by Crazy Horse
Grattan shook his head. “No, not too many. It will work out. Just make sure that the Oglala stay out of it if a fight starts.” Lucien was babbling his interpretations, and neither Grattan nor Young Man Afraid was convinced the other was being told his words exactly.
By the time they reached the Brule camp, a large open circle at the foot of a small bluff, most of the warriors had hidden themselves in the trees under the bluff. Conquering Bear came out to meet Grattan. It was obvious that he wanted to prevent trouble.
“Why all the fuss?” he asked. “It was a lame cow, no good to anybody.”
Grattan said, “I want High Forehead. If you won’t bring him to me, tell me where he is.”
Some of the Sioux standing behind the chief said that High Forehead had gone, but one man pointed to a lodge and said, “There. That is his tipi.”
Again and again, Conquering Bear tried to talk Grattan out of his purpose, but the lieutenant was adamant. All the while, Lucien kept riding back and forth behind the soldiers, shouting insults and threats at the Sioux. Grattan seemed to sense that trouble was brewing, but he didn’t know how to get out of it.
He ordered his men to aim and to fire on his command. A messenger sent to High Forehead’s lodge returned with word that the Miniconjou had five men with him, and they were all prepared to fight, even to die, if necessary.
Conquering Bear once more offered to pay for the cow with horses from his own herd, but Grattan would not be put off. The chief, realizing that the chance of avoiding a fight had gone, turned to walk away. At that moment, one of the troopers fired, hitting a warrior in the chest and killing him.
The Miniconjou appeared at the door to High Forehead’s lodge. Grattan ordered his two big guns fired, and the shells went high, nipping the tips of some lodge poles, but doing no other damage. The Miniconjous opened fire then, and Grattan gave the order to fire. In an instant, a flurry of arrows poured out of the village. Grattan and four other soldiers, three of them artillerymen, were hit. At almost the same moment, the Brule hidden at the base of the bluff thundered down on the village.
Young Man Afraid looked on in horror, yelling for the Oglalas to intercede, to help the soldiers before it was too late.
But there was nothing to be done. The fury of the Brule had been unleashed. The soldiers turned and ran, but the warriors pursued them on horseback and on foot. The soldiers’ single shot rifles were too cumbersome, and almost useless against the speed and deadly accuracy of the Sioux bowmen. Volley after volley of arrows poured into the fleeing troops. One by one they fell.
And then it was over. The village fell strangely silent. Grattan and all thirty-one of his men lay dead. In a frenzy, the Sioux swarmed over the two gun carriages, set them on fire, and destroyed the howitzers.
Conquering Bear had been badly wounded, shot in the back, the leg, and the side. He lay bleeding in the dust for several minutes before the warriors gathered him up and helped him to his tent.
Back at the Oglala village, the warriors, Young Man Afraid and Old Man Afraid at their head, stood silently and watched. Curly and Hump and Little Hawk had gotten their first look at a conflict that would shape the rest of their lives.
Chapter 6
September 1854
AFTER THE FIGHT with Grattan’s men, the Sioux seemed disorganized. Some wanted to ride on the fort and kill the rest of the soldiers, burn Fort Laramie to the ground, and take control of the Plains. Others, frightened that the whites would just send more and more soldiers, until there were too many for the Sioux to fight, wanted to stay where they were. They thought that the Great Father would understand that what had happened was not their fault.
The vast majority, though, just wanted to get away from Fort Laramie. They wanted their lives to continue as they had always been. If hanging around the Fort meant dependence on the white man’s goods, then they would leave. They had fed themselves long before anyone had seen a white man. They had more than held their own against the Pawnee and pushed the Crow far enough west that they had all the breathing room they could want. There was the beauty of the Paha Sapa and the wide open expanse of the plains where they could spend the rest of their lives without ever seeing another white man.
Old Man Afraid, though, knew that something had changed forever. In the first major armed conflict with the whites, the Sioux had won a victory, but it was hollow and, the chief suspected, likely to be shortlived.
The Oglala moved on, and the Brule, too. Curly and his family rode east with the Brule, his mother’s people. On the long trek, Conquering Bear continued to suffer from his wounds. Unable to ride, he was borne on a travois. Often, Curly and Hump would ride along behind the gravely wounded chief. Sometimes, at night, they would peek into the chief’s lodge. He would be lying there, more often than not asleep, wrapped in a buffalo robe. He was losing weight, wasting away from his wounds. No one wanted to say it aloud, but it was obvious that Conquering Bear was dying.
Confused by the events, upset over Conquering Bear’s condition, Curly rode out onto the prairie by himself. He was determined to seek a vision, but he was not playing by the rules. The vision quest was the central event of a Sioux warrior’s life. It was what gave him his adult name, and its cryptic intelligence would guide him for the rest of his life, if he were lucky enough to have a vision at all.
In order to be ready, custom required that the young man about to seek his vision receive intensive instruction for many weeks from a holy man. This would prepare his mind to receive the critical information the vision would impart. It was also a prerequisite to undergo a ritual of purification. Since purification was deemed essential before attempting to establish contact with the controlling spirits, the forces in nature and above it that controlled men’s lives, a shaman would officiate at a purifying sweat bath, held in a dome-shaped sweat lodge built for this purpose. A shaman would accompany the prospective seeker to supervise the purification. Fasting was a part of the preparation, as well.
But Curly was impatient. Desperate for an explanation of the confusing things around him, he decided to seek his vision on his own. He rode into the hills of western Nebraska without telling anyone where he was going. Deep in the Sand Hills, he found a lake, overlooked by a steep hill. Tethering his horse at the lakeside, giving it enough lead to feed itself on the thick grasses on the shore, he climbed the hill until he reached the top, where a flat table of unbroken stone jutted out toward the lake far below.
He lay down on the stone and began to fast. Determined to keep himself awake, he placed sharp stones under him. The points digging into his back and shoulders, the backs of his thighs, and his calves were torture, but they served their purpose. For two days with no food or water he lay there, staring at the sun in the daytime and the stars at night.
On the third day, his body sore, his lips cracked and his throat parched, he was beginning to fear that he would not have a vision after all. He began to worry that his lack of preparation had doomed his quest. Maybe it wasn’t right to seek so powerful a thing without the right prayers being said. Maybe he wasn’t pure enough. These thoughts, sharper than any of the stones poking into his flesh, tortured him for the rest of the day.
Getting to his feet, Curly looked at the lake far below. It seemed to shimmer in the sunlight, as if the waters were trying to part, giving birth to something deep beneath the surface. Dejected, he backed away from the rim and started down the hill. His head spun, and as he looked at the sky, the clouds began to swirl. Bright light seemed to pour like liquid out of them, thick waves of it sweeping toward him. The light rippled like the sea of grass far across the lake, shifting, undulating. He shook his head, but the sensation wouldn’t leave him.
He stumbled, fell to one knee, and reached out to catch himself. A sharp pain stabbed through his hand, the shock made his elbow buckle, and he gasped with the pain, fell headlong and began to slide over the rocks and gravel. The hiss of sand in his ears was like the voice of a rattler, and he twisted his head from s
ide to side, trying to see where it came from. His arms spread like wings, he clawed at the ground, but kept on sliding.
Halfway down the hill, on a little belly ledge in the slope, he slowed enough to arrest his fall. Rolling onto his back, he looked up to see a man on horseback. The man shimmered, his horse pawing the earth. Curly blinked, trying to clear his vision, but everything looked watery, as if the world were dissolving.
The great horse began to change colors, first a dark roan, then a brilliant, almost silvery gray. It turned dark again, black as night, a white blaze on its forehead, then it turned colors Curly had never seen anywhere, not on a horse, not on a bird’s wing or the wings of a butterfly.
The man on horseback said nothing. He was dressed in plain clothing—unadorned leggings, fringed but otherwise unremarkable, a plain buckskin shirt, unpainted and without even beadwork to relieve the ordinariness of its color. His face was unpainted, and he wore a solitary eagle feather in his hair, which hung long and straight. Light brown in color, it reminded Curly of his own hair. The man turned away for a moment, and Curly noticed a small stone tied behind his ear.
Curly tried to get up, but his body wouldn’t work. His joints seemed to have dissolved in his skin, leaving only jelly where the bone had been. Gasping for air, he tried to speak, but the man raised a hand to silence him.
“Don’t wear a warbonnet,” he said. “When you go into battle, leave your horse’s tail untied, free to balance him as he leaps across the stones. Before you ride into battle, sprinkle him with dust, let streams of it glide from your curled fingers in streaks and straight lines. Don’t paint your war pony.”
“Who …” Curly croaked.
But again the man raised a hand, cutting him off. “Rub dirt on your skin and hair. Dothese things before every battle, and you will never be killed by an enemy or a bullet. Your people must come first. Take nothing for yourself. Your people will know your worth. Know it yourself. Let them celebrate you. It is not necessary for you to boast or sing of your courage.”
As the man spoke, he seemed to be doing battle with ghosts. He wheeled on his horse then androde as if into battle. Strange blurs and shadows swirled around him, darting close, darkening as if about to become solid, then vanishing when the man waved his hand to chase them off. Arrows swarmed around him in clouds, like angry bees, but none struck him. Bullets sang as they flew past, sometimes close enough to raise the fine hairs on his skin as they passed. Most disappeared as they were about to strike him.
Curly felt his head spinning, his eyes bugging out. His throat was so parched that he could only rasp as he tried once more to speak, trying desperately to call out to the phantom warrior. A new wave of enemies swarmed around the strange man, and one of his own people, no face, just a shadow behind the strange warrior, grabbed his arms from behind, holding him back, preventing him from raising a hand to defend himself.
Thunder cracked then, as if the sky had split in two, the earth about to follow, rumbling beneath Curly, his body swallowing the tremors whole, quaking with the rattling of the earth and with terror. It grew dark, then darker still. Lightning flashed across the dark face of the clouds and it began to storm. Huge drops of water spattered Curly’s face, swept in torrents across the sky, almost blurring the man, blotting him out as the wind howled and hail began to rattle on the rocks around him. The man rode past once more, his horse pounding the earth. His face seemed to loom up out of the storm, and Curly saw that it was painted with a single bolt of lightning. A handful of white hail spots was sprinkled on his chest and shoulders.
Then, as suddenly as he had come, he was gone.
Curly closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. He was gasping like a fish, his body sucking air in huge gulps. He closed his eyes again, still listening to the storm as it swirled around him. The clatter of hail was gone, but the hammering of the rain on his chest and skull sounded like drums. He opened his eyes to a brightening sky. A single hawk soared high above him, its cry distant and desperate.
Then everything went black.
When he awoke, his vision was blurred. Great shadows speared the ground beside him as he blinked away the sun. He thought for a moment the rider had come back. As he tried to move his arms, he realized they worked normally, and he pushed himself up. His vision cleared, and he found himself staring into his father’s scowl. Hump stood a little behind, as if to be out of reach of his father’s wrath.
“What is wrong with you, boy?” his father shouted. “Conquering Bear is dying. You run off where no one can find you, except the Pawnee or the Crow.”
Curly swallowed hard. “I was seeking a vision, Father.”
“Without purification? Without instruction? Why?”
Curly shook his head. “I don’t know. I just wanted …”
His father was even angrier now. Curly decided it was better to say nothing of his dream. He got slowly to his feet. His father was already halfway down the hill. Hump tried to hang back, but Curly’s father kept calling to them both.
Maybe it was not a good dream, Curly thought. Maybe I will have another one.
All the way back to camp, he debated whether to tell his father what he had seen, but he knew now was not the time. And judging from the look on his father’s face, maybe that time would never come.
Two days later, Conquering Bear died, and the Brules wrapped the old chief in a buffalo robe, placed him on a burial scaffold, and left for the fall buffalo hunt. Curly had still said nothing, not even to Hump. He was biding his time. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that the dream was meant for him, that it was something he had to understand. One day, he knew, he would have to tell his father about it, and let the holy man tell him what it meant.
He would try to understand on his own, to puzzle his way through the meaning the way he puzzled his way through everything else, thinking for himself, learning, always learning. And if that didn’t work, if he was unable to piece together the meaning of the strange visitation, he could ask his father.
But not while his father was in such a mood. Not just yet.
Chapter 7
June 1855
AFTER THE DEATH of Conquering Bear, the Sioux decided that the Fort Laramie area was too uncomfortable. Some of the chiefs still wanted to stay close, in order to get the yearly annuities the government had promised them in the 1851 treaty. But most of the chiefs and warriors called such men Loaf About the Forts or Laramie Loafers. To their way of thinking, the freedom of the plains was preferable to a dependence on handouts.
But they also knew that there would be more soldiers coming. The river of settlers seemed to grow in force each year, and it was only natural to assume that more and more soldiers would come to protect them. So, following the buffalo would serve two purposes—it would allow them to live as they had always lived, and it would also keep them away from the Holy Road. Warriors, especially the young ones, were still fond of raiding the wagon trains, and would make long trips for that express purpose. The chiefs tried to stop them, but since the Sioux had no centralized authority, each man was expected to decide such things for himself.
Curly and his family traveled south, in a band led by the great Brule war chief, Spotted Tail, who was Curly’s uncle. Their purpose was to attack the Pawnee, steal some horses, and put the Grattan situation behind them.
But when they finally found a Pawnee village, it was deserted. In order to salvage the long trek, Spotted Tail decided to shift his attention to the Omahas. It would not be as rewarding as hitting the hated Pawnee, but it was better than nothing.
When they finally found an Omaha camp, they struck at once. Curly was in the raid, putting himself to the final test as a Sioux warrior. So far, he had hunted animals, but never killed a human being. In the Sioux custom, killing was less important than touching, or counting coup. It was, in fact, a more significant achievement to confront a living enemy and touch him with an extended lance or bow or, best of all, the bare hand. Such a feat would get one�
�s praises sung in the village. It entitled the warrior to wear a feather in his hair as well—the more coups, the more feathers.
With Hump and Lone Bear, Curly was looking forward to the battle. Hump, being older, had already counted his first coup. Curly hoped to join him soon. He looked up to the older warrior, and wanted to be like him. He was goaded, too, by the vision, which he still kept to himself. He had not even told Little Hawk of his dream.
When the assault began, the Omahas scattered in every direction. They had been taken completely by surprise, and warriors ran into the trees, trying to mount their horses while waging a desperate rear-guard action.
On his first pass through the Omaha village, Curly narrowly missed a running man with the tip of his bow, leaning far out over the left side of the pony in his effort. On the second pass, there was some resistance. Some of the Omaha warriors had managed to recover from the surprise, and were beginning to loose volleys of arrows in the general direction of the advancing Sioux.
Just beyond the village, a thick band of brush paralleled the creek on which the camp had been established, and Curly caught a glimpse of movement in the leaves. Aiming quickly, he launched an arrow, heard it strike, and heard a groan. He knew he had hit his target, and jumped from his pony, knife in hand, to take his first scalp.
Crouching as he entered the brush, he swept branches aside with one forearm, holding his knife ready in the other hand. At first, he saw nothing. There had been no further sound from the thick undergrowth, and he was beginning to think that after all, he had missed altogether.
The sounds of battle behind him faded away, the war whoops of Sioux and Omaha both faint, as he concentrated his attention on the possible danger just ahead.
Just as he was about to give up, he saw a swatch of color, cloth of some kind, and plunged through the intervening brush, his knife waving back and forth in front of him.
He saw the body then, lying on its stomach, and he dropped to one knee. Grabbing his target by the shoulder, he yanked the body over, grabbed a fistful of long black hair, and froze. It was a woman, a young woman, he had killed. And pretty. She reminded him of his sister, and he turned away then, trying not to smell the blood, trying to blot out the bright red stain on the side of her dress, where the shattered shaft of his arrow protruded like broken bone.