by Dee Brown
Another event that occurred during Dane’s absence was the birth of his first granddaughter to Swift Eagle and Buffalo Calf Woman. He and Sweet Medicine Woman spent much of their time with their two grandchildren, White Horn the boy and Sun Spirit Girl. Although he said nothing to Buffalo Calf Woman, Dane was disappointed that she had not named his first granddaughter after his grandmother.
Late in the Moon of Dry Dust Blowing, the Cheyennes turned eastward in pursuit of a buffalo herd and came upon Crazy Horse’s summer camp on the Belle Fourche. It was a large village, with almost as many wickiups as tipis because there were so many young unmarried warriors there who had left the reservations to join Crazy Horse. Every few days Crazy Horse led a war party into the nearby Black Hills to harass the miners despoiling Paha Sapa. Dane and his son Swift Eagle joined one of these war parties, and they went deep into the Black Hills to attack a tent camp of miners. The war party spent four days among the pine-clad crags and canyons from which mysterious rumbling voices seemed to speak. Some of the Oglalas believed that Paha Sapa was the home of the Thunderbird and the Great Spirit, but for the Cheyennes this was the place of the Holy Mountain where their prophet Motzeyouf, the Sweet Medicine, had journeyed to learn the secrets of the Great Medicine. From the Black Hills the prophet brought to the tribe its four sacred arrows and the warrior societies that had since kept the Cheyennes strong. For the first time Dane came to fully understand the veneration of the Northern Plains tribes for Paha Sapa and their bitter hatred for the plundering white intruders.
At about this same time, events unknown to any of these free Indians were occurring in Washington. A report prepared by a high-ranking bureaucrat was attracting unusual attention among the politicians and government officials. It recommended that soldiers be sent against all tribes who refused to live on their assigned reservations, because they were “well-fed and well-armed and were a threat to the reservation system,” a hinderance to the government’s acquisition of the Black Hills. A few days after this report appeared, the Secretary of War announced that troops might have to be sent to protect miners in the Black Hills. This was quickly followed by a series of telegraph messages to the government’s agents on the reservations, ordering them to send messages to all Indian tribes off the reservations warning them to come in and report by January 31, 1876, or a “military force would be sent to compel them.”
The first that the Cheyennes heard of this threat was the arrival of a party of Oglala messengers from the Red Cloud Agency late in the Moon of Popping Trees. Yellow Hawk’s and Two Moon’s people were camped that winter along the Little Powder near where it ran into the Powder. The two chiefs met in council with the messengers and told them they did not want to become reservation Indians, but neither did they wish to fight the Bluecoats. Because it would be impossible to move travois and old people and young children during the Big Freezing Moon of January, they agreed to start for the agency on White Earth River as soon as the snow melted and the grass was green enough for their ponies to feed.
From Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, whose winter camps were farther down the Powder, the messengers received virtually the same response. One reason the chiefs did not believe there was any need for hurry was the continual arrival of small parties of Sioux and Cheyennes fleeing the Red Cloud Agency in search of food. These fugitives said the rations doled out to them at the agency were rotten and filled with worms, and that their stomachs longed for fresh buffalo and antelope meat. An Oglala who brought his family to the Cheyenne camp told Dane that Red Cloud had asked the Bluecoat commander at Camp Robinson to come to the agency to inspect the food, but the day before the army officers came, the agent arrested Red Cloud. Red Cloud was put into the guardhouse with his hands tied and a wooden gag in his mouth until after the inspection was over so that he was unable to tell the officers that the food on display was not the usual daily fare offered the Indians.
None of the Indians in winter villages along the Powder knew that on February 7, 1876, the War Department ordered its commanders in the western forts to begin military operations against the “hostile” tribes who refused to report to their assigned agencies, or that one day later General Philip Sheridan notified generals George Crook and Alfred Terry to march their troops in the direction of the Powder, Tongue, Rosebud, and Bighorn rivers “where Crazy Horse and his allies frequented.”
In the Moon of the Snowblind, Yellow Hawk’s and Two Moon’s Cheyennes were camped on the west bank of the Little Powder, about a hundred lodges including a few visiting Sioux, and a horse herd numbering seven hundred, all sheltered by bluffs from the wintry winds. Dane and Sweet Medicine Woman still lived in the tipi that Amayi had painted, though some parts of it had been replaced from time to time through the years, the representations of the family carefully coated with new paint. The two coyotes facing each other on each side of the entrance were still bright and sharply delineated.
Before daylight one morning Dane awoke suddenly. He was not sure whether he had heard something or felt something. Sound or movement, whatever it was, it did not belong there. He pushed aside the thick buffalo robe, sliding quietly off the willow bed-frame so as not to disturb Sweet Medicine Woman. Shivering in the cold, he pulled on his blanket-cloth leggings and then sat listening. It was still there, a faint reverberation in the air. He wrapped himself in the buffalo robe and raked coals together in the fire hole, laying two sticks of wood over them. Then he opened the entrance flap and listened. Horses’ hooves on the snow, far away, he thought. All around the camp the snow cover had melted and frozen again. Now it was so cold that he could feel frost on his nose hairs when he breathed. He hurried to the top of a small knoll and looked toward the south. The late winter dawnlight was very pale, but he could see cavalry approaching at a steady pace, four troops, each mounted on horses of matched colors. The white-horse troop was in the lead.
Shouting an alarm, he ran back to arouse Sweet Medicine Woman and call his son Swift Eagle out of the adjoining tipi. Dane’s carbine was in good working order, but he had only four bullets left, and he knew that few others in the camp had ammunition for their weapons. While Dane armed himself with a bow and arrows, Sweet Medicine Woman wrapped a buffalo robe around her and fastened a parfleche bag to her back. Dane pushed her outside, and tossed his carbine to Swift Eagle. “I’ll get the women and children up on the bluff ledge!” he cried. Being one of the older men now, that was his duty—to save the seed of the tribe before entering the fight.
The camp was swarming with movement when the white-horse troop charged in, recklessly firing carbines and pistols. A second line of Bluecoats on darker-colored horses struck from the left, while a third swept toward the Cheyennes’ horse herd along the grassy flat. Dane lifted his young grandson to his shoulders, hurrying the women ahead of him. Swift Eagle’s wife, Buffalo Calf Woman, had the little granddaughter in a cradle and was also struggling with several packs. Sweet Medicine Woman took the packs, and they started running up the icy slope to the ledge. Behind them in the camp women were screaming and children crying. The firing continued, bullets whining in the cold air. Men shouted and cursed, ponies whinnied, a rumble of hooves came from the Cheyennes’ stampeded horse herd.
As soon as Dane was sure that his family was safe on the ledge, he turned back to help the old people who were hobbling up the slippery incline. Below, in the rear of the nearest tipi, he saw an old woman with one small child in her arms, another child clinging tight to her robe. All three were crying. The old woman was attempting to conceal herself and the children in a clump of leafless brush. A Bluecoat mounted on one of the white horses sighted them, and wheeled to face them. He raised his pistol but Dane had his bow up. He drove an arrow into the soldier’s neck; the man fell, sprawling on his belly in the snow. When Dane ran past him, he kneeled to jerk the pistol from the man’s tightening fingers. The riderless white horse was circling. Dane tried and failed to catch the bridle. The second time the horse came round he pulled the carbine from its bucket, and
then ran to help the old woman with the children.
By this time the Cheyenne warriors realized that they were too heavily outgunned to make a stand in their camp and began withdrawing to the ledge where their women and children had found refuge. From this position the warriors could pour enfilading fire down upon any soldiers attempting to pursue them. They could do nothing, though, to stop the Bluecoats from destroying their tipis. During the morning they watched everything except the clothing they wore go up in smoke. Sweet Medicine Woman wept when she saw flames licking at Amayi’s painting, and others cried out over the loss of their blankets and bedding, their medicine bundles and saddles, the carefully hoarded winter supplies of food. The Bluecoats made useless even their kettles, pans, and other utensils by knocking holes in them.
In the withdrawal only four warriors were killed, but several suffered painful wounds. Swift Eagle’s face was cut open from ear to eye, the bullet lodging in his cheekbone. Two Crows, the old medicine man, was prying a piece of lead out of the bone with a knife when Dane found his son with other wounded.
While the Bluecoats below were still destroying the tipis and everything they contained, Yellow Hawk and Two Moon decided their only hope of survival in the bitter weather was to reach Crazy Horse’s village. By horseback the distance was two long days, and they had brought out only a dozen or so ponies from the camp. A few more that had scattered when the Bluecoats drove off the herd were being recovered by daring warriors, but hundreds more were needed. The final decision of the leaders was for half the warriors to go with the women, children, old people, and wounded, following the rock ledge to a coulee through which they could move northward toward Crazy Horse’s village. While this was being done, the remaining warriors would watch the soldiers, distract them if necessary, and use any opportunity that offered to recover some of their ponies.
Late in the afternoon, the Bluecoats, after making a number of halfhearted attempts to drive the Cheyennes from the ledge, began withdrawing toward the south. As the winter light died, the warriors followed at a distance, tracking the cavalrymen to a tent camp in a grove of cottonwoods. They soon discovered what was left of their pony herd, penned in a cul-de-sac, with four army wagons blocking the entrance. Across a narrow gully, the picketed mounts of the white-horse troop looked like ghost horses frozen in the biting cold.
Dane was with these desperate horse hunters. He had defiantly refused to obey his brother-in-law Yellow Hawk’s command to go on with the women and children. Not until they left the ledge to begin following the soldiers did he discover that the warrior wearing a buffalo-hair headdress and wrapped to the eyes in a maroon blanket—and who had stayed near him all afternoon—was Red Bird Woman. He scolded her until she reminded him that she had brought the Cheyennes good luck when she went with them to Peno Creek against the fort on the Little Piney.
“But by now you must have seen sixty winters,” he said.
“And you more than that,” she retorted.
Two Moon and Yellow Hawk gave the task of regaining the horse herd to old Iron Crow, who had succeeded Lean Bear as head of the Dog Soldiers. It was done speedily and almost silently. Iron Crow sent several warriors to work their way along the steep face of the ravine and then down into the rear of the herd. Then he and three of his Dog Soldiers with their usual competence dispatched the two Bluecoats guarding the wagon barrier. When Iron Crow heard what sounded like the distant yelp of a coyote, he signaled the remaining warriors out of the nearby gully and they quickly rolled the empty wagons aside. Meanwhile the warriors in the rear of the herd had mounted and were driving the animals before them. As the ponies rushed by, each warrior caught one and rode swiftly away.
In the confusion, Dane lost Red Bird Woman. He did not remember seeing her after he leaped out of the gully to help move the wagons. When carbine fire rattled suddenly behind him he turned and saw one of the white cavalry horses jumping the gully. Thinking that a Bluecoat was starting pursuit, he quickly drew the pistol he had taken that morning. As he raised the weapon he recognized Red Bird Woman’s buffalo-hair headdress against the starry sky. She had stolen one of the mounts of the white-horse troop, and when she passed him like a streaking ghost her laughter was that of a gleeful young girl.
On their grim three-day journey to Crazy Horse’s village, the Cheyennes lost more people from cold and exhaustion than they had lost to the Bluecoats. They had not been able to recapture half their stampeded ponies, and out of fear of another attack by the cavalry, they discontinued any further searches for lost animals. Consequently many had to walk, or take turns at riding, and progress was slow without saddles or bridles.
Temperatures below zero protected them from Bluecoat pursuit, but the weather was also a deadly enemy. On the second day, freezing rain coated their ponies and their clothing with ice, and made it impossible to keep fires going that night. The only food they had were tiny bits of dried buffalo meat from the small stores that the women had managed to carry away with them.
Without shelters everyone suffered, and on the afternoon of the third day they halted long enough to build makeshift scaffolds for the dead before going on to Crazy Horse’s village. Among them was a tiny platform for Sun Spirit Girl. Dane and Sweet Medicine Woman had lost their only granddaughter. She died as Dane remembered the young McBee children dying on that long-ago exodus of the Cherokees—with a rasping of the throat and lungs, a choking, and then death.
When will this curse, this burden upon my people be lifted? he thought as he helped his wounded son lift the tiny blanketed form upon its scaffold. When will the running stop, the flights be ended?
Their sadness was lightened by the kindness of the Sioux, some of whom rode out from their village to welcome them. At every tipi they passed after they entered the camp circle, men and women and children stood outside in the cold to greet them. “Hokahe, brave Cheyennes, come and share food with us.” Others brought blankets and robes, offering them in silence.
Crazy Horse, almost unnoticed in his simple buckskins, a red hawk’s feather in his long unbraided hair, appeared out of the crowd to welcome Two Moon and Yellow Hawk. “I have heard,” he said, “of the Bluecoats’ savagery.”
“We have no food or shelter,” Two Moon answered, “and few horses.”
“I am glad you are come,” Crazy Horse said. “We Oglalas have more horses than are needed. We will share our food and shelter.” He placed his hands on the shoulders of the Cheyenne chiefs, his eyes burning with anger. “We all will have to fight the Wasicus again.” He recognized Dane, then, standing behind the chiefs. “Where is my old friend Pleasant?” he called out. Dane told him that his half-blood son was at the Red Cloud Agency. Crazy Horse’s face revealed his disapproval. “Hoh! With old Red Cloud and my uncle Spotted Tail, he eats the white man’s leavings? But one day he will come and join us. Like us, Pleasant will find that he must live where the wind blows free. He will come, and so will many others.”
Until the Geese Laying Moon of April, the Cheyennes lived with the Oglalas, slowly restoring their shattered world. For fresh meat, antelope were plentiful in the valley, but what they needed most of all were the life-giving buffalo—to replace their lost tipis and clothing and to replenish their stores of dried meat. The Oglalas also needed buffalo in the spring, and as soon as the grass was green and the ponies strong, both tribes moved west to the Tongue. There they found Sitting Bull with hundreds of lodges of Uncpapas as well as many others who had fled the reservations in search of freedom. The Uncpapas had heard of the disaster that had befallen the Cheyennes, and many came to offer ponies, blankets, tipi covers, bows and arrows, medicine pipes, anything that was needed.
During the days that followed, Sitting Bull’s buffalo scouts began coming in with reports that herds were plentiful between the Rosebud and Little Bighorn. Instead of breaking camps on different days and taking different routes, the tribes and subtribes for the first time in anyone’s memory moved westward as one great family, thousands of Uncpapas, Oglal
as, Brules, Sans Arcs, Blackfoot Sioux, Arapahos, and Cheyennes.
Along the way they were joined by Spotted Elk’s Minneconjous coming up from the southeast, and Dane and his family held a joyful reunion with Amayi and her husband, Bull Bear. Amayi was more beautiful than ever, her skin bright with life, her glossy hair plaited with ribbons, her eyes and mouth always smiling. Dane was about to chide her for not presenting him with a grandchild, when he heard her whisper to Sweet Medicine Woman that she had suffered a miscarriage that winter but was fully recovered. Several of the Minneconjous had spent the winter at the Red Cloud Agency, and all vowed they would fight the Bluecoats rather than return to the constraints and deadly impoverishment of reservation life.
In the Moon When the Buffalo Bulls Are Fat, these last free Indians of the Northern Plains made their camp circles along the Greasy Grass (which the white men call Little Bighorn) to begin a busy summer of hunting, hide dressing, meat drying, robe tanning, and lodgepole cutting. On the morning of June 25 their chosen way of life was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of six hundred well-armed Bluecoats under the command of George Armstrong Custer. When the fighting ended, the tribes had won a great victory, but the triumph soon brought down upon them the wrath of mighty forces, and in the end they lost Paha Sapa, the hunting paradise of the Powder River country, and their cherished freedom forever.
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“MR. TEDDY ROOSEVELT, YOUR President,” Dane said, “was always asking me to tell him about the fight on the Little Bighorn. He would not believe me when I told him I was there but saw only the finish of it from a long distance. He thought I was afraid to admit I might have helped kill Custer.”
