Quotes from Bob Drury

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

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.

To the Sioux, war was the reason for living,

The four pillars of Sioux leadership—acknowledged by the tribe to this day—are bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom.

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.

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.

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.

the only war the nation would ever lose to an Indian army.

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.

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

There was, however, a precise structure underpinning Sioux religious beliefs, even if it remained largely unrecognizable to outsiders.

verdant North Platte territory. The visit did not go as peacefully

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Between 1941 and 1945, maps of Pacific typhoon lanes may as well have been marked "Here Be Dragons.

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.

Less than two years later the swashbuckling operation was shut down when the Western Union Telegraph Company finished stringing its lines.

The Bloody Bozeman, Dorothy Johnson

The poor souls on the other side of the gate bars were merely frightened papa-sans and mama-sans clinging as fast to their children as they were to their hopes—families to whom the United States had made a promise. They'd bet their lives on that promise, and now they were going to lose. He was haunted by their pleading eyes. A

But extrapolating from Joseph Martin's records and Boone's own timeline of reaching subsequent geographical landmarks, it is safe to say that the horsemen ascended the gently sloping sixteen hundred feet to the southeastern entrance of the saddlelike breach in mid-May.

Mythology is what never was, but always is.