If nothing else,this narrative and what is to come,gives us a clearer picture of just who these Lakota Indians we hear so much about these days are.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
6
“PRINT
THE
LEGEND”
Large raiding parties
consisting of scores, and in
some cases hundreds, of
braves like the one that fell
on the Crow village had been
the modus operandi for
excursions since the Sioux
had walked out of the
Minnesota forests. But by the
early 1840s a new weapon,
the Hawken rifle, had been
introduced to the Plains, and
it was rapidly changing the
military equation among the
tribes. Red Cloud was one of
the first to recognize, and put
to use, the gun’s several
advantages over the
cumbersome Kentucky rifle,
which had been in use since
the Revolutionary War. The
Hawken was light enough to
carry easily whether one was
on a horse or on foot; it fired
a larger-caliber ball; and it
was accurate to 400 yards—
about four times the distance
of the black-powder, muzzleloading long rifle. Also, its
firing mechanism had been
tempered to avoid “flashes in
the pan”—which occurred
when the small charge of
gunpowder in the priming
pan failed to pass through the
touch-hole and ignite the
main, propelling charge, and
which was a frustrating and
often deadly characteristic of
the older guns.
The Hawken, equipped with a rear “set trigger” and a front “hair trigger, ” had been manufactured in St. Louis by the German immigrant brothers Jacob and Samuel Hawken for over twenty years, and Indian fighters and mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jim Bridger had long carried it through the Rockies. There was even a rumor that toward the end of his life Daniel Boone, who admired the gun’s curved maple cheek piece, had put away his famous Kentucky rifle in favor of an early version of the Hawken. But it had taken the increased trade between white pioneers and settlers traversing the Oregon and Mormon Trails for the gun to reach the Lakota.
It occurred to Red Cloud that the Hawken’s lightness and accuracy from a distance —always complemented, of course, by arrows, lances, war clubs, and tomahawks— would make smaller raiding parties of ten to twelve men as effective as the large-scale undertakings of the past. Smaller forays would be able to travel through enemy territory with greater stealth, and they would increase a village’s security by allowing more braves to remain in camp to guard the women, children, and horses. It was said that from the day the Bad Faces acquired a small cache of Hawkens, Red Cloud personally led every raid in this manner. So daring were his new tactics that Lakota from other bands began to arrive in his camp seeking to ride with him.
Yet as his fame among Indians grew—Red Cloud’s name was by now synonymous with success— so too did jealousy and resentment. A particular rival was a Bad Face warrior named Black Eagle. Had Red Cloud been actively looking to secure his reputation, he could not have asked for a more perfect foil than this envious brave. By all accounts Black Eagle was handsome and virile, came from a respected family, and was a renowned tracker and hunter who had acquired numerous scalps and counted many coups. His insides must have twisted when he saw the son of an alcoholic Brule take what he considered his own natural place atop the Oglala pecking order. But Black Eagle bided his time and concealed his intentions until one day he asked to join a small party Red Cloud had personally chosen to lead into the Rocky Mountains on a horse raid against the Shoshones. Red Cloud, unaware of Black Eagle’s simmering resentment, agreed.
The Lakota, so at home on the prairie, had many superstitions about the dark, ominous mountains that formed its western frontier, and it was highly uncomfortable journeying through them. Even the Black Hills were usually entered only for religious and purifying ceremonies, and when bands staked lodges near the sacred Paha Sapa they made certain to keep a respectful distance from the foreboding slopes. One of their favorite camping spots was on the indented oval of red sandstone shale that still circles the Black Hills’ core. According to Indian lore, this slightly indented rock formation was the result of ancient races between huge, fierce Thunderbirds and giant mammals, from whose combined weight the track had sunk, while the land in the middle burst into flames out of which the mountains rose.
Now Red Cloud proposed to go into an even higher mountain range, where an expedition would confront not only attacks by human enemies like the Shoshones but also, perhaps, gargantuan mythical animals and spontaneous combustion. Thus it may have been no surprise to Red Cloud when, about 100 miles into the Bighorn range, one of his trusted lieutenants told him that Black Eagle was fomenting mutiny. Black Eagle grumbled and complained to the other braves that their party was lost and in effect begging to be ambushed. He was agitating for an immediate return to their village, knowing full well that in the Lakota scheme of honor such a retreat would have humiliated Red Cloud.
That night Red Cloud approached his eleven other raiders one by one to determine whom he could trust. When he discovered that Black Eagle had managed to convince only three braves, he gathered his seven loyal tribesmen and concocted a plan. The next morning he invited the entire group to accompany him to the top of a nearby peak, the tallest in the area, for the ostensible purpose of finding their bearings. When they finished the ascent Red Cloud’s loyalists formed a ring around Black Eagle and the three other mutineers. Red Cloud then strode into the circle. He pointed to the east, turned to Black Eagle, and said, “Do you see that high blue ridge away yonder? At the foot of that mountain is our village. There is where the women are. Go. You cannot get lost. You can go back over the same trail you came. There is lots of game. Get some of your party to kill it for you. And when there is another war party to go out, you had better stay at home and send your women.” Red Cloud had thrown down the most insulting gauntlet a Sioux could conceive. Black Eagle said nothing. He was outnumbered, and he knew it. He left with his followers.
The raid against the Shoshones was a wild success. The eight remaining Bad Faces captured sixty horses and Red Cloud added a Shoshone scalp to his growing collection. As the party wound out of the Rockies they also killed enough elk and deer to feed the entire camp. Not even a mountain lion’s attack on one of their packhorses piled high with venison could dim their spirits. A day out of the Bad Face camp an outrider galloped up to them. It was a relieved Big Spider, who said Black Eagle was still spreading rumors: that Red Cloud was lost in the mountains, that he had been ambushed, that he had probably been killed. Red Cloud’s return a day later must have been triumphant, but in his memoirs he records only that on entering the camp he distributed the horses and meat and ordered a giant feast prepared. Oddly, Red Cloud took no punitive action against the traitorous Black Eagle, who, given the outcome of the raid, might have been expected to gather his followers and leave the Bad Face camp to start his own band as Bull Bear had done. Perhaps Red Cloud was content to let Black Eagle stew in his own humiliation; or it may have been that Black Eagle’s influential family intervened. In any case, the fact that Black Eagle suffered no consequences indicates that he and Red Cloud were more or less equal in social stature. And soon thereafter, Black Eagle again attempted to alter the equilibrium.
The new attempt occurred during a hiatus in Red Cloud’s horse theft. The Bad Faces had staked lodges on a broad plateau in southeastern Wyoming among a cluster of rust-colored hills known as the Rawhide Buttes. Over millennia the North Platte had cut a narrow, winding channel through these granite knobs, forming sheer rock walls rising to 100 feet on both banks. At a bend in the river a small valley angled gently from these cliffs, its carpet of wild bluegrass sprinkled with patches of fireweed, sticky geranium, and alpine forget-me-not. It was late summer, game was plentiful, songbirds nested in the saltbush, and soft warm breezes caressed the valley. Red Cloud was understandably loath to stir himself to raid and fight, although he eagerly joined hunting parties riding out for buffalo, elk, and deer. Because of his absence from horse raids, however, the gifts of stolen mustangs he habitually spread around the village had fallen off precipitously. Perhaps valuing this booty more than their pleasant surroundings, his tribesmen had begun to complain.
Black Eagle sensed an opportunity. Determined to emulate Red Cloud’s new, targeted raiding tactics, he recruited eight volunteers to join him and a medicine man priest (as opposed to a medicine man doctor) on an expedition into Crow territory. The priest, however, warned him that the number ten was a bad omen, and Black Eagle spent several days trying to persuade Red Cloud’s old friend White Horse—the brave who had scalped the Blackfoot alive— to join him. White Horse rejected the offers until one night Red Cloud encouraged him to go along as a spy. White Horse rode out with Black Eagle’s expedition the next morning.
Several weeks passed before Black Eagle’s straggling braves were spotted returning through the sun-slant of a late September afternoon. Five were mounted and five were on foot. One was missing. That night they all told a story of having been ambushed by a large war party of Crows, who had killed a Bad Face brave named Red Deer during, they said, a heroic standoff. The Crows had then stolen their horses. Although the raiders were perfunctorily celebrated for their narrow escape, something in their narrative did not ring true. It was as if schoolchildren were reciting a lesson by rote.
Late that night White Horse visited Red Cloud’s lodge and over a pipe related the true story. There was no large mass of Crows, he said; there had been just a small hunting party, which had stumbled on their encampment at night. The Oglalas had stupidly boxed themselves into a narrow gorge ringed by thick growths of bur oak, and the sentries Black Eagle had posted to guard the horses at the mouth of the gorge were either incompetent or asleep. In the mad chase to recover the stolen animals—with everyone on foot except White Horse, who had slept next to his hobbled horse a little apart from the others— someone from their own contingent, no one was certain who, had in the dark mistaken Red Deer for a Crow and shot him dead. His face had been mutilated, and Black Eagle himself was about to take Red Deer’s scalp before someone recognized that the body was wearing Sioux moccasins. They entombed Red Deer in the crook of a white spruce tree, and all except White Horse, who still had his pony, took turns riding home on four mustangs that belonged to Crow scouts who had picketed their animals unwisely.
Red Cloud took in this information almost wordlessly, speaking only to assure a shaken White Horse that he was not to blame for Red Deer’s death. The next day, as Red Cloud circled through the camp, rumors were already spreading that there was something off about the tale Black Eagle and his party had told. Red Cloud heard whispers, some alleging abject cowardice, that were even more sordid than the truth. Yet instead of confronting Black Eagle and exposing him as a fraud and a liar, Red Cloud found it wiser to let people’s imagination do the job for him. White Horse had also informed him that it was the priest who had concocted the cover story, but now the medicine man was having second thoughts about continuing the lie. Red Cloud quietly pulled the priest aside. What passed between them remains unknown, yet from then on the priest not only said no more about the episode but was seen riding through camp on one of Red Cloud’s finest horses.
This was just another example of how the young man’s political savvy was keeping pace with his image as a warrior. More than 100 years later the Hollywood director John Ford, famous for his panoramic Westerns, articulated a similar strategy for demeaning a rival in his film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For Red Cloud, a variation of this maxim would prove a valuable learning tool on his way to acquiring political power. For Black Eagle, it was the end of his hopes of ever becoming a Head Man.
Some years back white traders near Fort Laramie had begun to treat Old Smoke as the “chief” of the Oglalas. This nettled Bull Bear, who had ridden up to Old Smoke’s tepee in the Bad Face camp and challenged him to a fight. When Old Smoke failed to come out of his lodge and meet him, Bull Bear slit the throat of the “chief’s” favorite horse. None of this sat well with Red Cloud. But given Sioux mores and his own lack of stature at the time, there was little he could do about it. Undoubtedly the elders took this into account when they named Bull Bear as their leader.
Now, before hunkering down for that winter of 1841– 42, Red Cloud had led a small party on one last autumn raid into Ute country in present day Utah and western Colorado. On his return to Chugwater—leading a string of stolen ponies, and with the requisite Ute scalp affixed to his lance—he learned that in his absence a Bad Face brave had run off with a Kiyuska girl, and the girl’s father, an ally of Bull Bear’s, was demanding retribution from the Bad Faces. Red Cloud must have thought this rich. “Stealing” a woman was a rather mundane fact of life among the Lakota— particularly if the woman was not averse to being “stolen, ” as seemed to be the case here —and the blustery, bellowing Bull Bear was notorious for taking any young maiden that he fancied, with no thought of recompense. Nevertheless, the insolent and more numerous Kiyuska were not in the habit of letting pass what they perceived as an insult, and Bull Bear was certain to view any transgression, however minor, as an attack on his primacy. Red Cloud was told that Bull Bear was personally plotting a showdown.
In theory, the same Lakota council of elders who had chosen Bull Bear as Head Man would rule on disputes such as this. The Kiyuska leader, however, had demonstrated that he was not a man to stand on ceremony. Each band’s warrior class was in effect the essence of its Head Man’s authority, and Bull Bear had formed blood ties to numerous Oglala braves since his split with Old Smoke. Over time he had also developed a dangerous taste for the white man’s alcohol, which occasioned his band’s frequent stopovers at the Fort Laramie trading post. Bull Bear’s well-known affinity is probably the reason white whiskey traders passed near the Kiyuska lodges a few days after Red Cloud’s return from the Ute raid. This accelerated the showdown. Yet again the wheel of fortune was oiled by whiskey.
After draining several jugs of mini wakan, Bull Bear and his braves rode to the Bad Face camp. The first person they encountered was the father of the brave who had run off with the Kiyuska girl. The circumstances are unclear, but the man may have gone out to meet Bull Bear specifically to make amends for his son’s transgression. Bull Bear shot him dead. At the report of the rifle, a dozen Bad Faces, including Red Cloud, poured from the warriors’ lodge. Rifle volleys and arrows were exchanged, and one shot grazed Bull Bear’s leg, knocking him from his saddle. As he sat dazed on the ground, half drunk, blood seeping from his thigh, Red Cloud rushed to him. He shouted, “You are the cause of this, ” hefted a rifle, and put a bullet in his brain.
Bull Bear died instantly. His death was an unenviable example and an awful warning. And though it was generally felt that he had improved the world by taking leave of it, after the gun smoke cleared the Oglala elders once again found themselves trying to maintain a fragile peace between the Bad Faces and Kiyuska. In the end the fact that the Kiyuska remained the more numerous tribe swung the selection, and the council elected Bull Bear’s son, who was also named Bull Bear but now took the name Whirlwind, to succeed his father as Head Man.
It was a watershed in Sioux history. Though Whirlwind may have been the titular Head Man, it was evident to all that Red Cloud, barely out of his teens, had become the de facto warrior chief of the Oglala tribe— and, by extension, of the Western Sioux nation.
In his autobiography Red Cloud does not reveal his thoughts as he, Old Smoke, and the Bad Faces rode north from Horse Creek through the lowering haze of that September morning in 1851. Despite the proscriptions in the Horse Creek Treaty, Red Cloud soon enough returned to the lifestyle of all Western Sioux braves intent on earning glory—hunting buffalo, stealing horses, counting coup, warring on other tribes. One suspects that thereafter he gave the grand assembly little more than a passing thought except, perhaps, as a reminder of the plentiful Hawkens and deadly cannons the white soldiers possessed. With his keen eye for weapons, he also surely noticed that a few of the American officers wore a new type of weapon strapped to their legs, a revolver that fired six times without having to be reloaded. Red Cloud possessed forethought unusual in an Indian, and the possibility must have crossed his mind that one day he might have to look down the barrels of those guns.
At the same moment another man, a white man whose actions were more germane to the treaty council, also rode off from Horse Creek. He had no idea that his life was to become intertwined with Red Cloud’s and with the brutal Indian wars destined to reshape the American landscape. This was the mountain man Jim Bridger. It is difficult to fathom why, today, Bridger’s adventures and accomplishments have faded from our national consciousness. For a great portion of the nineteenth century his name was synonymous with the opening of the West—thanks in no small part to a semiaquatic rodent whose pelt, when blocked into a hat, became a de rigueur clothing accessory in European courts, theaters, and gentlemen’s clubs.
Semiaquatic beavers prefer
to build their dens, called
“lodges,
” in climates made
cold either by latitude or by
elevation. The New World
had plenty of each type, and it
is estimated that in the 1600s
as many as 400 million
beavers populated the
continent, with a beaver dam
every half mile on every
stream, in every watershed, in
North America. And though
the beaver market thrived
along the continent’s rocky
spine from Vancouver to
Taos, the western trapping
trade was initially centered
more or less along the river
corridors to the east and south
of the Black Hills—close
enough to the American Fur
Company’s outposts on the
Missouri for Indians to
exchange their furs for
weapons, beads, and blankets.
With adult beavers weighing
up to forty pounds and St.
Louis newspapers advertising
pelts at $8 a pound—$154 in
current, inflation-adjusted
dollars—it was only a matter
of time before the white man
jumped into the game. So
while on the other side of the
continent the American
invasion of Ontario was
turning into a disaster, in
1812 the Canadian Robert
Stuart, a scout for John Jacob
Astor’s Pacific Fur Company,
blazed what would come to
be known as the Oregon
Trail. Stuart, at the head of a
party of trappers, forged a
path from Fort Astoria on
Oregon’s Pacific coast
through the Rocky Mountains
and into southeastern
Wyoming by way of the
South Pass carved by the
Sweetwater and the Platte.
Trapping in this same area a decade later, the French Canadian Jacques La Ramée happened on a tributary of the North Platte so packed with beaver that it was said you could walk on their backs from one bank to the other without getting your boots wet. Not too much more is known about La Ramée, who was reportedly killed by Indians on the small river that was to posthumously bear the American version of his name, Laramie. (As do a city, a county, and six more geographic features in the present state of Wyoming: no small accomplishment for such a ghostly figure.) But the sleek pelts La Ramée and a few others like him shipped back to St. Louis inspired an industry led by a small band of hard, restless men willing to risk their lives beyond the fringe of civilization.
A young America craved heroes, and homegrown adventurers had fired the public imagination since the republic’s inception. Lewis and Clark, the Bostonian circumnavigator Robert Gray, Zebulon Pike, and Daniel Boone were feted as demigods in their own lifetimes. Davy Crockett and Kit Carson were destined to join them. Of all these pioneers, however, none loomed larger than Bridger, who, ironically, felt a deep ambivalence toward the white civilization encroaching on the Indians. This sensitivity set him apart from his contemporaries. He would kill as ruthlessly as any other, but he also had a conscience that once prompted a warrant for his arrest on charges of consorting with and supplying arms to hostile tribes.
Bridger was born in 1804, the eldest son of a surveyor from Richmond who moved his wife and three children from Virginia to St. Louis two years before the British burned the nation’s capital. The mean, rough river town took its toll; by Bridger’s fourteenth birthday his parents and siblings were dead. He found work as a blacksmith’s apprentice, and learned to handle guns, horses, and river craft well enough to be accepted two years later on a keelboat expedition seeking the source of the Missouri. Bridger was tall and spare at six feet, two inches, and his most striking features were his keen gray eyes set over cheekbones that seemed sharp enough to cut falling silk. He wore his mop of long brown hair, thick as otter fur, parted in the middle, and became known throughout his life for a kind, gentle disposition. His first taste of Indian fighting occurred on that keelboat journey, when his outfit was attacked on separate occasions by Arikara and Blackfeet. All told, eighteen whites were killed. The Holy Roller trapper Jedediah Smith, impressed by Bridger’s poise, nicknamed him “Old Gabe” after the Archangel Gabriel—perhaps envisioning the lanky teenager standing tall atop the 7,242-foot Harney Peak, the Black Hills’ highest summit, blasting his trumpet to signify the end of time, or at least the Indians’ time. The nickname stuck for the rest of Bridger’s life.
Afterward Bridger—an autodidact who spoke passable French, Spanish, and close to a dozen Indian tongues—joined two more river expeditions before his wanderlust took him into the mountains, where he hunted and trapped on both sides of the Continental Divide. In 1824, at the age of twenty, he led a small party up the Bear River in northern Utah to the lifeless shores of a briny body of water. Bridger thought he had reached a bay of the Pacific Ocean. Further surveillance determined that it had no outlet. He and his men had “discovered” the Great Salt Lake. Over the next three decades Bridger ranged from the Wasatch to the Yellowstone tracking beaver, otter, and grizzly. It was a prodigal, if perilous, lifestyle. In lean times he grubbed for roots and wild rosebuds and pricked the ears of his pack mules in order to drink their blood. When the beaver harvest was fat he awaited the caravans rolling in from St. Louis to the annual mountain man rendezvous, commonly held around Independence Day. There he would dance fandangos and get “womaned” while trading great packs of beaver pelts for rifles, gunpowder, and real whiskey, as opposed to the near-poison palmed off on the Indians.
In the 1830s one of the earliest congregations of missionaries trekking west encountered one of these rendezvous on the wild Wind River. A clergyman’s horrified wife provided a vivid snapshot of the “scandalous” incident. “Captain Bridger’s Company comes in about ten o’clock with drums and firing—an apology for a scalp dance, ” she wrote. “Fifteen or twenty Mountain Men and Indians come to our tent with drumming, firing, and dancing. I should say they looked like emissaries of the devil, worshipping their own master. They had the scalp of a Blackfoot Indian, which they carried for a color, all rejoicing in the fate.”
By this time Bridger was a legend even among the larger-than-life “French Indians” roaming the High Country. His bravery was unquestioned, and he was said to be the best shot, the savviest scout, the most formidable horseman, and, though functionally illiterate, the ablest interpreter in the Rockies. He took two arrows in the back in a fight with Blackfeet in 1832; his companions could extricate only one. Three years later, at a rendezvous on the Green River, a passing surgeon was enlisted to remove the other. The operation, witnessed by a Presbyterian missionary, illustrates the chilling realities of life on the frontier. Bridger fortified himself with several large swigs of raw alcohol before the doctor “extracted an iron arrow, three inches long, from the back of Capt. Bridger, ” wrote the Reverend Samuel Parker. “It was a difficult operation, because the arrow was hooked at the point by striking a large bone, and cartilaginous substance had grown around it.” Two years later the American landscape artist Alfred J. Miller crossed paths with Bridger at the 1837 rendezvous and captured him in a watercolor. Bridger posed in a full suit of steel armor that had been presented to him by a Scottish hunter for whom he had once served as a guide.
Along the way “Old Gabe” formed, broke up, and reformed partnerships and trapping companies with dozens of fellow mountain men, including Carson, “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, and the Irishman Robert Campbell, the last two the future co-founders of what would become Fort Laramie. Unlike the well-educated Fitzpatrick, most of these rough sojourners had little, if any, formal schooling, so their commercial success is all the more fascinating. Survival, however, required that their fighting ability far outweigh their business acumen. On one notable occasion a Ute raiding party made off with some of Bridger’s and Fitzpatrick’s mounts. For nearly a week the two led a party of trappers in pursuit through the rugged Uinta Mountains. When they finally came on the Indian camp, Fitzpatrick fronted a charge while Bridger sneaked through a thicket of willow and mountain juniper to flank the village. He successfully stole back their own horses as well as forty Indian ponies. Meanwhile Fitzpatrick and his men took six Ute scalps and escaped.
Despite these occasional skirmishes, however, in most cases the trappers adopted a live-and-let-live philosophy regarding the Indians— Bridger’s paternal affection for the Shoshones at the Horse Creek Council is a prime example. They were also generally free of the racism that infected the flatlands, and many went native themselves in all but name, taking squaw wives and siring mixed-race families. Bridger was known to anger white traders by warning Indians away from blankets that he suspected were infected with smallpox, and his first wife, Cora, was the daughter of a Flathead chief. She bore him three children, but died in childbirth delivering their third, a daughter named Josephine. A year later his eldest daughter, Mary Ann, was captured and killed by a raiding party of Nez Percé. Even this did not affect his goodwill toward the tribes, which he sensed were destined to be exploited, if not exterminated, by his own countrymen.
Toward the late 1830s, after a 150-year heyday, the beaver trade collapsed when cheap silk imported by the British East India Company replaced beaver felt as the European hat material of choice. In 1840 the mountain men held their sixteenth and final rendezvous before disappearing into the gloaming corners of the West. It was a memorable affair. According to the well traveled Father De Smet, when the fur traders convened near the Green River on June 30, 300 Shoshone warriors arrived at full gallop, “hideously painted, armed with their clubs, and covered all over with feathers, pearls, wolves’ tails, teeth and claws of animals. Those who had wounds, and those who had killed the enemies of their tribe, displayed their scars ostentatiously and waved the scalps they had taken on the ends of poles. After riding a few times around the camp, uttering at intervals shouts of joy, they dismounted and all came to shake hands with the whites in sign of friendship.”
And to bid one another farewell. What had once been a regiment of 3,000 trappers scouring the pine-bearded Rocky Mountain peaks dwindled to a few hundred forlorn wanderers, unfit for any other way of life, but still hoping to scrape out an existence above the clouds. Like Campbell and Sublette, however, Bridger had foreseen that the bottom would fall out of the beaver market and had hedged his bet by building his own, smaller stockade far to the west of Fort Laramie, on Blacks Fork of the Green River, near the present-day Utah border. It was the only river crossing for almost 400 miles, and he anticipated a surge of emigrants when he wrote that the rough picket fort “promises fairly” to become a strategic ford on the Oregon and California Trails. He had wagered well. Eventually even a Pony Express station was maintained at Fort Bridger.
Bridger was a mostly absentee owner of his river keep, leaving maintenance and day-to-day operations to a Spanish partner while he hired out as a scout on scientific, military, and commercial expeditions to Oregon, California, and present-day Mexico. In 1848 he was remarried, this time to a Ute woman, who also died in childbirth after giving him another daughter, Virginia. Two years later he took his third and final wife, the daughter of the Shoshone chief whom he would escort under the flag of truce to the Horse Creek Treaty Council. A year before that assembly, however, an Army topographical engineer, Captain Howard Stansbury, visited him at Fort Bridger. Stansbury was seeking a more direct route to Utah from the Missouri, and he asked for Bridger’s help. The leathery mountain man is reported to have yanked a burned stick from his cooking fire and scraped it along a slab of slate, drawing a trail of nearly 1,000 miles that climbed and descended the Rockies and crossed four major rivers and numerous creeks before finally skirting the southern terminus of the Black Hills. The next morning he packed his mules and led Stansbury along this trace. The captain mapped the route with geodetic and astronomical equipment, and the Union Pacific Railroad was soon to follow the same line, which led through what is still called Bridger’s Pass, bisecting the Continental Divide.
The orphaned teenager who had once answered a newspaper advertisement for keelboat hands had grown into a mountain man “with one third of the continent imprinted on his brain.” The breadth and depth of his knowledge about the territory and its tribes had not gone unnoticed by the Army, and Stansbury’s successful railroad survey reinforced Bridger’s reputation as a good fellow to have along in a tight spot. Someone in the federal government’s bureaucracy surely made a mental note that this was a fellow who might be of future service to the United States. It did not hurt that for all his affection for Indians, Bridger had never really cared much for the Sioux.
But the majority of the bands had become too dependent on the wares on offer at places like Campbell’s and Sublette’s market post, particularly the addictive goods: coffee, tobacco plugs, and another form of cheap, laudanum laced wheat liquor called Taos Lightning. They had begun to import these from New Mexico via the Santa Fe Trail, the west’s first, thin ribbon of commerce, made famous by Kit Carson. Indians who were friendly with the traders, including Old Smoke’s and Red Cloud’s Bad Faces, at first defended them. They argued that to place traders on the same level as the trappers was akin to, say, treating a Cheyenne like a Pawnee. Even the collapse of the beaver market seemed a good omen, as it meant fewer of the hairy white men standing between them and their mountain enemies. When Lakota began dropping dead from laudanum overdoses, however, anti-white rumblings intensified.
More ominous was the depletion of the vast northern buffalo herds that had once blanketed the Plains from the Upper Arkansas to the Missouri Breaks. Early American explorers reported riding from sunup to sundown through a single grazing drove, and one frontiersman spotted a herd that, he estimated, measured seventy by thirty miles. Though still numbering upward of 25 million to 30 million, nearly double the 17 million Americans counted in the 1840 U.S. census, the animals had begun to recede into smaller and smaller pockets. The decline was still imperceptible to most whites, but the Indians felt it, and feared it—although they do not seem to have considered that, because of their own growing dependence on the white man’s trade, especially his alcohol, they were complicit.
As early as 1832 the peripatetic western painter George Catlin reported passing through Fort Pierre on the Upper Missouri and watching a St. Louis keelboat merchant off-load a hull full of whiskey and announce that he would take salted buffalo tongues in kind. The Indians —Catlin does not name their tribe, but given the location they were probably a band of Sioux—formed a hunting party, slaughtered 1,500 buffalo, and sliced out their tongues in a remarkable day’s work. So great was their thirst, however, that they left the meat and skins littering the prairie for the wolves to pick over. Before they became enmeshed in the Americans’ commerce, such mass killings would have been unthinkable.
In 1841 the “Missouri Frenchman” Pierre Chouteau of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company purchased Fort William from the mountain men Campbell and Sublette, renamed it Fort John, and expanded the old post. A fifteen-foot adobe wall was constructed around the halfacre courtyard, and living quarters, warehouses, and a crude blacksmith’s shop were added. Two cannon towers, called bastions, were positioned on opposite corners of the stockade, and a set of large double gates lent the structure an air of menace. All this would serve as a template for dozens of Hollywood directors. In that same year the Bidwell/Bartleson party became the first wagon train to push off from what would soon become the eastern anchor of the Oregon Trail in Independence, Missouri, the portal of American westward expansion built on a site that the angel Moroni informed Joseph Smith had once been the Garden of Eden. The Bidwell-Bartleson caravan made for California, and it was guided by Thomas Fitzpatrick, who stopped at Fort John to reprovision. It had a mere eighty travelers, including the wandering Jesuit Father De Smet. Though it may have been a small affair, its importance was not.
By the time Chouteau sold the fort to the government eight years later, the United States was a changed country, its domain having increased by 66 percent. Two decades earlier, with the Regular Army capped at 6,000 men, the future president Colonel Zachary Taylor had in essence declared the end of war on the North American continent—“The ax, pick, saw, and trowel has become more the implement of the American soldier than the cannon, musket, or sword.” That was before the annexation of Texas in 1845, the negotiations with Great Britain a year later that set the present-day U.S.-Canadian border at the forty-ninth parallel, and Mexico’s ceding of Alta California and most of the Southwest in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—a concession made possible in large part when Taylor (now a general) routed GeneralÃsimo Santa Anna’s army at the Battle of Buena Vista.
That treaty, which cleaved Mexico nearly in half and added 1.2 million square miles of new land to the United States, was signed just before John Sutter lifted several flakes of gold from the mountain stream over which he was constructing a sawmill. America’s victory in its first war of foreign intervention meant that no longer would the nation’s vast, barren midsection need to serve as a convenient buffer—a perpetual wilderness designated as the “Permanent Indian Frontier”—to hold off foreign powers such as Russia, Great Britain, or Mexico; and settlers from the East and miners from the West began to fill the Great Plains and the intermountain West. The void on the nation’s map was taking shape. Indians, meanwhile, sensed a gradual invasion of their territory that gave no indication of ebbing.
What had begun as a trickle turned into a wave of homesteaders bound for Oregon’s lush Willamette River Valley; miners bound for the gold fields of California; and, after the murder of Joseph Smith, Mormons bound for the sweeping vistas that wound down into the Salt Lake country. When Smith’s successor Brigham Young decided to flee west with his flock, the first Mormon wagon train moved up the Platte in the spring of 1847 on the parallel Mormon Trail, a route that merged with the Oregon Trail at Fort John before crossing the mountains. By late summer of that year the broad, harsh Salt Lake Valley was already being irrigated, fenced, and farmed despite the fact that the land was still technically, if precariously, a part of Mexico. The next season three more Mormon trains of nearly 800 wagons, with Young himself in the van of the slow procession, transported 2,400 Latter-day Saints from Nebraska to Utah.
The Lakota, in particular the Oglalas, were initially helpless in the face of this onslaught. Red Cloud’s killing of Bull Bear had divided the tribe physically as well as emotionally, and those who were now called the “Bear People” had drifted southeast to Nebraska to hunt with the Southern Cheyenne while the “Smoke People” generally staked camps farther north on the Clear Fork of the Powder, and often as far east as the White. When bands from either faction made the trek to what they had known as Fort William, they were shocked by its transformation. A company of the 6th U.S. Infantry consisting of about fifty officers and enlisted men was now permanently bivouacked at Campbell’s and Sublette’s once-sleepy trading post. Before the Indians’ eyes Fort Laramie had become the Bluecoats’ main command and logistics center in the West, an oasis within which travelers could resupply, find decent medical care, purchase fresh horses, and hire scouts to guide them over the Rockies. When the soldiers—“Walk a Heaps, ” to the Lakota—were not drilling or taking target practice, they enlarged the fort’s kitchens, warehouses, and corrals; added enlisted men’s and officers’ quarters; and even constructed a schoolhouse and a wooden bridge spanning the Laramie River, a mud wallow for most of the year but an unfordable torrent of mountain melt in the spring. From 1849 to 1851 more than 20,000 wagons trailing over 140,000 head of livestock passed through Fort Laramie, an “Ellis Island of the West” in the center of Lakota land. The Indians seethed.
To the Mormons and homesteaders, who had dubbed the Oregon Trail the “Glory Road, ” the route may have been a godsend: a pathway across the High Plains that led to the promised land. But to the Indians it was a trail rife with pestilence. They believed that these insolent Meneaska were infecting their country not only spiritually, but also—by intention—with actual, fatal diseases. The Indians’ anger and bloodshed spiked, and emigrants’ journals from the era are filled with entries describing all manner of “provocations, ” from stolen oxen to gruesome killings. Even intertribal fights occasionally spilled over. On May 18, 1849, a newspaper, the St. Louis Republican, printed a letter from a gold miner whose wagon train had been intercepted by a small band of Pawnee fleeing a larger party of Sioux. The Pawnee begged for sanctuary. The whites refused and stood by, watching as the Sioux killed and scalped every Pawnee save one squaw and her young son.
The sullen “savages, ” another emigrant wrote, were now “foes on every hand, subtle as the devil himself.” Sioux braves lurked in butte breaks and amid the papery leaves of thick stands of cottonwoods and gambel oaks, from which they rode down on small parties unlucky enough to have been separated from the main wagon train. At night they sneaked into white camps to drive off horses and cows and steal metal cookware. They were constantly on the lookout for any pioneer too careless with his weapon. Should he lay his rifle down for even a moment to hitch his oxen team, or to fill his water barrel from a stream, the rifle would be gone, and perhaps him with it if no one stood lookout. And so ended the days of informal tolls of sugar and coffee in exchange for unmolested passage across the prairie.
Though Red Cloud never admitted making any of these early raids on the emigrant trains—and historians generally take him at his word—tension was nearing the breaking point. Oddly, the last people to notice this were the soldiers deployed to Fort Laramie, who remained rather oblivious of the Indians’ growing rancor. The enlisted men’s biggest complaint was the mind-numbing monotony of their daily routines such as putting up hay and chopping firewood in blowtorch summer winds, and cutting tons of ice blocks from the North Platte and Laramie and hauling them to the post’s icehouse through the raw Plains winter. The only diversion was dropping by the sutler’s store, which was run by former trappers, in hopes of meeting civilians laying in provisions and bearing news from the East. A highlight was the arrival of a mountain man wintering over before finding work as a scout in the spring. To sit by a roaring fire, whiskey jar in hand, and listen to the likes of Jim Bridger or Tom Fitzpatrick spin yarns of taking down an angry grizzly or escaping a Nez Percé ambush was tantamount, on the frontier, to attending a performance at the Royal Albert Hall by the “Swedish nightingale, ” Jenny Lind. The adventure stories of derring do over high passes, through deep canyons, and across sere deserts might as well have been tales from another planet to the Bluecoats, almost all of them easterners and many of them European born. (There was a distinct whiff of the peat bog among the enlistees; company rosters were larded with names such as McQuiery, Condon, Doyle, Grady, and Haggerty.)
But for the most part deployment to the fort was a monotonous, backbreaking grind, and the soldiers would do almost anything to have their names dropped from the daily rolls of wood-chopping and ice-cutting: “fatigue work” assigned by the sergeants. This included volunteering for field service, which meant accompanying Army freight and mail wagons across the prairie. In the early days of Fort Laramie the notion of an Indian attack on a well-armed Army unit, no matter how small, seemed almost absurd. Soon enough, however, the same soldiers who had once angled for escort duties would yearn for the carefree days of wielding axes and ice cutters. They would also have their own war stories to swap with the likes of “Broken Hand” and “Old Gabe.
next
PRETTY OWL AND PINE LEAF
The Hawken, equipped with a rear “set trigger” and a front “hair trigger, ” had been manufactured in St. Louis by the German immigrant brothers Jacob and Samuel Hawken for over twenty years, and Indian fighters and mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jim Bridger had long carried it through the Rockies. There was even a rumor that toward the end of his life Daniel Boone, who admired the gun’s curved maple cheek piece, had put away his famous Kentucky rifle in favor of an early version of the Hawken. But it had taken the increased trade between white pioneers and settlers traversing the Oregon and Mormon Trails for the gun to reach the Lakota.
It occurred to Red Cloud that the Hawken’s lightness and accuracy from a distance —always complemented, of course, by arrows, lances, war clubs, and tomahawks— would make smaller raiding parties of ten to twelve men as effective as the large-scale undertakings of the past. Smaller forays would be able to travel through enemy territory with greater stealth, and they would increase a village’s security by allowing more braves to remain in camp to guard the women, children, and horses. It was said that from the day the Bad Faces acquired a small cache of Hawkens, Red Cloud personally led every raid in this manner. So daring were his new tactics that Lakota from other bands began to arrive in his camp seeking to ride with him.
Yet as his fame among Indians grew—Red Cloud’s name was by now synonymous with success— so too did jealousy and resentment. A particular rival was a Bad Face warrior named Black Eagle. Had Red Cloud been actively looking to secure his reputation, he could not have asked for a more perfect foil than this envious brave. By all accounts Black Eagle was handsome and virile, came from a respected family, and was a renowned tracker and hunter who had acquired numerous scalps and counted many coups. His insides must have twisted when he saw the son of an alcoholic Brule take what he considered his own natural place atop the Oglala pecking order. But Black Eagle bided his time and concealed his intentions until one day he asked to join a small party Red Cloud had personally chosen to lead into the Rocky Mountains on a horse raid against the Shoshones. Red Cloud, unaware of Black Eagle’s simmering resentment, agreed.
The Lakota, so at home on the prairie, had many superstitions about the dark, ominous mountains that formed its western frontier, and it was highly uncomfortable journeying through them. Even the Black Hills were usually entered only for religious and purifying ceremonies, and when bands staked lodges near the sacred Paha Sapa they made certain to keep a respectful distance from the foreboding slopes. One of their favorite camping spots was on the indented oval of red sandstone shale that still circles the Black Hills’ core. According to Indian lore, this slightly indented rock formation was the result of ancient races between huge, fierce Thunderbirds and giant mammals, from whose combined weight the track had sunk, while the land in the middle burst into flames out of which the mountains rose.
Now Red Cloud proposed to go into an even higher mountain range, where an expedition would confront not only attacks by human enemies like the Shoshones but also, perhaps, gargantuan mythical animals and spontaneous combustion. Thus it may have been no surprise to Red Cloud when, about 100 miles into the Bighorn range, one of his trusted lieutenants told him that Black Eagle was fomenting mutiny. Black Eagle grumbled and complained to the other braves that their party was lost and in effect begging to be ambushed. He was agitating for an immediate return to their village, knowing full well that in the Lakota scheme of honor such a retreat would have humiliated Red Cloud.
That night Red Cloud approached his eleven other raiders one by one to determine whom he could trust. When he discovered that Black Eagle had managed to convince only three braves, he gathered his seven loyal tribesmen and concocted a plan. The next morning he invited the entire group to accompany him to the top of a nearby peak, the tallest in the area, for the ostensible purpose of finding their bearings. When they finished the ascent Red Cloud’s loyalists formed a ring around Black Eagle and the three other mutineers. Red Cloud then strode into the circle. He pointed to the east, turned to Black Eagle, and said, “Do you see that high blue ridge away yonder? At the foot of that mountain is our village. There is where the women are. Go. You cannot get lost. You can go back over the same trail you came. There is lots of game. Get some of your party to kill it for you. And when there is another war party to go out, you had better stay at home and send your women.” Red Cloud had thrown down the most insulting gauntlet a Sioux could conceive. Black Eagle said nothing. He was outnumbered, and he knew it. He left with his followers.
The raid against the Shoshones was a wild success. The eight remaining Bad Faces captured sixty horses and Red Cloud added a Shoshone scalp to his growing collection. As the party wound out of the Rockies they also killed enough elk and deer to feed the entire camp. Not even a mountain lion’s attack on one of their packhorses piled high with venison could dim their spirits. A day out of the Bad Face camp an outrider galloped up to them. It was a relieved Big Spider, who said Black Eagle was still spreading rumors: that Red Cloud was lost in the mountains, that he had been ambushed, that he had probably been killed. Red Cloud’s return a day later must have been triumphant, but in his memoirs he records only that on entering the camp he distributed the horses and meat and ordered a giant feast prepared. Oddly, Red Cloud took no punitive action against the traitorous Black Eagle, who, given the outcome of the raid, might have been expected to gather his followers and leave the Bad Face camp to start his own band as Bull Bear had done. Perhaps Red Cloud was content to let Black Eagle stew in his own humiliation; or it may have been that Black Eagle’s influential family intervened. In any case, the fact that Black Eagle suffered no consequences indicates that he and Red Cloud were more or less equal in social stature. And soon thereafter, Black Eagle again attempted to alter the equilibrium.
The new attempt occurred during a hiatus in Red Cloud’s horse theft. The Bad Faces had staked lodges on a broad plateau in southeastern Wyoming among a cluster of rust-colored hills known as the Rawhide Buttes. Over millennia the North Platte had cut a narrow, winding channel through these granite knobs, forming sheer rock walls rising to 100 feet on both banks. At a bend in the river a small valley angled gently from these cliffs, its carpet of wild bluegrass sprinkled with patches of fireweed, sticky geranium, and alpine forget-me-not. It was late summer, game was plentiful, songbirds nested in the saltbush, and soft warm breezes caressed the valley. Red Cloud was understandably loath to stir himself to raid and fight, although he eagerly joined hunting parties riding out for buffalo, elk, and deer. Because of his absence from horse raids, however, the gifts of stolen mustangs he habitually spread around the village had fallen off precipitously. Perhaps valuing this booty more than their pleasant surroundings, his tribesmen had begun to complain.
Black Eagle sensed an opportunity. Determined to emulate Red Cloud’s new, targeted raiding tactics, he recruited eight volunteers to join him and a medicine man priest (as opposed to a medicine man doctor) on an expedition into Crow territory. The priest, however, warned him that the number ten was a bad omen, and Black Eagle spent several days trying to persuade Red Cloud’s old friend White Horse—the brave who had scalped the Blackfoot alive— to join him. White Horse rejected the offers until one night Red Cloud encouraged him to go along as a spy. White Horse rode out with Black Eagle’s expedition the next morning.
Several weeks passed before Black Eagle’s straggling braves were spotted returning through the sun-slant of a late September afternoon. Five were mounted and five were on foot. One was missing. That night they all told a story of having been ambushed by a large war party of Crows, who had killed a Bad Face brave named Red Deer during, they said, a heroic standoff. The Crows had then stolen their horses. Although the raiders were perfunctorily celebrated for their narrow escape, something in their narrative did not ring true. It was as if schoolchildren were reciting a lesson by rote.
Late that night White Horse visited Red Cloud’s lodge and over a pipe related the true story. There was no large mass of Crows, he said; there had been just a small hunting party, which had stumbled on their encampment at night. The Oglalas had stupidly boxed themselves into a narrow gorge ringed by thick growths of bur oak, and the sentries Black Eagle had posted to guard the horses at the mouth of the gorge were either incompetent or asleep. In the mad chase to recover the stolen animals—with everyone on foot except White Horse, who had slept next to his hobbled horse a little apart from the others— someone from their own contingent, no one was certain who, had in the dark mistaken Red Deer for a Crow and shot him dead. His face had been mutilated, and Black Eagle himself was about to take Red Deer’s scalp before someone recognized that the body was wearing Sioux moccasins. They entombed Red Deer in the crook of a white spruce tree, and all except White Horse, who still had his pony, took turns riding home on four mustangs that belonged to Crow scouts who had picketed their animals unwisely.
Red Cloud took in this information almost wordlessly, speaking only to assure a shaken White Horse that he was not to blame for Red Deer’s death. The next day, as Red Cloud circled through the camp, rumors were already spreading that there was something off about the tale Black Eagle and his party had told. Red Cloud heard whispers, some alleging abject cowardice, that were even more sordid than the truth. Yet instead of confronting Black Eagle and exposing him as a fraud and a liar, Red Cloud found it wiser to let people’s imagination do the job for him. White Horse had also informed him that it was the priest who had concocted the cover story, but now the medicine man was having second thoughts about continuing the lie. Red Cloud quietly pulled the priest aside. What passed between them remains unknown, yet from then on the priest not only said no more about the episode but was seen riding through camp on one of Red Cloud’s finest horses.
This was just another example of how the young man’s political savvy was keeping pace with his image as a warrior. More than 100 years later the Hollywood director John Ford, famous for his panoramic Westerns, articulated a similar strategy for demeaning a rival in his film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For Red Cloud, a variation of this maxim would prove a valuable learning tool on his way to acquiring political power. For Black Eagle, it was the end of his hopes of ever becoming a Head Man.
✥ ✥ ✥
Although few whites on the
continent were aware of it, a
seminal moment in the
chronology of the American
West occurred on the High
Plains sometime in the early
1840s. Red Cloud was either
twenty or twenty-one. (The
Indians were not sticklers for
dates; credible historical
sources place the event
sometime during the winter
of 1841–42.) The Bad Faces
had staked winter lodges on
the Laramie plain along
Chugwater Creek, and
camping not far off was Old
Smoke’s antagonist Bull Bear
and his Kiyuska. Since their
contentious split, Bull Bear’s
pugnacious reputation had
attracted many warriors—
more than were drawn to any
other band—and a council of
Oglala elders had selected
him as a sort of Head Man for
the entire tribe. The electors
respected Old Smoke. In his
youth he had been hard as bur
oak. But they were hesitant to
bestow such an honor, and
the challenges that came with
it, on a man who was now in
his sixties and had grown
corpulent and jovial. There
was also an ugly memory to
consider. Some years back white traders near Fort Laramie had begun to treat Old Smoke as the “chief” of the Oglalas. This nettled Bull Bear, who had ridden up to Old Smoke’s tepee in the Bad Face camp and challenged him to a fight. When Old Smoke failed to come out of his lodge and meet him, Bull Bear slit the throat of the “chief’s” favorite horse. None of this sat well with Red Cloud. But given Sioux mores and his own lack of stature at the time, there was little he could do about it. Undoubtedly the elders took this into account when they named Bull Bear as their leader.
Now, before hunkering down for that winter of 1841– 42, Red Cloud had led a small party on one last autumn raid into Ute country in present day Utah and western Colorado. On his return to Chugwater—leading a string of stolen ponies, and with the requisite Ute scalp affixed to his lance—he learned that in his absence a Bad Face brave had run off with a Kiyuska girl, and the girl’s father, an ally of Bull Bear’s, was demanding retribution from the Bad Faces. Red Cloud must have thought this rich. “Stealing” a woman was a rather mundane fact of life among the Lakota— particularly if the woman was not averse to being “stolen, ” as seemed to be the case here —and the blustery, bellowing Bull Bear was notorious for taking any young maiden that he fancied, with no thought of recompense. Nevertheless, the insolent and more numerous Kiyuska were not in the habit of letting pass what they perceived as an insult, and Bull Bear was certain to view any transgression, however minor, as an attack on his primacy. Red Cloud was told that Bull Bear was personally plotting a showdown.
In theory, the same Lakota council of elders who had chosen Bull Bear as Head Man would rule on disputes such as this. The Kiyuska leader, however, had demonstrated that he was not a man to stand on ceremony. Each band’s warrior class was in effect the essence of its Head Man’s authority, and Bull Bear had formed blood ties to numerous Oglala braves since his split with Old Smoke. Over time he had also developed a dangerous taste for the white man’s alcohol, which occasioned his band’s frequent stopovers at the Fort Laramie trading post. Bull Bear’s well-known affinity is probably the reason white whiskey traders passed near the Kiyuska lodges a few days after Red Cloud’s return from the Ute raid. This accelerated the showdown. Yet again the wheel of fortune was oiled by whiskey.
After draining several jugs of mini wakan, Bull Bear and his braves rode to the Bad Face camp. The first person they encountered was the father of the brave who had run off with the Kiyuska girl. The circumstances are unclear, but the man may have gone out to meet Bull Bear specifically to make amends for his son’s transgression. Bull Bear shot him dead. At the report of the rifle, a dozen Bad Faces, including Red Cloud, poured from the warriors’ lodge. Rifle volleys and arrows were exchanged, and one shot grazed Bull Bear’s leg, knocking him from his saddle. As he sat dazed on the ground, half drunk, blood seeping from his thigh, Red Cloud rushed to him. He shouted, “You are the cause of this, ” hefted a rifle, and put a bullet in his brain.
Bull Bear died instantly. His death was an unenviable example and an awful warning. And though it was generally felt that he had improved the world by taking leave of it, after the gun smoke cleared the Oglala elders once again found themselves trying to maintain a fragile peace between the Bad Faces and Kiyuska. In the end the fact that the Kiyuska remained the more numerous tribe swung the selection, and the council elected Bull Bear’s son, who was also named Bull Bear but now took the name Whirlwind, to succeed his father as Head Man.
It was a watershed in Sioux history. Though Whirlwind may have been the titular Head Man, it was evident to all that Red Cloud, barely out of his teens, had become the de facto warrior chief of the Oglala tribe— and, by extension, of the Western Sioux nation.
Part II
THE
INVASION
Bring me men to match
my mountains
Bring me men to match
my plains
Men with empires in
their purpose
And new eras in their
brains.
—Sam Walter Foss, The Coming
American
7
OLD GABE
A charcoal-hued pictograph
from the Lakota Winter
Count of 1851 is roughly
interpreted as meaning “The
Big Issue.” This translation
surely had more to do with
the gifts spread among the
Indians at the Horse Creek
Council than with the actual
treaty signed. Neither side
would pay much heed to that.
The Army tried to use the
pact as a carrot, though with
so few troops stationed west
of the Missouri its stick was
weak and hollow. The
Indians, equally cynical,
leveraged it to cadge as many
more “presents” as possible,
including a shipment of
cattle, the “spotted buffalo,
”
delivered as part of the
government’s promised
annuity. A few Indians
developed a taste for the
white man’s beef, although
most still preferred what they
considered the real thing. In
reality, both sides recognized
the pantomime, as did the
United States Congress,
which voted soon after to
reduce annuity payments
from fifty to ten years, with a
murky codicil stipulating that,
at the discretion of the
president, the annuity
deliveries could be extended
if the tribes behaved.In his autobiography Red Cloud does not reveal his thoughts as he, Old Smoke, and the Bad Faces rode north from Horse Creek through the lowering haze of that September morning in 1851. Despite the proscriptions in the Horse Creek Treaty, Red Cloud soon enough returned to the lifestyle of all Western Sioux braves intent on earning glory—hunting buffalo, stealing horses, counting coup, warring on other tribes. One suspects that thereafter he gave the grand assembly little more than a passing thought except, perhaps, as a reminder of the plentiful Hawkens and deadly cannons the white soldiers possessed. With his keen eye for weapons, he also surely noticed that a few of the American officers wore a new type of weapon strapped to their legs, a revolver that fired six times without having to be reloaded. Red Cloud possessed forethought unusual in an Indian, and the possibility must have crossed his mind that one day he might have to look down the barrels of those guns.
At the same moment another man, a white man whose actions were more germane to the treaty council, also rode off from Horse Creek. He had no idea that his life was to become intertwined with Red Cloud’s and with the brutal Indian wars destined to reshape the American landscape. This was the mountain man Jim Bridger. It is difficult to fathom why, today, Bridger’s adventures and accomplishments have faded from our national consciousness. For a great portion of the nineteenth century his name was synonymous with the opening of the West—thanks in no small part to a semiaquatic rodent whose pelt, when blocked into a hat, became a de rigueur clothing accessory in European courts, theaters, and gentlemen’s clubs.
✦ ✦ ✦
Through much of the
eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the beaver was to
European fashion what bread
and circuses were to the
Roman mob. The wool felt of
Castor canadensis so
dominated European markets
for men’s hats that between
1700 and 1770 English
milliners exported over 21
million of these hats to the
Continent alone. By 1820 that
figure had nearly doubled; the
Old World species of the
animal had been hunted close
to extinction, and its North
American cousin, at least east
of the Mississippi, had fared
little better. Stepping into this
commercial vacuum were the
many fur companies of the
American West.Trapping in this same area a decade later, the French Canadian Jacques La Ramée happened on a tributary of the North Platte so packed with beaver that it was said you could walk on their backs from one bank to the other without getting your boots wet. Not too much more is known about La Ramée, who was reportedly killed by Indians on the small river that was to posthumously bear the American version of his name, Laramie. (As do a city, a county, and six more geographic features in the present state of Wyoming: no small accomplishment for such a ghostly figure.) But the sleek pelts La Ramée and a few others like him shipped back to St. Louis inspired an industry led by a small band of hard, restless men willing to risk their lives beyond the fringe of civilization.
James Felix Bridger
By 1824 brawling,
bearded, buckskin-clad
trappers had explored beyond
Paha Sapa, across the
Powder River Country, up
into the Rockies, and over
great tracts of deserts and
alkali flats all the way to the
Pacific. They spread through
the ranges singly, in twos and
threes, and in small brigades
either as “free trappers” or as
contract men tied to the
established outfits or the new
Rocky Mountain Fur
Company. In their search for
fresh fur fields they combed
distant, isolated streams and
river gorges,
“rough and
violent, making repeated
falls, and rushing down long
and furious rapids.” Their
payoff was beaver dams so
thick “that one would back
water to the falls above it for
ten miles.” Among them was
a twenty-year-old Virginian
named James Felix Bridger.A young America craved heroes, and homegrown adventurers had fired the public imagination since the republic’s inception. Lewis and Clark, the Bostonian circumnavigator Robert Gray, Zebulon Pike, and Daniel Boone were feted as demigods in their own lifetimes. Davy Crockett and Kit Carson were destined to join them. Of all these pioneers, however, none loomed larger than Bridger, who, ironically, felt a deep ambivalence toward the white civilization encroaching on the Indians. This sensitivity set him apart from his contemporaries. He would kill as ruthlessly as any other, but he also had a conscience that once prompted a warrant for his arrest on charges of consorting with and supplying arms to hostile tribes.
Bridger was born in 1804, the eldest son of a surveyor from Richmond who moved his wife and three children from Virginia to St. Louis two years before the British burned the nation’s capital. The mean, rough river town took its toll; by Bridger’s fourteenth birthday his parents and siblings were dead. He found work as a blacksmith’s apprentice, and learned to handle guns, horses, and river craft well enough to be accepted two years later on a keelboat expedition seeking the source of the Missouri. Bridger was tall and spare at six feet, two inches, and his most striking features were his keen gray eyes set over cheekbones that seemed sharp enough to cut falling silk. He wore his mop of long brown hair, thick as otter fur, parted in the middle, and became known throughout his life for a kind, gentle disposition. His first taste of Indian fighting occurred on that keelboat journey, when his outfit was attacked on separate occasions by Arikara and Blackfeet. All told, eighteen whites were killed. The Holy Roller trapper Jedediah Smith, impressed by Bridger’s poise, nicknamed him “Old Gabe” after the Archangel Gabriel—perhaps envisioning the lanky teenager standing tall atop the 7,242-foot Harney Peak, the Black Hills’ highest summit, blasting his trumpet to signify the end of time, or at least the Indians’ time. The nickname stuck for the rest of Bridger’s life.
Afterward Bridger—an autodidact who spoke passable French, Spanish, and close to a dozen Indian tongues—joined two more river expeditions before his wanderlust took him into the mountains, where he hunted and trapped on both sides of the Continental Divide. In 1824, at the age of twenty, he led a small party up the Bear River in northern Utah to the lifeless shores of a briny body of water. Bridger thought he had reached a bay of the Pacific Ocean. Further surveillance determined that it had no outlet. He and his men had “discovered” the Great Salt Lake. Over the next three decades Bridger ranged from the Wasatch to the Yellowstone tracking beaver, otter, and grizzly. It was a prodigal, if perilous, lifestyle. In lean times he grubbed for roots and wild rosebuds and pricked the ears of his pack mules in order to drink their blood. When the beaver harvest was fat he awaited the caravans rolling in from St. Louis to the annual mountain man rendezvous, commonly held around Independence Day. There he would dance fandangos and get “womaned” while trading great packs of beaver pelts for rifles, gunpowder, and real whiskey, as opposed to the near-poison palmed off on the Indians.
In the 1830s one of the earliest congregations of missionaries trekking west encountered one of these rendezvous on the wild Wind River. A clergyman’s horrified wife provided a vivid snapshot of the “scandalous” incident. “Captain Bridger’s Company comes in about ten o’clock with drums and firing—an apology for a scalp dance, ” she wrote. “Fifteen or twenty Mountain Men and Indians come to our tent with drumming, firing, and dancing. I should say they looked like emissaries of the devil, worshipping their own master. They had the scalp of a Blackfoot Indian, which they carried for a color, all rejoicing in the fate.”
By this time Bridger was a legend even among the larger-than-life “French Indians” roaming the High Country. His bravery was unquestioned, and he was said to be the best shot, the savviest scout, the most formidable horseman, and, though functionally illiterate, the ablest interpreter in the Rockies. He took two arrows in the back in a fight with Blackfeet in 1832; his companions could extricate only one. Three years later, at a rendezvous on the Green River, a passing surgeon was enlisted to remove the other. The operation, witnessed by a Presbyterian missionary, illustrates the chilling realities of life on the frontier. Bridger fortified himself with several large swigs of raw alcohol before the doctor “extracted an iron arrow, three inches long, from the back of Capt. Bridger, ” wrote the Reverend Samuel Parker. “It was a difficult operation, because the arrow was hooked at the point by striking a large bone, and cartilaginous substance had grown around it.” Two years later the American landscape artist Alfred J. Miller crossed paths with Bridger at the 1837 rendezvous and captured him in a watercolor. Bridger posed in a full suit of steel armor that had been presented to him by a Scottish hunter for whom he had once served as a guide.
Along the way “Old Gabe” formed, broke up, and reformed partnerships and trapping companies with dozens of fellow mountain men, including Carson, “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, and the Irishman Robert Campbell, the last two the future co-founders of what would become Fort Laramie. Unlike the well-educated Fitzpatrick, most of these rough sojourners had little, if any, formal schooling, so their commercial success is all the more fascinating. Survival, however, required that their fighting ability far outweigh their business acumen. On one notable occasion a Ute raiding party made off with some of Bridger’s and Fitzpatrick’s mounts. For nearly a week the two led a party of trappers in pursuit through the rugged Uinta Mountains. When they finally came on the Indian camp, Fitzpatrick fronted a charge while Bridger sneaked through a thicket of willow and mountain juniper to flank the village. He successfully stole back their own horses as well as forty Indian ponies. Meanwhile Fitzpatrick and his men took six Ute scalps and escaped.
Despite these occasional skirmishes, however, in most cases the trappers adopted a live-and-let-live philosophy regarding the Indians— Bridger’s paternal affection for the Shoshones at the Horse Creek Council is a prime example. They were also generally free of the racism that infected the flatlands, and many went native themselves in all but name, taking squaw wives and siring mixed-race families. Bridger was known to anger white traders by warning Indians away from blankets that he suspected were infected with smallpox, and his first wife, Cora, was the daughter of a Flathead chief. She bore him three children, but died in childbirth delivering their third, a daughter named Josephine. A year later his eldest daughter, Mary Ann, was captured and killed by a raiding party of Nez Percé. Even this did not affect his goodwill toward the tribes, which he sensed were destined to be exploited, if not exterminated, by his own countrymen.
Toward the late 1830s, after a 150-year heyday, the beaver trade collapsed when cheap silk imported by the British East India Company replaced beaver felt as the European hat material of choice. In 1840 the mountain men held their sixteenth and final rendezvous before disappearing into the gloaming corners of the West. It was a memorable affair. According to the well traveled Father De Smet, when the fur traders convened near the Green River on June 30, 300 Shoshone warriors arrived at full gallop, “hideously painted, armed with their clubs, and covered all over with feathers, pearls, wolves’ tails, teeth and claws of animals. Those who had wounds, and those who had killed the enemies of their tribe, displayed their scars ostentatiously and waved the scalps they had taken on the ends of poles. After riding a few times around the camp, uttering at intervals shouts of joy, they dismounted and all came to shake hands with the whites in sign of friendship.”
And to bid one another farewell. What had once been a regiment of 3,000 trappers scouring the pine-bearded Rocky Mountain peaks dwindled to a few hundred forlorn wanderers, unfit for any other way of life, but still hoping to scrape out an existence above the clouds. Like Campbell and Sublette, however, Bridger had foreseen that the bottom would fall out of the beaver market and had hedged his bet by building his own, smaller stockade far to the west of Fort Laramie, on Blacks Fork of the Green River, near the present-day Utah border. It was the only river crossing for almost 400 miles, and he anticipated a surge of emigrants when he wrote that the rough picket fort “promises fairly” to become a strategic ford on the Oregon and California Trails. He had wagered well. Eventually even a Pony Express station was maintained at Fort Bridger.
Bridger was a mostly absentee owner of his river keep, leaving maintenance and day-to-day operations to a Spanish partner while he hired out as a scout on scientific, military, and commercial expeditions to Oregon, California, and present-day Mexico. In 1848 he was remarried, this time to a Ute woman, who also died in childbirth after giving him another daughter, Virginia. Two years later he took his third and final wife, the daughter of the Shoshone chief whom he would escort under the flag of truce to the Horse Creek Treaty Council. A year before that assembly, however, an Army topographical engineer, Captain Howard Stansbury, visited him at Fort Bridger. Stansbury was seeking a more direct route to Utah from the Missouri, and he asked for Bridger’s help. The leathery mountain man is reported to have yanked a burned stick from his cooking fire and scraped it along a slab of slate, drawing a trail of nearly 1,000 miles that climbed and descended the Rockies and crossed four major rivers and numerous creeks before finally skirting the southern terminus of the Black Hills. The next morning he packed his mules and led Stansbury along this trace. The captain mapped the route with geodetic and astronomical equipment, and the Union Pacific Railroad was soon to follow the same line, which led through what is still called Bridger’s Pass, bisecting the Continental Divide.
The orphaned teenager who had once answered a newspaper advertisement for keelboat hands had grown into a mountain man “with one third of the continent imprinted on his brain.” The breadth and depth of his knowledge about the territory and its tribes had not gone unnoticed by the Army, and Stansbury’s successful railroad survey reinforced Bridger’s reputation as a good fellow to have along in a tight spot. Someone in the federal government’s bureaucracy surely made a mental note that this was a fellow who might be of future service to the United States. It did not hurt that for all his affection for Indians, Bridger had never really cared much for the Sioux.
8
THE
GLORY
ROAD
At the same time that trappers
roamed the High Country
amassing and losing small
fortunes, the Lakota were
spilling farther and farther
west into the country
bordering the Rockies. This
territorial expansion naturally
escalated their deadly tangles
with the mountain tribes and,
parenthetically, foreshadowed
a subtle shift in their
dynamics with the whites. To
this point in Sioux history,
both in Minnesota and on the
High Plains, their only real
contact with the white race
had been with traders
considered too few and
inconsequential to be of
concern. But the mountain
men had formed ties, in many
cases blood ties, with the
Shoshones, Nez Percé, and
Crows, and nearly always
took their side in bloody
skirmishes with the Plains
Indians. The Western Sioux
suffered considerable losses
from the guns of the
sharpshooting trappers, and
some Lakota advocated
driving all whites—trappers
and traders alike—from the
Powder River Country.But the majority of the bands had become too dependent on the wares on offer at places like Campbell’s and Sublette’s market post, particularly the addictive goods: coffee, tobacco plugs, and another form of cheap, laudanum laced wheat liquor called Taos Lightning. They had begun to import these from New Mexico via the Santa Fe Trail, the west’s first, thin ribbon of commerce, made famous by Kit Carson. Indians who were friendly with the traders, including Old Smoke’s and Red Cloud’s Bad Faces, at first defended them. They argued that to place traders on the same level as the trappers was akin to, say, treating a Cheyenne like a Pawnee. Even the collapse of the beaver market seemed a good omen, as it meant fewer of the hairy white men standing between them and their mountain enemies. When Lakota began dropping dead from laudanum overdoses, however, anti-white rumblings intensified.
More ominous was the depletion of the vast northern buffalo herds that had once blanketed the Plains from the Upper Arkansas to the Missouri Breaks. Early American explorers reported riding from sunup to sundown through a single grazing drove, and one frontiersman spotted a herd that, he estimated, measured seventy by thirty miles. Though still numbering upward of 25 million to 30 million, nearly double the 17 million Americans counted in the 1840 U.S. census, the animals had begun to recede into smaller and smaller pockets. The decline was still imperceptible to most whites, but the Indians felt it, and feared it—although they do not seem to have considered that, because of their own growing dependence on the white man’s trade, especially his alcohol, they were complicit.
As early as 1832 the peripatetic western painter George Catlin reported passing through Fort Pierre on the Upper Missouri and watching a St. Louis keelboat merchant off-load a hull full of whiskey and announce that he would take salted buffalo tongues in kind. The Indians —Catlin does not name their tribe, but given the location they were probably a band of Sioux—formed a hunting party, slaughtered 1,500 buffalo, and sliced out their tongues in a remarkable day’s work. So great was their thirst, however, that they left the meat and skins littering the prairie for the wolves to pick over. Before they became enmeshed in the Americans’ commerce, such mass killings would have been unthinkable.
In 1841 the “Missouri Frenchman” Pierre Chouteau of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company purchased Fort William from the mountain men Campbell and Sublette, renamed it Fort John, and expanded the old post. A fifteen-foot adobe wall was constructed around the halfacre courtyard, and living quarters, warehouses, and a crude blacksmith’s shop were added. Two cannon towers, called bastions, were positioned on opposite corners of the stockade, and a set of large double gates lent the structure an air of menace. All this would serve as a template for dozens of Hollywood directors. In that same year the Bidwell/Bartleson party became the first wagon train to push off from what would soon become the eastern anchor of the Oregon Trail in Independence, Missouri, the portal of American westward expansion built on a site that the angel Moroni informed Joseph Smith had once been the Garden of Eden. The Bidwell-Bartleson caravan made for California, and it was guided by Thomas Fitzpatrick, who stopped at Fort John to reprovision. It had a mere eighty travelers, including the wandering Jesuit Father De Smet. Though it may have been a small affair, its importance was not.
By the time Chouteau sold the fort to the government eight years later, the United States was a changed country, its domain having increased by 66 percent. Two decades earlier, with the Regular Army capped at 6,000 men, the future president Colonel Zachary Taylor had in essence declared the end of war on the North American continent—“The ax, pick, saw, and trowel has become more the implement of the American soldier than the cannon, musket, or sword.” That was before the annexation of Texas in 1845, the negotiations with Great Britain a year later that set the present-day U.S.-Canadian border at the forty-ninth parallel, and Mexico’s ceding of Alta California and most of the Southwest in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—a concession made possible in large part when Taylor (now a general) routed GeneralÃsimo Santa Anna’s army at the Battle of Buena Vista.
That treaty, which cleaved Mexico nearly in half and added 1.2 million square miles of new land to the United States, was signed just before John Sutter lifted several flakes of gold from the mountain stream over which he was constructing a sawmill. America’s victory in its first war of foreign intervention meant that no longer would the nation’s vast, barren midsection need to serve as a convenient buffer—a perpetual wilderness designated as the “Permanent Indian Frontier”—to hold off foreign powers such as Russia, Great Britain, or Mexico; and settlers from the East and miners from the West began to fill the Great Plains and the intermountain West. The void on the nation’s map was taking shape. Indians, meanwhile, sensed a gradual invasion of their territory that gave no indication of ebbing.
What had begun as a trickle turned into a wave of homesteaders bound for Oregon’s lush Willamette River Valley; miners bound for the gold fields of California; and, after the murder of Joseph Smith, Mormons bound for the sweeping vistas that wound down into the Salt Lake country. When Smith’s successor Brigham Young decided to flee west with his flock, the first Mormon wagon train moved up the Platte in the spring of 1847 on the parallel Mormon Trail, a route that merged with the Oregon Trail at Fort John before crossing the mountains. By late summer of that year the broad, harsh Salt Lake Valley was already being irrigated, fenced, and farmed despite the fact that the land was still technically, if precariously, a part of Mexico. The next season three more Mormon trains of nearly 800 wagons, with Young himself in the van of the slow procession, transported 2,400 Latter-day Saints from Nebraska to Utah.
The Lakota, in particular the Oglalas, were initially helpless in the face of this onslaught. Red Cloud’s killing of Bull Bear had divided the tribe physically as well as emotionally, and those who were now called the “Bear People” had drifted southeast to Nebraska to hunt with the Southern Cheyenne while the “Smoke People” generally staked camps farther north on the Clear Fork of the Powder, and often as far east as the White. When bands from either faction made the trek to what they had known as Fort William, they were shocked by its transformation. A company of the 6th U.S. Infantry consisting of about fifty officers and enlisted men was now permanently bivouacked at Campbell’s and Sublette’s once-sleepy trading post. Before the Indians’ eyes Fort Laramie had become the Bluecoats’ main command and logistics center in the West, an oasis within which travelers could resupply, find decent medical care, purchase fresh horses, and hire scouts to guide them over the Rockies. When the soldiers—“Walk a Heaps, ” to the Lakota—were not drilling or taking target practice, they enlarged the fort’s kitchens, warehouses, and corrals; added enlisted men’s and officers’ quarters; and even constructed a schoolhouse and a wooden bridge spanning the Laramie River, a mud wallow for most of the year but an unfordable torrent of mountain melt in the spring. From 1849 to 1851 more than 20,000 wagons trailing over 140,000 head of livestock passed through Fort Laramie, an “Ellis Island of the West” in the center of Lakota land. The Indians seethed.
To the Mormons and homesteaders, who had dubbed the Oregon Trail the “Glory Road, ” the route may have been a godsend: a pathway across the High Plains that led to the promised land. But to the Indians it was a trail rife with pestilence. They believed that these insolent Meneaska were infecting their country not only spiritually, but also—by intention—with actual, fatal diseases. The Indians’ anger and bloodshed spiked, and emigrants’ journals from the era are filled with entries describing all manner of “provocations, ” from stolen oxen to gruesome killings. Even intertribal fights occasionally spilled over. On May 18, 1849, a newspaper, the St. Louis Republican, printed a letter from a gold miner whose wagon train had been intercepted by a small band of Pawnee fleeing a larger party of Sioux. The Pawnee begged for sanctuary. The whites refused and stood by, watching as the Sioux killed and scalped every Pawnee save one squaw and her young son.
The sullen “savages, ” another emigrant wrote, were now “foes on every hand, subtle as the devil himself.” Sioux braves lurked in butte breaks and amid the papery leaves of thick stands of cottonwoods and gambel oaks, from which they rode down on small parties unlucky enough to have been separated from the main wagon train. At night they sneaked into white camps to drive off horses and cows and steal metal cookware. They were constantly on the lookout for any pioneer too careless with his weapon. Should he lay his rifle down for even a moment to hitch his oxen team, or to fill his water barrel from a stream, the rifle would be gone, and perhaps him with it if no one stood lookout. And so ended the days of informal tolls of sugar and coffee in exchange for unmolested passage across the prairie.
Though Red Cloud never admitted making any of these early raids on the emigrant trains—and historians generally take him at his word—tension was nearing the breaking point. Oddly, the last people to notice this were the soldiers deployed to Fort Laramie, who remained rather oblivious of the Indians’ growing rancor. The enlisted men’s biggest complaint was the mind-numbing monotony of their daily routines such as putting up hay and chopping firewood in blowtorch summer winds, and cutting tons of ice blocks from the North Platte and Laramie and hauling them to the post’s icehouse through the raw Plains winter. The only diversion was dropping by the sutler’s store, which was run by former trappers, in hopes of meeting civilians laying in provisions and bearing news from the East. A highlight was the arrival of a mountain man wintering over before finding work as a scout in the spring. To sit by a roaring fire, whiskey jar in hand, and listen to the likes of Jim Bridger or Tom Fitzpatrick spin yarns of taking down an angry grizzly or escaping a Nez Percé ambush was tantamount, on the frontier, to attending a performance at the Royal Albert Hall by the “Swedish nightingale, ” Jenny Lind. The adventure stories of derring do over high passes, through deep canyons, and across sere deserts might as well have been tales from another planet to the Bluecoats, almost all of them easterners and many of them European born. (There was a distinct whiff of the peat bog among the enlistees; company rosters were larded with names such as McQuiery, Condon, Doyle, Grady, and Haggerty.)
But for the most part deployment to the fort was a monotonous, backbreaking grind, and the soldiers would do almost anything to have their names dropped from the daily rolls of wood-chopping and ice-cutting: “fatigue work” assigned by the sergeants. This included volunteering for field service, which meant accompanying Army freight and mail wagons across the prairie. In the early days of Fort Laramie the notion of an Indian attack on a well-armed Army unit, no matter how small, seemed almost absurd. Soon enough, however, the same soldiers who had once angled for escort duties would yearn for the carefree days of wielding axes and ice cutters. They would also have their own war stories to swap with the likes of “Broken Hand” and “Old Gabe.
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PRETTY OWL AND PINE LEAF
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