The Rosebud reservation is beautiful, similar to Pine Ridge, but somehow its features are less pronounced; same buffalo grass, Ponderosa pines, but fewer ridges, more rolling hills. The roads are equally bad, potholes in potholes, puddles of mud and water. We pulled off the main road onto an even more wretched road, plunged across a small creek onto a flat patch of lush meadow bordered by evergreen shrubs. In this meadow was a traditional Sun Dance ground, a painted pole made from the trunk of a forked cottonwood, draped with dozens of colorful cloth fragments, sacred colors. Called the Tree of Life, this pole was surrounded by an arbor; twenty-eight smaller tree poles were aligned with the rising sun.
Nearby was a sweat lodge where the dancers purified themselves, bigger than the one I’d seen at Wounded Knee, with a buffalo skull in front of the opening. Crow Dog’s simple log house was on the far side of this meadow. The pickup truck was already parked; I could see men carrying the casket inside.
Along with the others, I parked my car and went inside with Jacob Holdt to pay my respects. Clearwater was resting peacefully in the now open casket placed in front of a beautiful yellow morning star quilt, the link between living and dead, a quilt that would be buried with him. I was surprised to see he was much older than I had expected; bare-chested, eyes closed, he had long straight hair, wore a Lakota bone choker. There had been no attempt to hide his massive head wound. An elder was sitting in the corner, playing the funeral drum and singing while Crow Dog passed a smoldering sage smudge stick over Clearwater’s body, around the casket, and throughout the room.
In the kitchen, the women were cooking wohampi, a traditional stew made with buffalo meat, prairie turnips, wild potatoes, and wild onions. There were about a dozen mourners, all ages, with more coming. No one really knew Frank Clearwater; the woman who arrived with him at Wounded Knee was just a hitchhiking companion and he had no known relatives. But now he was a martyr and a brother. Regardless of his true origin or how much Indian blood flowed through his veins, we were here to pray for his safe journey to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Jacob Holdt was determined to stay for the whole affair (probably not anxious to get back to Pine Ridge), but I needed to get back to Wanblee, resume my stay-at-home dad routine. And, to be honest, I was a bit uncertain about spending the night at Crow Dog’s Paradise.
It was late afternoon, a warm day, the air conditioner on full blast, the radio tuned to the nearest country station (KILI didn’t yet exist). I was feeling pretty good about myself. An article I’d written about life in Wanblee had been accepted for publication in the Sunday magazine of the Chicago Tribune, my little girl was beginning to walk, my wife had a good teaching job even if I didn’t. While life on the rez was hard, we had many friends—Indian and white. Once I was off the Rosebud, I turned up Highway 73 and drove on the dirt road through Allen, South Dakota; there was no traffic, and I must have been going ninety.
I didn’t think much of the car approaching me. Tilted to one side, it looked like a typical misaligned rez car, trailing dust and black exhaust, except it was moving really fast, and Indians mostly drive agonizingly slow. As it got near, I could make out the forms of three men in the car, six eyes intently fixed on me, and a rifle. The man in the backseat stuck his head and then his torso out of the window. He was the one with the rifle.
Hanging on tightly to the steering wheel, I hit my brakes, swerved, skidded, and slid down the gravel embankment. I never heard the shot but could feel the force of a shattered window. Luckily, it was the passenger window behind me. Somehow I managed to come to a stop. My hands shaking, heart racing, I struggled to breathe, scared shitless. I needed to regain some composure so I could get out of this ditch, get the hell out of there before they turned around and came back to finish the job.
Except for a tiny sliver of glass embedded in my neck, I was unscathed. Somehow I recovered, got back on the road, and revved it up again to ninety. I made it all the way back to our little trailer house without seeing another car. I told Linda and anyone curious that the window had been broken when a piece of gravel flew up from a passing vehicle.
No big thing.
BIG FOOT TRAIL
CHIEF BIG FOOT SURRENDERS
The next segment of my journey follows the last leg of the Big Foot Trail, the route Chief Big Foot followed with his starving band of Minneconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota in late December 1890. It was a deadly winter, with temperatures below zero and an unforgiving wind; snowflakes turned into ice bullets that bruised the face, blinded some of the horses. Not a good time for such a trip, but people were afraid not to go. At sunrise on the morning of December 15, Big Foot’s half brother, the great Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull) had been gunned down outside his lodge, murdered by one of the forty Indian police who had come to arrest him. It was not safe to be near Sitting Bull’s Standing Rock reservation, and Chief Red Cloud had offered Big Foot refuge on the Pine Ridge reservation; he decided to accept. There was no time to waste.
Tensions in the Dakotas were higher than they had been since the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Thousands of Lakota had abandoned the agencies to take part in a huge nonstop ghost dance at the Stronghold, a natural fortress in the Badlands on a high plateau between the Cheyenne and White Rivers. These Indians believed that ghost dancing would bring back their dead relatives and the buffalo—Mother Earth would return as she was before, the white people would disappear. Whites living near the reservations were terrified. Their paranoia intensified by false newspaper stories, they lobbied the federal government to protect them. “Lock the savages up in stockades before they go on a bloodthirsty rampage,” they demanded. “Exterminate them if necessary.”
Agency officials knew the dancing was harmless but outlawed it anyway and asked the 7th Cavalry to enforce the ban. Big Foot could have chosen to take his people to the Stronghold; his fellow chief Kicking Bear would have welcomed them, and nothing bad had so far happened to the ghost dancers. But Big Foot saw that Kicking Bear’s people had been dancing a long time, and nothing had changed. He also feared that the soldiers would attack the Stronghold. And if he stayed put, some would leave anyway, splitting his dwindling followers into two camps.
Of the 350 people with Big Foot, only 40 were warriors, the rest women, children, and old men. Many were sick. Big Foot himself had pneumonia, was hemorrhaging blood in a handkerchief. This 190-mile journey seemed impossible, suicidal; still, the collective will of the Lakota could never be discounted. With only a few horses and one wagon for their chief, the people fought their way through the never-ending blizzard, and on the seventh day they were within thirty miles of Pine Ridge. Big Foot’s warrior scouts spotted the first horse soldiers. To show peaceful intentions, one of the warriors hoisted a white flag over Big Foot’s wagon while another galloped off to greet the soldiers and ask them for a parley. Major Samuel Whitside, who was leading the 7th Cavalry Regiment, wanted to take the Indians in peacefully and was happy to oblige.
Whitside and his interpreter met with Big Foot in his wagon with his sixteen-year-old nephew Joseph Horn Cloud, who in 1906 was interviewed about this encounter by Eli Ricker, the Nebraska rancher and reporter who recorded dozens of eyewitness accounts of historical “Indian War” battles, some fifteen hundred pages on ruled tablets that have become invaluable for documenting the history of the American West. According to Ricker’s notes, Horn Cloud said the conversation went as follows:
“What is your name?” Major Whitside asked.
“My name is Big Foot.”
“Where you going?”
“Going to Pine Ridge to see the people because they sent for me.”
“Do you want peace or a fight?”
“My great fathers were friendly to the whites and died in peace. I want to die the same.”
“If you are telling me the truth, I want you to give me twenty-five guns.”
“I am willing, but if I do, your soldiers will do some harm to my people. Wait until we get to the agency. I will give you all you ask and return to my home.”
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Horn Cloud commented on Big Foot’s condition. “He was talking in a hoarse whisper; blood drops fell from his nose, froze on the icy bottom of his wagon.”
He continued: “Whitside agreed. He extended his arm and they shook hands.”
Whitside moved Big Foot to the army ambulance, where he would be more comfortable, and had his soldiers escort the band to the Wounded Knee valley, about five miles away. Horn Cloud and other survivors said Whitside had a big heart. Once they were at Wounded Knee, he put Big Foot in a Sibley tent with a warm stove and instructed the army physician to do everything he could for the suffering chief. Had Major Whitside stayed in command, Big Foot’s band surely would have made it safely to Pine Ridge, but a few hours after they’d settled down, Whiteside’s commanding officer, Colonel James Forsyth, arrived from Pine Ridge. The kindness evaporated. Forsyth told Whitside he had orders to escort Big Foot’s entire band to the railway station in Rushville, where they would be transported in boxcars to a military prison in Omaha. He had his soldiers surround the camp and placed four Hotchkiss guns on an overlooking hill, the very same hill where the mass grave is today.
James Asay, who owned a trading post in Pine Ridge and was a prototype of today’s Whiteclay liquor dealers, tagged along with Forsyth. He brought a ten-gallon keg of 120-proof Tennessee sour mash, which he generously shared with soldiers who were not on guard duty. These 7th Cavalry troopers had made a long trek, over five hundred miles from Fort Riley, Kansas. Tired, some were pissed; it had been less than fourteen years since Crazy Horse and his gang of scalp takers had wiped out Custer and his men. They itched for revenge. Liquored up, a few rowdy soldiers even hassled the captives at gunpoint. The whiskey-soaked soldiers demanded to know: “Were you at Little Bighorn? Which one of you savages killed Custer?”
By morning, the stage was set for the tragicomedy that followed. Colonel Forsyth ordered his troopers to search Big Foot’s camp and confiscate anything that could conceivably be a weapon, not just guns but cooking knives, scrapers, riding crops, even tent stakes. Yellow Bird did his dance, shots were fired, and once the madness got rolling, the only thing that could stop it was exhaustion. Some of Big Foot’s people were found up to ten miles away, lying bloodied and dead in the snow.
One survivor treated by Dr. Eastman at the makeshift hospital he set up in Pine Ridge told him she was hiding in a clump of bushes when two terrified little girls ran toward her. She grabbed them, put her hands over their mouths to keep them quiet, and tried to hide them with her in the bushes, but a mounted soldier spotted them. The soldier rode over, fired a bullet into the head of one girl, calmly reloaded his rifle and fired a second bullet into the head of the other girl. Then he shot the woman, who feigned death, living long enough tell her story to Dr. Eastman. Sadly, a few hours later she too died.
It is said that the sacred hoop of the Lakota was broken that day, that it would remain broken for seven generations before the Lakota nation could heal. And it has been a long hard wait, but now the seventh generation is here. Today’s teenagers and young adults are seven generations removed from those who died at Wounded Knee. As prophesied by the holy man Black Elk, they are mending the sacred hoop; the rebirth of Lakota culture and spirituality is upon us. Where once there were only two or three Sun Dances on the Pine Ridge reservation during the summer months, now there are fifty or sixty. Sweat lodges are everywhere; powwows are huge and frequent. Hostility between full-bloods and half-bloods is fading away. There is a Lakota language teacher in every reservation school. The tribe is asserting its sovereignty.
Nothing symbolizes the rebirth of Indian pride more than the annual Chief Big Foot Memorial Ride, seven grueling days on horseback tracing Big Foot’s torturous 190-mile ride in the dead of Dakota winter, starting at the place in Sitting Bull’s camp on the Standing Rock reservation in northeastern South Dakota where Sitting Bull was killed. Here up to five hundred riders assemble for an opening ceremony of prayers and remembrances before riding on to Big Foot’s camp on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, and then turning west to Wounded Knee and ending in Pine Ridge, much of the route through the Badlands. There were seventeen riders on the first of these Big Foot Rides in 1986; in more recent years there have been as many as five hundred.
There have been many harrowing adventures during these rides. On the third ride, in 1990, temperatures dropped to 30 degrees below zero with a windchill factor of minus 140; the riders were slammed by a whiteout blizzard, and drifts got so high that the tallest horses had to punch through the snow for the others. On another ride, Charlie New Holy’s horse, Nutcracker, plunged into a snow-covered pocket and fell on Charlie’s left leg, severely tearing the ligaments in his knee. An ambulance took Charlie to the emergency room at the Pine Ridge hospital, where doctors bound his leg and gave him a brace and crutches to use for walking. People cheered when he unexpectedly rejoined the riders. Charlie couldn’t get on and off his horse without assistance, but he finished the ride.
On Christmas Day during another severe blizzard, the Big Foot main support group had to abandon three of their vehicles—a car and two pickups—along the highway in the Badlands. When they went to retrieve them the next day, they discovered that Absolute Towing, acting on a request from the South Dakota Highway Patrol, had towed them to Rapid City during the night. The car and trucks were crammed with much-needed supplies, including a few replacement saddles and bridles, bottled water, and hay for the horses. Informed in advance about the upcoming Big Foot Ride, the highway patrol must have realized that these abandoned vehicles belonged to the riders, that they would return for them as soon as weather permitted. The people at Absolute Towing were sympathetic, but they too were put out; the roads were dangerous that night, and it took hours to finish the job.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, folks, but we refuse to release these vehicles or the stuff in them until you pay the eleven-hundred-dollar towing fee!”
Not all the memorable anecdotes are related to weather. A little black stray dog showed up on the first day of another ride. Every day for the entire distance, it ran out in front of the riders, looking back frequently as if it wanted to make sure the procession proceeded according to plan. There was something holy about this dog; the riders gave him the name Shadow, always made sure he was fed. Their intention was to have someone adopt Shadow, but after the Wiping of the Tears ceremony, which is held in Pine Ridge at the ride’s conclusion, Shadow trotted off, never to be seen again.
At the end of each day of a Big Foot Ride (except the last), riders circle their horses to pray and sing the “Warrior Society Song.” They take care of their horses, remove the saddles and bridles, feed them hay, and make sure they have plenty of water. Exhausted but hungry, the riders eat dinner, mostly soup or stew and some bread, provided by a local support group that has come out to greet them. After dinner and coffee, they go to bed, sometimes sleeping on the ground in sleeping bags, sometimes in tents.
If you ask anyone who’s been on one of these rides what the biggest challenge is, they will invariably say, “Keeping warm.” Vernell has ridden in every Big Foot Ride. His father went on the first ride in a horse and wagon (as did Chief Big Foot).
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Up ahead I see another familiar road sign I have stopped at many times. It commemorates the spot where Big Foot surrendered, a beautiful piece of land—rolling hills, small patches of snow, gigantic blue sky, high whispery cirrus clouds. The sign is graffiti scarred but still here; it hasn’t yet been stolen. I can make out the words, and just in case it is not here the next time I come by, I write them down:
CHIEF BIG FOOT SURRENDERS
East 1/2 mile from this point, on the old Cherry Creek–Pine Ridge Trail, Chief Big Foot (Spotted Elk) and his Minneconjou, wagon horse band, with some forty braves of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa band was intercepted and surrendered on December 28, 1890 to Major Samuel M. Whiteside, 7th U.S. Cavalry. The Band was escorted to Wounded Knee, where they camped for the night under guard. Big F
oot who was ill was attended by the army physician that night.
Just around a bend from the Big Foot sign is the village of Porcupine. The BIA houses here look older, more weather-beaten than the ones in Pine Ridge, with more boarded-up windows. One house has no door, only a tattered blanket covering the front entrance. Dirt roads and dead grass, weeds, garbage, straggly dogs, and a cluster of junked cars and trucks surround the houses; nearby are the Porcupine Trading Post, a simple white building with one gas pump in front; the Porcupine Day School; teacher housing; and a couple of school buses.
* * *
Driving on the reservation, one seldom slows down to pass through a village, but I downshift, drive slow, feeling a need to show respect. An Indian boy on a bicycle acknowledges me with a wave. Russell Means was born in Porcupine, recently died in Porcupine. For the first time today I feel like crying; it’s strange, but he did save my life, and while he may have sometimes been more interested in self-promotion than in Indian liberation, Means made a never-to-be-forgotten impression. Some say he will be remembered along with Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, but what makes me particularly sad is the memory of him as an old man, ravaged by throat cancer. Looking haggard, skeletal but still brilliant, champion of Indian liberation, Hollywood celebrity now destitute, respected by some, vilified by others, estranged from Dennis Banks, no longer welcome in AIM, powerless to do much about it.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 10