by Dee Brown
“When Opothle returned he told me as gently as he could of the hideous field of death, snowswept, with frozen bodies lying as they had fallen, of how they found many women and children who had been wounded but were able to crawl for more than a mile up gullies and ravines only to die in the blizzard. Several small children found their way to cabins down the creek and were taken in by Oglala families. They are still there, most of them, grown up now. The American government never made any move to help those children who had been orphaned by its army, leaving them to be fed, clothed, and sheltered by the poor people of the reservation.
“Opothle found Bull Bear and my two grandsons all lying facedown, frozen beside a frozen horse, as if they had been hiding there when the bullets struck them.
“I have seen that place many times in my dreams, and have heard many stories of how and why the shooting started. The soldiers say the Minneconjous fired first, and the few Minneconjous who survived say the soldiers fired first. Mary Amayi does not remember anything but the noise of guns and the stench of powder smoke, of her mother running with her up a little ravine, and then both of them falling to the ground and lying there a long time while the guns kept firing. After a while her mother raised up and took the Danish coin from her neck and put it around Mary Amayi’s neck. Then Mary Amayi saw blood soaking through her mother’s dress. A long time later a wagon stopped beside them and some soldiers picked them up and put them in the wagon. I am thankful to those soldiers, but if the soldiers had not been there, no one would have died.
“I know that my warrior people would never fire guns to provoke armed soldiers while their own women and children, the seed of the tribe, are in a place of danger. The whites say the warriors were wearing ghost shirts and believed the soldiers’ bullets could not harm them, but only a few, maybe none, of Spotted Elk’s people were wearing ghost shirts. Most of them were running away from the turmoil of the Ghost Dancers, the frightened white settlers, and the soldiers—their urgency increased because of the assassination of Sitting Bull. Perhaps some believed that a new earth was coming, but they never saw the promises of Kicking Bear’s messiah, the sweeping waves of sweet grass, clear running water and trees, and great herds of buffalo and wild horses. Instead they saw the only thing your people have ever given my people—pain and desolation and death.
“The Maker of Breath left to me only Mary Amayi, the last of Creek Mary’s red blood, and when Opothle and his wife out of kindness offered to take her into their family, I refused them with such rudeness that I fear they have never forgiven me.”
“He was like old she-cougar with dried dugs,” Red Bird Woman said. “Shielding the last of its young.” She took down one of the long lodgepoles she had lifted into place. “Door pole too long,” she announced. “John Bear-in-the-Water, go get Dane’s ax.”
The framework of poles was a black conical skeleton, a promise against the afternoon sky.
“I took Mary Amayi to the Blackrobes’ school,” Dane said, “but she would run away and come back here, I don’t know how many miles, no matter what the weather. The last time she ran away, two of the sisters came out here to talk to me about her. They said she would have nothing to do with other people, young or old, that she was interested only in animals. She had told them she could talk to animals and that animals talked to her. They wanted me to give them permission to keep her locked up so she could not run away again. I would not do so. Mary Amayi stayed with me and we talked with the coyotes every night.
“In the daytime she wandered up and down this stream, talking with the beavers, I suppose, and the birds and jackrabbits. One day she found a young eagle with a broken wing and brought it home. I thought the eagle would die surely, but she mended its wing and found food for it, and one morning she brought it up here, right here on this little rise, and turned it loose. It circled and soared into the sun, and for days afterward Mary Amayi sang about the eagle and its freedom.
“One thing she could not bear, and that was the sound of a gun firing. Even the smell of gunpowder smoke would set her to trembling. One evening I saw several antelopes feeding in the willows up there along the stream. I took my rifle and shot one, and when I went back in the cabin she was lying on the floor, holding her hands over her ears, crying and calling her mother’s name. After that I did no more shooting anywhere near the place when she was here.
“The next year Red Bird Woman helped me persuade her to go to the contract school. She lived with Red Bird and her sister, nearby the school, and she liked the teacher, who knew a great deal about animals and plants. Sometimes when she came to visit me, she would ask me to tell her what I knew about the leaves and roots of plants that healed animals and people. So I told her about the roots of beggar’s-lice and wild senna, the juice of milkweed and skullcap, the leaves of ferns and tassel flowers, and what they would heal. But most of these were medicine plants that Creek Mary told me about when I was a boy in the old Cherokee Nation, and they do not grow in this country.”
“I told her about balsamweed for loose kidneys,” Red Bird Woman said, “and black root for snakebites. My sister told some others, I forget what they are.”
John Bear-in-the-Water returned with the ax, and Red Bird Woman showed him where to chop the end of the lodgepole. “In one of my letters to Opothle I wrote about Mary Amayi and her healing plants,” Dane went on, “and I suppose Opothle must have read the letter to his stepmother, Saviah. Anyway, Saviah wrote me to bring my granddaughter to Pine Ridge so that she could teach her to be a healer. When I told Mary Amayi about Dr. Saviah Kingsley and the invitation, she could hardly wait for summer to come.
“That was six or seven years ago, but my old bones ached all night after the first day’s ride to Pine Ridge. After that I was all right. Red Bird Woman made Mary Amayi a buckskin riding dress for the horseback journey, and when I would look at her riding along the wild trails through the Black Hills she was so much like Sweet Medicine Girl when I first knew her that I felt I was a young man again.
“Mary Amayi stayed through the summer with Saviah, and when I went to bring her home I found that she had suddenly grown into a young woman, proud and smiling and beautiful to look upon. What she was proudest of was an old medical saddlebag filled with vials and a kit of surgical instruments, a present from Saviah. ‘Mary Amayi knows all that I know about healing, and more,’ Saviah said. ‘I would trust her with my life.’
“After we returned home, Mary Amayi told everyone that she was a healer, but she was so young the Cheyennes would let her treat only their animals at first—sick dogs, horses with rubbed sores, and steers that had got their hides cut on barbed wire. While they were building the railroad through here, she found a fawn lying by the tracks with a broken leg. She begged me to take my wagon down there and bring the fawn back to the cabin. I told her we ought to put the fawn out of its misery, but she made me help her strap it down so she could put splints on its leg, and damned if she didn’t heal that fawn. Kept it in the corral for a while and then turned it loose with four good legs. Everybody around here knew about that fawn, and when one of Buffalo Horn’s little boys caught his foot in a steel trap, they brought him over here to Mary Amayi. Some of the boy’s bones were crushed and the cuts were deep, and after she did everything she knew to do, she made Buffalo Horn take him to Miles City. The doctor there said the little boy’s foot was fixed just right, and sure enough in a week or so he was hopping around on it. After that, well, everybody around here with hurts and ailments was coming to see Mary Amayi. Old Bear-in-the-Water, John’s father, was the first of the Crow ranchers to come. Broke a splinter off in his hand and the flesh was all swollen up purple, driving him crazy with pain. She got the splinter out and used some of Saviah’s medicine, and the swelling went right down.
“Must’ve been around that time that Mr. Teddy Roosevelt, who is now your President, came riding up to my cabin early one afternoon in company with a pale-faced young man some years younger than he was. I’d never seen either one of
them before, and at first I thought they had got themselves lost and were going to ask me for directions. They were mounted on splendid riding horses and were leading two spare ponies loaded with tents and all kinds of expensive trappings, rich shining leather and fancy gunstocks and such.
“Mr. Roosevelt was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a fringed jacket, short leather leggings, and a big belt with a sheathed hunting knife on one hip and a holstered pistol on the other. ‘How!’ he called out in a high rasping voice, raising one hand the way some whites think they are supposed to do when greeting Indians.
“ ‘Good afternoon,’ I said to him.
“ ‘Are you Dane?’ he asked.
“When I told him I was, he dismounted and pulled a long brown envelope out of his jacket. He handed it to me, naming my lawyer friend in Miles City as the sender.
“As I soon came to find out from the letter, the pale-faced young man with Mr. Roosevelt was a Mr. Jefferies, a New York lawyer who was related to my friend in Miles City. Mr. Roosevelt had learned from my friend that the Cheyennes had a small herd of buffalo somewhere along Tongue River, and he had come down to ask permission to kill one.
“ ‘I want only the head,’ he said. He spoke very fast, telling me how eager he was to mount a buffalo head on the wall of his house in New York. ‘A wild buffalo,’ he said, showing his big white teeth. ‘Imagine, Jefferies, the head of a wild buffalo in my study. I thought they were all gone, except for the tame ones in parks and zoos.’
“I explained to him that the buffalo were the property of the Cheyennes, that the herd was very small, and the tribe allowed only a few to be killed each year. ‘But you know the chief,’ he insisted, his small eyes piercing me through the thick glass of his spectacles. ‘You will intercede for me.’
“There was nothing to be done but ride with Mr. Roosevelt and his friend over to see Two Moon. I did not expect Two Moon to allow them anywhere near the Cheyennes’ secret herd on the Lame Deer, and he did not. What he did was send some of the young men down there to drive out a worthless old bull they were going to kill anyway. The young men herded the old bull up into a blind coulee, and then Mr. Roosevelt—after paying Two Moon about five times what it would’ve cost him for a good steer—rode out to the coulee and got his buffalo head.
“I never expected to see Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Jefferies again, but after camping out somewhere that night they came up to my cabin soon after daybreak and called me outside. Mr. Roosevelt wanted me to go with them to the Bighorn Mountains. He craved a grizzly bear’s head to put on his wall with the buffalo head. I told him I had some beef cattle to look after and could not go. I suppose if I’d known what a big man he was, soon to be the President of the United States, I’d have gone along anyway, but he looked like any other Veheo to me.
“He asked me if I could draw him a map of the main trails into the Bighorns, and after I did so, he and Mr. Jefferies rode off toward the Tongue Valley, leading their spare ponies loaded with all those fine leather trappings and saddlebags and tents and the buffalo head wrapped in canvas.
“Two or three days passed and they’d gone out of my thoughts, and then one rainy morning Mary Amayi called me to the window. Like ghosts out of the gray mists and sheets of rain blown by the wind, two men in pommel slickers came riding slowly up the road from Dundee. When they turned in toward my cabin, I opened the door to invite them out of the wet.
“Mr. Roosevelt, who was in the lead, called out to me: ‘Where’s the nearest doctor?’
“ ‘A long day’s ride,’ I answered him.
“ ‘Don’t they have an infirmary and a doctor on the reservation?’ he asked.
“ ‘No. The Cheyennes come here to see my granddaughter. She’s our healer.’
“He did not know what to make of that, but he decided the first thing he should do was get his friend Jefferies out of the driving rain even if he had to bring him inside an Indian’s cabin. Mr. Jefferies was leaning forward in his saddle, his wet face ashen as death, his lips pressed tight together. On the day before, his horse had shied at some darting animal, Mr. Roosevelt explained, unseating Mr. Jefferies. He had taken a bad fall into some jagged boulders and broken a leg. They had been riding all night through fog and rain.
“We brought Mr. Jefferies inside, and Mary Amayi spread a blanket for him on the floor in front of the fireplace. ‘What a neat, clean place,’ Mr. Roosevelt said, looking around as if he’d expected to find us living amidst grime and squalor. He watched Mary Amayi slip a thermometer into his friend’s mouth. Then with her surgical scissors she cut away the lower part of Mr. Jefferies’s trousers, so that we could see the broken leg. The shinbone appeared to be twisted to one side, and the flesh was badly discolored. ‘I can ease his pain,’ Mary Amayi said, looking at Mr. Roosevelt, ‘with your permission.’
“ ‘Not with some kind of mumbo jumbo and black magic,’ he cried.
“She went and brought one of the vials of medicine that Saviah had given her, and he peered at the label through his thick glasses. ‘You know the dosage?’ he asked suspiciously, and then he showed the vial to Mr. Jefferies. ‘Let her treat me,’ Jefferies moaned.
“ ‘She’s a full-blood Indian,’ Mr. Roosevelt said.
“ ‘Let her treat me,’ Jefferies repeated in a piteous tone.
“We then had to decide who was to ride for the doctor. Mr. Roosevelt wanted to go, but he also was afraid to leave his friend in the power of two full-blood Indians, one of whom he still suspected of being a female witch doctor. So he gave me his rain slicker and I rode for the doctor. By midmorning I was out of the storm and under clear skies, and late the next day, after some hard riding, the doctor and I reached the cabin.
“We found Mr. Jefferies sitting up in my bed, drinking soup from a bowl that Mary Amayi was holding for him. Mr. Roosevelt was frisking about, showing his big teeth in a grin, and bragging about how he and Mary Amayi had set Mr. Jefferies’s broken shinbone. The doctor had to have a look, of course. He scissored off the bandages and splints and felt around with his fingers. ‘Damned good,’ he said, and started rebandaging the leg.
“ ‘It’s bully,’ Mr. Roosevelt said. ‘Bully!’
“Well, they stayed in the cabin another day or two, and then Mr. Roosevelt hired Old Bear-in-the-Water to haul Mr. Jefferies up to Miles City in a wagon, lined and upholstered with blankets and buffalo robes. I could see that Mr. Jefferies did not want to leave Mary Amayi. With his big pale-blue eyes he kept looking at her the way a calf looks at a mother cow. He kissed her hand and promised that he would remember her until the day he died. ‘You will hear from me,’ he said as we loaded him into the wagon.
“And we did hear from him, some weeks afterward, a long letter from Mr. Jefferies informing us that upon his recommendation Columbia Medical College was admitting Mary Amayi as a trial student at the beginning of its next term. The costs of her journey east and all expenses while in attendance would be borne by him, Mr. Jefferies wrote. At first, Mary Amayi said she had no intention of going east to a medical school and leaving her people without a healer, but soon I could tell that she was thinking hard about the matter. One day she asked me what I thought my grandmother Creek Mary would have done if she’d had a chance to go to a medical school and become a real doctor.
“ ‘If she wanted to become a doctor,’ I replied, ‘she would go even if it meant leaving her people.’
“ ‘But she would return to her people afterward,’ Mary Amayi said. ‘If I become a medical doctor I would not need to send anyone to Miles City. I could have a hospital on the reservation.’
“ ‘All right,’ I told her. ‘If you want to become a doctor, then go.’
“She was still troubled in her mind about something, however, and after a day or so she let me know what it was. Red Bird Woman was over here that day, and Mary Amayi started talking about Mr. Jefferies and the medical college. She wanted to be a doctor, she said, but she could not bear the thought of being indebted to a Veheo, not even a kind young ma
n like Mr. Jefferies.
“Red Bird Woman kept quiet while Mary Amayi was talking, but she was nodding her head and whispering: ‘Nihini, nihini.’ And then she said: ‘Your granddaughter is a wise one, Sanaki.’”
Red Bird Woman placed the shortened lodgepole into place and turned to face us. “That Veheo try to buy Mary Amayi,” she said. “Like that evil one, Belcourt, bought me from the Apaches.”
“Mr. Jefferies was not like Belcourt,” Dane said.
“All same, he try to buy your granddaughter.” She put her hands on her wide hips and frowned at him. “You too thickheaded to see, Sanaki. So I have to show you how we Cheyennes send Mary Amayi to doctor school.” She turned her back on him to examine the tipi frame again.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
Dane shaded his eyes against the lowering sun to look toward the west. “Everybody gave something,” he said. “The women made moccasins and necklaces and took them to Miles City to sell and trade. They sold all their old buffalo robes. After the trains started running through here, the children sold beads to the passengers through the coach windows.”
“They sold beads to white people?” I asked. “Glass beads?”
“The boys sold arrowheads and arrows,” John Bear-in-the-Water said. “Sometimes the train would start up before they gave us money. We would run along on the cinders beside the train until it was going too fast for us, and the mean ones would laugh at us and keep our arrows and not give us money.”
“Little girls sold their dolls same way,” Red Bird Woman said. “But most money for Mary Amayi come from beef cattle.”
Dane laughed. “That’s the truth. Red Bird went to everybody who was raising cows and threatened them until they sold one beef for Mary Amayi.”