Book of the week: The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

(Simon & Schuster, $30)

“If you’re a novice to Native American history, prepare for cultural whiplash,” said Don Oldenburg in USA Today. The names Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse may be the ones most people know, but the nearly forgotten Oglala Sioux chief known as Red Cloud stands easily as the most successful of American Indian military leaders. In this “exquisitely told” history, we learn in an endnote that Red Cloud produced an autobiography that somehow went missing for nearly a century after his 1909 death. But his story isn’t the only eye-opener here. In the authors’ detailed telling, neither Red Cloud’s united Sioux tribes nor the U.S. can claim the high moral ground: At a time when women and children were afforded no mercy and war was waged by rape, torture, disembowelment, and beheading, both sides fought with astonishing ruthlessness.

The authors make Red Cloud’s life story “a ripping yarn,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Born in 1821 to a father who soon drank himself to death, Red Cloud took his first scalp at 16 and quickly established himself as a fearless and effective -warrior and horse thief. Years later, he had the fore-sight to see that white men would take over his Great Plains homeland unless pre-empted. In 1866, he led a united force of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho that ambushed and slaughtered some 80 U.S. soldiers near Fort Phil Kearny in -present-day Wyoming, forcing a broad Army retreat. No other Indian chief would ever win a war against the U.S., and this book’s authors make every moment come alive. Reading their account, “I could almost smell the pines of the Black Hills and hear the hooves of the buffalo pounding the earth.”

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At times, “the scrupulousness of the telling can make it drag,” said Chloë Schama in Smithsonian. But Red Cloud’s recollections provide a valuable glimpse of the Sioux perspective on the settling of the West. He knew there’d be no final victory over the white man but “proved to be as shrewd a negotiator as he was a brilliant military tactician,” said Christopher Corbett in The Wall Street Journal. From 1873 on, his battles were largely bureaucratic, and he won temporary concessions for his people as they settled into reservation life. In the end, sadly, he died on a grim reservation of his foe’s choosing, a pawn of the very government “he had fought against with such great success.”