The Heart of Everything That Is, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
The subject of this book, Red Cloud, is less known than
Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse, though they fought in some of the same battles
against US forces. This history captures the period of time starting in 1851
when the tribes came to Fort Laramie to parlay with Congressional
representatives, up to Red Cloud’s emergence as a pre-eminent warrior and war
chief through his victory against the Cavalry in Wyoming at Fort Phil Kearny in
1866.
Unlike most of the Indians, who preferred to ride in fast,
steal horses or kill braves or kidnap women, then go back home, Red Cloud
studied the strategies of the whites and applied them in battles against
them. He did not trust the whites. At one point he said, “They kept only one of
their many promises to us. They said they would take our land, and they did.”
Some he respected as warriors, but for the most part he recognized that the tribes
would always be overmatched: the whites seemed in neverending supply, and they
had better guns.
Red Cloud was an upstart. His father was an
alcoholic, and this disadvantaged him in tribal culture. But he was brave and
adept, and earned the respect of his band despite enduring slights that must
have rankled. The first part of the book chronicles his development into a
leader, and his relationships with young Crazy Horse, the better-connected
Sitting Bull, and other chiefs.
The meat of the story, however, is the US Army’s
establishment of the Bozeman Trail, threading from Fort Laramie north and west, through the Bighorn Mountains of
north central Wyoming, to the gold fields in Montana. Prospectors and the
merchants who followed used this route, but without Army protection were being killed in lands previously ceded to the Sioux. So the Army drew
their map, and situated Fort Phil Kearny in the Bighorns. From the start the outpost was
understaffed, undersupplied, and its recruits, fresh from the Civil War, unprepared for harsh winters or isolation.
The officers in command, Colonel Carrington, who took a
defensive posture against the Sioux, and Captain Fetterman, fresh from Civil
War service and eager for battle and promotion, who preferred attack over waiting to be picked off, underestimated Red Cloud again and again. When they did finally
muster to ride out against the tribes, most of the post’s men were massacred.
The authors are sympathetic to the Indians, describing the
introduction of smallpox, cholera, and measles; liquor; and slaughter of the
buffalo, making clear the genocidal character of white advancement westward. Attempts
to appease the tribes were only stopgaps until they could be subdued by
starvation, disease, and some of the harshest winters in recent centuries.
Every treaty was broken when whites found reason to covet lands ceded to the
Indians, including the “Heart of Everything That Is,” Paha Sapa: the Black Hills. Red Cloud beat the whites at their own
game for a while, but he too was eventually pushed onto Pine Ridge Reservation. Read it and weep.
