Cheyenne Autumn, page 13
In the light of the thin westering moon Little Wolf went down to walk among his people, scattered in the rocks of the canyon slope. Some had crawled away into holes, or were covered with leaves and dead brush and afraid to come out even to his soft call. At last he had everybody collected as well as could be done without making too much movement for the listening scouts.
“My friends,” he said, “we must try to get away from here, reach home without more fighting or else we will all be killed. We must go fast now.”
But it would be hard, with all those horses down there lost and about sixty more, many with the women’s packs in a canyon too close to the soldiers. Some of the young men would stay back to see if these could be taken, but one must not hope. Many would have to walk now, very many. Yet if they were silent as the night that they slipped past the soldiers back at the place of the Standing Lodges, they could escape once more.
This time the early setting of the little moon helped hide the people creeping up the snakehead draw. But many had been wounded, and two good men were left dead, covered with a few rocks, none of the people keening for their warriors, so necessary was it that they be not heard. At least one woman and her son were lost in the darkness of getting away—no one knew where—and the father of Singing Cloud, too. When the girl went to his hiding place, there was only the mark of his thin old body left for her searching hand and finally for the twist of lighted grass she risked. So he had returned to the earth. Crying a little, softly, the girl followed the others. One young man was gone too, seen to slip around toward the south alone. They let him go. It was the one who fired the foolish shot and spoiled the decoy.
By the next morning the weary, footsore Cheyennes were far away, turned from a white-man place by sign left for them where Comes in Sight had passed. The band was hidden in a narrow draw cut deep through the flat country, so cleanly cut that it could barely be seen until its steep walls dropped away before the foot. They were butchering a few beeves there from a ranch herd to help replace some of the freshly dried buffalo, the bladders of pounded meat, the hides, the moccasin leathers prepared so carefully and still in the packs on Punished Woman Creek. Some scouts crept in during the morning. The people lost back there in the night could not be found, not even a fresh moccasin track. Perhaps they were hidden, afraid. The soldiers made a lot of shooting this morning. The sixty horses the Indians left behind were killed with a great echoing in the canyons, the smoke cloud rising like a thunderhead into the air, much of it from the packs that were piled and burned. Then the scouts had taken the Indian trail, leading the soldiers fast upon it. Ahh-h—
Toward noon two more men were suddenly there among them. It was Howling Wolf and the Roman Nose with the medicine eyes, bringing news. When the long pipe had gone around, Howling Wolf spoke. The ambulance of Lewis had been followed to the crossing of the Smoky Hill on the way to Fort Wallace. They had slipped up to hear that Colonel Lewis was very bad hurt, bleeding from the leg, it seemed—such a wound as only a medicine man like Bridge could cure.
Old Bridge made a grave murmuring to hear this. He would gladly have traded his powers to the soldier chief for the safety of his people. But such things cannot be between enemies, although he did not feel like an enemy to anybody now.
Roman Nose had followed the sick wagon a little farther. “The man who said he would catch the Cheyennes or leave his body on the ground is dead,” he added.
There was not a “Hou!” from anyone to this, only a slow getting up and going among the people to prepare them for more running.
7
Sappa—Meaning Black
After the escape from the soldiers on the Punished Woman, some things were done that would not be brought to the tongue so long as a Cheyenne lived. Even among themselves the names would not be spoken, as the names of those killed near there in the Sappa fight three years before were not used except when adopted by a grieving one, in honor.
The 1875 trouble had started from a bad year too. The winter of 1873–1874 was like frozen rain upon a whole nation of naked people. Even the whites, with all their goods, their guns, fire trains, plows, and great herds of beef, were dying in the roads of their great cities. Dull Knife and Little Wolf heard the bone hunter tell this to the chiefs at Red Cloud Agency. He said the banks, the places of the white man’s money, were slamming their iron doors against the owners of it. Those with work for the people had locked it away, and those with food shut their doors too, against the hungry.
“It seems strange that a man would think the Powers made the good things of the earth for just him and maybe a few, only a few, of his own people,” Little Wolf had said thoughtfully, trying to understand these whites with whom the Cheyennes must learn to live.
It seemed the whites were making no such effort. True, the Secretary of War complained the Indians were given insufficient provisions, and General Miles, who whipped the southern Indians to their hungry agencies, said, “The strong, industrious but degenerating tribe of Cheyennes proves the folly of the fruitless experiments and vacillating policy that has governed them for the past twenty years.”
But the general policy was for extermination. The Indian and his treaties stood in the way of progress. Custer headed into the Black Hills where by treaty no white man was to go, looking for gold to help raise money for another railroad, a fire road to thunder up the Yellowstone, the last of the great buffalo grounds. In the south the Medicine Lodge treaty had promised to keep the buffalo hunters out. The Arkansas River was patrolled by a few men, but the hide hunters shot their way across it and on to the Cimarron and the Canadian. It was the same with the Kansas law against the buffalo hunters, the Indians thought, not knowing that the act was never signed or that Grant had vetoed the same bill for the territories. So everywhere the hide hunters crept up the wind to the great herds, their heavy guns set on forked sticks, the boom and the smell of the blue smoke carried away as they worked, the plain darkened with dead animals that dropped suddenly, perhaps kicking a little, sometimes the buffalo nearby turning their shaggy heads to peer curiously through the little, hair-blinded eyes, and then eating again, snuffling, grunting their way into the wind. Finally a shift in the wind direction or a crippled one turning into the herd brought the smell of danger, of man or blood and sent thousands of thin, rope-ended tails up as the buffalo broke into a run, the earth thundering under their hoofs, the herd one dark, swift-flowing robe before the blackbirds could rise from their backs.
So the southern warriors undertook the agreeable fight against the hide hunters. But it was called raiding and soldiers came thick as grasshoppers that bad year of 1874. Little Robe, the southern chief who struck Dull Knife down with his quirt back there at the agency, was promised that the hunters and horse thieves would be kept out of Indian Territory, while at home his horses were stolen and his son, who went after them, was badly wounded by the soldiers. The angry warriors charged the agency, the agent fled, the soldiers came and stayed, setting up Fort Reno where no soldiers should ever walk.
Some of the angry Cheyennes went with a Comanche bulletproofing man in an attack on the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls. Six of these were killed, and the rest rode silently away. For revenge they shot a surveyor and his helpers measuring the Indian country for the whites and then attacked an emigrant train up on the Smoky Hill trail where Colonel Lewis died. They took four captives, the captives that make trouble, as the northerners down there for a visit predicted. “We were a small people and good captives made us more, so now there is scarcely one among us who is not enemy by blood,” Little Hawk, the joker, once said.
But the whites did not laugh. Soldiers came and the two smaller, weaker of the Germaine sisters were left behind for them. Still the troops gave chase, so not even the northern visitors could get past them to go home. Finally the Southern Cheyennes surrendered, the two white girls dressed in blankets and moccasins like the rest. The Indians were disarmed and dismounted and put into a prison camp near the new Fort Reno. Everybody who ever felt the power of a Cheyenne war charge could see them look whipped now. Spring ran in a pale greening along the sunny slopes, but there was no joy among them. One day soldiers lined up all the men, from youth to blind old age, in a double row through the camp. Then the two older Germaine girls, fifteen and seventeen, came. Dressed like visiting white ladies, with plumed hats and dark red cloaks bought by General Miles, they walked stiffly down the line pointing this way and that, and with them went a Mexican who had been around the Cheyenne camps too.
Back a ways, where the Indian women watched, a moaning and crying started up, a keening as for the dead. The northern Brave One saw men great in war and in peace taken from the line to be ironed and hauled away to a far stone prison. It was done on just the finger pointing by the two that the Indians considered foolish children, not women as Cheyennes would be at that age. Surely no soldier chief, no men among the whites would be judged guilty of any wrong because two such children walked along a row and pointed here and there while General Neill sat red-faced and unsteady on his horse overseeing the picking.
The double row of ragged Cheyennes, gaunt and poor, stood unmoving, the braids barely stirring on their breasts as the girls whispered coyly together, their sharp eyes running along the men and beyond, to the watching women. So honored men like Medicine Water were selected—some of them the Old Man Chiefs of the southerners, some who had worked hard for peace even when there was only the stink of the buffaloes left. Finally one of the girls pointed beyond to the watchers, to Mochsi, the warrior woman.
“She helped!” they both cried. “She helped kill our family!”
So Mochsi was put with the group of men held by the bayoneted long guns. Brave One was very angry that nobody told how Mochsi became a warrior woman—because at Sand Creek all the men of her lodge were wiped out, and later her cousins and her new husband too, so there was only Mochsi to carry the gun of her grandfather, a present from two gold seekers he had saved from starvation on the Smoky Hill trail. Now Mochsi was standing there for the irons.
By evening fifteen Indians were selected, and with anger and impatience Neill cut off eighteen more men from the right end of the line to make the thirty-three Cheyenne prisoners General Sherman had ordered. Neill would proceed with the identification some other day and release any found innocent, substituting proved offenders.1
Then the Germaine girls were hurried away in the carriage, for it was seen that some women had their long butcher knives out of their belts.
Three days later the whites brought chains fastened to cannon balls, a roaring forge, and an anvil to pound the chains to the legs of the prisoners. Soldiers ordered all the people back to their shelters. They stood there, watching, angry, sullen, some furious that the prisoners let the ironing be done easier than horses accept the fire-heated shoes. When they got to the younger men, the women lifted their voices in scorning, particularly against Black Horse, who had counted more coups than any other warrior there.
“Where will we get fathers worth giving sons to?” the women taunted. “We see there are no men among you worth taking to our beds!”
This was bold talk, bold Sioux and Comanche woman talk, and heating to the blood. When the hammer slipped and hit his ankle, Black Horse could endure no more. Powerfully he struck the blacksmith aside and ran toward the Cheyenne camp. Half a dozen infantrymen pursued him and fired several volleys after him, hitting his leg, most of the bullets striking into the camp, women and children falling, crying, scattering like leaves in a whirlwind. A woman and her three children were left like bundles on the ground, but the hurt ones were helped as the arrows came back thick. Some of the soldiers were hit, and while they retreated, Black Horse was dragged away by the many friends he had saved in battle. Then the cavalry came galloping out of Reno and the Cheyennes fled to a little sandhill in the bend of the river, the older Dog soldiers helping the women and weak ones, while the younger men ran ahead to dig up some guns hidden before the disarming. There were only a few, and little ammunition, but not everyone need die with empty hands.
While they scooped out holes in the sand, Black Horse dragged his bleeding leg from one to another. “Hold fast! Fight hard!” he said, and sang:
The women will see they still have men
To father their sons!
We will not sit in chains!
It is better to die fighting.
Two hundred and fifty men, women, and children cowered on the choppy little hill under cavalry fire, three companies by now, with two Gatling guns dragged up fast.2 The Indians dug like badgers to get below the blanket of driving bullets that came from all around, very close, and kept coming, the ear deafened by them, their wind lifting the hair, the smoke shutting off all that the soldiers did, even on the north where the flooded Canadian cut into the sandy hill. For the first time Cheyennes had let themselves and their families be completely surrounded, and in a place smaller than a village ground where the soldiers could come charging over them any beat of the heart. Some of the women were so afraid they had to be held or tied down. It seemed they must stand up into the thundering fire, try to run, if only to go down quickly.
Then there was a trumpet’s thin call and the three companies of cavalry attacked from all around, charging up the steep, smoke-drifted slopes. But the footing was too loose and the horses too easily hit with the arrows and the few guns of the Indians. They retreated and came again, afoot through the smoke, sneaking from bush to weed or up a little brush-filled gully. The bullets drove the sand upon the Indians like frozen sleet whipped by a blizzard; the thunder of the Gatling guns hammered the shaking earth, women screaming as they were hit. One Indian was killed trying to see down to shoot, then another, and a third, and many more wounded until there was a terror and crying in the sandy hilltop such as no Cheyenne had ever heard from his people. One strong warrior could not stand it. He would not have his children live this life, even if they could be spared by surrender now. With the little one in his arms he started up into the bullets, but his wife flung herself against him. In the struggle the baby was shot, and while the woman moaned over it, the man arose, arms folded across his naked breast, and was knocked straight backward, almost cut in two, so suddenly red.
The spring clouds thickened. At early dark the shooting stopped and the troops withdrew to the foot of the hill, settling to a ring of little fires, watching. While some Indians crept out to strip the meat from the dead soldier horses, a couple of scouts who knew some veho words got close to the soldiers. There were nineteen whites wounded, they heard, and entrenching tools and food and ammunition were being brought over from the fort. The Indians would be starved out.
“It will not take long, with no water for the wounded . . . ,” Bad Heart, the holy man, said.
No, and daylight would bring a strong charge.
When the women dared move again, they made little lights of twisted grass. With these the men went around the holes in the sand to see what had been lost: those left dead in the camp down there and six men here, with two people missing, one an old woman who had been very much afraid—twelve good people without even as much as a stone to keep the wolf away.
While the horse meat was roasting, the medicine man and his wife made their curings, with Black Horse the worst, perhaps hurt too bad. But there was something good. Black Hairy Dog slipped in from north of the river, from his father, Medicine Arrow, who had not surrendered because he carried the Sacred Arrows. Now the Keeper was hidden in the blackjacks and broken country only two travois days northwest, up the river. He was waiting to see what happened to the people who came in, to Medicine Water and Grey Beard and the other old chiefs who were not coffee coolers.
“They are used up—with irons on their legs, as they tried to put on Black Horse here. . . .”
Irons on Medicine Water and the others? Ahh-h! It was good they stayed out. They had only about forty men, but their women and children were strong so they had managed to escape the soldiers and live during the winter. Now they had enough meat and horses to carry themselves and these here to their relatives north, if it was carefully done.
No one asked if they would go. Black Horse had spoken for them all in his song that afternoon, even though it was two travois days away and they were afoot, bad hurt, and the soldiers would ride fast. Here they were already caught. So they started—the fourth flight of the Cheyennes to the north.
Silently, under the light patter of spring rain, the Indians crept through the sentinels, waded the hip-deep river, and scattered. They were cold and wet, poorer than even after Sand Creek, with not one horse and only the little fresh horse meat. But traveling so light they could go fast, and the rain that chilled them washed their passing from the places of their moccasins’ touch.
The next morning, the seventh of April, General Neill reported that 167 warriors with their families had escaped and were joined by some still out, perhaps 250 warriors all together, and their families. They were being pursued.
Once more the Cheyennes climbed the ladder of the east-flowing streams, going in small parties, keeping away from the whites. They were peaceful, and the Sacred Arrows must never be exposed to trouble except in a regular war party after the carrying ceremonials of the pipe. Medicine Arrow had given the crippled Black Horse a handsome golden pinto marked in the Keeper’s own medicine way with four straight tattoo lines like arrows on the jaw. No horse so marked had ever been shot.
Soon after the escape the soldiers had come close enough to be seen, but the Indians scattered and got away, remembering the time six years ago when they let Custer’s Monahsetah come to the camp and make the good promises of peace. Medicine Arrow had been cautious even then, and called the council with the Long Hair in the sacred lodge. There, while Custer promised them his peace forever, the Keeper smoked the pipe under the Arrows and, in the ceremonial of truthtelling, emptied the ashes on Custer’s boots, to bring death to the one who breaks the promise of peace spoken here.3 After the Indians started to the agency behind Custer, the general called a council with a trap. Medicine Arrow escaped, but three men sent to look were taken, to be hung unless the Indians gave up their white captives right away. These were with another band, but Medicine Arrow got them freed, and then Custer kept his three prisoners, took them up to Kansas where two were killed and the other wounded. Now six years later there was this ironing and killing again, after the Cheyennes came in on another promise of peace and safety. Truly it was better never to be caught.
