by Drury, Bob
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1. The last are a single tribe, but differentiated by one branch’s substitution of the letter “D” for “L”; these were also known as Tetons, which translates roughly as “Allies.” This is only a dialectical difference, not a political one. Various Sioux political subdivisions are split to this day over the pronunciation of “Lakota,” “Dakota,” and “Nakota,” but they all consider themselves part of the same tribe. For the purpose of narrative cohesion, we will refer to the Oglalas, Brules, Hunkpapas, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Blackfeet Sioux—not to be confused with the Blackfeet mountain tribe—as “Lakota.”
2. The Siouwan word Oglala roughly translates as “scattered peoples” or “divided peoples.” The name Brule—from brûlé, meaning burnt in French—was probably bestowed on the group by late-seventeenth-century fur traders mistranslating “burnt thighs” from Siouwan dialect, although some linguists give the literal meaning of the word as “stinky feet.”
3. The Sans Arcs were said to have acquired their name after following the order of one of their hermaphrodite priests to lay aside their bows and arrows while he performed a sacred ceremony. In the middle of this rite enemies attacked, routing the weaponless tribe.
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THE BLACK HILLS AND BEYOND
Today on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation the descendants of Red Cloud tell a story, probably apocryphal but powerful and perhaps steeped in some greater truth. It is about a chance meeting in Washington between a resentful Red Cloud and an Army officer who had served on the frontier. Red Cloud, by then a great Lakota Chief, had already driven the Bluecoats from Sioux territory, burned their forts, and secured the Black Hills for his people. He had then been persuaded, in 1870, to travel to Washington, where he assumed he would arrive as a dignitary. But the U.S. government had an ulterior motive.
With the Montana mines nearly played out, old rumors of gold in the Black Hills had begun to simmer again, like water coming to a boil. As far back as 1823 the Bible-thumping mountain man Jedediah Smith had reported great veins of gold running through the hills, but Smith was killed by Comanche on the Cimarron soon afterward, and no one was certain exactly where he had seen the ore. Given the size of the range, any exploratory expedition to discover America’s next great strike would have to be fairly large—large enough to attract the Indians’ notice. The politicians and generals hoped that on the long journey east Red Cloud would be intimidated by the size, strength, and modernity of the nation. They wanted him to think twice before fomenting a second war over any white intrusion into his territory.
As the tale goes, one evening Red Cloud attended a White House reception given by President Ulysses S. Grant, and found himself in conversation with the bitter officer. Trying to explain the mystical hold that Paha Sapa had on his people, he told the officer, “My ancestors’ bones lie in the Black Hills.”
“Horseshit,” the officer replied. “Your people have been there no more than a couple of generations. They come from Minnesota, and you were born in Nebraska. You took that land from the Crows. And do you know why you took that land from the Crows? Because you could.
“And do you know why we will take that land from you? Because we can.”
It is said that years later, as an old man, Red Cloud recounted this exchange to his lifelong campfire companion Sam Deon, a white trapper and trader who became the conduit through which the great chief told his life story. What the officer would never have been able to understand, Red Cloud told Deon, was how in the time before time began, the goddess Ite, the mother of the four winds in Sioux myth, conspired with the trickster god Inktomi to create the “Buffalo nation” of Siouan peoples. Together these deities delivered the Sioux nation up from a subterranean netherworld and onto the surface of an earth teeming with game. And what portal did the gods choose for this deliverance? The mystical “breathing” Wind Cave of the Black Hills. This, Red Cloud said, was the reason why the Sioux revere the mountain range.
In reality the Wind Cave of the Black Hills is a 132-mile series of honeycombed underground tunnels composed of thin, calcite fins—one of the longest caverns in the world. Because of its deep passageways and the smallness of its only mouth, the Wind Cave reacts inversely to outside air pressures. Thus it seems to “exhale” when the outside air pressure is low, and to “inhale” when the pressure is high. Red Cloud and his people believed that the ancient gods delivered their ancestors from this cave. Today, standing before the cavern’s eight-by-ten-foot entrance, one still gets the sense that the cave is alive and “breathing.” And though no one will ever know for certain who was the first Sioux to “discover” the Black Hills, the Oglala Winter Count of 1775–76 depicts a Head Man named Standing Bull feeling the breath of the Wind Cave the summer before America’s Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.
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By the late 1700s the Lakota, led by the Oglalas and Brules, had pushed farther and farther west across the South Dakota prairie. As the tall grass shortened to sparse sedge and greasewood and finally disappeared altogether across tracts like the Badlands, the lush slopes of the Black Hills swelling on the western horizon must have indeed appeared a godsend. It was also around this time that the pioneering Oglalas and Brules ceased their annual treks back to Minnesota to exchange robes and hides for weapons. Sensing a captive and untapped market, British merchants—now outnumbering the French on the North American continent by four to one—established a new location for the annual trade fair on the Great Bend of the Missouri near its confluence with the James River.
When not fighting rival tribes, the Lakota became, in a sense, middlemen between the English traders to the northeast and the Plains Indians to the west and south. They were careful to restrict the flow of bartered goods to the white man’s foods and his ribbons, his blankets and glass beads, while keeping for themselves his flintlocks, ammunition, and steel knives as well as iron kettles, which could be broken apart to make arrowheads. Whenever possible the Lakota bundled the European goods to exchange with the horse tribes for mustangs, the most prized commodity on the Plains. But by now their warlike reputation preceded them, and their rivals were not naive. The animals remained hard to come by. So despite their steady accumulation of arms, the Sioux were still on foot: slow, plodding travelers, lugging whatever belongings their women, children, and dog travois could carry. And then, seemingly out of the blue, they acquired their first pony herds.
Fossil remains attest to the presence of prehistoric protohorses on the North American prairie until the end of the Pleistocene epoch, 10,000 years ago. The earliest of these animals had toes instead of hooves and were the size of foxes. Succeeding iterations grew as large as collies. But, like the much larger mammoths and camels that also once roamed the Plains, this animal went extinct, and it was not until the Spanish introduced the modern horse onto the continent in the early 1500s that the stone canyons of the western hemisphere again echoed with thundering hooves. Despite the images carved into our subconscious by Hollywood Westerns, all American Indians, from Inuit to Iroquois to Inca, went on foot before encountering Europeans. Moreover, by one of history’s chance quirks the breed introduced to the New World by the conquistadores was ideally suited to its new environment, and the Lakotas’ extraordinary knack for taming and breeding the animal was an epochal moment in the timeline of the tribe and the American West.
Unlike the hulking, grain-fed steeds hitched to carts and plows across the middle and upper regions of Europe and ridden into battle from the Roncevaux Pass to Bosworth Field, the fleet Spanish mustang traced its lineage to animals that had once roamed the arid steppes of Central Asia. The breed took centuries to make its way to southern Europe via the Moorish invasions of Iberia, and along that journey it commingled with similar desert horses from the Middle East and North Africa to become a self-sufficient, intelligent animal quite at home in the dry, dusty climate of the Andalusian plain and, later, the North American West. The smallish mustang, usua
lly no taller than five feet from hoof to shoulder, was easy to break and able to travel great distances without water. It prospered in the high, dry flatlands of Mexico, thriving on the spare clumps of grass, shrubs, and even weeds. It was also prolific. Within two decades of Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Montezuma and the Aztec empire in 1519, the governor of the Northwest Frontier territory in New Spain, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, rode north as far as Kansas in search of the “Seven Cities of Cíbola” with more than 1,000 horses—terrifying, alien creatures to the Indians.
The territory the Spanish conquered soon extended north from Mexico City through present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and California; and Coronado and the settlers of New Spain knew full well the spell their horses cast over the indigenous peoples whom they enslaved and converted by force. In the eyes of the Indians the horse endowed the European invaders with seemingly supernatural powers, and some tribes even believed that the mounted conquistadors were immortal. Given the inhumanity with which the colonial authorities treated their sullen Native subjects, the Spanish also recognized the consequences of allowing the Indians any modicum of freedom or self-government—and most particularly any familiarity with horsemanship. Thus whenever a tribe did resist, retribution was swift. In 1595, to take just one example, a Spanish military expedition of seventy men dispatched to punish a restive band of Pueblos slaughtered 800 men, women, and children and took another 500 prisoners. The right foot was severed from every male captive over the age of twenty-five, and males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and females over the age of twenty were sentenced to slavery in the fields. It is little wonder the Indians lived in abject fear of the horse and its barbarous riders.
Meanwhile, although Coronado never found his “Seven Cities,” along his trek north he met numerous American Plains Indians. His descriptions of these resourceful, dexterous peoples hint at his foreboding about their quite literal bloodthirstiness. Describing a buffalo hunt, Coronado wrote, “They cut the hide open at the back and pull it off at the joints, using a flint as large as a finger . . . with as much ease as if working with a good iron tool. They eat raw flesh and drink blood. When they kill a cow they empty a large gut and fill it with blood, and carry this around the neck to drink when they are thirsty. When they open the belly of a cow they squeeze out the chewed grass and drink the juice that remains behind because they say it contains the essence of the stomach.”
Should these hardy people ever acquire mounts, Coronado recognized, they would constitute New Spain’s greatest peril. Yet as hard as the Spanish tried, they could not completely fence off their proliferating stock. Southwestern Apache were the first to take advantage, running the animals off during raids on isolated rancheros and later capturing them at water holes and in box canyons. The Apache ate most of their catch, but they spared the strongest, equipping them with crude tack fashioned from buffalo hide and using them as transportation for more distant raids. The Apache never did learn to breed these partially broken mustangs; when they needed to replenish their herd they organized more raids. Now they were more mobile than any other tribe on the continent, and the radius and targets of their attacks expanded across the New Mexico territory. They fell hardest on their ancient enemies, the Pueblos.
The Pueblos had been forced more or less at gunpoint into a pact with the Spanish colonizers—in exchange for forced labor and desultory conversion to Catholicism, the Spanish would provide protection against the Apache. Once the Apache had horses, however, this proved an impossible commitment. Mounted raids on Pueblo communities increased, and before Spanish expeditions could be roused the Apache would vanish like ghosts into the frontier’s Rembrandt gloom. The Apache raids grew more frequent and vicious, and in 1680 the Pueblos finally rose, emboldened by desperation and by a charismatic medicine man named Juan de Popé.
The ensuing massacre was retaliation for a century of cruelty. The Pueblos plundered Spanish haciendas, demolished government buildings, and took particular joy in destroying convents and churches and killing Franciscan priests, twenty of whom were captured in a churchyard and tortured to death, their bodies dumped in the charred husk of their chapel. The few Spanish who survived abandoned their livestock on a disorganized flight south to El Paso or to Mexico itself. Once New Mexico was cleared, the shaman Popé ordered his people to renounce the language, the religion, and even the crops of the colonizers. The Pueblos tore up fields of barley and wheat and slaughtered and ate the Spanish sheep and cattle. Because they had never developed the Apache taste for horseflesh, they merely flung open the corrals and allowed thousands of mustangs to run free across the Southern Plains. This has come to be known as North America’s “Great Horse Dispersal,” the seed of the transformation of the culture of the American West.
In the aftermath of this great escape, a combination of raiding and trading between tribes spread horse culture across the Plains. The Comanche, heretofore a primitive people barely scratching out an existence in the harsh Wind River country of west-central Wyoming, were drawn south to present-day West Texas by the lure of the wild herds. They were the first tribe to perfect horse-breeding techniques, including gelding, which had eluded the Apache. Soon the flow of horseflesh followed the ancient northerly trade routes. Within a century the Wichitas of Oklahoma were mounted; they were followed by the Kiowa of Kansas and the Pawnee of Nebraska. The Ute, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfeet, and Crows, and the tribes of the Canadian prairie, all acquired mustangs. As did the Sioux. Although the westernmost Lakota, the Oglalas and Brules, had been in possession of a few staggering, worm-eaten nags stolen from old enemies like the Arikara, no one can say at what precise moment they encountered their first herds of wild mustangs—the sungnuni glugluka. It was probably sometime between 1770 and 1785. The western Lakota bands took to these stout little animals with their sleek necks and concave faces like no other people on the Northern Plains.
The Arikara, driven high up on the Missouri and decimated by smallpox epidemics, tried to thwart the burgeoning Sioux by allying with the Mandan. The partnership came to naught, as the horseless Mandan were ridden down and slaughtered by the score while the Arikara remained huddled behind their battlements, subject to constant Sioux raids. The newly mounted Lakota, imbued with an “arrogance born of successful conquest,” spread south and farther west, and by 1803 had cleared the Kiowa from their traditional hunting grounds around the Black Hills and forced them to abandon their Missouri River Valley trade routes. Their old nemesis the Omaha, who had resettled in present-day northeastern Nebraska, had by now also obtained horses as well as guns from friendly Mississippi River tribes. Neither acquisition helped. When the Omaha tried to put up a fight, the Sioux crushed them.
The acquisition of horses did not alter the Sioux’s nomadic hunter-gatherer culture so much as extend it, changing the dynamics of America’s Northern Plains much as the invention of the stirrup had turned yurt-dwelling Mongols into the bloody scourge of Eurasia. The Cheyenne, who occupied land close to the Black Hills, have a traditional narrative, according to which the first Sioux they ever encountered were a greasy, lice-ridden band who arrived at one of their summer camps on foot, begging for food. This changed dramatically with the appearance of the wild herds. And besides naturally adding to the tribe’s wealth and power, it also subtly affected ancient customs. As packhorses could pull much larger travois than dogs, for instance, the size of the Lakota elk-skin lodges doubled. And with greater contact with conquered tribes came the concept of decoration. Oglala and Brule wives and daughters began to adorn formerly bare tepees with pictures of the sun, moon, stars, buffalo, and of course horses, using pigments made from blood, sap, ground roots, dead insects, and urine. In recognition of the horse’s transformation of their lifestyle Lakota braves even adopted a custom of dignified death for certain prized animals, letting older horses loose in secluded pastures to die instead of slaughtering them for food.
What would not be altered, however, was the tribe’s all-consuming lust fo
r battle honors. Some historians argue that the Great Horse Dispersal actually stunted Sioux society by preventing the tribe’s progression into the “civilized” pursuit of agriculture, hierarchical organization, and social diversification. In other words, the arrival of the horse amplified the Stone Age culture of the Lakota. Now, dazzling Sioux war parties riding painted mounts rapidly and overwhelmingly extended their savage and relentless subjugation of neighboring tribes. Moreover, even when a Lakota rider was ambushed or outnumbered, the horse afforded a swift, heretofore unimaginable means of escape. And there was no better hiding place than in the folds and crevasses of the sacred Black Hills.
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The Oglala writer Luther Standing Bear once described the Black Hills as “a reclining female figure from whose breasts flowed life-giving forces, and to them the Lakota went as a child as to its mother’s arms.” The Crows and Cheyenne had temporarily blocked the route to this earth mother. That began to change in the late 1700s. The Oglala Winter Count of 1785–86 depicts the defeat of a large Crow party in a great battle. It was the beginning of the end for the Crows, who for years afterward could mount only a rearguard action as they retreated farther and farther northwest into the Rockies. Around the same time a combined Oglala-Brule force swept down on a Cheyenne camp south of the Black Hills to avenge a warrior killed in a horse raid. They massacred many Cheyenne and captured the settlement’s tepees, weapons, and horses. Thereafter the Oglalas, the Brules, and even the Miniconjous, another Lakota tribe that had by this time forded the Missouri, all welcomed the Cheyenne as subordinate allies.