Yet some of the early Sioux, such as Gall, did try farming, a few even were successful, and with the modern developments in dryland farming large fields of winter wheat have made a showing on certain parts of the reservations, fields, however, that are often on land leased from the Sioux by white farmers and on reservations only 12% of which is suitable for agriculture.19 On old buffalo range, old buffalo hunters have done best with cattle, for a time making it look as if a new prosperity were to succeed the buffalo economy, but this prosperity also quickly disappeared when during the First World War the Sioux were permitted and even encouraged to sell their entire herds. They promptly spent the proceeds, and, concerning the rest of their slow, sad economic history, it is enough to say here that the Sioux have never found a source of wealth as sustained and democratic as the buffalo.20 Eventually, too, their ancient religion was supplanted; although certain native religious cults are still practiced on the reservations,21 the majority of the Teton Sioux slowly became converted to Christianity, in many cases and especially at first partly for the reason that they hoped to acquire the superior medicine of their conquerors.22
6.
During the 80’s, “the ancient regime” took no part in any of this future, yet they waited for something to come, waited in blankets, long hair, and big scattered villages. It was a period in the history of the Teton Sioux with analogies in other histories, a never-never period such as occurs indeed in much personal history when the present is no more substantial than the hope that the future will eventually omit it and continue ahead into the past. It has closer analogies to moments in the history of chosen people who have suddenly been faced with their powerlessness as people but who still believe in the power that chose them. In 1889, the Teton Sioux heard that an Indian Messiah was coming.23
The news came from the southwest. A Piaute Indian by the name of Wovoka, also known by the name of Jack Wilson because he had been brought up in a white family of that name, had a vision during an eclipse, a vision in which he was taken to heaven where he saw God and all his own people happily continuing their old way of life in a land full of game. God informed him that the universe was to be divided into three parts, God himself ruling heaven, Wovoka as his deputy handling matters in the west, and the east left in charge of “the governor,” President Harrison. God then returned Wovoka to earth to instruct his people to cease quarrelling among themselves and to keep peace with the whites in order to hasten the day of The Great Event. An important part of the preparation for things to come was a dance lasting five days, a time that proved sufficient for mass-hypnosis and fatigue to accumulate to a point where most of the dancers fell in a trance and communed with their departed relatives. The dance, something of an equivalent for the forbidden Sun Dance, was called the Ghost Dance.
The Word went out across the plains, but none heard more eagerly—or tragically—than the Sioux. A Sioux council was called late in 1889, a delegation was sent immediately to the southwest to find out more about the new Messiah, and upon its return in the spring of 1890 the reservations became tense with excitement.
Wovoka’s vision had been a Christian-Indian vision compounded out of simple elements of both faiths, an acceptance of a Christian peace on earth for an eternal Happy Hunting Ground. The vision that the Sioux returned with was naturally more their own than the dream of any Indian brought up in a Christian family named Wilson. The Sioux had a Sioux vision—undefeated in spirit but knowing the need for help, help necessarily to be borrowed from the only superior power, their conquerors.24 At the base of the Sierra Nevadas, they said, was the Son of God still bearing on his body the marks of the crucifixion as signs of His rejection by the whites. So the whites had had their good medicine and had destroyed it. Now the Son of God was returning to avenge their rejection of Him and their injustice to the Indians. The date of the Second Coming was set for some time in 1891.
In the camps of “the ancient regime,” there was dancing by day and far into the night. In the center, a young woman stood holding a red pipe pointing to the west, the direction from which the Messiah was to come, and about her the dancers circled in white Ghost shirts thought to be bullet-proof. Each people is always looking for a magic-carpet characteristic of its wishes, and the Indians were not yet completely disillusioned in their quest for something to wear that would turn aside bullets.25 Although the religious excitement spread through all the Sioux reservations, the real trouble was confined to certain camps such as those of Big Foot, Hump, and Sitting Bull. It can be and has been argued that the craze would have run its course if the management of affairs had been left to the Indian Bureau and if the agents on the reservations had all been experienced, firm, and patient.26 But, as is often the case, history was played out with a different set of characters from those wished for by historians, and at this moment only the agent at Standing Rock, Maj. James McLaughlin, had unusual qualifications and believed that he could handle the situation himself. Many of the settlers were understandably terrified and appealed for military support, the Christian Indians were alarmed, and there were whites who saw that the occasion could be turned to their advantage. On November 13, the president gave to the secretary of war the responsibility of seeing that an outbreak was prevented, Gen. Miles with headquarters at Rapid City was placed in command, and nearly three thousand troops surrounded the reservations. When the troops moved in, large bands of “hostiles,” eventually themselves numbering around three thousand, left their reservations and escaped into the most inaccessible parts of the badlands. Then the tension mounted.
There is no use arguing, at least here, as to whether Sitting Bull believed in the coming of an Indian Messiah or was merely using the new religion to inflame old passions among his people.27 Probably not even Sitting Bull himself could tell with any accuracy what proportions of belief and mere hope were stirred in him by the news that the whites had destroyed their own good medicine which would now work to return to the Sioux the way of life and the great lands that he regarded as rightfully theirs. Sitting Bull was a medicine man who had had great visions for his people, these visions had some times proved true, he now presided at Ghost Dances, and, when a woman would fall beside him in a trance, he would put his ear to her lips and then astonish the dancers with a long recital about her dead relatives.28
When the rumor came that Sitting Bull intended to move his camp off the reservation and closer to the “hostiles” in the badlands, the order went out to arrest him. Maj. McLaughlin insisted that it would be safer to use his Indian Police, but two troops of the 8th Cavalry were moved within supporting distance, although remaining out of sight. At daybreak of December 15, 1890, forty-three Sioux Police and volunteers under Lt. Bull Head, a cool and tough officer, surrounded his cabins, pulled him naked out of bed and got him dressed. He ordered his grey circus horse to be saddled, and seemed to be willing to go until he got outside the cabin which had quickly become surrounded by a large crowd of excited Ghost Dancers. At first they cursed the Metal Breasts. Then one of Sitting Bull’s wives chanted a song to him:
Sitting Bull, you have always been a brave man;
What is going to happen now?29
Catch-the-Bear had an old grudge to settle with Lt. Bull Head, and he went looking for him, shoving his Winchester into the bellies of the Metal Breasts. Sitting Bull stopped by his horse, turned, and then said in a loud voice to his people, “I am not going. Come on! Come on! Take action.” Catch-the-Bear dropped Lt. Bull Head who twisted as he fell to get Sitting Bull. It was bloody business between the Sioux—short and like a frenzy. At the sound of the shots, the circus horse sat down and lifted a hoof and they thought that the spirit of Sitting Bull was still there.
Although the fight had lasted no more than a few minutes, fourteen were killed, six of the Sioux police and Sitting Bull and seven of his followers. The remainder of his band, numbering over three hundred, then scattered, but before long most of these surrendered, and only about fifty joined Big Foot’s camp. For a while the
n, it looked as if there would be no further violence. The Second Coming began to appear less imminent than the three thousand white troops, and, although it is not customary in western history to credit the Army with intelligence or human intention, the truth is that Gen. Miles did his best to restore the situation by peaceful means. On the whole, he did a good job—better certainly than any historian who might have been put in charge of the same material. If the aim of the Army had been a military victory, it could have been realized fairly easily this time for those were not the Sioux of ’76. They were carefully surrounded by white troops, reduced in numbers, disunited, bereft of their sense of superiority, and crowded into an area too small to allow them the power to maneuver that they needed in order to carry on their kind of war. Miles’ tactics were to impress them with his strength while at the same time to persuade them through friendly Indians to give up their arms and return peacefully to their reservations, tactics that proved successful except for one bloody moment when all the feelings of the past blotted out any considerations of the present or the future.
7.
Big Foot’s camp of Ghost Dancers had left the Cheyenne River Reservation and was heading south, looking for the large bands of “hostiles” that had gathered in the badlands, but these camps had already been persuaded to surrender by Miles’ emissaries and were on their way back to their agencies, when Big Foot’s camp was intercepted and surrendered, agreeing to give up its arms on the following morning, December 29. Of course, it was tense as the Indians slept that night on Wounded Knee Creek surrounded by white troops and a battery of four Hotchkiss machine guns. Cool observers say, though, that the intentions on both sides were good—that the Indians intended to give up their arms and that the troops intended to escort them to the nearest agency (Pine Ridge). In fact, the commander had provided Big Foot, who had pneumonia, with a warm tent and stove and had sent his personal physician to attend him. He also had separated the women and children from the warriors in case of trouble and had issued strict orders to the troops that women and children should not be hurt.
In the morning the Indians received their orders—to bring out their arms and surrender them—and we might pause even here to think for a moment of what it meant to Sioux warriors to renounce their weapons. When only two rifles were forthcoming the soldiers were instructed to search the lodges, and they were probably not very delicate in going about this job. At the same time, the medicine man, Yellow Bird, walked through the warriors, blowing an eagle-bone whistle and assuring them that the white soldiers would become powerless and that their own “Ghost shirts” were bullet-proof. The women and children came crowding back in the excitement. Everything was close together—women, children, warriors, and soldiers. The moment came—certainly an understandable moment psychologically—when a soldier pulled open an Indian’s blanket to search him. A Sioux started the shooting. They were so crowded on top of each other that at first much of it was hand-to-hand fighting. Then the Indians broke and started running up a dry ravine, most of them women and children for all but a few of the warriors were dead in front of their lodges. The Hotchkiss guns poured two-inch explosive shells into the ravine at the rate of nearly fifty a minute, and infuriated soldiers followed, killing for two miles up the ravine. Big Foot’s camp, including men, women, and children, had numbered around three hundred and fifty and it would be merciful to estimate that a hundred of them were not killed.
But to the Teton Sioux the number of dead, whatever it may have been, was not the greatest casualty of the Battle of Wounded Knee; speaking of it in retrospect forty years later, a Sioux said: “After the Battle of Wounded Knee all ambition was taken out of us. We have never since been able to regain a foothold.”30 And Scudder Mekeel, modern historian of the Teton Sioux, uses it to mark the end of a historical period, one which he describes as a “complete rejection of white culture and its concomitant evils”; the next period, which still continues, is described as one of “acceptance, passive at least, of white culture.”31
These divisions of the historical periods of the Sioux are also marked by geometrical lines extending back to the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops who surrounded the Sioux camp on Wounded Knee Creek and ended even the hope for a return of the old way of life were themselves ruled that day, as were the Sioux warriors who could not renounce their weapons, by overpowering feelings and events of the past. They were troops of the 7th Cavalry.
CHAPTER 3
The Cheyennes
“‘Brave’ hardships, surely”
—Big Foot, Cheyenne Chief
The Cheyennes and Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas occupied special positions in the great column that marched up the Little Bighorn in the sunset of the day following the Battle—the Cheyennes led the column and the Hunkpapas protected the rear. Ahead of the Cheyennes lay three long shadows, one that fell upon all Indians, another that pursued those who had been in the Battle, and then the Cheyennes had their own dark way to go.
Even if they had not been specially marked, as Indians they were doomed to be no longer Indians and for a long time not much of anything else. But a shadow harsher in outline was to pursue them and the Teton Sioux. They were marked by too great a victory; for years a humiliated Army was to follow them wherever they were or were rumored to be, and western settlers who regarded all good Indians as dead ones, lived in special dread of the Cheyennes and Sioux with a picture far more vivid than ours of the mutilation on Custer Hill. Particular circumstances, however, and the particular character of the Cheyennes gave their succeeding history its own tragic form.
For instance, the Sioux in defeat have not been deprived of the glory of their victory whereas today few know that the Cheyennes had anything to do with the Battle. Yet on the march they were at the head of the Indian column; their circle was at the lower end of the Indian camp where Custer tried to make his attack; Lame White Man, the most important chief killed in the Battle, fell leading his Cheyennes in a charge that may have been one of the most important in demoralizing Custer’s troops; and there are soldiers and historians who rate the Cheyennes as the best cavalry men of the plains. It is not easy to explain how the Sioux have succeeded in completely winning the Battle of the Little Bighorn, obliterating even the Cheyennes. Their superiority in number is only part of the explanation. The Sioux had the gift for glory. They were the United States Marines—or the RAF—of the Plains Indians—they were good and they knew it and had besides this extra something which succeeds in conveying the impression that they did all the fighting. So the Cheyennes have had to suffer the harsh consequences of a victory for which they no longer get any of the credit.
1.
It is not very profitable to argue at this late date over whether the Cheyennes or the Sioux were the better fighters. They were both first-rate, that is clear from their record, but the record also makes clear that, as the Sioux had a gift for glory, the Cheyennes had a knack for defeat. It seems that almost every time the Army of the frontier got around to exterminating a camp of Indians, the Cheyennes happened to be the first they ran into—as at Sand Creek and Washita. And so it was again after the one great victory over the whites in which the Cheyennes participated. During the summer following the Battle of the Little Bighorn the Cheyennes like the Sioux moved back over the buffalo ranges of the Rosebud, Tongue and Powder rivers avoiding any serious trouble with an Army that was slowly preparing to defeat them forever, but the winter was different and part of the old story. Although the Sioux camps had to run, fight, hide, and fight again until many were ready to surrender, only the Cheyenne camp under Dull Knife was surrounded, crushed, and burned; its survivors, some of them naked or covered only with a cartridge belt, ran up the snow-covered hillsides and then started on the long frozen journey to find the camp of Crazy Horse. The cause of this defeat cannot be attributed just to bad luck. The Cheyennes had known for some days that Gen. Mackenzie’s troops were in the vicinity, but Last Bull, chief of the Fox fighting society, talked bigger than the chiefs
of the tribe and persuaded the camp not to move.1 So we have another example of a fatal weakness of the Indian—an aboriginal social and political organization in which bands were often more powerful than tribes and tribes more powerful than confederacies. The Cheyennes may individually have been better fighters than the Sioux, but their battle record is not; perhaps their very power as fighters gave too much power to their fighting societies and clearly they did not have leaders at this time comparable to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, both of whom camped fairly close to the white troops all winter without making mistakes. Still, when all is said and done, the Cheyennes were hard-luck fighters, lacking something indefinable that leads other fighters who are no better to victory.
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 7