Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03

by Sitting Bull

  Sitting Bull reached into the fire and grabbed a stick to poke at the coals. “He never should have listened to them the first time. That was his mistake. He believed them once, and then he could not stop believing them, even though his eyes saw the rotten food they gave him and his ears were filled with the cries of hungry children and the wailing of the old people who died like flies.”

  “But it is hard to know what else to do. As long as we stay off the reservation, the Long Knives will come after us. That is no way to live,” Four Horns said.

  Sitting Bull replied, “I have been thinking that we should leave this place, go to the Grandmother Country. The redcoats there will leave us in peace, as they do the Blackfeet.”

  Four Horns did not look happy. “It would be a hard thing to leave our land. And if we go to the Grandmother Country, we might not ever be able to come back.”

  “What is better—to go there and live as we have always lived, or stay here and be hunted like wolves for as long as we live? The Long Knives will never leave us in peace, and there are so many of them. You have heard the stories, just as I have, of the war between the bluecoat Long Knives and the graycoat Long Knives. There were more soldiers than there are buffalo, and they died in numbers too large to count. In one day, I have heard, more soldiers died than there are Lakota now living. For men who are so comfortable with death, what are the lives of a few Indians?”

  “It is something we will have to think about, Sitting Bull. It is not a decision that will be easy to make,” cautioned Four Horns.

  “But it must be made … and soon. Already we know that the Long Knives are crawling over the plains like the white worms that eat a buffalo carcass.”

  Sitting Bull poked at the fire again, then sat and watched the sparks rise up toward the smoke hole. He was about to continue speaking when a shout distracted him. He turned toward the lodge entrance and listened. He heard the shout once more, and got up quickly to go outside, Four Horns right behind him.

  He saw Eats-the-Bear, an Oglala he knew from Iron Shield’s band, hanging off his pony and bleeding from a wound in his shoulder. Warriors swarmed around him and Sitting Bull pushed through the crowd to help the man from his horse.

  With Four Horns helping him, he carried the wounded man into his uncle’s lodge. He turned to a woman who was peering through the entrance and said, “Go to my lodge and ask Four Robes for my medicine bags. Then bring some soup.”

  As soon as the woman had gone, Sitting Bull turned his attention to the warrior. “What happened, my friend?” he asked.

  “Three Stars,” the warrior gasped. “He is attacking Iron Shield’s camp. There are hundreds of Long Knives, and they are shooting everyone.”

  “Where?”

  “Slim Buttes,” the Oglala replied.

  To his uncle, Sitting Bull said, “See to him.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To help Iron Shield.”

  “But that is a long ride. You will not get there in time,” Four Horns warned.

  “If I don’t help, who will?”

  Four Horns nodded. “Then go,” he said.

  Sitting Bull sent runners through the camp to summon the warriors, then ran to his lodge to get his weapons. Within a half hour, they were ready to ride, more than a thousand warriors strong. But Slim Buttes was a long way off. They rode hard, passing more refugees along the way. The first reports were heartening. One old man estimated that there were only two hundred Long Knives and said that most of the people had managed to get away, but that the Long Knives had captured the camp and were burning the lodges.

  It was well into the afternoon by the time Sitting Bull’s war party reached Slim Buttes; in the meantime, the rest of General Crook’s column had arrived, and Sitting Bull’s forces were outnumbered almost two to one. And once again, the firepower of the soldiers was more than a match for Lakota determination.

  Sitting Bull and his warriors swarmed over the buttes, taking the high ground and trying to force the soldiers to relinquish what was left of Iron Shield’s camp. But it was no use. The two sides squared off in long lines and exchanged fire for much of the afternoon, but to little effect. The damage to Iron Shield’s small village had already been done, and all Sitting Bull could hope to do was provide cover for the escaping fugitives.

  Some of Iron Shield’s men were holed up in a makeshift cave with their chief. The soldiers knew they were there and fired relentlessly into the cave. Crook, impressed by the courage of the warriors, offered them a chance to surrender, but Iron Shield would not surrender.

  Crook’s forces resumed firing, and the warriors, supported by Sitting Bull and his men on the bluffs, did their best to return fire. But their supplies of ammunition were all but exhausted, and Crook seemed to have no end of bullets for his guns.

  Crook again called a cease-fire, and this time Iron Shield agreed to surrender if Crook would promise to spare his warriors. The general, moved by the chief’s courage and concern for his men, gave his word, and the small band of warriors staggered out of their cave. Iron Shield himself had been gut-shot and was mortally wounded, but he refused help and walked on his own to surrender his weapon to Three Stars.

  Sitting Bull, outnumbered and outgunned, was powerless to intervene. As the sun set, both sides dug in for the night. Crook’s men were exhausted. They had been on a forced march for nearly two weeks, subsisting on the meat of their own horses and mules because rations had been so depleted. And they were angry both at Iron Shield and his warriors, and at Crook himself for having given his pledge to let them live.

  A search of the captured camp had revealed the presence of articles belonging to Custer’s cavalrymen, including a glove marked with the name Myles Keogh, a captain in Custer’s command. In addition, several of the Lakota horses wore the 7th Cavalry brand on their flanks. In the days since Little Bighorn, a kind of frenzy had swept the country. The powers that be in Washington were determined to snuff out Sioux resistance, no matter what the cost. Crook’s men felt they had had a chance to exact a little personal revenge and resented their commander’s interference, but Crook would not yield.

  When the sun came up, Sitting Bull once more rallied his warriors, but there was nothing left to be done. All he could do was watch as Crook’s column reformed and started its march, bearing with it dozens of captives from Iron Shield’s village. Iron Shield himself had died during the night. Sitting Bull and his warriors shouted encouragement to the captives, and he led an abortive charge that cut off several soldiers and a handful of captives—only to learn that the captives were going along willingly. They had had enough of war.

  As the column moved out of sight, Sitting Bull oversaw the burial of the dead. Every body was like a knife through his heart. There were old men, women, children—even a newborn baby dead in its mother’s arms, shot through the head. The mother, too, had been shot to death. These were the bodies of people he knew, the children of friends, the parents of men who had ridden beside him, and between his grief and his rage, he felt as if his heart were breaking.

  And as the great chief climbed back onto his horse and headed home, he kept looking northward, as if his gaze were drawn by some irresistible force. He was going to the Grandmother Country. He knew that now. Because there was no place else to go …

  Chapter 29

  Saskatchewan

  1880

  LIFE IN THE GRANDMOTHER COUNTRY was not what Sitting Bull had hoped it would be. He and his people had freedom, of sorts, but it just wasn’t the same. Almost from the first, the people had begun drifting away by the handful, back below the border to turn themselves in at the agency.

  It was hardest for the young men, because the old ways, the ways that had allowed them to attain prominence, were gone. No more war parties against the Crows or the Arikara. No more stealing horses from the white settlers, or thundering down out of the mountains on a wagon train or brigade of Long Knives. The buffalo in Canada were fewer, and the hunt was not the same, eit
her. Nothing was the same; nothing was as good as it had been.

  Sitting Bull did his best to adapt. He was more than a chief now, he was a statesman, and he took his responsibility seriously. He had hundreds of people depending on him, and he knew that he was there in the Grandmother Country by sufferance of the redcoat representatives of the Grandmother herself, Queen Victoria. But that sufferance was thin ice on which to skate. He knew that the redcoats were just waiting for an excuse to expel him, and he knew, too, that if he were expelled from Canada, the soldier chief they called Bear Coat, Nelson Miles, would be waiting for him. Bear Coat himself had told him so—to his face.

  He could still remember the meeting with Miles in 1876, just after Slim Buttes. At first Bear Coat had been open and conciliatory, speaking to him with respect, warrior to warrior, and Sitting Bull had thought they had worked everything out. But on the second day of the council between them, the itchy Long Knives flexed their trigger fingers and the boisterous Hunkpapa warriors had been looking for trouble, even expecting it. And as Sitting Bull knew only too well, if you are looking for trouble, it finds you.

  So Miles had gotten angry and tried to blame Sitting Bull for things he had not done, and for breaking promises he had not made. The truth was that Miles had made promises he could not keep, and both men knew it. The council had broken off and Sitting Bull had headed for the border, taking his time in order to show that he was not afraid of Bear Coat or anyone else.

  The next winter, news reached him that Crazy Horse had been murdered. It had happened just as Crazy Horse had told him it would, the way it had been foretold in the great Oglala’s vision. Held by the arms by two Oglala policemen at Fort Robinson, he had been stabbed in the back by a soldier with a bayonet. That news, more than any other, had crushed Sitting Bull’s spirit. He had loved Crazy Horse like a brother, and with him gone, there was no one else left to speak for the people. Spotted Tail was just a pale shadow and Red Cloud was no better than a white man now. Only Sitting Bull was left.

  The redcoats did not trust him. They watched him like hungry wolves, just waiting for him to do something wrong, or maybe not even wrong, but something they could use to send him home. They were frightened of him. His reputation as a fearsome warrior had preceded him to Canada, and they were wary of him—as if they expected him to go on the warpath at any moment; as if he would be foolish enough to make himself unwelcome in his last refuge on earth.

  But it meant he had to be hard with his people, harder than he had ever been, harder than he wanted to be. He didn’t like it, but he did it because if he were not hard on them, the agents and redcoats of the Grandmother would be harder still, and that was one thing they could not afford.

  When his brother-in-law, Gray Eagle, had helped three other warriors steal horses from the Slota, the Slota had complained to the redcoats, and the redcoats came to Sitting Bull’s village. They knew what had happened to the horses, that some young warriors had taken them. The redcoat chief had demanded that the men be found and punished, warning that if Sitting Bull did not punish them, he would do it himself.

  So Sitting Bull had found the men, including Gray Eagle, and punished them, because he knew that if the redcoats punished them it would be much worse. He took the responsibility seriously, because he was chief. That is what it meant to be chief—to do the hard things that no one else wanted to do. And the punishment was severe, so severe that Gray Eagle still had not forgiven him.

  He could remember the time when they heard the Nez Percé were coming, when Joseph, with a thousand people and all they owned, tried to join him. That had been a tricky time, because the redcoats did not want every Indian in the United States coming to live in their country. Joseph had failed. It was Bear Coat Miles who stopped him at Bear Paw, just forty miles from the border and safety. That was a terrible time … so many Nez Percé killed, and all they had wanted was to be left alone. It had seemed especially harsh because Joseph was leaving his land, letting the white man have it, and even that was not good enough. Nothing the Indians did was ever good enough for the white man.

  The white men wanted the land and they wanted the Indians too, and it made no sense at all. It was as if they were saying, “You can’t stay here because this is not your land, now. It is ours.” And you said, “Fine, then I will leave.” And they said, “No, we won’t let you leave. You will go and live on land that we don’t want, land that is not good for anything. Except Indians.” It was so hard to understand what the white man really wanted. And just when he thought he did finally understand, it seemed to change. There were times when he thought the white man himself did not know, or maybe that the white men were fighting among themselves.

  Even in his confusion, Sitting Bull was homesick. White Bull had already gone to the reservation. One Bull was still with him, along with Jumping Bull and Four Horns. But the young men were drifting away, and soon there would be no one left—no one but old men to hunt the buffalo and to feed other men now too old to hunt for themselves. It seemed as if the Lakota people were withering away, drying up like leaves on a dying tree, just waiting for the wind to blow them off and carry them away.

  Sitting Bull did not want it to end that way. He did not want to be chief of a nation of old men with wrinkled skin and flabby arms, begging for food in a country that did not care whether they lived or died. But he knew that war was no longer feasible. There were too many Long Knives and too few warriors. And ahead of him lay one hard winter after another.

  Sometimes he led a hunting party south of the border to hunt buffalo in Montana, but Montana was filling up with settlers and there were complaints about the Lakota hunting. They were bothering no one. There were no raids on settlements or even on isolated farms. Just the buffalo, that’s all they wanted. And every summer there were fewer and fewer of them. Soon they would be gone altogether, and there would be no one left to mourn their passing except Sitting Bull and a handful of old men who remembered when the earth used to tremble with the pounding of a million hooves.

  Maybe, Sitting Bull thought, maybe what I should do is go back, cross the border, go home. They want me to live like a white man, think like a white man, maybe I can do this. And even if I can’t, the young ones can. The children can learn to do what an old man might not be able to learn. At least then they will have a chance, as long as there is someone to look out for them, the way Red Cloud is supposed to and does not, the way Crazy Horse wanted to and was not allowed to.

  He and Four Horns talked sometimes, an old man and an older man, and it seemed that maybe the world had changed too much for both of them, made them lost, strangers in a place that only looked familiar, but was not. Then he would talk to One Bull or to Jumping Bull, and they would say No, uncle, or No, brother, it has not changed so much that there is no place for you. But your place is here, not at Standing Rock. If you go home, they said, the Long Knives will kill you as they killed Crazy Horse.

  He knew that One Bull and Jumping Bull were probably right. But he knew, too, that sometimes you have to stake your life on something that is important, and if the people were not important, then nothing was. That was why Joseph, the Nez Percé, had risked everything. He had lost, but he had tried.

  I can try, too, Sitting Bull told himself. There was a time when I ran like the wind, when no one, not even Crawler, could catch me. There was a time when I would ride into a Crow village by myself, count coup, and ride out again. I was afraid of nothing. I was there when we stood up to Long Hair and punished him for stealing the Paha Sapa. I looked Bear Coat in the eye and told him I would not let him stop my people from going where they wanted, whenever they wanted to go. There was a time when I would have looked the Great Father himself in the eye until he blinked, and I would say to him, This is my land, and you cannot take it from me because I do not wish to sell it. And I think I would still do that today, if I had the chance.

  He would look at the sky then, at the vast expanse of unclouded blue, then at the green sweep of the plains s
tretching out in every direction, the purple smear of the hills, and the white-capped mountains sharp as the teeth of a wolf, and he would think, The world is so big, why can’t there be a place in it for me and my people to live the way we want to live?

  Some of the Canadians, like the Frenchman, LeGare, looked at him as if he were trade goods, something to be sold for a few dollars. There was enough traffic back and forth across the border, small groups of warriors leaving the reservation to hunt and visiting relatives in Canada, that Sitting Bull knew what the agents in the United States were thinking; that it would be useful to them if the great Sitting Bull could be induced to come back, to take his place in line with all the other Lakota, to stand with his hand out, waiting like a beggar for the Great Father’s annuities. They wanted to take his rifle and his lance and give him a rake. Instead of riding a buffalo runner behind a herd, they wanted him to walk behind a team of oxen and break the ground to raise corn.

  Every day it got harder and harder to resist. Without his land, without the right to roam from the Paha Sapa to the Bighorns, up the Missouri and down the Yellowstone, what was he but just another man without a country, an unwelcome presence in a country that wished he would just go home. But he had no home to go to, not now. The reservation was not home. It was more like a prison. And some of his people, he knew, they tried to put in real prisons. That had happened to Crazy Horse, and when he said no, they killed him, stabbing him in the back because they didn’t have the courage to look him in the eye. He wondered if that was what waited for him at Standing Rock.

  They sent commissioners to see him, men in stiff collars with wax on their mustaches, to paint him pretty pictures of reservation life. They told him how they would build him a house like the one they had built for Red Cloud. But what was wrong with a tipi? It kept him warm when it snowed. In the summer, when the air was thick and the heat enough to squeeze the breath from his chest, he could roll up its sides and let in the breeze if there was one. Could Red Cloud do that? Could Red Cloud roll up the sides of his house? And if the grass was used up, could Red Cloud pack up his house and move it to some other place?