The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  “What good is this firewater of the Wasicus?” Crazy Horse cried scornfully. “It makes a man like a bear who has lost his senses. He growls, he scratches and he howls, he falls down as if he were dead.” He pushed the bottle away, a queer look coming into his eyes as he stared hard at Pleasant. “Did the Bluecoats send you to me, Iron Shirt?” he asked.

  “No!” Pleasant drew away, hurt by the accusation.

  “I have learned to trust no one since coming to this place. They tell lies about me over in Red Cloud’s agency and in your soldier camp.”

  During the weeks that followed, Pleasant scouted with a company of cavalry up the North Platte, searching for a rumored band of “hostile” Arapahos. He did not want to find the Arapahos, but they found them, seventeen frightened men, women, and children, and herded them back to Camp Robinson like Longhorn cattle. As soon as he returned he noticed that the Crazy Horse camp was gone. The army, fearful of the magic of the Oglala leader, had moved him and his people a few miles farther south to put more distance between him and the Red Cloud Agency.

  Around the sutler’s store and in the adjutant’s office where Pleasant made his reports, he heard much talk about Crazy Horse. Long before, he had discovered that the army officers looked upon the Indian Scouts as useful animals, capable of understanding commands but no more likely than their horses to comprehend or communicate gossip or rumors spoken in English. The officers would say things in their presence they would never have whispered anywhere near the white enlisted men. After a few days, he learned enough to know that Crazy Horse was in great danger. Using the false promise of a buffalo hunt, the Bluecoats planned to bring him into Camp Robinson, put him in irons, and take him to the railroad under cover of darkness. The journey would end at Dry Tortugas, an island off the coast of Florida. Crazy Horse would die there, surely.

  After dark one evening, Pleasant rode to Crazy Horse’s camp. This time he wore his uniform, because he had learned that agency Indians were forbidden to visit the Oglala camp. An old man was hovering over the coals of a tiny fire beside Crazy Horse’s tent. He was the war leader’s father. “My son has gone far out on the prairie,” he told Pleasant.

  “He must never return here,” Pleasant said.

  “Crazy Horse will not desert his people.” The old man stirred the coals with a stick. “He related to me something that he dreamed. He was standing on top of the high white cliffs. A great eagle soared above him, floating in the blue sky. All at once the eagle folded its wings and began falling. It fell straight down, landing at the feet of my son, and when he looked upon it he saw that the eagle was himself, pierced through with an arrow, without life.”

  “I too have such dreams,” Pleasant said.

  “My son has traveled far out on the prairie to seek the meaning of this dream.”

  Pleasant turned toward his horse. “Old man,” he said as he mounted, “tell your son he must not come into Camp Robinson.”

  The next morning eight companies of cavalry, with several chiefs and Indian police from the Red Cloud Agency, marched out of Camp Robinson to arrest Crazy Horse. The Indian Scouts did not go, perhaps because their officers did not trust them, perhaps because—as they were told—they were needed at Camp Robinson to keep the agency Indians from entering the camp to await the arrival of Crazy Horse. Throughout the day Pleasant and his scouts circled the outer walls of the buildings and the connecting high board fences, warning a steadily enlarging assemblage of Indians to stay away. Until long after dark the crowd remained, and then singly or in small groups they departed. By daylight next morning they began returning, and the commandant sent out a company of cavalrymen to drive them away. But as soon as the cavalrymen rode back inside the fence, the Indians again gathered around the perimeter of the military post. All day this game of approach and withdrawal continued, and then just as the sun was setting the watchers sighted a dust cloud on the eastern horizon. For a while there was silence, and then the murmuring of voices was like a wind in a pine forest, rising and falling. Pleasant led the Indian Scouts to a wide gate between the officers’ quarters and the infantry barracks. They forced the crowd back, opened the gate, and used their horses to form a passageway for the approaching column to enter.

  The soldiers rode in quickly, a squad of cavalry first, and then a major with Crazy Horse and two chiefs from the agency followed. As Crazy Horse passed by, Pleasant called out his name above the rapid pounding of hooves. “Aban! Be careful!” Pleasant shouted, and made the sign for danger. Crazy Horse bowed his head, and was swept along by the cavalrymen in his rear.

  As soon as the column was through the gate, Pleasant closed it and posted the scouts along the fence. He then led his pony into the parade ground. A cavalry squad was drawn up around the adjutant’s office. In the dimming light of dusk he saw Crazy Horse dismount. Two infantrymen with bayoneted rifles and an Indian policeman from the agency surrounded him. Instead of leading Crazy Horse into the adjutant’s office they turned him toward the guardhouse.

  Pleasant climbed into his saddle and started slowly across the parade ground. He was halfway to the adjutant’s office when he heard Crazy Horse cry out, a wailing protest from deep in his throat, and Pleasant knew that his friend had seen the iron bars of the guardhouse and perceived in them the reality of the Wasicus’ lies that had tricked him into a final indignity. The four shadows—Crazy Horse, the two infantrymen, and the Indian policeman—scuffled in a wild dance while a voice shouted Kill the son of a bitch, kill the son of a bitch! A soldier’s bayonet went twice and deep into the lean body of Tashunka Witko, piercing entrails and kidneys.

  Within moments the thousands of his kinspeople gathered outside knew, and they waited into the darkness until he was dead, and they then went away.

  Sergeant Pleasant McAlpin could not go away. He went to the cubicle in the log building, longing for Maga to comfort him, but she was not there. For a while he sat in a chair staring at the empty whiskey bottle leaning against the log wall beside the bed, lusting not for dreams but oblivion. He started searching then, lifting the loose boards of the floor until he found a bottle that Maga had concealed in the sandy clay. He drank in quick swallows, retching and wiping his mouth, and swallowing again. After a while he took off his uniform, dropping the blouse and pistol belt and trousers on the flooring. Stuffed in a wooden box under the bed, he found musty-smelling unwashed blanket-cloth leggings and an old war shirt. He put them on and painted half his face black. From his belt on the floor he took his pistol, removed the cartridges, and flung them against the wall. He thrust the empty weapon inside his shirt, took a long gulp from the bottle, and went out into the darkness.

  The parade ground was quiet, but the night guard had been doubled and he could smell the uneasiness in the air. Lantern light bathed the front of the adjutant’s office in pale yellow, glinting off the bayonets of two guards posted there. Pleasant walked unsteadily toward them, and as he appeared out of the shadows both guards came quickly alert. He swayed toward the nearer man. “Tashunka Witko,” he muttered. “Who killed him?”

  “What’re you doin’ inside here, half-breed?” the guard demanded. “Pack off, or into the guardhouse with you.”

  Pleasant moved closer. When the guard brought his rifle to port arms, Pleasant reached out as if to seize it, but the guard shoved him roughly away with the weapon. “Pack off!” he repeated angrily.

  Regaining his balance, Pleasant thrust a hand inside his shirt for the empty pistol, quickly aiming it at the guard and drawing back the hammer.

  “Look out!” the second guard shouted. “He’s armed—”

  The first guard fired, and the last thing that Pleasant saw on earth was a flash of orange light against the log wall of the building in which Crazy Horse died.

  The official report stated that Sergeant Pleasant McAlpin of the Indian Scouts came to his death “in a drunken brawl.” The United States Army buried him on the bank of White Earth River, marking his grave with a wooden shingle which soon rotted
and was blown away by the wind, leaving his bones lost and unremembered, as were the bones of his Cherokee great-grandfather, the Long Warrior, on the bank of the Tallapoosa at Horseshoe Bend.

  56

  “MAGA TOLD ME HOW PLEASANT died,” Dane said. “I found her at Pine Ridge with the Oglalas after we came back from Canada and I started searching for lost members of my family. For a long time, however, I could find no trace of my daughter Amayi or her husband, Bull Bear, among the Minneconjous. When the army drove all the Sioux from the agencies on White Earth River into Dakota, the subtribes were scattered to different places—mostly Oglalas at Pine Ridge, but I found Minneconjous at Rosebud with the Brules, at Cheyenne River with the Sans Arcs and Blackfoot Sioux, and at Crow Creek with the Two Kettles and Yanktonai. None of them knew what had happened to Bull Bear and Amayi, and I feared they might have lost their lives in the last running fights with the Bluecoats.

  “The Sioux were all having a hard time on the Dakota reservations, worse than the Cheyennes suffered after we came back to Tongue River.”

  Red Bird Woman made a scoffing sound. “Aho-ya! We almost starve that first summer. Nothing to eat—only plums and cherries and serviceberries. We all sick.”

  “We were all sick before we left Canada,” Dane said. “If Yellow Hawk and Swift Eagle had not made their way across the border and found Two Moon scouting for the army at Fort Keogh, we all would have gone to the Darkening Land. One more winter in the canvas tents and never enough meat would have finished us. Some days in Canada we were so hungry we were glad when we found one of our ponies frozen to death so we could eat it.”

  “You came back here to the Cheyenne reservation?” I asked.

  “There was no reservation when we returned,” he replied. “But so many Cheyennes came and lived along the Tongue that after two or three years the American government took pity on them and gave them a reservation there. But I never lived on it. By that time I was alone in the world. Sweet Medicine Woman died of the lung disease she fell ill of while we were in Canada. Swift Eagle’s little boy, White Horn, the only grandchild I had left, suffered the same illness and died soon after. Then that old wound of Swift Eagle’s began suppurating, got into his bones. I took him to the contract surgeon at Fort Keogh, but all that army doctor knew to do was pour burning liquids into it. Swift Eagle lost the sight of his eye and then died in great pain. I am certain that if a healer like Mary Amayi had been among us she could have saved all of them. Oh, it was a dark time for me. I felt the way Creek Mary did when the Cherokees were penned up in the Tennessee stockade and the Maker of Breath kept taking the younger people to the Darkening Land and leaving her and old Stalking Turkey to burden the survivors.

  “I was about seventy years old then, but I was strong enough to drive an army freighting wagon for Fort Keogh. Then the railroad tracks were built, and they didn’t need freighting wagons anymore, so I worked as a blacksmith for an old Scotsman who owned a livery stable in Miles City.

  “As I’ve always said, Scotsmen and Cherokees are like blood brothers. After this man I worked for died, a lawyer came and told me the livery stable belonged to me. There I was, all alone in the world or so I believed, a wild hostile Indian who was a man of property. For a while I considered selling out and going to the Cherokee Nation to die among my blood kin. I thought I might find Jotham or his children, perhaps Jerusha; I’d heard nothing from them for many years.

  “And then one day, who do I see coming into my livery stable in a two-seated wagon? Red Bird Woman and Yellow Hawk and his wife and two or three others of my old Cheyenne friends, up from Tongue River with a load of moccasins and beadwork things to sell or trade!”

  “First time ever I saw tears in old Dane’s eyes,” Red Bird Woman said. “Next day he didn’ want us to leave.”

  “Soon after that,” Dane added, “I rode down here and found this little piece of ranchland so I could be nearby what real friends I had left. Sold the livery stable and built that little cabin over there that Red Bird wants me to give up for a tipi.”

  “You must have found your daughter Amayi,” I said, “or else how—”

  “Oh, yes, if I had not come here, most likely I never would have found Amayi, never would have known my granddaughter Mary Amayi. At that time the Cheyennes had a kindly agent, a Quaker man named Talcott. I got acquainted with him when I went over to the reservation to see the pony races. One day I told him I still had hopes that my daughter and son-in-law were alive, but I did not know how to find them. Mr. Talcott promised to have their names searched on the Minneconjou rolls in Washington, and the next time I went to the agency office he informed me that Bull Bear and his wife, Amayi, were living on the Cheyenne River Reservation in Dakota. His words passed from my ears into my heart, making it beat strong for knowing that I was not the last of the red blood of Creek Mary.

  “We had no courier mail then, and I was not sure a letter would ever find its way to Amayi. So I filled my old saddlepack with dried meat and hard crackers, rolled a blanket, and started out on horseback in the Moon of Black Cherries. Two hundred miles or more I had to ride. By day the hot sun warmed my old bones, and for the first time since losing Sweet Medicine Woman I slept sound through the chilly nights. It was like the old days, following streams through piny canyons, and then down the Cheyenne River with meadowlarks calling all around me. I was like a young man again, and I felt like singing when at last I saw their house on a low plain above the river. It was a good solid house of barked logs with glass-paned windows and heavy shutters to close against the winter blizzards, but it was then summertime and as I rode up the slope I could see the green leaves of a brush arbor hung from the front eaves, and under it a table, a big man seated next to the door, three children around it, a woman with braided hair standing facing me with a large spoon in one hand and a pot in the other. She was looking at me and I was looking at her, and as I dismounted she came running toward me. ‘At-é! At-é! At-é! Father! Father! Father!’ Swinging between the braids over her breast, on a silver chain, was Creek Mary’s Danish coin. We laughed and wept and hugged each other. ‘Three children?’ I finally managed to say. ‘Yes, three grandchildren for Grandfather Dane,” she cried, drying her eyes with her sleeve.

  “Amayi and Bull Bear had tried to find me the way I found them, but my name was not on the Cheyenne rolls, and they could find no trace of me. Amayi had learned of the deaths of her mother and brother and nephew, but we did not talk much of these sad things. For me all the magic that had gone out of my life was restored when I looked at the faces of my grandchildren—two boys, seven and nine, and the little girl of five. Amayi had named her Mary Amayi to please me. Her eyes were the young eyes of my old grandmother, constantly searching the great world with wonder.

  “When I would take the two boys out to teach them to play Cherokee racket ball, Mary Amayi was always there with us, running so hard after the deerskin ball that her cheeks were like bright little apples. She would swing the crude ballsticks I made for them with all the determination of a grown-up. She put a spell upon me, and I could not bring myself to leave, as I knew I must. I asked Bull Bear to come and bring his family to live with me on this little ranch. Although they were very poor, living mainly on rations doled out to them by the agency, Bull Bear was a leader in the tribal council, and he said his place was with the Minneconjous on Cheyenne River. At the beginning of the Drying-Grass Moon, when Bull Bear took the boys to a boarding school near the agency, I knew it was time for me to leave them.”

  “You went back there more times,” Red Bird Woman said. “Seem like every day I come here to see you, you gone to Cheyenne River.” She stood up, groaning, and stretched herself. John Bear-in-the-Water brought the last lodgepole across the stream and placed it carefully on the grass.

  “How many dressed buffalo skins you say you have?” Dane asked.

  “Seven, maybe eight if Ohona gives me one she promise.”

  “That’s only half enough. Only one of us can live in ha
lf a tipi. I tell you this, Red Bird, we are too old to live under canvas covers.”

  “Two Moon says our buffalo herd on Lame Deer big enough now so we can kill seven or eight. He promise me all hides if Mary Amayi need your cabin for medicine house.”

  Dane blew his breath sharply between his teeth. “God damn, you are a scheming woman, Red Bird.”

  He looked quickly across the stream. A one-horsed buggy with the top raised against the sun was crawling around the bend in the trail beside his corral. A bearded white man was driving. The box behind the seat was piled high with tools—picks, shovels, and drills. The driver glanced briefly at us as he passed, but he did not acknowledge our presence, although both Dane and Red Bird Woman raised their hands in salute.

  “Not even a nod,” Dane said, watching the dust cloud spinning behind the buggy.

  “Who that Veheo?” Red Bird Woman asked.

  “He is the man looking for gold,” John Bear-in-the-Water volunteered.

  “Not gold,” Dane said. “He is looking for coal. When he finds it, others will come and dig up our earth.”

  Red Bird Woman walked over to the row of lodgepoles and rolled three of the longest ones aside. “Where is tie rope, Bear-in-the-Water?”

  “I got it here,” the boy answered.

  “Come on, Dane,” she said. “You help with first three, I’ll do others.”

  57

  IN THE LATE SPRING of 1890 when Dane visited his daughter Amayi’s family, she greeted him with a piece of surprising news. She had recently seen her cousin, Opothle Kingsley. “More than twenty years have passed since we last parted from each other at old Fort Carrothers,” Amayi said, “but we knew each other at first sight.”

  “Creek Mary’s blood,” Dane declared. “I suppose there’s no mistaking it, even in Young Opothle.”

  Opothle had become a Christian minister, the head of a church at Pine Ridge, and he traveled occasionally to other Dakota reservations to preach his beliefs. Amayi had heard his name mentioned as being at the Cheyenne River Agency, and she rode over to see him. Their meeting was brief because she arrived just as Opothle was preparing to travel on to Standing Rock, but he promised to come and visit her on his next circuit, which would be in the autumn.