by H. W. Brands
Red Cloud’s Sioux and the allied Arapahos and Cheyennes attacked construction crews and ambushed travelers on the road. The attacks had little lasting effect, as the army stepped up patrols to protect the crews and travelers.
Red Cloud’s young lieutenant, Crazy Horse, had a better idea. He and a small party of Indians jumped a wagon train on the Bozeman road and inflicted modest damage. The train took refuge at Fort Phil Kearny, where the officer second in command, Captain William Fetterman, expressed outrage that a handful of savages would have the nerve to stage such an attack. Fetterman had fought in the Civil War, and he was certain the Indians were far inferior as fighters to the Confederates he had defeated. “A single company of regulars could whip a thousand Indians,” he declared. “With eighty men I could ride through the Sioux nation.”
In fact he had eighty-one men when he sallied forth in pursuit of Crazy Horse’s raiders. His commanding officer ordered him to go no farther than Lodge Trail Ridge, several miles from the fort, in case he ran into trouble and required reinforcement. But Fetterman knew better: he must catch the raiders before they got away.
Fetterman’s company galloped up Lodge Trail Ridge and kept going. Just beyond the ridge, Crazy Horse sprang his trap. Two thousand Sioux, Arapahos and Cheyennes fell upon Fetterman’s column and cut it to pieces. All eighty-one bluecoats were killed. Many of the corpses were mutilated.
THIS WAS THE BATTLE OF THE HUNDRED SLAIN OF BLACK Elk’s boyhood, the one in which his father’s leg was broken. The Sioux recalled it as a great victory, the one that marked Crazy Horse as the one who might save them and their land from the Wasichus.
As Black Elk got older, he took part in more of the activities of the tribe. He remembered his first buffalo hunt. “One morning the crier came around the circle of the village calling out that we were going to break camp. The advisers were in the council tepee, and he cried to them: ‘The advisers, come forth to the center and bring your fires along.’ It was their duty to save fire for the people, for we had no matches then. ‘Now take it down, down!’ the crier shouted.” The people dismantled their tepees and loaded them on the pony drags.
The crier said, “Many bison, I have heard; many bison, I have heard! Your children, you must take care of them!” The crier meant that the children had to be kept close and quiet, lest they scare the buffalo. “Then we broke camp and started in formation, the four advisers first, a crier behind them, the chiefs next, and then the people with the loaded pony drags in a long line, and the herd of ponies following,” Black Elk recalled. He rode in the rear with the young boys. “Something exciting was going to happen, and even the ponies seemed to know,” he said.
At noon they camped. “While the women were cooking all around the circle I heard people saying that the scouts were returning, and over the top of a hill I saw three horsebacks coming. They rode to the council tepee in the middle of the village and all the people were going there to hear. I went there too and got up close so that I could look between the legs of the men. The crier came out of the council tepee and said, speaking to the people for the scouts: ‘I have protected you; in return you shall give me many gifts.’” They gave him a pipe filled with the bark of red willow. He lit, smoked, and passed it to the scouts. He said, “The nation has depended on you. Whatever you have seen, maybe it is for the good of the people you have seen.” He asked for their report.
One of the scouts said, “You know where we started from. We went and reached the top of a hill and there we saw a small herd of bison.”
The adviser asked for more information.
The scout said, “On the other side of that, we saw a second and larger herd of bison.”
Tell me more, the adviser directed.
The scout said, “On the other side of that, there was nothing but bison all over the country.”
The adviser responded, “Hetchetu aloh!”—It is so, indeed.
Then the crier sang out to all within earshot, “Your knives shall be sharpened; your arrows shall be sharpened. Make ready, make haste; your horses make ready! We shall go forth with arrows. Plenty of meat shall we make!”
Everyone did as instructed. Knives and arrows were sharpened; the best horses were brought forward.
“Then we started for where the bison were,” Black Elk recalled. “The soldier band went first, riding twenty abreast, and anybody who dared go ahead of them would get knocked off his horse. They kept order, and everybody had to obey. After them came the hunters, riding five abreast. The people came up in the rear.”
The head man of the advisers selected the best hunters on the fastest horses. To them he gave encouragement: “Good young warriors, my relatives, your work I know is good. What you do is good always; so today you shall feed the helpless. Perhaps there are some old and feeble people without sons, or some who have little children and no man. You shall help these, and whatever you kill shall be theirs.” The young men listened and nodded; this was a great honor.
“Then when we had come near to where the bison were, the hunters circled around them, and the cry went up, as in battle, ‘Hoka hey!’ which meant to charge,” Black Elk said. “Then there was a great dust and everybody shouted and all the hunters went in to kill—every man for himself. They were all nearly naked, with their quivers full of arrows hanging on their left sides, and they would ride right up to a bison and shoot him behind the left shoulder. Some of the arrows would go in up to the feathers, and sometimes those that struck no bones went right straight through. Everybody was very happy.”
Black Elk was too young to join the killing, but he rode his pony in the rear and cheered the hunters on. As the carcasses littered the plain where the hunt took place, the butchering began. The hunters cut long strips of meat and draped them over their horses’ backs. The livers were a special delicacy. “On the way back to the hunting village all the hunting horses were loaded, and we little boys who could not wait for the feast helped ourselves to all the raw liver we wanted,” Black Elk said. “Nobody got cross when we did this.”
The women made ready at the camp to dry the meat the hunters brought in. The hunters threw the meat in great piles atop leaves that had been spread on the ground. The advisers praised the hunters for their good work. All gathered around.
Black Elk remembered the moment, and the hours that followed. “The women were all busy cutting the meat into strips and hanging it on the racks to dry. You could see red meat hanging everywhere. The people feasted all night long and danced and sang. Those were happy times.”
38
THERE WOULD BE NO SOLDIERS LEFT
WILLIAM SHERMAN’S FATHER HAD ADMIRED INDIANS enough to give his son the middle name Tecumseh, for the Shawnee chief who gathered tribes of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys into an alliance intended to drive whites out of North America’s heartland and back across the mountains to the Atlantic shore. As a boy he had been called Tecumseh, or Cump. As an adult, after the Civil War, in which he had become the second most famous soldier in the Union, behind Ulysses Grant, it fell to him to suppress an effort like that his namesake had organized.
Sherman received command of a military district that comprised the entire West north of Texas. He watched from his St. Louis headquarters as the fighting that followed the Sand Creek massacre escalated. At first he blamed the white settlers for most of the trouble. The settlers would provoke the Indians, he said, be attacked in response, and then cry for the army to come and kill all the Indians. He wanted nothing to do with it. Characterizing the Indians as “pure beggars and poor devils more to be pitied than dreaded,” he pledged, “I will not permit them to be warred against as long as they are not banded together in parties large enough to carry on war.”
Yet the Indians didn’t get Sherman’s message, and if they had, they would have ignored it. The Sand Creek killings demonstrated what white men would do to Indians if the Indians didn’t defend themselves. The Sioux and their allies refused to count on Sherman’s goodwill; they gathered in parties
of the kind Sherman forbade, and carried on war.
Sherman responded with the implacability that had made his reputation during the Civil War. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination: men, women, and children,” he wrote to Grant, his Washington superior, after the slaughter of the Fetterman column. The Plains tribes must be broken. “Both the Sioux and the Cheyennes must die, or submit to our dictation.”
Sherman elaborated on this brutal dichotomy at an 1867 council on the Platte River. Speaking for the federal government, he offered the Sioux a reservation, amounting to the western half of the modern state of South Dakota. The concept of reserved areas for Indians ran back to colonial times; it subsequently motivated the establishment of what was called the Indian Territory—essentially modern Oklahoma—in the 1820s. Sherman offered the Sioux a northern equivalent. They would also be allowed to hunt on the Powder River, and the government would give up the Bozeman road. The government would provision the Indians on the reservation and pay them an annual stipend.
Sherman told the Indians that this was the best offer they would get. “If you don’t choose your homes now, it will be too late next year,” he said. The Indians might win a battle or two against the whites, but they could never win the war. The whites were coming, and they would continue to come, in ever larger numbers. “You can see for yourselves that travel across the country has increased so much that the slow ox wagons will not answer the white man. We will build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotive any more than you can stop the sun or moon.” Sherman repeated that they would receive no better offer. “Live like white men, and we will help you all you want,” he said. The alternative was the Indians’ destruction. “Our people in the East hardly think of what you call war out here, but if they make up their minds to fight you, they will come out as thick as a herd of buffalo, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed.”
The Sioux chiefs took Sherman’s ultimatum as an insult. They stalked out of the council and galloped away. Sherman wasn’t surprised, and he wasn’t unprepared. He ordered Phil Sheridan, his theater commander, to do everything necessary to enforce the government’s policy. “Go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority,” Sherman said. “If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned of again and again.” Sherman continued, “I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry out their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext they may choose to allege.”
Sheridan was happy to comply. He had been as ruthless in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War as Sherman had been in Georgia, and he judged Indians to be beneath the consideration of whites. During a campaign in Texas, a Comanche chief surrendered to Sheridan, calling himself a good Indian. Sheridan sneered, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”
Sherman’s threats changed the minds of some of the Sioux, including Red Cloud. The aging chief, recognizing the essential truth behind Sherman’s warning of annihilation, led a delegation to another council at Fort Laramie, in 1868, and accepted the reservation Sherman offered.
IN THE SUMMER OF HIS TENTH YEAR, BLACK ELK HAD A VISION. He had fallen ill with a fever, and for many days lingered at death’s door. His vision appeared to him while he was unconscious. He felt himself rising out of his body and being lifted high into the clouds. The clouds became hills covered with snow. “I looked and saw a bay horse standing there, and he began to speak,” he recounted. The horse directed him to look west. “I looked, and there were twelve black horses yonder all abreast with necklaces of bison hoofs, and they were beautiful, but I was frightened because their manes were lightning and there was thunder in their nostrils.”
The horses carried him to a council of the elders of the four corners of the earth. “Younger brother,” said the Grandfather of the South, “with the powers of the four quarters you shall walk, a relative. Behold, the living center of a nation I shall give you, and with it many you shall save.” The Grandfather of the South stretched out his arm, and in his hand was a bright red stick that came alive. “As I looked it sprouted at the top and sent forth branches, and on the branches many leaves came out and murmured, and in the leaves the birds began to sing. And then for just a little while I thought I saw beneath it in the shade the circled villages of people and every living thing with roots or legs or wings, and all were happy.” The living stick had a message for Black Elk, the Grandfather of the South said. “It shall stand in the center of the nation’s circle, a cane to walk with and a people’s heart, and by your powers you shall make it blossom.”
The twelve horses now spoke to Black Elk, interpreting what the Grandfathers had done. “They have given you the sacred stick and your nation’s hoop,” the horses said. “In the center of the hoop you shall set the stick and make it grow into a shielding tree, and bloom.”
The horses carried Black Elk to a village filled with the laments of mourning. “When I looked around I saw that in nearly every tepee the women and the children and the men lay dying,” Black Elk recalled. But a voice told him to plant the stick and the hoop. “I took the bright red stick and at the center of the nation’s hoop I thrust it in the earth. As it touched the earth it leaped mightily in my hand and was a waga chun, the rustling tree, very tall and full of leafy branches and of all birds singing. And beneath it all the animals were mingling with the people like relatives and making happy cries. The women raised their tremolo of joy, and the men shouted all together: ‘Here we shall raise our children and be as little chickens under the mother sheo’s”—sage hen’s—“wing.”
BLACK ELK’S VISION BECAME THE GUIDING FORCE OF HIS LIFE. The Sioux respected the power of visions, and they provisionally respected Black Elk’s. His father was a medicine man, and so were several uncles. The boy might grow up to be a medicine man himself. The test would be whether Black Elk’s vision provided sound guidance in decades to come.
His friends and neighbors were more immediately impressed with the vision of Crazy Horse, who happened to be Black Elk’s second cousin. Crazy Horse’s vision told him that the world people saw in everyday life was but a shadow of the true world that existed beyond the shadows. His vision gave him access to the true world, and when he stepped into it, nothing in the shadow world could harm him. It also gave him great confidence. “When he went into a fight,” Black Elk remembered, “he had only to think of that world to be in it again, so that he could go through anything and not be hurt.”
Crazy Horse had a magnetic effect on those around him. “His eyes looked through things and he always seemed to be thinking hard about something,” Black Elk said. “All the Lakotas like to dance and sing, but he never joined a dance, and they say nobody ever heard him sing.” Yet he clearly put the interests of his people before his own. “He never wanted to have many things for himself, and did not have many ponies like a chief. They say that when game was scarce and the people were hungry, he would not eat at all.” Without trying, Crazy Horse became a natural leader of the Lakotas. “They would do anything he wanted or go anywhere he said.”
GOLD PROSPECTORS IN THE WEST BUCKED THE NATURAL TIDE of migration. While the emigrant trains were moving west, they moved east. This was an accident of history. James Marshall had stumbled over gold in California, with the result that the initial center of mining was in the region farthest west. After the returns there diminished, the prospectors had nowhere to go but east. They struck gold and especially silver in Nevada in the late 1850s, and gold in Colorado about the same time. They found gold and silver in Idaho in the early 1860s, and copper in Montana and Arizona. By the 1870s they had almost run out of promising geology. But one spot conspicuously
remained: the Black Hills of Dakota. So long as other regions remained unexplored, prospectors had given the Black Hills a wide berth, for the district was sacred to the Sioux, who defended it fiercely.
The Sioux knew the Black Hills held gold. And they knew the whites coveted gold. So they did their best to embargo the knowledge of the gold the Black Hills held. But as easy gold grew scarcer elsewhere in the West, the Black Hills grew more alluring to the prospectors. Some wondered if Sioux stories of ghosts and wizards in the Black Hills might be part of a deception campaign. Intrepid souls would occasionally slip into the Black Hills, and rumors of gold discoveries would leak out. But they remained rumors as of 1873, when a financial panic seized the nation’s railroads and compelled the Northern Pacific, which had been building across Dakota, to suspend construction. Local business owners desperate for replacement revenues agitated to open the Black Hills to prospectors and miners. A Dakota editor denounced the Fort Laramie treaty, reserving the Black Hills to the Sioux, as an “abominable compact.” “They will not dig the gold or let others do it,” the editor said of the Sioux. “They are too lazy and too much like mere animals to cultivate the fertile soil, mine the coal, develop the salt mines, bore the petroleum wells, or wash the gold. Having all these things in their hands, they prefer to live as paupers, thieves and beggars; fighting, torturing, hunting, gorging, yelling and dancing all night to the beating of old tin kettles.”
The Dakotans and their friends in Washington demanded that the federal government ascertain whether the rumors of Black Hills gold were true or not. Ulysses Grant, now president, was reluctant. The antithesis of the remorseless Sherman and Sheridan, Grant hoped that whites and Indians could live in peace. He sincerely tried to honor the treaties the government had negotiated with the Indians. He replaced venal Indian agents with Quakers and others of firmer conscience, and did his best to keep whites off the Indian reservations.
