“Your warriors have been raiding the Holy Road,” Harney said. “Some of your men attacked a mail train and killed several innocent civilians.”
“I know about those things, and I have tried to stop them, but …” He shrugged. “You have your wild young men, just as I do. You know what it is like to try to break them, to put a bit in their mouths.”
“You mean Lieutenant Grattan, don’t you?” Harney asked. He’d read the report filed by Fleming, and by Fleming’s successor, Lieutenant Colonel Hoffman. “You mean you are not to blame for failing to control your young bucks, and I am not to blame for the mistakes my young soldiers make, don’t you?”
Little Thunder nodded. “It is hard to be a chief.
You must try to make your people see the right thing, but there is just so much you can do to make them behave the way they should. When they do, you receive praise, and when they do not, you are blamed. I am blamed, and I accept it. But these people here with me, they have bothered no one. They have attacked no whites, stolen nothing except horses from the Crows and the Pawnees, which is what we have always done.”
Harney was getting nervous. The scout from Cooke was overdue, but he dare not move on the village until he was certain Cooke was deployed.
“I don’t want any of your people hurt, but you should have thought of that before now, Chief. You know that Agent Twiss said any Sioux north of the Platte will be considered hostile. That means you and your people are to be considered hostile.”
As he waited for the chief’s reply, he saw the dust cloud of a rider approaching at a full gallop. Crossing his fingers that it was Cooke’s scout, he excused himself and moved aside to wait for the rider. It was indeed Cooke’s messenger. Everything was ready. He was in place and waiting for the expected retreat.
Harney spurred his mount back toward Little Thunder. The chief watched him closely, as if he suspected something.
“I came here to fight you, Chief. Those are my orders,” Harney told him. “And I mean to follow them to the letter.”
“But there is no reason to fight. We will go in when we are ready.”
“No, now, that isn’t the way it’s going to be. I came to fight and you must fight.”
Little Thunder looked at Spotted Tail, who shook his head as he listened to the interpreter’s words. As their meaning sank in, he let the white flag fall to his side, turned his horse, and headed back toward the village at a gallop.
Little Thunder looked sadly at Harney. “I will fight if I must, but …” He couldn’t finish, turned slowly, and rode back toward the camp.
Harney waited patiently until Little Thunder was almost at the edge of the village, then gave the order to charge. His men moved ahead with fixed bayonets. The field pieces opened up, showering explosive shells into the middle of the camp. Suddenly, like a hornet’s nest poked with a sharp stick, the place came alive. Sioux were everywhere, running in every conceivable direction. Most of them were women and children.
The advancing troops waited for the artillery to let up, then charged ahead, firing their rifles, stopping to reload, then charging ahead again. Over and over, they fired in ranks, leapfrogging and laying down an incessant hail of fire.
As Harney expected, most of the Sioux scattered. Unused to organized fighting, they were helpless in front of Harney’s onslaught.
Those who ran up the draw behind the village fell under Cooke’s guns. Many of the Indians tried to climb up the steep face of the bluff to get at Cooke’s men, but the artillery was brought to bear, and shell after shell thundered into the scrambling warriors.
It was over as suddenly as it had begun. The village was a shambles. Most of the tipis had been destroyed. Systematically torched, they spewed smoke into the sky until a pall hung over the battle
site. The campground was littered with dead and dying Sioux, many women among them.
Harney’s men moved among the fallen. Women had their dresses yanked over their heads. If they were living they were raped and if dead, their pubic hair was cut out as if it were a scalp. The remaining Sioux who managed to escape ran for Fort Laramie, believing it was their only chance to survive.
Curly saw the smoke from miles away. He and Hump and Little Hawk lashed their ponies, fearing the worst as they sprinted for the village. As they drew closer, they could see the ruined lodges, some still blazing, others already reduced to ashes.
Dismounting on the edge of the silent, abandoned camp, they walked gingerly among the dead. One by one they checked the bodies, hoping to find survivors. The mutilated women lay everywhere. Curly choked back a sob, trying to control his rage. He thought of the young woman he had killed, and was glad that he had been unable to scalp her. Seeing the women of his own tribe brutalized this way convinced him that he had been right. Women and children should not be victims of the war.
Hump was calling for him to mount up, when Curly heard a sound from the far side of a tipi that lay on its side, the skin walls scorched but not burned through.
Stepping around the upended lodge, he saw a woman, a baby in her arms, lying on her side, curled into a ball. The baby was whimpering. He moved closer and knelt beside her, only to realize it was not the baby but the woman who cried so pitifully. He lifted the baby from her arms and saw that it was dead.
Trying to comfort her, he shouted for Little Hawk to make a travois. When it was ready, he wrapped the woman in a buffalo robe. Leaving Hump and Little Hawk, he rode out onto the prairie. Over and over, he asked her name, but she could only stare at him, strange, childlike sobs wracking her slender body.
That night, she was able to speak. She said her name was Yellow Woman. She was a Cheyenne, the niece of Ice, a great shaman, and had been visiting with the Brule.
“I’ll take you home,” Curly told her. She looked at him as if she did not believe him or worse, as if she did not care. She just sat across the fire from him, her eyes black as the sky overhead, swallowing the firelight as it danced between them.
Once more, he said, “I’ll take you home.”
And he knew she didn’t care.
T
HE NEXT TWO YEARS
were hard ones. Curly wandered from place to place, sometimes with Hump, sometimes with Young Man Afraid, sometimes with both and sometimes with neither. Sioux and Cheyenne alike made him welcome, but something gnawed at him. It was as if he had swallowed a small, vicious beast that chewed on his insides, not to get out, but simply for the pleasure of tormenting him.
On his long rides across the plains, he said little, even to his
kola.
Hump respected the silence and did not press him. Both young men knew that things were changing in ways they could not see and could not understand even if they could see. The Sioux way of life was being bombarded from all sides. Soldier chiefs like Harney attacked them, some of the Sioux had given up, their spirits broken, and hung around the forts until the yearly white man gifts were distributed, then wandered off, their heads down, their hearts numb.
Curly envied them that numbness. He felt too many things, and wanted to feel none of them. Better, he sometimes thought, to feel nothing at all
than to feel the empty ache in his belly. It was like the ache he felt when he watched Black Buffalo Woman carry water to her mother’s lodge, or when he would catch her staring at him as she sat in front of the lodge doing beadwork that everyone said was the best they had ever seen. She looked at him, and he looked back. And it seemed that that was all that would ever happen between them.
Yellow Woman’s uncle Ice understood these things. He was a wise man, like Curly’s father, a shaman who saw with more eyes than other men. He could see things they could not see, and knew things they would never know, no matter how many times they were told.
Like all shamans, he was custodian of the past and intermediary to the world beyond the plains and the endless blue sky. He could talk to Wakan Tanka. He could talk to the animals, and even to the clouds. He was less a man of the world than a man in it. He understood, too, that things were changing, and this understanding made him sad and silent. Often, he and Curly would sit together for hours, sometimes deep into the night, saying nothing.
But even during these long silences, Curly learned. The hoot of a great owl would break the silence, and Ice would get up, waving for Curly to follow him out of the lodge. On a clear night, they would walk away from the village, even out beyond the pony herd, where nothing would disturb them, and the voices of the night would whisper things to Ice, things he would relate to Curly. The ways of the Cheyenne were passing, he would begin. “The Cheyenne themselves are passing. The
Oglala and the Brule are passing, too. But none of them, not the Cheyenne or the Oglala, the Brule or the Miniconjou, understand. But I think that you understand.”
Curly would feel a profound sadness roll over him like a dark flood at these words, but he knew that Ice was right, and that there was nothing he could say to argue with the holy man.
But he refused to give up. There had to be a way to keep things as they always had been, and as they should continue to be. There had to be a way to make the white man go away, leave the Sioux and the Cheyenne in peace.
But Ice would not wait for these thoughts to lure Curly away into some dark wood where he would lose his way altogether. Instead, he would begin to talk of the old ways, tell him how things were before the white man came, and how they could be again, if only the white man would go away and leave them in peace. Neither the old holy man nor the young warrior knew how to make such a thing happen, but both believed it was the only way for their peoples to survive.
In the summer of 1857, Curly was fifteen years old. The Cheyenne were keeping to themselves in Kansas, but white soldiers were everywhere, looking for them and for the Sioux. Occasional fights between small bands of Cheyenne and small cavalry patrols had punctuated the spring months, and the Sioux they encountered warned them that great numbers of white soldiers were coming.
In late July, Ice and his band were camped on the Solomon River in northern Kansas. And the Sioux prediction came true. Six cavalry troops,
under the command of Col. E.V. Sumner, found them. Ice had had the warriors dip their hands in the cold waters of a lake to make themselves bulletproof, and they were confident as they rode out to meet the soldiers.
Curly, like the others, was almost casual. He let his bow hang on his shoulder, feeling the string tight against his skin. He looked around him, and saw that most of the Cheyenne were making no preparations to use their weapons. Instead, they formed a battle line after sprinting their horses back and forth to give them a second wind, as they always did before combat.
The soldiers seemed confused by the Indian tactics, but formed up in ranks three deep. As they moved forward, they held their fire. Sumner, wondering what was happening. waited until the forces were almost face to face, then gave the command for sabers to be drawn. The sudden flash of the arcing blades in the bright sun confused the Cheyenne warriors. They were expecting to catch bullets in the air like small bugs, and toss them harmlessly away, but Ice had said nothing about the long knives.
The Cheyenne line broke in disarray and the warriors raced back to their village to get the women and children. Leaving everything they owned behind, they scattered to the four winds. The soldiers, still baffled by the Cheyenne behavior, never fired a single shot. An hour later, the plains were empty of Cheyenne, except for the four men killed by the saber charge.
Curly decided to head north, to rejoin his family. On the solitary ride, he mulled over what he had
seen in the past few years. He was starting to put together pieces that did not seem to belong to the same puzzle. Starting with the things that Ice had taught him, and adding the evidence of his own eyes, he was beginning to understand.
The whites were too strong for any small village. Whenever there was a battle, it was the Indian village that was destroyed, the Indian women and children who were killed or left homeless, the Indian warriors who bled to death in the grass. The only success he had seen was at Grattan’s attack on Conquering Bear, and there the numbers had been so much in the Sioux favor, thirty soldiers against a thousand Sioux and more, that he had to face the fact that the Sioux could only win their battles with the white soldiers if they could work together in large numbers.
The white man’s guns were powerful weapons, and not one Sioux in a hundred had a rifle. The wagon guns tore lodges to pieces, and destroyed villages from long range the way no Sioux weapon could ever do.
All these things were tumbling over and over in his mind, like leaves in a flooded creek. He had to stop the water long enough to pull the leaves together and see what they would tell him.
A great council of all the Sioux was being planned at Bear Butte, and that is where Curly headed. It was where he had been born, in the very shadow of the butte, and as he drew near, he began to wonder whether he would ever see the great butte again. It seemed as if the Sioux were being sucked into a whirlwind. No one knew the numbers, but everyone knew that the flood of whites
was increasing month by month. Towns were springing up all over Kansas and Nebraska territories, newly created by Congress, although the Sioux did not know this. They knew only that where once there had been grass, rippling like water in the wind, stretching as far as the eye could see, and buffalo like black oceans rolling across the land, now there were houses made of sod, fences, and farms springing up like weeds.
When he reached Bear Butte, he was one of the last to arrive. More than seven thousand Teton Sioux had already gathered. All the bands were there except the Brule. Little Thunder and Spotted Tail, taking to heart the message of Harney’s assault on the Bluewater, had chosen to stay away. But the six other bands were well represented. The greatest Sioux warriors were there, men like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, Crow Feather and Old Man Afraid. Touch the Clouds, over seven feet tall, was there, too. These were men who loomed up like heroes out of the past, men whose names would live as long as there was a Sioux nation, men about whom he would listen to tales, mouth agape, around the campfire.
And friends he had not seen for months, even years, were there as well. Hump, Young Man Afraid, and Lone Bear. But best of all, he got to see his family for the first time in two years. Little Hawk spotted him coming along the great circle toward the Oglala lodges. He ran to get his father, and the holy man emerged from the tipi, squinting away the sun, shielding his eyes with one hand.
He started to run toward his son, then, as if ashamed, held back, choosing to walk slowly as
Curly dismounted and sprinted toward him, letting his pony follow in his wake at its own speed.
Curly threw his arms around his father, who squeezed him hard enough to force the air from his lungs, then held him back at arm’s length to look him over. Curly was tall now, almost six feet, but slender. At one hundred and forty pounds or so, the boy had filled out. He was still light-haired but sculpted now of lean muscle, his black eyes like hard chips of obsidian set in his light-skinned face.
“It has been a long time, Curly. Two winters since I have seen you, son. I have been worried about you. Are you well?”
Curly nodded. “I am well. I see that you are, too, and Little Hawk.”
“Where have you been?”
Curly shrugged. “Many places. I have seen much that I need to talk to you about.”
“Tonight we will talk, and you will tell me everything.” He turned then and led the way back to his lodge. Curly ducked to pull aside the flap, held it for his father, then followed the holy man inside.
Little Hawk was sitting by the fire, his face split by a broad grin. “I didn’t know if I would ever see you again,” he said.
“How could you doubt it? Someone has to keep you in line. Father is too busy for such things, so I will have to do it.” He threw himself at the younger boy, wrapped him in a bear hug, and rolled over and over on the buffalo robes spread around the fire.
Finally, letting his brother up and smacking him playfully on the cheek, he said, “You are strong now.”
“Not as strong as you, though,” Little Hawk said, pleased by the compliment.
“Soon you will be.”
“Then I will have to take care of you, I think.”
“Each of us will always take care of the other. That is what brothers do,” Curly said.
The council was drawing to a close, and Curly decided to wait until it was over, when he could have his father’s undivided attention before telling him of his dream. On the last day of the council, the young man and the old man rode off alone. They made a small camp beside a branch of the Belle Fourche River.
That night, sitting by the fire, Curly waited for his father to say what was on his mind. After the evening meal, the old man finally spoke. “You are getting to be a full-grown warrior now, and there are many things I should tell you, things I would have told you before now if you had been with me. But it is still not too late.”
“What sort of things?” Curly asked, wondering whether there would be an opening for him to tell of his vision.
“A warrior has many burdens to carry. It is not an easy thing to care for the old, and to see that everyone has enough to eat. It is important that you understand that your people come first. Only when everyone else has enough food do you feed yourself. When you capture horses from the Crows or the Pawnees, see that you give them to the people. Keep only the horses you need to hunt and to make war for yourself. “
Curly said nothing for a long time. He was about to break the silence, when his father stood up.
“Come with me,” he said, walking toward the creek.
Curly sprinted after him. “Where are we going?”
“I think we should build a sweat lodge. You should purify yourself. It is important to set things right with the Wakan Tanka. Only after a sweat bath can you expect to see things you need to see to be a good man.”
They gathered several willow branches and arranged them in a dome, planting them in the ground and bending the slender, supple wood toward the center, where they were tied together. Then the willow frame was covered with skins.
Pointing to the center of the floor, the holy man said, “You dig the
iniowaspe
, and I will gather the stones. Not too deep, but deep enough.”
Curly did as he was told. His father arranged the entrance and gathered a number of dry stones from the creek bank, and enough wood for a good-size fire, then started to heat the rocks. Normally, the holy man would have an assistant to carry the heated stones, but this was special, and he would do it himself. While the stones heated, the two of them moved along the watercourse, gathering sage to cover the floor of the sweat lodge.
When the stones were heated well enough, he took four of them inside, using a forked stick to carry them, placed them in the
iniowaspe
, and draped a water bag over his shoulder. Using a horn spoon, he sprinkled water on the hot rocks. While Curly took off his clothes, the lodge filled with swirling clouds of dense steam.
The sacred pipe was ready, and he touched it to one of the stones, then offered it to Curly. The fragrant
willow bark in the bowl filled the steamy lodge. Curly handed the pipe back and the holy man offered a benediction to each of the four directions.
After the appropriate prayers of purification, the holy man said, “I know there is something that you want to tell me.”
Curly started to tell his father about the vision he had had. It was a great relief, after keeping it to himself for so long, to share it with someone, especially someone who could tell him what it meant.
When he was finished, the old man said nothing for several minutes.
“What does it mean?” Curly asked, when he could endure the silence no longer.
“You are the man in the vision,” his father answered. “You must do exactly as the dream instructed you. Wear no paint except the lightning and the hail spots. Do not paint your horse. Pass the dust over your horse and your body before battle, just the way the man in the dream did. And, most important, take nothing for yourself. If you do these things, then it will be as the dream says. Your enemies will not be able to kill you with their bullets.”