The Heart of Everything That Is Quotes

“Memory is like riding a trail at night with a lighted torch. The torch casts its light only so far, and beyond that is darkness. —Ancient Lakota saying”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“They ranged from naive to obtuse to hateful, with personalities unencumbered with charisma and minds unclouded by thought.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“as Sitting Bull was to lament years later, “A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell. A death wind for my people.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“raw state militias patrolling the west with seasoned troops better capable of confronting the Indians of the Great Plains. South of the Arkansas, this meant eradicating the Kiowa and the Comanche, who were blocking movement along the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. North of the Platte, it meant killing Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. General Ulysses S. Grant, the Army’s commander in chief, had long planned such a moment. The previous November, the day after the Sand Creek massacre, Grant summoned Major General John Pope to his Virginia headquarters to put such plans in motion. Despite his relative youth, the forty-three-year-old Pope was an old-school West Pointer and a topographical engineer-surveyor whose star had risen with several early successes on western fronts in the Civil War. It had dimmed just as rapidly when Lincoln placed him in command of the eastern forces; Pope was thoroughly outfoxed by Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope had been effectively exiled to St. Paul, Minnesota, until Grant recalled him to consolidate under one command a confusing array of bureaucratic Army “departments” and “districts” west of St. Louis. Grant named Pope the commanding general of a new Division of the Missouri,”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“The Sioux regarded the universe as a living and breathing—if mysterious—being. And though they recognized the passage of time as measured by the predictable movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars, to their eyes mankind was but a flickering flame in a strong wind; and their concepts of past, present, and future were blurred so that all three existed simultaneously, on separate planes.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Now, however, Cooper’s romanticism was a receding memory, a newly muscular America replacing it with a post–Civil War vision of Manifest Destiny. The old attitudes were reconfigured with cruel clarity, particularly among westerners. Even whites who had once considered Indians the equivalent of wayward children—naifs like Thomas Gainsborough’s English rustics, to be “civilized” with Bibles and plows—were beginning to view them as a subhuman race to be exterminated or swept onto reservations by the tide of progress.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-year-old Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen-year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental not to keep tabs on this one.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“The four pillars of Sioux leadership—acknowledged by the tribe to this day—are bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“In the spring of 1825, four years after Red Cloud’s birth, Brigadier General Henry Atkinson led one of the earliest American military expeditions up the Missouri River. Atkinson, a decorated veteran of the War of 1812, departed St. Louis for the Yellowstone and was charged with securing treaties of “perpetual friendship” with as many of the Northern Plains tribes as possible.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“To the Sioux, war was the reason for living,”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“The white man made me a lot of promises, and they only kept one. They promised to take my land, and they took it. —Red Cloud”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Amid this bureaucratic confusion, Pope’s General Order No. 33 stood. This meant that by virtue of the political and social contacts that had secured him command of the 18th Infantry Regiment, the obscure Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington, with no fighting experience and an attorney’s approach to most military hurdles, remained in charge of the Army’s most ambitious undertaking on the western frontier—the defeat of Red Cloud, the mightiest warrior chief of the mightiest tribe on the Plains. A plan to endow such an officer with the authority to build and maintain outposts throughout the very wilderness that had been ceded time and again to the Lakota by government treaty appeared not only duplicitous but idiotic.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Bull Bear died instantly. His death was an unenviable example and an awful warning. And though it was generally felt that he had improved the world by taking leave of it, after the gun smoke cleared the Oglala elders once again found themselves trying to maintain a fragile peace between the Bad Faces and Kiyuska. In the end the fact that the Kiyuska remained the more numerous tribe swung the selection, and the council elected Bull Bear’s son, who was also named Bull Bear but now took the name Whirlwind, to succeed his father as Head Man.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“So safe had the Oregon Trail become that by 1860 the newly formed Pony Express began carrying mail along a 2,000-mile route between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, completing the circuit in ten days during good weather and fourteen in the dead of winter.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“The Sioux, like all American Indians, are descendents of Asian nomads who crossed the thousand-mile Bering Land Bridge in various migrations between 16,500 and 5,000 BC.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“the only war the nation would ever lose to an Indian army.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Starting around 1550, falling temperatures in the northern hemisphere had produced snowstorms in Portugal, flooding in Timbukto, and had destroyed centuries-old citrus groves in eastern China.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“There was, however, a precise structure underpinning Sioux religious beliefs, even if it remained largely unrecognizable to outsiders.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“verdant North Platte territory. The visit did not go as peacefully”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“A conservative estimate of trailside deaths for 1850 alone is 5,000, meaning that among the optimistic souls departing St. Louis to start a new and better life, one in eleven never made it past the Rockies.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“The Bloody Bozeman, Dorothy Johnson”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“and”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“children had children, and his oldest son, Jack, would succeed him as the tribe’s Head Man. (Jack Red Cloud would in turn be succeeded by his son James; his son, Chief Oliver Red Cloud, died at ninety-three on July 4, 2013, 110 years to the day after his great-grandfather stepped down as chief.)”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Becoming one with his physical environment was as natural a part of an Indian child’s education as learning to read and write was to an American boy back east.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Fossil remains attest to the presence of prehistoric protohorses on the North American prairie until the end of the Pleistocene epoch, 10,000 years ago. The earliest of these animals had toes instead of hooves and were the size of foxes.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“nascent”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“concern. Carrington had expressly directed”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

“Less than two years later the swashbuckling operation was shut down when the Western Union Telegraph Company finished stringing its lines.”
― Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend