Continuing with The Heart of Everything That is,The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend.The ugliness in the story is becoming more apparent with each chapter...

....Traveling at 250 feet per second and deadly accurate to 100 yards, it produced a sound that was described variously as a shrieking whistle or a mere whisper on the wind. In either case soldiers on the frontier certainly heard it coming, even if there was no time to react. So it was that in all likelihood Lieutenant Caspar Collins, a musket ball already lodged in his hip, recognized the hiss of the arrow an instant before its cast-iron tip pierced his forehead, drilled through his skull, and exploded his prefrontal cortex. The last thing he saw was his cavalry troop being overrun by Indians.

Hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne had poured from the ocher bluffs that overlooked the Army outpost known as Bridge Station, hard by the North Platte. They engulfed Collins’s command in a matter of moments. One trooper inexplicably dismounted in a dusty washout, determined to fight on foot. He was dead nearly before his boots hit the ground. Another’s horse was shot out from under him; wounded, he crawled on his hands and knees toward the 1,000-foot wooden span that led to the barricaded stockade on the far side of the river. Bluecoats on the battlements watched an Indian bury a tomahawk in his head. A third trooper fell with his mount, horse and rider both bristling with arrow shafts.

The last anyone saw of Lieutenant Collins, he was still in the saddle, blood streaming down his face, his hands squeezing the reins in a death grip as his horse reared and galloped into the center of the war party. Collins had been warned before leaving the fort that his was a suicide mission.

“I am not a coward, ” he had replied. “I know what it means to go out . . . but I’ve never disobeyed an order. I’m a soldier’s son.”

His body was never recovered.

It was July 26, 1865, and Collins was one of twenty- nine cavalrymen from Ohio and Kansas killed in a daylong series of running fights in east-central Wyoming that came to be known as the Battle of Red Buttes. How many Indians fell Red Cloud could not immediately determine, as half of his force had ridden off to attack a train of Army freight wagons making for the fort. What he did know was that he had, at long last, set out to avenge a lifetime’s worth of lies, injustices, and broken promises. In the process, he had ordered the first shots fired in what would come to be known as Red Cloud’s War. He had no idea that three long columns of Bluecoats would soon be mounted and moving toward him with orders to kill him and every male Indian over the age of twelve....
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