CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For three days, the Grandfather assigned to Gray Wolf attended to him, caring for his wounds, and helping him gain his strength. He spent the time schooling Gray Wolf about what would be expected of him, now that he was a man. He would have to make difficult decisions and take on brave responsibilities. He would have to learn how to capture the sacred golden eagle with his bare hands, in order to gather its tail feathers to add to his collection when it was time to count coup. As his popularity grew, the various societies, would invite him to join them, where they would come together as a group to discuss the running of the village and the assignment of special obligations of the members of each society. Some would be asked to police the village, or help needy families that had no sons to go on the hunt. They would be asked to support the widows, and watch over orphan children. Becoming a man held many responsibilities, he was told.
“Many generations ago,” his assigned Grandfather told him, to pass the time as Gray Wolf was recovering, “there was another brave by the name of Gray Wolf. Only he was a Pawnee tribesman. When he was alive his tribe had a special ceremony called the annual Morning Star Ceremony, which he did not agree with. He was a strong-willed brave who felt he knew more than the wise men of the village, and often voiced his disapproval of the ceremony, and refused to participate in it. At this ceremony, a captive maiden was sacrificed.
“When the maiden was first captured, she was well treated as a special guest, for she was not to discover her fate until it was too late. They did not want to frighten her or take away her innocent belief that she was a guest of the tribe. They needed her to trust them, so when the time came, she would willingly take part in the ceremony. Every attempt was made to keep her from discovering what was coming.
“Gray Wolf believed he had fallen in love with this maiden, and wanted to prevent that which would become her fate. Three days before the ceremony, she would be stripped of her clothing and painted all over, and be treated as a sacred person. Before the morning star rose on the forth morning, she would be led to a raised scaffold. It was considered a lucky sign if, in her innocence, the girl mounted the scaffold without resistance. Then she would be tied. Priests symbolized the torture of her but did not actually hurt her. Then a man would shoot her through the body from the front as the morning star rose, and at the same moment another would strike her over the head with a club. Death would be instantaneous. Her heart would be cut out as a sacrifice to the star, and every male in the tribe would shoot an arrow into her body.
“Gray Wolf had a high reputation and he decided to rebel against this rite. He had been assigned to stand beside her, wielding the club to strike her with, to prove his loyalty to the ceremony, since in the past he had refused to shoot an arrow through the sacrificed maiden. At the critical moment, he cut the girl free from the scaffold, threw her on his horse, and ran off with her. He set her free near her own tribe. When he returned, he was not punished, but admired for his courage. The people of his village seemed to have been relieved to drop the cruel practice and decided to end it because of his actions.
“Even though the Morning Star Ceremony was still celebrated annually, they no longer used a human sacrifice. It was rumored, that Gray Wolf went to the village of the young woman he saved. He joined her tribe, which was the Sioux tribe, and became her husband. Love is a strong medicine. It can overcome all obstacles if believed in completely,” the wise Grandfather ended.
The story gave Gray Wolf hope. Going after Little Flower was nowhere near the bravery that the Pawnee brave displayed. However, he knew it would not be easy. He was determined to prove to Little Flower that he loved her enough to retrieve her and bring her back safely to his own village. He only hoped that when he finally found her, she would be happy he came.
On the fourth day, he felt strong enough to start his quest. He thought of the fourth day of the Morning Star Ceremony and it gave him courage. He may be going to his own slaughter, if an enemy tribe attacked him and his friends, or white men decided the only good Indian was a dead Indian, but to him, it was worth the risk. Because he knew that a life without Little Flower beside him would be like death to him anyway, he did not value his life any longer. He only hoped that he did not bring danger to Sleepy Fox or Spotted Coyote because of his determination to find Little Flower.
Because the journey would be long, they planned to bring a packhorse with them to put their supplies on. Also it would be available if they had to secret Little Flower away, and she needed a horse to ride. Gray Wolf prayed that Little Flower would willingly return with him, once he declared his love for her. He felt the Great Mystery was with him, for wasn’t it the hand of that Great Mystery that carried him to Little Flower and allowed him to touch her cheek? Now that he was a man, he would be prepared to face any challenge, he told himself.
“You are fooling yourself trying to go after Little Flower,” Talking Dog taunted, as the small group passed by. “Her whiteness has beguiled you. She has put you under her spell in the same way she put me under her spell. Only after she blinded me with her beauty, and I had my way with her, I could see I had been tricked. She is not special, like you believe, Gray Wolf. Inside she is just an angry white girl who wishes to get revenge on the people who took her in. Inside she has no respect for the red man. She never loved you. She merely wanted what rightfully belonged to Merry Morning. She will dishonor you. You will lose face and regret going after her,” he predicted.
Gray Wolf closed his ears to Talking Dog’s warnings. He did not believe Talking Dog, and knew it was only his wounded pride over the fact that Little Flower had kicked him, after he had taken her, that made him speak harshly about her. The very thought of what Talking Dog had put Little Flower through caused him to tremor in anger, and he was glad she had kicked him where it counted. It was all he could do to keep himself from leaping from his horse and killing Talking Dog with his bare hands! Only he knew the punishment for such an act would be banishment from his tribe, no matter how justified he felt in doing so. Therefore, he tried to ignore Talking Dog’s taunts, keeping a stoic expression on his face as he passed by.
Gray Wolf looked about him as they started out. His heart swelled at the beauty of the countryside they passed through believing that Grandmother Earth had created it for him and his people. At the same time, his heart ached because the vast surroundings that used to belong to the Indians alone, was slowly being invaded by the white man a little piece at a time. Little by little the red man was informed by the Great Father of the United State government that they had no right to certain portions of land, which had always been their domain. As Sitting Bull had said, they were becoming an island of Indians in a lake of whites. Slowly, they were being pushed into one area, never permitted to go beyond what was designated as ‘Indian Territory’, even to follow the buffalo herds in order to gain food. Otherwise, they would be severely punished, so Gray Wolf was taking a great risk in disobeying those orders.
There had been other renegade Indians from various tribes who chose to disregard the decree to remain in a certain place allotted to the Indians, and some had been captured and put in prison for breaking the proclamation. Others went into hiding, but the white man’s army never gave up trying to hunt them down to roust them out of their hiding places.
However, Gray Wolf also knew that some of the Indians willing to help the white man had been used for scouts for their army. The Shoshone could travel unhindered because they offered to protect the white travelers who tramped through Shoshone land, destroying root fields and depleting Shoshone game by hunting it themselves. Only the Shoshone suffered with this in order to keep their own land from being taken away by the ever-powerful government. The white man knew that there were many Sioux who were friendly and traded at their forts, even setting up their teepees around the various forts. He would have to trust that he and his friends would be looked upon as friendly by the white man and the Shoshone alike.
The first few days of the jour
ney was simple enough because they were still in Indian Territory and it was not unusual for small bands of Indians to travel together from one area to another, visiting with other tribes or looking for game. They followed the easily marked trail that many wagons had traveled over as they spread out across the country, looking for gold, along with sod busters seeking a better place to farm. Once they reached Fort Bridger, they would turn to head in the direction of California which was referred to as the California cut-off by those who had blazed the trail when some of the first travelers to Oregon came through.
Fort Bridger was a trading post, founded by Jim Bridger and his partner Louis Vasques, who were well known mountain men in the area. The fort had been built about thirty years earlier at the tip of Black’s Fork River, on land granted to them by the Mexican Government when California and the land beyond it was still considered part of Mexico. The logs of the building were chinked with mud. The buildings look shabby with several Indian lodges nearby, which were occupied by white trappers with their Indian wives and half breed children. Gray Wolf could see the Indian wives were mostly from the Piute and Snake tribes, which usually dwelled along the Snake River, not far from there.
Because it was a trading post, Gray Wolf and his companions decided to go inside and see what was offered there. He discovered they had a good supply of robes, dressed deer, elk and antelope skins, coats, pants and other Indian gear. They also had flour, pork, powder, lead, coffee, sugar, butcher knives, spirits, hats and readymade clothing. The trading post offered horse for twenty-five to fifty dollars each. Gray Wolf noticed that they had about two hundred and fifty horses up for sale, along with goats, sheep and poultry, which were all fat and happy, it appeared.
Chief Beaver had given Gray Wolf a portion of the ransom money to take with him, and since they were getting low on supplies, Gray Wolf decided to get some of the food stuff offered, along with live chickens, which they could kill on their trek to use for meat, if hunting turned out to be sparse along the way. The man behind the counter was surprised to discover that Gray Wolf could speak English.
“What are you three doing so far out of your territory?” the chubby man with a ragged red beard and strange green eyes asked him, as Gray Wolf dropped the coins on the counter to pay for their purchase. “You ain’t no Piute’s!”
“We are Sioux, headed to San Francisco to visit a friend,” Gray Wolf informed him. “Do you know where that place is?”
“Clear out on the coast of California,” the man told him. “California takes in a lot of land. It is still quite a ways from where you are, ya know, because you have to cross over part of Utah territory and through Nevada territory to get there. Ya won’t find many of your kind in San Francisco, though. You sure your friend is in San Francisco?”
“She is not an Indian. However, she lived with our tribe for many seasons and then went back to her family who lives in San Francisco. I have decided to make sure she made it safely there and is happy with her family.”
“Does her family know you are coming?” the man wanted to know. “You could cause quite a stir, showing up dressed in your fancy Indian garb, ya know.”
“There is no way to get word to them,” Gray Wolf murmured.
“Well, just be careful. I hear there are renegade Apache out in the area, between here and there, and the military are out looking for them. They may mistake you and your friends for renegades, if you’re not careful.”
“We’ll be careful,” Gray Wolf grunted, as Spotted Coyote and Sleepy Fox stepped forward to help him carry the purchases out to the packhorse.
They decided that since there were other teepees set up by the trappers there, they would remain and camp the night before taking the cut-off towards California and then get an early start in the morning.
As the three began following the cut-off trail, the landscape became more hostile. The barren land was littered with rocks and cactus, scrub-brush, Mesquite and Joshua trees being the major plants along the way. For the next day, traveling through the broad expanse of desert was one of comparative sameness, desolate country with little grass and bad water. The three dripped with sweat as they traveled beneath the unrelenting blaze of the sun. A range of mountains to the east of the trail paralleled them since turning south, which ended in a high rocky peak where a narrow river sank into the ground creating a sink. The sink was a sandy marsh about three miles wide, ten miles long and full of bull rushes. Alkali and Sulphur permeated the air and the salty warm water of the sink was not drinkable. Gray Wolf was glad he and his friends had brought plenty of skins of water along to drink.
Forty miles of desert would have to be crossed before they would reach good water and six of those miles were through deep sand. Gray Wolf wondered how the wheels of the wagon which carried Little Flower and her father even made it through the impeding sand.
They had been traveling slightly west from their southerly direction for several days and then took a more westerly trend. At first, through low country and after a gradual climb, to the desert peaks. They continued across a southern spur and through an austere volcanic region. Their horses had little to eat or drink along the way, which caused them to slow their pace. Eventually, they approached a string of springs. Two of them were hot, boiling up from the volcanic rock, close together; one was ten feet in diameter. The next spring was cold and salty. The ground surrounding the springs was hot and there was a hollow drum sound that echoed up through the ground when walking around them. The group continued on and traveled all night in hopes to get to good water soon where they could water their horses.
The next morning brought them to the Truckee River, where they could finally rest and water their horses, then follow out across a meadow where sweet grass grew for their horses to eat. They decided among themselves that it would be best to let the horses rest for a day, drink and eat as much as they pleased and then they would move on.
The trail through the valley was good but when they finally had to turn slightly north, they were forced to travel over rocky terrain crossing the Truckee several times as they headed toward the mountains where they would have to climb to Summit pass before it opened into the Summit valley. There, they were lucky to find game, so after managing to shoot an antelope, they spent the night eating their bounty, and resting from their journey over the mountains.
When they reached the Yuba River the trail turned rocky again and the going was slow. It was then that Spotted Coyote called their attention to a small band of Indians, coming towards them. They looked to be Apache. This was not Apache territory and Gray Wolf suspected these Indians must be part of the renegades, the man at the trading post had mentioned, who had been hiding out of their own territory to keep from being found.
The three paused as the leader of the group approached them. They did not speak Apache, but Gray Wolf took a chance that some of the Apache’s must know the white man’s language, considering they had close interaction with the whites, even allowing them to build a Stagecoach station on their land, until a dispute arose which caused war between Cochise and the American military. It was a misunderstanding that brought on the deaths of many people, including some of Cochise’s family members. From that point on, there was no stopping the enraged Apache, only now there were more military men than Apache warriors, so the Apache had taken to raiding, to get back at the Americans who not only was taking their land, but killing their people or putting them in prison, over something they had never done.
Sign language was used until Gray Wolf asked the Apache if he spoke the white man’s tongue. The Apache grinned, but in such a way that showed his distaste for the white man and his language.
“I am Victorio,” the Apache informed Gray Wolf. I was once friends with the white man, until the Army moved my people out of their land. Now I will have my revenge. This is only a small portion of my warriors. We have many more, which we will join later. We need all the warriors we can get. Therefore, we wish for you to join us.”
“We are no
t Apache,” Gray Wolf insisted. “We have no reason to join you. The White army is too powerful to go against. You will never win.”
“It is not a matter of winning,” Victorio stated with a firm smirk across his features. “It is how many we can kill until we are finally overcome. We once thought that if we kept killing the settlers and miners, that it would discourage them from coming onto our land. We soon found the more we killed, twice as many would come to replace them.
“So finally, we allowed the white man to use our land, but then they accused our chief of stealing stock and kidnapping a young boy from a ranch, who was Apache born of a woman the Apache had captured at one time. Cochise knew nothing of the capture or the stolen stock and could not produce the boy, but offered to discover who took him. That was not good enough for the leaders of the white man army, so they captured Cochise, his wife and child, and several of his cousins, when they came for peaceful talks to resolve the problem.
“Cochise escaped, capturing one of their men, whom he was going to use as a trade to get his family back. However, the white soldiers refused the trade unless he produced the captive boy, which Cochise had no way of doing because he hadn’t taken the boy. Therefore, to take revenge, Cochise tortured and killed his captive, and in return, the soldiers hung his cousins on the same spot where the tortured and dead captive had been found, but allowed his wife and child to go free.
“After that, Cochise knew he could no longer trust the white man and declared war on all of America. He knew he could not win, but he would not give up until he had killed as many white men as he could. Now we must honor him by carrying on his pledge to get revenge on what the whites have done to our land and our people. If you had any honor, you would join us!”
Little Flower Page 14
