“Many soldiers will fall!” she screamed into the noise and the dust. “There will be much blood on my hands before the sun has crossed this sky.”
With a deep sense of pride, Rain bellowed a war cry for all to hear. “Fear this pretty bird, wasichu soldiers! She may be pretty as a sparrow, but she carries the talons of a war eagle!”
“Behold!” shouted another. “A pretty bird rides among us!”
Rain’s grim smile broadened. The beautiful unmarried girl would make his young men fight all the harder.
One final warning before Rain and his warriors reached the soldiers falling headfirst into the Hunkpapa camp.
“Beware that no man hides behind her skirts!”
Just as Sitting Bull had dreamed that potent vision of his, soldiers were falling into the Hunkpapa camp circle.
Unbelievable.
If the village had truly believed they would be attacked by soldiers, perhaps more of them would have torn down, packed up, and tramped off without delay during the morning hours. Yet the only lodges coming down were those belonging to families who wanted to get an early head start on the day’s journey down the valley. Another five or eight miles more toward the Yellowstone.
So no more than a handful of women in each circle busied themselves pulling their lodge skins from the poles when pony soldiers charged toward the south end of camp.
As word spread through the villages, pandemonium and confusion and fear raced on its heels like prairie fire along the Greasy Grass. Women shrieked, children cried, and the old ones wailed. And in the middle of it, war ponies neighed and whinnied while warriors shouted their prayers aloft into the singing air: Sioux praying to Wakan Tanka and the young Cheyenne men to their Everywhere Spirit Above.
Dashing like water-striders across the flat surface of a pond, women scurried about to locate their children. Likewise the little ones darted in and around lodges, shrieking for their mothers. Amid the din, the old and the infirm struggled, hobbling along on their own if they could. Everyone beginning to head west, escaping from the camp circles. West, toward the hills and safety.
“Take what you can carry and flee before the pony soldiers ride into camp!”
With their frightened children in tow, the women yanked down their husband’s most potent medicine bags and sacred objects to go with them into the western hills. No white soldiers must defile the power of their men.
Heralds scooted back and forth through the eight camp circles, shouting their news and mystical omens, raising their shrill and magical wishes for those young ones heading south into the fight. Hand-held drums throbbed their primitive beat as eagle wing-bone whistles sent an ear-piercing cry to the hot summer sky overhead.
In all the frightening noise and confusion, there nonetheless arose some sense of ages-old order: The women and children and frail ones must escape. Staying behind, the warriors would hold off the attack, giving those weaker ones a chance to flee.
“Will the pony soldiers stop at nothing?”
Each time the white man attacked, he threw his soldiers against a village of women and children … against the sick, tired, old ones.
“What kind of beast is this wasichu anyway? What kind of savage makes war on women and children … and those ready to die?”
Young Hunkpapa warrior One Bull drove his ponies east toward the river for morning watering, herding them in from their pasture, when he heard the first shots. Not too far to the south.
Leaping atop a pony bareback and gripping its mane with both hands in the shape of a narrow vee, he dashed into the camp circle to find the circle already in a wild disarray. Shouting and dust and screaming and a flurry of mad activity.
“One Bull!”
Turning, he saw Sitting Bull emerge from his tall red-and-black lodge, carrying a shield and stone war club.
“Give me your rifle, young one,” the chief ordered quietly.
Obediently One Bull handed over his old muzzle loader. “Yes, Uncle.”
“You will ride with these into battle, One Bull,” the Hunkpapa mystic declared evenly. “My shield and my war club are my symbols of authority, my power in battle. Take these in my place and go meet the soldiers. Talk with them, if they will talk, so we can end this killing. Tell them I will talk peace to save the lives of our children. Go now! You carry the power of your chief. Lead your men wisely, Nephew!”
The young warrior leapt on The Bull’s pony secured with a rawhide bridle and let fly a shrill war cry. He held high the coveted war shield of Sitting Bull, then vaulted away, leading close to a hundred warriors into the skirmish with Reno’s charging troops.
After he watched the warriors gallop off to the fight, Sitting Bull buckled on his leather cartridge belt, stuffing an old cap-and-ball revolver in the holster. He then took up his Winchester carbine.
Yet before he would fight this day, The Bull knew he must find his old mother. He tore off into the choking dust kicked up by a thousand hooves galloping out of the Hunkpapa village. Before his eyes his own mystic vision swam with frightening reality.
At the center of all the screeching pandemonium, some camp guards were busy at their important task. One at a time the buffalo-hide sections of the huge Teton Sioux council lodge came down from their poles. It would not do to let the enemy cast their defiling eyes on this sacred lodge. As each section was bundled, it was hefted aboard the back of a pony and the animal led west into those coulees and hills, where the white soldiers would not find the lodge.
Past this calm, deliberate crew of Hunkpapa guards raced a middle-aged Cheyenne warrior, holding aloft a blue jacket he had stripped from one of the first soldiers killed as Reno began his frantic retreat into the timber at the river. Stone Calf wanted his Sioux cousins to see this battle trophy—and remember well.
“Look, my friends!” he bellowed with rage. “Heed this marking on the pony soldier’s clothing!”
His gnarled finger pointed out the crossed sabers and that 7 nestled atop their apex.
“This is a good day for the Shahiyena, my cousins!” he roared. “A good day for the Cheyenne!”
A crowd of the curious gathered, slowing their dash to the battle or their flight into the hills for a moment to listen to the old Cheyenne’s story.
“These soldiers are the same who attacked my village—when Black Kettle camped us along the Washita many years ago! Aiyeee! These are the very same pony soldiers who killed my mother! The ones who butchered my wife and children when they could not escape the soldier bullets that winter dawn before the sun rose above the blood and stink of our dead people! I have been alone since these soldiers murdered my family!”
Shouts of praise and wails of despair arose all round Stone Calf as he continued. “This day my heart is once again made whole. The circle is complete, my cousins! The circle begun on the Washita is now made whole once more!”
“Hear it! The circle is healed!” roared another warrior who took the bloody cavalry blouse from Stone Calf and brandished it aloft on his rifle.
A woman raised a fiery limb from her midday cookfire, torching the torn blue tunic. Once flames enveloped it, the blouse fell in shreds to the ground amid cheers and shouts of both Sioux and Cheyenne celebrating the thrashing given those white soldiers down in the timber at the river.
“Let us go show these soldiers what we do to evil men who attack a village of women and children!” one woman shrieked, in one hand brandishing a bloody knife and in the other an old cap-and-ball revolver. “Women! Do not run. We will fight and die alongside our men!”
Before she could lead the throng away, an Oglalla horseman galloped up and reined in his pony, cascading dust over them all.
“More horse soldiers!” he rasped hoarsely, pointing to the sun-bleached ridges to the east beyond the river. “More soldiers riding on the hills above! Come fight, or they will overrun the villages!”
“Where?” many asked, panic rising in their voices.
“We cannot see any horse soldiers!” an old man de
clared with some sarcasm.
“This is only wild talk,” someone suggested. “Come, we must go kill those soldiers cowering in the timber to the south!”
“Wait! Aiyeee!” It is true! Look!” a woman screamed, pointing at the grassy hills across the river.
Pouring out of the mouth of the upper Medicine Tail Coulee and into the lower gully that reached all the way to the Greasy Grass itself, rode a long column of pony soldiers.
“Soldiers come!” The Oglalla messenger beat frantic heels against his pony’s flanks and tore off to carry his warning to the north.
“We must stop these soldiers,” one of the Santee Sioux warriors shouted, rallying those around him. “To the ford! We will cut off their charge!”
As most of this crowd dashed off toward the river, a small, ugly mob rumpled into camp from south of the Hunkpapa circle. These Santees had just captured an old friend who long ago had married a Santee woman. Now that this prisoner rode with the pony soldiers, the Sioux realized they had every right to consider Isaiah Dorman a traitor.
A big black-skinned Arikara interpreter, Dorman begged for his captors to kill him quickly and be done with it, savvy enough to know what fate awaited him if they did not.
“Just kill me now and throw me away! Kill me!” he shouted in Sioux at his tormentors.
Instead, one of the Santee men spit into his shiny black face and rubbed his spittle on the soldier’s eyes.
“You do not deserve to die like a man, Teat!” a warrior shouted Dorman’s Santee name, given him because of the dark color to his skin, like a nursing mother’s nipple. “Instead, we will give you over to the women for their amusement. A traitor like you deserves no better than a camp dog’s death.” He turned to the women. “Tie him to a tree!”
After they lashed Dorman’s arms and legs to a cottonwood so he could not fall, they started using the soldier for target practice. The Santees filled his legs with so many bullets, he could no longer stand, collapsing suspended against his rope bindings. Only then did the archers begin their grisly work. Again and again they fired arrows into Dorman’s body, but none of them enough to kill him right off.
“We don’t want you to die quickly—not the death of an honorable man,” an old man growled into the black face shiny with beads of sweat and pain. “You must die like a dog butchered for the pot. I want to hear you whine and whimper!”
When at last they cut him down from his tree, the Santees dragged the black soldier onto the prairie, where they stretched his body out among the hills of a prairie-dog town. Here the squaws continued their gruesome work, hacking little pieces of black-pink flesh from arms or legs or chest, bleeding him into tin cups that they repeatedly poured into an old blackened and battered coffee pot.
“Wasichu sapa must die slow!” one old hag spat into his face. “Black white man must die hard!”
In the midst of his painful torture, Isaiah Dorman harkened back to that last morning at Fort Lincoln, remembered his Santee wife tearfully telling him of her nightmare, begging him not to ride with Custer.
Now all the Negro soldier could do was die alone. His was a one-man job if ever there was one. Isaiah didn’t have the strength to cry out anymore, not with all the pain he had to endure, not with all the blood seeped from his body, drop by tormented drop.
Dorman just didn’t have the strength to do anything but die. And he did that just as bravely as he could.
Oglalla warrior White-Cow-Bull had stayed up into the early morning hours celebrating with the others their victory over Red Beard Crook.
His head ached from too little sleep and too much dancing as he lumbered up from the timber by the river, where he kept his wickiup with other young bachelors. The Cow wandered to a fire tended by an old woman, its greasy smoke rising to the hazy midmorning sun that boded a sultry summer day.
“Old woman,” he declared as he stood over her hunched skeletal form, “give me some food.”
For a long moment she stared up into the sunlight at the warrior, blinking her moist, rheumy eyes. Among the Sioux it was custom for young warriors without families of their own to be fed by those they supplied with camp meat. She-Runs-Him recognized White-Cow-Bull and speared some chunks of meat from her battered kettle for his breakfast.
“This day the attackers come to our village,” she slurred, gumming the words from a toothless mouth as she presented him the steamy bowl.
“How is it you know this, Grandmother?” he addressed her in polite form.
“I know no more but what I see behind my eyes,” she answered before disappearing into her lodge.
He knew she would not put her head out until he had finished his breakfast and was gone.
With nothing better to do this late morning, the young Oglalla determined to ride north to the Cheyenne camp in hopes of catching a glimpse of Monaseetah. When she had refused his offer of marriage, her words hurt like the cut of the Sun Dance knife—yet, if he tried again, perhaps he still might win her.
He must convince her that her soldier-husband would never return for her. It had been far too long already. Seven years should be long enough to wait for anyone. The soldier’s son waited all this time at his mother’s side.
Long enough to wait for any man—especially for a lying wasichu soldier.
“Let me help you with that,” the Cow declared when he found Monaseetah dragging some deadfall up from the river with Yellow Bird at her side.
“I can manage.” She smiled the brave, pretty smile of hers that lit up her face. “I have learned to manage on my own.”
Rebuffed in a gentle way, White-Cow-Bull turned off to visit Roan Bear, a Cheyenne friend who this day as a member of the Fox clan was in charge of guarding his camp circle. The Bear sat protecting the lodge where his Northern Cheyenne people kept their Sacred Medicine Hat made of the hide of a buffalo head and its horns. While the Southern Cheyenne revered their holy Medicine Arrows, these northern cousins revered the Hat.
In the welcome shade of that sacred lodge, Roan Bear and White-Cow-Bull, proven warriors both, shared again their favorite war stories and tales of a first pony raid. Above their laughter the sharp crack of rifle shots came from the south on the dry breeze.
Both leapt to their feet about the time a young Oglalla rode into camp shouting.
“Pony soldiers! Pony soldiers! They attack the Hunkpapa circle! Come! Come help in Sitting Bull’s vision!”
“We go!” The Cow shouted, grabbing his friend’s shoulder.
“No,” Roan Bear answered softly. “My duty is with the Medicine Hat. Because of the danger, I must take it far away to the prairie beyond the pony herd. There it will be safe from our enemy dirtying it. Only when another Fox warrior comes to relieve me, can I go fight the soldiers. Only when I know the Hat is safe, can I offer myself in battle as a Crazy Dog.”
“Look here at the old one!” White-Cow-Bull pointed out the Cheyenne chief, Lame-White-Man, who rushed past with nothing but a small blanket wrapped at his waist.
“I was taking a sweat bath,” the middle-aged chief announced with a self-conscious smile. “I do not have time to braid my hair, nor do I even take time to dress. With my rifle and this belt to hold my blanket up, I am ready to fight the pony soldiers.”
“Go, old man!” Roan Bear exhorted. “Go and fight well this day!”
“Bear!” a young Fox warrior cried out, loping out. He carried an old smoothbore muzzle loader.
“Sleeps Late? Have you come to carry the Medicine Hat far from the evil ones?”
“Yes,” he answered breathlessly, eyes blinking in the dust many others stirred up. “If you wish to fight, I will carry the Hat into the hills for our people. I would consider it a great honor, brother. A great honor to protect the Hat from our enemies.”
“Go then, little brother.” Bear handed the teenage warrior a fur-wrapped bundle enclosing the sacred object. “Protect it with your life.”
Sleeps Late stopped and turned after a few steps. “Protect our village, Ro
an Bear. Protect our people with your life.”
“Aiyeee!” Bear’s voice rose above the tall cottonwoods with the power of a war eagle. “This is so, Sleeps Late! It is a good day to die!”
“Nutskaveho!” Cheyenne war chief Two Moons rushed by, leading his war pony he always kept tethered at his lodge. “White soldiers on the hills above! Run for your horses! Run for your horses!”
“What is this?” Roan Bear yelled at the chief.
“More soldiers are coming!” Two Moons shouted back over his shoulder. “Some fight the Hunkpapas, and now the others come to attack our own camp circle! Nutskaveho!”
The Cheyenne camp belched free its young warriors to join the valley fight near the Hunkpapa village as soldiers dismounted in the timber along the river. Roan Bear and White-Cow-Bull for the first time saw the two long columns of soldiers ride off the ridge into the upper Medicine Tail Coulee. Heartbeats later gunfire erupted, echoing from the coulee itself.
In the time it would take to kindle a pipe, the two young warriors watched the soldiers who led drop from their horses to return fire, then remount.
“Nahetso! They will ride straight into our camp if they cross the ford!” Roan Bear shouted at two of his young friends, throwing an arm up to show the pair those soldiers riding down from the hills, coming in their direction.
“If they cross, they will sweep our people away as the warm chinooks eat the winter snows!” Bob-Tail-Horse replied, knowing exactly what needed to be done. “We must guard the ford!”
“You cannot!” old man Mad Wolf hobbled up, crippled with age. “There are too many pony soldiers coming down to the river. We need help. You must go to the Sioux camps and tell them of the other soldiers coming to cross the river. You four cannot do this alone, Nephew! Those pony soldiers will kill you!”
“Perhaps,” Bob-Tail-Horse replied calmly, a look of serenity crossing his face, giving it a strange light. “But only the heavens and the earth last forever, Uncle! A warrior is called upon to fight for his people and to give his life up for the Powers when he is called. Only the earth and sky will last. We who are warriors must die!”
Seize the Sky sotp-2 Page 27
