10 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

They ranged from naive to obtuse to hateful, with personalities unencumbered with charisma and minds unclouded by thought.

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.

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 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.