Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  The Reverend de Plachette had moved to Wyoming to be near his friend William Cody for that final year of the minister’s life. Cody had started a town named after himself there and built some hotels in it for the tourists he was sure would come to the beautiful West by way of the newly opened Burlington rail line. Buffalo Bill had named one of the big hotels after his daughter Irma and a road he’d paid to have built running from the town of Cody up to Yellowstone Park the Cody Road. Another sign of the aging entrepreneur’s wealth was the giant TE Ranch he established along the South Fork of the Shoshone River there. Cody had driven all of his cattle from his previous properties in Nebraska and South Dakota to the ranch.

  When Paha Sapa and little Robert first visited the failing Reverend de Plachette and prosperous Cody there at the ranch in early 1900, Buffalo Bill’s operation was running more than a thousand head of cattle on more than seven thousand acres of prime grazing land.

  Buffalo Bill, his hair white but still long and goatee still in place, had always insisted that his former employee and the boy stay with him in the big house when Paha Sapa visited, and it was that second and final visit, just before Reverend de Plachette died on the day of the first snowfall in Cody in autumn of 1900, that Cody had watched the two-year-old boy playing with some of the servants’ kids.

  —Your son’s smarter than you, Billy.

  Paha Sapa had not taken this as an insult. He already knew how intelligent his little son was. He’d only nodded.

  Buffalo Bill had laughed.

  —Hell, my guess is that he’ll grow up smarter than me. Did you see how he took that empty lantern apart and then put it back together? Didn’t even break the glass. Little fellow can hardly toddle and he’s already an engineer. What do you plan to do for his education, Billy?

  That was a good question. Rain had made Paha Sapa swear that Robert would go to good schools and then to a college or university somewhere in the East. Of course, she’d been sure that her father would be there to help—the old man had taught natural and revealed religion and rhetoric at both Yale and Harvard at different times—but she hadn’t counted on her father dying so soon after her own death. And she hadn’t counted on her father dying broke.

  The schools near Keystone and Deadwood where Paha Sapa had just begun working in the mines after leaving Pine Ridge Reservation were terrible and didn’t usually take Indian children anyway. The one school on the Pine Ridge Reservation was worse. Paha Sapa was saving money, but he had no idea how to buy his son an education.

  William Cody had patted him softly on the back as they watched the children play.

  —Leave it to me, Billy. My sister lives in Denver and I know of some good boarding schools there. The one I’m thinking of takes in boys starting at the age of nine and educates them right up to college age. It can be expensive, but I’ll be more than happy to…

  —I have the money, Mr. Cody. But I would appreciate you putting in a good word with the school. It’s not every school that takes in an Indian child.

  Cody had looked at the four toddlers playing on the floor.

  —Who the hell can tell Robert’s part Indian, Billy? I couldn’t and I’ve been around your people for more than thirty years.

  —He’ll still have the last name Slow Horse.

  William Cody had grunted.

  —Well, maybe he’s not as smart as we think he is, Billy, and he won’t need a good boarding school. Or maybe other people will get smarter in the future. One way or the other, we can always hope.

  ROBERT HADN’T DISAPPOINTED his father. The boy had essentially taught himself to read before he was four; he was reading every book Paha Sapa could find for him by the time he was five. Somehow he learned to speak Lakota as if he’d been raised by Angry Badger’s band, but he was also speaking Spanish by the time he was six (almost certainly because of the Mexican woman and her family and friends who watched him while Paha Sapa was working in the mine). By the time Robert did go to the boarding school in Denver in 1907—the trip to Denver from the Black Hills was daunting then, since there was no direct rail service, but Mr. Cody himself had driven them down the unpaved roads from Wyoming—the boy had already begun speaking and reading some German and French. He had no problem with his studies in Denver despite the fact that he’d rarely attended a real school in the Hills and that his father had been his tutor.

  In truth, Robert and his father had been inseparable until that day in September ’07 when Paha Sapa had looked out the oval rear window of Mr. Cody’s automobile in Denver and seen his son standing with strangers in front of a red-brick building with green shutters; Robert seemed too shy or stunned or perhaps just too interested in the strange situation to think to wave good-bye. But Robert had written every week that year and in the years since—good, long, information-filled letters—and although Paha Sapa knew that Robert had been terribly homesick all of that first year (Paha Sapa had felt his son’s aching homesickness in his own guts and heart), the boy had never once mentioned it in the letters. By January of each year they would be talking about where they would go camping together that summer.

  —Did you ever bring Mother here?

  Paha Sapa blinked out of his reverie.

  —To the Black Hills? Of course.

  —No, I mean here. To the Six Grandfathers.

  —Not quite. We came to the Hills when she was pregnant with you and we climbed there….

  Paha Sapa pointed to a peak rising to the west and south.

  Robert looked surprised, even shocked.

  —Harney Peak? I’m surprised you took Mother there—or even set foot on it.

  —Its wasichu name means nothing, Robert. At least to me. We could see the Six Grandfathers—and almost everything else—from up there. There was a dirt road that went close to the Harney Peak trailhead and none here to the Six Grandfathers. You saw how rough the ride in here still is.

  Robert nodded, looking up at the distant summit and obviously trying to imagine his mother up there, looking in this direction.

  —Why did you ask, Robert?

  —Ah, well, I was thinking of all the places you’ve taken me around here on our summer camping trips since I was little—Bear Butte, Inyan Kara, Wind Cave, the Badlands, the Six Grandfathers…

  Robert had used the Lakota words for these places, including Matho Paha, Washu Niya (“the Breathing Place,” for Wind Cave), Maka Sichu, and so forth. Their private conversations almost always slipped in and out of Lakota and English.

  Paha Sapa smiled.

  —And?

  The smile Robert returned looked like Rain’s when she had been embarrassed.

  —And, well, I just wondered if there were religious reasons for these visits as well as just great places to camp—or places important to your people.

  Paha Sapa noticed the “your” rather than “our” but said nothing.

  —Robert, when the whites summoned various Ikče Wičaśa and Sahiyela and other tribes’ chiefs and holy men and war leaders to Fort Laramie in 1868, to work out the boundaries of the Indian territories, the white soldiers and diplomats speaking for the distant Great White Father said their purpose in mapping our lands was “to know and protect your lands as well as ours,” and our chiefs and holy men and warriors looked at the maps and scratched their heads. The idea of putting a limit to one’s people’s territories had never occurred to the Natural Free Human Beings or to any of the other tribes represented there. How could you know what you might win in war the next spring or lose the next summer? How could you put a line showing your land in areas that really belonged to the buffalo or all the animals that lived in the Black Hills… or all the tribes that sheltered there, for that matter? But then our holy men began to make marks on the wasichus’ maps showing places that must belong to their tribes and people because they were so sacred to them—big loops around Matho Paha and Inyan Kara and Maka Sichu and Paha Sapa and Washu Niya and Šakpe Tunkašila, where we sit right now….

  Robert was already grinni
ng as Paha Sapa continued.

  —The wasichus were a little shocked because between just the Cheyenne and the Natural Free Human Beings, we considered just about every damned rock and hill and tree and creek and river and mesa and piece of prairie sacred in one way or another.

  Robert was laughing now—that free, easy, natural, always unforced laugh that sounded so much like Rain’s sweet laughter to Paha Sapa.

  —I get it, Father. There’s no place you could take me in or around the Black Hills that wouldn’t be part of the Ikče Wičas´a’s faith. But, still, don’t you ever… worry… about me in terms of religion?

  —You were baptized Christian by your grandfather, Robert.

  Robert laughed again and touched his father’s bare forearm.

  —Yes, and that certainly took, didn’t it? Actually, I don’t think I’ve written you about it, but I often do go to various churches in Denver… not just the required chapel at school, but with the other students and some of the instructors and their families on Sunday. I especially have enjoyed a Catholic church in downtown Denver, where I’ve attended Mass with Mr. Murcheson and his family—especially at Easter and other Catholic holy days. I like the ritual… the smell of incense… the use of Latin… the whole thing.

  Wondering what his wife and Protestant missionary-theologian father-in-law would think of this, Paha Sapa said—

  —Are you thinking of becoming a Catholic, Robert?

  The boy laughed again, but softly this time. He looked back at the shadowing summit of Harney Peak.

  —No. I’m afraid I don’t have the ability to believe the way I know you did… probably do… and perhaps the way Mother and Grandfather de Plachette did.

  Paha Sapa was tempted to tell Robert of how his grandfather had seemed to lose his faith in that year and a half after his daughter had died young. The danger, Paha Sapa knows too well, of having only one child… one child who becomes a human being’s only connection to the unseen future and, oddly but truly, to the forgotten past.

  Robert is still speaking.

  —… at least no religion I’ve encountered yet, but I look forward to seeing and learning more in different places. But I guess for right now, the only religion I can lay claim to is… Father, have you heard of a man named Albert Einstein?

  —No.

  —Not too many people have yet, but I suspect they will. Mr. Mülich, my mathematics and physics instructor at the school, showed me a paper that Professor Einstein published about three years ago, “Über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung,” and the implications of that paper, according to Mr. Mülich—the idea that light has momentum and can act like point-particles, photons, well… that’s probably as close as I get to religion these days.

  Paha Sapa looked at his son at that moment the way one looks at a photograph or drawing of a distant, distant relative.

  Robert shook his head and laughed again, as if erasing a blackboard.

  —But you know what the Catholic and Methodist and Presbyterian churches I’ve attended most reminded me of, Father?

  —I have no idea.

  —The Paiute Ghost Dance holy man you told me about a long time ago—Wovoka?

  —Yes, that was his name.

  —Well, his message of a messiah coming… him, I guess… and nonviolence and of how obeying his teachings would lead to the dead loved ones and ancestors returning to the world and the buffalo returning and how the Ghost Dance would induce a cataclysm that would carry away all the whites and other nonbelievers, sort of like the Tribulations and all that stuff in the Book of Revelation, sounded very Christian to me.

  —That’s what a lot of us thought when we heard it, Robert.

  —You told me about you and Limps-a-Lot planning to hear the Prophet with Sitting Bull up at Standing Rock Agency, but Sitting Bull getting killed when he resisted arrest…

  —Yes.

  —But you never told me about Limps-a-Lot. Only that he died shortly after that.

  —There wasn’t much more to tell. Limps-a-Lot did die shortly after Sitting Bull was shot.

  —But how? I mean… I know you’d thought that your honorary tunkašila had been killed years earlier, right after you’d had your Vision and the cavalry chasing Custer’s killers had burned your old village down, but you left that school the priests were running and went up to Canada to search for Limps-a-Lot when you were… gosh, you were about my age, Father.

  Paha Sapa shook his head.

  —Nonsense. I was much older… almost sixteen. A visiting priest from Canada had described a man who sounded like my tunkaˇsila. I had to go see.

  —But still… my gosh, Father… just you riding all the way to Canada to find one man up there—and in the winter, I think you said. When you were fifteen years old. How’d you do it?

  —I had a pistol.

  Robert laughed so hard then that Paha Sapa actually worried the boy was going to fall off the cliff edge.

  —That heavy Army Colt that you still own? I’ve seen that. What’d you kill for food with that monstrous thing? Buffalo? Antelope? Mountain lions?

  —Rabbits, mostly.

  —And you found Limps-a-Lot. After all that time?

  —It wasn’t so long, Robert. Less than five years after Pehin Hanska Kasata—the summer we rubbed out Long Hair at the Greasy Grass…

  Paha Sapa paused then and rubbed his temples as if he had a headache.

  —You all right, Father?

  —Fine. Anyway, it wasn’t so hard to find my tunkašila once I got up to Grandmother’s Country. The red-coated police told me where he was and said that I should leave and take him home with me.

  —How had Limps-a-Lot survived the attack that killed his wives and almost everyone else in your village?

  —He stepped outside his tipi when the detachment of Cook’s cavalry swept in at dawn and a bullet grazed him right here….

  Paha Sapa touched his forehead and felt his own scar there, the one imparted by the stock of the old Crow scout Curly’s rifle. He paused a second, his finger remaining on the raised white welt that had been with him for thirty-six years. It was the first time he’d ever considered the fact that he and Limps-a-Lot had carried almost identical scars.

  —Anyway, Limps-a-Lot was unconscious in the confusion, lying under the charging horses’ hooves, but two young nephews carried him from the battlefield, hid him in the willows, carried him out when the smoke from the burning tipis and bodies concealed their retreat. When my tunkašila awoke two days later, his old life and friends and wives and home—Angry Badger’s tiyospaye—were all gone forever, and he was on a travois and heading north to join Sitting Bull’s band in Grandmother’s Country.

  —But Sitting Bull came back from Canada before he did.

  —Yes. Limps-a-Lot had been ill with pneumonia when Sitting Bull took almost the last two hundred or so of his followers south—the rest had abandoned him, one family at a time, until his tiyospaye was a shadow of its former strength of eight hundred lodges—so I found Limps-a-Lot still ill up there in a village with only eight or ten dilapidated lodges and no food, my tunkašila living with only a couple of dozen old men and women too frightened to come back and too lazy or indifferent to take care of him in his illness.

  —That was… what? Eighteen eighty-two?

  —Eighteen eighty-one.

  —So you brought him back, but not straight to the Standing Rock Agency.

  —No, he went there later to be with Sitting Bull. First he rested and tried to recover while living with me near the Pine Ridge Agency. But he never fully recovered. And the pneumonia was not, I think, pneumonia—it never left him. I’m almost certain it was tuberculosis.

  When Paha Sapa had started this story about his beloved grandfather, he’d slipped into full Lakota. Somehow, the discussion of Limps-a-Lot’s final days required this, he thought, but he also knew it would be difficult for Robert to follow fully. As good at languages as his son was, Paha Sapa k
new that Robert’s only chance to practice Lakota was during his few summer weeks with his father and whenever they visited one of the reservations. This was a language, so beautiful and natural to Paha Sapa, in which a simple “thank you”—pilamayaye—translated literally to something like “feel good-me-you-made,” and a request for directions to a specific house would receive a reply such as Chanku kin le ogna waziyatakiya ni na chanku okiz’u icininpa kin hetan wiyoĥpeyatakiya ni, nahan tipi tokaheya kin hel ti. Nayašna oyakihi šni—which Robert would have to work out as “Road this along northward you-go and cross-road second from-that westward you-go and house first there he-lives. You-miss you-can not.” Statements involving technology became even more difficult for a nonnative Lakota speaker, so that merely asking the time became Mazaškanškan tonakca hwo? or “Metal-goes-goes what?” Most of all, it was a language in which everything had a spirit and volition, so that instead of saying, “It is going to storm”—a passive form that did not exist in Lakota at any rate—one said—“The Thunder Beings soon arriving-will-be.” In their wonderful four years of marriage, Rain—who was sublimely intelligent and had the advantage of being with many native speakers of Lakota—never really mastered the language and often had to ask Paha Sapa what someone from the reservation had said after a rapid-fire exchange of pleasantries.

  But Limps-a-Lot’s spirit deserved having his final story told in Lakota, so Paha Sapa spoke slowly and in short sentences, pausing from time to time to make sure his son was following along.

  —Limps-a-Lot did not like the Standing Rock Agency, but he liked living near his good friend Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull was killed just before the Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns began—that is on December 17, and Sitting Bull died on December 15, 1890, wasichu time, my son—I believe it was only the widespread belief in the Paiute Prophet Wovoka’s Ghost Dance that kept the Natural Free Human Beings there at Standing Rock from slaughtering all the wasichu and the tribal police as well.