Wolf Mountain Moon

by Terry C. Johnston

  Not long after that it was reported that the soldier chief who many called the Bear Coat started to talk peace with Sitting Bull while his soldiers came marching up to fight.⁁ From all that was going on around the Crazy Horse people, it was plain to see the soldiers would not rest this season of cold. They would continue to make it hard to hunt, difficult for the Lakota to live the old way.

  With so much relentless pressure, most of those chiefs who had been in the Sitting Bull village when Bear Coat attacked quickly promised the soldier chief they would go into their agencies as soon as their horses were strong enough and they made enough meat to last them through the cold moons. But, instead, within days those same chiefs grew too frightened to consider surrendering their people. Once out of sight of Bear Coat’s soldiers, they promptly scampered south into the country of the Tatonka Ceji Wakpa, the Buffalo Tongue River, where their wolves reported they would find the swelling camp of the Crazy Horse people.

  Old Lone Horn, head chief of the Miniconjou, had died just before his people had started their journey south to unite with the Hunkpatila. Now his sons each had their own band: Touch-the-Clouds, Spotted Elk,* and young Roman Nose. Not to mention the Miniconjou clan of war chief Red Horse, a veteran of many battles against the wasicu soldiers.

  They, as well as a growing number of his own Oglalla, had begun to talk openly about making peace.

  Especially Packs the Drum.

  A few winters older than Crazy Horse, Packs the Drum had been one of the bravest of the young warriors who had joined in their attack on the white settlement of Julesburg. Then again at the fight with Caspar Collins’s soldiers at Platte River Bridge.† But over the last ten summers, this courageous Oglalla warrior had been listening more and more to the wasicu agents. Why, the white man had even taken to calling him “Sitting Bull the Good,” to contrast him to Sitting Bull the Hunkpapa, who wanted nothing to do with whites.

  Packs the Drum even became one of the Oglalla leaders at the White River Agency.# As such, he had been taken back east just last year to visit the wasicu’s Great Father on a long journey. He returned with a repeating, lever-action rifle engraved with his name, presented to him by the Great Father Grant in appreciation of his good work with the white man’s government.

  But despite his long history of friendliness, Packs the Drum vigorously opposed the sale of the Black Hills. Although others like Red Cloud, Old Man Afraid, and Spotted Tail had touched the pen and given up the sacred He Sapa, Packs the Drum grew disgusted, and a little ashamed of his trust in the white man. So ashamed that he had packed up his family and abandoned the White River Agency. Late last summer in the north country he joined the wanderings of the Crazy Horse village.

  It hadn’t taken long for many of the chiefs in Crazy Horse’s camp to see that the soldiers were not going to rest for the winter. In a short time Packs the Drum became the leader of those who believed that the Oglalla should surrender to avoid the fighting that invariably killed so many women and so many of their children.

  As more and more of the chiefs began to listen to the persuasive arguments of those who suggested making peace with the wasicu, Crazy Horse spent more and more of his time away from the camps—preferring to be alone, sleeping in wickiups he constructed himself, or in caves and bear dens he found in the surrounding hills.

  At that moment Crazy Horse sat on the hillside looking down on the huge village, the thick fur of the buffalo robe brushing his cheek, tickling his flesh in the wind. How could he blame them? Crazy Horse thought. The Bear Coat was doing all that he could to drive a wedge between the Titunwan Lakota peoples. It wasn’t only just Packs the Drum, but men like Pretty Bear and Tall Bull, Yellow Eagle, Two Elk, and Poor Bear too—yes: Sans Arc, Miniconjou, and even Four Horns’s Hunkpapa—they all had talked with the soldier chief and believed he would give them a good peace.

  As inconceivable as it sounded, the Bear Coat had promised the chiefs that he would establish an agency for them at the forks of the Cheyenne River, east of the sacred He Sapa. The soldier chief even vowed they would have a soldier for their agent and that he would understand their needs. The Lakota would soon see that the Bear Coat could be trusted to treat them generously.

  Were there no warriors left who would stand steadfastly beside him? Crazy Horse brooded. How long must he go. on bullying his own people so they would not slip away to the agencies?

  It had come to that. So many in this great camp feared the soldiers would come without fail that winter, so many suffered from lack of meat and the brutal cold, that the Bear Coat’s words actually began to make sense to the Lakota heart.

  Filled with anger, Crazy Horse had ordered his akicita* to soldier the villages, throwing a wide cordon around them, allowing no family to escape back to the wasicu’s reservations.

  It was but another reason he spent so much time away from the camp. Only a man with a heart of stone could remain untouched when he looked at the ribs of the women, when he stared into the hollow eyes of the children, when he saw how the once-proud warriors cast their gaze on the ground like sick horses about to die.

  Crazy Horse had allowed the first few to go. They took down their lodges late at night while the rest of the village slept, slinking away in silence with their meager belongings, often lashing their possessions to travois left some distance from camp so others would not know until long after they had gone. Those first like those who would leave now if they could: all of them frightened of this terrible winter as much as they were of every soldier scare. So scared, they chose to flee to the little deserts the white man had made of the reservations, where the mighty Lakota would be forced to eat the moldy flour and the rancid pig meat, because they no longer had a choice. How heavy it made his heart to know that if his people went in to the agency, they had to surrender their ponies and their weapons.

  They might as well turn over their whole way of life. Without ponies and weapons—no more would they be Titunwan Lakota.

  Just what had happened to Red Cloud and Red Leaf at the White River Agency?

  Hoyay! What was a man without his weapons, without his pony? Was he still a man?

  Last autumn when Three Stars asked who among Red Cloud’s warriors would go with the soldiers in search of the hostile bands—Crazy Horse’s old nemesis, No Water, was the first to volunteer. Crook gave the traitor a rifle, pistol, and a pony to use when they came looking for Crazy Horse. No Water, the turncoat—the very same husband from whom Crazy Horse had kidnapped Black Buffalo Woman winters gone before.

  It had come to this: Lakota against Lakota!

  Only the wasicu would drive a wedge between the hearts of the People.

  Back and forth Crazy Horse felt himself begin to waver again like the willow blown by a strong autumn wind that strips it of all leaves. Day by day he grew more frustrated and angry; then in a rage he finally sent his police after those who had already abandoned his village. Once and for all he decided that if he did not stop the escapees, more and more and all the more would leave.

  Soon none would be left with him.

  “Break their lodgepoles!” he ordered his akicita. “Cut up their lodges so they are useless to anyone! Break the bows of those men who refuse to turn back with their families! Kill their ponies if you have to, and bring in the meat to feed our people!”

  But just when Crazy Horse was beginning to wonder if he himself had the strength to hold the Hunkpatila and others to him by force, if he himself had the heart to inflict such pain on his people for their own good … he saw how the sour ball of anger swelled in their bellies once more when they watched the crippled Shahiyela stumbling through the snow, making bloody prints in the snow, most clad in little more than the green frozen hides they had peeled from the carcasses of ponies sacrificed so that the little babes could be placed inside the temporary warmth, so that old ones could stuff their hands and feet into the steaming gut-piles.

  Just to cast their eyes on the pitiful Shahiyela made the bile rise again in the throats o
f Lakota warriors. Again the Titunwan talked of making war on the soldiers so evil they would drive helpless women and children into the winter.

  “But where will we find the ammunition and more rifles we need to fight the wasicu?” asked Two Elk.

  “After hunting to feed our families and fighting the soldiers all summer and into the autumn,” explained Red Horse, one of the Miniconjou who had been advocating making peace with the white man, “we do not have enough bullets and weapons to make war for the winter.”

  Each time the chiefs and headmen talked, Crazy Horse could see the anxious fear on all the faces. It was written there as plain as was the fear in the eyes of a new-foaled mare when she scented a nearby mountain lion. His people were wavering. But how could he blame them? He himself was beginning to have his own doubts.

  “Perhaps we can steal what bullets and rifles we need from the log villages in our sacred hills,”* Poor Bear suggested.

  “How can we decide to do that?” Yellow Eagle scoffed. “Our ponies are poor, and most will not be ready to ride into battle until the tender grass of spring has shown its head on the prairies.”

  Working hard to maintain his composure, Crazy Horse said, “Doesn’t a warrior fight on—even when the pony beneath him has been killed?”

  “Crazy Horse! You were my enemy in battle,” declared the stocky shaman who now carried the name Pehinhanska, Lakota for “Long Hair.” Last autumn, after the roaming bands learned who it was they had defeated at the Greasy Grass, this war chief had begun using the name—stating that the warrior spirit of the dead soldier chief talked through him daily. “But now I am your brother in death.”

  All eyes turned to Long Hair. Patiently, Crazy Horse said, “What do you have to say to me this day, Long Hair?”

  In that hushed lodge the stocky warrior half closed his eyes and spoke his words in an unfamiliar, high, and reedy voice. “You must not give up. Fight until you die. You are a warrior, Crazy Horse. As I was a warrior in life. A warrior must die as a warrior. Make your people understand there is no life at the agencies. Fight on, Crazy Horse!”

  In the growing clamor and hubbub Roman Nose whirled on Crazy Horse. “Fight on? What if we have no bullets to put in our guns?”

  “I will make bullets for you!” Long Hair shouted the others down.

  “Make bullets for us?” Crazy Horse demanded.

  “Yes. Each morning you will find that my two hands are filled with bullets for our guns. Wakan Tanka will provide, if you do not lose heart!”

  How he desperately wanted to believe.

  So the next morning at the middle of camp Crazy Horse waited with hundreds of others for Long Hair. Eventually the shaman appeared from his lodge, stopping in front of Crazy Horse to hold out his hands. Then he slowly opened his fingers, and out poured the shiny brass shells.

  “Use these to kill soldiers!” the shaman bellowed as proud as a prairie cock. “Kill all wasicu soldiers who march against us with Three Stars or with Bear Coat!”

  That morning Crazy Horse distributed the bullets. And for the next seven mornings. Then on the eighth day Long Hair did not appear. Within two more days the camp learned the shaman had made fools of them. Not only had they the winter and the soldiers to fight, the cold and the hunger to battle … but the Crazy Horse people now had despair to fend off as well.

  Once more they became like panting rabbits run to the end of their strength by the coyotes, forced to seek shelter in some tiny hollow, hiding with eyes wide, watching, waiting until the coyote eventually found them. These—the people who had reveled that bright summer day on the Onjinjintka Wakpa or Red Flower Creek* against Three Stars, again at the Greasy Grass against Long Hair’s many, many dead! To rise to such greatness with Wicokannanji, the Midsummer Moon.

  Now to collapse to such ruin with the arrival of winter.

  As much as he tried to keep the thought from his mind, Crazy Horse himself had begun to fear that soon there would be no more buffalo. Only soldiers.

  Crazy Horse returned to the hills. He had to flee the village—the empty eyes, the shrunken cheeks.

  All around him the children coughed. And some of those would not last out this winter. There simply was not enough buffalo to feed and shelter all who needed that meat and those robes. There were simply too many soldiers. They kept coming and coming.

  And coming.

  So the doubt first planted itself in his heart.

  Could it be true, he began to fear: no more were the Titunwan Lakota a mighty people. Had they already lived their finest days? Were those summers of greatness gone the way of breathsmoke on a sharp winter wind? Without counting the boys and old men, Crazy Horse had no more than six hundred warriors he could count on to fight. He knew that six-times-ten-times-ten was not near enough to hold back the wasicu forever.

  Would Sitting Bull stay to fight beside the Crazy Horse people? Or would the Hunkpapa medicine man flee with his warriors to the Land of the Grandmother, leaving Crazy Horse to fight on alone?

  And in the meantime, how many of these children and women and old ones would die needlessly? How many of these blank-eyed people who looked to him for help would not live to see spring because he himself clung to a warrior’s pride and vowed to fight on?

  Looking down at the village from the snowy hillside where the wind swept past him, Crazy Horse fully realized how those people had put their lives in his hands. They trusted that he would do right by them to save the Oglalla from the white man’s devastation. To save them from starvation … and soldier bullets.

  Why must things be so hard? he brooded. It had not always been this way—not always difficult to decide what was best for his Hunkpatila. It had all begun with the Little Chief Grattan coming after a sickly Mormon cow and continued with the boasts of Little Chief Fetterman crossing Lodge Trail Ridge. No longer could the Lakota just try to stay out of the way of those wasicu passing through.

  No, the white man had to own everything he saw, everything he touched, even that which could never be his.

  Yet now the enemy was everywhere. Try as they did, the Lakota and the Shahiyela had not been able to hold back the mighty tide. Now the buffalo were disappearing from the hillsides.

  With a sigh Crazy Horse resigned himself to listening … at least listening. Just the day before, two powerful Miniconjou chiefs had reached the village, come here on a long journey all the way from the agency at Cheyenne River. Important Man and Foolish Bear brought gifts of tobacco so they could talk of peace between the Crazy Horse people and the government.

  “Your people and Morning Star’s Shahiyela must surrender before all your warriors are killed,” Important Man had told Crazy Horse last night.

  “Before all your people starve,” Foolish Bear had added.

  They had said the Hunkpatila would have to do as Red Cloud had done: turn over their ponies and their weapons too. In return the wasicu soldiers would not punish them for killing the Long Hair at the Greasy Grass in the Midsummer Moon.

  He hadn’t slept for so many nights now. The weariness had seeped all the way to his bones. Why should this happen to him? He was nothing more than a warrior. They called him a Strange Man, but he was no more than a man who had begun to wonder, to despair for his people, and finally to doubt.

  Perhaps, as the others claimed … perhaps the day had come to see what terms of surrender he could wrest from the Bear Coat. True was it that Three Stars was retreating from Indian country. He would not be back until grass grew green. But the offer made by the soldier chief at the mouth of Buffalo Tongue River for a reservation of their own in the Shifting Sands River country was beginning to sound like something his people would have to live with.

  Crazy Horse bowed his head there in the wind scudding along the side of the hill above the upper Buffalo Tongue where Otter Creek joined the icy flow. He thought of nothing but the hollow eyes and the sunken cheeks of his hungry people. Not today—he could not bring himself to limp back to the village like a wounded man today. So m
aybe tomorrow … he would gather the chiefs and they would talk … about going to see the Bear Coat.

  Go to the mouth of the Buffalo Tongue to make the best peace they could before they all died of empty bellies, or soldier bullets.

  Or broken hearts.

  *Near present-day Ashland, Montana.

  †Blood Song, vol. 8, The Plainsmen Series.

  *As many as thirty-five hundred people.

  †The Seven Council Fires of the Teton, or Prairie Dwelling, Lakota bands.

  #Trumpet on the Land, vol. 10, The Plainsmen Series.

  @The Powder River.

  ⁁Battle of Cedar Creek, A Cold Day in Hell, vol. 11.

  *Who would one day change his name to Big Fool and in December of 1890 lead his band of Miniconjou to its fale at Wounded Knee Creek.

  † July 11, 1865—Cry of the Hawk, the Jonah Hook Trilogy.

  # Red Cloud Agency.

  *Camp police.

  *The Black Hills settlements of Deadwood, Whitewood, Custer, and Crook City.

  *Rosebud Creek.

  Chapter 13

  Big Freezing Moon 1876

  BY TELEGRAPH

  The Mississippi Closed by Ice at St. Louis

  ST. LOUIS, December 9.—The river at St. Louis is blocked solidly opposite the city and for six miles below. Pedestrians crossed yesterday, and if the cold weather continues teams will cross to-day or Wednesday.

  At long last, eleven suns after fleeing Three Finger Kenzie’s pony soldiers—soldiers guided to the Ohmeseheso village in the Red Fork Valley by their turncoat Indians—Morning Star’s advance scouts came racing back to all those people stumbling across the hills on frozen feet, yipping with their exciting news in the bitter cold that had killed old ones and tiny babes … those nowhere strong enough to endure this greatest of winter hardship.

  Descending from the high mountains where the ve-ho-e dared not follow their bloody footprints, down past the Big Lake,* over to Crow Standing Creek,† finally to the Tongue, where they marched north to the mouth of Otter Creek. Following the east fork, Morning Star’s Tse-Tsehese# crossed the high divide, where it was said they should find their friends and relations among the Lakota.