Stone Song
Page 23
Another reason altogether came, came with luminous clarity. His medicine had arranged that Black Buffalo Woman should not marry him. He didn’t know why—perhaps that was yet to be discovered. He felt no doubt about it, though. He knew that medicine worked mysteriously and with power men could scarcely imagine. Medicine made water flow downhill, moved the air, raised the sun each morning, sent the moon through her every-month changes. Medicine could keep one man from marrying one woman, easily.
Idly, he wondered what his medicine might have in mind for him. Maybe he was one of those meant to be a shirtman, like his uncle Spotted Tail. Owners of the people, these young men were also called. A strange figure of speech, for it truly meant “those responsible for the people.” These young men were chosen by the society of White Horse Riders, and they alone were obligated to put the good of all people ahead of everything. It was better if they weren’t married.
Since the winters of loafing around the forts had begun, the custom of putting the people in the hands of shirtmen had mostly died out. Crazy Horse pondered the case of his uncle Spotted Tail. Because he was a shirtman, because he had to consider all the people ahead even of his own family, Spotted Tail had thrown his life at the soldiers’ feet.
That had turned out strangely for everyone. The wasicu did not take the life offered, but in Crazy Horse’s view they gave the people back half a man.
He wondered if…
Oh, he must stop speculating like this.
His medicine took Black Buffalo Woman away from him. That was enough to know.
Black Buffalo Woman stooped to gather more white sage. No Water must be planning to make a sweat lodge—he had told her to pick a big armload. He wasn’t much interested in ceremonies, her husband, but Red Cloud had come and talked to him a long time last night. Maybe Red Cloud wanted them to make the sweating sacrifice together.
She sniffed at the sweet-smelling plant. It was one of her favorite fragrances. She didn’t understand people who didn’t notice all the smells of the earth. They made her giddy sometimes. She pulled the plant gently out of the ground.
She’d been giddy with fear of encountering Crazy Horse. Now she was just waiting for cold weather to set in for good. The villages would separate for the winter, and she would not have to worry about seeing him.
Before Crazy Horse had left—more of his weird solitary wandering—No Water had commanded her not to go anywhere by herself, anywhere at all. The order made Black Buffalo Woman catch her breath, she was so glad. She was terrified of a confrontation. Sometimes she felt Crazy Horse’s gaze on her. His eyes felt hot enough to burn her back.
Oh, didn’t he understand? She just got so … She didn’t know what to do and she couldn’t stand it and it was driving her crazy and everyone wanted her to … And it was true, she was perverse.
Now she was with No Water and things were simple. He was masterful. Life ran smoothly.
She was taking on life within her. When she saw Crazy Horse again next summer, she would have a child. Surely that would close his eyes to her. Forever, she hoped.
When she heard the clops, she raised her blanket over her head. The hoof sounds came right up to her. It must be what she feared—Crazy Horse, returned from wherever he had gone on whatever eccentric errand. She knew him. He would wait forever. Besides … She felt it as a tingle all over. She wanted to bare her face to him.
She lowered the blanket.
She couldn’t help it, she just started babbling. “I had duties,” she said rapidly, “a duty to my brother, who had the right to give me away, a duty to my father, and fathers are wise in these matters, and my mother, mothers know best for their daughters, and everyone said—”
“Shhh!” He was interrupting her. “Shhh!” again.
They looked at each other, just looked for a long moment.
At first her mind raced. He was wearing Inyan tied under his arm, one of the Inyan that men got from the Split Rock. People said those Inyan creatures gave men songs sometimes. Crazy Horse was wearing it next to his heart.
Her mind was buzzing like bees. Well, maybe Crazy Horse would start listening to that Inyan creature and stop looking at her. She hoped so.
He said softly, “Everything will be good between us. I have sworn that it will be good.” He hesitated for so long she thought he was finished. Then he added, “In my heart I have no anger anymore. Not even against myself.”
He touched his heels to his pony gently and reined it toward the village at a walk. He felt self-conscious about Inyan next to his heart. He didn’t know whether or not the Inyan creature had spoken to him, but since he started wearing it, those sentences had kept coming to his mind, over and over. No anger, not even toward himself.
He had another thought. On the Sweetwater River he sat by a still pool and looked at a star, luminous on the surface of water. The gentlest breeze rose, the water riffled, and the thought came to him. Black Buffalo Woman was like a star seen in water, brilliant and beautiful, and gone with the first rising of the wind.
THE BATTLE OF PLATTE BRIDGE
Bad Heart Bull kept for the Oglala people a buffalo robe with paintings on it. At the end of each winter, he made a painting to help the people remember what happened that winter. This document of tribal history the people called a winter count.
He marked down this particular winter as When Three Men Were Hanged at the Soldier Fort.
If the whites had counted their winters with names instead of numbers, they would have called it the Year of the End of the War between the States. Or, if Bad Heart Bull had been looking back from ten years later, he might have called it the Winter When Everything Changed.
What it meant, in both cases, was that two peoples who had been doing a martial dance, circling around each other, testing, feeling each other out, were finally ready to fight to the death.
Crazy Horse was ready and gladdened by the prospect. He had turned twenty-seven in the autumn. Since Black Buffalo Woman had married No Water, he had devoted himself entirely to living up to his vision of Rider. He did not court, did not loaf with his friends, did not take his ease in his parents’ lodge, did not learn the old stories, did not participate in village life. He made arrows and bullets and other weapons, trained his horses for war, worked with Chips to strengthen his war medicine after the mistake with the two scalps, stole better horses and better weapons, and looked for the enemy and fought. The result was that he had more war honors than all but the rarest of men would accumulate in a lifetime. He was ready in body, in training, in experience, in spirit, in medicine.
If his people still thought his ways strange, they now recognized that the pursuit of war was in some way a sacrament for him. It was as much understanding as he could hope for.
He immediately sensed the truth about this new fighting. It would last until the wasicu either left or took over. Too much had gone wrong—everything had gone wrong, in fact, everywhere Lakota lived. There were the many small offenses of the wasicu. There were the big troubles of the Dakota relatives in the lake country the wasicu called Minnesota. There was the continuing corruption of the Lakota who hung around the forts. There was the attempt to stake a trail through the heart of the Oglala hunting ground, the Shifting Sands River country, where the warriors threw the soldiers out contemptuously. There was the offense just this spring of hanging the three Lakota who did as the wasicu asked and turned a captive white woman over. Mostly, there was the arrogance of the entire white attitude toward the Lakota and all Indian peoples.
Only the War between the States had kept the hostilities to a skittish dance so far. Now that their war had ended, the soldiers were coming.
Crazy Horse thought more strongly that they were like wakinyan of the east, except that they had the destroying power of lightning without the blessing of rain.
He was impatient now: Though the Lakota had sworn at the big council at Bear Butte eight winters ago to stand firm against the wasicu, matters had never come to a decisive contest. Now the
gods of the wasicu and the spirits the Lakota knew would commit themselves to the combat would rise in the bodies of the two peoples and contend one with the other, and on the face of Maka, Earth, under the eye of Wi, Sun, blood would flow, and one people would thrive, and the other would die.
The call to arms arrived in a form recognized by everyone, a canupa sent by thousands of people. The Sahiyela and the Mahpiyato and the Lakota who lived south of the Shell River came traveling in the Moon of Frost in the Lodge bearing this canupa and a terrible tale. One moon ago the village of the peace chief Black Kettle had been smashed brutally at Sand Creek. Though the people had wanted peace so much that they camped where the agent told them to camp, the soldiers had made a sneak attack on Black Kettle’s sleeping village. Several hundred Sahiyela were killed, mostly women and children. The rest escaped on foot over the snow-covered plains, weeping and starving and freezing, while everything they owned went up in flames back at Sand Creek.
Afterward the soldiers took the scalps to the city where they dug the gold, Denver, and waved them like flags from the stages of their theatres, waved even scalps taken from between women’s legs, bragging about their great victory.
So the Sahiyela and their brother peoples of the south country wanted revenge.
Crazy Horse wanted revenge more hotly than most. Among the women and children killed were Yellow Woman and her son, the ones he had rescued in the storm ten winters ago, and the new child, a daughter.
This canupa galvanized all the Lakota. Warriors who usually loafed around Fort Laramie came to the camps of those the whites called “wild” Indians to join the fight. Spotted Tail himself wanted to fight. Though he thought he would never feel quite as close to the man again, Crazy Horse was pleased with this rousal of martial spirit in his mothers’ brother. Now and forever, everyone said, the Sahiyela peace chiefs surely wouldn’t be peace chiefs anymore.
An Oglala named Drum-on-His-Back was able to tell them what the whites were thinking—he had learned to read the white-man newspapers. Crazy Horse thought nothing good could come of learning English, much less learning to read it, but he was glad to know what the wasicu were thinking. Some of them said what happened at Sand Creek was an outrage, said Drum-on-His-Back. They were even talking about punishing the officers who had led the fight against Black Kettle. But most of them, especially the newspapers of the whites in this country, said the Indians had to be rubbed out, whatever it took.
So Crazy Horse prepared himself in wordless joy. He had ridden across a desert of spirit to fight the Psatoka after he lost Black Buffalo Woman. War was not meant to be cold rage but exhilaration.
Now he could feel Hawk buoyant in his heart. War was his way and this was his time, the risking of flesh, the clash of medicines, the test of spirit, the ride along the narrow edge of life and death.
His people deserved to win. He did not know whether they would. He thought a warrior’s duty was not to know the outcome but to fight the battle well, even beautifully. Now he would do what it was his calling on earth to do, perform the blood sacrament. Whether he lived or died, Hawk would soar over his head, and he would truly live.
They raided. All along the Holy Road, wherever the whites looked vulnerable, they raided—Sahiyela here, Mahpiyato there, the numerous Lakota everywhere, the young men of each tribe alone, two together, all three at once. Burning, scalping, killing, stealing, laughing all the while. Crazy Horse regretted only that it did not seem decisive—you could cut the talking wires, run off horses, kill some soldiers, and chase the rest into the forts, but that solved nothing, not for good.
He was troubled about something else: The young men treated this like most war, less as a cause than as a kind of rough play. Those who loafed around the forts had had little opportunity for war honors for a decade. They were less interested in inflicting lasting defeat on the wasicu than in counting coups and collecting scalps. For them war was mostly the old style, individual heroics, the display of courage and medicine. For this reason they did not maintain discipline, did not fight together, but simply sought personal glory.
Crazy Horse understood their feelings very well. It was the right kind of war. It was his kind.
He also understood that for the sake of the people the traditional ways were not enough. Which was why he and some of the other war leaders campaigned to get all the fighting men of all three peoples together for a big fight at the crossing of the Shell River near the mouth of the Sweetwater, what the wasicu called Platte Bridge. The akicita would be revived to enforce discipline, and the soldiers be lured out of the fort with decoys, all the warriors waiting for the signal to attack together, they said.
The first idea was to burn the bridge. Many white people got up the Holy Road by crossing the river here. They would find fording the wagons much harder. Or ferrying them. The second purpose was to kill a few soldiers.
Everyone cried, “Hoye!” in rousing assent.
They were going to decoy the soldiers away from the fort and across the bridge into some rough country to the north. They could overwhelm the soldiers, they were sure of that. The stockade at this Platte crossing had about 120 troopers. Red Cloud, Hump, and Big Road led the Lakota, Roman Nose and High Back Wolf the Sahiyela—together they had more than a thousand fighting men.
The warriors marched close to the fort very slowly, so the horses wouldn’t raise a cloud of dust. They were going to try a decoy, and the soldiers mustn’t know how many Indians were waiting. Near the bridge the leaders deployed their men out of sight of the fort, behind that ridge and on this gully. Only those with long-seeing glasses crept to the ridge tops and studied the fort, far across the river, southeast of the bridge.
Crazy Horse led the decoys down a gully, about twenty of them. To most of them he indicated places to hide themselves along the retreat route, so they could help if the pursuit was too hot. Then he led Little Hawk, one of the sons of the trader Bent, and an Arapaho into plain view of the fort, where the soldiers could see them with the telescopes.
“Point at those pony herds,” Crazy Horse said to Little Hawk.
Little Hawk did, saying, “They got a new herd shipped in.”
“Make them worry about their property, property, property,” said Bent, making the word sound like beating hooves. He pointed, too.
“Let’s stop,” said Crazy Horse. “Make it look like we can’t decide.”
While they were stopped, Bent said, “Did you hear what our old-man chiefs did when we made the last treaty? The toy soldiers offered us beef and bacon and flour and all their things for signing. The old-man chiefs said, ‘Yes, and some white women, too, for our lodges.’ ”
The Arapaho barked laughter.
“The toy soldiers were shocked,” said Bent, “shocked. The soldiers prong our women, but the very idea …” He rolled his eyes.
Everyone laughed and they moved on. Crazy Horse unfolded his blanket and snapped it in the air as though scaring the ponies to make them run. They all laughed. In this mad way they proceeded toward the fort until the gate swung open and the pony soldiers rode out fast and clattered across the bridge. The wagon guns followed.
Crazy Horse pointed and shouted to the others and, when the soldiers were still out of range, lifted some foolish arrows into the sky. Then he said a few soft words to the gopher, which lives by trickery, and to the wind, whose power is to confuse the enemy. The four decoys began their retreat.
Bent and Crazy Horse made little stands, until too many bullets began to churn up the dirt around them. Little Hawk and the Arapaho pretended to whip furiously at their horses to get them up the hills and out of there.
When the soldiers fired their wagon guns, Crazy Horse was sure it was going to work. The pony soldiers’ blood was boiling.
He quirted his pony down the side of a hill and up the far side. He turned to look. The pony soldiers were charging hard. A little closer, a few arrow flights, would do it. Then he heard something odd and looked at the top of the next ridge.
So he stopped his pony and sat and watched the soldiers stop and point and turn around and head back.
When he got to the ridge, Big Road was yelling at the warriors who had broken by the akicita men and spoiled the ambush, “Idiots! Fools!”
Red Cloud was staring at everyone in his haughty way.
Hump trotted toward his hunka wearing a forlorn expression.
Crazy Horse was too furious even to look at him. They rode off by themselves. Crazy Horse wanted to think and throw rocks at the empty prairie.
They did run off the herd of new ponies the soldiers had gotten. High Back Wolf, a Sahiyela fighter of repute, got killed doing it.
The next day about twenty-five soldiers tried to make their way to the west along the Holy Road, led by Caspar Collins. Collins was a young officer the Lakota liked. He’d spent time in the camps and learned their language. So when he rode into an ambush, Lakota on one side and Sahiyela on the other, Red Cloud and others yelled at him to go back.
Collins ordered a retreat. Then he came back alone to help a soldier who was down. Admiring him for this act of courage, most of the Indians held their fire. But Collins’s horse, a fine-looking gray, took the bit in its mouth and ran off into the Sahiyela. Still angry about High Back Wolf, the Sahiyela swarmed on him.
As they rode back to their villages, Little Hawk said what a shame it was Caspar Collins had gotten killed.
Crazy Horse didn’t have his mind on that. He was thinking that the three brother tribes, Lakota, Sahiyela, and Mahpiyato, had sworn to avenge the outrage against Black Kettle’s village at Sand Creek. They had gotten together over a thousand warriors and marched against an important white station, Platte Bridge. And accomplished absolutely nothing.