Great Plains (5 page)

Someplace in North Dakota, I picked up a guy from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, who said he was a truck driver in the process of moving to California. An axle had snapped on his rented trailer, or something, so he was hitchhiking. He said he had to leave Wisconsin because after his sixth drunk-driving conviction the state had taken away his driver's license. He said that once he established residence in California, he would get a new license.

Someplace in Kansas, I picked up a guy from Stuttgart, West Germany, who said he was a graduate student in anthropology spending a term at Wichita State University. He had a suitcase, a backpack, a beard going blond at the ends, khaki shorts, tanned, blond-haired legs, and eyes so blue they looked white. He looked at the landscape and said, “Ach! Zo vlat.” Then he said he was going to South Dakota to see Bear Butte, a landmark important to the religions of several plains tribes. “Za vite people in America haff done zuch terrible sings to za Indians,” he said. “Za vite people haff destroyed zo many uff za Indians' zacred blaces.”

I looked at him. “What is your name?” I asked.

“Gerhard Stadler,” he said.

I asked him to spell it. He did, and then shut up.

At a convenience store–gas station in Sheridan, Wyoming, a guy with a green baseball hat and long, dark hair asked me if I would give him and his wife and baby a ride back to their car, which had a flat tire thirty miles east. He said that his spare was flat, too, so they had hitched here with it to get it filled, and had been asking for a ride back since eight that evening. It was now about midnight. I said okay. He told me his name was Lydell White Plume and his wife's name was Anna. They were on their way back from a powwow at the Crow Reservation in Montana and had stopped by his brother's house in Busby, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, to pick up a television. The baby was completely quiet. Anna sat on the bed in the back of the van snapping gum. Lydell White Plume said that they lived in Riverton, Wyoming, on the Wind River Indian Reservation, and had to be there tomorrow for the funeral of his brother's sixteen-year-old stepson, who had hanged himself two days before. The stepson was one of nine young men who killed themselves on the reservation that year. Lydell White Plume said he thought the problem was lack of communication.

There were no cars or lights most of the way. Occasionally we would pass a big orange flame at a well site, throwing spokes of shadow across the prairie. When we reached the car, I held a flashlight while Lydell White Plume changed the tire. He told me that he was a Fancy Dancer, who entered dance competitions at reservations all over the West and in Mexico. He opened the hatchback of his car and carefully lifted out parts of his dance costume to show me. From the darkness, the two of us leaned into the glow from the car's rear overhead light while he pointed out the detail in his dance bustle—the turkey feathers, the white, yellow, and ginger-colored plumes, the beaded center. Then he set the bustle back into the car, saw that no parts were going to get crushed, and pushed the hatchback shut.

*   *   *

South of the town of McLaughlin, South Dakota, on a gravel road on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, I picked up a guy who was walking in the other direction. He was short, in his fifties, wearing a white shirt with a brown paisley pattern. He got in and looked at me and said, “I remember you. You passed me by on the highway.” I said I didn't remember seeing him. He said, “Yep. You passed me right by.” In his hand was a brown terry-cloth washrag. He mopped his face with it. The afternoon was cloudless, maybe ninety-five degrees.

I told him I was trying to find the site of Sitting Bull's cabin. An exhibit in a museum in Mobridge, S.D., said that it was on the Grand River on a marked road off U.S. Highway 12. I had been driving around for hours and couldn't find any marked road. I couldn't even find the Grand River. “I'll take you right to him,” he said. “I'm Sioux Indian. I own all this land. This is all tribal land. I've walked or drove every damn inch of it.” We shook hands. His name was Jim Yellow Earring.

I knew the actual cabin wasn't there. The one-room log house where the famous Hunkpapa Sioux chief spent his final reservation years was disassembled some time after his death and hauled away in wagons so that it could be displayed at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and I had read that it eventually ended up in the Chicago city dump. But I wanted to see the place Sitting Bull liked enough to live there. Places Indians liked are different from what you see while driving the grid of roads stencilled over the Great Plains. Sometimes when you find such a place it makes that grid seem to disappear.

Jim Yellow Earring directed me from the gravel road to a one-lane dirt road. Soon a strip of grass growing between the wheels brushed under the car. Then we were on no road at all, just prairie with faint wheel tracks across it. Then we bounced into a road with deep ruts, and red dust came up through the holes in the floor. Nowhere up ahead did I see anything that looked like a river valley. Jim Yellow Earring said to keep going.

Sitting Bull may have picked such a remote site for his cabin because he wanted to put plenty of distance between himself and Major James McLaughlin, Indian agent at Standing Rock. The two did not like each other. On McLaughlin's part, the feeling was closer to abhorrence. By the time Sitting Bull lived here, he was a celebrity. He had travelled America and Canada with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, had met President Cleveland and former President Grant, had spoken through an interpreter to large crowds on a fifteen-city lecture tour, had carried the flag at the head of a procession celebrating the opening of the Northern Pacific Railroad. He received fan letters in English, French, and German, hate mail, and letters from lunatics. He not only had an Indian agent, he had a booking agent. He sold his autograph for a dollar each. Fame made him a lot of money, but his colleague Annie Oakley remembered that he gave all the money away to ragged little boys. McLaughlin maneuvered to undercut his influence on the reservation, and favored other chiefs over Sitting Bull and tried to humiliate him, and Sitting Bull was ornery right back. Sitting Bull was on the way to becoming one of the best-known Americans in history; the process would probably have been difficult even for someone who had not hated and fought white people most of his life.

Jim Yellow Earring pointed to a speck across the prairie. “That's my brother-in-law's house,” he said. “He's got a well with the best damn water, makes the best damn coffee in the world. I'm pretty dry. I been walking all day. Do you have anything to drink?”

“There might be a couple of beers somewhere, but they're hot.”

On the floor, he spotted a plastic bottle of amber liquid with the brand name Mix-I-Go. “Hey!” he said, “what's this? Whiskey?”

“God, no! That's gasoline additive! For the car!”

He looked at the bottle for a moment, reading the small print. Then, reluctantly, he set it back on the floor.

Another reason Sitting Bull chose to locate his cabin on the banks of the Grand River was that he was born there. In fact, one biography says that he was born in March of 1831 at a spot within a few miles of where his cabin later stood. The Grand River was called the Ree then, and the place was called Many-Caches. Sitting Bull was a quiet and deliberate child, and one of his names was Slow. Like many Westerners, he spent so much time on horseback when he was little that he grew up bowlegged. He had a good singing voice, and women always loved him. As a young man, he was in many battles with other tribes and white people. A Crow shot him in his left foot in a fight on Porcupine Creek, near the Yellowstone River. Sitting Bull killed the Crow, and limped for the rest of his life. At a skirmish near White Butte, on the Little Missouri River, a soldier shot him in the left hip with a pistol. At a battle with some Flatheads near the Musselshell River, he was shot through the bones of the left forearm with an arrow. In a standoff fight with the Army escort of a railroad surveying party in the Yellowstone valley, he sat down within range of the soldiers' rifles and smoked a pipe while bullets hit around him. Several other Indians joined him, and when the pipe was finished, they got up and ran; Sitting Bull walked. Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull made a spiritual offering of one hundred pieces of his flesh, and sang while his adopted brother, Jumping Bull, cut fifty, each the size of a matchhead, from each arm. After that battle he eventually fled with other Sioux north to Canada, and returned to surrender at Fort Buford in 1881. The Army promised him amnesty, held him for two years at another fort, and sent him to the Standing Rock Agency in 1883.

This is not the kind of history that breeds immediate warmth and trust between peoples. In the rearview mirror I looked at my eyes, marked by worry and second-guessing with little lines like the calibrations on a camera lens. Then I looked at Jim Yellow Earring's eyes—calm, bloodshot, brown as a deer's. “Keep going, I'll take you right to him,” he said. The road had now become so deeply rutted that the trick was finding the exact moment to steer from one set of ruts into a new set to the right or left. Just as we were about to high-center, Jim Yellow Earring would yell, “My side! Come over to this side!… Okay, okay, now your side!”

Sitting Bull naturally attracted to him the wildest and most unreconstructed Indians on the reservation, and they pitched canvas tipis and built cabins close to his, and the place became known as Sitting Bull's camp. When the Ghost Dance religion swept the Indian reservations of the West in 1889–90, Sitting Bull's camp was where all the reservation's Ghost Dancers gathered. The Ghost Dance religion was one of the saddest religions of all time. It was the invention of a Paiute Indian called Wovoka, who may have been inspired by the doctrines of an earlier Paiute holy man called Tävibo. Wovoka had lived with a white family, who knew him as Jack Wilson. Part of his education had consisted of Christian religious training, and he sometimes said he was the Messiah returned, and his followers called him the Christ. It may be impossible for any white person ever to explain Ghost Dancing, but evidently the idea came to Wovoka in a vision during an eclipse of the sun on January 1, 1889. He said that he went to heaven and saw God, who told him that if the Indians did a dance which He would teach him, and danced long enough and hard enough, all white people would be submerged under a layer of new earth five times the height of a man, and the buffalo would return, and all the Indians who had ever lived would come back to life, and the land would become a paradise. Certainly, this would be an attractive philosophy for any American Indian at the end of that century, who was likely to have more friends and close relations among the dead than among the living. News of Wovoka's vision spread among the Western tribes, and many sent delegates to meet and talk with him. One of the Sioux delegates reported later that he “saw the whole world” when he looked into Wovoka's hat.

The road now led down a gully so steep that Jim Yellow Earring was thrown forward. His handprints were still in the red dust on the dashboard months later. I said I wasn't going any farther. I put the car in reverse and tried to back up. Nothing happened. So we headed on down, with bushes now scraping the side. A branch came through the open window and caught me on the side of the head. Jim identified it as a branch of the wild plum tree. He said that wild plums were delicious. The high grass bent down under the front bumper and then sprang up when we passed. In the river bottom, where we finally stopped, the grass was above the door handles.

Ghost Dancers danced past exhaustion, and often lay on the ground in a trance, their skin shivering, for days at a time. When they regained consciousness, they told of the distant stars they had visited, and of the long-dead friends and relatives they had talked to. Sometimes they brought back white, grayish earth—a piece of the morning star—as proof. Desperate as it was, the Ghost Dance did not originally have violent implications, but among certain tribes (the Sioux in particular) it soon acquired them. Indians often painted symbols of the dance on muslin shirts, and some began to say that these paintings made the shirts bulletproof.

“This is the place,” Jim Yellow Earring said. “It was plentiful with deer in the old days. Back then, it was all flat ground and them cottonwoods growin' like weeds. In 1949—that's when the river really came. That was the big flood. That's why these banks are here. This used to be a big prairie-dog village, but the government poisoned 'em all. From here it's about twelve miles to the town of Bullhead,
ichipasisi.
That means walking along a river crossing back and forth, you know, like sewing.”

The Ghost Dance frightened white people on and near the reservations, and the Indian agents jailed its leaders and called for military support. One agent, R. F. Royer, of the Pine Ridge Reservation, whom the Indians nicknamed Young Man Afraid of the Sioux, sent so many telegrams to Washington that the Army soon responded with thousands of troops. Agent McLaughlin, as a matter of pride, preferred to handle problems at his reservation with his own Indian police, and he ordered them to arrest a fierce warrior named Kicking Bear, leader of the Ghost Dancers there. Somehow Kicking Bear caused the police to return, dazed, without him. At Sitting Bull's camp was a wealthy widow from Brooklyn named Catherine Weldon, who was a representative of the National Indian Defense Association, and who was serving Sitting Bull as secretary. She thought the Ghost Dance was a Mormon plot, and she challenged Kicking Bear to an open debate. Apparently, Kicking Bear declined.

The spot where Sitting Bull's cabin stood is surrounded by a woven-wire fence with a swinging gate. Inside the fence is a stone obelisk, and a metal plaque erected by the South Dakota State Historical Society. The plaque's inscription begins: “Sitting Bull, best known American Indian, leader of the ‘hostile groups' for a generation, a powerful orator, a clever prophet…” A grove of bur oaks grows above the fence, and the grass is high all around. I walked over to look at the Grand River, and suddenly a three-foot-long rattlesnake reared out of the grass, rattling. I saw the white of his belly as he flopped over on his back trying to get away. Jim Yellow Earring went for him like a man chasing a bus. “I'll snap his tongue out of his bone head for you,” he said. I asked him please not to.