The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  2.

  A further difference between the Cheyennes and the Sioux appeared in the spring of 1877. The Cheyennes recognized the inevitable sooner and more completely than the Sioux, and by May almost all of them2 had surrendered for reasons some of which are not hard to surmise—their hostility toward the whites had not been of such long standing as the Sioux’, they lacked the Sioux’ collective sense of self-confidence, and the defeat of Dull Knife’s camp in the winter must have been a frozen memory, although stirring memories of other bitter defeats. In any event, they surrendered in two bands, the smaller of which came to be called the Two Moon Band3 to Gen. Miles in the north at Ft. Keogh[. . . .]

  3.

  There is still something else distinguishing the after-history of the Cheyennes from the Sioux—mountains and Ponderosa pine. Although both tribes were plains Indians, they were Indians of the High Plains of the northwest where, as in the paintings of Charley Russell, there is usually a haze of mountains that look cool in the distance and suddenly are cool as they get close. To be close to them means many things—to game and horses, they mean shade, high grass and white water, things that also have meaning to us, and it is not necessary to be a western painter or an Indian deifying the Four Winds to sense that mountains overlooking the plains guard still other meanings more difficult to express. As for the Ponderosa pine, it has special meanings, too, turning black in the distance and naming the Black Hills, but what we would all notice close at hand is that it completely dominates the ground under it, making it open and good to walk on. From east to west, the main mountain ranges to be considered are the Black Hills, the Rosebud Mountains between the Tongue river and the Rosebud, the Wolf Mountains between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, and beyond, the Bighorns themselves.

  This is roughly the “unceded” land which had been granted by treaty to the Sioux; it was the land which they were fighting to stay on, and, in surrendering, many of them believed that a reservation would be established for them there.4 Instead, they were returned to their reservations in the badland or semi-badland country of South Dakota, and, although to some one who has lived in the mountains this country looks as if it had been designed primarily for snakes and fossils, still it was part of the former home of the Teton Sioux even if they had fought not to be confined on it. With the Cheyennes it was different, both better and much worse. The Two Moon band that had surrendered in the north to Gen. Miles was kept at Ft. Keogh where the Tongue river joins the Yellowstone, so they were still near home. Moreover, in surrendering to Gen. Miles, they surrendered to a soldier who had fought the Cheyennes in the southwest and had a special respect for them. He promised them that, if they would enlist and help him in his wars against the Indians, he would help them get a permanent reservation in their own country,5 and in addition Indians at Ft. Keogh were usually given special immediate inducements to enlist—raisins and a chance to listen to the telephone (“whispering spirit”) and to see the telegraph sparking messages (“captured lightning”). Many Cheyennes “held their hands to the sky” and proved to be Miles’ best Indian soldiers,6 and he did not forget his promise, although it took a long time to fulfill. So for some years Two Moon’s band continued their old way of life as warriors, and if they now fought against their former allies, the Sioux, and even against some Cheyennes, still it was fighting and fighting was deeper with them than the color under the scalp. Besides there were brass buttons and raisins and the promise of a permanent home in the mountains.

  4.

  This is not what happened to Dull Knife’s band after their surrender at Ft. Robinson. The Cheyennes, when they became nomadic plains Indians, had at first ranged with the seasons as far south as Texas and as far north as the Black Hills, but in 1832 William Bent, a trader, on the upper Arkansas river, had married a Cheyenne woman and after that a portion of the tribe stayed in the south, became known as the Southern Cheyennes, and eventually were granted a reservation in Indian Territory (in what is now the state of Oklahoma).7 Crook and Miles were so busy collecting Indians in the spring of 1877 that Ft. Robinson and Ft. Keogh become overcrowded, and orders were issued to transfer Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyennes to the southern reservation. Nine hundred and eighty Indians started south, many of them on foot, and seventy days later 937 arrived at the Cheyenne Agency in Indian Territory.8

  Then the real misery began. Their arrival overcrowded the southern reservation, there was no hunting range left, the government had not provided extra rations for the newcomers, the rations were no good anyway and the so-called beef was old cow and not much of that. The Northern Cheyennes had to live off the soup of their relatives with whom they were soon quarreling, and for the hope of something on the side the girls began to slip off their chastity ropes and go out with the soldiers. Worse still, it was the south and not their home; wherever they looked, it looked the same. Even biologically the Northern Cheyennes were no longer a part of this environment—within two months after their arrival two-thirds of them were sick with malarial diseases and at the agency there was one physician and no quinine.9 Although this part of their history after the Battle has no parallel in Sioux history it is a fate they shared with many other tribes—eastern, middle western, and western—who were removed from their homeland and settled among the mosquitoes on land that seemed permanently worthless. There is one big difference, though, between the Northern Cheyennes and the others—the Northern Cheyennes are back on the Rosebud, just east of Custer Battlefield, and they fought their way back, all the way back, 1500 miles.

  By early summer of 1878 Dull Knife and Little Wolf, the great Northern Cheyenne warrior, were trying to persuade the agent to let them return home. Little Wolf said to the agent, “These people were raised far up in the north among the pines and the mountains. . . . Now, since we have been in this country, we are dying every day. This is not a good country for us, and we wish to return to our home in the mountains.”10 When the prospect of another winter was not far off, Dull Knife and Little Wolf concluded the argument, shook hands with all present, and hoped that they would be allowed to go peacefully. Then Little Wolf added, “I do not want to see blood spilt about the agency. If you are going to send your soldiers after me, I wish that you would first let me get a little distance away from this agency. Then if you want to fight, I will fight you, and we can make the ground bloody at that place.”11 On September 7, 1878, two hundred and eighty-four of the thousand Northern Cheyennes who had marched south from Ft. Robinson left the reservation without permission and headed north. Of this band of less than three hundred, fewer than a hundred were warriors.12

  This homeward journey of the Northern Cheyennes has been likened many times to the march of the Greeks to the sea, but it needs no analogy and in many ways was a thing in itself. Mari Sandoz has recorded its sufferings in her book Cheyenne Autumn, and here all that can be done is to indicate merely the kind of thing it was.

  Word that the Cheyennes were loose was the same as word that Cheyennes were on the warpath. The nation was angry and alarmed,13 and the plains in terror, so the Cheyennes had to fight not only the Army but settlers, buffalo hunters, cowboys and various combinations of these. Going north rather than east or west they should have been easy to head off—they had to cross three railroads over which reinforcements could be rushed and many quick-sand rivers with fords that could be guarded. Even worse was the fact that for hundreds of miles they went over flat country with no place to hide; often they and the Army were in plain sight of each other all day with the Cheyennes fighting in depth, throwing out screens of warriors to protect their moving camp. At night if they were not surrounded they kept on to be ahead of the Army the next morning; if they were surrounded, the women tried to cook something and the men fought all night. And always they had the problem of supply. Before long their ammunition ran low, their food was gone, their horses gave out, and they had to supply themselves in flight off the country. The policy of Dull Knife and Little Wolf originally had been to fire on the Army only af
ter the troops had started the shooting and not to kill any settlers, but they had to have beef and horses and it is not possible to make a practice of running stock off ranches without eventually killing some ranchers. Besides, as was so often the case in Indian history, there was a big difference between what the old chiefs said and what the young warriors did, yet the chances are that Dull Knife and Little Wolf probably didn’t care much after their own women and children were shot in holes where they were trying to hide. Perhaps between thirty or forty settlers were killed, although the newspapers had the plains covered with scalps and drenched with innocent blood.14

  It is not customary in histories of Indian warfare to recognize the presence of women except as they are contained in the proposition that one of the great military weaknesses of the Indians was that they usually had their camps with them. For a moment, let us examine this proposition and more simply, try to visualize what it was like to fight fifteen hundred miles with women along, many of them on foot. No doubt there were times when it would have been better for Indians if their women could have been left safely behind, but this was only sometimes the case, and without them this fifteen-hundred-mile fight would been much shorter and with not enough humanity in it to be long remembered. The Cheyennes themselves did not think of their women as ornaments of peace; there is an old saying among them, “No people is whipped until the hearts of its women are on the ground, and then it is done, no matter how great the warriors or how strong the lance.”15 They were beautiful Indian women, and noted among Indians for their chastity, fidelity, and courage. But they were Indian women, and for their own sakes should not be sentimentalized into sweet Victorian types in extra good physical condition. It was their silvery laughter that sounded over Custer Battlefield as they cut off the genitals of the dead, and what they did to captured white women was dreaded almost as much as being passed around among the warriors. They were Indian women, with their own beauty and wonderful in their own kind of ways, and if Gen. Custer had an Indian “wife,” he took the daughter of a Cheyenne chief, who, according to legend, did not marry again until after she heard of his death. And, if none of this story is true, still the Cheyennes made it up and expressed something deep of themselves in it.

  As the Cheyennes hurried ahead of the soldiers, their women hastily picked currants, chokecherries, and plums, and, when there was no meat, they caught snakes and sand turtles. When the young warriors drove in beef, they pulled the sharp knives from their belts and went to work skinning and butchering, hanging the meat in strips on drying ropes and hardening the hides over fires for the soles of moccasins. When fresh horses were captured, the work was rougher, for even the horses that had been ridden before were not used to Indians and some times danger was so close that about all a woman could do was to crawl on a horse with her papoose and see what would happen. There were women along who were already noted for their exploits in battle—Buffalo Calf Road Woman in whose honor the Indians call Crook’s defeat on the Rosebud, “Where the girl saved her brother,16 and Pretty Walker, the long-legged daughter of Little Wolf who at fifty-seven was still one of the fastest Cheyenne runners. But Pretty Walker’s great battle exploit—rescuing a white soldier from the thick of battle because he had given his horse to a squaw too old to run away—while respected was not named or mentioned.17 Also children were born on the long flight north—a woman would drop behind, crouch in a hole while the troops rode by, and pinch the nose of the baby every time he cried until he learned by strangulation the first Cheyenne law, to be noiseless in danger; at night she did or did not succeed in passing through the troops again and rejoining the camp waiting for her around low fires. Yet there was even a darker time ahead for the Cheyenne women.

  5.

  Trouble began to develop in the Cheyenne camp as they reached Nebraska, old-time Cheyenne trouble, dissension among the leaders. Dull Knife believed that now they were close at home nothing bad would happen to them; besides winter was not far off and he seemed to remember that he had been told he could return to Ft. Robinson if he did not like it down south. Little Wolf, the warrior, was wiser than the statesman. He said it was bad to divide but worse to stop before they reached home. Somewhere near the Platte river they separated,18 Little Wolf continuing north until he reached the Sand Hills of Nebraska where he camped for the winter. Soldiers and others rode close by without discovering them, for no one left the camp on foot and they rode out to meet all returning messengers in order that there would be no moccasin tracks about, and each stick was charred before it was burned in order that there would be no smoke. In March, Little Wolf broke camp and headed north again until he crossed the Little Missouri where he was spotted by the Indian scouts of Lt. W. P. Clark, one of those unheard-of young Army men who felt deeply about the Indian and had studied his customs, psychology, and speech.19 Lt. Clark rode out ahead of his troops and said, “I have prayed to God that I might find my friend Little Wolf, and now I have done so.” Little Wolf replied, “It is well; we will go with you wherever you say.”20 So Clark took them to Ft. Keogh where they joined the Two Moon Band, and Gen. Miles offered them a chance to enlist. Little Wolf said they had been fighting a long time and were tired, and Gen. Miles said, “Well, think the matter over and see how you feel about it.” They thought it over and after some of the weariness was gone, Little Wolf and all the young men enlisted and went back to their old job of fighting in the country that had been their home.

  6.

  For some time after Dull Knife’s band surrendered at Ft. Robinson, things went well with them. They ate and slept their fatigue away; though they were prisoners, they had a good deal of freedom as long as they showed up at night; and there were even dances to which soldiers came bringing presents for the girls. Then in the hard cold of early January, the order came from Washington that they were to be returned to the south immediately. The order was so appalling that Gen. Crook, trying to avert shame from himself and the Army, telegraphed the Indian Bureau demanding that they and not the War Department superintend the move if it had to be carried out.21 Dull Knife said, “No, I am here on my own ground, and I will never go back. You may kill me here; but can never make me go back.”22 When all the other Cheyennes refused to go, the new commander at Ft. Robinson, Capt. Wessels (“The Flying Dutchman”), ordered them confined to one barracks and denied them heat, food, and finally water. He tried to get the women and children to leave the building, but none would go except those ordered out by the young men—the families of two warriors who were being held in the guard house and the old women.23 Since they had cached a little food in the barracks, what was worst at the beginning was the cold and filth—everything had to be done in front of everybody else except that the soldiers occasionally marched the women out behind the stables. Afterwards some of the Indians said that they were eight days without food and water, others that they had no food for five days and were without water for three,24 but how could people agree precisely on such suffering afterwards? They scraped the ice off the window sills, and the women, when they were taken out behind the stables, tried to collect a little snow in their dresses. Toward the end it became like the preparation for a religious ordeal, like the fasting and ecstasy before a Sun Dance when they run skewers through their breast muscles and then hang from poles until the flesh pulls away. On January 9, Little Shield, one of the soldier chiefs, said, “Now, dress up and put on your best clothing. We will all die together.”25 They all put on such finery as they had—a terrible thing to do considering the cold outside—and the women began to assemble rifles. Supposedly, they had surrendered all their arms, but the women had not been searched very carefully and a few had strapped carbines on their backs under their dresses, a few more had revolvers hanging between their breasts, and others had distributed pieces of rifles to the children who since the surrender had been playing with such toys as triggers and rifle sights. When they assembled all their arms, they had five rifles, nine revolvers, and another that worked part of the time.26 Then they
sang their death songs, kissed each other, and went out through the window.

  The soldiers came running in their underwear, looking like white ghosts to the Indians. It was bright outside and easy shooting—five inches of snow and moonlight—with the temperature standing at zero. Those who got as far as the creek drank too much, and those who got across had to go from there on in frozen finery. The bluffs ahead were too much for most of the starved women carrying children. One of Dull Knife’s three daughters, who had been called “the Beautiful People” by Lt. Clark, was found part way up the hillside holding somebody else’s baby, and when they tried to lift her she was so badly shot she was in pieces. Figures will have to tell the rest of the story: of the hundred and fifty in Dull Knife’s band, sixty-four were killed, eight or ten were never heard of again, and the rest were captured; of these, fifty-eight were sent to Pine Ridge reservation and the remaining twenty were returned south to stand trial for the murder of settlers,27 and, looking for something to say for ourselves, let us add that they were eventually acquitted.

  Dull Knife, with his remarkable capacity for bringing grief to his people and surviving himself, quickly separated himself and his small party from the main body of the Cheyennes trying to climb the bluffs, found a hole in the rocks, and starved there for ten more days. Then after nearly three weeks of traveling by night, hiding by day and eating moccasins and rosebuds, he and his family reached Pine Ridge reservation. Dr. V. T. McGillycuddy, in charge of Pine Ridge, was one of the best Indian agents of his time, but he wanted none of these Cheyennes who were joined by Wild Hog and the others acquitted of the murder charge. He complained that they “were of a more war-like nature than our Sioux” and “were mourning continually for their relatives who were killed,” and consequently he was only too glad “to accede to a request of General Miles” who both fought and befriended the Cheyennes, that the remnants of Dull Knife’s band be transferred to Ft. Keogh. So in 1880, two years after Dull Knife had left the Indian Territory in the south, he and what was left of his followers arrived home. They had made it the long and hard way. Later, when Lt. Clark was gathering material for his book, The Indian Sign Language, Dull Knife, trying to explain to him that in Cheyenne “brave” means not only fearless in conduct but outstanding generally in quality, illustrated by speaking of the journey north and especially of the outbreak at Ft. Robinson and of the days following as “‘brave’ hardships, surely.”