by Dee Brown
“Because this mock attack would be more dangerous than stampeding an unguarded horse herd, all the younger Fox Soldiers volunteered. Among them were Yellow Hawk and Magpie Eagle, and of course I asked to go because I was eager to prove my bravery. There was also a very young boy, no more than fourteen or fifteen. I had seen him on buffalo hunts but did not know his name.
“The night turned off very cold, and when we swam our horses across the river just before daylight, the water felt like ice. We fastened our ponies in a thicket close by the river and started upstream toward the Crow camp.
“When we could see sparks from their fires rising above the willows, we spread far apart and moved slowly forward, trying to avoid making any noise. One of their dogs must have smelled us. It howled a warning, and the Crows came charging on foot out of the willows. There was just enough light so that they could dimly see us, and because all of us fired at once and were spread out, the Crows were not sure of the size of our party. At Yellow Hawk’s signal, we backed away a short distance, taking cover behind bushes or trees, reloading and firing our guns again. In this way we slowly drew the Crows out from their camp. As soon as we heard the cries of our mounted Fox Soldiers and the splashing of the captured herd in the river shallows we all turned and ran for our ponies. Those Crow warriors didn’t know what to do next—chase after us on foot or run back to their camp and mount whatever horses they had left.
“They must have had quite a few animals picketed around their tipis, because our little party of ten was only halfway across the river when a dozen Crows came streaking after us. We lashed our ponies and headed for a coulee where War Shirt’s men and the captured herd were supposed to be waiting. Suddenly my pinto stumbled in a muddy place, spinning around to regain its footing, and I saw one of my companions and his mount on the ground behind me. The other young men in our party had swept on ahead of us. The Crows were galloping fast from the riverbank, one of them far out in front on a swift pony.
“What I did next was done without thinking. The unhorsed Cheyenne was that young boy of fourteen or fifteen. His pony still lay motionless, and he was limping toward me. As I said, without thinking of bravery or danger I jabbed an arrow point into the pinto’s flank and made him leap forward. I swung him around right in front of the limping boy, but the lead Crow was closing upon us, his lance drawn back ready to hurl. I had to stop him with my first shot. Whether it was Creek Mary’s gorget or Whistling Elk’s magical pouch, I’ll never know, but my medicine was strong that day. I shot that Crow out of his saddle, reached for the boy’s wrist, and lifted him up behind me. Then I heard gunfire from ahead. Yellow Hawk and the others had turned back to help, and not far behind them came War Shirt and his bunch. The outnumbered Crows scattered for the river.
“When we reached the captured horse herd, the boy behind me slid off slowly, favoring his sprained leg. Magpie Eagle came rushing up then, grabbing the boy in his arms and brushing the mud off him. ‘You stole my girl,’ Magpie Eagle shouted at me, ‘and now my young brother’s life belongs to you. What else do you want?’ His scowl turned to a grin, and he reached up a hand. When I took it to shake, he pulled me out of my saddle, spilling me roughly on the ground. Everybody broke into laughter.
“That night after we made camp, Magpie Eagle proposed that I be invited to join the Fox Soldiers. He also gave me his share of the horses we had taken, and then War Shirt said that after we divided the animals evenly among us, there would be eight left over. Ordinarily these extra horses would belong to War Shirt and Yellow Hawk because they were the leaders in the raid, but both said that I must have them for my offering to Big Star.
“As soon as we returned to the Ghost Timbers, I was ready to take my horses to Big Star’s tipi, but Yellow Hawk and Magpie Eagle told me that I could not do this myself. I must first find a ‘mother’ to adopt me, and then she would take the horses to Big Star and ask for Sweet Medicine Girl. I remembered Grandmother Mary telling me of her difficulties in finding a ‘brother’ so that she could become a Cherokee, but her troubles seemed slight compared to mine. Every woman I went to who was old enough to be my mother refused to adopt me as a son, some quite rudely, and as the day went on I began to suspect a tribal plot among the women to keep me from marrying Sweet Medicine Girl.
“The whole thing, however, was a trick, a kind of joke arranged by Yellow Hawk and Magpie Eagle to test my steadiness. Long before sundown I was in despair, sitting beside Whistling Elk’s tipi and hating all Cheyenne women, when Red Bird Woman’s old mother, Rainbow, came up to me and said she was looking for a son to adopt. As I jumped up to embrace her, Yellow Hawk and most of my Fox Soldier brothers appeared, all laughing over how they had tricked me.
“From that moment, everything went along like a dream. Rainbow led my horses one at a time over to Big Star’s tipi, while I obeyed her instructions and moved my things into her tipi. There I was to wait for Big Star’s answer. Across from me on the edge of the Dog Soldiers’ circle, Lean Bear and Red Bird Woman sat in front of their tipi watching with great amusement. Every once in a while Lean Bear would make a teasing remark, and then suddenly he jumped to his feet and cried: ‘Here they come!’
“To my great joy, Big Star had given his permission and the marriage ceremony was beginning. Wearing a fine red dress, Sweet Medicine Girl was mounted on one of the best of the captured ponies, a splendid Appaloosa. It was led by a young woman on foot, and other young women were leading several of the gift horses that Big Star was generously returning to me. Lean Bear came running with a new blanket, spreading it on the ground in front of Rainbow’s tipi, and Yellow Hawk and Magpie Eagle, both wearing their best costumes, took Sweet Medicine Girl from her saddle and placed her in the center of the blanket. Lifting the blanket by its corners, they then carried her into the tipi.
“While I and all the other men taking part in the ceremony waited outside, the women went inside to comb and rebraid Sweet Medicine Girl’s hair, paint her face, and decorate her with gift ornaments. At the same time, my adopted mother, Rainbow, was preparing the wedding feast. When this was ready, we young men were invited into the tipi.
“If I were trying to choose the happiest day of my life, that day would be the one. The last ceremony of the evening was my presentation of Grandmother Mary’s gorget to Sweet Medicine Girl.
“When we awoke together the next morning in Rainbow’s lodge, she was no longer Sweet Medicine Girl, she was Sweet Medicine Woman. Her nihpihist cord lay on the tipi floor beside our bed, and without shyness she let me look upon the silver Danish coin lying between her naked breasts.
“Rainbow called us to a breakfast she had prepared over coals outside the tipi. I dressed first and went out to thank her again for adopting me. Rainbow came up close to me, pulling my head down so that she could examine my neck. There were no teeth marks this time for her to see. ‘Your wife is beautiful,’ she said, ‘but she has not the fire of my daughter.’
“ ‘My woman’s fire burns in a different way,’ I told her, but she was laughing so hard that I don’t think she heard me.”
31
AFTER THE LAST WINTER snows melted around the Ghost Timbers, Big Star announced that in the Moon of Greening Grass they would start north to spend the summer along the streams that flowed into the Yellowstone. Lean Bear and the Dog Soldiers chose to go south for the season, however, and so the Fox Soldiers were assigned to lead the movement of march.
For Dane the slow journey northward was so pleasurable that he could not help but contrast it with the misery of the Cherokees on their exodus from the East. His duties as a Fox Soldier required him to ride back and forth along the caravan to maintain order and see that the families kept close together. Instead of traveling in wagons, however, the Cheyennes used travois. These were tipi poles fastened to each side of a horse’s saddle with the lower ends trailing on the ground behind. Tipi covers tied across these poles formed litters for carrying parfleches packed with food, clothing, and household goods. Old people t
oo feeble to ride or walk and some of the youngest children also were carried by travois. Instead of suffering from starvation, sickness, and harassment as the Cherokees had, the Cheyennes delighted in an abundance of food and the constantly changing scenery. Sometimes they stopped for three or four days along pleasant streams to hunt or laze away the warming afternoons. Occasionally they met small bands from friendly tribes, but not once did they encounter white men.
The country of forests and rich grass into which Big Star led them was a paradise of wild game. Buffalo and antelopes were everywhere, and rarely a day passed that they did not see elk and deer, beavers and bears. The skies were filled with hawks and eagles of many varieties, the waters were covered with ducks and geese, and the earth offered them wild berries, choke-cherries, and breadroots.
They camped for the summer along a stream of sweet water flowing from the Bighorns, and for the first time Dane met the northern cousins of these people he had made his own. Many of the Northern Cheyennes still disdained the clothing and blankets of white men, using buckskin and buffalo robes, and they spoke in a harsher dialect, often using Lakota words borrowed from their Sioux neighbors. He also met some of these Sioux, who were divided into subtribes—Oglalas, Brules, Minneconjous, and Uncpapas. What all these people took from that paradise to sustain themselves seemed to have no more effect upon it than a handful of water taken from a lake. He was told that no white man had ever seen this country.
That summer was the happiest of his life. He and Sweet Medicine Woman had their own tipi now, and they spent hours each day simply sitting close beside each other, sheltered by the benevolent land and the open sky. Upon waking each day, he looked upon his young wife and thanked his Maker of Breath and her Great Medicine for bringing them together upon the earth. There was about her the graceful delicacy of a flower, but he knew she was strong, as tenacious as a wild plant whose roots can split creviced granite. She told him one morning that his child was ripening within her.
Because their summer paradise turned into a winter land of snow and ice, in the Moon of Falling Leaves the tribes began moving toward their winter camps. Again Big Star led them to the Hinta Nagi, the Ghost Timbers, where walls of giant cottonwoods and red willow brush shielded them from the bitter winds of the Plains. In the Deer Rutting Moon snows began to fall there, small ones at first, and then blizzards the equal of which only the oldest of the Cheyennes remembered seeing in that place. Because of the weather they spent most of their time gathered in tipis, listening to the old storytellers vie with each other in relating tales of ghosts and monsters, of heroes and villains, of trickster animals and bawdy lovers. After bedtime the howling winds made the trees shriek and groan like the ghosts after which they were named.
Sweet Medicine Woman’s belly grew heavy with the child, and she and Dane worked constantly at sealing their tipi against the frigid air. They collected wood to be used later to keep their infant warm, and bargained for bearskins to make a bed that could not be penetrated by cold. In the Moon of Popping Trees, the child was born, a bright-eyed boy with a voice louder than the painful outcries of his mother. They named him Swift Eagle.
The next day when Bear Woman came to bathe her grandchild, she held its face close to her own and began shaking her head. “He has the Frenchman’s nose,” Bear Woman said.
Dane, who was poking at the fire, looked up at her. “What do you mean, the Frenchman’s nose?” he asked.
“Big Star can tell you more than I,” Bear Woman said. “His grandfather was a French trapper. Big Star does not have the Frenchman’s nose, but his dead brother had it.”
Dane was outraged. “Why did you not tell me of this?” he shouted at Sweet Medicine Woman. She was lying on their bed, covered with a bearskin and smiling across at the baby.
“I thought it of no importance,” she replied, surprised at his sudden outburst. “My father seldom speaks of the Frenchman.”
“I swore to my grandmother that I would marry only a full-blood,” he cried angrily. He walked toward her, his hands half clenched as if he meant to seize and shake her. “And now I find that my wife has the blood of the Veheos.”
She had never seen him so infuriated. Tears formed in her eyes, and she tried to sit up. He pushed her gently back, awkwardly adjusting the bearskin around her. “It does not matter,” he said quietly. “The child is what matters.”
He said no more about the Frenchman, but he thought often of the irony of fate that had brought him a wife and son who were not full-bloods. He wondered how Creek Mary would accept the situation. Most likely, he thought, she would view it as a marvelous prank played upon mortals by the Maker of Breath. He could almost hear her deep laughter ringing over the Hinta Nagi. Sometimes, however, he would hold Swift Eagle in his hands, examining the tint and texture of the child’s skin and the thin aristocratic nose that was a heritage from the Frenchman.
Sweet Medicine Woman once saw him doing this, and her temper flared up. “So you think your son is ugly?” she cried accusingly. She was pounding dried buffalo chips into powder.
“They say he resembles you,” Dane replied teasingly.
She was in no mood for banter. She slammed the pan of buffalo-chip powder down beside the fire to warm it. “If he is uncomely,” she said, “perhaps it is the Cherokee in him. Don’t blame everything on the Frenchman.” She came over and took Swift Eagle from him, undressing the child within the warmth of the fire. Dane saw that the little boy’s buttocks were badly chafed. He watched his wife dust the buffalo-chip powder over the tender flesh and then place him gently back in his cradle.
“He is the most handsome boy in the Hinta Nagi,” Dane said, reaching for her waist. “Let us make another one.”
Before the winter ended great herds of buffalo, driven by the blizzards, tried to find shelter in the Hinta Nagi. They resembled ghosts themselves in their icy coats, and were such easy kills that every family had frozen meat hanging in the trees—to keep it out of reach of dogs and wolves. Dane hunted almost every day, and he soon had a great heap of buffalo skins for trading when spring arrived.
During the Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs, a half-blood Arapaho wearing white man’s clothing visited the Hinta Nagi and invited the Cheyennes to bring their buffalo skins to Fort Laramie. He represented a St. Louis fur company which had stocked many trade goods at the fort and was offering top prices for hides. As Laramie was easier to reach than Bent’s Fort, Big Star decided the Cheyennes should go there to trade.
Fort Laramie was a sturdy structure of adobe and timbers, with pointed-roof parapets built at opposite corners and above the entrance gate. It stood just across a shallow river also called Laramie. Some Brule Sioux were already camped in a grove nearby the walls, and so the Cheyennes set up their tipis along the grassy east bank amid a multitude of wild flowers. No soldiers had yet come to Fort Laramie, but an American flag was flying, and several white men from the fur company were there to welcome them.
Dane and Yellow Hawk crossed the stream together, carrying a few buffalo hides on their horses to test the trading market. About two years had passed since Dane had seen a white man, and they looked and smelled strange to him. He caught the friendly eye of a lean weatherbeaten man with flaxen hair falling to his shoulders, a drooping yellow mustache, and a short beard cut to a sharp point.
“Trade?” the man asked, and began talking in a sort of singsong Cheyenne-Arapaho jargon.
“Name your prices in English,” Dane said.
The trader stared at him in disbelief. “Good God, man! Where’d you learn to speak the lingo?”
Dane explained, telling him he was Cherokee-born from the Cherokee Nation in the state of Georgia.
“Wa-agh! And I was born in Augusta Town on the Savannah! I reckon this calls for a drink.”
The trader’s name was Jim Carrothers and he had made his way to St. Louis in his teens to travel west with the American Fur Company. He had taken an Arapaho girl for his wife. “We got four young-uns,” Carrothers said.
“Live up on the North Platte. I never been back to St. Louis but once.”
Dane traded his first hides for sugar, coffee, flour, and a length of red stroud cloth for Sweet Medicine Woman. Then he noticed some pocket notebooks covered in black leather on Carrothers’s worktable. “How much for a notebook?” he asked.
“On me,” Carrothers said, handing him one.
“I’ll need a pen and ink,” Dane added.
“Good God! You write the lingo, too? All I can do is scrawl my name and make figgers.” With a shrug he gave Dane an ink bottle and a pen.
That night in their tipi, after Sweet Medicine Woman had gone to sleep, Dane took out the notebook, dipped his pen in the ink, and made a first entry: Swift Eagle, Robert Dane, of one-half Cheyenne blood mixed with French blood, three-eighths Cherokee blood, and one-eighth Creek Mary’s blood, of which there may be some Spanish, was born at the Ghost Timbers in the year 1844 in the Moon of Popping Trees.
Although he could not record the exact day, he knew, as he wrote the words giving his son Swift Eagle an English name, that in the act of writing he had revealed to himself that he was not yet free of his ties to the white man’s world.
32
“MY SECOND SON, LITTLE Cloud, was born in 1845,” Dane said. “I wrote an English name for him in my book too, William Jotham Dane, but we never used it, not even when I took him to the seminary to be enrolled as a student. For a while I tried calling him Little Billy, but he would not answer to that, so I quit. Little Cloud did not have the Frenchman’s nose. He looked so much like his mother while he was very young that strangers took him for a girl. He was always undersized, but a splendid little fighter. I’ve always wondered what he’d have been like full grown…”
