The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  “My old man sold two for her,” John Bear-in-the-Water said proudly.

  “You would not think a Crow do that, would you?” Red Bird Woman said, winking at me.

  Dane pointed across the plain to a horsewoman riding toward us. “There she comes,” he said. “I can tell the way she rides, they gave her no help for the hospital.”

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  JOHN BEAR-IN-THE-WATER trotted on foot to meet her, and I could hear her contralto voice returning his greeting as he reached for the halter of her pony. He led the pony up the slope toward the tipi skeleton, and they were etched against the sky like one of those old medieval tapestries showing a hostler leading the caparisoned steed of a knight’s lady or a princess in from the hunt.

  She dropped easily from the saddle, adjusted her divided riding skirt, and stood looking at the tipi frame while Dane and Red Bird Woman moved toward her.

  “So you’ve started the tipi,” she said. Red Bird Woman embraced her, speaking softly in Cheyenne.

  “No,” she said. “They refused to help.”

  “You had to find out,” Dane said. “You’ll have to start in the cabin.”

  “You can’t give up your cabin,” she answered him strongly.

  “I’ll live in the tipi,” he said. “It’s warmer in winter and cooler in summer.”

  “And easier to keep clean,” Red Bird Woman added.

  “No,” she said. “For a hospital we’ll need beds and instruments and medicines. Cost too much maka-eta.”

  “We get medicine house things same way we make you a doctor,” Red Bird Woman said. “Everybody share.”

  “I got six steers,” John Bear-in-the-Water said. “I will sell all of them for you. My old man will sell two.”

  “Nohetto! Now then!” Red Bird Woman’s hands gripped Mary Amayi’s shoulders. “If Crows help like that, think what Cheyennes will do.”

  Dane turned her toward me, whispering something. Noticing me for the first time, she smiled, and I could feel an impulse of life, that driving force I had felt the day I saw her at Teddy Roosevelt’s luncheon in the White House. In some romantic fashion, I suppose, I thought of her as the essence of America, the Lady of Cofitachequi and Hernando De Soto, Muskogean blood and Spanish blood, and the Long Warrior and the blood of the Ani-Yun-Wiya, the Real People, the magic of the Cherokees mixed with that of the Tall People, the Cheyennes, and the unnamed Frenchman, the voyageur, whom I saw as a young man of noble blood bearing a magnificent nose, fugitive from the French Revolution, and then the Minneconjous of the Teton Sioux, the mighty Dakotas. Warriors they all had been, male and female, warrior survivors. What was she, if she was not America?

  I felt her strong hand in mine and looked into her eyes and knew the heritage of all those strains of blood, and when she drew away I saw the Danish coin, larger than I had imagined it to be, silvery against the tawny risings of her breasts. She was Creek Mary, the reason for my being there, the sun lowering behind her reminding me that I was only a sojourner there, an outsider, and I said something about the train I must board.

  “You ride in wagon to Dundee station with me and John Bear-in-the-Water,” Red Bird Woman said.

  I could have stayed forever. I wanted to see the unfolding of the dream, but this was not my world to live in.

  When I looked back from the wagon seat, waving, her hand was resting on her grandfather’s shoulder, and he was smiling with his thin lips closed, the ends of his smile extending into the wrinkles of his aging face. And then the wagon jolted over a hump in the land and there was only the framework of the tipi sinking slowly out of view.

  The wagon seat was not wide enough for the three of us, and John Bear-in-the-Water crouched forward of Red Bird Woman’s wide girth, slapping the lines and urging the team to move faster. “He want to get back to Mary Amayi in a big hurry,” she said, blinking at me.

  “I would be in a hurry, too,” I replied.

  “I glad you there today.”

  “Why?”

  “Easier for me to make Dane give in for tipi with you there.” Her body shook against me as she laughed. We were already nearing the brown-stained railroad depot. The wagon swung with the turning of the road, the wheels spinning up dust. John Bear-in-the-Water sawed at the lines, whoa-ing the team to a jarring halt. I reached behind the seat for my bag, and stepped down, thanking them for the ride. “See you sometime,” he said. Red Bird Woman said nothing. She just looked at me with her young-old eyes that had seen more pain and grief and injustice and hate and love and farewells than I could imagine. As the wagon started rolling away, she turned and placed her fingers on her lips and blew me a Veheo kiss. I returned it.

  From the rear the depot appeared to be deserted, but when I turned the corner onto the cindered platform I found a man seated on an iron bench facing the tracks. He looked up at me in surprise. “By God, you startled me,” he said. “Seldom see a white man around here.”

  He was the bearded man who earlier in the afternoon had passed Dane’s cabin without acknowledging our presence, the man who Dane said was looking for coal so that miners could come and dig up the Indians’ earth.

  “Going to catch the eastbound?” he asked.

  I told him that I was.

  “I’m waiting for supplies coming on the baggage car,” he explained. “You one of the ranchers hereabouts?”

  I told him I was a traveling newspaperman from Washington.

  “Roving correspondent, eh? Not much going on here, is there? Nothing but Indians. I’m a geologist. Work for a coal company.”

  “What are the prospects?” I asked.

  “God, this country is rich in coal, close to the surface, easy to mine, just scrape the worthless earth away. Most of it’s on reservation land, though. The government gave the land to the Indians because it looks so damned worthless, arid and scrubby. But there are fortunes underneath when the time comes to mine it. Someday we’ll have to move these Indians out of here. They wouldn’t know what to do with coal, any more than they know how to do anything else for themselves. They stand in the way of progress, you know. Got all these strange notions about land being sacred—”

  The hoarse whistle of the approaching train overrode his words, the locomotive bearing down upon us, its black smoke pluming across the tall grass. Somehow it metamorphosed into the drawing described to me by Dane of his daughter Amayi’s calendar depiction of an Iron Horse breathing fire and smoke through its teeth. The cars swept by us, the geologist rising from the bench and clumping angrily along the cinders in his high-laced miner’s boots toward the distant baggage car.

  A blue-uniformed conductor dropped down from the first passenger car and motioned me to board. Before I fell into a plush seat and faced eastward, the train was moving again. Through the dingy window I watched the daylight fade, and then I quickly pressed my forehead against the glass. For a moment a line of low irregular hills seemed to shape themselves into the silhouette of a woman supine, gazing up at the indigo sky, Creek Mary’s Sleeping Woman materializing on the Western Plain. It could have been a trick of the light and the motion of the train, or some magic in the landscape of Montana.

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to express sincerest thanks to David Gerber for his initial encouragement, continued amiable goading, and good counsel during the writing of this book.

  A Biography of Dee Brown

  Dorris Alexander “Dee” Brown (1908–2002) was the author of many fiction and nonfiction books about the American West and the Civil War. He is best remembered for his celebrated chronicle Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which is widely credited with exposing the systematic destruction of American Indian tribes to a world audience.

  Born in Alberta, Louisiana, Brown grew up in the small town of Stephens in Ouachita County, Arkansas. His father died when he was five years old, and he was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, who proved instrumental in igniting his interest in reading at an early age. His grandmother told him stories from the
Civil War, as well as tales of Davy Crockett, the frontier hero who had been an acquaintance of her father’s. A regard for Pawnee baseball pitcher Moses Yellowhorse, as well as Brown’s friendship with an Indian peer, helped fuel his lifelong interest in the plight and history of American Indians.

  As an adolescent, Brown was drawn to literature, particularly the works of John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Jack London, and Robert Louis Stevenson. His interest in history was reinforced when a teacher introduced him to the expedition of Lewis and Clark. He was also drawn to journalism, and published his first story at the age of fifteen in a neighborhood tabloid he started with friends. Brown worked as both a reporter and a printer before enrolling at Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas), where he met his future wife, Sally Stroud. Brown later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in library science from George Washington University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, respectively. In the years between these studies, during World War II, he was drafted to into the U.S. Army and served as a librarian in the Department of Agriculture, a position that gave him frequent access to the National Archives.

  Brown began publishing magazine articles in the 1930s, followed by a novel in 1942. His writing career took off in 1948, with the publication of the first of three books of frontier history he had co-authored with Martin Schmitt, titled Fighting Indians of the West. Legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins oversaw the series.

  Brown went on to publish more than thirty books during his lifetime. His novels, which unite a love of storytelling and high adventure with rigorous historical accuracy, include Action at Beecher Island, Cavalry Scout, Conspiracy of Knaves, Killdeer Mountain, The Girl from Fort Wicked, and Creek Mary’s Blood, a notable saga about five generations of one American Indian family. Among his extensively researched works of nonfiction are The Gentle Tamers, about the role of women in the Old West; Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, a history of the beginnings of the railroads; and The Year of the Century: 1876, a look at America at the time of its first centennial. Brown’s most famous title is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). During years of research, Brown compiled eyewitness accounts, tribal histories, and other archived documents, synthesizing them into a record of the deadly frontier conflicts in the late nineteenth century from an American Indian perspective. The book has been translated into more than thirty languages over the years, and continues to be translated for new audiences today. It remains one of the definitive works on American history, as it revealed a devastating side to western expansion.

  Brown died in 2002 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was ninety-four and at work on a new novel that was to be a sequel to The Way to Bright Star, which he published at the age of 90.

  Infant Dee Brown with his half-siblings, Mildred and Daniel Brown, around 1908.

  A young Brown in Arkansas, before 1920. (Photo courtesy of the Dee Brown LLC.)

  Brown in the early 1920s. (Photo courtesy of the Dee Brown LLC.)

  Brown’s college photo, taken in the 1920s.

  Brown in the late 1920s in Wilson, Arkansas.

  Brown with his mother, Lula Brown (left), and wife, Sally Stroud (right), in Washington, DC. in the 1930s.

  A portrait of Brown taken during World War II.

  Brown in the 1940s with his dog, Ivan, most likely taken in Maryland.

  A studio shot of Brown from around 1950.

  Brown with his grandson, Nicolas Wolfe, in 1972. He dedicated Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Nicolas. (Photo courtesy of Linda Luise Brown.)

  Brown in the 1970s, in a photo taken by friend Rueben Thomas.

  Brown in 1981, after the publication of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. (Photo courtesy of Linda Luise Brown.)

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This collection includes a work of fiction, in which names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee copyright © 1970 by Dee Brown

  The Fetterman Massacre copyright © 1962 by Dee Brown

  Creek Mary’s Blood copyright © 1980 by Dee Brown

  Cover design by Itzy Ramirez

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4958-0

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  DEE BROWN

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