“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

The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin is an in-depth, scholarly account of Red Cloud, an American Indian who defeated the United States Army in war.

In 1821, while giving birth to her first son on the banks of the Blue Water Creek, North Platte River in present-day Nebraska, an Oglala woman noticed a glowing red meteor streak across the night sky. The child came to be known as Makhpiya-luta, or Red Cloud.

Red Cloud became skilled in the way of native tradition. Warfare was considered a way of life; stealing horses from other tribes a means of exhibiting skills. They hunted the sacred buffalo, from whom they gained not only food, but clothing, material to construct tepees, and weapons. The animal itself represented Indian culture.

Red Cloud became chief among his own Oglala people, and eventually maintained authority over the Southern branches of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota, collectively known as the Sioux.

The Indian way of life was diminishing. White settlers wanted more and more land. Gold lured people to Indian hunting grounds. To the Lakota, the Black Hills are Paha Sapa, “the heart of everything that is,” but this sacred land became the casualty of one of the most blatant land grabs in U.S. history. Treaty after treaty was broken, the Indians pushed aside as thirst for gold and more land grew. Indians were shoved onto barren land that couldn’t adequately support them. Promised rations often arrived spoiled or not delivered at all.

U. S. Army forts were erected to protect the Americans, and soldiers sent on missions to annihilate the Sioux. Seeing his way of life threatened, Red Cloud, now a powerful warrior, was forced to fight for the very existence of the Indian way of life. In 1866 Red Cloud led a successful war, the Fetterman Massacre, against the United States. The U.S. Army would not experience such a defeat again until a decade later with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, sometimes called Custer’s Last Stand.

The Heart of Everything That Is is a comprehensive study of the Indian way of life, brutal though it may seem by today’s standards. The United States made promises to its native people that it didn’t keep. Many familiar names are mentioned, people who played roles in Red Cloud’s life: mountain men such as Jim Bridger, U.S. generals like William Tecumseh Sherman, who were charged with annihilating the Sioux, fearless explorers, such as John Bozeman, and memorable warriors like Crazy Horse, whom Red Cloud groomed.

The four pillars of the Sioux nation—acknowledged by the tribe to this day—are bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom. Red Cloud stood for all these pillars, attributes toward this great leader that are finally recognized in United States history.