The Powder River

by Win Blevins

  He stepped outside, stuffed the last few belongings into his saddlebags. They had to leave the wagon, which wouldn’t stand the rough country ahead. They had to leave the tent, which would have given them privacy but was Indian Bureau property. He looked at Elaine. She was perched on her sidesaddle. Though she was a good rider, the sidesaddle seemed …

  Hell, what had he gotten her into? From Boston, the center of civilization, her family, and her way of life, to … what?

  His life. He looked around at his mother and grandmother. The Cheyennes had spent Smith’s whole life getting swamped by the white man. This red-white fighting had even killed his father. And his brother. Now he was throwing his wife into it. Christ, he was scared, and the fear tasted vile in his mouth.

  He swung into his saddle and looked sideways at Elaine. She hung there on the side of her horse in her long skirt that hid the horns her legs used to do the work of riding. To Smith she looked like an old-fashioned daguerreotype of an ideal New England lady. He felt a skin-prickly rush of want for her.

  Calling Eagle clucked, and they moved out.

  Chapter 2

  Elaine looked at Little Wolf’s face in the moonlight, and wondered what he was thinking. Was the chief having second thoughts about what he had done? It was a grave face, blighted by smallpox scars and lined by responsibilities.

  Little Wolf was the Sweet Medicine chief, the carrier of the sacred bundle Sweet Medicine had brought to the Cheyennes, and so first among the four old-man chiefs of the Tsistsistas and the Suhtaio, the two strands of people who camped together and made up the Human Beings. One other of the forty-four was among the Cheyennes fleeing tonight, Morning Star, also called Dull Knife. Elaine thought he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Elaine had worked with the two of them all summer, and thought them extraordinary men, devoted to their people and deserving of genuine respect.

  Elaine, Smith, Lisette, and Calling Eagle waited for the people to come walking stealthily through the darkness. Calling Eagle had told them how Little Wolf and Morning Star threw the gauntlet in council yesterday afternoon, while Smith and Elaine were being wed. They told Miles, the agent, that the people had to go back home—the chiefs had repeated those words all summer. They reminded Miles of the promise made at Red Cloud Agency, that the people could come back north if they didn’t like the southern lands. They spoke in a measured way, regretfully and firmly.

  Miles said, also sadly, that if the Cheyennes tried to leave, the soldiers would drive them back to the agency. As a promise that they would not run off, the agent asked that they turn over ten young men as hostages.

  Ten young men. They didn’t have a hundred men of any age left. Silently appalled, Morning Star said he would speak to the people about it, and left to go to the camp. He knew he was walking out of that council for the last time.

  Camp was temporarily in a valley among some sand hills in a corner of the reservation where the women could dig roots, for they had nothing to eat. Since the army was fearful that the Cheyennes would flee for their homeland, they had horse soldiers and cannon on both sides of the little valley, the far-shooting guns trained down on the quiet lodges, not lodges of fine buffalo hides but of pathetic, ragtag canvas.

  After Morning Star walked out of the talk, Little Wolf made one further request of the agent. To the ears of the people it was a forlorn request: “I have long been a friend of the whites,” he said. “The Great Father told us that he wished no more blood spilled, that we ought to be friends and fight no more. So I do not want any of the ground of the agency made bloody. Only soldiers do that. If you are going to send them after me, I wish you would first let me get a little distance away. Then if you want to fight, I will fight you and we can make the ground bloody on that far place.”

  The people hoped the agent would hear both the friendship and the soul-deep resolution in Little Wolf’s words, would realize that the people knew they might die going home, and faced that prospect with an inner-smiling acceptance.

  The choice was clear: stay in this bad country and die of disease, or strike out for home and live or die like human beings. It was an easy choice. Surely, they thought, if the agent Miles truly understood that, he would not send the soldiers after them—he would leave them alone. Surely. Was he not a man, with human feelings?

  As he spoke those words to the agent, Little Wolf felt their uselessness. Miles was decent and sympathetic, but he didn’t understand. He thought the people should adapt to the new life the white people had chosen for them, farming, school-going, learning new gods, feeding on white-man handouts. He thought they should just forsake their own way of life as a remnant of the past, the way a snake sheds its old skin. Accept life entirely on white terms.

  Little Wolf hid his impatience. Miles had no idea that the Cheyenne people had to live as Cheyennes or not at all. He didn’t know that their way of life had been brought to them from the powers by Sweet Medicine and Buffalo Calf Woman. He didn’t see the importance of fidelity to the sacred arrows and the buffalo hat. So he didn’t realize that once the holy ways were abandoned, the good life gone, pride and honor given up, a Cheyenne could find no joy in living. Little Wolf had to suppress his contempt for such a man.

  The Sweet Medicine chief was glad the people felt these issues so profoundly—they made Little Wolf’s eyes wet with pride. Now they chose to start acting like Tsistsistas and Suhtaio again. They would go to the Powder River country. Or toward it. We will walk north like Tsistsistas and Suhtaio—Human Beings, Little Wolf declared over and over, and if necessary die like Human Beings.

  He added his motto: the only Indian never killed is the Indian never caught.

  That night, as Little Wolf stood afoot beside the mounts of his friend Calling Eagle and her family, he waited with fear and admiration to see the first Human Beings starting on their journey.

  He knew they had to sneak out of their camp. The soldiers and cannons were close, and ready. If they saw the people leaving, they would shoot. So the people would be walking quietly, even the children, and keeping to the moon shadows.

  Back in camp, as Little Wolf had started out ahead, a young man played a song on a love flute, partly to cover the small noises of moccasins on earth and stone, and to make the night seem normal to the soldiers’ ears. The chief thought of the northern Cheyennes creeping up this canyon, young and old, weak and strong, infirm and healthy, many bearing heavy loads. He loved them.

  Little Wolf looked at his old friend Calling Eagle. He wondered if Calling Eagle felt as he did at this probable catastrophe—exhilarated.

  How had they come to such a state?

  The thousand Tsistsistas-Suhtaio led by Little Wolf and Morning Star had come in to Red Cloud Agency a year and a half ago, in the spring of what the white men called 1877. As the soldiers intended, the Indians were starving.

  These Cheyennes had been on the Red Cloud Agency the summer before, but they had gone hungry—the agent at Red Cloud never seemed to have the appropriations promised to the Cheyennes. In 1876 they left the agency for their summer hunt, and barely missed the Custer fight in June. All that summer and all that autumn Little Wolf and Morning Star’s people got chased by the soldiers, just like the Lakotas and Cheyennes who did kill Yellow Hair. Because of the pursuit, they never got to make a proper buffalo hunt, so they spent the winter hungry. In the spring, they considered their empty bellies, and the white man’s promises of food and a reservation in their country, the Powder River country. They came in to Red Cloud Agency.

  That was when they discovered that they had stepped into the web of the veho, their word which meant both “spider” and “white man.” General Crook, whom the Cheyennes fought and admired, argued hard for them to get an agency in Powder River country, but the Great White Father said no. He said these Cheyennes must join their southern relatives at the agency in Indian territory, far to the south.

  Now the northern Cheyennes said no. They knew that country, and didn’t like it. So the officials a
t Red Cloud Agency cut off their rations.

  After a little starvation, the Cheyennes relented. They would go and see the new agency on the Canadian River, on the condition that if they didn’t like it, they could come back. Blue-coated soldiers escorted them on the seventy-day journey to the south, and only three or four dozen Cheyennes slipped away and went back to their homeland, the Powder River country.

  Right away the two old-man chiefs, Morning Star and Little Wolf, saw that the new agency was no good. The southern Cheyennes did not have enough appropriations to feed themselves, and the whites proposed to feed everyone, including nearly a thousand new Indians, without increasing the rations.

  The old-man chiefs went immediately to the agent, Miles, and told him they were going back to Red Cloud Agency before the snow flew. Then the agent said, for the first time, that if the Cheyennes left, the soldiers would drive them back.

  So, said Little Wolf, the promise that we could return if we didn’t like the country of the Canadian River was only a dust devil, gone with the breath that spun the words. So, said Morning Star, the promise was only the bait that drew us into the web of the veho, pronounced “way-ho,” the spider and white man.

  During that winter the people were miserable with hunger. The next summer they began to die of malaria and dysentery, despondency and despair.

  It was sick and dying that Smith found them in the summer of 1878. He had left his people’s country in 1865, the year the War of the Rebellion ended, to go east to Dartmouth College. That had been the last wish of his father, Mac Maclean, a Scots trader who married Smith’s Cheyenne mother and founded a trading post on the Yellowstone River.

  Adam Smith Maclean, who was named after a Scots professor his grand uncle admired, had lived a life nearly as wild as any Cheyenne. True, he had sometimes gone to school in St. Louis. True, he had spent most of his nights at his family’s trading post. But almost every one of his first twenty years he had hunted the buffalo with his mother’s people and slept in his grandfather’s lodge. He had danced the Cheyennes’ dances and sung their songs. He’d dreamed of Cheyenne girls and courted them. In his last year in the West, the year following the massacre of the Cheyennes led by Black Kettle at Sand Creek, he had even gone on the warpath—shed white blood and taken white scalps.

  Sometimes, during his teenage years, one or two young men of the tribe taunted Smith that he was no Cheyenne. His father was a veho. His mother was no true Cheyenne either, but the half-breed daughter of old Charbonneau and an Assiniboin woman who later married into the Cheyenne tribe. Some winters, they added, Smith and his brother Thomas disappeared downriver, all the way to St. Louis, and came back in the moon when the buffalo bulls are rutting with funny clothes and funny ways.

  One of Smith’s grandfathers (the white people would have said grand-uncles), a man who once had a strong vision, asked Smith closely about his dreams. Did Smith dream of enchanted buffalo or messenger magpies? Did the wind words of the grandfathers of the four directions sound in his dreams? Did he ever see painted horses or painted faces? Did he hear power in the sound of running water? Or did he dream of watches and telescopes and books, and the things he spoke of when he came back from St. Louis, railroads and steamboats and houses and especially his favorite subject, this science?

  Smith answered honestly, and told the old man his dreams, which were a coat of all these colors, and more—castles with knights in armor he read of in books, stories of the men who investigated the stars and discovered that the earth circled the sun, and tales of coyote, the trickster of many shapes, and of Sweet Medicine and Buffalo Calf Woman, sometimes all in the same dream. In his recurring dream, he said, he felt himself swimming in the river among all the water creatures, not like a man holding his breath, but comfortable, a native there, quick and graceful in movement. He said he loved flowing water, and heard it constantly in his dreams.

  The old man shook his head in puzzlement and put the pipe away. He didn’t know water medicine, he said. Perhaps if the boy could find someone who did …

  When Smith went to his buffalo robes in his own lodge, he felt uncertain what he was, veho or Cheyenne.

  The next summer Smith and his brother and their Cheyenne comrades joined Red Cloud and Crazy Horse and the other Lakotas and made the white man pay for their blood lust at Sand Creek. And then he knew. When you fight with your people, the dust acrid in your eyes and mouth, the smell of gunpowder and dung and blood rank in your nostrils—when you shed your blood with theirs, and sometimes hold them while they die, and make the enemy die for hurting them—then you are one with them. When Smith went to Dartmouth, he knew he was a Cheyenne.

  He reminded himself all through the thirteen long years of his schooling. He wanted to be a white-man doctor, so he put in his learning time at Dartmouth, and then at Boston Medical College, and rubbed shoulders with white people, and learned the ways of their drawing rooms, and sometimes dallied with their women. Occasionally white men spoke to remind him that in blood he was three-quarters white, and although his skin was dark, his reddish hair marked him a veho. But he always wore two objects to remind them, and himself, that he was a Cheyenne. Underneath his shirt he kept tied to the inside of his right biceps a gift from his mother Lisette, the shell of a mussel, traded to the Powder River country from the western ocean, cobalt outside, silver inside, and to Smith reeking of magic. And he wore a small deerskin pouch, its strings braided into his long, reddish hair, its contents small seeds given to him by his other mother, Annemarie. To wear this pouch he had to stay away from white-man barbers—he left his hair long, and free.

  By these gestures he helped keep his home country as the place of his heart during his years of exile. Like any exile, he dreamed of the time he would be able to go home. Go home to his mothers and the family trading post on Powder River, where the Little Powder flowed into it. Go home and help his people. That was the reason his father, who loved the Cheyennes, sent him east—to get some of the white man’s knowledge to put to use on behalf of the Cheyennes, and all Indian people. Smith’s gift to them would be the white man’s power of healing.

  He saw no contradiction in bringing a white-man gift to the Cheyennes. He believed what his father had believed: The Cheyennes would take from white culture what was best in it—principally the beauty of science—and leave what was repugnant. For white people were inferior to Cheyennes in many ways: they often killed one another, which Cheyennes did not tolerate. They admired men who acquired wealth—Cheyennes admired those who gave it away. They had a religion of doctrines which affected their lives but little—Cheyennes had a half-spoken but powerful sense of the sacred that pervaded their daily lives and directed their steps almost without their being aware of it.

  Smith was eager to get home and graft his learning onto the tree of the Cheyenne way.

  But when it was time to go home, Dr. Adam Smith Maclean got a sharp disappointment. The Cheyennes were not in Powder River country, where he had grown up, and where the family trading post now was, moved by his mothers from up the Yellowstone. The Cheyennes had been moved by force to Indian territory, fifteen hundred miles to the south. His mother Lisette was there, his father’s second wife, where she had followed her new husband, Jim Sykes. His biological mother, Annemarie, ran the trading post in the north country. Some of his relatives were still in the north. All the rivers and mountains and prairies he remembered and loved from his childhood and youth were there. That was where he belonged, where the Cheyenne people belonged.

  Nevertheless, he went to Kansas City by rail and to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency on the North Fork of the Canadian River in Indian territory by stage and horseback. He went because one of his mothers and his grandmother were there, and because the Indian Bureau told him to go. On the way he mourned. His family divided, his people uprooted, the land he was attached to lost—it was the fate the white man had brought to the Cheyennes.

  And there, in a country he disliked, which had only slow, muddy rivers, where t
he water and the air were making his people sick and despair was killing them, he had the great good luck of his life—he met Elaine Cummings.

  Not for the first time. He had come across her two or three times in Cambridge and Boston, at proper social events, and admired her, and heard her spoken of admiringly as a poetess. But he had not gotten to know her. With the quirkiness of life that he always noticed and delighted in, she was now the teacher at his people’s agency, the person who would bring knowledge to the Cheyenne and Arapaho children. She had even created the job. Since knowledge was what Smith believed his people needed, he thought her the most important person at the agency.

  Therefore he believed in Elaine Cummings. After two months’ acquaintance, he discovered that he was also in love with her ass-over-tea-kettle.

  During those two months, he saw that his people’s circumstances at the Canadian River agency were desperate. They were dying of dysentery, for they were not accustomed to the water. They were dying of malaria, and he had no quinine to give them. They were suffering from the heat. They were starving.

  So Smith went to the agent, Miles, a reasonable man, and since he was a Quaker an honest man, and had a talk. Smith didn’t trust those damned councils anyway. Half the interpreters mistranslated what the Indians said, and the other half converted it into a kind of phony biblical poetry, and there was nothing poetic about starvation, malaria, and diarrhea. Smith told Miles bluntly what had to be done. The people had to get out of the hot southern climate, and they had to get back to water their innards were used to. The agent agreed with Smith: It was essential.

  That talk was why Smith did not expect the scratch on his door in the dark hours on his wedding night. Now Miles brandished his troops. And Smith sat his horse here in the predawn darkness, with his new wife, both of them fugitives.

  Three hours ago they had been making love for the first time. Now they were running pell-mell through the dark across a prairie, headed home. Angry words tumbled wildly in Smith’s mind, words about starving the hungry, words about marching people who could barely walk, words about fighting the U.S. Army empty-handed. He couldn’t keep track of the words—they were making him crazy. He forced himself to study Elaine’s face, let himself wonder how she was taking it. She smiled a wan smile at him.