He had thought to bring Little Flower back with him. Only her parents had her now, and they had control over her choices. Even if he took her, her father would complain to the Indian agents, and he would be put in prison for taking a white woman, especially after the ransom had been paid.
He would have to do it her way. Wait the year and then return for her. That way, once she became his wife, her father would have no say over her. He could take her back to his tribe and show the paper proving they were tied together forever. Then no one could ever take Little Flower from him again! In the meantime, he would serve his tribe the way every good brave should.
He seldom stopped to sleep or eat. Luckily, he did not run into any Apache renegades along the way. By the time he reached his village, he was bedraggled and tired. He missed the company of Spotted Coyote and Sleepy Fox traveling with him. He would be glad to see them again, and hoped they would agree to return with him and attend his wedding in the white man’s church. Only he vowed, once he brought Little Flower back to his village, they would be tied the right way, the way the Great Spirit recognized.
The village members were surprised to see him riding up, as they ran to greet him, many calling out asking where Little Flower was. “Do you not have your wife with you?” Merry Morning asked as he started to pass her and Talking Dog, who had his arm around her. “Spotted Coyote said you stayed to make her your wife in a white man’s church. Did she change her mind?”
“No. It is just not going to take place right now,” Gray Wolf mumbled.
“Oh,” Merry Morning’s voice sounded disappointed.
“I hope you do not wish I was thinking of taking you as my wife still.”
“Why should I?” Merry Morning said scornfully. “I am Talking Dog’s wife now. We got tied while you were away.”
Gray Wolf glanced down at the two. He still hated Talking Dog for what he had done to Little Flower. They deserve each other, he thought angrily to himself. Because of them Little Flower had been taken from him. Now Merry Morning will at least leave him and Little Flower alone, once he brought her back. He feared that Merry Morning had planned to hound him to take her as his second wife, once he took Little Flower as his first wife.
“I wish you happiness,” he muttered, and then continued on.
All he wanted to do was fall from his horse and sleep, but first he would talk to his father and discover what had happened while he was away. Little Flower had told him about the army sending men to gather up some renegades and return them to their reservation. He remembered what had happened when they were with the Apaches. However, that had only been a little over two-hundred renegades. According to Madison there were eight-hundred Indians that had left the reservation to join with other tribes celebrating a Sun Dance Ceremony near Rosebud Creek.
There had been disagreement about the Americans wanting the Black Hills land to put the long iron tracks on that carried the huge Iron Horses bringing even more people across Indian land. Sitting Bull refused to give it or sell it to them.
Sitting Bull and his village were off-reservation Indians, and were permitted to live off the reservation as long as they stayed on Indian land. However, when the Sioux refused to sell the gold-encrusted land, which miners were already illegally working, to the Great Father of the whites, the Great Father got angry. Rather than telling the white trespassers to leave Indian land, he demanded that all Sioux living off the reservation, now be regulated to the reservation. Sitting Bull ignored the demands, along with many other chiefs of tribes living off the reservation, refusing to take his people to the reservation, which angered those in power even more.
The Americans were determined to inforce the demand, not only to retrieve those who had left the reservation, but to force all the rest of the Sioux to comply. Now there was unrest with both the Sioux and the whites. The Sioux had been pushed to their limit!
When Gray Wolf entered his family’s lodge, he found his father sitting and smoking his pipe, his expression thoughtful, yet worried. His eyes lifted and his face rearranged itself into a smile when he saw his son.
“You have returned home,” he greeted Gray Wolf. “I heard you found Little Flower. Do you return without her?”
“For now,” Gray Wolf frowned. “I must wait a year before I will have permission to take her as my wife, and must return to be tied to her in a white man’s church. I could have remained but I knew of the trouble between the Sioux and the Great Father of the whites. It has been written about in the white man’s papers. I decided my place was here with my people for as long as they needed me, before I returned.”
Chief Beaver nodded. “It is true. We will be leaving soon. Sitting Bull has called for a Sun Dance Ceremony to find divine instructions. He is calling not only all the Sioux, both off the reservation and on, but also, our friends, the Cheyenne and Arapaho to join us. Our scouts tell us that many bluecoats come from different directions to join together against us. They wish to force us all to live on the reservations set up for us so they can have free rein over Indian Land.
They wish to control us while they break their own laws not to use Indian land for their own desires. When they offered to buy the Black Hills, we asked for six-hundred-million white man dollars. They said they would only pay six-million. Now, because we have turned down that offer, they wish to take the land from us instead!”
“At the beginning of spring, white soldiers came, thinking to stop our people from moving freely over our land, to frighten us into complying with their wishes. A group of Cheyenne, who were friendly with the whites, was crossing Sioux land to try and make it to the reservation, where they would be safe. Stupid white soldiers, not knowing one tribe from the other, mistook them to be Sioux. They attacked their camp of a hundred teepees and tried to set fire to it.
“Only Grandmother Earth was with them and sent a late blizzard to confuse the white army. The Cheyenne were able to push them back. That was when Sitting Bull decided something should be done and asked all chiefs of all tribes to bring their people to join together with him at Rosebud Creek for the Sun Dance. After discovering that the white man cannot be trusted, the Cheyenne have decided not to go to the reservation as planned, and to join us instead, in our quest to put a stop to the white man’s dishonesty.
“When Sitting Bull heard about the attack on the friendly Cheyenne, he said…We must stand together or they will kill us separately. These soldiers have come shooting. They want war. All right! We will give it to them!”
“How soon do we leave?”
“By sunrise,” Chief Beaver responded. “Crazy Horse, a well-known warrior of Sitting Bull’s tribe, will be among the ones gathered there. He is to lead the attack, once we are ready.”
By early dawn all the people from Chief Beaver’s village, had dismantled their camp. Everyone including women and children, headed out towards Rosebud Creek. Gray Wolf joined beside his good friends Spotted Coyote and Sleepy Fox, Talking Dog rode with Merry Morning and some of his own friends, not far away. Gray Wolf felt excitement surging through his body. This was his first official act as a true brave, and if they came upon the white man’s army, he would discover his place as a warrior.
As with the Sun Dance Ceremony that had taken place when Gray Wolf became a man, all the tribes were converging together, where the Sun Dance would take place at the head of Rosebud Creek. However, this was the largest Sun Dance gathering Gray Wolf had ever witnessed. He realized that thousands upon thousands of his people were converging in one place for the first time in the history of his people.
When they arrived, Sitting Bull was prepared to sacrifice the scarlet blanket on his people’s behalf and arrange for the Sun Dance. However, it would not be like the Sun Dance Gray Wolf had been a part of. Sitting Bull had already suffered through that type of Sun Dance as a youth.
First, the bravest of the warriors were sent out to select the symbolic forked Cottonwood tree, which they ceremonially struck with their coup sticks. Then a group of chaste
women went to help fell the tree. Once it was downed, the branches were removed and it was carried back by the braves, shouldering the burden, to where the Sun Dance Lodge was to be erected.
There, the pole was prepared, being painted red on the west side, blue on the north side, green on the east side, and yellow on the south side. They prepared the ‘eagle’s nest’ of a red robe along with the offerings of the Cherrywood sticks, tobacco and the two dried pieces of buffalo hides, one cut in the shape of a buffalo and one in the shape of a man, to the top of the pole and then erected it in the hole dug for that purpose.
On the day of Sitting Bull’s sacrifice, at daybreak, the priests, who would conduct the ceremony, went to the nearby hill and prayed for blue skies on that day. This had not been the first time Sitting Bull had participated in a Sun Dance, in his forty-five seasons of life. Only by constant demonstrations of unflinching courage, could a leader acquire valid claim to greatness.
His hands and feet had been painted red by the priests, and across his shoulders were blue stripes in token of the sky. Now there was the matter of the scarlet blanket he had promised… Wakan Tanka… and he was about to offer it up.
Sitting Bull strode to the sacred center pole tree, and then sat on the ground with his legs stretched out as he leaned against it. With an anguished continence, he began to pray a wailing, singsong prayer. His adopted brother, Jumping Bull, had been chosen as his assistant. Years before, during a raid on an enemy encampment, the Sioux had killed all the members of a family except Jumping Bull, who was eleven at the time. He had gained Sitting Bulls admiration by fighting fearlessly in the face of death. Sitting Bull spared the boy and raised him up as a warrior, giving him a name taken from one of his father’s visions.
With a needle-pointed awl in one hand and a sharp knife in the other, Jumping Bull knelt beside his brother. He began to draw blood at sitting Bull’s right wrist, piercing the skin with the awl and lifting a matchhead-sized bit of tissue, which he sliced off with the knife. As soon as the blood began flowing, Jumping Bull continued the procedure up Sitting Bull’s arm until fifty cuts had been accomplished from wrist to shoulder. Sitting Bull continued to pray his singsong mantra, his expression never changing. Then Jumping Bull moved to his other arm performing the same rite, until both arms wore a blanket of blood all the way down his arms and dripping from Sitting Bulls fingers…the Scarlet Blanket Sacrifice… Wakan Tanka… had been offered up.
Although the blood gradually began to congeal, the sacrifice was not at an end. There began the performance of the ‘sun-gazing’ dance, even though the dancer did not actually gaze at the sun, but merely at the top of the sacred pole. Sitting Bull rose from his place against the sacred trunk, facing the sun and began bobbing up and down on his toes in the rhythmic dance that lasted all day, his eyes fixed on the nest, which appeared as though he was looking into the sun, as he continued his prayer. Eventually, the sun slowly ascended toward the zenith, coursed down toward the west and disappeared into the ground haze above the crest of the Bighorn Mountains.
Sitting Bull continued dancing with no food or water through the hours of darkness and into the next morning, driving him into a state of utter exhaustion, which would bring on the rite’s climax. That moment arrived when the sun was high in the sky. He staggered a few steps and then collapsed to the ground and fainted, the Sioux considered it dying a passing death.
Slowly consciousness began to creep back and out of the mist around him, a vision appeared. He heard a disembodied voice and saw human forms taking shape and moving against the blackness of his delirium. They were soldiers of the white man’s army, entering the great Sioux encampment. This startled Sitting Bull. Surely they were not coming as conquerors! These were men in defeat, their heads bent and hats falling.
When Sitting Bull opened his eyes, he knew there was to be a victory and so informed those around him of what he saw. Only he was also troubled because the vision had carried a warning…These soldiers are gifts of Wakan Tanka, he told his people. Kill them, but do not take their guns or horses. If you set your hearts upon the goods of the white man, it will prove a curse to this nation.
After the ceremony was completed, the great camp was moved. While boys rounded up the stock, the women took down the teepees, folded the heavy hide covers, and packed household goods and children on horse-drawn travois. Before night had fallen, the campground was empty and the massed bands were traveling westward together, up and over the hilly saddle and on toward Little Bighorn River, which they called Greasy Grass.
They were not fleeing, even though the white army was not far away. The Sioux had not joined together only to run away. They were confident in their numbers and pride. This time, they would strike first and in force. The Warriors painted their faces and bodies for war, and took up their coup sticks, weapons, and shields of buffalo hide. About half of the warriors had guns. A few carried modern repeating rifles, but most possessed only old muzzle-loaders. However, they were adept at loading the ancient long-guns on the run, as they rode their horses. They would pour the powder into the muzzle, not needing their hands to guide their mount, pop a ball in their mouth, put the muzzle to their mouth and then blow the ball down the muzzle, making ready for their next shot. The rest were armed with bows and arrows, lances and war clubs.
Crazy Horse was eager to lead his brothers in war! The warriors followed him back across the saddle toward Rosebud Creek, heading southward. Early in the morning, they took the white soldiers by surprise. The Soldiers were led by General George Crook, the very man who had come upon the Cheyenne camping on the Tongue River and tried to burn their village.
Crazy Horse sneered inside. The man was a bungling idiot and wasn’t prepared for so many braves to be descending on him. It would be an easy battle, he thought greedily. In a brilliant display of leadership, unprecedented in Crook’s experience of Indian-style warfare, Crazy Horse launched wave after wave of mass attacks that cut deep into the white army’s disorganized defense.
Unexpectedly, though, there was a twist of fate. Crazy Horse discovered that the Shoshones were teamed with Crook, who knew nothing about the style that Indians used to fight a battle, but Washakie, the chief of the Shoshones, did. The Shoshones were Sioux’s bitter enemy, only there numbers were limited and they were never able to win a battle with the Sioux.
Ever since the Sioux had killed Washakie’s son, and scalped him in front of him, Washakie had vowed to get revenge. Now he was following through with that vow. Suddenly, the Sioux were on the defense, rather than the offence, even though they out-numbered the group. Under the experienced Shoshone onslaught, fighting more fiercely than Crazy Horse had ever seen the Shoshone fight before, he was forced to make an orderly withdrawal from the battlefield.
Crook claimed a victory, but Crazy Horse had stopped his advance in its tracks, forcing him to halt, regroup, and wait for supplies and reinforcements. He fought no more that month.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The battle had been exciting to Gray Wolf, yet disappointing when they had to retreat. It had barely started and they had been on the winning end of the skirmish, until the Shoshone showed up! Even though they had only lost a few braves, much less than their enemy had lost, there was an anticlimax in the event. Was that all that was going to happen after so many Sioux had converged to bring about Sitting Bull’s vision?
Sitting Bull did not participate in the combat at Rosebud Creek. It had occurred the third day after the Sun Dance, and the Chief’s sacrifice of the Scarlet Blanket still racked his body, and he was in no condition to fight with his braves. He had great faith in Crazy Horse, so he did not worry. When Crazy Horse returned, Sitting Bull was confused. What had happened certainly was not a fulfillment of his vision. Had he seen it wrong? This puzzled him. The twenty-eight white men who had been killed there, and the fifty or so wounded, had in no way brought the enemy to disgrace.
Crook was still waiting for Gibbon and Terry, leading other troops to join him. Gene
ral Custer was under orders to circle about and swing up on the Indians from the south, pinching them against Gibbon’s force, but he threw strategy to the wind when he came across the huge trail left by the moving Sioux encampment, leaving the Sun Dance.
Custer was vain and reckless. He didn’t want to share the glory with the other commanders of the white man’s army. Instead, he turned and proceeded along the trail the Sioux had left for him to follow, which led towards the Little Bighorn River, not thinking to contemplate how many there were. When he found them, he committed a drastic error of judgment. Even though he could see he was outnumbered, he split his force, sending about a fourth of his men to create a diversion, while he took five companies of cavalrymen to strike the Sioux camp from another angle. He was certain most of the Sioux warriors would chase after his smaller troop and he would move in for the kill, not only of the warriors but of the whole Sioux village.
Custer’s recklessness matched the Sioux’s overconfidence. Even though the Sioux had seen sightings of the approaching enemy, they failed to realize the danger. They would have been caught unprepared, had it not been for two Sioux boys from Sitting Bulls tribe, out looking for stray horses. These two youths crossed the cavalry’s trail and found a pack which had fallen off one of their mules, during the night march. They broke it open and were enjoying the hard bread it contained when an Army patrol, looking for the lost pack, stumbled upon them. One boy was killed, but the other got away and hurried back to the encampment to raise the alarm.
Even so, the Indians were not fully ready when the diversionary attack Custer had sent, came across the river, striking the southern sector of the great camp. The boy’s warning caught Sitting Bull in the council lodge. He hurried to his own teepee and took up his weapons, a 45 revolver and an 1873 model Winchester carbine.
One Bull, his twenty-three-year-old nephew, joined him, and they galloped from the camp to meet the soldiers. Sitting Bull sat on his war pony and watched as the white men began to fall. Within minutes they were all trying to withdraw. There were plenty of Sioux warriors to meet them. The whites were up against a thousand warriors, and never had a chance. There were a mere hundred and fifty of the soldiers, and by the time they had plunged back across the river, almost half of their number were either killed or wounded. Sitting Bull smiled with satisfactory at the sight of the retreat.
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