He arranged fourteen of the wagon boxes on the ground, in a circle.
Some of the boxes had been lined with boiler iron. Two wagons were left on wheels, so that the rifles might be aimed from underneath. The boxes were pierced low down with a row of loop-holes. The s.p.a.ces between the ends of the boxes were filled with ox-chains, slabs and brush. He had plenty of ammunition and plenty of new breech-loading rifles.
The little fort was located in an open basin, surrounded by gentle hills. He directed the men of the other camp to come in at the first sign of trouble.
The Sioux were at hand. Red Cloud had been merely waiting for the soldiers to march out and make it worth his while to descend. He was resolved to destroy Fort Kearney this year, before the snows.
It seemed to him that again he had the soldiers where he wanted them.
Word of the flimsy little corral spread a laugh among his two thousand warriors. The squaws and old men were summoned from the allied Sioux and out-law Cheyenne village, to come and see and be ready with their knives.
On the morning of August 2 he so suddenly attacked the unfortified wood camp that he cut it off completely. Two hundred of his men captured the mule herd; five hundred of them attacked the wagon train there, burned the wagons and drove the soldiers and teamsters and choppers who were outside the corral, in flight to Fort Kearney. Scalps were taken.
Now it was the turn of the puny corral, and the rest of the soldiers.
He could see only the low circle of wagon-boxes. They were covered with blankets; underneath the blankets there were soldiers--few and frightened.
The hill slopes around were thronged with his people, gathered to watch and to plunder. He felt like a great chief indeed. And at wave of his hand eight hundred of his cavalry dashed in a thundering, crackling surge of death straight at the silent circle.
On they sped, and on, and on, and were just about to dash against the circle and sweep over, when suddenly such a roar, and sheet of flame, struck them in the face that they staggered and melted. Now--while the guns were empty! But the guns were not yet empty--they belched without pause. Veering right and left around a b.l.o.o.d.y lane the warriors, crouching low, tore for safety from the frightful blast.
Red Cloud could not understand. His own men were well armed, with rifles and with muskets captured from the soldiers during the past year or supplied at the trading post. It seemed to him that there were more soldiers under those blankets than he had reckoned. But he knew that his men were brave; his people were watching from the hills; he had no mind for defeat.
In the corral Captain Powell had told his twenty-six soldiers and four civilians to fight for their lives. The poor shots were ordered to load guns and pa.s.s them as fast as possible to the crack shots.
Red Cloud rallied his whole force, of more than two thousand. He dismounted eight hundred and sent them forward to crawl along the ground, as sharpshooters; they ringed the corral with bullets and arrows.
He himself led twelve hundred, afoot, for a charge. His young nephew was his chief aide--to win the right to be head chief after Red Cloud"s death.
But although they tried, in charge after charge, for three hours, they could not enter the little fort. Sometimes they got within ten yards--the soldiers threw augers at them, and they threw the augers back--and back they reeled, themselves. The guns of the little fort never quit!
Red Cloud still could not understand. He called a council. In the opinion of his chiefs and braves, the white soldiers were armed with guns that shot of themselves and did not need reloading.
The squaws on the hills were wailing; his men were discouraged; many had fallen. So finally he ordered that the bodies be saved, and the fight ended. His braves again crawled forward, behind shields, with ropes; tied the ropes to the bodies, in spite of the bullets, and running, snaked the bodies away behind them.
"Some bad G.o.d fought against us," complained the Red Cloud people.
"The white soldiers had a great medicine. We were burned by fire."
And all the Indians of the plains, hearing about the mystery, when the breech-loading rifles mowed down the Sioux and the Cheyennes, spoke of the bad G.o.d fight that defeated Chief Red Cloud.
The Sioux reported that they had lost eleven hundred and thirty-five warriors. Red Cloud"s nephew was sorely wounded in the charge.
Captain Fetterman"s loss was Lieutenant Jenness and two men killed, two men wounded. He said that when the reinforcements, with the cannon, arrived from Fort Kearney, while the Sioux were removing their dead, he was in despair. Another charge or two and he would have been wiped out.
But the road remained closed. Red Cloud remained in the path. This fall the Government decided that, after all, it had no right to open the road. In April of the next year, 1868, another treaty was signed with the Sioux and the Cheyennes, by which the United States gave up any claim to the Powder River and Big Horn country, and the Indians promised to let the Union Pacific Railroad alone.
Red Cloud did not sign. "The white men are liars," he insisted; and he waited until the three forts, Smith and Kearney and Reno, were abandoned. Then, in November, after his warriors had burned them, and all the soldiers were gone out of the country, he put his name to the treaty.
Thus he won out. He had said that he would close the road, and he had done it.
Through the following years he remained quiet. He had had his fill of fighting. His name was great. He was head chief of the Red Cloud agency, later called Pine Ridge. Spotted Tail of the Brules controlled the other agency, later called Rosebud.
Red Cloud always closely watched the whites. He was at peace, but suspicious. When the Black Hills were finally demanded by the United States, he sent out men to count the buffalo. The number in sight was too small. Some day, soon, the Indians would have no meat on their hunting grounds. Therefore Red Cloud decided that the red men must begin to live by aid of the white man; and he favored the reservations--even the sale of the Black Hills so that his people would be made rich enough to settle down.
He was looked up to as a warrior and a councillor, but the United States did not trust him; and after a time, put Spotted Tail over him, in charge of the two agencies. This made bad feeling, and Red Cloud and Spotted Tail did not speak to each other. However, his own people, who rose under Sitting Bull, urged him to join with them, in vain.
Red Cloud lived to be a very old man. He became almost blind, and partly paralyzed. He stuck to his one wife. They were together for many years.
He died in December, 1909, in a two-story house built for him by the Government on the Pine Ridge agency in South Dakota. He was aged eighty-seven. Five years before he had given his chief-ship over to his son, young Red Cloud, who carried the name. It is a name that will never be forgotten.
CHAPTER XXIII
STANDING BEAR SEEKS A HOME (1877-1880)
THE INDIAN WHO WON THE WHITE MAN"S VERDICT
The Ponca Indians were members of the large Siouan family. They had not always been a separate tribe. In the old days they and the Omahas and the Kansas and the Osages had lived together as Omahas, near the mouth of the Osage River in eastern Nebraska.
Soon they divided, and held their clan names of Poncas, Omahas, Kansas and Osages.
The Poncas and Omahas clung as allies. Finally the Poncas remained by themselves, low down on the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska.
When the captains, Lewis and Clark, met some of them, the tribe had been cut by the small-pox to only some two hundred people. They never have been a big people. Their number today, about eight hundred and fifty, is as large as ever in their history.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Standing Bear. Courtesy of The American Bureau of Ethnology.]
They and the Omahas warred with the Sioux, but they never warred with the white men. They have always been friendly to the white men, except once; and that once brings up the story of Standing Bear.
Back in 1817 the Poncas made a treaty of friendship with the United States; and in 1825 they made another treaty, allowing white traders to live among them, and agreeing to let their own bad men (if any) be punished by the United States; and in 1859 they made another treaty, selling their hunting grounds to the United States, and keeping a tract on the Niobrara River for their own homes.
None of these treaties did they break. They were at peace with even the Sioux. They had good farms, and were prospering.
But in 1868 the United States laid out a new reservation for the Sioux.
By a mistake this took in the Ponca reservation in Nebraska, and the Poncas were not told. The way they found out, was this: The Sioux began to come in and claim the land.
"That is not right," said the Poncas. "You do not belong here. All this country is ours. Go back. We do not want you."
So there was fighting, every little while, and the Poncas lost many warriors. This continued for nine years, until, by the raids of the Sioux, one fourth of the Poncas had been killed or captured.
Still they had not been told by the United States that these lands were theirs no longer; but, suddenly, in 1877, they were told that they must get out.
At this time they had three villages, on the lower Niobrara River, and eight bands, each under a chief. The chiefs were Standing Bear, White Eagle, Big Soldier, Traveling Buffalo, Black Crow, Over-the-land, Woodp.e.c.k.e.r, and Big-Hoofed Buffalo.
The United States informed the eight chiefs that they must remove their people to the Indian Territory, but did not say why.
Standing Bear had been born in 1829, so he was forty-eight years old.
He stood high among the Poncas, because of his clan, the Wa-zha-zhe--a clan that could cure rattle-snake bites and work other wonders.
He strongly opposed giving up the Ponca home-land, upon which the tribe had lived for almost one hundred years, and which the United States had agreed, on paper, to give them in exchange for their hunting grounds.