The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  “Dane speaks true,” Red Bird Woman said. “He was with me and Sweet Medicine Woman out on prairie digging breadroot when Custer’s Bluecoats come shooting.”

  “Amayi was with us, too,” Dane said, “and White Horn my grandson, six years old. Swift Eagle and Buffalo Calf Woman stayed in camp that morning, and my son-in-law, Bull Bear, was out with some Minneconjous hunting antelope. Our buffalo scouts had told us of Bluecoats prowling from the west, but we did not know about the column coming from the east—Custer’s. And of course we did not know it was Custer until long after the battle.”

  “You had heard of Custer?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. The Cheyennes hated him because he killed Black Kettle and many relatives and friends of the Washita in Indian Territory. But we did not know Custer had come to kill us so far to the north.”

  He stepped down to the edge of the stream to help John Bear-in-the-Water bring one of the lodgepoles across. After the young man turned back to the wagon for another, Red Bird Woman asked in a loud whisper: “You going to let Mary Amayi marry that Crow boy?”

  He shrugged. “Mary Amayi knows her own heart. These times are not like the old times, Red Bird.”

  “The Crows rode as scouts for Custer,” she said, glancing at me.

  He laughed. “They didn’t stay around long after Crazy Horse and Gall and Two Moon started chasing them. The Crows did us no harm. As I said, I was far out on the prairie. It was covered with wild flowers, wide sweeps of yellow and red and blue and white, and I was wading with my little grandson in melted snowwater, too cold to teach him to swim. I was drying his legs and feet with dead grass when we heard the guns popping far off toward the south end of the long camp where the Uncpapas had their circle. From the first sound of the firing I knew it was Bluecoats attacking, and I started running for the north end where the Cheyennes were camped. Soon in the distance I saw many people moving around our horse herd, women helping with saddles, and warriors riding off toward the Little Bighorn.

  “Custer brought his men right down to the edge of the Little Bighorn across from the Cheyenne camp, and my brother-in-law, Yellow Hawk, told me that if Crazy Horse had not come with his Oglalas, many Cheyenne warriors would have died there in the river. The Cheyennes all alone had to stop Custer from reaching their tipis and then Crazy Horse came, and also Gall, after the Uncpapas drove the eagle chief Reno and his men upon that high bluff.

  “By the time I got to our Cheyenne tipis, Custer and all his men were lying dead on the slope across the river. Sitting Bull always said the fight did not last long enough to light a pipe.

  “I found Buffalo Calf Woman safe at her tipi, and soon afterward Swift Eagle came riding in, blood dripping down his Frenchman’s nose from his unhealed scar. He held out his lance to me, and I saw the blond hairs of a fresh scalp fastened to the shaft. ‘I did not want to fight the Bluecoats today any more than I wanted to fight them when I was a boy, the day they fired their big guns at us on that place called Pea Ridge,’ he said, and dismounted. ‘The Bluecoats were coming to destroy our tipis again, so I took the scalp for Sun Spirit Girl. When we pass her burial scaffold I will leave it there.’

  “All that night we kept Reno’s soldiers trapped on the high hill, but we could not get at them and they were afraid to come down and fight us. Before daylight our scouts came in to tell us of many Bluecoats coming from two directions. The chiefs held council with Sitting Bull, and they decided our great family should break apart again, each tribe and subtribe going in different directions, traveling fast so that the Bluecoats would have a hard time finding any of us. So Sweet Medicine Woman and I had to say good-bye again to Amayi and Bull Bear, who went off with the Minneconjous.

  “Several chiefs took their people toward the Bighorn Mountains to hide in the forests, but we Cheyennes knew we could not live long without grass for ponies and buffalo for food, shelter, and clothing. And so we went across the Yellowstone and down to where the Tongue flows in. Sitting Bull must have felt the same way we did because we soon discovered the Uncpapas camped near us.

  “For a few moons we lived as we had lived before, but then the Bluecoats began to come from all the four directions. We would run this way and run that way, trying to keep our tipis and our lives, seldom camping in one place for more than a day. Once on the Powder we met Sitting Bull and his people running from one bunch of soldiers while we were running from another bunch. ‘The Bluecoats are angry because we beat them,’ Sitting Bull said. ‘We did not fight them until they came to fight us. What have we done that the Wasicus want us to stop? We have been running up and down the country but they follow us from one place to another.’ He told us that Crazy Horse was farther up the Powder, and that his people were hungry because they could not stop running long enough to hunt buffalo.

  “Not long after that we had a skirmish with some Bluecoats, and during the fighting our little band—Yellow Hawk’s—got separated from the Two Moon people. In our flight we caught up with the Uncpapas. Sitting Bull welcomed us, but he was angry because he had discovered Bluecoats building a new fort where the Tongue ran into the Yellowstone. We all knew that soldiers prowling from there would make it impossible for us to live peaceably in what was left of our hunting paradise. We were being squeezed from all sides, and now the Bluecoats were going to stab us in the heart.

  “Sitting Bull sent one of the French half-bloods in our camp to arrange a meeting with the commander of this new fort. In the Falling-Leaf Moon of October, I went as interpreter with the chiefs to meet the Bluecoats’ star chief. All our warriors formed into a line facing a line of Bluecoats, and the chiefs and a few warriors and I walked out to meet the star chief and a few of his officers.

  “We named him Bear Coat because he was wearing a fur hat and a long bearskin coat. He was General Miles. The town that grew up there later was named for him—Miles City.

  “Bear Coat pretended to be friendly, but Sitting Bull would not smoke a pipe with him. ‘Why will you not be my friend?’ Bear Coat asked.

  “ ‘I am not for the Wasicus,’ Sitting Bull replied, ‘but neither am I your enemy. I want only to be left alone.’

  “ ‘What are you doing in the Yellowstone country?’ Bear Coat then asked.

  “ ‘I am hunting buffalo to feed and clothe my people,’ Sitting Bull answered. ‘I do not want to fight you. I have never fought the Wasicus until they come to fight me. There will be no more fighting if you will take your soldiers and forts out of our country.’

  “Bear Coat’s smile turned to a scowl. His hard eyes glared at each of us. ‘There will be no peace for you,’ he said, ‘until you go to the reservation we have made for you.’

  “I could feel the anger growing in Sitting Bull. He turned his head and looked back at our line of poorly armed warriors facing the line of Bluecoats with their shiny new rifles. He knew the Wasicus sometimes violated truce meetings. If Bear Coat chose to do so, he could kill or capture all of us in the council group. ‘The Great Spirit made me an Indian,’ Sitting Bull said quietly, ‘but not a reservation Indian. I do not intend to become a reservation Indian.’ He glanced at Yellow Hawk and me. ‘Aban! Look out, be careful. It is ended.’ He turned his back on Bear Coat, and we all walked without hurrying to our line of warriors and mounted our ponies. From the Bluecoat line came the sound of clicking rifle hammers. Sitting Bull waved the warriors into the trees. Two or three shots were fired behind us, the bullets whining over our heads, and then we heard Bear Coat bellowing a command to cease firing. At least he had honored the truce meeting.

  “That night the chiefs held a council and Sitting Bull said the Wasicus had taken our land and there was no longer room enough for us to live in the Great Father’s country. If we stayed where we were we could hope for nothing but imprisonment or death. The only thing left for us was to go to Canada, to the land of the Grandmother, Queen Victoria. Before we left, Sitting Bull and Yellow Hawk sent messengers south along the Tongue and Powder to find Crazy Horse and Two Moon and ask th
em to go with us to the Grandmother’s Land. But the messengers found only a few scattered bands fleeing from soldiers, and no one knew what had happened to Crazy Horse and Two Moon.

  “And so we went to Canada, and there we became prisoners of the redcoated Mounted Police. They did not want to kill us and they treated us kindly, but we were outcasts forbidden to wander or hunt buffalo. We had nothing to do but sit in our canvas tents day after day, remembering our lost homeland and waiting for the Mounted Police to feed and clothe us. Survival was all we had to live for.

  “This is the way life is. Things may be going well for you, then one day something happens and you are finished. Remember, it can happen to you, too.”

  55

  SERGEANT PLEASANT MCALPIN, INDIAN Scout, buttoned his dark blue uniform blouse and buckled on his pistol belt. Listening for the bugle call, he tiptoed to the door of the tiny bedroom. Maga, his Oglala wife, lay in a drunken stupor on the bed, a blanket twisted between her naked legs. A whiskey bottle rested at an angle against the clay wall. He went inside and picked it up, saw liquor in the bottom, and drained it into his throat, relishing the sweet warmth, hoping it would drive the aching from his head.

  The bugle sounded then, and he hurried out into the dry morning chill of Camp Robinson, facing the towering white cliffs on the north where the sun was already lighting the pine trees. When he brought his horse from the grazing ground, he saw infantrymen far across the river to the south putting up rows of gray canvas tents, and for the first time he truly believed that Crazy Horse was bringing his people in to surrender.

  With the other Indian Scouts he rode around the cavalry barracks to the parade ground. There he formed the scouts into a squad at one end of Lieutenant Clark’s regular cavalry company. Lieutenant Clark wasted no time that morning, and they were soon moving out, the lieutenant in the lead, the ten scouts ranked behind him, the cavalrymen in a column of fours. Less than half an hour after leaving Camp Robinson they sighted the Oglalas coming down the valley from the northeast. Lieutenant Clark shouted an order for the cavalrymen to form a line front, and as they continued at a slow walk Pleasant saw that the Oglalas were advancing in a similar formation. Crazy Horse was out front on a white-faced mustang, ten subchiefs riding behind, then a thin line of warriors, and in the rear a mass of women and children with a large pony herd. They had not one travois, which meant they were without shelter of any kind. The lieutenant and Crazy Horse halted almost simultaneously, not more than twenty paces apart.

  The Oglala warriors were hollow-eyed and lean-fleshed, their clothing worn to scraps, the bones of their ponies pressing against loose folds of hide. Yet the warriors held themselves proudly while Crazy Horse dismounted and came forward to meet the lieutenant and the interpreter from Camp Robinson. Crazy Horse’s gaze passed contemptuously over the faces of the ten Indian Scouts, and Pleasant wondered if his old companion of daring decoy exploits on the Little Piney had recognized him under his broad-brimmed army hat.

  From where he sat in his saddle, Pleasant could hear the slow talk, Crazy Horse’s soft-spoken Lakota words rendered into crude English phrases. Crazy Horse offered his left hand to Lieutenant Clark, explaining that his heart was on the left side of his body and he was giving his heart to the Wasicus. He wanted to sit on the ground while he smoked a pipe with the Little White Chief because the earth they sat upon would make the peace solid. He was surrendering, Crazy Horse declared, because he had been promised a reservation in the Powder River country, a place of his choosing. Pleasant knew this was a lie; the army officers had invented the promise to ensnare the last of the great Sioux war leaders.

  Pleasant wanted to shout to Crazy Horse that the promise was a lie, to tell him to turn and flee to safety, but he knew there was no place of safety left this side of the Canadian border. Two Moon, who had already surrendered his Cheyennes, had told Pleasant that Dane and Sweet Medicine Woman were in flight to Canada with Yellow Hawk and Sitting Bull; that is, if they were still alive. But no one knew if they were alive. He felt that old pain of loneliness smothering him again. His throat was dry and he craved the dreams he could find only in a bottle of that craw-rot whiskey the sutler sold from a wagon hidden up the willow-bordered river. He was certain that his mother, Jerusha, was dead. He had written three letters to her in the Cherokee Nation but no reply ever came. He ached with a loneliness that Maga, his wife, could no longer relieve because she too sought her own dreams from the bottle, spending on whiskey the money she earned as a laundress for the soldiers, weeping when sober for the old days of freedom, cursing the log walls of the cubicle that imprisoned her with Pleasant.

  Lieutenant Clark was on his feet, shouting orders to the Indian Scouts and cavalrymen. They spent the morning counting and disarming Crazy Horse’s people, searching the 217 men and 672 women and children for hidden weapons, finally collecting 84 worn-out rifles and 33 pistols. Pleasant was glad when it was finished. He did not like the way the warriors and the women looked at him when they saw who he was, and he felt like crying when he looked at the children. When he had known them they were always running and laughing. Now they were as solemn as old men and women, many coughing painfully, pus running from their noses and eyes.

  Then the procession began. Along the valley, with the high white bluffs on their right, the remnants of the last free Oglala Sioux moved toward the bend of White Earth River, skirting Camp Robinson. On both sides of the river thousands of reservation Sioux and Cheyennes were gathered to honor Crazy Horse, their voices rising in rhythmic chants and songs, wailing old forgotten battle cries. Not since the victory against Carrington on Peno Creek, eleven years past, had Pleasant heard such a crescendo of pulsating voices.

  They crossed the narrow river and rode on to the canvas tents that were set in straight military rows instead of in a camp circle. Here, as the Oglalas dismounted, their ponies were led away by the Indian Scouts and added to the herd. Before nightfall Sergeant Pleasant McAlpin and the scouts had the two thousand half-starved ponies of Crazy Horse’s people safely corralled on the west side of Camp Robinson. In the days to come these animals would be slaughtered and fed to their former owners, who were now prisoners of the United States Army.

  A week passed before Pleasant could steel himself for a visit to Crazy Horse. He feared that his former warrior comrade would refuse to speak with him, or, if he did so, would condemn him as a mercenary, a traitor. All of Camp Robinson buzzed with rumors of the strange man of the Oglalas, and it was plain to Pleasant that Crazy Horse’s presence was disturbing to the higher army officers. The noisy demonstration by the agency Indians had alarmed them. Even though Crazy Horse and his warriors were now without arms or horses, he remained a symbol of freedom, a danger to the reservation system. Pleasant heard whispers of plans to send him far away where he could no longer be a threat.

  Early one evening after Pleasant was relieved from duty, he dressed in his buckskins and waded the river, walking at a rapid pace until he reached Crazy Horse’s camp. The Oglalas had rearranged the tents into a circle, so that he had no trouble finding Crazy Horse. He was seated on a horse blanket beside his tent, gazing into the setting sun, lines of melancholy ridging from his nose to the sad corners of his mouth. He looked much older than his thirty-five years. Pleasant approached him from the side, expecting him to turn at the sound of footsteps, but he seemed oblivious of everything but the sun.

  “Tashunka Witko,” Pleasant said softly.

  Crazy Horse looked at him then, his face remaining grave, but he stood up, offering his hand. “Iron Shirt Pleasant,” he said, with the faintest flicker of a smile. Crazy Horse still wore the red hawk’s feather in his hair. Holes were worn at the elbows of his buckskin shirt.

  “You saw me the other day,” Pleasant said. “In my bluecoat uniform I was ashamed for you to look upon my face.”

  “Hna!” Crazy Horse grunted. “We both have done things to shame ourselves, Iron Shirt. But wait a little, wait a little. You and your wife Maga can come and live
with me where buffalo are still plentiful. The Wasicus have promised me a reservation in the Powder River country.”

  The promise is a lie, Pleasant thought. I must tell him they lie. Instead he asked: “Have they named the moon when you will go there?”

  Crazy Horse made a growling sound. “They say I must first go to Washington to see the Great Father. I tell them I will go to see the Great Father after I see the reservation. They wait. I wait. They tell me my people must become civilized. I tell them my people are civilized, that we want to live as our fathers lived and their fathers before them. We must now look to the Wasicus for food, shelter, and clothing. In this way they will destroy us. We do not want the civilization of the Wasicus. They do not understand me. I do not understand them.”

  They talked until darkness fell, and then Pleasant left without telling Crazy Horse of the lie, knowing that without the lie his friend would have nothing, nothing, nothing—not even a dream from a bottle.

  On another evening he asked Maga to go with him to see Crazy Horse. Some of her relatives were in the camp. But she refused. “I could not bear to see them the way they are now,” she said, “or for them to see me. Crazy Horse and his people have always been wild and free. They will all die soon in this place.” She began weeping soundlessly, and he went alone across the river.

  This time he and Crazy Horse talked mostly about the old days, the hunts and wars along the Tongue and Powder, the great victories at Peno Creek and the Little Bighorn. “It is all finished,” Crazy Horse said abruptly, his lean body shivering with the realization of the present, the false world that surrounded him.

  Pleasant took out a bottle from the lining of his coat. “This is my deliverance,” he said, offering it to Crazy Horse.