Part 5: The Heart of Everything That Is...Pretty Owl & Pine Leaf...A Blood Tinged Season...A Lone Stranger

The Heart of Everything That Is: 
The Untold Story of Red Cloud 
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
9 

PRETTY OWL AND PINE LEAF 

The four pillars of Sioux leadership—acknowledged by the tribe to this day—are bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom. Time and again Red Cloud exhibited each. Yet, traditionally, the Lakota also considered lesser factors when weighing the attributes of an aspiring Head Man. One was the patronage of important religious medicine men. Red Cloud was a crafty enough politician to recognize this, and his gifts of horses to the shamans and vision diviners as well as the lavish piles of meat his hunting forays provided to the entire band—with holy men usually receiving the choicest cuts—were more than enough to sway ecumenical opinion.

The second factor was a trickier business. It involved paternal lineage and prestige, specifically the membership of a man’s father in important fraternal societies. In The Sioux, Hassrick notes Red Cloud’s “unexcelled” war record, “unparalleled” brilliance as a leader, and unequalled diplomatic “finesse, ” only to conclude, trenchantly, that in spite of these qualities, Red Cloud “was never able to command the kind of reverence among the Sioux which someone from an important family might have received.” Among the Oglalas, even Red Cloud’s strong maternal bloodline could not completely erase the memory of his alcoholic Brule father. He would always lack the cachet of a Head Man like Whirlwind, son of Bull Bear. 

A stoic, Red Cloud faced and accepted this prejudice while doing his best to overcome it. He joined numerous warrior societies, and went out of his way to aid the weak, the poor, and the old among his band in particular and the tribe in general. Around 1850, as he turned twenty-nine, he also calculated the advantage of marrying into the right family in order to seal power alliances, even if it meant abandoning his one true love —to her tragedy and his horror.

A Sioux man could take as many wives as he could afford—the bride price, a kind of reverse dowry, always involved the transfer of property, usually horses. Aside from his Brule lineage, Red Cloud’s desirability as a son-in-law was manifest, and the parents of the tribe’s most eligible maidens knew it. He was also in love with two women whom he intended to marry. The only question was which he would wed first. It was a social formality among the Lakota that a man wait at least a month or two before marrying again, which meant that the first wife would always hold a slight edge in status. Red Cloud had set his sights on two women from within his Bad Face band. He was more attracted to a girl named Pine Leaf—and events would prove that she was hopelessly in love with him as well—but Pine Leaf’s family did not have the prestige of another young Oglala woman, Pretty Owl. In the end, he chose Pretty Owl to become his first wife, with every intention of bringing Pine Leaf into his tepee when the proper amount of time had passed. 

Red Cloud’s courtship of Pretty Owl was the talk of the camp. While his mother, sister, and aunts began construction of a honeymoon lodge sewn from tanned elk skins, his older male relatives entered into negotiations with Pretty Owl’s father. As a result of these negotiations, Red Cloud tethered four fine mustangs to Pretty Owl’s lodge early one spring morning. The horses were a splendid matrimonial gift, and the people of the camp gathered about waiting for Pretty Owl and her father to come out and inspect them, as was the custom. When, by noon, no one from her family had so much as pulled back the flap of their tepee, Red Cloud arrived with four more ponies, all better than the first. He left the eight horses for review. 

Eight beautiful mounts were a grand—actually an excessive—bride price, even for a family as well connected as Pretty Owl’s. By late afternoon, however, they remained unaccepted. The crowd began to buzz over the rejection. Some thought Red Cloud a fool, whose obvious desperation to climb the social ladder led him to waste his resources on such a fickle family. Others whispered that Pretty Owl was behind the public humiliation; she knew that Red Cloud’s heart favored Pine Leaf, and this was her way of making him pay. There was a puzzled murmur when Red Cloud arrived for a third time, with four more ponies. These included a mustang everyone knew to be his favorite racing horse. He tethered them and left. And there the twelve animals stood until sundown, when a glowing Pretty Owl, a spot of vermilion on each cheek, came out of the tepee beside her father. He looked over the ponies casually and nodded to his daughter, who began to untie them. This signaled acceptance, and the crowd erupted in whoops and hollers.

Two days of feasting and dancing ensued. The Bad Face village was enthralled by the pageantry—but there was at least one exception. Several times during the festivities Red Cloud caught glimpses of a subdued Pine Leaf lurking in the flickering shadows beyond the bonfire. He vowed to himself to slip away and tell her that he loved her, and that he would soon take her as his second bride. The opportunity never arrived. On the second night of feasting Pretty Owl’s father led her to the center of the camp. She was clad in a tunic of brushed deerskin that had been bleached white by a scouring with prairie clay. A medicine man presided over the ceremony: Red Cloud pledged his troth by withdrawing the ramrod from his Hawken and tapping it on Pretty Owl’s shoulder, symbolically counting coup. “You are mine, ” he told his new wife. The two retired to their lodge in the shadow of a large tree, set a little apart from the village on a rolling swale carpeted by threadleaf sedge and wild blue flax. 

The next morning at dawn the groom stepped from his tepee into a gray mist. He carried a rawhide lariat, intending to ride into the surrounding hills to gather his horses. When he passed the single tree near his honeymoon lodge he froze. Hanging from a low branch, a rope around her neck, was Pine Leaf. Her face was bloated and distorted; her bulging eyes were open. She seemed to stare accusingly at the man who had thrown her over. For perhaps the only time in his life, Red Cloud fell into shock. He mechanically threw his blanket over Pine Leaf’s head and walked to her father’s lodge to inform him. Then he returned to his mother’s tepee; lowered himself into her bed, facedown; and did not move. 

Pretty Owl fled to her father’s tepee and was not present when Pine Leaf’s family arrived to cut her down. Wails and moans echoed through the village, gradually superseded by the angry cries of Pine Leaf’s male relatives as they slashed Red Cloud’s honeymoon lodge to pieces. Still he did not stir from his mother’s bed. None of his friends moved to stop the razing of his tepee, although a few did surreptitiously retrieve his rifle and bow. Soon the torn elk skins littered the sedge, and the small mob’s energy was spent. That afternoon Red Cloud and Pretty Owl watched from a respectful distance as Pine Leaf’s body was carried on a travois to the top of a boulder-crowned butte and lifted onto a scaffold. Plates of food and a jug of water were laid by her side, and her favorite pony was shot and arranged beneath her to accompany her into the afterlife. A large quilt of tanned skins was draped over the grave site. 

A short time later, their grief assuaged, Pine Leaf’s clan apologized to Red Cloud and Pretty Owl for having been impetuous and repaid them with gifts of horses. The clan even built them another elk skin tepee. But the incident left a deep impression. Red Cloud fathered five children with Pretty Owl—and probably more with other Sioux women—but he always insisted that he remained “monogamous” for the rest of his life, an oddity in Sioux culture, in fealty to the tragic memory of his first love, Pine Leaf. 

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Whether Red Cloud was unlucky in love is debatable; he and Pretty Owl remained married for fifty-nine years, and she was present at his deathbed. More important, despite now being in league with her powerful relatives, he was fortunate in another matter, one over which he had no control—specifically, to have been born at the right moment in Sioux history. The mid-nineteenth century was an opportune time for a striving Oglala brave from the wrong family to buck the ancient traditions. The Western Sioux had put up a putative united front at the Horse Creek Council, largely for the benefit of their white audience. But the Lakota were in fact facing their greatest existential crisis since stepping out onto the prairie. The buffalo herds were shrinking, the Army presence on their lands was multiplying, and the emigrant trains were transmitting diseases that felled entire villages. The Oglalas in particular were so splintered that the northern “Smoke People” and the “Bear People, ” now hunting as far south as the Arkansas, were nearly separate tribes. The growing autonomy of each served only to weaken the other. 

From the white point of view—which was always confused, at best, by the dizzying particulars of Indian hierarchy—Red Cloud was too young and obscure to be considered a “chief” as long as stalwarts like Old Smoke, Whirlwind, and Old-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses still held that position. The Indians, however, looked at tribal leadership more obliquely. Red Cloud was undoubtedly the most feared warrior on the High Plains. And though his rank as a blota hunka was, officially, below that of Old Smoke or Whirlwind, in troubled times a warrior’s prominence was elevated, in spirit if not in fact. The U.S. government, through a process of natural selection, would one day recognize Red Cloud as “chief” of the Lakota. But long before that, there was a sense among his people that he was their spiritual and martial leader. 

And if Red Cloud literally had to fight to maintain that position, he would happily do so. There were certainly enough opportunities for a man with his wolfish ambition, as the worsening scarcity of the buffalo led to even more competition between the western nations. It also did not hurt that he had acquired a reputation for supernatural powers. The truth was that Red Cloud worked hard to hone his craft as warrior, hunter, and scout. He taught himself to cut trails by prowling alone, barefoot, over the trackless western prairie through pitch-dark nights, the better to “feel” where an enemy might have trod. And he became so attuned to natural phenomena that he could “smell” water from even the tiniest shift in wind currents. These were talents few white men ever acquired.

There had been minor roadblocks, both emotional and physical, to his growing legend. Close friends noticed that Pine Leaf’s suicide had smothered any vestigial joy in his already somewhat dour personality. And, during a horse raid, not long after the killing of Bull Bear, he had taken a Pawnee arrow that passed clean through his body. But he had recovered swiftly from that wound, and this was much remarked on by friend and foe alike, as was the general good health and good fortune of those who rode with him. And because of his prowess at finding game it was rumored that he could talk to animals, and sometimes even take their form. Most amazingly, simultaneous Red Cloud “sightings” at impossible distances led to reports that he could either fly or be present in two places at once. Whether or not he cultivated this mystique, it elevated his prestige among a people who set great store by charms, spells, omens, and dreams, and who envisioned only a diaphanous curtain separating the human and spirit worlds. The Crows, perhaps the most superstitious tribe in the West, certainly believed in this Sioux warrior’s mystical powers. 

A few summers after the Horse Creek Council the Bad Faces were hunting perilously close to Crow country, camped on crumpled, loamy black earth along a turbid river called the Little Missouri. The water was flowing taupe with runoff one night when a Crow raiding party struck the Oglala pasturage and made off with nearly 100 ponies. The next morning Red Cloud recruited fifteen to twenty akicita and lit out after the Crows. They rode west for three hard days and nights before locating the enemy camp spread over the pleated flats where Rosebud Creek flows into the Yellowstone in present-day Montana. The Bad Faces hobbled their mounts and crawled through the dark on their bellies toward the Crow herd, springing from the thick saw grass at dawn and killing and scalping most of the young sentries. By the time the alarm was raised Red Cloud was leading his braves east at a gallop, stampeding not only the stolen Oglala ponies but an additional 100 or so Crow mounts. 

The surprise factor gave the Bad Faces a tentative head start, but from the higher limestone bluffs they could see that a large party of Crows, too many to take on, had wrangled spare horses and were flying after them. It was in such situations that the genius of Red Cloud—and perhaps his renown as a flying shape-shifter— blossomed. At dusk the Sioux reached a tableland scarred by a maze of crooked doubleback trails. Red Cloud instructed six of his warriors to keep the stolen herd moving east at a leisurely gait while he and the rest laid false tracks through the breaks. He also turned over his headdress to one of the departing Bad Faces. As he expected, when the Crows reached a high point leading into the tableland they spotted the remuda moving slowly across the distant prairie, escorted by only a few riders —one of whom, judging by his feathers, was Red Cloud. But given the unhurried pace and the confusing tracks, they suspected an ambush. They proceeded warily.

While they picked their way through the rocky goosenecks, expecting a surprise attack around every outcropping, Red Cloud and his braves caught up to the herd and helped drive them back to the Little Missouri. He suggested to Old Smoke that they dismantle the lodges and disperse. But first he instructed the band to gather all the old and lame horses destined to be “given to the moon.” Having rounded up fifty or so of these animals, he gathered them into a small valley and had a sort of Potemkin Village of tattered lodges skins erected to give the impression that someone was guarding them. Then he and a small party again rode west, careful to avoid the oncoming Crows. 

The Crows reached the decoy village that night and crept past the tepees, not realizing that these were unoccupied. Then they spotted the animals. They took the bait, stampeding the ponies and riding breakneck through the dark. It was only at dawn that they realized the herd they had stolen back consisted of old, worthless horseflesh. A few had even died from exhaustion during the escape. When the humiliated Crows gazed up at an eastern height they were greeted by the sight of Red Cloud and his Bad Faces framed by the rising sun, mooning them in mockery. 

Red Cloud did not go out of his way to suppress the rumors of his preternatural capabilities, because if such a reputation aided him in his battles against enemies, and in accruing even greater honors, such was the way of the Sacred Hoop. On the other hand, not every fight he picked was intended as a strategic maneuver to enhance his tribal standing. Sometimes it just felt good and natural to go out and steal horses. If he took some scalps in the process, so much the better. 

Thus one midsummer day when life in the Bad Face camp grew too monotonous for the blota hunka and a group of restless warriors, they decided that it had been far too long since they had raided the Arikara. Red Cloud and twenty-three braves rode off toward the faraway Upper Missouri. By the 1850s nothing was left of the once mighty Arikara except a pathetic tribe in a single earth-lodge village abutting the Missouri in a forlorn corner of present-day North Dakota. Red Cloud’s raiding party traversed over 150 miles before reaching the big river, where they spied a cluster of tepees set in a stand of willow extending down to the water’s pebbly banks. The Bad Faces recognized the lodges as belonging to Gros Ventres, usually a much hardier foe than the Arikara. But a Sioux brave could resist anything except temptation, and the sight of a large pony herd feeding along the braided streambeds emptying into the river determined their decision. Moreover, these were not the mighty Gros Ventres of the mountains, but merely their river-dwelling cousins. The prairie-hardened Lakota looked down on such bottom-dwelling “mosquito eaters” with a contempt customarily reserved for cowards and whites. They counted the lodges, and estimated between thirty and forty fighting men—versus twenty-four Oglala warriors. On its face, a Sioux rout. 

It took the Bad Faces several hours to creep through a marshy gully until they were behind the village. At noon they charged, on foot, screaming, eagle feathers streaming. The barrels of their Hawkens blew fire, and arrows whistled. But these mosquito eaters could fight. They streamed from their lodges and formed a skirmish line that not only held but repulsed the Bad Faces, driving them north against the river. There they mustered again and charged at a full run. Once more the Gros Ventres stood their ground, their long rifles and arrows knocking down four Oglala braves. On the next retreat Red Cloud’s party managed to cut 100 or so ponies from the enemy herd. One Oglala had been killed, three more had been slightly wounded, and a healthy remuda was in their possession. They counted it a good day’s work, found a ford, crossed the river, and rode south. 

That night Red Cloud, satisfied that they were not being pursued, laid his dead compatriot to rest in the branches of a large elm and split his command. Ten braves, including the three wounded, were sent to escort the stolen herd back to Old Smoke’s summer camp on Heart Creek. The remaining thirteen would follow Red Cloud south along the Missouri until they came on their original target, the Arikara village. They found it the next afternoon, nestled between an overhanging shale promontory and the river. They climbed the escarpment to scout their attack. 

Hollywood movies have not accustomed us to envision Indians, particularly western Indians, living in houses. But as the Sioux peered down on the Arikara village the tableau resembled a medieval European hamlet more closely than what we have come to expect of a North American Indian camp. The Arikara lived in round lodges constructed from woven and plaited willow branches anchored by thick cottonwood beams. Over this infrastructure was daubed, inside and out, a wet, mortarlike mixture of prairie grass and mud that dried into effective weather stripping. A single opening not far up the oval roof served as both chimney and window, and larger structures were often divided into family living quarters and indoor stables for cherished mounts. Unlike the majority of western tribes, the Arikara also built corrals to pen their ponies at night. In spite of their recent hard times, the tribe had always been, and remained, good horsemen. This accounted for the Sioux’s interest. The Arikara were also known for their strange little boats— made of buffalo bull hides stretched tight over rounded frameworks of willow branches—that they sailed in lieu of canoes. They were expert at navigating these unstable tubs across rivers and surging creeks. From his perch on the butte Red Cloud could see a small flotilla of the craft beached on a sandy shoal at the far end of the camp.

The Arikara village conformed to the mud-yellow river flats in two elongated crescents, with an open space, like a main street, running between them. A good-size corral made from interlaced sagebrush protruded from one end. The effect was that of a series of giant anthills girding a dusty town square. Nothing seemed amiss or suspicious as dusk deepened into night and the Rees brought in their herd. Still, as a precaution the Sioux waited until midnight before mounting and moving out. Crouched low in their saddles, they dropped down the butte in single file, Red Cloud in the lead. The plan, which indicates that they were not looking for a fight, was to smash open the Arikara corral and stampede the horses. Once again in defiance of our cinematic preconceptions, rarely did Indians fight from horseback; even on the vast Plains they preferred to sneak up on an enemy on foot. The Bad Faces moved to within an arrow’s flight of the corral when two rows of Rees rose from the tall grass on either side of their column and opened fire with rifles and bows. 

Red Cloud realized immediately that the Rees had been alerted to their presence by the Gros Ventres. In the pandemonium he and the brave behind him lost control of their mounts, which bolted down the corridor and through an opening in the Arikara corral. The two men dropped to the ground and mixed with the herd. But the volleys of gunshots had agitated the remuda, and several of the horses were rearing and bucking. The last Red Cloud saw of his companion, the brave was clutching the tail of a horse that broke through the sage fence and galloped downriver.

Within moments the gunfire behind Red Cloud subsided, the rifle reports becoming more spaced. He could sense that the fight had moved from the river and up onto the bluffs. The Arikara did not know he was here. It would not be long, however, before they returned to check on their herd. Now or never. Red Cloud squatted low, dipping beneath the mustangs’ bellies and crawling around the skittering hooves until he reached the corner of the corral closest to the village. He pinned his rifle against his leg, threw his blanket over his head, and stepped boldly into the main thoroughfare that ran between the earth mounds. There was no moon, and lights from the chimney-windows cast eerie shadows as he walked toward the water. He passed several people, including men with weapons, who took no notice. Once, a woman carrying water addressed him in the Arikara tongue, which he did not understand. He grunted in response. The smell of the rushing river in the night air, thrillingly sweet and fresh, filled his nostrils. He was a few yards away from the bank. He forced himself not to run. 

He scrambled down the crumbling bank and was about to swim for it when he remembered the boats. He made for them, cut one loose, pushed it out into the current, and tumbled inside. It was like riding a teacup circling a bathtub drain. The shooting had stopped completely now, and he could see torches nearing the spot on the riverbank where the tribe moored their craft. But they must not have missed the boat he stole. No one followed him. 

There was a single paddle in the boat, and he used it to propel himself down the main channel and push off from shoals. He drifted all night on the swift current and at dawn steered into a narrow creek on the west side of the river shaded by dusky box elders. The stream fed down from a pocket ravine enclosed by walls of fine-grained yellow sandstone. He was hungry, and he took a chance, tying up and exploring the valley floor. There was no game, but he spooked a small flock of prairie chickens and shot one off a tree branch. He plucked its feathers with rough abandon, as if killing it for a second time; sliced out the entrails; and ate the bird raw. He crawled into the brush beside the boat and lay flat. He was certain his friends were dead.

When Red Cloud awoke it was nearly sundown. He pushed back into the river and for four days repeated this pattern: drifting by night and hunting, eating, and sleeping by day. Early on the fourth night he thought he heard drumbeats carrying up the river corridor. He paddled to the bank and moved cautiously, grabbing overhanging reeds and tree roots hand over hand to slow his progress against the rough current. He heard a dog bark, then another. He tied up and crawled to the edge of an Indian camp. He burrowed into a nook of butterfly weeds just outside the firelight to listen for voices coming from the tepees. Presently he heard one, an old man haranguing a woman. He was speaking the Sioux tongue. Red Cloud stood and strode into the open. He assumed he had found a band of eastern Lakota: Hunkpapas or Miniconjous, perhaps even an adventuresome Yankton clan that ordinarily roamed farther to the east. He was instead surprised to find himself surrounded by Brules, their astonishment at the sight of the mighty Red Cloud in their midst equal to his own relief and delight. 

For days the Brules feted Red Cloud as he told and retold the story of the fight with the Gros Ventres, the trap set by the Arikara, and his miraculous escape by the river. Finally they supplied him with horses and provisions, and selected two young braves to escort him home. Five days later he rode into Old Smoke’s camp, to the shock and jubilation of Pretty Owl and the Bad Faces, who had supposed him dead. Of the fourteen warriors who had been ambushed by the Arikara, he was the seventh to straggle in. Although two more survivors arrived the following day, one died almost immediately from his wounds. No more followed. The brave Red Cloud had last seen gripping the tail of the runaway Arikara horse did not return. Red Cloud himself had suffered no visible injury. His legend grew.

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Few of these constant intertribal raids and fights were ever reported to eastern authorities, although government Indian agents in the West knew full well that the Indians’ adherence to the articles of the Horse Creek Treaty had lasted about as long as it took for the ink to dry. But the agents stood to lose too much power and wealth if Washington were to understand this. In some cases the Lakota even implored the Indian agents to inform the Great Father that they no longer wished to be held to the pact, that they neither wanted nor needed the American gifts if accepting them meant having to cease their raids on the Arikara and Pawnee or, more gallingly, ceding any land to the hated Crows. The Hunkpapas, a tribe being squeezed by sodbusters pushing up the Missouri and egged on to retaliate by the charismatic young warrior-mystic Sitting Bull, were most adamant in this regard. They refused to have anything to do with the Indian agent assigned to their tribe, and warned him to stay out of their territory if he valued his scalp. 

In their reports to St. Louis and Washington, however, the agents never mentioned any of this. Instead they found more tractable, mostly alcoholic Head Men loosely associated with the Hunkpapas to sign the receipts for any commodities delivered according to the treaty—but not without first taking their own hefty cut of the grain, cattle, and tools. Unlike Sitting Bull’s people far to the northeast, Red Cloud continued the ancient warring rituals without much government interference, although he and Old Smoke could not completely disentangle the Bad Faces from the growing white presence clogging the Oregon Trail. The Oglalas continued to be mesmerized by the mysterious lure of these queer strangers with their funny clothes, odd body odors, and bald, vulture-like heads. 1 Whether or not the Indians connected the cross-cultural pollination that accompanied these interactions with the ravaging diseases and cheap whiskey carried by the newcomers, it was happening, and there was no stopping it. 

1. Most pure-blood Native Americans, like Australian Aborigines, lack the gene that causes baldness.

Old Smoke and Red Cloud had for the most part managed to keep their band as far north on both sides of the Black Hills as possible during the worst of the cholera, measles, and smallpox outbreaks. But many other Sioux bands were decimated, particularly those roaming west of Fort Laramie, where word of the rampant epidemics was slower to arrive. On one of his surveying expeditions, the same Captain Stansbury who had sought Jim Bridger’s assistance in laying out the railroad route observed lodge after lodge filled with Lakota corpses lying in their own watery bile. Red Cloud is reported to have personally devised a remedy for cholera, a concoction of boiled red cedar leaves that apparently had some effect on the dehydrated and dying, although not nearly enough. Evidently there were Bad Faces who had become too dependent not only on the white man’s liquor, gleaming metal cook pots, tobacco, and glass beads, but also, now, on his medicine. They were left to beg for such goods by the side of the increasingly rutted “Glory Road, ” usually to no avail. 

These outbreaks were one reason the Western Sioux initially welcomed the arrival of U.S. troops at Fort Laramie. The Indians believed (insanely, in hindsight) that the soldiers had been dispatched to police and control, if not curtail altogether, the prairie schooners slithering through their country like a long white snake. They ultimately realized, with astonishment, that the exact opposite was true. The Bluecoats and their officers cared not a whit for the Natives. They were there to serve the emigrants, at any cost. In this they were complicit with the traders in requiring trumped-up Head Men with whom they could do business. And if a true leader such as Red Cloud refused to allow his people to visit the Army-backed trading posts, they could easily find another, more pliable “chief.” 

Few details from the Indian perspective have emerged about the hazy years immediately prior to and after the Horse Creek Treaty Council. What is known is that at some point—no one is certain precisely when—the Army selected an elderly, obscure Brule Head Man named Conquering Bear to represent the Lakota as just such a “chief.” The decision was undoubtedly a sop to the trading post operators, as Conquering Bear and his band were regular visitors to the private stores and warehouses that had begun to bloom like sage stalks around the soldiers’ stockade. Conquering Bear’s elevation, however, further divided the Western Sioux. As always, the Indians could not conceive of a single man making decisions for all seven Lakota tribes. And even if the idea had any validity—which it did not—if there was going to be a single Head Man to represent the Western Sioux, why choose one so far past his fighting prime?

The eastern Lakota—the Miniconjous, Hunkpapas, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Blackfeet Sioux—for the most part ignored Conquering Bear’s appointment, or saw it as a good joke on the crazy whites. But the Oglalas, in closer contact with the Americans, were astounded and angry. This was more than just an insult; it was a clear erosion of their autonomy. Whirlwind, Head Man of the Oglala Bear People, had inherited many of his father’s bullying and obnoxious traits, and he nearly sparked an intertribal war by initially refusing to recognize Conquering Bear’s chieftaincy. He eventually thought better of alienating the more numerous Brules, however, and relented. And Red Cloud, despite his reputation, was not yet even thirty years old and could not have expected to be handed so lofty a position. Still, this second snub to his mentor Old Smoke—first by the Oglala council of elders after the killing of Bull Bear, and now by the heedless whites— sat in his stomach like broken glass. By now Old Smoke was in his early seventies, but unlike the old women of his tribe—“ugly as Macbeth’s witches, ” according to the historian Francis Parkman, who visited the tribe around this time—the Head Man of the Bad Faces was by all accounts still large, strong, and wily.

Conquering Bear, however, remained a “chief” in name only among most Brules, further proof to the tribes that accommodation with the United States was a fool’s game. The newcomers took, and took, and then demanded more. As the Lakota-born historian Joseph M. Marshall III wryly notes, “The whites had one truth and the Lakotas another.” Further hostilities, if not all-out war, with the land-grabbing whites must have seemed inevitable to the Western Sioux. For the astute Red Cloud it was merely a question of when and how. It would take a concerted strategy—never an Indian strong point—to defeat these invaders, as well as a true sense of unity among the squabbling tribes. This, too, was a doubtful proposition. Thus it no doubt occurred to Red Cloud that his best strategy was to stall for time. He was still young and held no official tribal leadership position. If the goal was to check the American flood tide, there was no way, right now, that the Indians could challenge the might of the U.S. Army. He knew well that aside from his own relatively well armed akicita, perhaps one in a hundred Sioux braves owned a gun that worked. As it turned out, when the first deadly shots were loosed in what would become the decades-long Indian wars on the High Plains, it was the soldiers who fired them. 

10 

A BLOOD TINGED SEASON 

In June 1853 nearly 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne arrived at Fort Laramie to stake their lodges amid the ripening blades of blue grama extending like a thick, manicured lawn in all directions from the white man’s lonely outpost. The Lakota contingent included large delegations of Brules and Oglalas, among them the Bad Faces, as well as a small band of Miniconjous down from the Upper Missouri. All were awaiting delivery of the promised government annuity. The fort, never fully manned to begin with, was garrisoned by only thirty or so soldiers, as a good third of the 6th Infantry had completed their tours and been discharged at the spring thaw, despite the fact that their replacements had not yet arrived. The post was also missing a detachment of mounted infantry that had been deployed to escort one of the summer’s first Mormon wagon trains rolling into the territory.  

It had been a glorious spring, and on the brisk, clear morning of June 15 several Miniconjou braves asked to join a boatload of emigrants who were being ferried across the swift-running North Platte, nearly bursting its banks with snowmelt. The leader of a small squad of Bluecoats assisting the emigrants refused the request, a small scuffle ensued, and a Miniconjou fired a shot, freezing the Indian dogs frolicking in the prairie grass. The musket ball missed its mark, and the offending brave disappeared into a ravine intersecting the prairie.

This seemingly irrational provocation had become familiar Miniconjou behavior since the death of their longtime Head Man, The One Horn. He was by all accounts a strong and judicious chief, wary and wise in the ways of the whites. He was also a handsome man, if we judge by the three Catlin paintings for which he sat, with a broad forehead, sharp cheekbones, a Roman nose, and piercing oval eyes. But when illness took his favorite young wife, so heavy was his grief that in a kind of ritual suicide he attacked a bull buffalo, alone, on foot, with only a knife. The two-horned animal gored The One Horn to death. Since then, observed the fur trader Edwin Denig, the tribe had fractured into several “quarrelsome and predatory” factions of “murderous character” toward the whites. 

The soldiers stationed at Fort Laramie were certainly aware of this “Miniconjou problem, ” and later that afternoon a platoon of twenty-three dragoons led by a callow second lieutenant named Hugh Fleming rode to the Miniconjous’ isolated camp and shot to death at least five braves. It is not known if the troublemaker was among them. Word spread among the Lakota, and war councils were convened. The Oglala Head Man OldMan-Afraid-Of-His-Horses was able to persuade his furious tribesmen—including an influential medicine man who was the father of the eleven-year-old Crazy Horse —not to retaliate. Still, members of the arriving Mormon train could feel the tension. “The Indians no more look smiling, but have a stern solemn  look, ” a homesteader’s wife noted in her diary. “We feel this evening that we are in danger. We pray the kind Father to keep us safe this night.” 

Her prayer was answered, but not those of another emigrant family camped farther away from the main body of wagons. That night a party of Sioux crept up to their isolated encampment and killed a husband and wife and their two children. When news of these “most terrible butcheries” reached the fort another squad of enraged soldiers galloped out of the gates and fired on the first Indians they saw, killing one and wounding another. This led to an age-old Indian conflict—again young warriors thirsted for vengeance; again older and wiser heads counseled caution. 

It is not difficult to imagine the soldiers’ shooting spree as the visceral response of resentful, ill-disciplined, and possibly drunken troops isolated in hostile territory. Personal revenge has occurred in armies throughout history, and these overreactions foreshadowed American atrocities at Sand Creek, at Biscari, at My Lai, at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, the few officers stationed at Fort Laramie were young and inexperienced, unable to control their enlisted men, most of whom considered the Indians subhuman. The instigator of the killings was not even a soldier, but a hard drinking half-blood interpreter named Wyuse, employed by the Army. Small, swarthy, and foul tempered, Wyuse was the son of a French trader and a woman from the conquered Iowas, and he had a searing hatred for the Sioux. One of the soldiers who fell under his sway was the shavetail Second Lieutenant John Grattan, a twenty-four-year old eager to prove his mettle in battle against the Indians— to “see the elephant, ” in a colloquial phrase that was to become popular during the Civil War. A recent West Point graduate, Grattan drank to excess and boasted incessantly about “cracking it to the Sioux.” He became a constant drinking partner of the scheming interpreter Wyuse.

Before more blood ran, two companies of mounted riflemen that were returning to the United States from the Oregon Territory arrived at Fort Laramie. So too did the trusted government Indian agent “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick persuaded the veteran cavalry commander from Oregon to linger, and between his straightforward apologies to the Miniconjous, his longstanding friendship with several Lakota Head Men, and the overwhelming firepower of the Oregon contingent, a fight was averted. The unusually punctual arrival of the annuity train served to ease the tension—for the moment. The continuous beat of war drums provided the sound track for the restless winter that followed as Lakota Head Men and war chiefs rode to and from one another’s camps to discuss the growing difficulties with the arrogant whites, particularly the murderous soldiers, and to argue over possible solutions. 

The Miniconjous were bent on vengeance. Their sentiments were echoed, not surprisingly, by Sitting Bull and the Hunk Papas. The headstrong Sitting Bull, now thirty-two, had counted his first coup at the age of fourteen, when he’d disobeyed his father and joined a raiding party against the Crows. He had since grown into a skilled fighter as well as a holy wicasa wakan, or “vision seeker, ” who had performed the Sun Dance numerous times. His voice carried weight, but not enough to convince the Oglalas and Brules—who were much more familiar with the Army’s firepower and who urged accommodation. In the end, the old “chief” Conquering Bear, perhaps wiser than some gave him credit for being, proposed a radical solution. The Lakota, he said, should petition the Great Father in Washington to reconsider his policy of stationing such small, ill trained, poorly led, and easily spooked garrisons in the middle of a territory granted to the Western Sioux by the white man’s own treaty. 

Red Cloud was not happy with this compromise, which he perceived as a groveling response. His influence over the Lakota would carry much greater force a decade hence, but now he remained silent as he went along with the plan with a mixture of disappointment and anger. Given the apparent timidity of so many of the Sioux Head Men, as well as their inability to reach a consensus, a part of him recognized that this was not the politic moment to speak up for Indian provocations. As it happened, the blood-tinged events of the following summer proved beyond his control.

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In August 1854, the Lakota returned to the grasslands on the North Platte, again in anticipation of the Army freight wagons hauling the seasonal annuity. This time they staked camp a cautious distance south of Fort Laramie. The post’s duty roster had increased to forty troopers and two officers— the twenty-eight-year-old garrison commander Fleming, since promoted to first lieutenant, and his hard charging subordinate Grattan. The same small band of Miniconjous were again present; they had the foresight to camp close to a large contingent of Brules. One afternoon a Mormon wagon train was passing nearby when a worn-out, footsore cow broke its tether and wandered in among the Miniconjou lodges. A pack of dogs cornered the lame animal in a dry arroyo, from where its terrified owner dared not retrieve it. A Miniconjou man shot the cow, butchered it, and shared the stringy meat with his band. 

In the white man’s eyes, Conquering Bear was still the “chief” of all the Lakota, and when word of this seemingly inconsequential event reached him he sensed trouble. He acted immediately to head it off by riding into Fort Laramie and offering payment for the cow. Lieutenant Fleming instead insisted that the offending Miniconjou turn himself in. Conquering Bear was incredulous. Not only was the scrawny animal not worth a fight, Conquering Bear was also acting in accordance with the document he and the Army officials had signed three years earlier. A provision of the Horse Creek Treaty stated that in the case of an Indian offense against a white civilian, the offending tribe, through its chief, should offer satisfaction. Conquering Bear suggested they wait for the arrival of the Indian agent Fitzpatrick, who usually came to the post around this time of the year. The Lakota, he said, would abide by whatever compensation “Broken Hand” deemed fair. Lieutenant Fleming was surely aware that Fitzpatrick had died of pneumonia six months earlier in Washington while on a mission to plead the Indians’ case. Whether or not he informed Conquering Bear of this remains unrecorded. In any case the Head Man’s attempted compromise failed to mollify Fleming and the Mormons, who were obviously itching for a fight. 

In a last-ditch effort at reconciliation, Conquering Bear told Fleming that he would try to persuade the offending Miniconjou to turn himself in. This was an extraordinary offer, and Conquering Bear must have known it was useless. No Indian, and especially no Sioux, would willingly allow himself to be taken to the Bluecoat jail. An Indian would rather die fighting. Conquering Bear’s incredible offer indicates that he was aware of what could happen if the soldiers provoked another confrontation. But young Fleming was in a lather. The next morning, egged on by Grattan, Fleming ordered his subordinate to lead a troop to the Brule/Miniconjou village and seize the cow-killer. In hindsight more than 150 years later, what followed is no surprise. But no Army officer serving on the godforsaken western frontier in the 1850s, let alone an officious graduate of the Military Academy, could be faulted for such hubris. In Grattan’s view the white race would always trump the red, no matter the numerical odds. It was his Christian God’s intended order of things. 

Grattan requisitioned a twelve-pound field piece and a snub-nosed mountain howitzer, and called for volunteers. All forty infantrymen stepped forward. He selected twenty-nine to mount up. He also summoned the interpreter Wyuse, who was so drunk he had to be lifted onto his saddle. Along the trail this motley cavalcade halted at a small trading post operated by a stout little “Missouri Frenchman” named James Bordeaux. Grattan tried to convince the veteran trapper to join him. But Bordeaux, who had married a Brule, was too wise in the ways of the Indians. He knew that when they drove their herds in from the grasslands they were preparing for a fight. He eyed the clusters of mounted Sioux flanking the troop on the redearth bluffs overlooking the rutted road—including, by his own admission, Red Cloud’s Bad Faces—and declined to join the soldiers. Bordeaux did offer Grattan one piece of advice: gag your drunken interpreter. 

Between the gates of Fort Laramie and Grattan’s destination stood at least 300 Oglala lodges, another 200 Brule lodges, and finally the 20 Miniconjou lodges next to a smaller contingent of 80 Brule tepees. Five thousand Indians. Twelve hundred warriors. Still, on nearing the Miniconjou camp, Wyuse galloped ahead roaring insults and threatening to eat the heart of every Lakota before sundown. 

Conquering Bear, again exhibiting a jarring independence, attempted one final intercession. He met Grattan at the edge of the Miniconjou camp as the officer positioned his artillery and asked him to hold the guns while he made a last appeal to the offending man who had killed the cow. Later, there were reports that the half-blood Wyuse intentionally mistranslated these last words. In any case, as the old chief rode away Grattan lost what little patience he had started with, particularly after seeing half a dozen Indians leave a tepee and begin to prime their muskets. He ordered his men to form a skirmish line. One went a step further, aimed his rifle, and fired. A brave tipped over dead. At this Grattan ordered a volley loosed into the village. The rifle reports surprised Conquering Bear, who turned and tried to wave Grattan off. The old man was standing tall in the center of the camp, exhorting his tribesmen not to return fire, when the howitzers boomed and another rifle volley echoed. Grapeshot splintered several lodgepoles, and Conquering Bear fell, mortally wounded. 

It was over in minutes. Rifle balls and clouds of arrows as thick as black flies sailed into the American line. Grattan and most of his men were killed on the spot. A few wounded Bluecoats managed to swing up onto horses or crawl into the artillery wagon to try to flee back up the trail. One, punctured by seven arrow and musket holes, made it as far as Bordeaux’s trading post, where he staggered inside and hid in a closet. He later died from his wounds. The rest were engulfed by Brules and Miniconjous galloping up the road and a separate wave of Oglalas led by Red Cloud and his akicita sweeping down from the bluffs. The soldiers were dead by the time the whirling dust clouds kicked up by the horses had settled. Odds are Red Cloud killed his first white man that day.

Wyuse darted into an empty tepee, a “death lodge” whose owner had been buried a few days earlier. The Lakota found him and dragged him out. He writhed in the dirt and wailed for mercy as they sliced out his forked tongue and replaced it with his severed penis. When what was left of his body had ceased twitching, two Oglala boys ran up to his corpse and offered him the ultimate Sioux insult by jerking up their breechcloths and waggling their own penises before his empty eyes. One of them was the fair-skinned Crazy Horse. 

After the soldiers’ bodies were stripped of uniforms, boots, guns, and ammunition, the customary orgy of atrocities ensued. Scalps were collected and limbs hacked away. Some of the bodies were flayed and skinned, others rolled into a roaring bonfire. Grattan, pierced by twenty arrows, died splayed across his cannon; his boots were filled with manure and shoved down the big gun’s barrel. Back at Fort Laramie, Fleming and his remaining ten infantrymen could only await the same fate. They were too distant to have heard Grattan’s first rifle volley. But when the sound of cannon fire confirmed that a fight had begun they hurried the emigrants and their livestock into the stockade and barred the double gates. When no one from Grattan’s troop returned they prepared for the inevitable attack. 

Meanwhile, when the last of Grattan’s dead Bluecoats had been picked over and chopped to pieces, the Lakota warriors and their Cheyenne allies gathered at Bordeaux’s trading post. The Brules had carried the bleeding, unconscious Conquering Bear to the mean adobe structure, and while the life oozed from his body their bloodlust ran hot. Some Head Men, predominantly Oglalas, urged temperance, and it is a measure of their authority and their powers of persuasion that a war party did not immediately start up the trail to storm the fort. Yet with most warriors still arguing for a fight, Bordeaux suddenly materialized among them like a ghost. At the snap of the first shots he had climbed onto his roof, flattened himself, and watched the slaughter. Now he clambered down to address the seething warriors. He knew well that he was arguing for his own life.

Bordeaux told the Indians that if they overran the fort more white troops would come: hundreds, thousands, with their long knives and their guns that shoot twice. The Indians, both the guilty and the innocent, would be hunted to the four corners of the earth. He coaxed and he wheedled. He drained his stock of trade goods, bestowing gifts on important fighters. As the western sky purpled to the color of a mussel shell and then to sooty black, he talked in a voice that became increasingly hoarse, imploring the Head Men to consider their responsibilities to their tribes, to their bands, to their women, and to their children. When the first rays of sunrise glinted off the dew-flecked branches of a nearby stand of dog ash the Indians were still, amazingly, listening to Bordeaux’s exhortations. 

Bordeaux later testified that when the Indians rode off, not to attack the fort but instead to plunder the nearby American Fur Company warehouse, he collapsed in an exhausted, trembling heap onto the beaten brown grass. The man had previously carried a reputation as something of a coward, stemming from an incident years earlier when he managed what was then still called Fort John and had refused to engage in a rifle duel with a drunken mountain man. When the trapper called him out from the front steps of his own bunkhouse, Bordeaux refused to leave his bedroom until the man sobered up and departed, and such was his humiliation that even his squaw wife had been disgusted with him. On this night he erased that stigma forever. 

By the time the tribes broke camp the next morning the story of the “Grattan Massacre” was already curdling. It was now the devious Conquering Bear who had lured the innocent soldiers into a trap. The Council Bluffs (Iowa) Bugle reported that Grattan was attempting a peaceful parley with the Indians when Conquering Bear poked him with a lance, “calling him a squaw and a coward, and charged him with being afraid to fight.” Lieutenant Fleming went along with the lie, his career and reputation at stake. The white traders, who should have known better, said nothing. No doubt their government shipping contracts influenced their silence. Messengers were sent east with news that the Western Sioux nation had risen, and frenzied calls for a retaliatory Army force reverberated from the Platte to the Missouri and, eventually, on to the Potomac. White attitudes hardened. When the rare voice was raised asking why, if the Sioux had taken to the warpath, there had been no follow-up raids on trading posts or emigrant trains, it was shouted down with the all-purpose charge “Indian lover.” [See,truth seekers have been shouted down forever in this country,what we face is nothing new,Washington has always been the same DC]

In November a small party of Brules from Conquering Bear’s clan did in fact attack a mail coach on the Oregon Trail south of Fort Laramie. The raiders were led by a half-Brule warrior named Spotted Tail, a famous fighter who, though two years younger than Red Cloud, led his band’s akicita and was said to have already taken more than a hundred scalps. Spotted Tail ordered the two coach drivers and a luckless passenger killed and mutilated, and a strongbox containing $20,000 in gold coins was taken. (This incident, four score and nine years later, gave the writer Ernest Haycox and director John Ford the germ of an idea for a movie about an embezzling banker’s stagecoach being stalked by hostile Indians.)

Later that winter Spotted Tail sent out emissaries carrying the war pipe. Some Miniconjous and Hunkpapas, including Sitting Bull’s clan, were receptive. But on the whole the outriders returned frustrated. Most of Conquering Bear’s Brule kinsmen and nearly all of the Oglalas, including Red Cloud and the Bad Faces, considered the fight with Grattan a one-off affair in which revenge had been taken. The Indians’ considerations, however, as usual mattered little. Calls to avenge the “murders” of young Grattan and his men spread like ripples on a lake all the way to the Capitol, where the causes, and repercussions, of their deaths were debated in Congress. Moreover, the St. Louis shipping companies, spooked by the mail coach raid and the missing strongbox cache, used the atrocities to lobby politicians and reporters for more federal troops to clean out the “savage” menace. Indian agents, silent at first but now sensing their gravy train departing, protested. It was too late. The government’s hand had been forced.

11 

A LONE STRANGER 

A sense of foreboding spread across the High Plains in the wake of the Grattan affair just as, in the early summer of 1855, Red Cloud was granted the highest social and political honor extended to a Sioux warrior. After long years of striving he was finally asked to become a part of what passed for the aboriginal Lakota aristocracy, in an elaborate public “Pipe Dance” ritual called the hunka. The ceremony was attended by all the Oglala bands save one, Whirlwind’s Kiyuska, reaffirming their reputation as the “Cutoffs.” Though Old Smoke was still alive and hearty, this was the clearest signal yet that the tribe considered Red Cloud a future Head Man. Ironically, the ceremony did not occur before an embarrassing military setback.

Following the spring buffalo hunt the Bad Faces had staked camp in northern Nebraska along the Niobrara, a shallow, braided river that meanders across willowed sandbars snagged with driftwood to its confluence with the Missouri. The men of the village, as usual, lounged around the cook fires fashioning new bow staves and arrows or dozing in the shade of lean-tos attached to their lodgepoles while women and girls repaired tools, butchered meat, and tanned buffalo robes. One day a party of their old enemies the Poncas swept through the camp, killed two Sioux, and escaped unscathed with a number of ponies. The Poncas, a small, agricultural tribe even in their heyday, had been pushed out of the Ohio River Valley more than 150 years earlier by the Iroquois, and in their much diminished condition had laid claim to the nearly 600 miles of the Niobrara River corridor as their new territory—until the Western Sioux descended on them and overwhelmed them in a short war in the early 1800s. Since that defeat the Poncas, their strength recorded by Lewis and Clark (and probably undercounted) at less than 200 men, women, and children, had been further reduced by a smallpox epidemic. By the mid-nineteenth century they were bottled up on a small piece of land where the Niobrara empties into the Missouri, tending tiny plots of maize and other vegetable gardens. That they had dared to raid the Bad Faces and succeeded was not only a wonder but an embarrassment, exacerbated when the small group of pursuing akicita led by Red Cloud failed to find them. 

It was therefore a chastened band of Bad Faces who broke camp soon after and moved north toward the White River in South Dakota where the hunka ceremony was to be held. But the incident with the Poncas was soon forgotten as they joined the entire Oglala tribe on rolling bluestem grassland along the banks of the White in preparation for the Pipe Dance. In essence, the ritual that followed, while not officially anointing Red Cloud as Old Smoke’s successor, certainly made him eligible. Given his modest heritage, even a few decades earlier this would have seemed impossible. But these were desperate times for the Western Sioux, and Red Cloud’s martial prowess and wealth of horses allowed for such an exception. It was a good political start for the thirty-four-year-old blota hunka, and the pageant itself offers a rare insight into the similarities between the Sioux religious liturgy and allegedly more civilized Christian rites. 

After several days of feasting, tribal elders planted a three-foot-wide tree stump gilded with gypsum, a sacred mineral, in the center of the vast area to serve as an “altar.” The Oglalas—men, women, and children— encircled this holy table, leaving openings on opposite ends. Through the eastern portal marched the tribe’s Head Men and shamans adorned in their most lavish finery, feathers, and paint. Simultaneously, a procession of supplicants, including Red Cloud, entered from the west, naked except for small breechcloths. At a signal from a sacred drum the Head Men, according to seniority, peeled off from the shamans and formed a line that wound past the altar and in front of the candidates. Each Head Man placed his palm on each applicant’s forehead as a symbol of his worthiness and submission to the Great Spirit. Then, still in single file, the older men returned to the east side of the altar, took up a gourd of water, and again approached the applicants, one standing before each applicant to wash first his face, then his hands, then his feet.

When the Head Men had returned to their original positions the shamans stepped forward, one by one, performing ancient, elaborate dance steps and flourishing a single eagle feather in the direction of the four compass points. Each laid his right palm flat on the symbolic stump, and with his left hand pointed to the sun while vowing to the Great Spirit that his heart was pure. He emphasized that he had never lied to injure his people, nor ever spilled the blood of any tribesman. He intoned that he expected the same from the men who were about to join the leadership class. This shaman then moved to the other side of the altar, removed a small bag of paint from his belt, and proceeded to daub the face of the first candidate. While that was occurring, another shaman moved to the stump in the same manner and made the same vows; and by the time the first had moved on to paint the next face, the second was painting the first candidate’s hands and arms. 

And so it went with a third shaman, who spread paint over the legs of the applicants from knees to feet. A fourth shaman followed, anointing each candidate’s face and head with holy oil. Finally, the tribe’s most celebrated priest stepped forward. After making the by-now familiar vows at the altar, he swept his hands over the heads of the acolytes and in a voice that all the tribe could hear issued a sermon driving home the great duties and responsibilities the electees owed to the Siouan peoples by virtue of their new, exalted position. 

When these ministrations were complete, the Head Men took their new brethren by the hands and led them into a semicircle on the east side of the altar. The high priest then removed from his pouch a handful of downy eagle feathers, which had been plucked from the underside of the bird’s wing, and attached one to each man’s head. The ceremony was complete; the men had been elevated to the chieftain class. As the tribe’s best dancers burst from the crowd to gyrate around the holy tree stump, another round of feasting began. 

When Red Cloud later recounted this ceremony, he described it as one of the proudest moments of his life. Yet his joy, he wrote, was not for himself. Not only had the ritual promoted individual warriors into an elevated class; it also redounded to their male children. This meant that his only son, Jack Red Cloud—the fourth of five children he would sire with Pretty Owl—would not have to suffer the hereditary prejudices that had stood in his own path to leadership. Of course, if the whites had their way in that summer of 1855, his hopes and dreams for his son would be of no consequence. 

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While the Oglalas were gathered for the Pipe Dance their cousins were busy. The Brules in particular, coalescing behind the charismatic Spotted Tail, stepped up their raids to steal livestock from the emigrant trains—abetted later in the summer by Oglala bands returning from the hunka. Spotted Tail had taken his name as a boy when a trapper presented him with the gift of a raccoon tail, and he wore the talisman on every raid. It became a familiar sight to whites traveling the “Glory Road”; sometimes their last. Similarly, in June 1855 a group of Miniconjous waylaid a wagon train passing through a tight ravine on the trail. When the wagon master rode out to mollify them with the usual gifts of sugar and coffee, they shot him through the heart. A few days later the same Indians, eighteen braves in all, swooped down on another train and ran off sixteen horses. During the melee an oxcart became separated from the main body; the Indians surrounded it and relentlessly thrust their lances into a man and woman until their organs seeped out and spilled onto the prairie. A group of horrified Oglala Head Men later returned the stolen stock, and even organized a general Lakota offensive against the Omaha in hopes of distracting the bloodthirsty Miniconjou braves. But the damage had been done. That August, a year to the day of the Grattan massacre, a new Indian agent named Thomas Twiss rode into Fort Laramie.

Twiss, a lean, ambitious West Point honors graduate, had been personally recruited for this position by the veteran Indian fighter Colonel William Selby Harney. Harney, with his plump cheeks and snowy whiskers, resembled a uniformed Father Christmas. But his jolly countenance was deceiving. He had once been chased out of St. Louis by a mob after he’d beaten to death a female slave who had lost his house keys. And he hated Indians and enjoyed killing them, either in the field or at the end of a rope on the gallows. He had led troops against the Sauk in the Black Hawk War and against the Seminoles during Andrew Jackson’s Everglades campaign—where his buffoonish negligence resulted in the massacre of an entire detachment of dragoons. He himself had escaped by capering through the Florida bush wearing only his underwear. The resultant embarrassment increased Harney’s fervor to slay red people; and during the Mexican War his overzealous pursuit of the Comanche—as opposed to engaging Santa Anna’s troops—enraged the commander of the U.S. forces, General Winfield Scott, who relieved him of command. But the Harneys were Tennessee neighbors of the family of President James K. Polk, who reinstated the colonel. Now the War Department decided that Harney and his agent Twiss were just the men to put down an as-yet-nonexistent Sioux uprising in the High Plains. 

Twiss’s first official proclamation was to declare the nearby North Platte a literal “deadline.” He dispatched riders to inform the Lakota and their allies that any Indians found north of the winding tributary would be considered hostile and killed on the spot. Though this applied to much of the prime buffalo range, many Brules and almost all the Oglalas rode south and made camp near the post. In his typical coy fashion, Red Cloud never mentions in his memoir whether he obeyed Twiss’s order, and there are no witnesses to his presence at Fort Laramie that summer. He does hint throughout his book, however, that in a pinch he often found it convenient to be off hunting or raiding in the no-man’s land west of the fort, and it is not difficult to imagine him, at this stage in his life, thumbing his nose at the Indian agent’s proclamation by doing just that. 

The tribes and bands of Oglalas and Brules who did “come in” initially staked separate camps on either side of Fort Laramie, but Twiss eventually forced them to combine their 400 lodges into one huge village thirty-five miles north of the stockade. When the Indian agent felt he had a quorum he rode out to address the Head Men. He told them that he knew the names of the Brules who had attacked the mail coach and promised that they would face swift and certain justice, as would any Indian who left this safe harbor and recrossed the North Platte. As Twiss spoke, Colonel Harney’s combined column of 600 infantry and cavalry troops had already begun a stealthy march out of Fort Leavenworth in eastern Kansas, bound for Sioux territory. 

This turn of events spelled disaster for a Brule band led by a Head Man named Little Thunder. Though of the same tribe as Conquering Bear, Little Thunder was not overtly associated with Spotted Tail or the slain chief’s clan. He had even taken the French trader Bordeaux’s side against attacking Fort Laramie after the fight with Grattan. Bordeaux now tried to return the favor by sending runners to Little Thunder’s camp, urging him to return before Harney’s force found him. But Little Thunder was overconfident about his friendship with the whites—it is what had led him to disregarded Twiss’s edict in the first place. Moreover, his buffalo hunt along Blue Water Creek, not far from where Red Cloud was born, was proving a spectacular success. He told Bordeaux’s messengers that his people were still following the herd across the vast corduroy plain in order to lay in winter meat. When the hunt was complete, he added, he would come in.

In late August Little Thunder’s sparse band was joined by an even smaller group of Oglalas that included Crazy Horse’s family. All told, about 250 Indians had made camp in a narrow swale along Blue Water Creek—which the whites called Ash Creek— several miles north of the North Platte. Some of the boys, including Crazy Horse, were out scouting the droves, but Little Thunder had posted no sentries in the juniperflecked hills that overlooked his encampment. He was not hard to find, and on September 2, one of Harney’s Pawnee scouts found him. The colonel arranged his line of attack by sundown, and at dawn marched his infantry through the tall saw grass lining the natural defilade carved by the stream. His final instructions to his men were to spare not “one of those damned red sons of bitches.” By the time the Indians spotted them it was too late. 

Little Thunder and several warriors rode out, unarmed, to parley. The Head Man signed this intention to Harney’s scout. But it was an old Indian trick for a leader to buy time while his people broke down their lodges and slipped away. On the colonel’s command the infantrymen shouldered their rifles and advanced in a quick march. The Indians turned and galloped off, only to run headlong into Harney’s cavalry sweeping down the creek. What ensued became known as the Battle of Ash Creek. 

It was a mad scene. The Army pincers closed, regimental bugles blared, and battle guidons snapped as bullets and arrows flew. Cavalry horses panted and snorted, and booming howitzers sent grapeshot ripping through tepees. Braves taken by surprise picked up tomahawks, spears, and war clubs and shrieked as they threw themselves at the American lines. They were cut down by rifle fire. Women and children screamed, dogs yelped, and the hooves of racing Indian ponies echoed from bare ocher buttes and cracked, dusty coulees soon pocked with scarlet pools of blood. The running fight, if it can be called that, covered five miles before it was over. One of Harney’s company commanders noted drily in his journal, “There was much slaughter in the pursuit.” And the young topographical engineer Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who was riding with the troop—and who would be better known in later years as the Union general who arranged the last-minute defense of Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg— recorded “the heart-rending sight—wounded women and children crying and moaning, horribly mangled by the bullets.” 

Eighty-six Lakota men, women, and children were killed. The soldiers, bent on revenge for Grattan, scalped most of the bodies and mutilated the pubic areas of the women, whose vaginas were hacked out as trophies. Another seventy women and children were captured. Harney’s losses were negligible—four killed and seven wounded. When the abandoned Indian campsite was searched, soldiers found papers taken from the mail coach (but not the gold coins), the scalps of two white women, and clothing identified as belonging to Grattan’s troops. Although a popular Army marching song 1 celebrating Little Thunder’s death was composed soon afterward, the Brule Head Man had in fact escaped. (He was, ironically, killed by his own people ten years later for fraternizing with whites.) 
1. We did not make a blunder, We rubbed out Little Thunder, And we sent him to the other side of Jordan
After the Battle of Ash Creek the Lakota called Harney “Women Killer.” (While technically correct, this seems a bit precious given the Sioux’s own rules of engagement.) After Harney had force-marched his captives to Fort Laramie, the officers were allowed to select the prettiest for themselves, with the rest “shared out among the soldiers.” A year later halfbreed “war orphans” ran thick at the fort, including an infant girl alleged to have been fathered by Harney himself. Between amorous interludes the colonel rode out to the Lakota camp and demanded the surrender of Spotted Tail and the others who had raided the mail coach. In what would have been an unthinkable act prior to Ash Creek, several Head Men persuaded the responsible Brules to turn themselves in for the good of the tribe. Spotted Tail and his retinue arrived at the fort the next day, unarmed, in their finest battle raiment, singing their death songs. Watching closely as they surrendered was the young Crazy Horse. He knew Spotted Tail well. His father was married to two of the great warrior’s sisters. 

Inexplicably, instead of being hanged, Spotted Tail and the rest were taken in chains to Fort Kearney on the Lower Platte, where for two years they were employed as scouts. The Lakota, Red Cloud in particular, were astounded. Friendly Indians had been slaughtered while hostile braves were housed and fed.[does not matter if it is 1855 or 2019,the federal government's dalliance's with the 'criminal element of the moment has MANY examples along their narrative timeline D.C] The whites seemed truly crazy—but they also possessed overpowering strength of arms, and Harney made certain the Indians recognized it. He established Fort Grattan at the mouth of Ash Creek and garrisoned it with a company of the 6th Infantry. He then spent most of the autumn of 1855 on a leisurely march through the heart of Western Sioux territory, from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre on the Upper Missouri. It was an affront, a challenge to any and all to come out and fight. No one dared. A year later, testifying at a government hearing investigating the Blue Water Creek engagement, Harney apologized to the panel (but, notably, not to the Indians) for his attack on Little Thunder’s people. He stated that when he moved up the “Glory Road” that September he had been “very mad, ” and anxious to strike the first camp of Indians he could find on the wrong side of the North Platte. 

As word of Harney’s testimony circulated among the Lakota they gave him a new nickname—“Mad Bear.” The Indians suffered another indignity in March 1856 when Harney summoned the Lakota Head Men from their winter camps to a council. He demanded that they return any property and livestock stolen from whites and end all harassment of emigrants along the Oregon Trail—a virtual surrender of the once buffalo-rich Platte River Valley—and added that the United States now also officially considered the path of Harney’s diagonal march from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre as inviolable American land. He promised that the same consequences that had befallen Little Thunder would be meted out to any Indian harassing travelers along this new road. And there, in an unmarked grave, the skeletal remains of the Horse Creek Treaty were buried.

It was as if a veil had fallen from the eyes of the Lakota. Why it had taken so long is impossible to say. For nearly four decades they had put up with traders, trappers, soldiers, and emigrants trespassing on their lands. They had been literally sickened to death by white interlopers, and when they protested they had been given promises that the whites never intended to keep. They had watched the buffalo herds recede as homesteaders advanced along the Missouri. They had seen the whites turn on a Head Man they themselves had appointed and kill him over an old cow, friendly tribes attacked by soldiers, and their women and children murdered, captured, and raped. The trapper-trader Edwin Denig, traveling among the Lakota at the time and not particularly favorably inclined toward the “heathens, ” nonetheless feared their imminent destruction. “They are split into different factions following different leaders, and through want of game and unity of purpose are fast verging toward dissolution, ” he wrote in 1856. “Their ultimate destination will no doubt be to become a set of outlaws, hanging around the emigrant road, stealing horses, killing stragglers and committing other depredations until the Government is obliged to use measures for their entire extermination. It cannot be otherwise. It is the fate of circumstances which, however to be regretted, will become unavoidable.” 

Denig may have overestimated the disastrous effects American guns and germs had on the Indians—he put the entire Oglala population in 1856 at somewhat less than 700, but just a year earlier the Indian agent Twiss had counted 450 Oglala lodges with a population closer to 2,000. Denig’s prophecy would also prove faulty—the Lakota may have been down, but they were not out. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that a stray cow would become the impetus for a series of events that tipped the High Plains toward three decades of conflict. Yet there it was. Something big, the Western Sioux had finally recognized, something momentous never before considered, must be done. 

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Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-yearold Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental note to keep tabs on this one.

All is well for the moment in Red Cloud’s small world. But as he strolls through the village he spots movement atop a distant sandstone mesa. He catches a glint of the sun’s last rays reflected, he knows, by a saddle pommel plated with Mexican silver, and he understands that the horse’s owner is an Indian. Gradually the dark speck comes into focus, a single approaching rider, and Red Cloud recognizes the distinctive raised cantle and raven feathered arrow fletchings— three at the top, three at the bottom, tied with sinew— favored by the Brules. Within moments the lone visitor dismounts before Old Smoke’s lodge, and Red Cloud joins his tribesmen already gathered as the Head Man pulls back the flap of his tepee and signals them to enter. 

Inside, seated by a wood fire, the Brule stranger eagerly accepts a bowl of dog stew seasoned with prairie turnip and wild artichoke and wordlessly consumes his meal before pulling from his buckskin blouse a long object wrapped in a wolf’s pelt. It is a pipe, as Red Cloud knows before it is even unwrapped. But it is not the war pipe he is anticipating. This sacred pipe indicates a greater matter, one that Red Cloud has never before encountered. Enjoy your winter camp, the messenger reports, and make your spring buffalo hunt. But come the next summer hard decisions must be made. 

As the stranger continues Red Cloud realizes that, for the first time in his life, for the first time since the Western Sioux ventured out onto the High Plains, all the Lakota have been summoned to a grand tribal council. It is there that they will formulate a united resistance against the mounting white threat. 

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