Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03

by Sitting Bull

  They told him that he would have to give up his horses and his guns. You will live in one place, they told him, and when you do that, you don’t need a horse. And you don’t have to shoot corn, so you don’t need a gun. They told him that, too. But it didn’t matter, because that wasn’t what he wanted.

  But when he thought of the people, how they had no one to look the white men in the eye and say no, it made him sad. He knew that he could do that, and there were times when he thought that he was the only one who could. Maybe, he told himself, maybe I have to go back, even if I don’t want to. Maybe I can learn to live in a house that stays in one place like a tree.

  There were long days and longer nights when he turned these thoughts over and over in his mind, like stones tumbling in a swift creek, until they were smooth and polished and pretty to look at. But after all, they were just stones like any other. It depended on what you wanted to see when you looked at them, that was all.

  He prayed to Wakantanka, but there was no answer. These questions were too hard even for the Great Spirit to answer. He knew then that he would have to decide for himself, and for the people. And he knew what he would have to do, because there was only one thing to do, just as there was only one man to speak for the Lakota, and he was that man. He could stand on the highest hill in the Grandmother Country and shout until his throat was raw, but no one would hear him.

  If he wanted to be heard, he would have to go back.

  Chapter 30

  Fort Buford, Dakota Territory

  1881

  JEAN LOUIS LEGARE, A FRENCH-CANADIAN TRADER, had been working on Sitting Bull so hard for so long, trying to convince him to turn himself in at Standing Rock, that the chief accused him of wanting to sell him by the pound. It was a joke, but only partly. Sitting Bull knew that LeGare stood to profit if he were the one who succeeded in bringing in the last and most significant of the Lakota chiefs.

  The Canadians had refused to feed the Lakota, hoping their hunger would lead them to return to the United States. LeGare had been supplying food, not out of humanitarian concern but as a business investment. With nowhere else to turn, Sitting Bull had taken the trader’s food because he did not want to go to the reservation.

  The future seemed to be shrinking around Sitting Bull like a skin drying in the sun, squeezing the life out of him, and in early July, LeGare finally got his wish.

  They left LeGare’s trading post on July 10 and headed south. To make certain the Lakota followed him, LeGare packed all the food and other supplies from his warehouse in wagons and brought everything along. He did not want anything to tempt the chief to think there was any point in staying behind. Many of the impoverished Lakota were themselves packed into wagons because they no longer had their own horses. Those few who had mounts went on horseback, as they had always done; although the horses, too, were worn to a frazzle.

  As the wagons crossed the border and rolled south through buffalo country, with the melancholy procession of warriors with a few lodges trailing in their wake, Sitting Bull saw the ruins of the old way of life lying in the grass. The bones of long-dead buffalo, almost hidden by the summer growth, the plains dotted with flowers, the way the white man decorated the graves of his dead, as if in memory of Lakota freedom, stretched in every direction. These were not buffalo the Lakota had killed, but the picked-over remains of herds slaughtered by the hide hunters and soldiers. Lupine and columbine sprouted inside the rib cages of the huge beasts, looking for all the world as if they had been imprisoned in the bones. Sitting Bull could not help but wonder if these chalky hulks were all that remained of the skeletal herd of his vision; if perhaps it was here those stampeding dead had finally fallen still and silent.

  Ahead lay Fort Buford, the trading post where Sitting Bull had so often gone to trade skins for guns and ammunition. He tried not to think about it, about those days when he had ridden to a post knowing that in a day or two or three, whenever he chose, he would climb onto his horse and ride away again. Those days were gone now, dead as the buffalo whose skeletons lay all around him. But he could not think of another way. There was no other place to go, and he set his jaw, trying to hold back the flood of emotions welling up inside him.

  Looking at the pathetic column straggling along in the wake of the wagons, he shook his head. It was hard to believe that it had come to this; that a life so rich, so full, and so free could have been reduced to this bedraggled procession. He wanted to shout out his defiance, but there was no one to hear, no one to quake at the sound of his voice, and if it were to be a prayer, no one to answer it.

  They reached Fort Buford on the afternoon of July 19 and set up camp. Some of the Long Knives, like curious children, came to gape at the man whose very name had once made their skin crawl. He could see it in their faces—the wonder, the disbelief, the question … could this tired and ancient-looking man in tattered clothes once have been the scourge of the plains? When camp was established, Sitting Bull retired to his lodge to rest.

  He was feeling his age. At fifty, he could no longer do what he had done at thirty … or even at forty. The years had taken their toll, wearing him down.

  It seemed to him as if the ravages of time on his body replicated in some symbolic way everything that had happened to his people. They too were worn down, old and tired. Not just the older ones who had come with him to Fort Buford, but all of them. The faces of the young men at the fort looked haggard and drawn as if they, too, had been worn out, made old before their time.

  When they had rested overnight, it was time to turn in their horses and their guns. The ragged and hungry Lakota lined up before the officers and, one by one, surrendered everything that had made them free—the buffalo runners and warhorses, of which they had managed to retain only fourteen, then their pistols and revolvers.

  Sitting Bull, as befitted his station, went last, accompanied by Crow Foot, his eight-year-old son. He set his treasured Winchester repeater, which had been a gift from White Bull so long ago, on the floor, nodded to it and to Crow Foot, then looked Major David Brotherton in the eye … still proud, bent but not broken … but no longer free.

  Afterword

  AFTER HIS SURRENDER, SITTING BULL was taken to Fort Randall, where he was interned as a prisoner of war. The officers at the fort treated him well, and those who came to know him admired his courage and intelligence. His health improved, and he began to recover his old vigor. And, as could be expected, he never lost his concern for his people.

  When he was finally released to the agency at Standing Rock, he became active in the affairs of the Lakota reservation, working unstintingly to improve conditions there, and waging an uphill battle against the indifference of the Indian Bureau, the treachery of the United States government, and the greed that continued to fuel westward expansion and piecemeal subjugation of his former country.

  But the biggest threat to his influence, which remained considerable and actually seemed to increase, was the backbiting and jealousy of other chiefs, including former friends like Gall and Running Antelope. The Lakota knew they had been given a raw deal, but powerless to throw off the white yoke, they turned their bitterness inward, many of the chiefs competing with one another for influence that no longer counted for much.

  The agent at Standing Rock, James McLaughlin, tried repeatedly to undermine Sitting Bull’s authority, refusing to acknowledge his status as chief and constantly trying to sabotage Sitting Bull’s efforts to improve conditions on the reservation.

  For a time, the chief joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and became a celebrity. Everywhere he went, people lined up for his photograph, which he sold by the hundreds, almost always giving the money away to poor children he encountered on his travels. Generosity was—and for Sitting Bull remained—one of the four cardinal virtues for a Lakota, especially for a chief.

  The government remained uneasy about Sitting Bull. When another Lakota, the dreamer and medicine man Wo-vo-ka, began to preach his Ghost Dance religion, that uneasin
ess quickly turned to paranoia and then to hysteria. The Ghost Dance cult believed that all the great chiefs would come back, and that the white man would be driven away. The buffalo would return, and the Lakota would be able to return to their old way of life.

  Sitting Bull was not a member of the cult, but he thought the Ghost Dance itself harmless. Nonetheless the government, concerned about a possible uprising, overreacted. Several Indian policemen were sent to arrest him, rousting him out of bed in the middle of the night. When friends grabbed weapons and came to his assistance, a gun-fight broke out. Sitting Bull was shot once each by Bull Head and Red Tomahawk, two of the policemen. Like his friend Crazy Horse, probably his only rival for preeminence among the Lakota chiefs, Sitting Bull met his death while unarmed, at the hands of his own people.

  There are several biographies of Sitting Bull, but the most recent, and by far the best, is by Robert Utley, The Lance and the Shield. For those who wish additional reading, two other biographies, by Stanley Vestal and Alexander Adams, are helpful, as is Vestal’s Warpath, a biography of Sitting Bull’s nephew, White Bull. There is, of course, a multitude of works available on the Sioux War of 1876, but one of the most comprehensive overviews is Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876 by John S. Gray. For a broader acquaintance with Lakota society, Royal Hasrick’s The Sioux is excellent, and the work of James Walker, published in several volumes by the University of Nebraska Press, is comprehensive and invaluable on Lakota myth, ritual, and belief.

  A PROUD STAND

  Sitting Bull took the lead. “I have killed many whites,” he began, “but not without provocation. They have taken our land, they have killed our women and children, they have come where they were not welcome, telling those who have always lived there that they would have to leave. I am willing to listen to what you have to say, and I am prepared to be peaceful, but not if it means giving up everything my people need to live.”

  De Smet listened respectfully, occasionally asking a question or two. “I am not here to make peace,” he said. “I cannot do that, but it is something I want to see happen. I think it would be a good thing if you were to meet with the peace commissioners at Fort Rice. This war is a terrible thing. It is terrible for the whites and it is terrible for the Lakota. The cruelty is causing pain to everyone involved, and it would be a good thing if it could be ended now.”

  Sitting Bull said nothing.

  BOOKS BY BILL DUGAN

  WAR CHIEFS

  Chief Joseph

  Crazy Horse

  Geronimo

  Quanah Parker

  Sitting Bull

  Published by HarperPaperbacks

  Copyright

  HarperPaperbacks

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers

  10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Bill Dugan.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-13023-5

  A previous mass market edition of this book was published in 1993 by HarperCollinsPublishers.

  HarperCollins®, ®, and HarperPaperbacks™ are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Cover illustration by Jim Carson

  Revised HarperPaperbacks printing: January 2000

  Visit HarperPaperbacks on the World Wide Web at http://www.harpercollins.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1 Auckland,

  New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com