The Heart of Everything That Is

August 12, 2013
For all of our culture’s fascination with the American Indian, it’s almost impossible to believe that one of the most well-known Indians of his time, the Oglala Sioux warrior chief Red Cloud, could be largely forgotten until now. Yet that’s exactly what we discover in this illuminating account by Drury and Clavin (Halsey’s Typhoon). As the de facto leader of the Western Sioux nation—an unprecedented feat in itself given the Sioux’s rigorous individualism and a “culture consisted of fluid, haphazard tribal groups”—Red Cloud and his army stand alone in history as the only Indians to ever defeat the United States in a war, which took all of two years (1866–1868). A history inconveniently at odds with the accepted American narrative, the manuscript for Red Cloud’s 1893 autobiography lay in a drawer at the Nebraska State Historical Society into the 1990s. Thanks to that work and the authors’ extensive, additional scholarship, readers now have access to a much more thorough, comprehensive understanding of the Plains Indians’ brutal and tragically futile efforts to protect their land and way of living from the progress of ”civilization.” Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel-Weber Associates.