by Dee Brown
“Yes,” Dane said. “Camp after camp for forty miles. By that time, many Cheyennes from the south had come to join us, some of Black Kettle’s people who would not let the Bluecoats drive them to Indian Territory. Yellow Woman, William Bent’s Cheyenne wife, came with her half-blood sons. She swore she would never again live with a Veheo, and they renounced the blood of their father.
“Red Cloud would not rest until he brought all the Teton Sioux into war camps along the Tongue. He brought Brules up from the south, and Uncpapas, Sans Arcs, and Two Kettles down from the north. One day he met a hunting party of our old enemies, the Crows. His warriors could have rubbed them out, but Red Cloud escorted the Crows to our camps and invited them to join us in our war on the Bluecoats. The Crows said they would consider the matter, but they must have spent a lot of time considering, because they never came back.
“Red Cloud always treated the war chiefs as equal allies, but in the councils he decided when and where we would strike the Bluecoats, and which chiefs would lead the attacks and ambushes. I remember Sitting Bull of the Uncpapas was always wanting to set traps for soldiers guarding supply trains coming up from Fort Laramie. Oh, we had some great war chiefs—Black Shield and White Bull of the Minneconjous, Black Bear and Sorrel Horse of the Arapahos, Dull Knife of our Northern Cheyenne cousins, Roman Nose, who had brought a band of Dog Soldiers up from the south, Old Two Moon and Iron Crow of our people. Crazy Horse of the Oglalas was only a young boy then, but no one could match him as a decoy leader. Pleasant and Swift Eagle rode with him several times and in camp at night after the chases were over they would tell of Crazy Horse’s daring, how he would badger the Bluecoat cavalrymen by leaping right out into the trail in front of them, shaking his red blanket to frighten their horses, and darting in and out of the brush until they foolishly followed him right into ambush.”
“I remember Swift Eagle got pretty good, too,” Red Bird Woman said, “decoying Bluecoats.”
“We knew the fort was too strong for us,” Dane continued, “but no Veheos could come or go on the Bozeman Trail without fear. Only one time did we let a white traveler go without hindrance. One morning Jim Carrothers rode out of the fort, alone, heading south for Fort Laramie. His shoulders were bent and he looked tired and beaten. We knew that old Jim had his craw full of the foolish White Eagle Chief. Old Jim was more our friend than the Bluecoats’. So we let him go. I heard afterward he went back to Westport and died.
“We were sure that if we could get Colonel Carrington’s Bluecoats outside in the open we could beat them. To do this we had to make them crazy, like buffalo bulls pricked with lances until they run from the herd. Red Cloud chose the day for this to be done, and more than a thousand warriors rode up the Tongue to the fork of the Peno. We camped in three great circles—Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho—no tipis, but saddle-blanket windbreaks and other shelters. Because we had used up most of our gunpowder and lead, and could get no more, most of us were armed with bows and arrows, lances and war clubs. It was very cold, with a fine powdery snow falling.”
“Aho-ya, I remember that cold,” Red Bird Woman said. “Night before battle when I kept you warm in my buffalo robe, our breath made icicles on the hair—” She stopped suddenly, putting both hands over her mouth, her eyes opening wide before she turned her face away from me.
Dane laughed. “She went to the battle camp with the warriors.”
“Some other women, too,” she added quickly. “Some without men like me, and some not long married. I dressed like warrior. Arapahos thought I been changed into he-e-man-eh. But Dane, he knows better.” Her body shook with silent laughter, the little folds of fat around her eyes squeezing them shut.
He shrugged. “Next morning Crazy Horse led one bunch of decoys down Big Piney on the north side of the fort and Swift Eagle took another bunch to the south side. Swift Eagle found a heavily guarded train of wagons going up the Little Piney to cut firewood for the fort. Swift Eagle’s warriors began making feints against the wood train, just enough to anger the soldiers so they would fire their guns. The sound of the guns brought a rescue party of Bluecoats from the fort, and when they galloped out of the gate, Crazy Horse came down the slope of Lodge Trail Ridge and started tantalizing them. Colonel Carrington fired one of his cannons, and Crazy Horse’s boys put on a show, jumping and yelling and darting back and forth on their ponies. Before long the wood train guard was chasing Swift Eagle’s decoys, and another bunch of Bluecoats was after Crazy Horse.
“While all that was going on, our main war party moved up Peno Creek under the screen of Lodge Trail Ridge. The Sioux rode behind some big rocks on the east side of the Bozeman Trail, several remaining mounted, others leaving their horses and concealing themselves in high grass nearby the trail. The Arapahos and we Cheyennes took the west side of the trail. We waited there, about a thousand of us, for the decoys to bring the Bluecoats into our trap.
“The soldiers were cautious at first, firing at our little bunch of darting decoys, their anger rising because so few Indians dared challenge a hundred well-armed soldiers. At last the Bluecoats charged our decoys, chasing them over Lodge Trail Ridge and along both sides of the trail right into our trap. Cheyennes and Arapahos swarmed upon them from one side, Sioux from the other. It was like a buffalo surround. The air was filled with arrows, warriors on foot closing in, pony riders circling. The Bluecoats fought bravely and stubbornly, trying to break out of our ring.
“If we had not gone mad and killed with such fury, very few of us would have gone to the Darkening Land or suffered wounds. But a craziness of desperation came over us. These Bluecoats symbolized death to us. As long as we could remember, the white man’s soldiers had been pushing us always westward, taking our lands whether we resisted or not. Now there was no place left to go. When cavalrymen found cover among some rocks, warriors gave their lives to make certain that no one escaped. Toward the end of the fighting, Cheyennes on one side of the soldiers and Sioux on the other were so close together that Cheyenne arrows were striking Sioux warriors, and Sioux arrows were striking Cheyenne warriors. Then it was all over. Not a soldier was left alive. But we lost many, too.
“Then the scalping began. The Cheyennes who had come up from Sand Creek were the worst. They not only took scalps, they stripped off uniforms and mutilated the bodies of the soldiers in the same way the soldiers mutilated their women and children at Sand Creek.
“We left the battlefield then, believing that if we always fought as one tribe united we could defeat the Bluecoats with our bows and arrows. Many of us were certain that after our great victory Colonel Carrington would take his survivors out of our land and leave us alone. But instead the army took Carrington away because we had beaten his men and sent another soldier chief and more Bluecoats to fight us.
“For several more moons we raided and ambushed as we had done before, and then at last Brule messengers from Fort Laramie began visiting our camps to tell us that a new peace commission had come there to meet with the chiefs. The commissioners wanted to talk about the boundaries of a reservation within which the tribes could live without white interference. All those who signed the new treaty were promised presents, including gunpowder and lead, and the right to trade for them forever. We had heard all that before, of course, and the chiefs held together with Red Cloud, replying that they would not come to Fort Laramie to talk peace until all soldiers were removed from the Powder River country.
“At last, Red Cloud got what he wanted—except for one thing. In the Moon of Red Cherries, the Bluecoats started leaving the fort, with white flags fluttering on their wagons, their long train crawling southward toward Fort Laramie. As soon as the last soldier was gone, Red Cloud led a number of warriors, heroes from all the tribes, down to the abandoned buildings and set them on fire.
“I was with him when he rode triumphantly to Fort Laramie with a thousand warriors to sign the treaty. After I read the treaty carefully, I advised him not to sign, but he would not listen. The boundaries of th
e promised land included the sacred Black Hills and extended to the Missouri River, but did not include our Powder River hunting paradise. When the commissioners promised him that his people would be given the right to hunt on any lands above the North Platte ‘so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase,’ Red Cloud signed, but I knew that we would soon lose our way of living forever. The boundaries of the Great Reservation were not meant to keep the white man out, but to keep the Indians locked in.”
51
WHEN AMAYI WAS SEVENTEEN she made her first visit to Fort Laramie with Dane and Sweet Medicine Woman. The reason for the journey was a special council called by the peace commissioners for the Northern Cheyennes and Arapahos, who had not been included in the treaty with the Teton Sioux tribes. All the chiefs and warriors went, taking their families with them, so that for several days there was an enormous village of tipis along the Laramie River.
Not long after they returned to the Lower Tongue and made summer camp, Amayi started a calendar on a buffalo hide that Sweet Medicine Woman dressed soft and smooth for her. Using bright blue and red and yellow paints, Amayi drew tiny pictures of the things she had seen at Fort Laramie—the great tipi village, the soldiers, the buildings, and the big tent where the chiefs and her father parleyed with the Veheos who spoke for the Great Father in Washington.
What Amayi did not show in her Fort Laramie drawing was the apprehension of the Southern Cheyennes who were at the council. When the commissioners discovered that some of the chiefs were not northerners—such as War Shirt (Big Star’s successor) and Big Shin (of Black Kettle’s band) and two of the Southern Arapaho leaders—these chiefs were told that they must take their people south to the Indian Territory. Another treaty had been made for them at Medicine Lodge in Kansas, assigning all the Southern Cheyennes and Southern Arapahos a reservation in Indian Territory between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers. None of the southerners, however, wanted to go back to the country in which they had suffered so much at the hands of the Bluecoats, and the night after they learned of the other treaty, they struck their tipis and hurried back north to the sanctuary of the sweet-watered Tongue. The southerners never forgave Dull Knife, Little Wolf, and the other chiefs for signing a treaty that gave only the northerners the right to roam and hunt north of the Platte, as well as a home in the same lands assigned the Teton Sioux. If Amayi had been able to forecast the future in her calendar drawings she might have depicted the irony of Dull Knife’s and Little Wolf’s Northern Cheyennes being driven south as prisoners to Indian Territory ten years later, while her own southern people were escaping to Canada.
Amayi was not a seer, however, but only a picture chronicler of the events of each passing moon in her young life. In her second moon-drawing she portrayed the Sun Dance held by the Uncpapas in which the neighboring Cheyennes were invited to participate. She drew a black buffalo bull seated atop the Sun Dance pole to represent Sitting Bull. He was defeating the sun by gazing steadfastly into it. She also painted figures of young women in bright shawls dancing, and several young men around a Sun Dance pole, tugging at leather thongs running from the pole to skewers in their bleeding breasts. The face of one handsome young man was turned toward the dancing girls.
Amayi kept her buffalo-skin calendar above her bed, fastened to the inner lining of the family tipi. Dane began to notice that in each moon-drawing there was usually a handsome young man in the foreground looking out of the picture. When the Cheyennes followed a buffalo herd west to Rosebud Creek and camped with the Oglalas, Crazy Horse was the young man whose face was turned to look out of Amayi’s moon-picture instead of at the buffalo he was pursuing on horseback.
Then after they rejoined the Two Moon Cheyennes for winter camp, Young Two Moon’s smiling round face began appearing in Amayi’s drawings—in the foreground of the tipi village with large snowflakes falling around him, or leading his soldier society members off toward the tall lodgepole pine forest, or returning with a captured horse herd. Young Two Moon was courting Amayi in earnest that winter, but she seemed to be only amused by his overtures.
Her pattern of drawings changed somewhat the next spring when her half brother, Pleasant, paid them an unexpected visit, bringing along Maga, his Oglala widow, and entertaining everyone with his tales of wrecking one of the Iron Horses on the railroad. With a mixed band of Oglala warriors and Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, Pleasant had gone far down into Nebraska to raid wagon trains and stagecoaches. When they discovered that the railroad had penetrated into their old hunting grounds, they pried up some of the iron rails with an ax and waited nearby until the Iron Horse came puffing along. It ran off the track with a great noise, and some of the wagons on wheels behind it fell on their sides. Pleasant said they found many bottles of whiskey and bolts of multicolored cloth in one of the Iron Horse’s wagons.
After Pleasant and Maga left, Amayi tried to draw a moon-picture of Pleasant’s adventure, but she had never seen an Iron Horse and her drawing of a locomotive resembled a living monster breathing fire and smoke through its teeth. In this drawing, Pleasant was in the foreground looking out with smiling blue eyes above a tawny beard he had let grow during the winter. Amayi obviously did not care for the Oglala wiwazica, who stood on the edge of the picture appearing older than she was, a vulpine expression upon her profiled face.
One of Amayi’s summer moon-drawings recorded the birth of her brother Swift Eagle’s first son. Swift Eagle, his wife, Buffalo Calf Woman, and the baby wrapped in a cradle, were all smiling out of the picture. In the background was Buffalo Calf Woman’s tipi that Amayi had decorated with figures of horses and antelopes, and the moon, sun, and stars.
Later in that year, while the Cheyennes were camping on the Bighorn River near Spotted Elk’s Minneconjous, a handsome young man began returning to the foreground of Amayi’s calendar drawings. In each picture, the figure and face were always the same, easily recognized by Dane and Sweet Medicine Woman because they saw the young man almost every evening. He was Bull Bear, a Minneconjou warrior with friendly eyes and a strong jaw, the handsomest of all the young men who paid court to Amayi or appeared in her drawings.
The last drawing that Dane remembered seeing on his daughter’s calendar was of Bull Bear with his head shaved, vermilion rings circling his eyes, pendants of beads around his neck, copper bracelets on his wrists, and wearing a white cincture, beaded moccasins, and leggings decorated with porcupine quills. In the background were the dancers and musicians at the wedding of Amayi and Bull Bear, painted so that it was almost possible to hear the little bells on the dancers’ skirts and the sound of the drums and tambourines.
When Amayi left her parents’ tipi with Bull Bear, to go with the Minneconjous, she rolled up her calendar to carry with her. At the last moment of leavetaking, Dane warned her never to forget that her blood was the blood of Akusa Amayi. He had told her many stories of her great-grandmother, and now he begged her to keep Creek Mary’s name always in her memory. As he spoke, Sweet Medicine Woman removed the silver Danish coin from around her neck, and placed it around the neck of her daughter. “Wear this in remembrance,” Sweet Medicine Woman said. “It has been kept for you since the days of the old grandmother.”
Dane blinked, looking away because he did not want his surprise and pleasure to show in his face. He had said nothing to Sweet Medicine Woman about Creek Mary’s gorget. He supposed that she must have read his thoughts. They both spent much time now in the world of dreams and magic where no unspoken thoughts could be kept hidden from another, and he had often thought strongly that his daughter Amayi should wear the silver coin when she went away from them forever.
52
“MARY AMAYI ALWAYS WEARS same breastpiece now,” Red Bird Woman said. “Dane, you think Mary Amayi come back today from agency?”
“Before dark, I think,” he replied, and tossed a small stone into the stream.
“You know agency never give her money for medicine house, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “She had to go and find out, didn’t she?”
“Veheos give us nothing. They only take. What we must do is give her your cabin for medicine house.”
“Make my cabin into a hospital!” His thin lips parted, then opened wide as he broke into laughter.
“Why you think I build tipi for you up here?” Her eyes, half-closed by the tiny folds around them, flashed with a spark of exasperation at his slowness in comprehending.
He raised up on his knees, stood erect, and turned to look toward the west. “The agent promised to telegraph Washington,” he said. “But you speak true, Red Bird. They’ll give Mary Amayi nothing. We’ll have to make the hospital ourselves, the way we got the money to sent her to medical school.” He looked at me then, as though surprised to find me still there. “My granddaughter does not wish to go to a city to doctor in a hospital for the white people,” he explained in a soft voice. “She wants the bureau to build a hospital here for her people.”
“And you don’t think they will?”
“The bureau has our name on it, but it is not our bureau. They have some money that was paid for our land and the use of our land, but the bureau decides what is good for us. To them we are still children. The bureau does not believe children can doctor themselves.” He did not smile.
“Thirty years ago I went to Washington as interpreter with a delegation of chiefs. Gold had been found in the Black Hills and the American government wanted to make a new treaty to take the Black Hills out of the reservation they had marked off for the Sioux only six or seven years before. Red Cloud sent for me in the Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs. His Oglala messenger found me in our first spring camp on the Lower Powder, and told me that Red Cloud wanted me to go with him to the Great Father’s village. Red Cloud did not trust the government’s interpreters, the messenger said, and wanted me to go and help him save the Black Hills from the white man’s greed. If I could not come to the Red Cloud Agency on White Earth River I was to meet him at Fort Laramie early in the Moon When the Ponies Shed.
