The Heart of Everything That Is:
The Untold Story of Red Cloud
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
12
The Untold Story of Red Cloud
an American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
12
SAMUEL
COLT’S
INVENTION
In August 1857 more Lakota
congregated along the placid
Belle Fourche River than had
attended the Horse Creek
Treaty Council six years
earlier. For 10,000 years
bands of indigenous North
Americans had made
pilgrimages to this holy
ground in present-day
western South Dakota where
the stark Bear Butte loomed
high over the riverbanks. To
the Cheyenne this igneous
rock was the sacred “Giving
Hill,
” the height from which
the Great Spirit had imparted
the “sweet medicine” of life
to the tribe; and this belief
influenced later Sioux
arrivals, who considered
remains of an ancient
volcanic eruption a holy place
of meditation despite placing
their own origin myth farther
south, in the Black Hills. But
never before had the Western
Sioux come together at Bear
Butte, or anywhere on the
Plains, as a single people.
To this gathering had arrived not only Oglalas, Miniconjous, and Brules but the wild northern tribes—the Sans Arcs, Blackfeet Sioux, Two Kettles, and Hunkpapas —who set a tone of defiance. By some estimates as many as 10,000 Indians were present, more than three quarters of the total population of Western Sioux, convened under a domed blue sky to fashion a “national” policy for dealing with the American aggressors. The Lakota had finally recognized their mistake in not challenging General Harney when he invaded their country, and they vowed that this would be the last in a half century’s worth of accommodations.
The lodges were arranged in a huge oval around the southern rim of the barren stone tower, and as young men raced horses, gambled, and purified themselves in preparation for a multi tribal Sun Dance, women gossiped and girls preened for boys running among tepees gawking at heroes they knew only from legend. Here was the fierce Hump, the mighty Blackfoot whose future was said to have been foretold when as a boy he strayed into a cave and stared down a great gray wolf. Hump was conferring with his handsome tribesman Long Mandan, whose clear, wide-set eyes sparkled above scythe-like cheekbones. Young and old alike tilted their heads to gawk at the seven-foot Miniconjou fighter Touch The Clouds, who walked in the manner of a praying mantis, lifting his legs so high that he appeared to be using them as feelers. Packs of snapping dogs followed the fierce Hunkpapa “shirt wearer, ” Four Horns, who wore a necklace of raw meat strung across his hair-fringed tunic and was accompanied nearly everywhere he went by his nephew Sitting Bull. In each lodge they visited, these two proselytized for war against the whites.
Revered members of the western Oglala bands such as Red Cloud and the father and son Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His Horses and Young-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses—the father striding through the camps with a regal mien befitting a man acknowledged by many as the successor to the slain Conquering Bear— introduced themselves to eastern counterparts such as the seasoned fighter Crow Feather of the Sans Arcs. And Crazy Horse, now nearly seventeen, was reunited with his family, including his younger half brother Little Hawk, whose adventuresome raids on the Crows had already inspired jubilant brave-heart songs. It was reported that of all the maidens vying to catch the eye of Crazy Horse, he was most attracted to a raven haired beauty named Black Buffalo Woman, niece of Pretty Owl and Red Cloud. This infatuation would not end well.
Over many council fires and private feasts the Americans were, figuratively, put on trial. Militants like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull lobbied separately and together for immediate raids against Army detachments and emigrant wagon trains. Moderates such as Old-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses and a Hunkpapa Head Man named Bears Ribs urged forbearance, arguing that the whites seemed content to have secured their “holy road.” The moderates would fight if they must, they said, but why disturb a hornet’s nest? Red Cloud and his allies countered that it was only a matter of time before these white wasps again flew as a swarm in search of larger Indian orchards. When had the Indian, Red Cloud asked, ever known the whites to be satisfied with the lands that they already possessed?
Despite these tactical disagreements, one unifying strategic goal did emerge— continued protection, by force if necessary, of the sanctity of the most sacred Black Hills. Oaths were sworn to defend the cherished Paha Sapa from all white intrusions; and the festivities remained generally upbeat and positive, the only shadow cast by the pale boy with the curly hair— the precocious Crazy Horse. He had spent the spring and early summer wandering from Montana to Kansas with his best friend, Young-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses. They had visited bands from numerous tribes, and at the Bear Butte Council Crazy Horse told a disheartening tale.
A month earlier he had joined a Cheyenne camp staked well below the Platte, on the banks of the Smoky Hill River south of the Republican—coincidentally, this would be the site of General George Armstrong Custer’s first Indian campaign a decade later. There he was befriended by a medicine man called Ice. It was from Ice, he said, that he began to learn the ways of the Cheyenne, who, if possible, hated the whites even more than the Sioux did. Ice’s people had carried out several successful raids on small detachments of soldiers crossing the Kansas Plains, but had been taken aback by the small guns the Bluecoats now carried that fired multiple rounds without having to be reloaded after each shot. These were the revolvers Red Cloud had seen at Horse Creek. But neither he nor any of the other Indians present at Bear Butte that summer were aware that their world was in the process of an irrevocable evolution, and that a driving force behind this change was emanating from, of all places, an industrial city far to the east in a state called Connecticut.
The inventor of these mysterious weapons, Samuel Colt, had taken a roundabout journey to fame. Colt’s fascination with guns began when he was a child living in Hartford and his maternal grandfather, a former officer in the Continental Army, bequeathed him a flintlock pistol. As Colt grew older he became familiar with a cumbersome multi barreled handgun called a “pepperbox revolver, ” which required the shooter to manually rotate its cylinder, like a pepper grinder, after each discharge. Then, when he went to sea in 1830 at the age of sixteen, on a brig bound for Calcutta, he observed that the spokes in the ship’s wheel, no matter in what direction it was spun, always synchronized with a clutch to hold the wheel in place. He became transfixed by the idea of applying that technology to a handgun. Using scraps from the ship’s store, he built a wooden model of a five-shot revolver based on the movement of the brig’s wheel: a cocking hammer would rotate the cylinder, and a pawl would lock it in place on the tooth of a circular gear.
Back in the United States two years later, Colt secured American and European patents for his invention, founded the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, and set about raising funds. He was spectacularly inept. He toured the eastern United States and Canada with what can best be described as a carnival act: his demonstrations incorporated nitrous oxide, wax sculptures, and fireworks. He presented theatrical speeches and gave elaborate dinner parties awash in alcohol to which he invited wealthy businessmen and military officers in hopes of luring investors and securing Army contracts. Colt’s problem was that he usually ended up outdrinking them all. Although his sales spiked briefly when the Army ordered a consignment of five-shot Colts during the Second Seminole War, it was not enough to keep the firm afloat. In 1842, the assets of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company were sold at public auction in New York City.
Colt tried his hand at other inventions—underwater electrical detonators and, in partnership with Samuel Morse, a cable waterproofing company to run undersea telegraph lines. But their genius was ahead of its time, and Colt returned to his revolver. While tinkering with its original design he scraped together the money to hire a New York gunsmith to begin a limited production run—and then lightning struck in the form of a veteran of the Seminole War named Samuel Walker. One day Walker knocked on Colt’s door with an order for 1,000 guns. Walker had recently been promoted to captain in the Texas Rangers, and his Ranger company had used the five-shot Patent Colt with great success against marauding Comanche. Now he proposed adding a sixth round to the cylinder. Their collaboration produced the Walker Colt, the template for a generation of western handguns.
At the urging of General Sam Houston, President James Polk approved succeeding versions of Colt’s handgun, most famously the Navy Revolver, as the official sidearm of the U.S. Army. It would be said after the Civil War that “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” By then, Colt and Walker were both dead—Walker was killed in a skirmish during the Mexican War, in 1847; and Colt, wealthy beyond description, died of gout in 1862 at only forty-seven. But their revolver lived on, and Red Cloud, always enamored of new weapons, took a particular interest as Crazy Horse continued his story of the white soldiers and the magic guns.
Not long after one of their raids, the boy said, the Cheyenne learned that the Bluecoats were assembling a large retaliatory force to ride on their camp along the Smoky Hill. There was much debate among the Dog Soldiers about how best to face these new weapons until the medicine man Ice gathered the band’s warriors and led them to a small lake near the village. The Cheyenne set even more store by charms and omens than did the Sioux, and Crazy Horse had watched as Ice taught the braves his medicine songs and told them to immerse their hands in the lake water while they sang and he danced. Satisfied with the ritual, he instructed a few of the cleansed Dog Soldiers to extend their arms, palms out. He then handed a rifle to another brave and ordered him to shoot. The bullets bounced off their hands. 1 The Cheyenne, mystically inured against the white man’s balls and bullets, were now not only eager but frenzied for a fight.
1. Stephen E. Ambrose, in Crazy Horse and Custer, proposes an explanation of this “miracle”: the shells may have been underloaded with gunpowder, perhaps on Ice’s secret instructions.
Soon enough, in mid-July, they got their wish when about 300 Dog Soldiers rode out to face an equal number of Bluecoats of the 1st U.S. Cavalry under the command of Colonel E. V. “Bull Head” Sumner. It was an extraordinary scene, possibly the only classic “European” battle formation the Indians ever displayed on the American Plains. They rode from the west into a tight valley bounded by the Solomon River to the north and a string of high bluffs to the south. Sumner must have been shocked. The Indians’ martial attributes—their speed, their stealth, their ability to surprise—were considered skulking and sneaky by American Army officers. Yet here was an enemy line as worthy of attack as any Hussar light cavalry. Sumner ordered his mounted skirmishers into three rows and cantered up the valley from the east. The Cheyenne raced their horses wildly in circles in order to give them a second wind, and then re-formed and loped easily toward the Americans.
Now the U.S. cavalrymen became confused. The few Indians who had long rifles held them at their sides, barrels pointed to the ground, while the rest kept their arrows in their quivers. At Ice’s signal the Cheyenne horsemen extended their arms, palms out, and awaited the usual fusillade. But no guns sounded. Sumner had inexplicably ordered his troops to sling their carbines and unsheathe their threefoot-long “Old Wristbreaker” sabers. Sumner’s instructions were pure chance. Never before or afterward was a saber charge recorded in the long history of the Indian wars. At the sight of the long knives descending on them the Cheyenne panicked. Their medicine had not prepared them for swords. Some turned and fled, while others dashed toward the river or up into the bluffs. It was a demoralizing rout. Only four braves were killed, and the women and children managed to flee, but the Americans captured the entire Cheyenne camp as well as the Indians’ herd of pack horses and mules. On the American side, the “battle” was notable for drawing first blood from the young Lieutenant James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, who suffered a slight wound from a bullet to his chest.
The memory of the defeat, Crazy Horse told his Sioux brethren, had rested heavily on his mind since the day after the fight, when he and Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His Horses packed up and rode north toward Bear Butte. Now he vowed, along with many others, to avenge it. To Red Cloud this account of the guns that fired six times must have seemed ominous. Whatever trepidation he felt, however, may have been overridden by the decisions made by the Lakota Head Men at Bear Butte. By the time the thousands of Indian ponies had reduced the prairie grass to nubs in all directions it was decided that each tribe would stake out its own, new hunting ground to develop and defend. “Thus, ” writes the Sioux historian Robert W. Larson, “those Oglalas who had followed Old Smoke chose the Powder River".
Ironically, despite their haphazard approach to a unified “war” on the whites, in the years following the Bear Butte gathering this migratory shift allowed most of the Oglalas to give the Americans a wide enough berth that their culture experienced a minor but flourishing mini-renaissance, evoking memories of the fat and happy early 1800s. The Powder River Country had the most unspoiled hunting grounds in North America, and as Oglala society grew wealthier and stronger, so too did Red Cloud’s grip on power. Warriors from disparate Oglala bands now vied to ride with him against the Crows and other enemies, and each fighting season he attracted greater numbers of Brules, Miniconjous, and even Sans Arcs and Hunk papas to join his far reaching expeditions. These companions included Crazy Horse.
Because of the new geographic reality, Red Cloud’s martial leadership also took on a new form and function. No longer could he afford to lead a few braves on raids merely for glory and plunder; his war parties for the first time now also hunted for Indian “intruders” to expel from the Western Sioux’s burgeoning empire. This often meant deviating from the traditional Lakota method of prairie warfare on open, flat terrain. On one occasion, for instance, his scouts picked up fresh Shoshone moccasin tracks hugging the base of the Bighorns in northern Wyoming. Red Cloud and about seventy-five braves caught up to the Shoshones and chased them back into the mountains. In the old days, that would have been warning enough. Not now. Red Cloud ordered his Sioux to dismount and hitch their horses, and they pursued the Shoshones on foot up the steep pitch. A running high country battle through thick whitebark pine and blue spruce ensued—a fight a Mohawk, a Choctaw, or even a Minnesota Sioux might have felt more comfortable engaging in than a Plains Lakota. When the Shoshones disappeared behind a circular wall of boulders that formed a natural fortress on top of a rocky promenade, Red Cloud’s braves surrounded them.
For a day and night the Lakota besieged the Shoshones, feinting, charging, being beaten back, each side’s sharpshooters firing whenever an enemy exposed himself. Occasionally a Sioux arrow would lodge in a Shoshone’s head as it was raised over the top of the wall. For the most part, however, the Shoshones holding the high ground got the better of the fight. One defender in particular seemed to have the best shooting eye —he had killed at least one Bad Face and wounded several others—and Red Cloud, crouched behind a tree perhaps 100 yards downslope, studied the shooter’s pattern. He observed that the enemy would jump onto the stone barricade, aim his long rifle, and fire in a nearly continuous motion before ducking back down for cover. Red Cloud also noticed that the Shoshone shot from behind the same rock each time.
Red Cloud hatched his plan and signaled to one of his braves to dash for a nearby boulder. As he expected, the sharpshooting Shoshone showed himself. Red Cloud stood, and in an electrifying display of accuracy, shot him dead. The Shoshone toppled forward, outside the fortress, and a shrieking Red Cloud tore up the mountain brandishing his tomahawk. He reached the man, scalped him, and hacked off his right arm at the shoulder. He then crawled to and fro along the outside of the wall, raising the severed arm at intervals and shouting for the cowardly enemies to come out and fight like men.
But the Bad Faces, still mired in the ways of prairie warfare, failed to press their psychological advantage. So excited were those guarding the rear of the makeshift fort that they abandoned their positions to crowd below Red Cloud and whoop him on. This left open a back door through which most of the Shoshones escaped into the forest. Red Cloud was furious. But all he could do was file away the episode and ensure that it never happened again. The Oglala war party climbed down the mountain, retrieved their horses, and rode back and forth along the foot of the range for three days as a signal to any Indians who might be watching that this was now Lakota land. This, too, was something new.
Those numbers multiplied nearly exponentially when gold was discovered in 1858 on Cheyenne and southern Arapaho lands along Cherry Creek, the future site of Denver. The area around Pikes Peak came to resemble an ant colony, with 100,000 pitmen and placer men swarming over the hills and dales. So safe had the Oregon Trail become that by 1860 the newly formed Pony Express began carrying mail along a 2,000-mile route between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, completing the circuit in ten days during good weather and fourteen in the dead of winter. The small, wiry Express riders, many of them still in their teens, sparked a trend in publishing circles back east, their roughneck adventures filling “true” dime novels and early pulp magazines. The romance lasted longer than the endeavor. Less than two years later the swashbuckling operation was shut down when the Western Union Telegraph Company finished stringing its lines. The railroad was also coming: industry executives were already dusting off Captain Stansbury’s old surveys in preparation for laying track.
Most of the Indians these emigrants saw before reaching the Rockies were bands of “tame” Oglalas and Brules—“Laramie Loafers, ” the Bluecoats called them with a sneer—who scratched out a living begging and scavenging along the trails west. There was much to scavenge, for it is doubtful that by the early 1860s Red Cloud would have recognized the Platte River Valley of his youth. The route was now littered with broken-down wagons and handcarts, empty food tins, and clothes worn to rags, while the cottonwood and chokecherry trees that had once lined every creek and streambed had been burned for countless cooking fires. The buffalo had disappeared, having lost the battle for the corridor’s already scarce water and vegetation to the 100,000 head of cattle and 50,000 sheep that passed through the territory annually. And the Oregon Trail itself had been transformed into “a swath of stinking refuse, ” its very air soured by the rotting carcasses of worn-out horses, mules, oxen, and sheep mixing with the half-buried corpses of humans struck down by heat, exhaustion, or disease, their bones dug up and picked over by gray wolves and coyotes.
The increased traffic proved beneficial for traders, blacksmiths, innkeepers, hostlers, and even a few professional gamblers who set up shop along the route— as well as for some of the old mountain men whose financial opportunities skyrocketed with the need for guides and scouts. As late as 1852 Jim Bridger had been sighted still trapping in the Rockies, probably as much for sport as need, since his cedar log fort on the Blacks Fork of the Green River in central Utah was doing a thriving business as a layover near the “California ferry, ” which put off at the head of the western trails. But Bridger’s legendary intimacy with the Indians, particularly the Ute and his wife’s Shoshone tribe, made him a marked man.
Unlike the Lakota, the mountain tribes stood in the way of the Mormons’ expansion. Brigham Young, by now governor of the Utah Territory, had turned the Salt Lake Valley into his own semi-autonomous fiefdom, which he named Deseret, and in July 1853 a full-scale war broke out between the Ute and the Latter-day Saints. Both sides committed the usual atrocities and Young, suspicious of Bridger’s loyalties and envious of his real estate holdings, used the bloodletting as an excuse to issue a territorial proclamation forbidding all trade with any of the tribes. The following month at a Mormon town hall meeting Bridger was accused of having “stirred up the Indians to commit depredations upon our people.” It was alleged that he had supplied the Shoshones with powder and lead—the very act with which he had kept the peace, and for which he had been lauded, at the Horse Creek Council two years earlier. “Old Gabe” was tried and found guilty in absentia at a secret hearing, and a posse of 150 “avenging angels” was dispatched from Provo to arrest him. Indians warned him and he eluded the riders, taking his family east to Fort Laramie. When the Mormons reached his stockade they burned his copious stocks of whiskey and rum and seized the fort and livestock. They never returned them.
From Wyoming, Bridger meandered farther east until finally, after having been away for thirty years, he arrived back home in St. Louis. His fame had preceded him, and he was mobbed by reporters and well-wishers wherever he went. He purchased a large farmstead just outside the city, but plowing, planting, and reaping were not in his blood. Through the remainder of the decade he found steady employment, at $5 a day, guiding various kinds of expeditions. He took part in a congressional scientific survey seeking the source of the Yellowstone, and discovered a mountain pass that shortened the route between Denver and Salt Lake City for the overland mail coach—today’s U.S. Route 40. He achieved some measure of revenge on the Latter-day Saints by guiding 2,500 federal troops into Salt Lake City during the “Mormon War, ” fought over Brigham Young’s theocratic rebellion of 1857–58. And in one of the more bizarre chapters of his life he contracted with a wealthy, dissolute Irish peer, Sir St. George Gore, as a scout for Gore’s hunting safari. Bridger spent the better part of two years wandering the High Plains with Gore—the eighth baronet of Manor Gore, near Sligo—mostly trying to prevent his self-indulgent employer and a retinue of beaters, skinners, wranglers, chefs, and sommeliers from wandering into Lakota territory.
He was not often successful. Gore killed animals on a whim at an astounding pace, and toward the end of his wanton holiday he and Bridger crossed paths with U.S. Army captain Randolph B. Marcy, fresh from his discovery of the headwaters of the Red River. Marcy recorded that among Gore’s voluminous antelope, deer, and elk trophies were the coats of 41 grizzly bears and 2,500 buffalo skins. It took six wagons and twentyone carts to haul all this. Since Bridger professed to care deeply for the welfare of the Indians, it is difficult to explain why he did not recognize that such indiscriminate slaughter might antagonize the Western Sioux.
But if Bridger did not notice, Red Cloud surely did. The great blotahunka was now Head Man of the Bad Face Oglalas in all but name, because at age eighty-two, Old Smoke had faded into senescence to enjoy the December of his long life. Though greenhorn Army officers deployed to Fort Laramie after the Mormon War continued to recognize the more pliant Old-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses as “chief” of the Sioux—Red Cloud’s name had yet to appear in any official government reports—most Lakota, including those from the far Missouri River regions east of the Black Hills, considered Red Cloud their martial and spiritual leader.
This primacy, however, also carried a heavy responsibility. The history of the white incursion had demonstrated that individual bands could not stand alone against the might of the American Army. But could a multi tribal alliance actually be formed to battle the intruders? And if so, what were its chances of prevailing? Of one fact Red Cloud was certain—large scale engagements against the Bluecoats where the two sides were of equal numbers were essentially suicide missions. The only way to fight them was to gather enough of the squabbling Sioux under one banner and use overwhelming force against any smaller targets that presented themselves. Barring that, or perhaps in addition to that, the Indians would need to rely on stealthy hit-and-run tactics, where the chance of casualties was low. They would use their knowledge of the country to run off Army remudas and beef herds, and starve the Bluecoats out of their isolated forts. It would be a war of decoy and ambush, of fighting from bluff to butte and from coulee to creek bed —in short, a guerrilla war before it was actually known as such. It was, Red Cloud recognized, the Indians’ only recourse.
Yet how to rouse his disparate peoples, particularly his own tribesmen? Despite the occasional incursions by insatiable white hunters guided by the likes of Bridger, the Lakota cultural and political revival in the years following the Bear Butte assembly had ushered in a period of quiescence. With their enemies, particularly the Crows, cleared from the mile-high Powder River Country, the Lakota were free to roam an immense short-grass prairie bursting with buffalo, antelope, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep and crossed by abundant sources of sweet water flowing out of pine shrouded ranges. During the broiling summer months cool mountain meadows awash with goldenrod and black eyed Susans beckoned, and in winter the south face of the Black Hills constituted a gigantic windbreak against the numbing gales freighting down from the Canadian flats.
Moreover, just as Old Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses had argued at Bear Butte, the Bluecoats had not strayed far from their line of forts and mail stations along the Oregon Trail since General Harney’s march. Even the secondary road Harney had blazed from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre was now growing over; the ruts from the Army freight wagons were barely visible beneath carpets of white prairie clover and purple asters. Red Cloud still suspected that white expansion was not complete, that the trespassers would once more arrive in greater numbers to steal Lakota lands. Why they had not done so already remained a mystery.
Given the circumstances, it would be hard to make the case for war on the whites. As it was, Red Cloud and the Western Sioux had no way of knowing that, far to the east, two American armies were already preparing for an epic Civil War that would, at least temporarily, push the “Indian Problem” far down on the government’s list of priorities.
In the years since the fight at Blue Water Creek and his “invasion” of the Lakota lands, Harney’s bungling adventures had continued into the farcical. He still hunted Indians, seemingly for sport, but that had never bothered the authorities back east. It was only when, in 1859, he nearly set off a shooting war with Great Britain that his superiors thought to rein him in. This occurred during an inspection tour of the U.S.- Canadian borderlands, when his inept handling of a minor incident involving an “English” hog rooting through an America farmers fields resulted in an armed standoff between Harney’s troops and British Royal Marines. Diplomats were roused, cooler heads prevailed, and Harney was shuffled back into the nation’s interior, where it was thought he could do no more lasting damage to either himself or the Union cause. But twelve months into the Civil War he was relieved of command by President Lincoln when rumors surfaced that he was secretly negotiating a western truce with Confederate authorities.
Harney denied the charge and set off for Washington to defend himself. But he somehow lost his way and made the error of passing through rebel-held territory, where he was captured and presented to General Robert E. Lee. Lee offered him a Confederate commission, which Harney to his credit declined, and he was released and allowed to complete his journey. On reaching Washington, however, Harney was quietly retired and whisked from the national stage.
Though happy to be rid of the murderous “Mad Bear, ” the Western Sioux made no concerted effort to exploit either Harney’s absence or the War Between the States. Nevertheless, those who learned of its particulars took no small satisfaction in the great droves of white men slaughtering each other on faraway battlefields. This absence of tension, however, did not prevent rumors from reaching Washington of Confederate agents fomenting insurrection among the tribes, particularly the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and, farther south, the sullen peoples occupying the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. In keeping with the government’s usual incomprehension of Indian mores, particularly those of the Northern Plains tribes, none of the fearmongers gave a thought to why Indians would ever fight for a slaveholding republic that had facilitated the greatest deportation of Native Americans on the continent. In any case, the South lacked the means to incite such an uprising.
The exception was in Minnesota, where the war did, however tangentially, facilitate a feral Indian conflict in the summer of 1862. It erupted, and was put down, with brutal efficiency, but not before much blood— most of it Indian, and innocent—was spilled.
1. It should be noted that whites have always been much more inclined to affix the term “massacre” to Indian atrocities while preferring to call their own victories, such as the one at Blue Water Creek, “battles.”
The ember that ignited the Minnesota powder keg could be traced back, as usual, to the government’s broken promises. Four years earlier Minnesota had become the thirty-second state admitted into the Union, and in the summer of 1862 it was not lost on the Indians that the already sparse population of just over 170,000 2 had been drained of young men, many of whom were off fighting the Confederacy. Washington had signed treaties with the Dakotas in 1851, and again in 1858, whereby the Sioux ceded large blocks of rich bottomland in the southwest part of what was then a territory in exchange for over $1.5 million and an annual allowance of sundry trade goods. In addition, the Dakotas agreed to relocate to two Indian agencies on the Upper Minnesota River; these consisted of a strip of land about 20 miles wide and 150 miles long on either side of the river. Like most of these pacts, the treaty was not worth the ink used to write it.
2. Five American cities had a greater population than Minnesota, and three western hubs—New Orleans, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—each contained nearly as many people
The Sioux soon realized they had been duped; they could not exist, let alone thrive, on their new reservations, and the promised government payments were not only smaller than they expected, but usually late—if they arrived at all. Various Dakota Head Men tried every avenue short of war to rectify the injustice, including making a trip to Washington with their Indian agents to plead their cases. This, amazingly, resulted in two more treaties in which the Indians agreed to hand over an additional 1 million acres on the north side of the Minnesota River. Congress authorized a payment of 30 cents an acre for the land but, like the earlier compensations, these funds disappeared. The Sioux were now desperate, and as their plight worsened they enlisted the advocacy of a local Episcopal bishop, the Reverend Henry Whipple, who wrote a heartfelt letter to President Lincoln on their behalf. Whipple denounced the local Indian agents as party hacks and the entire U.S. Indian Office as a congeries of “inefficiency and fraud.” Nothing came of his intervention, and the Indians’ contempt for the white man’s lies and deceit intensified.
A subsequent series of harsh winters and crop failures left the Dakotas near starvation, and when in June 1862 the promised government annuity failed to arrive, they took advantage of the state militia’s depletion and rose. Nearly 5,000 Sioux descended on Indian agency warehouses on the Upper Minnesota demanding provisions: pork, flour, tobacco, and coffee. The cowed agents agreed, but of course there was not enough to go around. A delegation of Dakotas then asked the local traders to extend them credit based on their government IOUs. A merchant named Andrew Myrick summed up the whites’ reaction, telling friends, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” As would become evident later, the Indians knew of Myrick’s remarks.
An uneasy month passed in the high north until, around noon on Sunday, August 17, four Dakota hunters who were returning to their lodges on a rutted trail in south central Minnesota stopped at a combination store, inn, and post office operated by a man named Robinson Jones and his family. One of the braves found a cache of hen eggs, smashed them, and taunted his companions as cowards. Goaded into action, the other three entered the Joneses’ compound and demanded whiskey. Jones was inside with his two adopted children: blond, fifteen-year old Clara Wilson and her fifteen-month-old half brother Joshua. His wife was half a mile away, visiting at the home of her son Howard Baker, his wife, Clara, and her two young grandchildren. Also at the Baker homestead that day were a young couple who had stopped on their push west from Wisconsin: Viranus Webster and his wife (she is referred to in the accounts only as Webster’s “new young wife”).
When Jones refused the demand for liquor the Indians threatened him, and he burst out the back door and ran for the Baker homestead. Just as he was entering the house, the Dakotas caught him and clubbed him and his wife to death. Before Howard Baker and Viranus Webster could reach their rifles they were shot and killed. Their wives somehow managed to gather the two Baker children and escape into the woods. But when the Indians returned to the Jones compound they came upon the teenage Clara Wilson. They raped her and shot her to death. They were apparently unaware of the presence of her sleeping baby half-brother.
Word of the attack on Clara Wilson rattled the surrounding communities. Some whites, including Bishop Whipple, attempted to stem the reaction, but it was inevitable. The Dakota Sioux had murdered white adults and raped and killed a blond, angelic-looking teenage girl. Such atrocities always evoked hard and swift vengeance. Whipple’s Indian counterpart was a Dakota Head Man named Little Crow, who that very night convened a tribal council and cautioned his people against fighting. Little Crow had been among the Indians who had journeyed to Washington, and he feared for the tribe’s very existence in a war with America. “We are only little herds of buffaloes left scattered, ” he told the bands gathered around the council fire that night. “The white men are like locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one, two, ten, as many as the leaves in the forest, and their brothers will not miss them. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.” But Little Crow could not deter his tribesmen, and with weary reluctance he assumed the role of war chief.
The next day painted war parties descended on white settlements and farms across western Minnesota and overran the government barns and warehouses of the lower Indian agency. The braves killed about twenty whites, including the contemptuous merchant Myrick, who tried to flee his store by jumping from a second-story window. He was run down and scalped before he could reach the forest, and his corpse’s mouth was stuffed with grass. About 100 emboldened warriors next surrounded Fort Ridgely, a rickety log structure in the southwest corner of the state that had been constructed nine years earlier with no forethought of an Indian attack. Over 200 frightened civilians, mostly women and children, were gathered in the stockade, which was defended by a few farmers and twenty-two volunteer soldiers. But they possessed cannons, and even though the fort’s commander, Lieutenant Thomas Gere, was bedridden with mumps, the powerful artillery allowed his troops to hold out for three days until reinforcements arrived.
It was the beginning of the end. Within weeks a large combined force of 1,500 from the Minnesota militia and the Regular Army—many of them paroled from Confederate prison camps specifically to return to Minnesota to fight Indians— routed the Dakotas at the Battle of Lake Wood. Afterward the soldiers scalped the enemy dead as their commander and the state’s first governor, Colonel Henry Sibley, looked on admiringly. As Little Crow had predicted, the white men with guns were as numerous as the leaves in the forest. The fight went out of the Indians.
The Dakotas claimed they were promised leniency if they surrendered—“Sibley assured us that if we would do this we would only be held as prisoners of war for a short time, ” recalled the warrior Big Eagle. And increasingly large numbers turned themselves in, until the Army held 1,250 Indian men and boys in custody. But the military judicial commission appointed to try the Indians either knew nothing about or ignored Sibley’s guaranty. Most of the Sioux were handed long prison terms, and 307 were convicted of murder, rape, or both, and sentenced to be hanged the day after Christmas. These sham proceedings were too much for even some vengeful whites, and several clergymen and muckraking newspaper editors began investigating and reporting the injustices. The din reached all the way to the White House, where President Lincoln commuted the death sentences of 268 men while personally writing on Executive Office stationary the names of the remaining 39 to be hanged. (One of these 39 would be granted a last-minute reprieve.) Little Crow remained at large until the following summer, when he was recognized by a white hunter who collected a bounty by shooting and killing him. His tanned scalp, skull, and wrist bones were put on public exhibition.
Estimates of the number of white civilians and soldiers killed in the “Dakota War” range as high as 800. Indian dead were undoubtedly much more numerous; no one bothered to count them. The war’s impact on the eastern Sioux, however, went deeper than its death toll. The once mighty Dakotas were now a society in shards, “most of the six thousand former residents of the reservations either forced to flee westward to the plains, incarcerated, or executed, ” according to one historian. And as those renegades who did manage to reach the prairie related their stories, the entire bloody business left a palpable foreboding hanging over the Lakota camps of the Upper Missouri and the Powder River Country. The implications were not lost on Sam Deon, the thirty-four year-old Québécois fur trader, when he arrived at Red Cloud’s winter camp on the Belle Fourche in northern Wyoming on a bitter cold night not long afterward.
Unlike most whites, Deon understood perfectly the breadth of Red Cloud’s influence not only over his own Oglala Bad Faces, but over all the Western Sioux. On this December night in 1862 he would also learn just how adept Red Cloud could be at sending a veiled message. A week earlier Deon had set out from his base at Fort Laramie, 150 miles to the south, leading a mule train of four high-sided Murphy wagons hauling over 10,000 pounds of trade goods. Like all white traders, Deon had his share of violent run-ins with the Plains peoples; he seemed to consider this the price of doing business. Yet for all his long good-fellowship with Red Cloud, he was savvy enough, after the Minnesota rising, to be wary. Red Cloud was fresh from a final victory over the Crow chief Little Rabbit, whom he had personally killed in a fight that marked the unofficial end of any Crow pretensions to the Powder River Country. The decisive generalship Red Cloud had displayed during the blood-soaked “Crow Wars” in the late 1850s and early 1860s not only added to his prestige among the Lakota, but also served to bring his name to the attention of soldiers still stationed in the West.
Though remaining proud of his ability to count coup and take scalps, Red Cloud had reached his early forties, an age when the role of leading war parties should naturally be relinquished to younger braves. He also recognized that he could do his people the most good by dedicating himself to formulating strategic tribal aims. He suspected that when the white Civil War ended, whichever side proved victorious would again set its sights on Lakota lands. This apprehension gnawed at him, and manifested itself most obviously in his muted celebration of his victory over the Crows. There was also another reason for the pall that seemed to hang over his village: as Deon’s wagons rolled into view: the thirty nine Dakota braves still awaited the gallows in a jail in Mankato, Minnesota, and Red Cloud and his people were aware of this.
These hard feelings made Deon worried. The trader and his teamsters understood just how vulnerable and isolated they were. Two years earlier the census had recorded over 31 million people in the United States, not counting Indians but including nearly 4 million slaves. Ninety percent lived east of the Mississippi. The boomtown of Denver had fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, and there were no white population centers of any significance at all west of the Black Hills until one crossed the Rockies and traveled another 1,000 miles to San Francisco. Moreover, the closest U.S. Army post to Red Cloud’s winter camp— Fort Laramie, with not even 150 soldiers—was a six-day ride.
Given all this, Deon was not certain what kind of welcome he would receive, and was surprised when Red Cloud invited him and his men into the camp proper instead of ordering them to its edge, as was the usual trading custom. Even more shocking was the feast laid out for the whites—a meal of boiled venison, hominy, and strong roasted coffee. Though the teamsters eased themselves into the firelight as if entering a snake pit, after some friendly trading Deon was beckoned to attend a storytelling session in Red Cloud’s lodge. He sat cross legged as the great warrior stood to take the floor.
By all accounts the chief’s heroic tales lacked any subtlety—like his deeds, they were straight to the point. This bluntness did not make them any less riveting. Tonight, perhaps with the fate of his thirty-nine condemned Dakota kin on his mind, he began with a story of once having saved a fellow warrior’s life during a raid on the Omaha.
It was a long-ago spring morning, Red Cloud began, and he was a young warrior with scant reputation, when Old Smoke’s scouts spotted the gray plumes of many cook fires near the bluffs surrounding Prairie Creek in what is now central Nebraska. Red Cloud was a member of the war party sent out to investigate, and from the summit of a red sand hill they spied several hundred trespassing Omaha engaged in a raucous buffalo-hunt dance around a pole erected in the center of an encampment. From the top of the pole flew an old, tattered Spanish flag. The Sioux charged immediately, their mounts thundering through the village and scattering the dancers. Red Cloud decided that depriving the Omaha of their pennant was more important than killing or counting coup, and he beckoned several Sioux braves to follow him as he broke off from the attack. But by the time he reached the center of the village the Omaha had organized a spirited defense, and what Red Cloud had perceived as a game of capture the flag suddenly turned serious. When he neared the sapling that flew the piece of cloth, arrows and a few balls from ancient muskets cut the air around him. He had raised his tomahawk and was about to hack off the top of the pole when one of his companions was shot. At that instant Red Cloud dropped the tomahawk and caught the brave by one hand before he hit the ground. Then another Sioux warrior grabbed the wounded man’s other arm, and the three rode to safety.
Approving grunts filled the lodge, and Deon himself nodded in admiration. The white trader was well aware of the great value that all Indians placed on the rescue of a fallen comrade; it was considered the paramount act of bravery. He was looking forward to the probable denouement: perhaps Red Cloud had returned to the Omaha village to skewer and flay an enemy brave, or at least toss a writhing body onto a pile of roasting buffalo chips. Instead, Red Cloud abruptly fell silent and gestured to a very old man seated closest to the lodge fire. Via a series of hand gestures he indicated that he was now anxious for his friend Deon to hear the tales of the old days and old ways, and encouraged the old man to recount the Sioux origin story, “The Lost Children.” The old man lifted his clay pipe, filled the wooden bowl with dried kinnikinnick, lit it with an ember, and drew in several puffs. He passed the pipe to his west, and began to speak.
What followed was a riveting tale of revenge, betrayal, heroism, and the sundering of the Sioux Nation into eastern and western branches. It involved mythical ancient battles and a band of Lakota children, mistakenly abandoned, who taught themselves to survive, alone, on the prairie. Although the children were initially angry enough to fight the elder kinsmen who had “lost” them, in the end both sides came to an agreement that if any Sioux tribe ever called for help, every other tribe was duty-bound to answer. And thus it had been, concluded the old man at the lodge fire, that the great Nation of the Seven Council Fires was divided into separate tribes, yet each tribe would forevermore remain loyal to its cousins.
By this point in time the great, grand oaths sworn at the Bear Butte gathering five years earlier were thought to have been forgotten by the Western Sioux. But this night, left unsaid but hovering over Red Cloud’s lodge like smoke from the fire, was the moral of both stories. Red Cloud had made it clear to Sam Deon how he, his tribesmen, and by extension every Lakota warrior stalking the High Plains felt about the treacherous treatment of the Minnesota Dakotas at the hands of the white man.
Six days later, at 10:30 on a dull gray morning in faraway Mankato, the raucous cheering of a vast crowd of civilians and soldiers drowned out the death songs of the thirty-eight Dakotas who climbed the scaffold. (President Lincoln, as noted above, had commuted one man’s sentence.) A moment later, according to one observer, the Indians’ “lifeless bodies were left dangling between heaven and earth.” It was the largest mass execution in American history.
Most died wearing war paint.
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Part 3
THE RESISTANCE
15 STRONG HEARTS
To this gathering had arrived not only Oglalas, Miniconjous, and Brules but the wild northern tribes—the Sans Arcs, Blackfeet Sioux, Two Kettles, and Hunkpapas —who set a tone of defiance. By some estimates as many as 10,000 Indians were present, more than three quarters of the total population of Western Sioux, convened under a domed blue sky to fashion a “national” policy for dealing with the American aggressors. The Lakota had finally recognized their mistake in not challenging General Harney when he invaded their country, and they vowed that this would be the last in a half century’s worth of accommodations.
The lodges were arranged in a huge oval around the southern rim of the barren stone tower, and as young men raced horses, gambled, and purified themselves in preparation for a multi tribal Sun Dance, women gossiped and girls preened for boys running among tepees gawking at heroes they knew only from legend. Here was the fierce Hump, the mighty Blackfoot whose future was said to have been foretold when as a boy he strayed into a cave and stared down a great gray wolf. Hump was conferring with his handsome tribesman Long Mandan, whose clear, wide-set eyes sparkled above scythe-like cheekbones. Young and old alike tilted their heads to gawk at the seven-foot Miniconjou fighter Touch The Clouds, who walked in the manner of a praying mantis, lifting his legs so high that he appeared to be using them as feelers. Packs of snapping dogs followed the fierce Hunkpapa “shirt wearer, ” Four Horns, who wore a necklace of raw meat strung across his hair-fringed tunic and was accompanied nearly everywhere he went by his nephew Sitting Bull. In each lodge they visited, these two proselytized for war against the whites.
Revered members of the western Oglala bands such as Red Cloud and the father and son Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His Horses and Young-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses—the father striding through the camps with a regal mien befitting a man acknowledged by many as the successor to the slain Conquering Bear— introduced themselves to eastern counterparts such as the seasoned fighter Crow Feather of the Sans Arcs. And Crazy Horse, now nearly seventeen, was reunited with his family, including his younger half brother Little Hawk, whose adventuresome raids on the Crows had already inspired jubilant brave-heart songs. It was reported that of all the maidens vying to catch the eye of Crazy Horse, he was most attracted to a raven haired beauty named Black Buffalo Woman, niece of Pretty Owl and Red Cloud. This infatuation would not end well.
Over many council fires and private feasts the Americans were, figuratively, put on trial. Militants like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull lobbied separately and together for immediate raids against Army detachments and emigrant wagon trains. Moderates such as Old-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses and a Hunkpapa Head Man named Bears Ribs urged forbearance, arguing that the whites seemed content to have secured their “holy road.” The moderates would fight if they must, they said, but why disturb a hornet’s nest? Red Cloud and his allies countered that it was only a matter of time before these white wasps again flew as a swarm in search of larger Indian orchards. When had the Indian, Red Cloud asked, ever known the whites to be satisfied with the lands that they already possessed?
Despite these tactical disagreements, one unifying strategic goal did emerge— continued protection, by force if necessary, of the sanctity of the most sacred Black Hills. Oaths were sworn to defend the cherished Paha Sapa from all white intrusions; and the festivities remained generally upbeat and positive, the only shadow cast by the pale boy with the curly hair— the precocious Crazy Horse. He had spent the spring and early summer wandering from Montana to Kansas with his best friend, Young-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses. They had visited bands from numerous tribes, and at the Bear Butte Council Crazy Horse told a disheartening tale.
A month earlier he had joined a Cheyenne camp staked well below the Platte, on the banks of the Smoky Hill River south of the Republican—coincidentally, this would be the site of General George Armstrong Custer’s first Indian campaign a decade later. There he was befriended by a medicine man called Ice. It was from Ice, he said, that he began to learn the ways of the Cheyenne, who, if possible, hated the whites even more than the Sioux did. Ice’s people had carried out several successful raids on small detachments of soldiers crossing the Kansas Plains, but had been taken aback by the small guns the Bluecoats now carried that fired multiple rounds without having to be reloaded after each shot. These were the revolvers Red Cloud had seen at Horse Creek. But neither he nor any of the other Indians present at Bear Butte that summer were aware that their world was in the process of an irrevocable evolution, and that a driving force behind this change was emanating from, of all places, an industrial city far to the east in a state called Connecticut.
The inventor of these mysterious weapons, Samuel Colt, had taken a roundabout journey to fame. Colt’s fascination with guns began when he was a child living in Hartford and his maternal grandfather, a former officer in the Continental Army, bequeathed him a flintlock pistol. As Colt grew older he became familiar with a cumbersome multi barreled handgun called a “pepperbox revolver, ” which required the shooter to manually rotate its cylinder, like a pepper grinder, after each discharge. Then, when he went to sea in 1830 at the age of sixteen, on a brig bound for Calcutta, he observed that the spokes in the ship’s wheel, no matter in what direction it was spun, always synchronized with a clutch to hold the wheel in place. He became transfixed by the idea of applying that technology to a handgun. Using scraps from the ship’s store, he built a wooden model of a five-shot revolver based on the movement of the brig’s wheel: a cocking hammer would rotate the cylinder, and a pawl would lock it in place on the tooth of a circular gear.
Back in the United States two years later, Colt secured American and European patents for his invention, founded the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, and set about raising funds. He was spectacularly inept. He toured the eastern United States and Canada with what can best be described as a carnival act: his demonstrations incorporated nitrous oxide, wax sculptures, and fireworks. He presented theatrical speeches and gave elaborate dinner parties awash in alcohol to which he invited wealthy businessmen and military officers in hopes of luring investors and securing Army contracts. Colt’s problem was that he usually ended up outdrinking them all. Although his sales spiked briefly when the Army ordered a consignment of five-shot Colts during the Second Seminole War, it was not enough to keep the firm afloat. In 1842, the assets of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company were sold at public auction in New York City.
Colt tried his hand at other inventions—underwater electrical detonators and, in partnership with Samuel Morse, a cable waterproofing company to run undersea telegraph lines. But their genius was ahead of its time, and Colt returned to his revolver. While tinkering with its original design he scraped together the money to hire a New York gunsmith to begin a limited production run—and then lightning struck in the form of a veteran of the Seminole War named Samuel Walker. One day Walker knocked on Colt’s door with an order for 1,000 guns. Walker had recently been promoted to captain in the Texas Rangers, and his Ranger company had used the five-shot Patent Colt with great success against marauding Comanche. Now he proposed adding a sixth round to the cylinder. Their collaboration produced the Walker Colt, the template for a generation of western handguns.
At the urging of General Sam Houston, President James Polk approved succeeding versions of Colt’s handgun, most famously the Navy Revolver, as the official sidearm of the U.S. Army. It would be said after the Civil War that “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” By then, Colt and Walker were both dead—Walker was killed in a skirmish during the Mexican War, in 1847; and Colt, wealthy beyond description, died of gout in 1862 at only forty-seven. But their revolver lived on, and Red Cloud, always enamored of new weapons, took a particular interest as Crazy Horse continued his story of the white soldiers and the magic guns.
Not long after one of their raids, the boy said, the Cheyenne learned that the Bluecoats were assembling a large retaliatory force to ride on their camp along the Smoky Hill. There was much debate among the Dog Soldiers about how best to face these new weapons until the medicine man Ice gathered the band’s warriors and led them to a small lake near the village. The Cheyenne set even more store by charms and omens than did the Sioux, and Crazy Horse had watched as Ice taught the braves his medicine songs and told them to immerse their hands in the lake water while they sang and he danced. Satisfied with the ritual, he instructed a few of the cleansed Dog Soldiers to extend their arms, palms out. He then handed a rifle to another brave and ordered him to shoot. The bullets bounced off their hands. 1 The Cheyenne, mystically inured against the white man’s balls and bullets, were now not only eager but frenzied for a fight.
1. Stephen E. Ambrose, in Crazy Horse and Custer, proposes an explanation of this “miracle”: the shells may have been underloaded with gunpowder, perhaps on Ice’s secret instructions.
Soon enough, in mid-July, they got their wish when about 300 Dog Soldiers rode out to face an equal number of Bluecoats of the 1st U.S. Cavalry under the command of Colonel E. V. “Bull Head” Sumner. It was an extraordinary scene, possibly the only classic “European” battle formation the Indians ever displayed on the American Plains. They rode from the west into a tight valley bounded by the Solomon River to the north and a string of high bluffs to the south. Sumner must have been shocked. The Indians’ martial attributes—their speed, their stealth, their ability to surprise—were considered skulking and sneaky by American Army officers. Yet here was an enemy line as worthy of attack as any Hussar light cavalry. Sumner ordered his mounted skirmishers into three rows and cantered up the valley from the east. The Cheyenne raced their horses wildly in circles in order to give them a second wind, and then re-formed and loped easily toward the Americans.
Now the U.S. cavalrymen became confused. The few Indians who had long rifles held them at their sides, barrels pointed to the ground, while the rest kept their arrows in their quivers. At Ice’s signal the Cheyenne horsemen extended their arms, palms out, and awaited the usual fusillade. But no guns sounded. Sumner had inexplicably ordered his troops to sling their carbines and unsheathe their threefoot-long “Old Wristbreaker” sabers. Sumner’s instructions were pure chance. Never before or afterward was a saber charge recorded in the long history of the Indian wars. At the sight of the long knives descending on them the Cheyenne panicked. Their medicine had not prepared them for swords. Some turned and fled, while others dashed toward the river or up into the bluffs. It was a demoralizing rout. Only four braves were killed, and the women and children managed to flee, but the Americans captured the entire Cheyenne camp as well as the Indians’ herd of pack horses and mules. On the American side, the “battle” was notable for drawing first blood from the young Lieutenant James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, who suffered a slight wound from a bullet to his chest.
The memory of the defeat, Crazy Horse told his Sioux brethren, had rested heavily on his mind since the day after the fight, when he and Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His Horses packed up and rode north toward Bear Butte. Now he vowed, along with many others, to avenge it. To Red Cloud this account of the guns that fired six times must have seemed ominous. Whatever trepidation he felt, however, may have been overridden by the decisions made by the Lakota Head Men at Bear Butte. By the time the thousands of Indian ponies had reduced the prairie grass to nubs in all directions it was decided that each tribe would stake out its own, new hunting ground to develop and defend. “Thus, ” writes the Sioux historian Robert W. Larson, “those Oglalas who had followed Old Smoke chose the Powder River".
13
A BRIEF
RESPITE
By mid-century the era of the
Oglalas’ annual spring
buffalo hunt from the Black
Hills east to the Missouri had
long ended. White settlers
had converted the fertile
floodplain along the Big
Muddy in the state of Iowa
and in the Kansas, Nebraska,
and Dakota Territories into
one long string of farms and
small communities, and by
1857 nearly two dozen
steamboats were in regular
service between St. Louis and
Sioux City. With the
homesteaders hemming the
Lakota in from the east while
Army troops stepped up
patrols along the Oregon
Trail to the south, the
Western Sioux had no choice
but to forge north and west,
deeper into the rich buffalo
grounds bordering the
Yellowstone and Bighorn
ranges on lands held by the
Crows, the Shoshones, the
Nez Percé, and the northern
Arapaho.Ironically, despite their haphazard approach to a unified “war” on the whites, in the years following the Bear Butte gathering this migratory shift allowed most of the Oglalas to give the Americans a wide enough berth that their culture experienced a minor but flourishing mini-renaissance, evoking memories of the fat and happy early 1800s. The Powder River Country had the most unspoiled hunting grounds in North America, and as Oglala society grew wealthier and stronger, so too did Red Cloud’s grip on power. Warriors from disparate Oglala bands now vied to ride with him against the Crows and other enemies, and each fighting season he attracted greater numbers of Brules, Miniconjous, and even Sans Arcs and Hunk papas to join his far reaching expeditions. These companions included Crazy Horse.
Because of the new geographic reality, Red Cloud’s martial leadership also took on a new form and function. No longer could he afford to lead a few braves on raids merely for glory and plunder; his war parties for the first time now also hunted for Indian “intruders” to expel from the Western Sioux’s burgeoning empire. This often meant deviating from the traditional Lakota method of prairie warfare on open, flat terrain. On one occasion, for instance, his scouts picked up fresh Shoshone moccasin tracks hugging the base of the Bighorns in northern Wyoming. Red Cloud and about seventy-five braves caught up to the Shoshones and chased them back into the mountains. In the old days, that would have been warning enough. Not now. Red Cloud ordered his Sioux to dismount and hitch their horses, and they pursued the Shoshones on foot up the steep pitch. A running high country battle through thick whitebark pine and blue spruce ensued—a fight a Mohawk, a Choctaw, or even a Minnesota Sioux might have felt more comfortable engaging in than a Plains Lakota. When the Shoshones disappeared behind a circular wall of boulders that formed a natural fortress on top of a rocky promenade, Red Cloud’s braves surrounded them.
For a day and night the Lakota besieged the Shoshones, feinting, charging, being beaten back, each side’s sharpshooters firing whenever an enemy exposed himself. Occasionally a Sioux arrow would lodge in a Shoshone’s head as it was raised over the top of the wall. For the most part, however, the Shoshones holding the high ground got the better of the fight. One defender in particular seemed to have the best shooting eye —he had killed at least one Bad Face and wounded several others—and Red Cloud, crouched behind a tree perhaps 100 yards downslope, studied the shooter’s pattern. He observed that the enemy would jump onto the stone barricade, aim his long rifle, and fire in a nearly continuous motion before ducking back down for cover. Red Cloud also noticed that the Shoshone shot from behind the same rock each time.
Red Cloud hatched his plan and signaled to one of his braves to dash for a nearby boulder. As he expected, the sharpshooting Shoshone showed himself. Red Cloud stood, and in an electrifying display of accuracy, shot him dead. The Shoshone toppled forward, outside the fortress, and a shrieking Red Cloud tore up the mountain brandishing his tomahawk. He reached the man, scalped him, and hacked off his right arm at the shoulder. He then crawled to and fro along the outside of the wall, raising the severed arm at intervals and shouting for the cowardly enemies to come out and fight like men.
But the Bad Faces, still mired in the ways of prairie warfare, failed to press their psychological advantage. So excited were those guarding the rear of the makeshift fort that they abandoned their positions to crowd below Red Cloud and whoop him on. This left open a back door through which most of the Shoshones escaped into the forest. Red Cloud was furious. But all he could do was file away the episode and ensure that it never happened again. The Oglala war party climbed down the mountain, retrieved their horses, and rode back and forth along the foot of the range for three days as a signal to any Indians who might be watching that this was now Lakota land. This, too, was something new.
📖 📖 📖
Meanwhile, far to the south,
General Harney’s clearance
of the Platte River corridor
provided a freeway for the
thousands of emigrants still
driving west. Among these
were motley bands of
Mormon “handcart pioneers,
”
who formed a nearly
continuous stream into the
Salt Lake Valley. Many of
the converts to the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints were recent northern
European immigrants who
could not afford to pay $300
to $500 for a prairie schooner
and a mule or oxen team.
Those families,
disproportionately Danish
and Swedish and speaking
little or no English, instead
loaded up their earthly
possessions into pushcarts
that could be purchased in
Iowa City for as little as $10.
These sturdy contraptions—a
simple bed of hickory or oak
laid over thin iron wheels—
could haul up to 500 pounds,
and between 1856 and 1860
nearly 3,000 Mormons
walked west from the United
States into the New Zion,
pushing and pulling their
humble handcarts. Those numbers multiplied nearly exponentially when gold was discovered in 1858 on Cheyenne and southern Arapaho lands along Cherry Creek, the future site of Denver. The area around Pikes Peak came to resemble an ant colony, with 100,000 pitmen and placer men swarming over the hills and dales. So safe had the Oregon Trail become that by 1860 the newly formed Pony Express began carrying mail along a 2,000-mile route between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, completing the circuit in ten days during good weather and fourteen in the dead of winter. The small, wiry Express riders, many of them still in their teens, sparked a trend in publishing circles back east, their roughneck adventures filling “true” dime novels and early pulp magazines. The romance lasted longer than the endeavor. Less than two years later the swashbuckling operation was shut down when the Western Union Telegraph Company finished stringing its lines. The railroad was also coming: industry executives were already dusting off Captain Stansbury’s old surveys in preparation for laying track.
Most of the Indians these emigrants saw before reaching the Rockies were bands of “tame” Oglalas and Brules—“Laramie Loafers, ” the Bluecoats called them with a sneer—who scratched out a living begging and scavenging along the trails west. There was much to scavenge, for it is doubtful that by the early 1860s Red Cloud would have recognized the Platte River Valley of his youth. The route was now littered with broken-down wagons and handcarts, empty food tins, and clothes worn to rags, while the cottonwood and chokecherry trees that had once lined every creek and streambed had been burned for countless cooking fires. The buffalo had disappeared, having lost the battle for the corridor’s already scarce water and vegetation to the 100,000 head of cattle and 50,000 sheep that passed through the territory annually. And the Oregon Trail itself had been transformed into “a swath of stinking refuse, ” its very air soured by the rotting carcasses of worn-out horses, mules, oxen, and sheep mixing with the half-buried corpses of humans struck down by heat, exhaustion, or disease, their bones dug up and picked over by gray wolves and coyotes.
The increased traffic proved beneficial for traders, blacksmiths, innkeepers, hostlers, and even a few professional gamblers who set up shop along the route— as well as for some of the old mountain men whose financial opportunities skyrocketed with the need for guides and scouts. As late as 1852 Jim Bridger had been sighted still trapping in the Rockies, probably as much for sport as need, since his cedar log fort on the Blacks Fork of the Green River in central Utah was doing a thriving business as a layover near the “California ferry, ” which put off at the head of the western trails. But Bridger’s legendary intimacy with the Indians, particularly the Ute and his wife’s Shoshone tribe, made him a marked man.
Unlike the Lakota, the mountain tribes stood in the way of the Mormons’ expansion. Brigham Young, by now governor of the Utah Territory, had turned the Salt Lake Valley into his own semi-autonomous fiefdom, which he named Deseret, and in July 1853 a full-scale war broke out between the Ute and the Latter-day Saints. Both sides committed the usual atrocities and Young, suspicious of Bridger’s loyalties and envious of his real estate holdings, used the bloodletting as an excuse to issue a territorial proclamation forbidding all trade with any of the tribes. The following month at a Mormon town hall meeting Bridger was accused of having “stirred up the Indians to commit depredations upon our people.” It was alleged that he had supplied the Shoshones with powder and lead—the very act with which he had kept the peace, and for which he had been lauded, at the Horse Creek Council two years earlier. “Old Gabe” was tried and found guilty in absentia at a secret hearing, and a posse of 150 “avenging angels” was dispatched from Provo to arrest him. Indians warned him and he eluded the riders, taking his family east to Fort Laramie. When the Mormons reached his stockade they burned his copious stocks of whiskey and rum and seized the fort and livestock. They never returned them.
From Wyoming, Bridger meandered farther east until finally, after having been away for thirty years, he arrived back home in St. Louis. His fame had preceded him, and he was mobbed by reporters and well-wishers wherever he went. He purchased a large farmstead just outside the city, but plowing, planting, and reaping were not in his blood. Through the remainder of the decade he found steady employment, at $5 a day, guiding various kinds of expeditions. He took part in a congressional scientific survey seeking the source of the Yellowstone, and discovered a mountain pass that shortened the route between Denver and Salt Lake City for the overland mail coach—today’s U.S. Route 40. He achieved some measure of revenge on the Latter-day Saints by guiding 2,500 federal troops into Salt Lake City during the “Mormon War, ” fought over Brigham Young’s theocratic rebellion of 1857–58. And in one of the more bizarre chapters of his life he contracted with a wealthy, dissolute Irish peer, Sir St. George Gore, as a scout for Gore’s hunting safari. Bridger spent the better part of two years wandering the High Plains with Gore—the eighth baronet of Manor Gore, near Sligo—mostly trying to prevent his self-indulgent employer and a retinue of beaters, skinners, wranglers, chefs, and sommeliers from wandering into Lakota territory.
He was not often successful. Gore killed animals on a whim at an astounding pace, and toward the end of his wanton holiday he and Bridger crossed paths with U.S. Army captain Randolph B. Marcy, fresh from his discovery of the headwaters of the Red River. Marcy recorded that among Gore’s voluminous antelope, deer, and elk trophies were the coats of 41 grizzly bears and 2,500 buffalo skins. It took six wagons and twentyone carts to haul all this. Since Bridger professed to care deeply for the welfare of the Indians, it is difficult to explain why he did not recognize that such indiscriminate slaughter might antagonize the Western Sioux.
But if Bridger did not notice, Red Cloud surely did. The great blotahunka was now Head Man of the Bad Face Oglalas in all but name, because at age eighty-two, Old Smoke had faded into senescence to enjoy the December of his long life. Though greenhorn Army officers deployed to Fort Laramie after the Mormon War continued to recognize the more pliant Old-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses as “chief” of the Sioux—Red Cloud’s name had yet to appear in any official government reports—most Lakota, including those from the far Missouri River regions east of the Black Hills, considered Red Cloud their martial and spiritual leader.
This primacy, however, also carried a heavy responsibility. The history of the white incursion had demonstrated that individual bands could not stand alone against the might of the American Army. But could a multi tribal alliance actually be formed to battle the intruders? And if so, what were its chances of prevailing? Of one fact Red Cloud was certain—large scale engagements against the Bluecoats where the two sides were of equal numbers were essentially suicide missions. The only way to fight them was to gather enough of the squabbling Sioux under one banner and use overwhelming force against any smaller targets that presented themselves. Barring that, or perhaps in addition to that, the Indians would need to rely on stealthy hit-and-run tactics, where the chance of casualties was low. They would use their knowledge of the country to run off Army remudas and beef herds, and starve the Bluecoats out of their isolated forts. It would be a war of decoy and ambush, of fighting from bluff to butte and from coulee to creek bed —in short, a guerrilla war before it was actually known as such. It was, Red Cloud recognized, the Indians’ only recourse.
Yet how to rouse his disparate peoples, particularly his own tribesmen? Despite the occasional incursions by insatiable white hunters guided by the likes of Bridger, the Lakota cultural and political revival in the years following the Bear Butte assembly had ushered in a period of quiescence. With their enemies, particularly the Crows, cleared from the mile-high Powder River Country, the Lakota were free to roam an immense short-grass prairie bursting with buffalo, antelope, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep and crossed by abundant sources of sweet water flowing out of pine shrouded ranges. During the broiling summer months cool mountain meadows awash with goldenrod and black eyed Susans beckoned, and in winter the south face of the Black Hills constituted a gigantic windbreak against the numbing gales freighting down from the Canadian flats.
Moreover, just as Old Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses had argued at Bear Butte, the Bluecoats had not strayed far from their line of forts and mail stations along the Oregon Trail since General Harney’s march. Even the secondary road Harney had blazed from Fort Laramie to Fort Pierre was now growing over; the ruts from the Army freight wagons were barely visible beneath carpets of white prairie clover and purple asters. Red Cloud still suspected that white expansion was not complete, that the trespassers would once more arrive in greater numbers to steal Lakota lands. Why they had not done so already remained a mystery.
Given the circumstances, it would be hard to make the case for war on the whites. As it was, Red Cloud and the Western Sioux had no way of knowing that, far to the east, two American armies were already preparing for an epic Civil War that would, at least temporarily, push the “Indian Problem” far down on the government’s list of priorities.
14
THE
DAKOTAS
RISE
The distant echoes of the
bombardment of Fort Sumter
on April 12, 1861,
reverberated well beyond the
Mississippi. As one historian
noted,
“the frontier army
suddenly ceased to protect the
frontier.” At the start of the
hostilities, officers from
southern states, who
represented nearly a third of
the Regular Army officer
corps, resigned en masse, 313 threading home to fight
for the Confederacy,
including 182 of the Army’s
184 West Point graduates.
Most of the
noncommissioned officers
and enlisted men remained
true to the Union, but they,
too, rapidly disappeared from
the Plains. Even the
detachment at Fort Laramie,
the western communications
hub connecting the coasts,
was reduced to a skeleton
garrison of about 130 soldiers
as battalions and regiments
from across the West
marched home. Chaos ensued
as the sons of Virginia
planters, Boston Brahmins,
Iron Mountain dirt farmers,
and Philadelphia steamfitters
enlisted as volunteers and
state militia trained in
haste and then moved like
chess pieces across a grand
board. The few southern
officers who did not
relinquish their commissions
were viewed with suspicion
by the War Department—
particularly the Tennessean General Harney, who
remained commander of the
Northwest Territories.In the years since the fight at Blue Water Creek and his “invasion” of the Lakota lands, Harney’s bungling adventures had continued into the farcical. He still hunted Indians, seemingly for sport, but that had never bothered the authorities back east. It was only when, in 1859, he nearly set off a shooting war with Great Britain that his superiors thought to rein him in. This occurred during an inspection tour of the U.S.- Canadian borderlands, when his inept handling of a minor incident involving an “English” hog rooting through an America farmers fields resulted in an armed standoff between Harney’s troops and British Royal Marines. Diplomats were roused, cooler heads prevailed, and Harney was shuffled back into the nation’s interior, where it was thought he could do no more lasting damage to either himself or the Union cause. But twelve months into the Civil War he was relieved of command by President Lincoln when rumors surfaced that he was secretly negotiating a western truce with Confederate authorities.
Harney denied the charge and set off for Washington to defend himself. But he somehow lost his way and made the error of passing through rebel-held territory, where he was captured and presented to General Robert E. Lee. Lee offered him a Confederate commission, which Harney to his credit declined, and he was released and allowed to complete his journey. On reaching Washington, however, Harney was quietly retired and whisked from the national stage.
Though happy to be rid of the murderous “Mad Bear, ” the Western Sioux made no concerted effort to exploit either Harney’s absence or the War Between the States. Nevertheless, those who learned of its particulars took no small satisfaction in the great droves of white men slaughtering each other on faraway battlefields. This absence of tension, however, did not prevent rumors from reaching Washington of Confederate agents fomenting insurrection among the tribes, particularly the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and, farther south, the sullen peoples occupying the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. In keeping with the government’s usual incomprehension of Indian mores, particularly those of the Northern Plains tribes, none of the fearmongers gave a thought to why Indians would ever fight for a slaveholding republic that had facilitated the greatest deportation of Native Americans on the continent. In any case, the South lacked the means to incite such an uprising.
The exception was in Minnesota, where the war did, however tangentially, facilitate a feral Indian conflict in the summer of 1862. It erupted, and was put down, with brutal efficiency, but not before much blood— most of it Indian, and innocent—was spilled.
🔖 🔖 🔖
For years small bands of
renegade Dakotas—the
closest eastern cousins of the
Lakota—had mounted
scattered attacks on isolated
homesteaders in Minnesota.
The most notorious occurred
in 1857, when a Santee brave
named Scarlet Point led a war
party that killed at least thirty
whites near one of Iowa’s
Okoboji lakes. Scarlet Point
then crossed the Minnesota
border and raided several
farmsteads in Jackson County
before escaping west. Yet
despite the “Spirit Lake
Massacre,
”1 as the incident
came to be known, the better armed Minnesotans seemed
willing to live with this risk
as long as the majority of the
Indians kept to the
reservations. Their attitude
changed in 1862.1. It should be noted that whites have always been much more inclined to affix the term “massacre” to Indian atrocities while preferring to call their own victories, such as the one at Blue Water Creek, “battles.”
The ember that ignited the Minnesota powder keg could be traced back, as usual, to the government’s broken promises. Four years earlier Minnesota had become the thirty-second state admitted into the Union, and in the summer of 1862 it was not lost on the Indians that the already sparse population of just over 170,000 2 had been drained of young men, many of whom were off fighting the Confederacy. Washington had signed treaties with the Dakotas in 1851, and again in 1858, whereby the Sioux ceded large blocks of rich bottomland in the southwest part of what was then a territory in exchange for over $1.5 million and an annual allowance of sundry trade goods. In addition, the Dakotas agreed to relocate to two Indian agencies on the Upper Minnesota River; these consisted of a strip of land about 20 miles wide and 150 miles long on either side of the river. Like most of these pacts, the treaty was not worth the ink used to write it.
2. Five American cities had a greater population than Minnesota, and three western hubs—New Orleans, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—each contained nearly as many people
The Sioux soon realized they had been duped; they could not exist, let alone thrive, on their new reservations, and the promised government payments were not only smaller than they expected, but usually late—if they arrived at all. Various Dakota Head Men tried every avenue short of war to rectify the injustice, including making a trip to Washington with their Indian agents to plead their cases. This, amazingly, resulted in two more treaties in which the Indians agreed to hand over an additional 1 million acres on the north side of the Minnesota River. Congress authorized a payment of 30 cents an acre for the land but, like the earlier compensations, these funds disappeared. The Sioux were now desperate, and as their plight worsened they enlisted the advocacy of a local Episcopal bishop, the Reverend Henry Whipple, who wrote a heartfelt letter to President Lincoln on their behalf. Whipple denounced the local Indian agents as party hacks and the entire U.S. Indian Office as a congeries of “inefficiency and fraud.” Nothing came of his intervention, and the Indians’ contempt for the white man’s lies and deceit intensified.
A subsequent series of harsh winters and crop failures left the Dakotas near starvation, and when in June 1862 the promised government annuity failed to arrive, they took advantage of the state militia’s depletion and rose. Nearly 5,000 Sioux descended on Indian agency warehouses on the Upper Minnesota demanding provisions: pork, flour, tobacco, and coffee. The cowed agents agreed, but of course there was not enough to go around. A delegation of Dakotas then asked the local traders to extend them credit based on their government IOUs. A merchant named Andrew Myrick summed up the whites’ reaction, telling friends, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” As would become evident later, the Indians knew of Myrick’s remarks.
An uneasy month passed in the high north until, around noon on Sunday, August 17, four Dakota hunters who were returning to their lodges on a rutted trail in south central Minnesota stopped at a combination store, inn, and post office operated by a man named Robinson Jones and his family. One of the braves found a cache of hen eggs, smashed them, and taunted his companions as cowards. Goaded into action, the other three entered the Joneses’ compound and demanded whiskey. Jones was inside with his two adopted children: blond, fifteen-year old Clara Wilson and her fifteen-month-old half brother Joshua. His wife was half a mile away, visiting at the home of her son Howard Baker, his wife, Clara, and her two young grandchildren. Also at the Baker homestead that day were a young couple who had stopped on their push west from Wisconsin: Viranus Webster and his wife (she is referred to in the accounts only as Webster’s “new young wife”).
When Jones refused the demand for liquor the Indians threatened him, and he burst out the back door and ran for the Baker homestead. Just as he was entering the house, the Dakotas caught him and clubbed him and his wife to death. Before Howard Baker and Viranus Webster could reach their rifles they were shot and killed. Their wives somehow managed to gather the two Baker children and escape into the woods. But when the Indians returned to the Jones compound they came upon the teenage Clara Wilson. They raped her and shot her to death. They were apparently unaware of the presence of her sleeping baby half-brother.
Word of the attack on Clara Wilson rattled the surrounding communities. Some whites, including Bishop Whipple, attempted to stem the reaction, but it was inevitable. The Dakota Sioux had murdered white adults and raped and killed a blond, angelic-looking teenage girl. Such atrocities always evoked hard and swift vengeance. Whipple’s Indian counterpart was a Dakota Head Man named Little Crow, who that very night convened a tribal council and cautioned his people against fighting. Little Crow had been among the Indians who had journeyed to Washington, and he feared for the tribe’s very existence in a war with America. “We are only little herds of buffaloes left scattered, ” he told the bands gathered around the council fire that night. “The white men are like locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one, two, ten, as many as the leaves in the forest, and their brothers will not miss them. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.” But Little Crow could not deter his tribesmen, and with weary reluctance he assumed the role of war chief.
The next day painted war parties descended on white settlements and farms across western Minnesota and overran the government barns and warehouses of the lower Indian agency. The braves killed about twenty whites, including the contemptuous merchant Myrick, who tried to flee his store by jumping from a second-story window. He was run down and scalped before he could reach the forest, and his corpse’s mouth was stuffed with grass. About 100 emboldened warriors next surrounded Fort Ridgely, a rickety log structure in the southwest corner of the state that had been constructed nine years earlier with no forethought of an Indian attack. Over 200 frightened civilians, mostly women and children, were gathered in the stockade, which was defended by a few farmers and twenty-two volunteer soldiers. But they possessed cannons, and even though the fort’s commander, Lieutenant Thomas Gere, was bedridden with mumps, the powerful artillery allowed his troops to hold out for three days until reinforcements arrived.
It was the beginning of the end. Within weeks a large combined force of 1,500 from the Minnesota militia and the Regular Army—many of them paroled from Confederate prison camps specifically to return to Minnesota to fight Indians— routed the Dakotas at the Battle of Lake Wood. Afterward the soldiers scalped the enemy dead as their commander and the state’s first governor, Colonel Henry Sibley, looked on admiringly. As Little Crow had predicted, the white men with guns were as numerous as the leaves in the forest. The fight went out of the Indians.
The Dakotas claimed they were promised leniency if they surrendered—“Sibley assured us that if we would do this we would only be held as prisoners of war for a short time, ” recalled the warrior Big Eagle. And increasingly large numbers turned themselves in, until the Army held 1,250 Indian men and boys in custody. But the military judicial commission appointed to try the Indians either knew nothing about or ignored Sibley’s guaranty. Most of the Sioux were handed long prison terms, and 307 were convicted of murder, rape, or both, and sentenced to be hanged the day after Christmas. These sham proceedings were too much for even some vengeful whites, and several clergymen and muckraking newspaper editors began investigating and reporting the injustices. The din reached all the way to the White House, where President Lincoln commuted the death sentences of 268 men while personally writing on Executive Office stationary the names of the remaining 39 to be hanged. (One of these 39 would be granted a last-minute reprieve.) Little Crow remained at large until the following summer, when he was recognized by a white hunter who collected a bounty by shooting and killing him. His tanned scalp, skull, and wrist bones were put on public exhibition.
Estimates of the number of white civilians and soldiers killed in the “Dakota War” range as high as 800. Indian dead were undoubtedly much more numerous; no one bothered to count them. The war’s impact on the eastern Sioux, however, went deeper than its death toll. The once mighty Dakotas were now a society in shards, “most of the six thousand former residents of the reservations either forced to flee westward to the plains, incarcerated, or executed, ” according to one historian. And as those renegades who did manage to reach the prairie related their stories, the entire bloody business left a palpable foreboding hanging over the Lakota camps of the Upper Missouri and the Powder River Country. The implications were not lost on Sam Deon, the thirty-four year-old Québécois fur trader, when he arrived at Red Cloud’s winter camp on the Belle Fourche in northern Wyoming on a bitter cold night not long afterward.
📚 📚 📚
A short, wiry man who could
speak several Sioux dialects
fluently, Peter Abraham
“Sam” Deon had set out from
Montreal fifteen years earlier
to make his fortune in the
uncharted American West.
Arriving in St. Louis via
Boston and New Orleans, he
found work almost
immediately as an agent for
the American Fur Company,
and had since roamed
extensively among the firm’s
Upper Missouri trading posts
exchanging dry goods,
blankets, tinned groceries,
and guns for buffalo robes
and beaver pelts. The ruddy faced Deon—described in
one Army officer’s journal as
“a jolly, royal, generous
fellow; happy everywhere,
and whom the very fact of
existence filled with
exuberance and joy”—was
quick to accept the manners
and psychology of the Sioux.
He understood, for instance,
that there was no such thing
as a homogeneous “Indian,
”
that each tribe had its own
social, political, and martial
mores, and that these
indigenous people would
never comprehend the
workings of a capitalist free
market. Accordingly, he
knew enough to frame his
transactions as an exchange
of gifts. Moreover, during his
High Plains circuits Deon had
taken as his wife Red Cloud’s
maternal aunt Bega, later
known as Mary Highwolf,
and camped with her people
often. He was as close to the
great warrior chief as any
white man could be, and over
the course of their tentative
friendship he had witnessed
firsthand the maturation of
the strapping young brave
from a prideful, ambitious,
and arrogant youth into a
thoughtful and soft-spoken
leader.Unlike most whites, Deon understood perfectly the breadth of Red Cloud’s influence not only over his own Oglala Bad Faces, but over all the Western Sioux. On this December night in 1862 he would also learn just how adept Red Cloud could be at sending a veiled message. A week earlier Deon had set out from his base at Fort Laramie, 150 miles to the south, leading a mule train of four high-sided Murphy wagons hauling over 10,000 pounds of trade goods. Like all white traders, Deon had his share of violent run-ins with the Plains peoples; he seemed to consider this the price of doing business. Yet for all his long good-fellowship with Red Cloud, he was savvy enough, after the Minnesota rising, to be wary. Red Cloud was fresh from a final victory over the Crow chief Little Rabbit, whom he had personally killed in a fight that marked the unofficial end of any Crow pretensions to the Powder River Country. The decisive generalship Red Cloud had displayed during the blood-soaked “Crow Wars” in the late 1850s and early 1860s not only added to his prestige among the Lakota, but also served to bring his name to the attention of soldiers still stationed in the West.
Though remaining proud of his ability to count coup and take scalps, Red Cloud had reached his early forties, an age when the role of leading war parties should naturally be relinquished to younger braves. He also recognized that he could do his people the most good by dedicating himself to formulating strategic tribal aims. He suspected that when the white Civil War ended, whichever side proved victorious would again set its sights on Lakota lands. This apprehension gnawed at him, and manifested itself most obviously in his muted celebration of his victory over the Crows. There was also another reason for the pall that seemed to hang over his village: as Deon’s wagons rolled into view: the thirty nine Dakota braves still awaited the gallows in a jail in Mankato, Minnesota, and Red Cloud and his people were aware of this.
These hard feelings made Deon worried. The trader and his teamsters understood just how vulnerable and isolated they were. Two years earlier the census had recorded over 31 million people in the United States, not counting Indians but including nearly 4 million slaves. Ninety percent lived east of the Mississippi. The boomtown of Denver had fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, and there were no white population centers of any significance at all west of the Black Hills until one crossed the Rockies and traveled another 1,000 miles to San Francisco. Moreover, the closest U.S. Army post to Red Cloud’s winter camp— Fort Laramie, with not even 150 soldiers—was a six-day ride.
Given all this, Deon was not certain what kind of welcome he would receive, and was surprised when Red Cloud invited him and his men into the camp proper instead of ordering them to its edge, as was the usual trading custom. Even more shocking was the feast laid out for the whites—a meal of boiled venison, hominy, and strong roasted coffee. Though the teamsters eased themselves into the firelight as if entering a snake pit, after some friendly trading Deon was beckoned to attend a storytelling session in Red Cloud’s lodge. He sat cross legged as the great warrior stood to take the floor.
By all accounts the chief’s heroic tales lacked any subtlety—like his deeds, they were straight to the point. This bluntness did not make them any less riveting. Tonight, perhaps with the fate of his thirty-nine condemned Dakota kin on his mind, he began with a story of once having saved a fellow warrior’s life during a raid on the Omaha.
It was a long-ago spring morning, Red Cloud began, and he was a young warrior with scant reputation, when Old Smoke’s scouts spotted the gray plumes of many cook fires near the bluffs surrounding Prairie Creek in what is now central Nebraska. Red Cloud was a member of the war party sent out to investigate, and from the summit of a red sand hill they spied several hundred trespassing Omaha engaged in a raucous buffalo-hunt dance around a pole erected in the center of an encampment. From the top of the pole flew an old, tattered Spanish flag. The Sioux charged immediately, their mounts thundering through the village and scattering the dancers. Red Cloud decided that depriving the Omaha of their pennant was more important than killing or counting coup, and he beckoned several Sioux braves to follow him as he broke off from the attack. But by the time he reached the center of the village the Omaha had organized a spirited defense, and what Red Cloud had perceived as a game of capture the flag suddenly turned serious. When he neared the sapling that flew the piece of cloth, arrows and a few balls from ancient muskets cut the air around him. He had raised his tomahawk and was about to hack off the top of the pole when one of his companions was shot. At that instant Red Cloud dropped the tomahawk and caught the brave by one hand before he hit the ground. Then another Sioux warrior grabbed the wounded man’s other arm, and the three rode to safety.
Approving grunts filled the lodge, and Deon himself nodded in admiration. The white trader was well aware of the great value that all Indians placed on the rescue of a fallen comrade; it was considered the paramount act of bravery. He was looking forward to the probable denouement: perhaps Red Cloud had returned to the Omaha village to skewer and flay an enemy brave, or at least toss a writhing body onto a pile of roasting buffalo chips. Instead, Red Cloud abruptly fell silent and gestured to a very old man seated closest to the lodge fire. Via a series of hand gestures he indicated that he was now anxious for his friend Deon to hear the tales of the old days and old ways, and encouraged the old man to recount the Sioux origin story, “The Lost Children.” The old man lifted his clay pipe, filled the wooden bowl with dried kinnikinnick, lit it with an ember, and drew in several puffs. He passed the pipe to his west, and began to speak.
What followed was a riveting tale of revenge, betrayal, heroism, and the sundering of the Sioux Nation into eastern and western branches. It involved mythical ancient battles and a band of Lakota children, mistakenly abandoned, who taught themselves to survive, alone, on the prairie. Although the children were initially angry enough to fight the elder kinsmen who had “lost” them, in the end both sides came to an agreement that if any Sioux tribe ever called for help, every other tribe was duty-bound to answer. And thus it had been, concluded the old man at the lodge fire, that the great Nation of the Seven Council Fires was divided into separate tribes, yet each tribe would forevermore remain loyal to its cousins.
By this point in time the great, grand oaths sworn at the Bear Butte gathering five years earlier were thought to have been forgotten by the Western Sioux. But this night, left unsaid but hovering over Red Cloud’s lodge like smoke from the fire, was the moral of both stories. Red Cloud had made it clear to Sam Deon how he, his tribesmen, and by extension every Lakota warrior stalking the High Plains felt about the treacherous treatment of the Minnesota Dakotas at the hands of the white man.
Six days later, at 10:30 on a dull gray morning in faraway Mankato, the raucous cheering of a vast crowd of civilians and soldiers drowned out the death songs of the thirty-eight Dakotas who climbed the scaffold. (President Lincoln, as noted above, had commuted one man’s sentence.) A moment later, according to one observer, the Indians’ “lifeless bodies were left dangling between heaven and earth.” It was the largest mass execution in American history.
Most died wearing war paint.
next
Part 3
THE RESISTANCE
15 STRONG HEARTS
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