The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  Next day when the Dog Soldiers left the Arapaho camp, Pleasant wore the coat of mail, cantering proudly along on his remaining Appaloosa. Late in the afternoon as they were approaching the place where Poison Spider Creek flows into the North Platte, not far from the Oregon Trail bridge crossing of the river, they saw a patrol of bluecoated cavalry coming toward them. The Cheyennes had heard that some soldiers were stationed at the bridge, but this was the first time they had seen any of them. Lean Bear signaled his Dog Soldiers to a halt and they waited in line for the soldiers to come up to them. While they waited, Lean Bear counted the Bluecoats. Twenty-six, or six more than the number of Dog Soldiers he had brought along for the raid. The cavalrymen would be much better armed and were not burdened with a herd of captured ponies. Lean Bear signaled his warriors to make ready their guns and bows.

  The cavalrymen halted about forty yards away, a young lieutenant moving a few paces to the front of them. “We want to inspect your horses,” he called out.

  Lean Bear, not being certain what the lieutenant meant, glanced at Pleasant.

  “We took them from the Shoshones,” Pleasant replied. He remembered that three of the horses had U.S. brands on their flanks. A Dog Soldier named Sata had captured one and then traded for the other two. Sata admired the U.S. markings.

  “We’re coming up!” the lieutenant shouted, evidently relieved to hear English spoken, but he was also puzzled by Pleasant’s coat of mail. “We’ve lost a dozen mounts, stolen by somebody.”

  The cavalrymen approached at a slow pace, circling around into the horse herd until they sighted the U.S. brands. They began cutting out the three horses from the herd. A sergeant was looping ropes over their necks when Sata danced his mount over beside him, seizing the ties. “They are my horses!” he shouted in Cheyenne. “We took them from the Shoshones.”

  The sergeant unslung his carbine and waved him away. Sata pulled an old pistol from his belt. “Shoot him!” the lieutenant ordered. The carbine bullet knocked Sata off his horse.

  For a moment there was a confusion of movement. The frightened horse herd began to scatter. The lieutenant shouted orders in a high excited voice, and his men drew away, forming a line of defense, the sergeant leading the three army horses off to one side.

  Sata was badly wounded, but he forced himself up on his knees, screaming for his horses. Lean Bear signaled his warriors into a single rank, facing the soldiers.

  “I’m going to make them empty their guns,” Pleasant said, reaching for Lean Bear’s lance. “When they have emptied their guns, rush them and take back Sata’s horses before they can reload.”

  “No!” Lean Bear cried. “Today I am your father and I forbid it!”

  Pleasant kicked the Appaloosa into a fast run, holding the lance straight, heading for the lieutenant. “Kill him!” the lieutenant shouted. Pleasant swung the Palouse to the right, leaning out of the saddle so as to use his mount for a shield. Carbines crackled along the line, and then he heard the cries of the onrushing Dog Soldiers, the pounding of their ponies’ hooves.

  When the cavalrymen fled in disorder, Lean Bear killed the sergeant himself to stop him from taking Sata’s horses. But the Appaloosa went down, blood gushing from its neck, and died with Pleasant sitting beside its outstretched head, crying. Not long after they rounded up their scattered herd, Sata died. They put him on a burial scaffold, led the three horses with the U.S. markings up beside it, and slew them with arrows. That night when they camped, Pleasant found two bullets enmeshed in the interlaced rings of his Spanish coat of mail.

  36

  “AFTER THAT SKIRMISH WITH the Bluecoat horse soldiers,” Dane said, “the Cheyennes looked upon Pleasant as a young man of strong medicine. They called him Iron Shirt, and he became a Dog Soldier, a high honor for one so young. But he didn’t seem to want to be singled out. He preferred to be alone much of the time, brooding and wondering to himself if he were an Indian or a white man. He gave the coat of mail to Sweet Medicine Woman to keep for him. Sometimes he would ask for it to clean rust specks off the metal, and then he would tell her to put it away again. Often at night in our tipi I would be awakened by moans and cries of fright from Pleasant’s bed and I knew he was having terrible visions in his dreams.

  “One day I was down on a sandbar with Swift Eagle and Little Cloud, telling them Cherokee ghost stories. I had taught both of them how to write their names in English, as well as a few English words, and while I was telling a story Swift Eagle took a stick and scratched his name in the sand. He then made a drawing of the wolf I was telling about and wrote W-o-l-f under it.

  “ ‘He can write words!’ Pleasant cried out behind us. He had crept down to the riverbank so silently that I did not know he was there. Lean Bear taught him how to do that.

  “ ‘I can write my name, too,’ Little Cloud boasted, pulling at his brother’s stick.

  “ ‘Why is it that you never showed me how to write?’ Pleasant asked in a tone of reproach.

  “ ‘Surely you can read and write,’ I said.

  “ ‘Jerusha taught me how to pen my name.’

  “ ‘You never had any schooling in the Nation?’

  “He shook his head. ‘Reverend Crookes said words to me to put in my memory. But not to read or write.’ He shrugged. ‘What use has an Indian for such things!’ He jumped down on the sandbar, dragging a moccasin across the letters that Swift Eagle had made, erasing them.

  “ ‘I’ll teach you how to write words,’ I said, but he was already running away down the riverbank.

  Another time not long after that, I found him brooding on a hilltop, facing toward the east, his face sad and dreary like an old man’s.

  “ ‘How far is the Nation, how many days’ travel?’ he asked.

  “ ‘Are you sick for home?’ I said.

  “ ‘I want to see my mother, Jerusha, again,’ he replied. ‘I want to be a white man instead of an Indian.’

  “ ‘You could go to the seminary at Tahlequah,’ I suggested. ‘They can teach you to live as a white man.’

  “I was surprised at his eager response. He wanted to start that very day.

  “In spite of Sweet Medicine Woman’s earnest objections, Pleasant and I were on our way the next morning. During the days of the Drying-Up Moon that we spent together on trails to the Indian Territory, I came to truly know my half-blood son for the first time. The only other people we talked with while going there were our relatives at Fort Carrothers. The night we stopped at the trading post we changed to white man’s clothes and I made an arrangement with Jotham so that I could use buffalo skins to pay for Pleasant’s schooling in the Cherokee Nation.

  “There is nothing like close travel with one companion to bring out strengths and weaknesses that may be overlooked in ordinary living. I soon discovered that Pleasant’s reckless ways were only a mask for his fears. He talked once about the charge he made against the soldiers so they would empty their guns, confessing that he could never have done that without the coat of mail which was a mask over his fears. He still had terrible dreams about that, he said, feeling in his own flesh the bullets that penetrated the flesh of his shield, the Appaloosa.

  “Day by day as we moved southward his spirits brightened, and when we rode into Tahlequah, he was almost singing with gladness. We soon found Mr. Ebenezer Keys’s Seminary for Young Males, and I enrolled Pleasant for the coming year. Mr. Keys was a friendly little man from New England, and he promised me that Pleasant would receive the best instruction in reading, spelling, arithmetic, and geography, to be taught both in Cherokee and English.

  “The next day Pleasant and I rode out to the crossroads to see Jerusha. She had no knowledge that we were in the Nation, and was almost overcome with surprise and joy. She embarrassed her eighteen-year-old son with hugs and kisses, treating him like a long-lost child. The solemn Reverend Crookes had little to say to us, and I soon left Pleasant there to spend the night while I went over to stay with William and Tatsuwha. William was beginning to sho
w his age. He had turned fifty years and was quite reserved of manner, but he was hospitable and wanted to know everything I could tell him about Jotham and Griffa and the Fort Carrothers trading post.

  “That evening in the moonlight I walked over to the burying ground to visit Creek Mary’s grave. The churchyard was filled with wagons and buggies, and the high-pitched voice of Reverend Crookes rang from the open windows of the church, warning of the hand of death, the grim messenger of God, the scourge of strong drink, and the wickedness that desolated the Cherokee Nation.

  “I was standing under a walnut tree that overlooked the simple cedar marker of Akusa Amayi when I was startled by a figure in white, flitting along, avoiding patches of moonlight to keep within the shadows. For a moment I thought this was a ghost, but then I knew it was Jerusha. She stopped close beside me, breathing hard. ‘I saw you from the church window,’ she said. ‘When he kneeled to pray I slipped out. I can stay only a minute.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘I want to thank you for bringing Pleasant back to me. He is all that I can have of you.’

  “I did not know what to say, so I reached out and took her hand, and then she moved against me, her arms tightening around me, her lips warm against my cheek, her whole body pressing against me so that I could feel the thinness of her legs. She shivered then and drew away quickly, running toward the church. As I have said, I believe Jerusha’s feelings went beyond the limits of the heart.

  “For her I felt a great tenderness, and on my lonely journey back to Fort Carrothers my thoughts were much on Jerusha and our son Pleasant. I had grown attached to the boy. There was a frailty in both of them, a constant searching for strength to draw upon. To survive, the weak must feed on the hearts of the strong.

  “More than three years passed before I saw Pleasant again. After he learned to write, he would scrawl short letters to me, sending them by the stagecoach mail to Fort Carrothers. I would pick them up whenever I stopped at Jotham’s place, sometimes months after they were written, and I answered every one.

  “Within him seethed a pitiless conflict between his Indian and white blood, and after reading his letters I often recalled the night with Saviah Manning when she told me of how she and Jotham were much alike, their white blood contesting with the Indian in them. Yet Jotham seemed to have made peace with himself. He was more white than Indian, the passing travelers often asking him if he were Portuguese or Spanish or of some other dark-skinned race, seldom suspecting that this post trader in white man’s clothing, speaking their language as well as they, was a half-blood of the native peoples they feared or despised.

  “After Pleasant left the school, he worked awhile for Mr. Tim Rogers, but he found blacksmithing tiresome and tried to make his way by hunting and trapping in the Boston Mountains over in Arkansas. I remember well the last letter I received from him. ‘My means are failing,’ he wrote. ‘My relatives are poor. I have no means of profitably employing my time. To disperse care and trouble, I have turned to drinking whiskey.’

  “A few weeks after that Pleasant suddenly appeared at Fort Carrothers. He arrived on one of the Overland Mail stagecoaches that had begun making daily stops at the trading post on regular runs over the trail to California. Jotham and Bibbs begged him to stay and help with the blacksmithing, but after a day or so he joined me and my family in our tipi at the Ghost Timbers. He discarded his ill-fitting black broadcloth for buckskins, and when we started north Pleasant was with us, his mind firmly made up to follow the ways of the Cheyennes.

  “That summer he married one of Magpie Eagle’s nieces, a pretty girl named Rising Fawn, and his pathway might have been smooth had it not been for one thing—the craving for whiskey that had begun to afflict him while he was in the Indian Territory. In the old days he could have fought it down, would have had to fight it down, but by this time white men were bringing whiskey on the trails in wagons, setting up whiskey stores on wheels, and moving to some other place after trading to Indians who could not obtain strong drink at the licensed trading posts.

  “Whenever Pleasant had buffalo skins to trade, he would seek out a whiskey wagon and come back to camp so drunk he could not stand on his feet. One evening he challenged me in front of our tipi, raging at me, blaming me because I had fathered him from a white woman so that he was neither an Indian nor a white man. The more I tried to soothe him the angrier he became, frightening Sweet Medicine Woman with his threats to kill me for creating him. At last in one of his rages he fell senseless upon the ground, and I carried him to Rising Fawn, who cried over him through the night.

  “Some days afterward in that same summer, Pleasant and three of his friends, all Dog Soldiers, were hunting for black-tailed deer along the upper Platte when they came in sight of the Oregon Trail bridge crossing. They were in territory where they were forbidden to hunt, and should not have been there, but they had drunk some whiskey, so they had more recklessness about them than good sense. From the hill where they stopped they could see the bridge and the stockade at one end in which the soldiers lived. At the other end of the bridge grazed a small herd of picketed horses, with one soldier guarding them.

  “ ‘Look,’ Pleasant said, ‘those soldiers down there are the ones who killed Sata after we raided the Shoeshones with Lean Bear. They owe us three horses.’

  “He and his companions talked about this for a while. Most likely none of the soldiers were the same ones who had been there three years before, and they probably knew nothing about Sata and the horses. Also there were two or three times as many soldiers in the stockade as those they had chased that day near Poison Spider Creek, and there were only four Dog Soldiers now. Yet they foolishly decided to rush down upon the herd, shoot the guard, and capture three U.S. horses.

  “Because the soldiers were not expecting such a foolhardy raid, the four Dog Soldiers got away with three horses, leaving the scalped guard behind. However, Pleasant and his companions had hardly crossed the hills when a bunch of mounted Bluecoats came swarming after them. The first that we in our camp knew about this was the clatter of hooves and the sight of the four Dog Soldiers galloping into our midst. ‘Bluecoats coming!’ one of them shouted, and of course we all started helping the women and children run to cover. There was no time to dismantle tipis or pack anything. We hurried to arm ourselves with whatever we could get our hands on—guns, bows, lances, clubs, knives. While we were doing these things the soldiers set fire to some high dry grass on the slope above the camp, and a strong wind swept clouds of black smoke down upon us.

  “Out of this smoke the soldiers charged us with drawn sabers, yelling furiously. Some carried burning sheafs of grass which they tossed on our tipis. Others dismounted and used our own campfires to set bedding and robes and tipis to blazing. Those who kept to their saddles struck down with their sabers anyone they came within reach of—children, women, old people.

  “Because of the suddenness of their attack, we barely had time to strike back before they were gone, taking many of our horses with them. I’m sure I shot one soldier in the leg with my carbine. He was grimacing and squeezing the fleshy part of his thigh as he galloped away from me. And then I saw another dash by with an arrow deep in his shoulder. They suffered some punishment, but we suffered far more.

  “Luckily for my family, we were camped at the farther end of the village from where the soldiers came in. Sweet Medicine Woman had time to get our four children into some thick brush along the river, and no damage was done to our tipi. For others it was worse. The young son of my brother-in-law, Yellow Hawk, received a bad saber cut on one arm, and we had great difficulty in stopping the flow of blood. Yellow Hawk and his wife, and several other families who were camped upstream lost their tipis and most of their buffalo robes, saddles, and parfleches to fire.

  “As soon as Big Star was certain the soldiers had gone back to the bridge station, he called a council. We learned that we had lost two to death. One was a member of the Crooked Lance society who had tried to stop a soldier from setting fire to his
tipi and was shot dead. The other was my dear old friend Whistling Elk, who had given me his medicine pouch for my raid against the Crows with the Fox Soldiers. Whistling Elk burned to death in his tipi, being too feeble to crawl out and escape.

  “Lean Bear brought Pleasant and the three other Dog Soldiers to the council and ordered them to explain why the Bluecoats had chased them and then attacked our village so fiercely. After they told their stories, Lean Bear denounced them for being so foolish and offered them to Big Star for punishment. Big Star, however, would not punish them. ‘Many moons ago my blood was hot, as theirs is hot because of their youth,’ he said. ‘The trouble came to us because of the soldiers. If the soldiers were not in our country, such things would not happen. We must move away from the Veheos and their bluecoated pony soldiers. Last winter when Black Kettle’s people camped near us in the Hinta Nagi, he told me that buffalo had come back to the valley of the Smoking Land River, more than enough buffalo for all our people. That country in the south was given to the Cheyennes in the Big Treaty. Before the sun goes down, let us strike our tipis and turn our faces to the south.’

  “Although the soldiers had taken many of our best horses, we also had lost much to the fires. By crowding the travois that we had horses to draw, we were able to pack almost everything we had left. We built burial scaffolds and mourned for the two men who died, and then we started southward.

  “Twice along the way we were stopped by Bluecoat cavalrymen who patrolled the Plains as if we had no right to be there on land that belonged to us. They wanted to know where we came from and where we were going. But after we passed Beaver Fork of the Lower Platte we saw no more Veheos, and we found the valley of the Smoking Land River rich in buffalo, as Black Kettle had promised.