Red Cloud, the Solitary Sioux: A Story of the Great Prairie

by Sir William Francis Butler

It will be seen from the foregoing summary of the conversation which had been held over the fire by the Assineboines now grouped around it, that the bravery of the party individually or collectively was not of the highest order; but in truth the thing we call courage is much the same among red men as among white all the world over. Confined to no class or to no people, its examples will be found often mixed with strange evidences of cowardice; and side by side with the man who dares for the sake of daring, will be found the man in whose heart a bit of cheap courage is only less cherished than his life.

It was while thus the party of Assineboines debated their future action that the voice of the scout who had left them some days previously was heard saluting from the darkness. The new arrivals came forward into the circle of light. McDermott was an old acquaintance, and he and his Salteaux were soon seated around the fire. The presence of the trader did little to interrupt the flow of conversation between the Assineboines. Too much engrossed by the prospect of such an easy prey, they soon resumed the thread of their discussion, and after some questions asked and answered the new comer was left to smoke in silence.

But as the Assineboines debated their plans, and mention had been made once or twice of the two men in the other camp against whom the braves had no quarrel, there came into the trader’s face an expression of rapt attention, and he listened eagerly to every word that fell from his companions. He might well start at the utterance of one name—the name of the Red Cloud, the son of the man he had foully betrayed to his doom.

Face to face he had never met the Sioux chief, but a vague undefined fear had oppressed him whenever his name had been mentioned. He well knew that the vengeance of the Sioux is deep and lasting; he knew too that if any act merited revenge it was the act which he had committed upon the father of this man with whom he had had no cause of quarrel, with whom he had been on terms of long and deep intimacy, in whose tent he had eaten in former times, when the Sioux had held their lands up to the shores of the Otter Tail and to the sources of the Mississippi.

Nine years had passed since that foul deed had been wrought. In the wild life of the prairies, and amid a society whose deeds of violence were of too frequent occurrence, the memory of any particular act of bloodshed is soon forgotten; but time had never blotted out the recollection of the treachery of the trader McDermott. There was not a Sioux on the most southern tributary stream of the great Missouri who had not heard of that dark night’s work, when, drugged at the feast to which he had gone in the confidence of old friendship, the chief Black Eagle was carried through the snow of the winter night and yielded a prisoner at the frontier post on the Red river.

Since that time the trader had grown rich. He had many successful ventures on the plains; for the quarrels of the Sioux were not the quarrels of the Crees, the Assineboines, and the Blackfeet, the Sircies or the Salteaux; but through all these years he lived as it were in the shadow of his own crime, and he felt that while a Sioux was left to roam the prairie, the dead body of the man whose life he had sold was still unburied. Many a time when the shadows darkened upon the great landscape had he heard in his heart the mysterious voice of conscience, upbraiding him with the deed of blood; but more than all had he conceived, with the intuitive faculty of fear, a dread of the Red Cloud.

Whether there came tidings of a battle or a skirmish, fought between the remnants of the Sioux, the Mandans, the Minatarree, or the Ogahalla branches of that once mighty nation with the troops of the United States, McDermott longed to learn that this wandering chief, whose presence ever haunted his imagination, had at last met his end. But he ever seemed to bear a charmed life.

At one time he was heard of in a raid upon the American post on the great bend of the Missouri; again came tidings that he had led a small band of the Ogahalla against a detachment of soldiers in the fort hills of Montana, and that not one living soul had escaped to tell the fate of the American soldiers; and again there came news that a solitary Indian had been seen by the Touchwood hills, or in the broken ridges of the Mauvais Bois, and that this roving red man was the Red Cloud.

That curious instinct which danger frequently gives to the mind long before any actual symptom of its approach is visible, had warned the trader McDermott that while the Sioux lived he had reason to dread at his hands a fate as cruel as the one to which he had consigned the old chief.

Now all at once, sitting here at this camp fire, he heard the dreaded name of his enemy, and gathering from the conversation that only a few miles away from where he sat lay camped the man he feared more than anything on earth, it is little wonder that his heart beat loudly within his breast, and his face showed unmistakable traces of the conflict of passion that raged within him. For with the news of this proximity of his hated enemy there was also a chance not to be lightly lost. Here was the Sioux in company with a wounded Cree, close to a war-party of Assineboines hungry for trophies and for plunder. His course was plain. Could he succeed in inducing the Assineboines to attack the Sioux camp, and end for ever his hated enemy? It would go hard with him if he could not.