Frontier Partisans

The Adventurers, Rangers and Scouts Who Fought the Battles of Empire

Red Cloud — Mighty In War

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“When I was young among our nation, I was poor. From the wars with one nation or another, I raised myself to be a chief.’

— Red Cloud

The first thing that must be understood is that Red Cloud was an epic Frontier Partisan badass. Like the great Shawnee Tecumseh, he was named after a meteorite or comet. And like Tecumseh, he would become an exceptional war leader of the native resistance to American expansion.

The young Oglala Sioux craved status as only the poor, fatherless son of a dead alcoholic can crave it. And in Lakota society in its mid-19th Century heyday, the only path to status was the path of war. The Lakota did not need a reason for war; war was the reason. War created wealth in the form of captured horses; war gave men their identity and their spiritual purpose; success in war gave men political power.

“To the Sioux, war was the reason for living, and though their raids and ambushes were of course made to establish territory and gain booty, more important was the chance for an individual warrior to give vent, in public, to an aggressiveness prized by the tribe’s ethos. 

“A Sioux brave would wager his last breath against the most courageous adversaries, and no matter the outcome, he won. A good death did honor to an entire life…”*

No Lakota — not even Crazy Horse — exceeded Red Cloud in war honors. The Pawnee, the Ute, the Crow, the Blackfeet all learned to fear his name.

*

The photographs of Red Cloud show a man from late middle age to a man in sunset, a man who has cultivated the reserve and gravitas appropriate to a head man of his people, a man who has travelled to Washington, DC, and met a president, who seen the overwhelming scope of American civilization. A man who knows that the days of his people’s freedom are over.

We must strip away the age, dignity and defeat from that image, and picture Red Cloud as a young man, a killer from the age of 16, a tall, lithe, pantherish athlete, a rage-volcano who quenched his lust for blood in countless raids against tribal enemies and found joyous release in the thrill of the great buffalo hunts that punctuated the cycle of seasons, spring and fall.

Red Cloud stacked up an astonishing record of coups — touching an enemy and refraining from killing him. The practice of counting coup has often been misunderstood and/or misapplied by those who seek to posit a kind of moral superiority of the Indian over the white man, leading them to treat indigenous warfare as a kind of benign game that only turned deadly when the white man entered the equation. That’s nonsense.

Counting coup by striking a living enemy was a display of balls-out courage, because the enemy remained a threat throughout the encounter. Counting coup did not obviate the brutality of Lakota warfare in the slightest — and Red Cloud himself stands as Exhibit A. He counted coup some 80 times. He also killed scores of enemy. He once held a warrior of the Blackfeet while a comrade scalped him alive, sending the mutilated warrior back to his people to spread the terrifying name of Red Cloud. On another occasion, he pulled a drowning Ute warrior out of a river — so that he could knife him and claim his scalp. He shot a Lakota political rival through the head with a rifle (Lakota politics made for a supremely dangerous game of thrones).**

Red Cloud would qualify for the FP Natural Born Killers series, except that his blood lust was not an aberration in his culture — it was exemplary.

His extraordinary martial prowess, political ambition and savvy, and an unusual degree of self-control and ability to persuade others to his point of view or course of action made Red Cloud a formidable leader. He was among the most prominent men of his imperial nation when they pushed into the Powder River Country in what is now north-central Wyoming during the 1850s, pushing out the Crow whose land it had been by custom and by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. By the time the Bozeman Trail was punched through from Laramie skirting the east slope of the Bighorn Mountains on to the Montana goldfields, Red Cloud was positioned to lead the militants among his people in a highly-organized, coordinated and sustained campaign that would ultimately force the U.S. Government to the negotiating table on his terms.

 

 

*Bob Drury/Tom Clavin, The Heart Of Everything That Is: The Untold Story Of Red Cloud, an American Legend (2013)

** Drury and Clavin have Red Cloud armed with a Hawken Rifle in the 1840s, a notion I quite fancy. It’s entirely plausible that such a warrior would obtain such a high-status weapon — one prized by white frontiersmen, mixed-blood frontiersmen and Indian warriors alike. Have to say, though, that the authors seem to have been swayed to the Cult of the Hawken, assigning almost mystical potency to the weapon. They describe it as lighter than the old Kentucky Rifle, which isn’t the case. It was generally shorter and handier for horseback carry, but just as heavy and sometimes heavier. They also say that it was accurate out to 400 yards, three times the range of Ol’ Kaintuck — which is ludicrous. And they don’t seem to understand the difference between the percussion ignition system and the flintlock. Ah, well…

Don’t get me wrong — theirs is a fine book. But they clearly have no hands-on experience with frontier-era muzzleloading firearms.

 

Comments

  2. Breaker Morant says

    It is absolutely mind-boggling how late (the 1850’s) that they pushed into the Powder River Country.

    Reply

  3. felonious monk says

    It is indeed a fine book, one with a lot of mistakes.
    To “rectify” one should pick up John D. Mcdermott’s
    “Red Cloud Oglala Legend”

    Reply

  5. Traven Torsvan says

    If you are wondering why Red Clouds autobiography stops before the war that bears his name, it was really a collection of the stories he told to Sam Deon, a trader who decided to publish them without Red Cloud’s awareness. Incidentally the manuscript was typed by Marie Sandoz.

    Reply

  6. wayne says

    For 2 novels dealing with the reservation aftermath of the Sioux Wars and Red Cloud’s struggle to hold his people together, I suggest Dan O’Brien’s The Contract Surgeon and The Indian Agent.

    Reply

  7. Breaker Morant says

    I saw on the other blog that you and Craig are going back to Montana and Wyoming this fall. You will love the Little Bighorn, although it is not quite as raw as Fetterman. You are right-Fetterman is something special.

    Suggestion, might as well try and hit Rosebud battlefield as well-obviously it is close and less visited. I have never been there-you can only push the wife so much.

    Hmm, musing out loud-if my wife let me and work permitted-I would love to tag along for a day (I would be quiet) and listen to your guys’ brand of bullshit* by the hour (*Stolen from Leon Uris’s “Battle Cry.”) LOL.

    Seriously, that area of Wyoming and Montana is really special. I don’t know if you caught the Buffalo, Wyo, claims to be the home of Longmire.

    Reply

    • JimC says

      Yeah, I took a pic of Walt’s “Campaign HQ.” Apparently Longmire Days brings thousands of tourists there…

      I’ll let you know what our timing is and if we can connect we’ll make it happen. That would be a grand and glorious thing.

      Reply

  8. Breaker Morant says

    Another thought for your visit. I have been to Little Bighorn 3 times. I had decided that if I went again, and this might be good for a first timer, is that there is a private museum (Custer Battlefield Museum) west of the river and south of the main road to the battlefield.

    My thought is that visiting that area first would approximate the location of the Indian village with views looking up at the bluffs and so forth.

    It might be a unique and interesting perspective to gain as a first-timer. Everybody looks down from the bluffs towards the Indian village.

    Reply

    • John Bullard says

      I heartily recommend going to the Custer Battlefield Museum. I went there last September the day after visiting FPK, Wagon Box and Fetterman sites, after seeing the Little Big Horn battlefield. It is incredible what they have in that museum. And, they have an absolutely incredible book section in the store there specializing in books on the Indian Wars and westward expansion that will destroy your bank balance. They even have barbecue available on Saturdays that they cook on site.

      Reply

      • Breaker Morant says

        John Bullard>>>”And, they have an absolutely incredible book section in the store there specializing in books on the Indian Wars and westward expansion that will destroy your bank balance.” <<<<

        After my last comment, I started chuckling about this post. We all realize that if any subset of this crew walks into that bookstore (or any like it) the proprietor is going to be very happy and he might even have a story or two to tell for awhile as he counts his money on his winter island.-LOL.

        Reply

  9. wayne says

    This could very quickly develop into an annual Frontier Partisans rendezvous in the Rockies. I’m game!

    Reply

  10. lane batot says

    I certainly enjoyed both the last posts–I’ve been intrigued, and an admirer of Red Cloud since reading his accounts in “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee”, lo, those many decades ago…… Read “The Heart of Everything That Is” just recently, as well. But for me, Red Cloud’s image is tainted by his latter years on the reservation–his jealousy of Crazy Horse, and competing for favors from his white captors–understandable and completely human as that was–none of us is perfect….I, also, visited both the Fetterman sight, and the Little Bighorn battleground that fateful year(1984) of my life when I was fleeing a rather dangerous situation involving some organized criminal types(of which I hope all are long dead, or completely senile and debilitated, incarcerated in some old folks home) trying to help someone I thought was a friend(only to be severely disillusioned on that score later, as well…), so definitely NOT in the typical tourist mood at the time. But I still HAD to stop and FEEL those places, too; places I’d read so much about. Breaker Morant used the term I would for the Fetterman site–raw! And STARK.. I spent more time at the Little Bighorn–getting out and roaming all over the site, and the riverbanks below. Picked up a small stone for my medicine bag there. All this before I saw the bit of paper flapping in the wind posted on the locked museum door stating that walking over the grounds and picking up anything was unlawful! NOBODY was around, though–I had the place all to myself the whole time I was there. I found it very peaceful and beautiful there–nothing like that day, June 25th, back in 1876!

    Reply

    • JimC says

      I’m going to save up my thoughts on Red Cloud till we get to the end of this trail. I have long held similar attitudes to him due to his post-1868 actions — I am developing a greater understanding. One thing that is coming clear is that he was a very political animal — and he was full of a titanic rage.

      Reply

  11. wayne says

    I’ve been to the Little Bighorn site, but I haven’t made it to the site of the Fetterman fight; it’s on my list. The 2017 book, Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight: Indian Views edited by John H. Monnett is the best work I’ve found on the subject. These remembrances highlight the interactions of the tribes that took part, and the slight differences in point of view you’d expect from people on different parts of the battlefield with different responsibilities.

    In the past few years I’ve been reading as many first-person accounts by Native Americans as I can. Two Leggings: The Making of A Crow Warrior by Peter Nabokov is a fine example.
    Granted, some of the translations made in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries might not be fully accurate, and story tellers might have embellished their accounts understandably fearing reprisals from whites who they saw as enemies. However, like the photography of Edward S. Curtis, these are often the best depictions of this period we have.

    As much as I love the thrill of the hunt in a used book store, I have to admit that Amazon’s collection of rare books from this period available on Kindle for a dollar or two is hard to beat. Not taking advantage of this research tool is like refusing to give up the Dewey-Decimal system at the library.

    Reply

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