Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Lem—” Jane said.

  He turned away from her and Virgil and walked back to where the men were still listening to Edison’s phonograph.

  NINETEEN

  War was coming. Crazy Horse had sensed that even before Plenty Coups of the Crow, Crooked Horn of the Arikara, and Gall, the adoptive brother of Sitting Bull, had ridden to his camp. The three chiefs told him that Touch-the-Clouds was talking of war, had been talking of war ever since the Sun Dance, but Crazy Horse had already dreamed of war and had known what they would tell him.

  He had last dreamed of his own death almost a year ago, in the same dream that had come to him from time to time ever since the battle with Custer in the Black Hills. In that dream, he was sitting in the tepee of Touch-the-Clouds when the Blue Coats came for him. They took him to one of their walled forts, and there he saw the warrior Little Big Man wearing the blue coat of a Wasichu soldier. The Wasichu, he realized, were going to put him in an iron cage, a place with barred windows where men were chained like animals. In his dream, Crazy Horse thought, I will run from this place, trance myself into the true world. A Blue Coat came at him then and stabbed at him with a knife on the end of a firestick, and it was when he felt the stabbing of the knife that he would leave his dream and find himself in the world where his death had not happened.

  The dream had come to him so many times that he had expected, while drifting into yet another dream of Blue Coats and of warriors, to dream his death once more. Instead, he had dreamed of a camp filled with Blue Coats and Lakota warriors praying over war pipes and painting themselves for battle. His people would be at war soon. It was good that they would fight, since the warriors had been given no chance to display their valor for some years now, and some of the younger men had not yet proven theirs. What Crazy Horse did not understand was why his people were in a camp with the Blue Coats preparing for war and getting ready to fight alongside them. He had awakened after that, and only then had it come to him that he had not dreamed of his death for a long time.

  That death, the dream death brought to him by the Blue Coat’s knife, would not come to him. Crazy Horse knew that now, yet the dream still existed inside him. It was as if he had dreamed himself into another world and had died there, while the waking world around him was only one of shadows.

  Plenty Coups said to him, “Touch-the-Clouds says that we will be at war before next summer.”

  Crooked Horn said, “Touch-the-Clouds now talks to Morning Star Brother, the Orphan from the East, of war. He seek his counsel. He speaks to him as if the Orphan is a war chief.”

  Gall said, “Sitting Bull had another vision after the Sun Dance. He saw Blue Coats falling into camp, falling with their heads pointed at the ground, just as he did before the battle against Long Hair Custer in the Black Hills. But there were other Blue Coats with their feet pointed at the ground, standing apart from the battle, and still others falling away from us. Sitting Bull thinks that it means that not all of the Blue Coats will fight against us.”

  Crazy Horse had known even before the Sun Dance that Sitting Bull would have a vision. After Plenty Coups and Gall and Crooked Horn left his camp, Crazy Horse knew that he had to seek his own vision.

  He got up before dawn on the following morning, put on his hair-fringed shirt, and said to his wife, Black Shawl, “I am riding out today.” He had not spoken so many words to her in months, but he had always been a silent man, one who lived largely apart from others. He had never told Black Shawl that he had also dreamed her death, and that of their daughter, that he had seen them wasting away from the evil spirits that sucked the strength from the lungs of people and made them burn with fever. The Wasichu brought such evil spirits, and many had died from them in the past. Crazy Horse had taken his dream as a warning to keep his distance from the white man.

  ‘‘You will need food,” Black Shawl said, handing him some dried meat and a pouch of pemmican. He would not need food, he would be starving himself in order to see his vision more clearly, but he took the food from her because it was simpler than refusing it.

  His Oglalas had made camp on the west bank of the Powder River. The women working at hides with their bone tools did not look up as Crazy Horse rode past them. The men grazing the horses and practicing with their bows said nothing to him as he passed.

  He rode west, toward Wolf Mountain. He would go to the Greasy Grass, to the river the Wasichu called the Little Bighorn. In years past, he would have ridden to the Black Hills to seek his vision, but Paha Sapa, the Center of the World, which had begun to change after Touch-the-Clouds had his visions, had changed even more since Long Hair Custer had died there with his men. The Blue Coats had come there to look for the yellow metal, and now others came there to take it, to use it for weapons and other tools of the white man that the Lakota wanted, to buy what was needed to make rocket-arrows and firesticks and thunderclap balls to shoot from metal cylinders and to pay the men who knew how to make them. Touch-the-Clouds said that the spirits wanted them to take what they needed from Paha Sapa so that they could defend themselves. Crazy Horse had made his peace with that, yet he ached when he saw the scars miners had left there, and bare places where trees had once grown. His heart grew heavy whenever he climbed to a vantage point from where he could make out the square wooden buildings and dirt roads of Deadwood, so near to Paha Sapa. The Wasichu would have done much worse to the Hills had they exiled the Lakota from that sacred ground, but knowing that was little consolation when he heard the spirits wailing. They wailed now whenever the wind blew through the Black Hills, mourning for what had been lost, and if others could no longer hear them, Crazy Horse still did.

  He reached Wolf Mountain by evening and camped there, sleeping under a shelter made with a few tree limbs and a hide. He awoke to the sound of his roan horse pawing at the ground. Another horse was standing several paces from him, a gray horse with no saddle and no bridle. The air rippled around the horse. The sky grew lighter, the horse’s gray hide became white, and then the horse began to dance.

  He had seen this horse before, as a boy, in the vision that had given him his name. A warrior had been mounted on the horse in that early vision, a warrior with lightning and hailstones painted on his face and body and a red-backed eagle in his hair, the warrior in whom Crazy Horse had seen himself. The spirit-horse was alone now, without a rider.

  The spirit-horse trotted west, in the direction of the valley of the Greasy Grass. Crazy Horse mounted his roan and followed the dancing white horse. The thick buffalo grass rippled in the wind, and the trees growing along the banks of the Tongue River swayed, as if they, like the white horse, were dancing.

  His visions had shown him the real world, the world of spirits that lay behind the world of shadows in which he dwelled. They had also shown him that there were other shadow worlds beside the one he knew. There was a world in which he had died as a prisoner at the hands of a Blue Coat. There was a world in which Touch-the-Clouds, defeated in battle, had led his people to one of the white man’s reservations, there to live out his life in despair. There was a world in which the Lakota fled north to the Grandmother’s country, and never again saw the Black Hills. There was even a shadow world in which the white men had never come to the land of the Lakota, where black herds of buffalo too numerous to count roamed over the grassland.

  If there was a trail that could lead him from the world in which he lived to another shadow world, Crazy Horse had not yet found it. He could move between this world and the world of spirits, where the white horse was now leading him, but other shadow worlds were closed to him. Still, he could glimpse them in dreams and visions, and what the visions had told him was that every moment, every time a man did one thing instead of another, brought a new shadow world into being. Every step along a trail led a man farther from other trails he might have taken. By glimpsing those he might have followed, he could perhaps see what he might have to do, and where he might be led astray.

  War is coming, Crazy Horse thought a
s he rode after the white spirit-horse. He had learned much from watching how the Blue Coats fought and how they practiced for fighting, how they drilled, how they formed lines, how many supplies they would need if they were to travel deep within Lakota territory to do battle. Now he was thinking of what to tell Touch-the-Clouds about the war that they would soon have to fight.

  One way to fight would be to move farther west, to keep as far away from the Wasichu during this coming winter as possible. But if the Blue Coats came after them, they would most likely send one force up from the south and another from the east; they would try to trap the Lakota in their camps, steal their horses and destroy their tents, and leave them without food and shelter during the winter storms. They would not even have to kill them, as Long Hair Custer had when attacking Black Kettle’s camp of Cheyennes on the Washita. Crazy Horse had seen such fighting, in many of the shadow worlds, and he did not want to fight that way.

  He thought of telling Touch-the-Clouds that they should draw the Blue Coats west, farther from their forts, and then north to the Grandmother’s country of Canada. If Three Star Crook became chief of the Blue Coats in the West, he would come after them, and order Miles to break the promises made at Fort Lincoln, but then he would risk provoking the Grandmother’s Red Coats and drawing them into battle.

  Crook would also have a hard time finding scouts that would help him. That was another thing Crazy Horse had seen in the shadow worlds: more and more of the Lakota and Cheyenne and Crow and Arikara selling themselves to the white man as scouts. If the Blue Coats won a few victories, red men would leave their camps to serve the Wasichu again.

  “The Lakota cannot hide in their own lands and expect to win anything in the end,” a voice whispered to him. This was a voice he had heard before, that he knew. Crazy Horse looked around, but saw no one who could have spoken the words.

  A spirit is trying to tell me what to do, he thought, accepting that; it was why he had come here.

  He continued to follow the white horse, stopping only to let his mount graze. He did not eat the food or drink the water his wife had given him. He did not stop to rest, but followed the spirit-horse through the mountain divide and down a steep slope into the valley of the Greasy Grass. By then, he was growing lightheaded, his mouth dry, but he had starved himself for much longer than this in the past while seeking a vision.

  The river the Wasichu called the Little Bighorn lay before him. He dismounted, led his roan down a narrow trail to the water to drink, then looked up. The white horse had vanished.

  Crazy Horse sighed and touched his wasicun, the personal medicine bundle he wore under his shirt. “I hope I haven’t come here for nothing,” he said aloud. Although he said little around men, he often grew more talkative in the presence of spirits.

  “The Lakota cannot hide in their own lands and expect to win their war.”

  This was the same voice he had heard before, a woman’s voice. He turned around and saw Graceful Swan, the woman that Touch-the-Clouds had given to the Orphan, standing above him on the bank.

  “You are dead,” he said to her, not that this especially worried him; he had seen and spoken to the dead before. There had been some talk among the men of how Graceful Swan had died at the hands of Blue Coats, of how deeply the Orphan was mourning her. He had pitied the Orphan Rowland for his loss, and thought of how the man from the East had behaved at the Sun Dance. Rowland had become one of them that summer, taking the name Morning Star Brother. He had even endured having the sticks thrust under his chest muscles by one of the medicine men and dancing for a day with his face turned to the sun. Crazy Horse thought of the shadow world in which he had seen Black Shawl wasting away, of how helpless he had felt, and yet Rowland grieved too deeply for his woman. He had been using the pain of the Sun Dance ordeals not to prove his courage but instead to dampen his grief.

  “Yes, of course I am dead,’’ Graceful Swan said. “I wouldn’t be here speaking to you otherwise.” She wore a dress made out of a buffalo hide with beadwork in the shapes of diamonds and triangles. In one hand, she held a red war pipe, and in the other, a tomahawk, and she bore a shield on her left arm. For a moment, he thought it was his own rawhide shield, with its designs of lightning symbols and a bear and a dragonfly to give him the powers of those spirits. But instead, on the right side of the shield, a Blue Coat with rifle and horse had been painted, and on the left, a warrior in battle dress, and there were other symbols he did not know—a round cylinder, a dome, two lines with more lines drawn between them that made him think of an Iron Horse trail.

  “I don’t know why you are speaking to me at all, Graceful Swan,” Crazy Horse said. “I came here to think about how to counsel Touch-the-Clouds about the war we’ll have to fight. The ghost of a woman can’t tell me anything about war.”

  “My last message to Touch-the-Clouds was to tell him that war was coming. He heeded that message even though it came from a woman, and it has turned out to be true. He listens to my husband Morning Star Brother when he speaks of war, and my husband still hears me in his dreams.”

  “There’s something that’s bothering me.” Crazy Horse sat down on the slope of the bank. “I don’t know why the Blue Coats attacked the settlement where you were staying. I don’t know why they killed so many people there. Bear Coat Miles going after White Eagle and his talking wire warriors—that I can understand. His chief ordered him to do that, and he had to obey, and if he had killed most of White Eagle’s men and kept the Wasichu medicine man Edison as a captive, it would have been a great blow to us.”

  “Yes, it would have.” Graceful Swan’s voice was coming from his left; he turned his head and saw that she was now sitting next to him. “The Lakota would have had to avenge that. They would have had to attack Fort Lincoln and punish Bear Coat Miles for breaking the treaty. Some of the men would have been very angry, and might have killed many people in Bismarck, too, and that would have turned many Wasichu against the Lakota. The war would have started there, and we might have lost it in the end.”

  “I know.” The ghost of Graceful Swan had said only what he was thinking to himself. “That made sense, what Bear Coat Miles did. But it made no sense for the Blue Coats to kill you and all those other people. The Cheyenne and Lakota who were camped there came to that place only because the Wasichu in the town had welcomed them and allowed them to come there to trade. And if the Blue Coats were sent there to break the treaty and kill people, they should have stopped after all of the Cheyenne and Lakota were dead and ridden away.”

  “Instead,” the ghost said, finishing his thought, “they have only enraged both the red man and many white men as well.”

  Crazy Horse turned her words over in his mind. In some ways, that massacre in Kansas might turn out to be useful to his people. There were Wasichu who would hate the soldiers for what they had done, and that might make them less willing to fight the Lakota. Graceful Swan would not see it that way, of course, nor would the spirits of the people who had died with her, but she had known this war was coming before her death. She might have seen her death coming for her, too, and known that she could not escape it.

  “You cannot fight this war alone,’’ Graceful Swan said. “The Lakota and Cheyenne will need all of their allies. I am not speaking only of the Kiowa and Comanche and Cherokee and others who have agreed that red men must not fight among themselves. There may be others besides those red brethren who will fight with the Lakota.”

  “If we had enough comrades to fight with us,’’ he said, “we could carry this war away from our grazing grounds. We could carry it east. We could move along the Iron Horse trails and take what we needed along the way. The chiefs of the Blue Coats would not expect us to fight in that way.” That was the best way to fight the Long Knives, to keep them from fighting in their customary manner and to fight in ways that they would not foresee.

  “That could be done,” Graceful Swan said, “but to do it, you must either take what you need from the Wasichu you meet al
ong that trail or have them freely give it to you.”

  “Surrender, and be spared,” Crazy Horse muttered, remembering when Touch-the-Clouds had spoken to him of mercy and terror and their uses in warfare, “or fight, and be destroyed completely. That is the promise we would have to make. We could bring along our rocket- arrows, even if using them is a cowardly way to fight.”

  “It may be cowardly,” Graceful Swan murmured, “but it is effective.”

  “We wouldn’t need wagons with horses to haul them, we could put the rocket-arrows into the Iron Horse wagons. We could shoot those rocket-arrows right up the asses of our enemy.”

  “You see what you must do, Crazy Horse,” the ghost said. “You must win your victory over the Wasichu in the East if the Lakota are to keep their lands.”

  Touch-the-Clouds, Crazy Horse knew, had been aware of that for some time. Touch-the-Clouds had not brought the Lakota together and made his alliances with other peoples merely to keep what his people already had, or to protect it from the whites. He saw himself as a man like the warrior that Yellow Hair Rubalev told stories about, the warrior who had made his people the rulers of the other side of the world. Maybe that was the only way that the Lakota could keep their lands for all time.

  “Yes, you see that,” Graceful Swan whispered. He looked toward her and saw that he and his horse were again alone by the river.

  Lemuel Rowland had traveled by steamboat to St. Louis and then down the Mississippi to Natchez. A taciturn middle-aged man with a graying beard met him at the dock with horses. Geronimo had deigned to travel as far east as the Red River Valley to meet with Lemuel and Grigory Rubalev. That was the message that had been given to Lemuel in St. Joseph; it had been spoken to him by a rough-looking red-headed young man whom he assumed was one of Rubalev’s shadowy acquaintances. Geronimo’s concession meant that Lemuel had not had to make a long stagecoach trip to meet with the Apache in Santa Fe, but he had not known that Rubalev was also to be an envoy from the Lakota to the Apache chief.