Kavita's Reviews > The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

The white man made me a lot of promises, and they only kept one. They promised to take my land, and they took it.

I am shocked with myself that so far I had dismissed the American West history as 'boring'. My strong impression of guns, wars, violence, squalor, scarcity, thievery and general nastiness no doubt comes from the legend of the West, rather than any real knowledge. While much of this is also true, somehow I had missed the point that these were real people living with real problems, and this is real, live history. Well, no more! I have some more books on this subject lined up.

This is my first book on this period in history, so I really cannot vouch for the accuracy of any of the details. But I think I learned a lot. The best thing about the book is that it is very evocative in its descriptions. It transports you to Old America and you begin to feel really close to the subjects. You can see the lush greenery and the buffaloes, and the tents of the Native Americans. You can also picture the army barracks and men in uniform struggling to keep control with limited resource. You can picture in your mind’s eye the large train of wagons with hundreds of people travelling to the gold fields. And if you can’t, here are some real pictures to help your imagination along!

The first part of the book was brilliant. It basically focussed on Red Cloud’s family, antecedents, way of life and discussed the various alliances and enmities between the various tribes. It gives a real insight into the way of life of the Sioux, which is why I read the book in the first place. Then halfway through the book, the focus shifts to the army. So far, so good, because it was interesting to see how the army functioned under the circumstances. The last part of the book, however, simply degenerates into just repetitions of one attack after the other.

This brings me to another problem in the book – repetitive narrative. It got exceedingly tiresome to read about how the natives attacked from the west and then killed four people and then the army attacked from the north and killed five people. Then again the same thing the next day, only this time from a different direction. And the next, maybe from the top of a hill. And so on. A hundred pages of this and it is like war of boredom being declared against the reader personally. There was also plenty of superfluous stuff, like some cowboy turned cattle baron, who marched through the trail. It was not relevant to the story and was simply stuffed in for no reason. Perhaps the authors didn’t want their research to go waste, but this occurred regularly and the story veered off to include random side characters who were of little importance. The narrative itself is not very consistent or coherent and jumps back and forth all the time, even within the same paragraph. The entire book could have been cut down by hundred pages for better effect.

A final problem was that this book is not what it really claims to be. This is not a biography of Red Cloud; it is a story about the clashes that took place between the US army and the Native Americans led by Red Cloud. What is interesting to me is Red Cloud and his life in entirety. I am not really interested in a list of how many people he killed, and where and how he killed them. Though there were snippets of his personal life once in a while, the story really never focused on the man himself. The book even ended after the Fetterman Massacre in 1866, even though Red Cloud lived on until 1909 and campaigning for the rights of Native Americans till the very end. I would have been far more interested in that stuff than the endless and boring list of battles.

That said, I must say I really enjoyed the book because it had flashes of some really brilliant writing as well as some interesting information. With a lot of editing, it might even make it to 4 stars! Even with all its faults, it is still a book worth reading for those interested in the subject.