From CGI member oldmaninthedesert:

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Continuing with Bob Drury & Tom Clavin's Book,The Heart of Everything That is. Red Cloud can start to see the writing on the wall for his people,as the white man continues his trek West on the Oregon Trail,and Brigham Young heads for Utah,and a confrontation with the Ute people.

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[....Over many council fires and private feasts the Americans were, figuratively, put on trial. Militants like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull lobbied separately and together for immediate raids against Army detachments and emigrant wagon trains. Moderates such as Old-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses and a Hunkpapa Head Man named Bears Ribs urged forbearance, arguing that the whites seemed content to have secured their “holy road.” The moderates would fight if they must, they said, but why disturb a hornet’s nest? Red Cloud and his allies countered that it was only a matter of time before these white wasps again flew as a swarm in search of larger Indian orchards. When had the Indian, Red Cloud asked, ever known the whites to be satisfied with the lands that they already possessed?

Despite these tactical disagreements, one unifying strategic goal did emerge— continued protection, by force if necessary, of the sanctity of the most sacred Black Hills. Oaths were sworn to defend the cherished Paha Sapa from all white intrusions; and the festivities remained generally upbeat and positive, the only shadow cast by the pale boy with the curly hair— the precocious Crazy Horse. He had spent the spring and early summer wandering from Montana to Kansas with his best friend, Young-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses. They had visited bands from numerous tribes, and at the Bear Butte Council Crazy Horse told a disheartening tale....

....A month earlier he had joined a Cheyenne camp staked well below the Platte, on the banks of the Smoky Hill River south of the Republican—coincidentally, this would be the site of General George Armstrong Custer’s first Indian campaign a decade later. There he was befriended by a medicine man called Ice. It was from Ice, he said, that he began to learn the ways of the Cheyenne, who, if possible, hated the whites even more than the Sioux did. Ice’s people had carried out several successful raids on small detachments of soldiers crossing the Kansas Plains, but had been taken aback by the small guns the Bluecoats now carried that fired multiple rounds without having to be reloaded after each shot. These were the revolvers Red Cloud had seen at Horse Creek. But neither he nor any of the other Indians present at Bear Butte that summer were aware that their world was in the process of an irrevocable evolution, and that a driving force behind this change was emanating from, of all places, an industrial city far to the east in a state called Connecticut.....

.....The distant echoes of the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, reverberated well beyond the Mississippi. As one historian noted, “the frontier army suddenly ceased to protect the frontier.” At the start of the hostilities, officers from southern states, who represented nearly a third of the Regular Army officer corps, resigned en masse, 313 threading home to fight for the Confederacy, including 182 of the Army’s 184 West Point graduates. Most of the noncommissioned officers and enlisted men remained true to the Union, but they, too, rapidly disappeared from the Plains. Even the detachment at Fort Laramie, the western communications hub connecting the coasts, was reduced to a skeleton garrison of about 130 soldiers as battalions and regiments from across the West marched home. Chaos ensued as the sons of Virginia planters, Boston Brahmins, Iron Mountain dirt farmers, and Philadelphia steamfitters enlisted as volunteers and state militia trained in haste and then moved like chess pieces across a grand board. The few southern officers who did not relinquish their commissions were viewed with suspicion by the War Department— particularly the Tennessean General Harney, who remained commander of the Northwest Territories.

In the years since the fight at Blue Water Creek and his “invasion” of the Lakota lands, Harney’s bungling adventures had continued into the farcical. He still hunted Indians, seemingly for sport, but that had never bothered the authorities back east. It was only when, in 1859, he nearly set off a shooting war with Great Britain that his superiors thought to rein him in. This occurred during an inspection tour of the U.S.- Canadian borderlands, when his inept handling of a minor incident involving an “English” hog rooting through an America farmers fields resulted in an armed standoff between Harney’s troops and British Royal Marines. Diplomats were roused, cooler heads prevailed, and Harney was shuffled back into the nation’s interior, where it was thought he could do no more lasting damage to either himself or the Union cause. But twelve months into the Civil War he was relieved of command by President Lincoln when rumors surfaced that he was secretly negotiating a western truce with Confederate authorities....]

full text here

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/06/part-6-heart-of-everything-that.html