virtually beckoning someone to claim the land. The peoples soon to be known as Red Cloud’s Sioux, who to this point, culturally, continued to have at least one foot in Minnesota, happily complied.
In the second half of the eighteenth century sketchy reports began reaching English traders on the Missouri about a tectonic shift in the balance of power on the prairie. The little information we have about this period comes almost exclusively from the Lakota Winter Counts, which allow various interpretations at best, and only wild guesses at worst. In this case they do not help much. It remains a mystery, for example, why the formerly forest-dwelling Oglalas apparently preferred to keep as their base the scrubby country in present day South Dakota near the brackish water of the aptly named Bad River. Early French trappers, the first whites to set eyes on this landscape, aptly christened it Mauvaises Terres. The Sioux agreed, naming it mako sica, “land bad, ” and one wonders what went through their minds as they traversed the most desolate, and weirdest, geographic formation in the United States.
To call the Badlands a moonscape does an injustice to the moon. Situated in southwestern South Dakota, some forty-five miles due east of present-day Rapid City, this stark, treeless mashup of slate-gray gullies, buttes, canyons, plateaus, and towering hoodoos was once the westernmost bed of North America’s Great Inland Sea, a shallow body of water that connected the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico 65 million to 80 million years ago and split the continent roughly in half. Millions of years later a dome of molten rock ruptured the earth’s crust on the western edge of this sea and gave rise, first, to the towering granite outcroppings of the Rockies and, later, to the Black Hills. The land to the east of these mountain ranges crumpled and folded in on itself in a chain reaction, and the Inland Sea drained.
Rivers and creeks streaming out of the mountains spread mud, gravel, and sand across the Badlands, which was transformed over millennia from a lush, semitropical ecosystem into a dry geological wasteland. Northern winds and diminished rainfall combined with frost and flash floods to further erode the soft, sedimentary rock and volcanic ash, leaving exposed in the sharp ridges and nobs the fossil remains of the Inland Sea’s eerie creatures— proto alligators, giant sharks, and predatory marine reptiles such as the toothy mosasaur, which grew up to fifty feet long. What the Sioux made of the petrified bones of these fantastical creatures littering the dynamic sweep and complications of the landscape no one knows.
The “Badlands Wall, ” which runs sixty miles on a rough east-west line, delineates the upper and the lower prairie, and to the naked eye this harsh vista would appear to offer nothing but misery and slow death to any human foolish enough to enter. But the Sioux were no ordinary people. They were quick to recognize that the sixty or more varieties of mixed short grasses growing on the eastern rim of the Badlands were prime fodder for buffalo, antelope, and mule deer (as well as for the millions of prairie dogs that in turn provided food for wolves, foxes, rattlesnakes, coyotes, black-footed ferrets, hawks, and eagles). And though bighorn sheep weighing up to forty pounds would be hunted to extermination there by the mid-1920s (they were reintroduced into Badlands National Park in 1964), these food sources would have been plentiful enough for the Oglalas, who now thought of themselves as a sovereign tribe.
Before they acquired horses, the Oglalas took advantage of the Badlands’ topography by posting scouts on its high, eerie rock spires to spot buffalo herds drifting like a dark cloud’s shadow across the prairie below. As the animals’ eyesight was poor, a herd could be approached carefully and quietly from downwind, and on a signal from these lookouts a hunting party would form a semicircle behind the buffalo and, whooping and waving blankets, stampede them over a cliff like a stream of water. The men would then sing the buffalo song as the entire band made camp next to the pile of dead and dying creatures. As every American schoolchild has since come to learn, no part of the dead beast was wasted.
Religious ceremonies were attached to the butchering of each section of the animal, from the skull to the pancreas; and the fatty meat was divided out, usually in accordance with tribal seniority. The savory tongue and liver—sliced warm from the writhing buffalo and flavored with bile dripped from the gallbladder—were awarded to the bravest hunters, and the tanned hides that were not set aside for robes were sewn into buckskins, leggings, and moccasins (and, later, tack and saddles). The horns were used to carry crushed herbal medicines, and the bones were fashioned into tools ranging from sewing needles to war clubs. The coarse, matted hair was twisted into ropes; the bladders were set aside for water storage; the sinews were made into bowstrings; and the inch thick skin on the side of the buffalo’s neck was set out to bake in the sun before being cut into shields that could stop an arrow and deflect a musket ball. At night, the band would roast a portion of the succulent marrow over fires fueled by bricks of dried buffalo dung, the smoke of which seasoned the meal with a bitter tang. The leaner meat was mixed with marrow grease and seeded chokecherries and pounded into a nutritious concoction called pemmican, a staple of western Indians.
Back east the buffalo was best known for providing the tens of thousands of lap robes that warmed New Englanders and Midwesterners through sleety winters. The tanning process that created these blankets—always performed by women, who sang their own buffalo song—was backbreaking. First the stinking hides were pinned taut to the ground and thoroughly scraped with flint knives or elk’s antlers to remove the flesh. Then a mixture of jellied buffalo brains and liver was rubbed into the fleshy side until it penetrated the pores. After being left for several days to dry in the sun, the hides were carried to a nearby river or stream and washed until somewhat pliable. They were then tied to poles with rawhide thongs and stretched taut again. Any stray fleck of meat still attached was eliminated by an elk antler or a fleshing flint, and more jellied buffalo brains were rubbed in. After several days, when the gooey brains had been sufficiently absorbed, women or girls would grab either end of the hide and draw it back and forth around a small tree for hours, as if operating a large two-person saw. When the end product was soft enough to fold, it was a buffalo robe.
The historian Royal Brown Hassrick does not exaggerate when he notes in his classic study, The Sioux, that once the Lakota moved out of the forests and into the heart of the great northern buffalo range, “their way of life burst into magnificence.” And for a brief period in early spring the earth around their camps near the Badlands exploded in a glorious green, and the air was perfumed with clusters of blooming elephant head, larkspur, and wild crocus that lent a magenta-streaked patina to the new buds of dog ash, cottonwood, and river willow sprouting along streambeds roaring with clean, cold snowmelt.
But the vibrant display was short-lived. By late May streams and creeks were already drying into mud wallows, and the plant life had withered to a dingy brown that provided excellent kindling for the ubiquitous prairie fires ignited by lightning strikes. Yet the Sioux even learned to use this to their advantage. The succession of fires that swept the area left large swaths of the land covered in ash. The Oglalas welcomed these fast- moving walls of flame that danced into and out of sandstone arroyos and consumed the grassy bases of sand hills. The drought resistant native grasses had roots that grew as deep as twenty-four inches, holding them steady in the soil and allowing for rapid regrowth. Within a few days tender green shoots would push up through the blackened wasteland to attract packs of hungry animals. These included herds of the perpetually astonished looking pronghorn antelope, the Lakota meat of preference after buffalo. Though these antelope could run at nearly fifty miles per hour and were the fastest animals on the North American continent, they were surprisingly easy to hunt. The Indians would merely cut armfuls of sagebrush, hold the branches before their chests and faces, and slowly walk to within arrow distance before loosing their volleys. Perhaps this accounted for the animals’ apparent astonishment.
The Oglalas’ chosen territory may have been high, dry, and windswept—they mocked their Brule cousins as Kutawichasha, or soft and indolent “Lowland Folk” who lingered in the more hospitable south—but it provided them with what they needed to fill their bellies and to keep warm in winter. This, in turn, allowed them the luxury of more time to form raiding parties that prowled the prairie in every direction until the “savage” Sioux became known, and feared, across the High Plains. All this fighting, however, was merely a prelude to one overarching aim—control of the isolated, 6,000-square mile mountain range rising to the west like a giant green fortress, known to all as the Black Hills.
With the Montana mines nearly played out, old rumors of gold in the Black Hills had begun to simmer again, like water coming to a boil. As far back as 1823 the Bible thumping mountain man Jedediah Smith had reported great veins of gold running through the hills, but Smith was killed by Comanche on the Cimarron soon afterward, and no one was certain exactly where he had seen the ore. Given the size of the range, any exploratory expedition to discover America’s next great strike would have to be fairly large —large enough to attract the Indians’ notice. The politicians and generals hoped that on the long journey east Red Cloud would be intimidated by the size, strength, and modernity of the nation. They wanted him to think twice before fomenting a second war over any white intrusion into his territory.
As the tale goes, one evening Red Cloud attended a White House reception given by President Ulysses S. Grant, and found himself in conversation with the bitter officer. Trying to explain the mystical hold that Paha Sapa had on his people, he told the officer, “My ancestors’ bones lie in the Black Hills.”
“Horseshit, ” the officer replied. “Your people have been there no more than a couple of generations. They come from Minnesota, and you were born in Nebraska. You took that land from the Crows. And do you know why you took that land from the Crows? Because you could.
“And do you know why we will take that land from you? Because we can.”
It is said that years later, as an old man, Red Cloud recounted this exchange to his lifelong campfire companion Sam Deon, a white trapper and trader who became the conduit through which the great chief told his life story. What the officer would never have been able to understand, Red Cloud told Deon, was how in the time before time began, the goddess Ite, the mother of the four winds in Sioux myth, conspired with the trickster god Inktomi to create the “Buffalo nation” of Siouan peoples. Together these deities delivered the Sioux nation up from a subterranean netherworld and onto the surface of an earth teeming with game. And what portal did the gods choose for this deliverance? The mystical “breathing” Wind Cave of the Black Hills. This, Red Cloud said, was the reason why the Sioux revere the mountain range.
In reality the Wind Cave of the Black Hills is a 132- mile series of honeycombed underground tunnels composed of thin, calcite fins —one of the longest caverns in the world. Because of its deep passageways and the smallness of its only mouth, the Wind Cave reacts inversely to outside air pressures. Thus it seems to “exhale” when the outside air pressure is low, and to “inhale” when the pressure is high. Red Cloud and his people believed that the ancient gods delivered their ancestors from this cave. Today, standing before the cavern’s eight-by-ten-foot entrance, one still gets the sense that the cave is alive and “breathing.” And though no one will ever know for certain who was the first Sioux to “discover” the Black Hills, the Oglala Winter Count of 1775–76 depicts a Head Man named Standing Bull feeling the breath of the Wind Cave the summer before America’s Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.
When not fighting rival tribes, the Lakota became, in a sense, middlemen between the English traders to the northeast and the Plains Indians to the west and south. They were careful to restrict the flow of bartered goods to the white man’s foods and his ribbons, his blankets and glass beads, while keeping for themselves his flintlocks, ammunition, and steel knives as well as iron kettles, which could be broken apart to make arrowheads. Whenever possible the Lakota bundled the European goods to exchange with the horse tribes for mustangs, the most prized commodity on the Plains. But by now their warlike reputation preceded them, and their rivals were not naive. The animals remained hard to come by. So despite their steady accumulation of arms, the Sioux were still on foot: slow, plodding travelers, lugging whatever belongings their women, children, and dog travois could carry. And then, seemingly out of the blue, they acquired their first pony herds.
Fossil remains attest to the presence of prehistoric proto horses on the North American prairie until the end of the Pleistocene epoch, 10,000 years ago. The earliest of these animals had toes instead of hooves and were the size of foxes. Succeeding iterations grew as large as collies. But, like the much larger mammoths and camels that also once roamed the Plains, this animal went extinct, and it was not until the Spanish introduced the modern horse onto the continent in the early 1500s that the stone canyons of the western hemisphere again echoed with thundering hooves. Despite the images carved into our subconscious by Hollywood Westerns, all American Indians, from Inuit to Iroquois to Inca, went on foot before encountering Europeans. Moreover, by one of history’s chance quirks the breed introduced to the New World by the conquistadores was ideally suited to its new environment, and the Lakotas’ extraordinary knack for taming and breeding the animal was an epochal moment in the timeline of the tribe and the American West.
Unlike the hulking, grain fed steeds hitched to carts and plows across the middle and upper regions of Europe and ridden into battle from the Roncevaux Pass to Bosworth Field, the fleet Spanish mustang traced its lineage to animals that had once roamed the arid steppes of Central Asia. The breed took centuries to make its way to southern Europe via the Moorish invasions of Iberia, and along that journey it commingled with similar desert horses from the Middle East and North Africa to become a self-sufficient, intelligent animal quite at home in the dry, dusty climate of the Andalusian plain and, later, the North American West. The smallish mustang, usually no taller than five feet from hoof to shoulder, was easy to break and able to travel great distances without water. It prospered in the high, dry flatlands of Mexico, thriving on the spare clumps of grass, shrubs, and even weeds. It was also prolific. Within two decades of Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Montezuma and the Aztec empire in 1519, the governor of the Northwest Frontier territory in New Spain, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, rode north as far as Kansas in search of the “Seven Cities of Cíbola” with more than 1,000 horses— terrifying, alien creatures to the Indians.
The territory the Spanish conquered soon extended north from Mexico City through present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and California; and Coronado and the settlers of New Spain knew full well the spell their horses cast over the indigenous peoples whom they enslaved and converted by force. In the eyes of the Indians the horse endowed the European invaders with seemingly supernatural powers, and some tribes even believed that the mounted conquistadors were immortal. Given the inhumanity with which the colonial authorities treated their sullen Native subjects, the Spanish also recognized the consequences of allowing the Indians any modicum of freedom or self government—and most particularly any familiarity with horsemanship. Thus whenever a tribe did resist, retribution was swift. In 1595, to take just one example, a Spanish military expedition of seventy men dispatched to punish a restive band of Pueblos slaughtered 800 men, women, and children and took another 500 prisoners. The right foot was severed from every male captive over the age of twenty-five, and males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and females over the age of twenty were sentenced to slavery in the fields. It is little wonder the Indians lived in abject fear of the horse and its barbarous riders.
Meanwhile, although Coronado never found his “Seven Cities, ” along his trek north he met numerous American Plains Indians. His descriptions of these resourceful, dexterous peoples hint at his foreboding about their quite literal bloodthirstiness. Describing a buffalo hunt, Coronado wrote, “They cut the hide open at the back and pull it off at the joints, using a flint as large as a finger . . . with as much ease as if working with a good iron tool. They eat raw flesh and drink blood. When they kill a cow they empty a large gut and fill it with blood, and carry this around the neck to drink when they are thirsty. When they open the belly of a cow they squeeze out the chewed grass and drink the juice that remains behind because they say it contains the essence of the stomach.”
Should these hardy people ever acquire mounts, Coronado recognized, they would constitute New Spain’s greatest peril. Yet as hard as the Spanish tried, they could not completely fence off their proliferating stock. Southwestern Apache were the first to take advantage, running the animals off during raids on isolated rancheros and later capturing them at water holes and in box canyons. The Apache ate most of their catch, but they spared the strongest, equipping them with crude tack fashioned from buffalo hide and using them as transportation for more distant raids. The Apache never did learn to breed these partially broken mustangs; when they needed to replenish their herd they organized more raids. Now they were more mobile than any other tribe on the continent, and the radius and targets of their attacks expanded across the New Mexico territory. They fell hardest on their ancient enemies, the Pueblos.
The Pueblos had been forced more or less at gunpoint into a pact with the Spanish colonizers—in exchange for forced labor and desultory conversion to Catholicism, the Spanish would provide protection against the Apache. Once the Apache had horses, however, this proved an impossible commitment. Mounted raids on Pueblo communities increased, and before Spanish expeditions could be roused the Apache would vanish like ghosts into the frontier’s Rembrandt gloom. The Apache raids grew more frequent and vicious, and in 1680 the Pueblos finally rose, emboldened by desperation and by a charismatic medicine man named Juan de Popé.
The ensuing massacre was retaliation for a century of cruelty. The Pueblos plundered Spanish haciendas, demolished government buildings, and took particular joy in destroying convents and churches and killing Franciscan priests, twenty of whom were captured in a churchyard and tortured to death, their bodies dumped in the charred husk of their chapel. The few Spanish who survived abandoned their livestock on a disorganized flight south to El Paso or to Mexico itself. Once New Mexico was cleared, the shaman Popé ordered his people to renounce the language, the religion, and even the crops of the colonizers. The Pueblos tore up fields of barley and wheat and slaughtered and ate the Spanish sheep and cattle. Because they had never developed the Apache taste for horseflesh, they merely flung open the corrals and allowed thousands of mustangs to run free across the Southern Plains. This has come to be known as North America’s “Great Horse Dispersal, ” the seed of the transformation of the culture of the American West.
In the aftermath of this great escape, a combination of raiding and trading between tribes spread horse culture across the Plains. The Comanche, heretofore a primitive people barely scratching out an existence in the harsh Wind River country of west-central Wyoming, were drawn south to presentday West Texas by the lure of the wild herds. They were the first tribe to perfect horsebreeding techniques, including gelding, which had eluded the Apache. Soon the flow of horseflesh followed the ancient northerly trade routes. Within a century the Wichitas of Oklahoma were mounted; they were followed by the Kiowa of Kansas and the Pawnee of Nebraska. The Ute, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfeet, and Crows, and the tribes of the Canadian prairie, all acquired mustangs. As did the Sioux. Although the westernmost Lakota, the Oglalas and Brules, had been in possession of a few staggering, worm-eaten nags stolen from old enemies like the Arikara, no one can say at what precise moment they encountered their first herds of wild mustangs—the sungnuni glugluka. It was probably sometime between 1770 and 1785. The western Lakota bands took to these stout little animals with their sleek necks and concave faces like no other people on the Northern Plains.
The Arikara, driven high up on the Missouri and decimated by smallpox epidemics, tried to thwart the burgeoning Sioux by allying with the Mandan. The partnership came to naught, as the horseless Mandan were ridden down and slaughtered by the score while the Arikara remained huddled behind their battlements, subject to constant Sioux raids. The newly mounted Lakota, imbued with an “arrogance born of successful conquest, ” spread south and farther west, and by 1803 had cleared the Kiowa from their traditional hunting grounds around the Black Hills and forced them to abandon their Missouri River Valley trade routes. Their old nemesis the Omaha, who had resettled in present day northeastern Nebraska, had by now also obtained horses as well as guns from friendly Mississippi River tribes. Neither acquisition helped. When the Omaha tried to put up a fight, the Sioux crushed them.
The acquisition of horses did not alter the Sioux’s nomadic hunter-gatherer culture so much as extend it, changing the dynamics of America’s Northern Plains much as the invention of the stirrup had turned yurt dwelling Mongols into the bloody scourge of Eurasia. The Cheyenne, who occupied land close to the Black Hills, have a traditional narrative, according to which the first Sioux they ever encountered were a greasy, lice-ridden band who arrived at one of their summer camps on foot, begging for food. This changed dramatically with the appearance of the wild herds. And besides naturally adding to the tribe’s wealth and power, it also subtly affected ancient customs. As packhorses could pull much larger travois than dogs, for instance, the size of the Lakota elk-skin lodges doubled. And with greater contact with conquered tribes came the concept of decoration. Oglala and Brule wives and daughters began to adorn formerly bare tepees with pictures of the sun, moon, stars, buffalo, and of course horses, using pigments made from blood, sap, ground roots, dead insects, and urine. In recognition of the horse’s transformation of their lifestyle Lakota braves even adopted a custom of dignified death for certain prized animals, letting older horses loose in secluded pastures to die instead of slaughtering them for food.
What would not be altered, however, was the tribe’s all consuming lust for battle honors. Some historians argue that the Great Horse Dispersal actually stunted Sioux society by preventing the tribe’s progression into the “civilized” pursuit of agriculture, hierarchical organization, and social diversification. In other words, the arrival of the horse amplified the Stone Age culture of the Lakota. Now, dazzling Sioux war parties riding painted mounts rapidly and overwhelmingly extended their savage and relentless subjugation of neighboring tribes. Moreover, even when a Lakota rider was ambushed or outnumbered, the horse afforded a swift, heretofore unimaginable means of escape. And there was no better hiding place than in the folds and crevasses of the sacred Black Hills.
It is difficult to explain what inspired the Western Sioux with such undying hatred for certain tribes, such as the Crows, Pawnee, and Kiowa, while at the same time they made tentative peace with others, such as the Cheyenne. Yet the Lakota seemed to tolerate the tall, stately Cheyenne more than any others despite the fact that the Cheyenne were distant cousins of the same Algonquins who had driven the Lakota out of Minnesota. One likely reason for this friendship was that, like the Lakota, the Cheyenne were fiercely opposed to white emigration. Another, and perhaps more important, reason was their access to horses through a long tradition of trading with tribes to the south, which the Sioux considered enemies. In any case, after a flurry of brutal early battles, the Sioux and Cheyenne settled into a partnership that would continue over the next century.
Meanwhile, as more of the Minnesota Sioux bands and tribes were drawn onto the Great Plains in the early 1800s by the estimated 60 million buffalo migrating across the prairie—more than eleven times the number of people living in the United States, according to the 1800 census—the Oglalas and Brules continued to lead the march west, their advance scouts sending back word of the rolling paradise of rivers and abundant game that lay on the other side of the Black Hills. According to the Winter Count of 1801, a combined Oglala-Brule raiding party that ventured to the head of the Powder River was set upon by the Crows, who in one of their rare victories killed thirty Sioux braves. Some historians believe that it was around this time that the Sioux collectively decided to abandon the arid, broken land east of the Black Hills and to make their home among the thick grasses and game herds of the Powder River Country of Wyoming and Nebraska.
This would take some effort. Although thoroughly outgunned, the Crows were richer in horses than the Sioux—a Crow brave was considered poor if he owned fewer than twenty horses, while a Lakota Head Man was considered wealthy if he owned thirty—and Crows were known to be capable of riding forty miles nonstop in twenty-four hours, thus perfecting the art of escape even while carrying captives. In fact, of all the Indians on the Plains, the Crows and their cousins the Gros Ventres were the only tribes who did not routinely torture and kill women and children prisoners. Infant mortality, high among all Plains Indians, was particularly severe among these rugged mountain tribes, and with their population constantly in jeopardy, they made a habit of marrying their female prisoners and adopting the children. Crow warriors, as tall as the Cheyenne, also had a physical trait that distinguishes them from just about every other tribe in the West, if not the continent. Given their diet, lifestyle, and, at best, casual hygiene, most adult Indians had teeth like a crazy fence. Contemporaneous accounts, however, describe the Crows’ teeth as invariably straight, gleaming white, and remaining intact in their mouths into old age.
And while the Sioux were to eventually push these finedentured people higher into the forested crags of the Bighorns and beyond, the Crows were also blessed, or cursed, with memories as long as the Sioux’s. Crow fathers passed on to sons a burning hatred of the Sioux (as well as their toadies the Cheyenne), while Sioux fathers instructed their sons in the most excruciating tortures, to be reserved for Crow enemies. A favorite was not only to gouge out a Crow’s eyes and hack off his ears, arms, feet, and penis, but also to punch a hole in his bladder and urinate or defecate into it.
Indian torture rituals, as inconceivable as they were to most whites, did have a purpose beyond inflicting excruciating pain. The majority of tribes believed that all humans went to the same idyllic afterlife in the exact physical condition in which they had died. This breathtaking arcadia, bursting with ponies and game and populated by unlimited comely maidens, was a literal Happy Hunting Ground. But if the ghostly warrior had no eyes or tongue with which to see this paradise and taste its fatty meat, if he had no feet with which to chase the game, no hands with which to draw back a bowstring, no genitalia with which to satisfy his carnal desires, then one man’s heaven had become another’s hell. This belief was universally accepted among the tribes, although the even more cruel atrocities exchanged between Sioux and Crow were purely malicious.
For all the wonders of such an afterlife, however, both the Lakota and the Crows recognized that on this earth their continual battles came down to the acquisition and defense of the most desirable hunting grounds. And as much as the Western Sioux hungered for the Crows’ Powder River Country, by the turn of the nineteenth century they were not yet strong enough to take it and hold it. Instead they consolidated in the territory on the buffalo feeding grounds to the east of the Black Hills across present day South Dakota to such an extent that when Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark led an expedition that ascended the Missouri in the fall of 1804, the American explorers were amazed to find that so few Sioux had managed to amass such vast power and prestige.
Following a parley with the Oglalas on the Bad River, the Americans recorded in their journals that the entire tribe totaled sixty lodges containing 360 people, 120 of them warriors led by a chief named Stabber. Granted, not all seven of the Oglala bands may have been camped together, and to this day some historians dispute Lewis and Clark’s census, finding it difficult to fathom how such a minuscule armed force could have routed the more numerous Arikara, Kiowa, Omaha, and lesser tribes while simultaneously enfolding the defeated Cheyenne into its orbit. The key word is “armed.” The Sioux had the most, the best, and in some cases the only guns in any fight. And though the disparate Sioux bands and tribes operated as politically distinct entities, their shared language, myths, and culture provided a loose coherence that radiated power in all directions across the Plains.
Notes Chapter 2
1. The last are a single tribe, but differentiated by one branch’s substitution of the letter “D” for “L”; these were also known as Tetons, which translates roughly as “Allies.” This is only a dialectical difference, not a political one. Various Sioux political subdivisions are split to this day over the pronunciation of “Lakota,” “Dakota,” and “Nakota,” but they all consider themselves part of the same tribe. For the purpose of narrative cohesion, we will refer to the Oglalas, Brules, Hunk papas, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Blackfeet Sioux —not to be confused with the Blackfeet mountain tribe—as “Lakota.”
2. The Siouan word Oglala roughly translates as “scattered peoples” or “divided peoples.” The name Brule— from brûlé, meaning burnt in French— was probably bestowed on the group by late-seventeenth-century fur traders mistranslating “burnt thighs” from Siouan dialect, although some linguists give the literal meaning of the word as “stinky feet.”
3. The Sans Arcs were said to have acquired their name after following the order of one of their hermaphrodite priests to lay aside their bows and arrows while he performed a sacred ceremony. In the middle of this rite enemies attacked, routing the weaponless tribe.
A Sioux brave would wager his last breath against the most courageous adversaries, and no matter the outcome, he won. A good death did honor to an entire life, and thus on the battlefield and afterward he was an exhibitionist with no sense of modesty. When he took a scalp, hacked off a hand, gouged out an eye, or severed a penis, he screamed at the top of his lungs to proclaim his own greatness. Later, when he handed the scalp to his woman, she too sang his glory while dancing with the bloody skull piece suspended from a pole.
Such behavior was alien enough to baffle seventeenth century Europeans. Whites observed a tribe that hunted and grubbed for a living with flint arrows and stone tools and exhibited no artistic tendencies other than painting their bodies and faces with hideous designs in preparation for battle. The Sioux did not weave baskets or fabrics, bake pottery, or make jewelry. They disdained farming and constructed no permanent lodges. And with no pack animals available on the continent—unlike the horse, mule, camel, or ox, the buffalo could not be bred to be harnessed or yoked— Native American animal husbandry had lagged about four millennia behind the rest of the world. Also, as other tribes took their first, tentative steps into modernity, this cultural leap seemed impossible for the hunter-gatherer Sioux. Had some of their historical contemporaries—the imperious Aztecs, the sophisticated Cherokee, the politically savvy Iroquois— been aware of their existence, they would probably have considered the Sioux laughable or subhuman. But the Sioux could fight, and the fires of their blood-feud memories were banked and stoked until the day they died.
The Sioux, like all American Indians, are descendents of Asian nomads who crossed the thousand mile Bering Land Bridge in various migrations between 16,500 and 5,000 BC. There is archaeological evidence to suggest that the first pre- Columbian peoples to strike south from Beringia and into what is now the great, grassy, Northern Plains of the United States did so about 12,000 years ago, trailing and stalking the migratory routes of the great herds of mastodons, woolly mammoths, and a giant form of bison that had gone extinct by the time the Europeans arrived. These hunters, who devised their first bows and arrows around the time Jesus was preaching in Judea, rapidly spread east and west to the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, through Central America, and across the Isthmus of Panama. Linguists hypothesize that the wandering proto-Sioux bands originated somewhere in the southeastern United States, perhaps in the Carolinas or near the Gulf of Mexico.
By the 1500s the Sioux were again on the move, pushing up the Mississippi River Valley and settling near the river’s headwaters in the forests of northern Minnesota. At the time, as today, the region was laced by a network of intersecting streams, marshes, and lakes, and the development of the birch bark canoe allowed separate bands not only to gather and consume wild rice from still waters, but to stake out individual territories.
Theirs was a patriarchal society with tribal affiliation passed from father to son, a simple solution for men fathering children with multiple wives from different bands. Leaders—called “Head Men” and “Big Bellies”—were for the most part chosen on merit. In some cases a chief would create an inside track for his favorite son, but even then the inheritor would have to earn the band’s loyalty on the strength of his wisdom, his personality, and above all his martial ability. And if an ordinary brave was not pleased with a new chief, he had the option of persuading any followers to strike out with him and form a new band with himself as Head Man.
Perhaps influenced by the seven stars of the Big Dipper —the “Carrier” that conveyed the souls of the dead to the Milky Way, which the Sioux called the “Road of the Spirits”—the tribe attributed mystical qualities to the number seven. It was the hostile Chippewa who dubbed these peoples “Sioux, ” or “Little Snakes.” The Sioux referred to themselves as Otchenti Chakowin, the “People of the Seven Council Fires, ” those tribes being the Sissetons, Yanktons, Yanktonais, Santees, Leaf Santees, Blewakantonwans, and Lakota/Dakotas. 1 Each tribe in turn usually consisted of seven bands, and with minor dialectical differences they all spoke the same language. The seven council fires thus served to validate the cohesion of the peoples as a single, united nation.
Early New France officials and traders valued the North American Indians’ hides and pelts, and pursued a social policy of benign neglect toward the tribes. Though the Europeans would occasionally attempt to agitate the Indians as a buffer against probes from the nascent Spanish empire far to the southwest, for the most part they left the “nations” to their own political and military customs. As a result, for over a century the savage Sioux generally had their way with their Algonquin neighbors. That balance of power shifted abruptly around 1660, when English trading ships sailed into Hudson Bay offering muzzle-loading, smoothbore flintlock muskets and steel knives in exchange for furs. The bay bordered the homeland of the Cree, an Algonquin people, and they were the first Native Americans to obtain this new weaponry. The journals of British sailors record great numbers of Cree paddling out to their flotillas in canoes piled high with furs and skins; the braves returned to the Cree villages bearing crates of guns, powder, and ball.
With the aid of their Algonquin cousins the Chippewa as well as a renegade band of Sioux called the Assiniboines, the newly armed Cree took bloody revenge on the People of the Seven Council Fires, who had terrorized them for generations. They drove the Sioux from their forested hunting grounds into swampy wastelands, where they could only grub for acorns, roots, and edible plants. And still the Algonquins hunted them like small game. The Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who was knighted for being the first man to traverse Canada to the Pacific Ocean, remarked that these forlorn Sioux were so skittish that the mere sight of strange spires of campfire smoke would drive them deeper into the swamps and marshes.
As best historians, ethnologists, and paleoanthropologists can tell, the Indians who would eventually become known as the Western Sioux split from their woodland eastern cousins sometime around 1700. These breakaway tribes subsequently splintered into many smaller bands as they conquered or subjugated a host of peoples during their migration west by southwest onto the buffalo ranges. Of course, the Sioux were not alone in these territorial shifts; the European invasion and subsequent expansion sparked chain-reaction movements all over the continent, and tribal borders were in a state of flux. A few years earlier the powerful Iroquois had overrun the Ohio Valley and did much the same, first to the Hurons and then to the Eries, driving them farther and farther west. And, now, tribe by tribe, the Algonquins with their modern weapons were in turn forcing the Sioux out of their fetid marshlands and onto the tallgrass prairies west of the Mississippi. French trappers and voyageurs were virtually the only chroniclers of these great migratory shifts, and they recorded that the Yanktonais tribe of Sioux moved west first, followed by the Lakota faction of the Tetons, who were in turn trailed by the Yanktons.
By the early eighteenth century the People of the Seven Council Fires found themselves far to the west and south of their old hunting grounds, and it was here, at the elbow bend of the Minnesota River in southwestern Minnesota, where the watercourse makes a hard northeast turn toward the Mississippi, that a further fragmentation of these tribes took place. As each tribe reached this crucial geographic boundary the same scene was played out. After council parleys that invariably led to squabbles, the elder, more conservative tribal leaders opted to follow the Minnesota River northwest to its headwaters, keeping to the more forested country. Younger clans, meanwhile, forded the river and plunged into the prairie, which seemed endless but eventually rose to the Black Hills and, beyond, the Rockies. Thus was born the Western Sioux nation.
Modern Americans living in an irrigated and fertilized West would find it difficult to visualize the stark contrast in the early eighteenth century between the green, forested land and what lay beyond when it more or less ceased to exist around the ninety-fifth meridian west—a line running a roughly southerly course from modern-day Minneapolis to San Antonio. The sere, harsh, timberless prairie that stretched westward from that line was as great a barrier as any ocean. Even the grass bending and rising uniformly with the wind gave an impression of waves rolling in from the sea. The country was bisected in places by lonely rivers and creeks, but it had almost no natural lakes and even fewer aquifers, so the land was prone to vast dust storms in summer and blizzards beyond the imagination of most easterners in winter. The decision to venture into this emptiness called for either extreme courage or supreme foolhardiness. The Sioux had ample streaks of both.
Not long after the Lakota group opted to ford the Minnesota, it fractured naturally into the seemingly requisite seven factions, led by the pioneering Brules and Oglalas, 2 the tribe in which Red Cloud would be raised. At around the same time, English traders from the Hudson’s Bay Company were also migrating south to the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, near modern-day Saint Paul. There, beginning in the eighteenth century, they began holding annual trade fairs. This nascent commerce was the start of a cultural entanglement that through disease and alcohol would kill more Plains Indians than all the battles with whites combined. It was also at these fairs that Western Sioux bearing buffalo robes for trade finally began to arm themselves with guns and steel knives. A familiar pattern repeated itself as they moved onto the prairie. Just as the Chippewa and the Cree had pushed the Sioux west, so the Sioux with their muskets would defeat or shoulder aside each successive Plains tribe with which they came into contact.
Though the Sioux were to become its most vicious practitioners, warfare among Indians was simply a way of life. Nearly every tribe called itself “The People” and harbored deep suspicion and hatred toward outsiders with whom it competed for game and plunders. Death arrived swiftly and often in the violent thrust and parry of aggression and defense, abetted by a culture that revolved around a quest to avenge insults and injuries real and perceived. Yet it was rare for Indians to set out to conquer a territory in the European sense of the idea. The Sioux were that rarity, and as they spread west a northern branch of the Cheyenne was the first to fall. These Cheyenne, having been similarly mauled by armed Cree to their north, packed up and walked west across the Missouri River. This Sioux triumph was followed in rapid succession by the defeat of the weak Iowas and Otoes. Both of these farming tribes retreated farther west in hopes of allying with the more numerous Omaha, who occupied the territory south of the Great Bend of the Missouri. But the Omaha, like the Cheyenne, Otoes, and Iowas before them, lacked firearms. The Sioux slaughtered them at every turn. The survivors of all three tribes fled into the eastern Missouri floodplain, with the savvy Otoes crossing the river to decamp in southern Nebraska.
Precisely how many years or decades it took the various bands of Western Sioux to reach the Missouri, and in what order they did so, is lost to history. What is known is that before the arrival of the white man, all Eastern Sioux tribes had conducted annual summer hunting parties across the Minnesota River to track the buffalo through the tall grass around what today is the Minnesota–South Dakota border. By 1725, however, these lands were largely denuded of game; this suggests that it was the relocated Western Sioux who had scoured them clean. Further, sometime in the late 1720s or early 1730s reports from French explorers and trappers indicated that the Iowas, Otoes, and Omaha were again on the move, retreating north from their fixed locations in the fertile bottomland of Nebraska and moving up into the inhospitable wastes of the northern Dakota Territory. Although the reason for this migration is unclear, historians reasonably speculate that once again they were fleeing the Western Sioux.
By the mid-eighteenth century the Oglala and Brule bands of Lakota had tracked the buffalo herds up onto the windswept flatiron plateau that the French called the Coteau des Prairies. This 100- by-200-mile pipestone escarpment, carved by retreating glaciers and rising gradually to 900 feet, is sharply defined on modern satellite imaging maps. Shaped like an arrowhead pointing north, it fans south from North Dakota through South Dakota, through Minnesota, and into northern Iowa. As the Sioux were still without horses, they transported their smallish lodgepoles and tepee skins across these rocky highlands on the backs of their dogs, women, and children— including girls as young as six or seven. Progress was naturally slow, perhaps five to six miles a day, and their westward movement was delayed even more by the annual trek from the treeless Plains back to their old territory to acquire more weapons and ammunition at the English trade fairs, which by now had moved to the wooded headwaters of the Minnesota River.
Even as the bloody French and Indian War raged along the Atlantic seaboard, the Western Sioux returned to these fairs for guns, allowing the seven Lakota bands to exchange goods and news with their eastern kinsmen. Intermarriage was common among the tribes and bands, as was the baffling swiftness with which each group might change its name. (Thus the people Lewis and Clark chronicled in their journals as the Teton Saone—most likely a collective name bestowed on all Lakota who lagged behind their westward driving cousins—turn up as the Hunk Papas two decades later.) Most modern historians, for clarity’s sake, have settled on the seven Lakota bands that we noted earlier: the Oglalas, Brules, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, 3 Two Kettles, Hunk papas, and Blackfoot-Sioux. It was also around this time that the Lakota had their first encounter with Indians who owned horses, the Arikara.
The Sioux were certainly aware of the existence of the horse. Although they had no formal written tradition, since at least the early seventeenth century various bands had kept and passed down pictographic “Winter Counts,” a sort of snapshot chronicle of the most important events of any given year—eclipses, raids, droughts—etched into a deerskin or buffalo hide. The Lakota Winter Count of 1624 included a rough outline of the mustang that had been introduced to the western hemisphere by the Spanish a century earlier. But the Arikara, or Rees, were the first people the Sioux had ever seen incorporate the animal into their culture.
The Arikara were a semiagricultural people who lived in fixed villages of earth lodges strung like beads along the Upper Missouri near present-day Pierre, South Dakota. Their compounds were fortified by wide ditches, earthen walls, and in some cases even cedar log stockades. And despite the haughty Sioux’s disdain for these “dirt eaters, ” they were a hardy tribe known to ride their tough little ponies on buffalo hunts as far west as the Black Hills, an island of trees in a sea of grass 135 miles away. The Arikara had probably acquired their mounts, as well as some Spanish-made saber blades, in trade with the southern Kiowa, who prized the corn, squash, and beans of the Arikara. And though the Sioux coveted their horses, the Rees had numbers on their side. Their total population of perhaps 20,000, including 4,000 warriors, was nearly double that of all the wandering bands of Lakota put together.
Apparently sensing that they had nothing to fear from these emaciated newcomers from the east adrift on the High Plains, the Arikara initially took pity on the Lakota. After all, the Arikara had horses with which to not only ride down buffalo, but also overwhelm slow, pedestrian enemies. They also had attached the Spanish steel blades to the tips of their heavy, fourteen-foot buffalo lances, so no mangy band of itinerants on foot was any match for them. This overconfidence led them to accept some Brules and Oglalas into their villages and, in effect, provide them with handouts of corn, dried pumpkins, and even a few old horses. This was a mistake.
Despite their strong mounts and steel, the Arikara did not have guns. And though their settlements were too well fortified for the Lakotas to storm, raiding parties of 20 to 100 Sioux began roaming around the edges of their villages, burning their cornfields, and running down and scalping any Rees who ventured beyond the walls and moats. The Sioux also managed to steal a few horses. In the end, however, it was smallpox that doomed the Arikara. Three great epidemics, caused by tainted European blankets, swept through their settlements in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The tribe was so severely weakened that by 1795 even its fortified villages afforded little safety against the marauding Sioux. What was left of the broken tribe fled north, abandoning the Missouri watershed below the river’s Great Bend, virtually beckoning someone to claim the land. The peoples soon to be known as Red Cloud’s Sioux, who to this point, culturally, continued to have at least one foot in Minnesota, happily complied.
In the second half of the eighteenth century sketchy reports began reaching English traders on the Missouri about a tectonic shift in the balance of power on the prairie. The little information we have about this period comes almost exclusively from the Lakota Winter Counts, which allow various interpretations at best, and only wild guesses at worst. In this case they do not help much. It remains a mystery, for example, why the formerly forest-dwelling Oglalas apparently preferred to keep as their base the scrubby country in present day South Dakota near the brackish water of the aptly named Bad River. Early French trappers, the first whites to set eyes on this landscape, aptly christened it Mauvaises Terres. The Sioux agreed, naming it mako sica, “land bad, ” and one wonders what went through their minds as they traversed the most desolate, and weirdest, geographic formation in the United States.
To call the Badlands a moonscape does an injustice to the moon. Situated in southwestern South Dakota, some forty-five miles due east of present-day Rapid City, this stark, treeless mashup of slate-gray gullies, buttes, canyons, plateaus, and towering hoodoos was once the westernmost bed of North America’s Great Inland Sea, a shallow body of water that connected the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico 65 million to 80 million years ago and split the continent roughly in half. Millions of years later a dome of molten rock ruptured the earth’s crust on the western edge of this sea and gave rise, first, to the towering granite outcroppings of the Rockies and, later, to the Black Hills. The land to the east of these mountain ranges crumpled and folded in on itself in a chain reaction, and the Inland Sea drained.
Rivers and creeks streaming out of the mountains spread mud, gravel, and sand across the Badlands, which was transformed over millennia from a lush, semitropical ecosystem into a dry geological wasteland. Northern winds and diminished rainfall combined with frost and flash floods to further erode the soft, sedimentary rock and volcanic ash, leaving exposed in the sharp ridges and nobs the fossil remains of the Inland Sea’s eerie creatures— proto alligators, giant sharks, and predatory marine reptiles such as the toothy mosasaur, which grew up to fifty feet long. What the Sioux made of the petrified bones of these fantastical creatures littering the dynamic sweep and complications of the landscape no one knows.
The “Badlands Wall, ” which runs sixty miles on a rough east-west line, delineates the upper and the lower prairie, and to the naked eye this harsh vista would appear to offer nothing but misery and slow death to any human foolish enough to enter. But the Sioux were no ordinary people. They were quick to recognize that the sixty or more varieties of mixed short grasses growing on the eastern rim of the Badlands were prime fodder for buffalo, antelope, and mule deer (as well as for the millions of prairie dogs that in turn provided food for wolves, foxes, rattlesnakes, coyotes, black-footed ferrets, hawks, and eagles). And though bighorn sheep weighing up to forty pounds would be hunted to extermination there by the mid-1920s (they were reintroduced into Badlands National Park in 1964), these food sources would have been plentiful enough for the Oglalas, who now thought of themselves as a sovereign tribe.
Before they acquired horses, the Oglalas took advantage of the Badlands’ topography by posting scouts on its high, eerie rock spires to spot buffalo herds drifting like a dark cloud’s shadow across the prairie below. As the animals’ eyesight was poor, a herd could be approached carefully and quietly from downwind, and on a signal from these lookouts a hunting party would form a semicircle behind the buffalo and, whooping and waving blankets, stampede them over a cliff like a stream of water. The men would then sing the buffalo song as the entire band made camp next to the pile of dead and dying creatures. As every American schoolchild has since come to learn, no part of the dead beast was wasted.
Religious ceremonies were attached to the butchering of each section of the animal, from the skull to the pancreas; and the fatty meat was divided out, usually in accordance with tribal seniority. The savory tongue and liver—sliced warm from the writhing buffalo and flavored with bile dripped from the gallbladder—were awarded to the bravest hunters, and the tanned hides that were not set aside for robes were sewn into buckskins, leggings, and moccasins (and, later, tack and saddles). The horns were used to carry crushed herbal medicines, and the bones were fashioned into tools ranging from sewing needles to war clubs. The coarse, matted hair was twisted into ropes; the bladders were set aside for water storage; the sinews were made into bowstrings; and the inch thick skin on the side of the buffalo’s neck was set out to bake in the sun before being cut into shields that could stop an arrow and deflect a musket ball. At night, the band would roast a portion of the succulent marrow over fires fueled by bricks of dried buffalo dung, the smoke of which seasoned the meal with a bitter tang. The leaner meat was mixed with marrow grease and seeded chokecherries and pounded into a nutritious concoction called pemmican, a staple of western Indians.
Back east the buffalo was best known for providing the tens of thousands of lap robes that warmed New Englanders and Midwesterners through sleety winters. The tanning process that created these blankets—always performed by women, who sang their own buffalo song—was backbreaking. First the stinking hides were pinned taut to the ground and thoroughly scraped with flint knives or elk’s antlers to remove the flesh. Then a mixture of jellied buffalo brains and liver was rubbed into the fleshy side until it penetrated the pores. After being left for several days to dry in the sun, the hides were carried to a nearby river or stream and washed until somewhat pliable. They were then tied to poles with rawhide thongs and stretched taut again. Any stray fleck of meat still attached was eliminated by an elk antler or a fleshing flint, and more jellied buffalo brains were rubbed in. After several days, when the gooey brains had been sufficiently absorbed, women or girls would grab either end of the hide and draw it back and forth around a small tree for hours, as if operating a large two-person saw. When the end product was soft enough to fold, it was a buffalo robe.
The historian Royal Brown Hassrick does not exaggerate when he notes in his classic study, The Sioux, that once the Lakota moved out of the forests and into the heart of the great northern buffalo range, “their way of life burst into magnificence.” And for a brief period in early spring the earth around their camps near the Badlands exploded in a glorious green, and the air was perfumed with clusters of blooming elephant head, larkspur, and wild crocus that lent a magenta-streaked patina to the new buds of dog ash, cottonwood, and river willow sprouting along streambeds roaring with clean, cold snowmelt.
But the vibrant display was short-lived. By late May streams and creeks were already drying into mud wallows, and the plant life had withered to a dingy brown that provided excellent kindling for the ubiquitous prairie fires ignited by lightning strikes. Yet the Sioux even learned to use this to their advantage. The succession of fires that swept the area left large swaths of the land covered in ash. The Oglalas welcomed these fast- moving walls of flame that danced into and out of sandstone arroyos and consumed the grassy bases of sand hills. The drought resistant native grasses had roots that grew as deep as twenty-four inches, holding them steady in the soil and allowing for rapid regrowth. Within a few days tender green shoots would push up through the blackened wasteland to attract packs of hungry animals. These included herds of the perpetually astonished looking pronghorn antelope, the Lakota meat of preference after buffalo. Though these antelope could run at nearly fifty miles per hour and were the fastest animals on the North American continent, they were surprisingly easy to hunt. The Indians would merely cut armfuls of sagebrush, hold the branches before their chests and faces, and slowly walk to within arrow distance before loosing their volleys. Perhaps this accounted for the animals’ apparent astonishment.
The Oglalas’ chosen territory may have been high, dry, and windswept—they mocked their Brule cousins as Kutawichasha, or soft and indolent “Lowland Folk” who lingered in the more hospitable south—but it provided them with what they needed to fill their bellies and to keep warm in winter. This, in turn, allowed them the luxury of more time to form raiding parties that prowled the prairie in every direction until the “savage” Sioux became known, and feared, across the High Plains. All this fighting, however, was merely a prelude to one overarching aim—control of the isolated, 6,000-square mile mountain range rising to the west like a giant green fortress, known to all as the Black Hills.
3
THE
BLACK
HILLS AND
BEYOND
Today on the Pine Ridge
Indian Reservation the
descendants of Red Cloud tell
a story, probably apocryphal
but powerful and perhaps
steeped in some greater truth.
It is about a chance meeting
in Washington between a
resentful Red Cloud and an
Army officer who had served
on the frontier. Red Cloud, by
then a great Lakota Chief,
had already driven the
Bluecoats from Sioux
territory, burned their forts,
and secured the Black Hills
for his people. He had then
been persuaded, in 1870, to
travel to Washington, where
he assumed he would arrive
as a dignitary. But the U.S.
government had an ulterior
motive.With the Montana mines nearly played out, old rumors of gold in the Black Hills had begun to simmer again, like water coming to a boil. As far back as 1823 the Bible thumping mountain man Jedediah Smith had reported great veins of gold running through the hills, but Smith was killed by Comanche on the Cimarron soon afterward, and no one was certain exactly where he had seen the ore. Given the size of the range, any exploratory expedition to discover America’s next great strike would have to be fairly large —large enough to attract the Indians’ notice. The politicians and generals hoped that on the long journey east Red Cloud would be intimidated by the size, strength, and modernity of the nation. They wanted him to think twice before fomenting a second war over any white intrusion into his territory.
As the tale goes, one evening Red Cloud attended a White House reception given by President Ulysses S. Grant, and found himself in conversation with the bitter officer. Trying to explain the mystical hold that Paha Sapa had on his people, he told the officer, “My ancestors’ bones lie in the Black Hills.”
“Horseshit, ” the officer replied. “Your people have been there no more than a couple of generations. They come from Minnesota, and you were born in Nebraska. You took that land from the Crows. And do you know why you took that land from the Crows? Because you could.
“And do you know why we will take that land from you? Because we can.”
It is said that years later, as an old man, Red Cloud recounted this exchange to his lifelong campfire companion Sam Deon, a white trapper and trader who became the conduit through which the great chief told his life story. What the officer would never have been able to understand, Red Cloud told Deon, was how in the time before time began, the goddess Ite, the mother of the four winds in Sioux myth, conspired with the trickster god Inktomi to create the “Buffalo nation” of Siouan peoples. Together these deities delivered the Sioux nation up from a subterranean netherworld and onto the surface of an earth teeming with game. And what portal did the gods choose for this deliverance? The mystical “breathing” Wind Cave of the Black Hills. This, Red Cloud said, was the reason why the Sioux revere the mountain range.
In reality the Wind Cave of the Black Hills is a 132- mile series of honeycombed underground tunnels composed of thin, calcite fins —one of the longest caverns in the world. Because of its deep passageways and the smallness of its only mouth, the Wind Cave reacts inversely to outside air pressures. Thus it seems to “exhale” when the outside air pressure is low, and to “inhale” when the pressure is high. Red Cloud and his people believed that the ancient gods delivered their ancestors from this cave. Today, standing before the cavern’s eight-by-ten-foot entrance, one still gets the sense that the cave is alive and “breathing.” And though no one will ever know for certain who was the first Sioux to “discover” the Black Hills, the Oglala Winter Count of 1775–76 depicts a Head Man named Standing Bull feeling the breath of the Wind Cave the summer before America’s Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.
★ ★ ★
By the late 1700s the Lakota,
led by the Oglalas and Brules,
had pushed farther and farther
west across the South Dakota
prairie. As the tall grass
shortened to sparse sedge and
greasewood and finally
disappeared altogether across
tracts like the Badlands, the
lush slopes of the Black Hills
swelling on the western
horizon must have indeed
appeared a godsend. It was
also around this time that the
pioneering Oglalas and
Brules ceased their annual
treks back to Minnesota to
exchange robes and hides for
weapons. Sensing a captive
and untapped market, British
merchants—now
outnumbering the French on
the North American continent
by four to one—established a
new location for the annual
trade fair on the Great Bend
of the Missouri near its
confluence with the James
River.When not fighting rival tribes, the Lakota became, in a sense, middlemen between the English traders to the northeast and the Plains Indians to the west and south. They were careful to restrict the flow of bartered goods to the white man’s foods and his ribbons, his blankets and glass beads, while keeping for themselves his flintlocks, ammunition, and steel knives as well as iron kettles, which could be broken apart to make arrowheads. Whenever possible the Lakota bundled the European goods to exchange with the horse tribes for mustangs, the most prized commodity on the Plains. But by now their warlike reputation preceded them, and their rivals were not naive. The animals remained hard to come by. So despite their steady accumulation of arms, the Sioux were still on foot: slow, plodding travelers, lugging whatever belongings their women, children, and dog travois could carry. And then, seemingly out of the blue, they acquired their first pony herds.
Fossil remains attest to the presence of prehistoric proto horses on the North American prairie until the end of the Pleistocene epoch, 10,000 years ago. The earliest of these animals had toes instead of hooves and were the size of foxes. Succeeding iterations grew as large as collies. But, like the much larger mammoths and camels that also once roamed the Plains, this animal went extinct, and it was not until the Spanish introduced the modern horse onto the continent in the early 1500s that the stone canyons of the western hemisphere again echoed with thundering hooves. Despite the images carved into our subconscious by Hollywood Westerns, all American Indians, from Inuit to Iroquois to Inca, went on foot before encountering Europeans. Moreover, by one of history’s chance quirks the breed introduced to the New World by the conquistadores was ideally suited to its new environment, and the Lakotas’ extraordinary knack for taming and breeding the animal was an epochal moment in the timeline of the tribe and the American West.
Unlike the hulking, grain fed steeds hitched to carts and plows across the middle and upper regions of Europe and ridden into battle from the Roncevaux Pass to Bosworth Field, the fleet Spanish mustang traced its lineage to animals that had once roamed the arid steppes of Central Asia. The breed took centuries to make its way to southern Europe via the Moorish invasions of Iberia, and along that journey it commingled with similar desert horses from the Middle East and North Africa to become a self-sufficient, intelligent animal quite at home in the dry, dusty climate of the Andalusian plain and, later, the North American West. The smallish mustang, usually no taller than five feet from hoof to shoulder, was easy to break and able to travel great distances without water. It prospered in the high, dry flatlands of Mexico, thriving on the spare clumps of grass, shrubs, and even weeds. It was also prolific. Within two decades of Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Montezuma and the Aztec empire in 1519, the governor of the Northwest Frontier territory in New Spain, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, rode north as far as Kansas in search of the “Seven Cities of Cíbola” with more than 1,000 horses— terrifying, alien creatures to the Indians.
The territory the Spanish conquered soon extended north from Mexico City through present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and California; and Coronado and the settlers of New Spain knew full well the spell their horses cast over the indigenous peoples whom they enslaved and converted by force. In the eyes of the Indians the horse endowed the European invaders with seemingly supernatural powers, and some tribes even believed that the mounted conquistadors were immortal. Given the inhumanity with which the colonial authorities treated their sullen Native subjects, the Spanish also recognized the consequences of allowing the Indians any modicum of freedom or self government—and most particularly any familiarity with horsemanship. Thus whenever a tribe did resist, retribution was swift. In 1595, to take just one example, a Spanish military expedition of seventy men dispatched to punish a restive band of Pueblos slaughtered 800 men, women, and children and took another 500 prisoners. The right foot was severed from every male captive over the age of twenty-five, and males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and females over the age of twenty were sentenced to slavery in the fields. It is little wonder the Indians lived in abject fear of the horse and its barbarous riders.
Meanwhile, although Coronado never found his “Seven Cities, ” along his trek north he met numerous American Plains Indians. His descriptions of these resourceful, dexterous peoples hint at his foreboding about their quite literal bloodthirstiness. Describing a buffalo hunt, Coronado wrote, “They cut the hide open at the back and pull it off at the joints, using a flint as large as a finger . . . with as much ease as if working with a good iron tool. They eat raw flesh and drink blood. When they kill a cow they empty a large gut and fill it with blood, and carry this around the neck to drink when they are thirsty. When they open the belly of a cow they squeeze out the chewed grass and drink the juice that remains behind because they say it contains the essence of the stomach.”
Should these hardy people ever acquire mounts, Coronado recognized, they would constitute New Spain’s greatest peril. Yet as hard as the Spanish tried, they could not completely fence off their proliferating stock. Southwestern Apache were the first to take advantage, running the animals off during raids on isolated rancheros and later capturing them at water holes and in box canyons. The Apache ate most of their catch, but they spared the strongest, equipping them with crude tack fashioned from buffalo hide and using them as transportation for more distant raids. The Apache never did learn to breed these partially broken mustangs; when they needed to replenish their herd they organized more raids. Now they were more mobile than any other tribe on the continent, and the radius and targets of their attacks expanded across the New Mexico territory. They fell hardest on their ancient enemies, the Pueblos.
The Pueblos had been forced more or less at gunpoint into a pact with the Spanish colonizers—in exchange for forced labor and desultory conversion to Catholicism, the Spanish would provide protection against the Apache. Once the Apache had horses, however, this proved an impossible commitment. Mounted raids on Pueblo communities increased, and before Spanish expeditions could be roused the Apache would vanish like ghosts into the frontier’s Rembrandt gloom. The Apache raids grew more frequent and vicious, and in 1680 the Pueblos finally rose, emboldened by desperation and by a charismatic medicine man named Juan de Popé.
The ensuing massacre was retaliation for a century of cruelty. The Pueblos plundered Spanish haciendas, demolished government buildings, and took particular joy in destroying convents and churches and killing Franciscan priests, twenty of whom were captured in a churchyard and tortured to death, their bodies dumped in the charred husk of their chapel. The few Spanish who survived abandoned their livestock on a disorganized flight south to El Paso or to Mexico itself. Once New Mexico was cleared, the shaman Popé ordered his people to renounce the language, the religion, and even the crops of the colonizers. The Pueblos tore up fields of barley and wheat and slaughtered and ate the Spanish sheep and cattle. Because they had never developed the Apache taste for horseflesh, they merely flung open the corrals and allowed thousands of mustangs to run free across the Southern Plains. This has come to be known as North America’s “Great Horse Dispersal, ” the seed of the transformation of the culture of the American West.
In the aftermath of this great escape, a combination of raiding and trading between tribes spread horse culture across the Plains. The Comanche, heretofore a primitive people barely scratching out an existence in the harsh Wind River country of west-central Wyoming, were drawn south to presentday West Texas by the lure of the wild herds. They were the first tribe to perfect horsebreeding techniques, including gelding, which had eluded the Apache. Soon the flow of horseflesh followed the ancient northerly trade routes. Within a century the Wichitas of Oklahoma were mounted; they were followed by the Kiowa of Kansas and the Pawnee of Nebraska. The Ute, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfeet, and Crows, and the tribes of the Canadian prairie, all acquired mustangs. As did the Sioux. Although the westernmost Lakota, the Oglalas and Brules, had been in possession of a few staggering, worm-eaten nags stolen from old enemies like the Arikara, no one can say at what precise moment they encountered their first herds of wild mustangs—the sungnuni glugluka. It was probably sometime between 1770 and 1785. The western Lakota bands took to these stout little animals with their sleek necks and concave faces like no other people on the Northern Plains.
The Arikara, driven high up on the Missouri and decimated by smallpox epidemics, tried to thwart the burgeoning Sioux by allying with the Mandan. The partnership came to naught, as the horseless Mandan were ridden down and slaughtered by the score while the Arikara remained huddled behind their battlements, subject to constant Sioux raids. The newly mounted Lakota, imbued with an “arrogance born of successful conquest, ” spread south and farther west, and by 1803 had cleared the Kiowa from their traditional hunting grounds around the Black Hills and forced them to abandon their Missouri River Valley trade routes. Their old nemesis the Omaha, who had resettled in present day northeastern Nebraska, had by now also obtained horses as well as guns from friendly Mississippi River tribes. Neither acquisition helped. When the Omaha tried to put up a fight, the Sioux crushed them.
The acquisition of horses did not alter the Sioux’s nomadic hunter-gatherer culture so much as extend it, changing the dynamics of America’s Northern Plains much as the invention of the stirrup had turned yurt dwelling Mongols into the bloody scourge of Eurasia. The Cheyenne, who occupied land close to the Black Hills, have a traditional narrative, according to which the first Sioux they ever encountered were a greasy, lice-ridden band who arrived at one of their summer camps on foot, begging for food. This changed dramatically with the appearance of the wild herds. And besides naturally adding to the tribe’s wealth and power, it also subtly affected ancient customs. As packhorses could pull much larger travois than dogs, for instance, the size of the Lakota elk-skin lodges doubled. And with greater contact with conquered tribes came the concept of decoration. Oglala and Brule wives and daughters began to adorn formerly bare tepees with pictures of the sun, moon, stars, buffalo, and of course horses, using pigments made from blood, sap, ground roots, dead insects, and urine. In recognition of the horse’s transformation of their lifestyle Lakota braves even adopted a custom of dignified death for certain prized animals, letting older horses loose in secluded pastures to die instead of slaughtering them for food.
What would not be altered, however, was the tribe’s all consuming lust for battle honors. Some historians argue that the Great Horse Dispersal actually stunted Sioux society by preventing the tribe’s progression into the “civilized” pursuit of agriculture, hierarchical organization, and social diversification. In other words, the arrival of the horse amplified the Stone Age culture of the Lakota. Now, dazzling Sioux war parties riding painted mounts rapidly and overwhelmingly extended their savage and relentless subjugation of neighboring tribes. Moreover, even when a Lakota rider was ambushed or outnumbered, the horse afforded a swift, heretofore unimaginable means of escape. And there was no better hiding place than in the folds and crevasses of the sacred Black Hills.
🔺 🔺 🔺
The Oglala writer Luther
Standing Bear once described
the Black Hills as “a reclining
female figure from whose
breasts flowed life-giving
forces, and to them the
Lakota went as a child as to
its mother’s arms.” The
Crows and Cheyenne had
temporarily blocked the route
to this earth mother. That
began to change in the late
1700s. The Oglala Winter
Count of 1785–86 depicts the
defeat of a large Crow party
in a great battle. It was the
beginning of the end for the
Crows, who for years
afterward could mount only a
rearguard action as they
retreated farther and farther north west into the Rockies.
Around the same time a
combined Oglala-Brule force
swept down on a Cheyenne
camp south of the Black Hills
to avenge a warrior killed in a
horse raid. They massacred
many Cheyenne and captured
the settlement’s tepees,
weapons, and horses.
Thereafter the Oglalas, the
Brules, and even the
Miniconjous, another Lakota
tribe that had by this time
forded the Missouri, all
welcomed the Cheyenne as
subordinate allies.It is difficult to explain what inspired the Western Sioux with such undying hatred for certain tribes, such as the Crows, Pawnee, and Kiowa, while at the same time they made tentative peace with others, such as the Cheyenne. Yet the Lakota seemed to tolerate the tall, stately Cheyenne more than any others despite the fact that the Cheyenne were distant cousins of the same Algonquins who had driven the Lakota out of Minnesota. One likely reason for this friendship was that, like the Lakota, the Cheyenne were fiercely opposed to white emigration. Another, and perhaps more important, reason was their access to horses through a long tradition of trading with tribes to the south, which the Sioux considered enemies. In any case, after a flurry of brutal early battles, the Sioux and Cheyenne settled into a partnership that would continue over the next century.
Meanwhile, as more of the Minnesota Sioux bands and tribes were drawn onto the Great Plains in the early 1800s by the estimated 60 million buffalo migrating across the prairie—more than eleven times the number of people living in the United States, according to the 1800 census—the Oglalas and Brules continued to lead the march west, their advance scouts sending back word of the rolling paradise of rivers and abundant game that lay on the other side of the Black Hills. According to the Winter Count of 1801, a combined Oglala-Brule raiding party that ventured to the head of the Powder River was set upon by the Crows, who in one of their rare victories killed thirty Sioux braves. Some historians believe that it was around this time that the Sioux collectively decided to abandon the arid, broken land east of the Black Hills and to make their home among the thick grasses and game herds of the Powder River Country of Wyoming and Nebraska.
This would take some effort. Although thoroughly outgunned, the Crows were richer in horses than the Sioux—a Crow brave was considered poor if he owned fewer than twenty horses, while a Lakota Head Man was considered wealthy if he owned thirty—and Crows were known to be capable of riding forty miles nonstop in twenty-four hours, thus perfecting the art of escape even while carrying captives. In fact, of all the Indians on the Plains, the Crows and their cousins the Gros Ventres were the only tribes who did not routinely torture and kill women and children prisoners. Infant mortality, high among all Plains Indians, was particularly severe among these rugged mountain tribes, and with their population constantly in jeopardy, they made a habit of marrying their female prisoners and adopting the children. Crow warriors, as tall as the Cheyenne, also had a physical trait that distinguishes them from just about every other tribe in the West, if not the continent. Given their diet, lifestyle, and, at best, casual hygiene, most adult Indians had teeth like a crazy fence. Contemporaneous accounts, however, describe the Crows’ teeth as invariably straight, gleaming white, and remaining intact in their mouths into old age.
And while the Sioux were to eventually push these finedentured people higher into the forested crags of the Bighorns and beyond, the Crows were also blessed, or cursed, with memories as long as the Sioux’s. Crow fathers passed on to sons a burning hatred of the Sioux (as well as their toadies the Cheyenne), while Sioux fathers instructed their sons in the most excruciating tortures, to be reserved for Crow enemies. A favorite was not only to gouge out a Crow’s eyes and hack off his ears, arms, feet, and penis, but also to punch a hole in his bladder and urinate or defecate into it.
Indian torture rituals, as inconceivable as they were to most whites, did have a purpose beyond inflicting excruciating pain. The majority of tribes believed that all humans went to the same idyllic afterlife in the exact physical condition in which they had died. This breathtaking arcadia, bursting with ponies and game and populated by unlimited comely maidens, was a literal Happy Hunting Ground. But if the ghostly warrior had no eyes or tongue with which to see this paradise and taste its fatty meat, if he had no feet with which to chase the game, no hands with which to draw back a bowstring, no genitalia with which to satisfy his carnal desires, then one man’s heaven had become another’s hell. This belief was universally accepted among the tribes, although the even more cruel atrocities exchanged between Sioux and Crow were purely malicious.
For all the wonders of such an afterlife, however, both the Lakota and the Crows recognized that on this earth their continual battles came down to the acquisition and defense of the most desirable hunting grounds. And as much as the Western Sioux hungered for the Crows’ Powder River Country, by the turn of the nineteenth century they were not yet strong enough to take it and hold it. Instead they consolidated in the territory on the buffalo feeding grounds to the east of the Black Hills across present day South Dakota to such an extent that when Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark led an expedition that ascended the Missouri in the fall of 1804, the American explorers were amazed to find that so few Sioux had managed to amass such vast power and prestige.
Following a parley with the Oglalas on the Bad River, the Americans recorded in their journals that the entire tribe totaled sixty lodges containing 360 people, 120 of them warriors led by a chief named Stabber. Granted, not all seven of the Oglala bands may have been camped together, and to this day some historians dispute Lewis and Clark’s census, finding it difficult to fathom how such a minuscule armed force could have routed the more numerous Arikara, Kiowa, Omaha, and lesser tribes while simultaneously enfolding the defeated Cheyenne into its orbit. The key word is “armed.” The Sioux had the most, the best, and in some cases the only guns in any fight. And though the disparate Sioux bands and tribes operated as politically distinct entities, their shared language, myths, and culture provided a loose coherence that radiated power in all directions across the Plains.
To this point the Western
Sioux’s contact with whites
had been limited to annual
swap meets on the Missouri
and occasional visits from
mountain men. But following
the War of 1812, French
traders began to reassert
themselves along the Big
Muddy, establishing
permanent posts on its Great
Bend to barter with the
Arikara and Mandan. The
Lakota occasionally lingered
along the river after the
trading season to ambush
French keelboats, and in the
summer of 1807 a group of
Oglalas fired on a small U.S.
Army unit escorting home a
Mandan chief who had
accompanied Lewis and
Clark to Washington. During
the shoot-out an Oglala Head
Man named Red Shirt was
killed by an American ensign.
Red Shirt could very well
have been the first Sioux to
die at the hands of a U.S.
soldier. He would be far from
the last.
🔺 🔺 🔺
Sometime in 1815 another
momentous opportunity fell
to the Lakota when the
Cheyenne invited them to an
annual horse-trading meet
held on the North Platte in
Nebraska, just south of the
Wyoming border. The
Cheyenne had been attending
these all-Indian exchanges for
decades, to acquire not only
mustangs but Spanish swords,
knives, and bits of
conquistador breastplates and
helmets from Comanche,
Kiowa, Arapaho, and Plains
Apache up from the Red
River. But this was the
Sioux’s first venture into the
verdant North Platte territory.
The visit did not go as
peacefully as the Cheyenne
had hoped—a Brule brave
split open a Kiowa’s skull
with his war club,
precipitating an all-out battle.
But the Lakota liked what
they saw of the country.
When the Lakota liked what
they saw of a country, it was
not a good omen for the
inhabitants.
At this time the Northern
Plains contained several
neutral zones that separated
the major hostile tribes from
one another. These areas had
no fixed boundaries and were
subject to continual mutations
as the fortunes of war ebbed
and flowed. Four of them
related to the Western Sioux
—the Yellowstone drainage
of the Powder and Rosebud
Rivers to the northwest, a
loose demilitarized zone
against the Crows; the
western Laramie Plains that
kept the Ute at bay; the
Republican River country
along the Kansas-Nebraska
border contested by the
Kiowa; and the region
between the forks of the
South Platte and North Platte,
east of which resided the
Pawnee. All Indians trod
cautiously through these
territories, usually only in
heavily armed hunting or war
parties. So it was a sign of the
Sioux’s growing dominance
that by the spring of 1821 a
band of Brules were
confident enough to stake
camp on the stubby Nebraska
panhandle in the center of the
fourth neutral zone, not far
from the Colorado border
along a tributary of the North
Platte called Blue Water
Creek.
Among this band of Brules
was a brave called Lone Man,
whose Oglala wife, Walks As
She Thinks, was pregnant
with her first child. In early
May some of the Sioux
reported seeing a glowing red
meteor streak across the night
sky above their camp. Several
days later Walks As She
Thinks spread a brushed
deerskin blanket over a bed of
sand on the banks of Blue
Water Creek and gave birth to
her first son. When Lone Man
announced to the band that he
had named the boy after the
strange meteorological
occurrence in order to
appease the Great Spirit, the
Brules agreed that he had
done a wise thing. This is
how the child came to be
called Makhpiya-luta, or Red
Cloud.
next...“RED
CLOUD
COMES!”
Notes Chapter 2
1. The last are a single tribe, but differentiated by one branch’s substitution of the letter “D” for “L”; these were also known as Tetons, which translates roughly as “Allies.” This is only a dialectical difference, not a political one. Various Sioux political subdivisions are split to this day over the pronunciation of “Lakota,” “Dakota,” and “Nakota,” but they all consider themselves part of the same tribe. For the purpose of narrative cohesion, we will refer to the Oglalas, Brules, Hunk papas, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Blackfeet Sioux —not to be confused with the Blackfeet mountain tribe—as “Lakota.”
2. The Siouan word Oglala roughly translates as “scattered peoples” or “divided peoples.” The name Brule— from brûlé, meaning burnt in French— was probably bestowed on the group by late-seventeenth-century fur traders mistranslating “burnt thighs” from Siouan dialect, although some linguists give the literal meaning of the word as “stinky feet.”
3. The Sans Arcs were said to have acquired their name after following the order of one of their hermaphrodite priests to lay aside their bows and arrows while he performed a sacred ceremony. In the middle of this rite enemies attacked, routing the weaponless tribe.
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