Part 3:The Heart of Everything That Is...Red Cloud Comes....Counting Coup

The Heart of Everything That Is: 
The Untold Story of Red Cloud 
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin

 4 

 “RED CLOUD COMES!”

In the spring of 1825, four years after Red Cloud’s birth,Brigadier General Henry Atkinson led one of the earliest American military expeditions up the Missouri River. Atkinson, a decorated veteran of the War of 1812,departed St. Louis for the Yellowstone and was charged with securing treaties of “perpetual friendship” with as many of the Northern Plains tribes as possible. The 475 rifle-bearing soldiers from the1st and 6th U.S. Infantry Regiments who sailed with him were blunt reminders to the Indians of the consequences of failing to grasp the import of this friendship.

The Sioux, eyeing the gun barrels that lined the deck of Atkinson’s wheel boat, were no fools. When the general reached the Oglala camps in South Dakota they laid out a grand banquet of venison,antelope, and buffalo meat.Atkinson noted their extraordinary good health,and recorded the tribe’s number at nearly 1,500, a fourfold increase from Lewis and Clark’s estimate two decades earlier. This was probably an under count,given that not every member of each Oglala band was present. A population explosion of such magnitude over so brief a period could be credited to a miscount by Lewis and Clark. More likely it indicated the beneficial influence of the horse. Not only had horses allowed the Indians to range farther after game to prevent winter shortfalls and ward off famine and nutritional diseases, but the pack horses had taken on the physical burdens that previously stunted or damaged the ovaries and wombs of women and girls of childbearing age.In addition, being able to act on their bold wanderlust had allowed them to avoid diseases such as smallpox and cholera, which had begun to afflict Indians living in fixed villages across the nation’s massive midsection.

A more subtle purpose of Atkinson’s excursion was to bind the tribes to licensed,regulated trade agreements with the burgeoning United States—as if the words“licensed” and “regulated” had any meaning in Native culture. Nevertheless, gifts were proffered and various Western Sioux Head Men,some actually chiefs, others put forward as a kind of joke on the Americans—touched the pen. For example, on July26, 1825, the Hunk papas “signed” a treaty that began:“For the purpose of perpetuating the friendship which has heretofore existed,as also to remove all future cause of discussion or dissension, as it respects trade and friendship between the United States and their citizens, and the Hunk papas band of the Sioux tribe of Indians, the President of the United States of America, by Atkinson, of the United States Army, and Major Benjamin O’Fallon, Indian agent, with full powers and authority,specially appointed for that purpose, of the one part, and the undersigned Chiefs,Headmen, and Warriors of the said Hunk papas band of Sioux Indians, on behalf of their band, of the other part.” Even the most skilled interpreter could hardly have conveyed the sense of this to the Hunk papas.

The United States may have been in its infancy, but even the Indians of the far West had by now heard stories about a government whose customary double standard ignored nearly all Native interests. They accepted General Atkinson’s beads and blankets, nodded at his assurances, slyly inquired if he had guns for sale (he did not), and on his departure continued with their lives as if nothing had changed. They certainly had no idea that 1825 was also the year when Secretary of War James Barbour had begun to act on a concept of the forcible removal of the eastern tribes,first put forth by his predecessor, John C.Calhoun, to an “Indian Country” in modern Oklahoma, where “the future residence of these people will be forever undisturbed.”

The more salient fact for Red Cloud that year was the death of his father, Lone Man. According to his  incomplete autobiography as well as statements he made late in life, the cause of Lone Man’s death was an addiction to what the white man called whiskey but was in reality a shuddering mixture of diluted grain alcohol, molasses,tobacco juice, and crushed red pepper. Red Cloud may have witnessed his father succumb to delirium tremens. Although historians do not take every word of Red Cloud’s memoir as hard truth—his dictated account almost certainly smoothed the sharp edges of his savage youth—this particular assertion about his father’s alcoholism seems reasonable and reliable, not least because the timing coincided with a trade war between Canadian and American merchants, who were flooding the Indian camps along the Missouri with cheap rotgut in order to attract business. Native Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no more immunity to alcohol than to smallpox, and if bringing whiskey to the negotiating table facilitated the one-sided deals, so much the better.

In any case, Lone Man’s death left an impression. Red Cloud abhorred the distilled mini wakan—“the water that makes men crazy”—and its mongers for the rest of his life. Years later, after he had assumed tribal leadership, a whiskey trader rode into his camp in early April just as his band was breaking winter quarters. Red Cloud was not happy with this disruption,but despite his position as a Head Man he could not forbid his braves to indulge. All he could do was order the trader to set up temporary shop beyond the village boundaries. By early evening many of his men were drunk,and disputes broke out over real and perceived insults,fresh and ancient. Red Cloud bounded around the village extinguishing these small prairie fires until one drunken brave killed an elderly father in an argument over his daughter. Red Cloud exploded, and ordered the trader’s wagon and tent burned and his barrels and kegs emptied onto the flames.

After Lone Man’s death,Red Cloud’s mother left the Brule camp and took him, his younger brother Big Spider,and an infant sister back to her original Oglala band,which was led by Old Smoke. He recognized her as a“sister,” a term indicating that she was either his true sibling or a close cousin with the same status as a sister.Although he was by then in his early fifties, Old Smoke was still a vibrant war leader;he had been a Head Man for close to two decades, and his band was the largest,strongest, and most influential of all the Oglala tribes, if not of the Sioux nation. His willingness to take in Walks As She Thinks and her family proved most fortunate for her elder son.Fatherless boys, though not explicitly ostracized in the patriarchal Sioux society,nonetheless began life at a distinct social disadvantage.Red Cloud’s burden was further lightened by having not one but two strong uncles who by all accounts cared greatly for him and his mother, brother, and sister.

Old Smoke’s brother was a warrior named White Hawk,and there is evidence that he may have been the band’s blotahunka, or chief protector. The Sioux set great store by inculcating in their children from infancy a respect for a reserved poise,and apparently White Hawk was crucial in teaching the young Red Cloud to control what he called the “unusually headstrong impulses” that in the future would establish his reputation for heartless cruelty. White Hawk was also responsible, along with Walks As She Thinks, for the child’s education, and before Red Cloud was two years old both his mother and his uncle were interpreting for him the message to be found in every birdsong and the track of every animal, the significance of the eagle feather in a warbonnet, and the natural history of the tribe in relation to its surroundings. By the age of four he was sitting at council fires emulating the gravity of his elders.

As the Western Sioux’s territorial ambitions expanded, so too had their political traditions, and the concept of tribal leadership had evolved since the bands departed Minnesota. Back in their old homeland along the Mississippi the Head Men of the Seven Council Fires were for the most part totemic figures, influential and certainly supported by their kinsmen, but wielding nothing close to absolute power. Since the Missouri crossings, however, a more hierarchical system of social organization had gradually taken hold. This was no doubt partly because of the decisions that needed to be made on a daily basis by a wandering, war like people no longer tethered to set communities. No Head Man could as yet “order” any braves to obey his commands.(Nor would he ever be able to.) But as authority accrued to the best hunters, trackers,horsemen, and fighters, a sort of natural primacy was accorded certain men that would have been unrecognizable to their distant eastern cousins. Old Smoke was one of these men,and as his power grew so did the ambitions of his rivals.

When Red Cloud was thirteen years old he watched Old Smoke suppress his cousin Bull Bear’s attempt to usurp his leadership. Bull Bear, by all accounts a canker of a man with a face like a clenched fist, had strength in numbers. But Old Smoke retained the loyalty of his brother White Hawk’s less numerous but better-armed Akita. In the end, Bull Bear’s followers thought better of challenging them  Under Lakota custom and with White Hawk’s braves at his back, Old Smoke could have confiscated Bull Bear’s horses and women as punishment for his mutinous insubordination. Instead he merely banished Bull Bear and his followers, greatly weakening his own band in the process.

Humiliated, Bull Bear threw dust in Old Smoke’s face before riding out of camp. It was an act of disrespect Red Cloud never forgot. And though numerous explanations have been put forth for how around this time Old Smoke’s people acquired a new name—some said it was because of their sullen,fierce demeanor; others said it was because of their penchant for cheating on their wives—Bull Bear’s   intemperate affront is the likely reason they became known as the Ite Sica, or“Bad Faces.” The incident also gave Bull Bear’s new band the name for which it would be known forevermore—the Kiyuska, or “Cutoffs.”

Temporary winter settlements not withstanding, the Lakota's rarely maintained residence in any one place, following the game along rivers that acted as natural highways, seeking fresh pasturage for their expanding herds of ponies,and camping along long-trod trails in places that had acquired mystical significance. As these journeys pushed the tribe farther and farther west by southwest out of South Dakota, life on the lush  prairie offered Indian men and boys plenty of opportunity for self-reflection and long, metaphysical conversations deep into the night as the camp’s women—closer to slaves than second-class citizens by modern  standards of thinking—did most of the hard work. Red Cloud therefore had ample opportunity to absorb his uncles’ wisdom and insights regarding the Sioux philosophy of existence.

The Sioux regarded the universe as a living and breathing—if mysterious—being. And though they recognized the passage of time as measured by the predictable movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars,to their eyes mankind was but a flickering flame in a strong wind; and their concepts of past, present, and future were blurred so that all three existed simultaneously, on separate planes. Whites steeped in Christian culture and Victorian science failed to comprehend this Indian cosmos, and often threw up their hands and resorted to the cliché of Indian spirituality as an amalgam of ignorance and superstition. This also contributed greatly to the white man’s description of Indians as feral and nihilistic people utterly lacking personal discipline. There was, however, a precise structure underpinning Sioux religious beliefs, even if it remained largely unrecognizable to outsiders.

In brief, Sioux religious philosophy flowed from their recognition of what the famous Oglala holy man Black Elk described as the“Sacred Hoop” of life. That hoop consists of a series of concentric circles, divine rings, the smallest of which encompasses one’s immediate family. The hoops then expand outward,growing ever larger to envelop extended clans,bands, tribes, entire peoples,the earth and all its living things, and finally the universe. It is a universe in which everything, from the clouds in the sky to the insects on the ground, is connected as a part of Wakan Tanka. So while whites viewed animals in terms of their usefulness as food or workers, the Sioux saw them as nearly equal, sentient beings. Thus the young Red Cloud learned from his elders, for instance, that running down a stray single buffalo that had escaped from one of their hunts was a question not of greed but of necessity, so the beast would not warn others of its kind away. This was the sort of knowledge and wisdom that dominated conversation in each tepee, and in this regard Red Cloud was fortunate to have Old Smoke as a kinsman.

The section of the Sioux tepee opposite the entrance is called the catku, and it was the place of honor where the head of the family slept, sat,and discussed matters of what can be called philosophy and politics. While the women and infants generally lived on the other side of the fire closer to the lodge’s entrance,the eldest son sat with his father in the catku until about the age of six, learning and observing. The young Red Cloud occupied this position in Old Smoke’s tent. In later years, Red Cloud and his closest kin often told stories about Old Smoke’s habit of treating the boy as his own. It was in Old Smoke’s catku that Red Cloud absorbed his first life lessons.

Given the makeup of Western Sioux bands at the time, Old Smoke’s probably comprised a dozen or so extended families that, in the spirit of the Sacred Hoop,raised their children collectively. Whites were later shocked at the laxity with which the Sioux treated their children, especially their boys. Young males were continually showered with love, did nothing but play games, and were rarely  punished for even the most obnoxious transgressions.(The Sioux were equally appalled when they saw white fathers on the emigrant trails beating their children in order to instill discipline.) Not incidentally, all the games Lakota boys played were intended to hone their tracking, hunting, and fighting skills, which provided the only means of social advancement in Sioux society.

Boys and young braves loved to gamble on pastimes involving clubs, sticks, and rocks that often knocked them silly. A version of “king of the hill” was popular—with the “attackers” issued shortened lances to count coup against the “king.”There was one major difference from the game as we know it: Sioux boys played at night, when stealth was crucial. By the age of three or four, boys would be gathered in packs, presented with toy arrows and spears,and told to pick out an object—a rock, a tree—at a short distance and aim for it. The boy who came closest kept all the “weapons.” As the boys grew, so did the distance from the targets until at around the age of twelve they were given otter or dog skin quivers and real bows constructed of strong, dried sage that could propel either flint or iron-tipped arrows completely through a buffalo,or a man.

Red Cloud, blessed with strength and coordination well beyond his contemporaries, excelled in these competitions. Perhaps because he was a child whose father had died not in battle or on the hunt but from whiskey, and he stood just outside the ring of light thrown by the lodge fires of boys with important fathers, it was always Red Cloud who hit hardest with the lance during “king of the hill,” or laughed loudest while confiscating the other boys’ toy weapons. Such was his temper that was he was sometimes warned by his uncles to curb his ruthless streak.

As soon as a Sioux boy was capable of straddling a pony, his father, an older brother, or as in Red Cloud’s case, an uncle would present him with a colt and its tack. He was instructed in the colt’s care and feeding, and it was made clear to him that the precious horse was now his responsibility. Preteens learned rudimentary horsemanship through pony races, the sight of boys holding tight to reins as 850-pound animals nearly bounced them out of rough saddles was a near-daily occurrence, and as they grew older one of their paramount chores was caring for the family’s herd. When a family was too poor to furnish a son with his own horse, his peers lent him a colt to break. This ensured that each male member of the band grew up with a thorough knowledge of martial horsemanship. The older the boys became, the more closely their horse games simulated raids and buffalo hunts. According to the few surviving accounts of Red Cloud’s boyhood, he took naturally to this horse culture,and especially to the hunt.

The advantages the horse provided the Sioux in both hunting and warfare cannot be overstated. Once mounted,hunting parties could track,out-gallop, and kill buffalo along migratory routes never before accessible. Although the bands still occasionally drove an entire herd over a cliff when the opportunity presented itself, gone were the days when a party of hunters camouflaged in wolf skins were forced on their bellies to approach a single bull or cow, cull it from the herd, and bring it down with a volley of arrows. Now a solitary mounted brave, his pony stretched out and galloping belly low, rider and steed exhibiting an intimate kinetic grace, could do the work of a half-dozen men.

The buffalo hunt did not come naturally to the skittish mustang. A full-grown bull stood six feet tall at its shoulder, and was ten to twelve feet from nose to tail.With an average weight of just under 2,000 pounds—some bulls grew to 3,000—it was not averse to turning,standing, and fighting. The horse and rider who faced these beasts needed heart,agility, and stamina, but above all a reactive instinct acquired by years of practice.From birth a colt was accustomed to the scent of its prey by being smeared with buffalo fat and being swaddled in buffalo robes.When it was old enough to be broken, a snug cord fashioned from buffalo hair would befitted over its muzzle and attached to leather reins made from buffalo sinews. Its owner would train it to charge by continually riding at full gallop in and among the tribe’s horse herds, running as close astern as possible.When it was deemed ready to hunt, its ear would be split as a sign of respect and importance. Almost every Lakota family had at least one pony that was specifically groomed for buffalo hunting.Such was its worth that on the rare occasion when it was traded, it could bring between ten and thirty common horses in return.

The distribution of the slain buffalo’s component parts also changed with the coming of the horse. Where as hunting, particularly cliff-driving, had once been a group effort on foot, now the killer of a slain beast could be identified by the distinctive designs and fetching of the arrows that brought the animal down. Although the meat was still shared among the band, the hides were awarded to the clan of the arrows’ owners, and this too marked a subtle change in tribal hierarchy. With individual hunters thus rewarded, competitive boys became even more anxious to prove their mettle, and by the time Sioux boys reached their early teens the most adept of them could bury two dozen arrows into a buffalo’s short ribs with deadly accuracy in the time it took an Americandragoon1 to fire and reload his musket. One frontiersman watched an exhibition put on by Lakota boys and noted,“They could hit a button,pencil, or any small article at about thirty yards.” Red Cloud developed this gift.

1.“Dragoon” was derived from the“dragon guns” carried by legendary French mounted forces
Early white observers of a Sioux buffalo chase described it as barely controlled chaos,with braves knocking one another out of the saddle helter-skelter. This was taken as just another example of the Indians’ lack of discipline—a mistake, as whites had not been trained to detect the hunt’s formal structure. The action was aggressively policed by akicita outriders,who would bring down any brave who got out ahead of the advancing line of attackers and spooked a drove prematurely. In later years Indians who had grown up riding with Red Cloud said there was nothing in life he enjoyed so much as the spirit and excitement of the buffalo run.

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Where the buffalo ranged,Old Smoke and his band followed, usually breaking and making new summer camps at least once a week in order to find fresh pasturage.In his autobiography Red Cloud had little to report about his early youth. Perhaps he did not think his life important until he became a hunter and warrior. But according to Lakota custom,his uncles and mother undoubtedly steeped him in the topography and plant and animal life of the Powder River Country. Old Smoke’s band would have roamed through all the major river valleys, from the Republican to the Yellowstone to the Missouri, and would have been familiar with the geographic nuances of Nebraska’s Sand Hills, the Black Hills straddling what is today’s South Dakota–Wyoming border, and even the Laramie Range on the eastern face of the Rockies.He would have been taught to recognize plants such as the special riverbank sage that warded off evil spirits, heed signs that buffalo were near,and learn to differentiate scat from a grizzly with a belly full of elk from the scat of a hungry bear that might be on the prowl for a Lakota horse.Becoming one with his physical environment was as natural a part of an Indian child’s education as learning to read and write was to an American boy back east. And although the great American wagon migrations were still a decade off, Red Cloud acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the ways of the whites from Old Smoke’s frequent layovers at the trading post that was to become Fort Laramie.

The mean, small structure,erected in 1834 and initially named Fort William, was the only American trading post west of the Missouri. Situated at the juncture of the Laramie and the North Platte in southeastern Wyoming, about midway between present-day Cheyenne and Casper, it was the brainchild of an Irish-born mountain man, Robert Campbell, and was named after his trigger-happy partner, William Sublette,who was said to have fled the mountains after initiating the slaughter of a band of peaceful Gros Ventres during the annual mountain man rendezvous of 1832.Campbell and Sublette had trapped in the Rockies for over a dozen years, and both recognized by the mid-1830s that the European craze for beaver hats was dying. The new money would be made in buffalo robes, and the two did a thriving business, especially with the Lakota, whose superior tanned hides of buffalo cows were craved by the merchants in St. Louis.(Bull hides were deemed of lesser quality.)

Fort William, protected by a fifteen-foot palisade of cottonwood logs and a cannon mounted in a blockhouse over the front gate, became a regular winter transit point for Indians meandering across the Powder River Country.White-Indian interactions were generally peaceable.Given their isolation and small numbers, the two mountain men and the few teamsters they employed did not have much of a choice.The Indians, meanwhile, not only wanted and needed the dry goods they imported, but saw no glory to be gained by wiping them out. They were,after all, merely whites. The Lakota, in any case, were still busy with the broader pursuits of their Plains expansionism, raiding and fighting the Crows, Ute,Pawnee, and Kiowa at every opportunity.

Once they took a territory,the Sioux patrolled it ruthlessly. This philosophy of security through aggression naturally filtered down to individuals, for whom military glory became a stepping-stone to leadership.It was impossible to become a Sioux leader without also being a distinguished warrior,and no one was more prepared to seize the mantle and the rewards that came with it than Red Cloud. The most important of these rewards was social advancement. “When I was young among our nation, I was poor,” he told Sam Deon.“But from the wars with one nation or another, I raised myself to be a chief.”

A warrior’s vocation was the only path to success and stature for a fatherless boy,even a boy with powerful and respected uncles. Red Cloud was about sixteen years old when he joined his first raiding party. It was sometime in the late 1830s,and the Lakota were waging a war of attrition against the Pawnee, who dwelled in stationary earth lodges and whose territory in east-central Nebraska was dwindling precariously. One day after a rare unsuccessful raid on a Pawnee stronghold along the twisting Platte, word spread through the Oglala camp that Red Cloud’s older cousin had been killed in the fight. The horror of losing a battle to the lowly Pawnee turned to cold fury, and Old Smoke organized an even larger retaliatory force from among several Lakota bands camping nearby. Red Cloud had always, if reluctantly,obeyed the pleas of his mother when she argued that he was too young to take part in these raids. Despite a Sioux woman’s inferior status, Walks As She Thinks did speak with some authority due to her brothers’ standing.But even the respect afforded Old Smoke and White Hawk could not alter the fact that Red Cloud’s absence from the war parties was beginning to be remarked on.

When young warriors painted and dusted themselves and their horses for battle, an unofficial headcount circulated through the camp as to who was riding and who was staying behind.Although there were many reasons for a man of fighting age to sit out a raid (usually having to do with omens),any young brave repeatedly failing to participate was said to have had his “heart fail him.” Red Cloud was still on the cusp of war-party age, but perhaps he had heard this insinuation once too often. Or maybe his cousin’s death was the spark. For whatever reason, on this day as the departing braves gathered at one end of the village a shout suddenly rose among the mothers, wives, and sisters gathered about the warriors.“He is coming.”

“Who is coming?”someone called.

“Red Cloud,” called another voice, and the crowd took up a chant. “Red Cloud comes! Red Cloud comes!” 

He then appeared on his spotted pony, painted and feathered, leading a spare  bay by a rope. Both horses wore ribbons entwined in their manes and tails. 

Within moments the scouts had fanned out and the bulk of the party rode east down the North Platte. It took the Sioux ten days to reach the rough sand hills overlooking the Pawnee village. On the eleventh day they charged at dawn. One can imagine the terrifying,primal electricity that accompanied the roaring sound of battle. Elk-bone whistles shrieked. High-pitched war whoops cut the air. Lakota arrows and musket balls ripped through the blankets and skins hanging from the entrances to the earthen Pawnee lodges. 

As their women and children fled, Pawnee fighters scrambled from their beds and poured through the camp on foot, loosing their arrows from taut bows and swinging  their war clubs wildly above their heads. They made for their pasturage only to discover that Sioux scouts had driven off their horses.Though the Pawnee were known as efficient hand-to-hand fighters, they were now facing a mounted enemy, and the battle looked to be over almost before it began. The Sioux trampled through the camp, crushing men, women,and children under their horses’ hooves, and it was only the fortuitous arrival of a large Pawnee hunting party that broke off the fighting

 
The Sioux gathered up nearly 100 stolen horses and rode off, putting two solid days’ distance between them and a token, weak pursuit.When they neared their own camp women and boys rode out to meet them and escort them into the village. Their ululation reached fever pitch as four warriors paraded from lodge to lodge lofting Pawnee scalps high on their spears.One of the four was Red Cloud. He had made his first kill.

It was a Lakota custom that when warriors returned from battle their closest kinswomen gathered about them, took the reins of their bridles, and led them to their lodges in a fawning procession. For Red Cloud,this task fell to his mother.When he and Walks As She Thinks reached their tepee the boy dismounted, entered, put away his weapons, and waited. Soon enough a young female cousin called at the entrance. She beckoned him to his uncle’s lodge. Red Cloud rose, wrapped himself in a blanket, and strode through the camp. One can only imagine what was going through the young man’s mind as veteran braves grunted and yipped in approval and young women stole peeks at the conquering hero. 

When he reached Old Smoke’s tepee he was fed a sumptuous meal and prompted to recount his  performance, particularly the circumstances of his scalp-taking. He would tell the story many times that day,including during his first appearance in the soldier lodge, the village’s largest,where warriors spun tales of battle in order that the narratives might become public property. Meanwhile,the fires in the tepees of the men who had not returned were doused, and in the surrounding hills the wails of their women echoed for hours as they cut their hair and flesh in mourning rituals, some even chopping off fingers.

The next morning, amid more feasting, a tall medicine pole was erected in the center of the camp, and at dusk ceremonial fires were lit in a circle around it. When the sun had set, a drumbeat announced the victory dance.For the next two days and nights the warriors danced without stopping; should one drop from exhaustion,another would take his place.Those like Red Cloud who had killed an enemy used a tincture that was ground from manganese oxide to paint themselves black from head to toe as a show of menace.But the most important ceremony was saved for the end of the dance. It was then that the distribution of the Pawnee horses took place.Most were kept by their captors, but some were given to the tribe’s old, poor, and infirm, and even to the winkte, the transvestites who had opted out of male Lakota society and lived on the edge of camp with the band’s other dispossessed. That day Red Cloud proudly gave away the one pony he had made off with. Alas, he never mentioned the recipient. More important, he also learned a great lesson. He had witnessed this ceremony many times, but he now felt a true understanding of the Sioux concept of martial honor. Someone, for the first time, was in his debt. 

After his first killing Red Cloud noted another important lesson—warriors who had physically struck an enemy without killing him, or “counted coup,” were accorded the tribe’s highest respect, more so than those who had taken scalps. Among the western tribes it was understood that the greatest courage was displayed by coming close enough to smell  a man’s hot breath while striking, or “quirting,” him and allowing him to live. The theory was that in so doing a brave took a greater chance of being killed himself. Such was Red Cloud’s intuitive intellect that as a teenager he was beginning to comprehend how the ancient customs could be used, even by a fatherless boy, to accrue power. It was the opening of Red Cloud’s strategic and tactical mind, and he stored this memory for use during the rest of his life, beginning with an incident only a few months later.

5 

Counting Coup

It was the winter after Red Cloud’s first kill, and Old Smoke’s Bad Faces had staked camp in a small cottonwood valley close to where the Laramie flows into the North Platte near the Nebraska-Wyoming border.Though the season was waning, it had been an unusually severe March, with successive storms rolling down from the north. Under the cover of one of these spring blizzards a raiding party of fourteen Crows, on foot and far from their Montana homeland, had closed to within about ten miles of the Sioux pony herd when they were spotted by a lone Oglala brave out hunting deer. Their plan had been good. The Crows were just unlucky. And now they were doomed.

The mounted Sioux hunter raced back to camp, and that night a party of fifty to sixty braves, including Red Cloud,rode out to ambush them.They circled around behind the Crows, and by dawn they had the raiders, still unaware of their predicament, trapped near the mouth of a tight canyon. The Sioux charged,their gunshots and battle cries echoing off the defile’s granite walls. The Crows,weak from their trek,outnumbered, and caught completely by surprise,recognized at once their hopeless situation. They knelt in the snow, drew their blankets over their heads, and sang their death songs. Red Cloud, the first of the attackers to reach them, drew his bow, slowed his horse,and ostentatiously struck three of the Crows in the back of the head. He then rode off a bit and turned to watch his tribesmen annihilate the intruders.

The victory banquet that night was a muted affair. The Bad Faces well understood that little glory had been achieved by massacring enemies who refused to fightback. Only one young brave was singled out to be celebrated, for he had struck the Crows while they were still alive and armed. As Red Cloud had anticipated, his stature within the tribe soared that night. He was a quick learner, and the Crow coup notwithstanding, a quicker killer.

In later years, when old Sioux who had ridden with Red Cloud reminisced, they invariably recalled three traits the young brave always exhibited. The first,surprisingly, was his grace. He rode, walked, and stalked like a panther, his every action shorn of extraneous movements. The second wash is brutality; he was like flint,they said, hard and easily sparked. On one occasion he killed a Crow boy who was guarding a herd of ponies,and the next day he waited in ambush for the pursuing Crow chief, the boy’s father,to kill him, too. On another he took obvious joy in jumping into a river to save a floundering Ute from drowning, only to drag him up onto the bank, knife him to death, and scalp him. The third trait was his arrogance,essential to any Sioux leader and exemplified by a famous story about the one and only time he allowed a captured enemy to live. 

It occurred while Red Cloud was leading a horse raid against the Crows.Before reaching their camp he and his braves ambushed a small party of Blackfeet who had gotten there first. As the Blackfeet were escaping with a remuda of mustangs, the Oglalas captured one brave.They brought him to Red Cloud, who told the man that if he could withstand what would come next without uttering a single sound, he would live to see his family again. Red Cloud then handed his knife to his best friend, a Lakota brave named White Horse, who had recently lost a cousin in battle. He told White Horse to scalp the man alive. Two Lakota took hold of the Blackfoot’s arms as Red Cloud stood before him,his heavy war club raised. White Horse walked behind the Blackfoot, grabbed his braid, and took the scalp at its roots. The Indian, his body trembling, blood running down his face, never made a noise. Red Cloud, true to his word, told him to return to his village and tell his people that it was the Lakota warrior Red Cloud who had done this to him. Red Cloud had intuited that the Blackfoot would withstand the agony in silence, and as much as he coveted an enemy’s scalp, it was more important at this stage that rival tribes learned,and feared, his name.

By the time Red Cloud reached his late teens his fighting qualities—reckless bravery, stealth, strength, and impervious to personal danger—had been established and were merely being honed and perfected. He once singlehandedly killed four Pawnee in battle, and his ruthless massacres of men and boys—Arikara, Snakes, Gros Ventres, and Crows—were becoming legendary. He was a living embodiment of the maxim that war is the best teacher of war; in his case,too much was never enough.Moreover, as a striving young brave he did not spare himself the self-inflicted pain common in Sioux warrior culture. There were numerous self-torture and vision-fasting purification rites that Lakota fighting men undertook, but none was as notorious—or as fearsome and unfathomable to whites—as the annual Sun Dance ceremony.

In the Sioux ethos this fortnight-long ritual, usually held in July before the late summer raiding season—the“Moon of the Ripening Chokecherries”—offered the penultimate physical sacrifice to the “great mystery” of the universe; and it is likely that Red Cloud performed his own Sun Dance purification around this time. Sioux braves (and, in a few rare cases, women) believed that only by subjecting the body to excruciating physical suffering could an individual release the spirit imprisoned in the flesh and come to understand the true meaning of life. This was no mere quest for spiritual enlightenment. It was the key,the Sioux believed, to gaining a physical edge, to avoiding bad luck and illness, and to ensuring success during the hunt and in battle. Warriors like Red Cloud felt that the Sun Dance ceremony made them much harder to kill.Some whites who observed or heard of the ceremony judged the tribe to be “masochists.”But to all the participants the rituals of the Sun Dance celebration were the price paid by those who hoped to become tribal leaders.

The Sun Dance was always voluntary, and whenever possible it was performed in the shadow of Mato Paha: Bear Butte, the majestic 1,200-foot stone edifice in present-day western South Dakota long revered as a holy place by both the Lakota and the Cheyenne.The ceremony was initiated by a warrior through a simple vow to a celestial deity to exchange his suffering for heavenly protection. Much as modern prizefighters have seconds, a young Lakota,typically in his late teens or early twenties, would approach older men who had undergone the ordeal to help guide him through it. The dance was generally held in public, sometimes in a specific lodge set up for the occasion, but more often in the center of the village.There a painted pole made from the trunk of a forked cottonwood, representing the Tree of Life, was erected beneath an arbor. The acolyte believed that this symbolic tree connected him to his creator. The older men would pierce either side of the Sun Dancer’s breasts, and sometimes the back flesh near the wing bones, and push wooden skewers through the cuts. Then they looped rawhide thongs over the exposed ends of the skewers and tied the free ends of the lines to the center pole. In extreme cases heavy buffalo skulls would be hung from the incisions in the back.

As medicine men uttered prayers and female relatives trilled and wailed to a steady drumbeat, the Sun Dancer gyrated around the pole,going through a series of ancient dance steps, for twenty-four hours. The ceremony ended in one of two ways. Either the dancer would fling himself backward from the pole, ripping his own flesh, or his older mentors would seize him and yank him back hard. In either instance the result was the same. The skewers would burst from his chest and back and the odd, ragged bits of flesh would be trimmed away with a ceremonial knife and laid at the foot of the pole as an offering to the sun.

For Red Cloud, the Sun Dance had multiple purposes.The most fundamental was that as a Sioux warrior he needed all the celestial help he could get. But he also saw  the sacrifice as another rung on the ladder to tribal acceptance and prominence,for aside from his fighting skills he was also beginning to exhibit cunning resourcefulness. This pragmatism may have been innate, or the young brave may have gone out of his way to demonstrate it to his peers as a sign that he was capable of one day becoming their chief. What was becoming undeniable, however, was that he had the best qualities of a warrior chief.

Once, while still a  teenager, Red Cloud joined a large party on a raid into Crow lands. Resting by day and riding by night,traversing only the rugged ravines and wooded creek bottoms that provided cover in enemy territory, the Sioux took twice the usual time to cover the distance. After two weeks of riding they reached a spot close to where Rosebud Creek empties into the Yellowstone. Red Cloud, impatient with the cautious pace set by the expedition’s leaders—two prominent warriors named Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses1 and Brave Bear—diplomatically suggested that they were in fact much closer to the Crow encampment than they realized. The two elder men disagreed, and Red Cloud did not argue. He was learning to control his temper, to refrain from blurting out an insult that might make him an enemy for life. Instead, he waited for his tribesmen to retire for a rare night’s rest,then donned a thick pair of moccasins and sneaked away on foot with a trusted friend. 
1.Whites sometimes translated this name as “Man Even Whose Horses Are Feared.” Yet given the Sioux’s subtle humor and their habit of passing names from fathers to sons, it is more likely that the name Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses was bestowed on a grandfather in the late eighteenth century, when the tribe was acquiring its first wild mustangs and just learning, sometimes awkwardly, how to break them.
 
The two walked for ten miles, picking their way through thick copses of lodge pole pine and blue spruce, before they heard a faint sound, perhaps a horse’s whinny. They settled on a ridge line to await the dawn.At the first streaks of light in the east they saw below them a herd of fifty Crow mustangs quietly feeding on a small,grassy plateau. The remuda was guarded by a lone sentry who was sleeping with his back against a tree. There was no Crow village in sight.They crawled down to the herd, caught two fine horses,and mounted. Red Cloud signaled to his friend to lead the herd in the direction of the Bad Face camp, and rode his own horse toward the sleeping Crow. When he was only a few yards from the sentry he raised his war club and broke into a gallop. The horse’s pounding hooves awakened the Crow, who ducked seconds before Red Cloud’s club slammed into the tree where the man’s head had been.

The terrified Crow took off at a sprint. Red Cloud,still mounted, calmly retrieved an arrow from his quiver, nocked it, and sent it into the man’s back. He trotted up to the writhing body, dismounted, grabbed the victim’s own knife from his belt, and stabbed him to death before scalping him.

The ride back to the Sioux camp was far from triumphant. Red Cloud warned his companion that they might be in trouble and were likely to be subjected to the whipping that usually accompanied the “soldiering of a delinquent.” When they were met on the trail by the Lakota raiding party, several akicita indeed charged them,with quirts raised. But at commands from Brave Bear and Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses they halted, and Red Cloud (who was obviously the instigator) was ordered to state his case. He related his adventure and showed them the scalp. He said that he would never have risked his tribesmen lives if the Crow horses had been tethered near an enemy camp where warning cries could have been raised. He added that,judging by the horse tracks he had seen, he could indicate where the Crows kept an even larger herd. The two elders sent Red Cloud and his friend back to the temporary camp,deciding to reserve judgment,and punishment, until they followed up on this intelligence. 

The next day, when the party returned with another 250 stolen mustangs that had been captured in a dawn raid on the Crow village—located exactly where Red Cloud had guessed—he was forgiven.He was also awarded half of the fifty horses he had taken.His fellow warriors took approving note. As a bonus,he was now a rich man. 

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It was not long after this episode that Red Cloud’s uncle White Hawk, the Bad Faces’ blotahunka, was killed—some say by the embittered Bull Bear—and his charismatic young nephew inherited the bleached white bull-hide buffalo shield signifying his rank. Red Cloud now commanded a select society charged with not only protecting the band from outside enemies but, as they had demonstrated during the Crow raid, acting as a sort of police force to maintain tribal discipline during buffalo hunts and amid the controlled chaos when the village moved from one pasturage to another. One autumn, while the band was camped in a timbered thicket on the Clear Fork of the Powder, Red Cloud led a party of about forty hunters out onto the buffalo grass to stock their winter larders.These hunts could be month long affairs, with the Indians moving every two or three days from one temporary campsite to the next as they followed the herd and burdened their pack horses with piles of hides and dried meat. On this occasion they were joined by a party of Cheyenne, who accompanied them back to the Clear Fork and staked their own winter camp about a mile away.

The next day a sobbing Bad Face woman came to the new blotahunka and told him that while gathering water she had been molested by a Cheyenne brave. Red Cloud questioned her, realized he knew who the man was, and gathered seven of his akicita to ride on the Cheyenne village. Aside from his gun,bow, and quiver of arrows, he also carried an old Spanish saber. What happened next was nearly unprecedented on the Plains. On reaching the village he ordered his men to form a circle around the Cheyenne brave’s lodge,stepped inside alone, and began to club the man with the flat of the steel blade. The Cheyenne’s howls and yelps,not to mention the presence of “foreign” warriors in the camp, naturally attracted attention. Soon a large group of armed Cheyenne had surrounded the Sioux. The akicita signed that Red Cloud was inside redressing a grievance, and that all should stand back. Astonishingly, the Cheyenne obeyed. Soon enough the cries from the tepee turned to whimpers, and Red Cloud stepped out. He wordlessly signaled his men to mount and led them out of the camp at a gallop.

This episode was extraordinary on several levels. As a general rule of the era, when Indians were angry enough to fight, they were angry enough to kill en masse; fistfights or gunfights between individuals from separate tribes were rare. And the fact that Red Cloud, of all people, had left the Cheyenne man alive seemed to run against the grain of his warrior’s nature. But what is almost beyond comprehension is the fact that a band of Cheyenne, known for their courage as well as for their hair-trigger tempers,did not retaliate when a small party of Sioux rode into their camp and formed a human chain around one of their lodges while, inside, their tribesman was being beaten to a bloody pulp.

The only explanation was that the man executing the rough justice was Red Cloud, whose fame by now preceded him throughout the Powder River basin and beyond.

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