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

“Back at the rock pile [Captain William Judd] Fetterman was also fast losing soldiers. His skirmish lines had devolved into two loosely concentric rings rapidly collapsing in on themselves – a tightening noose with the captain in its center. Their position at the top of the rise bought them some time, but daring Indians burst through the defenses on horse and on foot, first singly, then by twos and threes, and finally a second storm of arrows preceded a wave of thrusting lances and swinging war clubs. Warriors in front were pushed ahead by a surge from behind. The soldiers fired their old Springfields, but the Indians were so close that there was no time to reload…”
- Bob Drury & Tom Clavin, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

When you read about the history of U.S.-Indian relations, you quickly learn that the only coherent thread of an otherwise incoherent, schizophrenic policy, was this: divide and conquer. The U.S. Government treated with the tribes seemingly at random. Some Indians were slaughtered. Some were moved and removed. Others were rewarded. Sometimes governmental policy was benignly misguided (see Grant, Ulysses); at other times it was premeditatedly cruel (see Jackson, Andrew). Seldom did it make any sense.

The results of that inconsistency exists to this day. During my high school years, I lived in Prior Lake, Minnesota, two minutes away from the Mdewakanton Sioux reservation, which owns Mystic Lake Casino. The tribe’s resorts and casinos provide a six-figure income for every member. The tribe makes so much money they literally don’t know what to do with it all. At one point, I think they might have bought a fire truck that turns into a robot. Or vice versa. Go a few hundred miles west, and you have Pine Ridge Reservation, which is as blasted-out as any third-world country.

The reason that divide-and-conquer worked as an unofficial and ad hoc policy was because the American Indians were not (and are not) a monolithic group. There are hundreds of tribes, and those tribes have various sub-divisions. Before Europeans arrived, these tribes existed within their own political-economic-military context. Tribes traded with each other, fought with each other, formed and broke alliances, in the same way as the nations of Europe. When white people hit these shores, those tribes didn't magically forget those old quarrels and compromises. They might have gained a common enemy, but they didn't lose their own unique histories.

Because of this, and despite facing their own imminent destruction, the Indian Wars feature only a handful of pan-Indian alliances to face the white tide. The most famous of these are the confederations led by the Shawnee Tecumseh circa 1810 and the Ottawa Pontiac in 1763.

On the Great Plains, there was one great pan-Indian leader, a man who joined the various tribes and held them together for a singular purpose. This man wasn’t Crazy Horse, he wasn’t Sitting Bull. He was an Oglala Lakota called Red Cloud.

Red Cloud is the subject of Bob Drury’s and Tom Clavin’s The Heart of Everything That Is (the title refers to one of many conceptions of the Black Hills). The book is billed as a biography of the Oglala leader, and for about half its length, it is just that.

Certainly, Red Cloud is a fascinating man, and worthy of the chance to step out from the shadows of more famous Indians. He came from a broken family, his father an alcoholic who died young. The desire to compensate for his father’s shame likely spurred Red Cloud to his incredible feats of warlike daring. In his autobiography, which is used as a major source (though, unfortunately, its veracity is never discussed), Red Cloud claims some 80 coups. A coup could mean anything from touching an enemy on the shoulder to tearing out his heart. Whatever it meant, whether enemies killed or shamed, it shows Red Cloud to be an absolutely ferocious warrior.

Too often, in my opinion, we tend to view American Indians in one of two ways, either as the Noble Victim or the Unrepentant Savage. I call this the Dances With Wolves Dichotomy (trademark pending) because the Oscar-winning movie perfectly embodies this split, by separating Indians into good (Rodney A. Grant’s Wind in His Hair, and Graham Greene’s Kicking Bird) and bad (Wes Studi’s murderous Pawnee warrior).

Drury and Clavin do a very good job of breathing life into Red Cloud, into making him into a multi-dimensional human being. He is not simply a stone-faced warrior with a fearsome reputation, but a man with complex motivations, ambitions, and desires.

Red Cloud’s transformational moment came in the 1866 blockade of Fort Phil Kearny in present-day north-central Wyoming. The United States Government had sent the Army up the Bozeman Trail to build a string of forts to protect miners on their way to the mineral-fields of Virginia City. The Bozeman Trail and the accompanying forts cut right through the heart of the Powder River County, homeland to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne.

Red Cloud led the resistance. The war that later bore his name was atypical of Plains Indian contests. It was marked by the usual hit-and-run style raids, which nullified white firepower advantages by exploiting numerical disparities and leveraging surprise. But under Red Cloud’s leadership, these raids maintained a level of intensity and duration never seen before or since on the Plains. From the moment Fort Phil Kearny came into existence, it was under a constant state of siege.

Woodcutters sent from the fort were harassed. Emigrant trains along the trail were attacked. Cattle and horses were stolen. Anyone foolish enough to wander off alone was like to end up dead. This strategy of attrition, a death by a thousand cuts, culminated in the December 1866 Fetterman Fight.

Eighty-one officers and men (including two civilians with repeating rifles) under the command of Captain William J. Fetterman were ordered by Fort Phil Kearny’s commander, Henry Carrington, to go to the aid of a woodcutting party that had come under attack. Fetterman was ordered – according to Carrington, who spent the rest of his life explaining – to pursue the attackers only as far as a geographical feature called Lodge Trail Ridge. To pass beyond the ridge meant passing beyond sight of the fort.

Fetterman’s detachment, consisting both of mounted cavalry and dismounted infantry, marched out of the fort. The Indians attacking the woodcutting party fled. A small band of Indians acting as decoys lured Fetterman (or more likely, lured Fetterman’s impetuous subordinate, George W. Grummond) over the ridge. Waiting for them were a thousand or more warriors, who destroyed Fetterman’s band after a brisk, fierce fight. (I think a strong argument can be made that Fetterman’s tiny band put up a much sharper fight than Custer’s more-lauded 7th Cavalry a decade later).

The siege of Fort Phil Kearny and Fetterman’s demise are roughly half this book. Unfortunately, once Drury and Clavin get to this place, the viewpoint shifts to the white side of the story. During his greatest victory, Red Cloud is almost forgotten. The narrative, meanwhile, focuses on Carrington and Fetterman and the soap-opera-worthy dysfunction of Carrington’s military command. (A finer collection of drunks, incompetents, and back-stabbers has seldom been seen. And that doesn’t even include the insubordinate bigamist who might have triggered Fetterman’s ambush. King’s Landing doesn’t have nothing on Fort Phil Kearny!).

I’m assuming the reason for this viewpoint shift is a factor of the lack of primary sources within the Indian camps. With a few exception, Plains Indian traditions are oral and pictorial (referring to the fascinating winter counts), meaning that the written tradition of the whites often takes precedence. In some cases, it means that the white side is the only side that still exists.

Drury and Clavin can’t be held responsible for reporting facts that have been lost to our world. I can hold them responsible for their lackadaisical sourcing. The authors use the “trailing phrases” method of citing their work, which is just about the least helpful manner of citation known to man. They explain this choice as an artistic one, saying they were “primarily interested in telling a good yarn.” This is a classic cop-out. Scholarly and readable are not mutually exclusive. John Monnett’s Where A Hundred Soldiers Were Killed is not only a great “yarn,” but it has annotated citations that allow interested readers to go to the source. Likely, it came down to doing the simpler thing.

This is unfortunate, because Drury and Clavin presented facts that I’d never read before. Facts that called out for specific pinpoint citations. Facts that begged to be supported.

If this sounds like nitpicking…It is! But I am a part-time drunk a notorious grifter an amateur student of the Indian Wars. I might be the only person you know who has read the entire records of the Senate inquiry into the Fetterman Fight. I’ve been to the battlefield five times. (I’ve been to Rome once. Never to Vienna. But five times to a lonely, windswept hill. I have no regrets). I want to know everything Drury and Clavin used, so I can trust their work, and perhaps look at their sources myself.

Of course, the same part of me that can be highly critical over a minor matter is pretty happy that these authors took on this subject. As Americans, I feel we tend to ignore the Indian Wars whenever we can, because they don’t reflect particularly well upon us. When we do sneak a glance, we tend to focus on white defeats, such as the Little Big Horn, perhaps because it mitigates some residual guilt.

Anything that gets people reading about this oft-ignored time period is a good thing, in my opinion. All the better that it steps beyond the obvious Indian heroes, to shed some light on a fascinating figure – part killer, part genius – and one of the few Indians who can say he won his war against the whites.