by Dee Brown
Dane also found Bull Bear greatly concerned over the apostle of another religion—Kicking Bear and the Ghost Dance. Kicking Bear, a Minneconjou medicine man, had recently returned from a journey far to the west, where he had gone with several other Sioux and Cheyennes to investigate rumors of an Indian messiah who lived near the Sierras. Kicking Bear claimed to have seen this Son of the Great Spirit, who had given him a message and a Prayer Dance to bring back to Cheyenne River.
“Many of our people are leaving their livestock unattended,” Bull Bear said. “They do no more work on their little farms. Some have taken their children from the mission schools to spend their days and nights listening to Kicking Bear and dancing the Ghost Dance. They believe they can bring back their dead relatives, the great buffalo herds, and make everything the way it was before the Wasicus came. I too would like to believe these things, but I cannot. Our agent is growing angry, threatening to stop issuing rations.”
A few days after Dane’s arrival, the time came to take eight-year-old Mary Amayi to the girls’ boarding school. The four of them rode over in Bull Bear’s new wagon, and then went on to the boys’ school to visit Dane’s two grandsons, who were now almost into their teens, very handsome and very bright. Dane wished that he could bring Creek Mary back from the Land of the Ghosts for a few minutes so that she could see them.
On the way back home, as they were crossing a little creek, they saw about twenty wagons drawn up as though in a camp circle along a dusty flat beside the stream. Off toward a low ridge were a few tipis covered with canvas and pieces of aging buffalo skins.
“Kicking Bear must be starting a new Ghost Dance up here,” Bull Bear said, a disapproving tone in his voice.
“Let’s stop and see what is the nature of this dance,” Dane suggested.
Bull Bear showed no enthusiasm, but he hawed his team to the left and stopped the wagon on the outer rim of the circle. “Look,” he said, “there are some Uncpapas from Sitting Bull’s Standing Rock reservation. The Ghost Dance is spreading everywhere.”
It was late in the afternoon, the weather turning colder with a biting wind as the sun lowered. Everyone was wrapped in blankets, some standing, some on horseback, some sitting in the wagons, all waiting for Kicking Bear. He appeared suddenly from one of the tipis and came striding down the slope. He was wearing a dark red blanket gathered round his waist by a large brass-buckled belt. Around his neck was a bright crimson scarf. His long hair fell over his shoulders. As he began orating, he walked around the inner circle of wagons, gesturing with thumb and forefinger, his eyes burning with a strange fever. He told of how he had traveled to the far mountains to see the Son of the Great Spirit.
“Long, long ago,” intoned Kicking Bear, “the Great Spirit made this earth and then sent his Son to teach the people how to live, but the Wasicus treated him badly, piercing his side with a lance, driving nails into his hands and feet, and so the Son returned to the Upper World. Now the Great Spirit has sent his Son back to earth as an Indian, to make the earth as it was before the Wasicus came here. For twelve moons we must dance the Ghost Dance, and then the Great Spirit will send a whirlwind to destroy all the Wasicus, leaving a new land covered with sweet grass and clear running water and trees. If we dance and pray every day through these twelve moons, we can bring back our dead relatives and friends, we can bring back the lost buffalo, and herds of wild horses. While the whirlwind is passing, the Great Spirit will take the Ghost Dancers up in the sky, and when it has passed, they will be set down upon the new earth where only Indians will live.”
Kicking Bear called to the spectators to join him in the Ghost Dance. They left their wagons slowly at first, mostly old men and women, then children, and a few young men and women, until more than a hundred formed into a dance circle. Kicking Bear told them to stand with their hands placed on the shoulders of the person in front of them, and he repeated for them a chant that would be used instead of a drum to mark the rhythm of the dance.
“Father, I come!” Kicking Bear chanted, and the dance began, a slow shuffle forward, the circle constricting and then enlarging, the dancers’ moccasins kicking up little spurts of dust. “Mother, I come,” the voices called. Following Kicking Bear’s example, they raised their arms above their heads, praying to the Great Spirit. “Brother, I come,” they chanted. “Father, give us back our arrows!”
The dancing went on and on, until the shadows of the wagons fell long and black across the ground. Some of the older dancers would shriek out the names of dead relatives and then fall trancelike into the powdery dust, lying there unnoticed while the others continued to dance.
Amayi shivered under her blanket. “Let’s go home,” she said. “They are calling the ghosts to come back.”
“I think Kicking Bear tells big lie,” Bull Bear said, and clucked his team into motion. For a long time they could hear the deep rhythm of chanting above the grating of their wagon wheels.
With no grandchildren left at the house, Dane grew restless. He told Amayi that he wanted to see Young Opothle, and so he cut his visit short and instead of returning straight westward, he followed the Cheyenne River down to the Badlands and then rode toward Pine Ridge.
He had thought that Kicking Bear’s dance was an occurrence limited to the Cheyenne River Reservation, but after he reached White Earth River he passed several small groups of Oglala Ghost Dancers. Along a creek not far from Pine Ridge, he saw more Oglala dancers wearing ghost shirts made of cheap muslin, with bright-colored figures of thunderbirds, eagles, buffalo, and arrows painted upon them. The haranguer at this dance told his listeners that the holy shirts were invulnerable to the bullets of the Wasicus, and he led them in a chant:
It is I who makes the Sacred Shirt
Says the father, says the father.
The shirt will cause you to live
Says the father, says the father.
Dane rode on, pitying the believers, knowing they were driven to believe because they had nothing else in which to believe. They lived in a time without spirit, in a time of despair.
Late that afternoon he sighted Opothle’s church, the tall white steeple visible far across the bleak treeless plain, with a scattering of small log houses and a few shabby tipis beyond it. As he rode up to a hitching rail, he saw two children playing in the churchyard. “Opothle Kingsley,” he called out to them, and they ran inside the back door of what appeared to be living quarters appended to the main church building. A minute or so later a rotund man in a black suit filled the doorway. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles too small for his fleshy olive-skinned face, and his eyes blinked uncertainly as he watched Dane dismount.
“Uncle Dane!” he cried suddenly, and lumbered forward in the same awkward way that Dane remembered Young Opothle walking as a boy.
They had much to talk about, seated by a tall cast-iron stove that took the chill off the spring evening. After Dane met Opothle’s wife and two children, he learned that both Jotham and Priscilla had been dead for more than ten years. “Aunt Prissie was the one who led me to my calling,” Opothle said. “She was always very religious, you know.”
“Jerusha Crookes?” Dane asked. “What happened to Jerusha?”
Opothle did not know. He thought that the Reverend Crookes and his wife had left the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War, but he did not know where they went. “There is someone here,” he added, “who remembers you. My stepmother. After father died, she became a part of my family.” He stood up. “She’s growing frail now and naps in the afternoons. I’ll see if she’s awake.” He went down a passageway and after a minute or so returned with a narrow-waisted woman of about Dane’s age. Her iron-gray hair was clipped short, her eyes much friendlier than when Dane had last looked into them more than forty years past on a rainy leaden morning in Cane Hill, Arkansas.
“Saviah Manning,” he exclaimed. “Dr. Saviah Manning.”
“Saviah Kingsley,” she corrected him, laughing as she extended a slender but strong-fingered hand.
Next morning Opothle insisted that Dane stay a month, at least a week, with him and his family, but Dane explained that he was hoping to start a beef herd before the weather turned too warm and he had to be riding on to Montana. As he was preparing to leave, he asked Opothle if the Ghost Dance craze was affecting his church activities.
“It has come so quickly,” Opothle replied, shaking his head in bewilderment. “The older people seem most drawn to the Ghost Dance, although the teachings are pernicious to me, as a Christian. I don’t know where the belief could have come from.”
“It came from you and your fellow preacher men,” Dane said. “The Ghost Dancers are throwing the Resurrection and the Last Judgment back at you Christians, from their point of view.”
“You can’t be serious.” Opothle stared at Dane through the heavy lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles. “You always were a great teaser, Uncle Dane.”
“If you don’t believe me, go and listen to the chants.” Dane tightened the fastenings on his saddlebags, and then quickly mounted. “You should have preached to them of the Maker of Breath.”
Opothle was still shaking his head when his stepmother came out through the back door, making her way determinedly toward the hitching rail. “My recollection of you, Dane,” she scolded, “is of one who always runs away from me before sunrise.”
She offered her hand, and when he leaned from the saddle to take it, she whispered: “I remember, I remember. What an arrogant young female fool I was.”
“No more a fool than I.” He reached for his reins.
“You will write to us,” Opothle called. “With the new mail courier, letters go quickly between the agencies.”
“I’ll write if you’ll write.” Dane raised his hand in good-bye. “We’re the last of the old blood, and we must not lose track of our separate pathways again.”
During the late summer and autumn, Dane received letters from both Amayi and Opothle. Each described at length the turmoil brought on by the Ghost Dance on their reservations. In his replies, Dane complained that they had written more about the Ghost Dancers than about their children. “As for the Ghost Dancers,” he wrote, “I can tell you all about them. My poor Cheyenne neighbors do nothing else these days but spend all their waking moments at wild dancing and chanting. The Crows, on the other hand, will have nothing to do with this Ghost Dance. Like me, they are skeptical of prophets.”
In November an alarming letter came from Amayi. The Cheyenne River boarding schools had closed because so few pupils remained. Most of the teachers had fled in fear, the trading posts were locked and shuttered, and soldiers summoned by alarmed white settlers were patrolling the borders of the reservation. Worst of all, Bull Bear had received warnings and threats because he would not join in the Minneconjou Ghost Dances.
For some days Dane heard nothing more except wild rumors of many soldiers marching in the Black Hills, and then one dawn he was awakened by the sound of hoofbeats. Through his misted window he saw a troop of cavalry passing slowly down the road toward Dundee. After that, he rode to the agency every two or three days to see if Mr. Talcott might have a letter for him from Amayi or Opothle.
He was saddling his horse one morning when he saw Red Bird Woman approaching across the plain from the west. The old mare she was riding snorted as though with indignation because Red Bird Woman forced it into a canter over the last lap of the ride. As she crossed the stream, Red Bird Woman held up a white envelope. “Mr. Talcott sent letter,” she explained.
He reached for it. The envelope was marked Urgent in Opothle’s stilted handwriting. Before he could open it, she said: “Sitting Bull has been killed.”
“Sitting Bull! At Standing Rock?”
“Mr. Talcott says he killed few days ago. Ghost Dancers will mourn for him tonight.”
“Sitting Bull would never believe in Ghost Dancing.” He ripped the envelope open and hastily read Opothle’s short letter. Amayi had sent Opothle a verbal message by a government courier. She and Bull Bear and their children had been forced to leave their home and take refuge at the Cheyenne River Agency. They had their wagon and some household goods and were starting to join Spotted Elk’s Minneconjous at Cherry Creek. From there they hoped to make their way with other fugitives to the safety of Pine Ridge.
“I must go to Pine Ridge,” Dane said, turning toward his cabin. While he was packing his saddlebags, Red Bird Woman came in to help, gathering blankets from the bed. “Pack enough jerky for two,” she said. “I go with you.”
“You’re too old,” he answered her.
“No older than you.”
“We’re in the Big Frozen Moon,” he said. “There’ll be snow for certain going through the Black Hills.”
“All more reason you need Cheyenne woman to keep you warm, Sanaki.”
Red Bird Woman went with him, and he was glad for her company, although he would not tell her so. Snow fell on them twice, but not heavily, and they did not suffer from the cold until the last day, after they left Horsehead Creek and faced into a bitter east wind off the rolling plain. They were almost frozen when they rode up to Opothle’s church in the dismal December darkness.
Light filtered from the sharp-pointed side windows, so that they appeared to be yellow arrows aimed at the black sky. The wind made a horizontal line of the smoke pouring from a brick chimney behind the steeple. Banked against the hitching rail were several long high-backed benches, pews that had been removed from the church.
As Dane dismounted, the door under the peak-roofed entranceway opened, and he saw the silhouette of a man framed there against the lamplight. He caught a faint scent of carbolic acid. Red Bird Woman was blowing on her fingers, trying to warm the numbness out of them so she could tie her horse to the rail. Dane reached out and tied the rope for her, and then guided her toward the church entrance. The man who had come outside stopped to peer at them through the dim light. “Hau,” he said, and Dane saw the vapor of his breath.
“Opothle Kingsley?” Dane asked. “Is he in the church?”
“You have relatives?” the man replied in Lakota.
“Reverend Kingsley is a relative,” Dane said, and the man moved aside for them to reach the doorway.
When Dane pulled the door open, he was surrounded by a wave of humid air, heavy with the odors of antiseptics, human bodies, and putrefying flesh. Straw covered the floor of the church, and along both walls lay thirty or more Indians—men, women, and children—on blanket beds. Wreaths and long pendants of pine greenery, Opothle’s Christmas decorations, still hung from walls and ceiling, the streamers coming to a point over the pulpit. Mounted to the chancel wall on opposite sides of the altar were two banners with letters cut from red and green paper: GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST and ON EARTH PEACE, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN.
“Aho-ya,” Red Bird Woman moaned, and had she not been there beside him Dane was certain that he would have believed himself trapped alone in a vision of unbearable desolation. He saw Opothle then, seated on an old straight-backed chair beside one of the blanket beds, a child on his lap, and the child was eight-year-old Mary Amayi. Stumbling over the strewn hay, Dane reached for his granddaughter, and saw dangling from her delicate throat Creek Mary’s Danish coin on its silver chain. “Where is your mother?” he whispered, and then he looked down and saw the face of Amayi framed against the straw, a blanket drawn to her chin. Her eyes were closed, her beautiful mouth twisted in a pain more powerful than sleep.
“It happened at Wounded Knee Creek,” Opothle said, his voice weak from weariness.
Mary Amayi’s head rested against Da
ne’s shoulder, and he could feel the muscles of the child’s thin body slackening into complete repose.
“Amayi?” Dane asked. “How bad…”
Opothle shook his head. “Very bad. All very bad. Those who were able to run fled down the creek. Your grandchild is the only one without a scratch.”
“Bull Bear and my two grandsons?”
“We don’t know. They were not brought in on the wagons.”
“Let me warm the child,” Red Bird Woman said, and she took Mary Amayi from Dane’s arms and carried her to the red-hot stove in a corner of the church. Dane saw Saviah Kingsley moving slowly from one blanketed form to another, offering water from a tin pitcher to an old woman, soothing a whimpering child. He waited until she glanced up and saw him, and then he went to her.
“Your daughter was shot through the hips,” Saviah said softly. “The army surgeon gave us some morphine. It dulls the pain, but she cannot live, Dane.” She touched the back of his hand gently, and then a little girl raised up on the straw behind them, calling in Lakota for water. Saviah held a tin cup to the child’s mouth. She swallowed a long gulp of water, but most of it flowed in a pale red stream down the front of her dress, from a hole in her throat. “Nor can she,” Saviah added bitterly. “Have they determined to destroy us all, Dane?”
58
“AMAYI LIVED THROUGH THAT night of howling winds,” Dane said, “with sleety snowflakes spitting against the church windows. Opothle’s Oglala friends kept bringing more blankets for the wounded, and sticks of wood so that we could keep the stove red-hot, but the cold crept in like an invisible biting monster. Soon after daylight the storm stopped and a pale sun showed in the dull sky. Opothle and some of the young Oglalas went off with the soldiers to search for dead on the battlefield. Late that morning, while they were gone, Amayi died.
