Cheyenne Autumn, page 27
Now almost everything was used up, and the below-zero cold that sat among them like a wolf grew stronger from the frost crawling in between the logs, the women huddled together, the children crying out in their cold and hunger from the troubled half sleep as they would not have dared if awake.
The young men had long planned for this day that Hog promised them the night they were brought here. The council chiefs were pushed aside even more now than usually happened in warring, this time by younger leaders like Black Bear, Little Shield, Bull Hump, and the southern Pug Nose. There were older men among them too, like Great Eyes and even Bridge, who had never gone armed except by his healing power, and the wilder young sons of the chiefs, Little Hump and Young Hog, following Roman Nose and the Little Finger Nail, the one who had grown so strong these few moons past.
Behind the blanket-covered windows the plans were approached with the old formality now. In the prolonged desperation of the barracks the killings down in Kansas by any avenger seemed suddenly the work of a foolish and faraway time, like the things of hot youth seen from the responsible years of the council fire. Here everyone must work together for the surprise, the power they did not have in guns or numbers.
Little Shield, the leading warrior of the Elks, the lesser and so the guest society here, was given the place of bravery. He would head the outbreak on his end of the barracks, be the first through the window there and upon the walking sentries with loaded guns to be taken, every gun possible. Those on the opposite side would be led by Little Finger Nail. The work of all the others was well planned too, who would step into a man’s tracks as he fell, the younger women also in it this freezing night that was like day. Always the weather was against them now, with storms to hide the attacking soldiers, moonlight to reveal the fleeing Indians. Truly the Cheyennes had lost the sacred way somewhere, long ago.
With the moonlight and a cold to freeze the grouse, they must go very fast, and for that the ropes and the few elk-horn saddles and pads must be taken along. Two good horse catchers would run ahead to Bronson’s ranch on Dead Man Creek, the nearest herd. Some day their friend would be paid for what they must now take, and if not, no man would grudge the taking less.
Dog soldiers, experienced in this duty, would guard the rear, fight to hold the soldiers back while the other men ran with the children and helped the women get away. Some were to carry a few things of the old times, old medicine objects, although the best they had brought, the Chief’s Bundle, hung under the arm of Little Wolf. But they had the stone buffalo horn sacred to the Dog soldiers, the lance heads of their tribal bands, a few pieces of fine old quill work—something to hold to, to remind those who might be left after tonight of the greatness of the past time; to remind them that they must always be Cheyennes. It was in this planning that Great Eyes took out his fine old shield, with the triple tail of eagle feathers and the claws of the strong-hearted grizzly, and called his nephew, the thirteen-year-old Red Bird, to him.
“You have no weapon, not even a broken knife, my son,” he said. “You have grown too small in the hungry times to help other people much in the fast fighting of this night, so I give you this shield to care for. You know how old it is, how many arrows and bullets it has turned away. Take it, my son, and run hard. Pay no attention to anything, do not stop for a drink from this long thirsting or for mercy for anyone. Run very hard and keep hidden, and if you must die, die with your body protecting this. . . .”
The tall, thin boy stood shamed by this honor, feeling foolish and weak, unable to reply. Gently the man passed his long hand over the shield cover once more, as if to remember all its form and feel all the greatness of its power. Then he put the wide rawhide band of it over the boy’s shoulder, and turning quickly, he went to stand at the blanketed window, looking for a long time where one could not see.
As evening neared, the young men became restless, some walking up and down, their moccasins soft on the bare earth where the boards were gone. Some were like drunk with firewater, talking, talking, staggering a little; some cried out suddenly, “Open the door! Let me charge against the soldiers! I want to die right now . . . ,” until older men led them away. And if one young man here in the barracks now wished to give up, he did not put the words to his tongue. Not a young man or any one.
So it was like lying on the hill for the vision, the dreaming, the exaltation. None had eaten or drunk or warmed himself; none had been with a woman for a long time, or the women with a man. Now they were prepared for the ordeal in the old, old way, and it was as if all the foolish things had fallen from them and ahead was the greatest thing in their lives, the greatest test of all.
That morning Wessells had sent for Hog because he was the one the warriors had seemed to follow at Chadron Creek. Hog refused to go, thinking of the hanging post where a man swung from a rope. Besides, no one chief could speak for the Cheyennes, and whatever was said someone must be there to hear it, so the whites could make no lies of it later and his people never know.
“I cannot go alone,” he said. “I must talk where all can hear.”
When he was told he could bring a man along, Old Crow consented to walk beside him to the adjutant’s little building, but the warriors cried out “No! No!” and stood against them at the door. Only Hog’s growing power kept them from actually putting their hands upon him. Even his own son, Young Hog, shouted against him. “Those two blinded men will never be allowed to come back!”
“Wait!” the father said again, as he had two days ago when Young Hog drew his foolish knife against a sentry and had to be held back so he would not die right there, heavy on a bayonet.
But now Hog’s sick wife saw he was going and she began to moan, rocking herself back and forth, and so he had to stop and go to her with a few quieting words.
“They will kill you!” she cried.
“We have these other people here,” Hog said, in the long-known chieftain’s reply to such protestations. “They are given into my palm to care for now, to shield. . . .”
So with Old Crow beside him, he went slowly through the blinding glare of sun on snow to the little adjutant’s building that was full of whites, several officers sitting around the chunky red-faced Captain Wessells, and many of the soldiers packed in there too. When Hog said once more that they could not go south, the guards sprang upon the two Indians from behind, with irons ready for their hands. Old Crow was subdued first, and easily, but the still powerful Hog, grunting, with soldiers hanging to him all around, managed to bend and twist and get a hand to the knife in his belt as he lurched himself halfway out through the door, his old shirt torn away, his naked shoulders heaving to throw these puny whites from him. One of the men was cut a little in the struggle, as with a great roar to those over in the barracks Hog got his hand up. But as he drove the knife quickly downward against his own belly, the jerk of the panting soldiers deflected the blade, and the iron rings were snapped upon the Indian’s wrists.
It was done very quickly, and perhaps even Hog’s cry would have been lost in the blowing wind, but a Cheyenne woman was out talking to her brother from Red Cloud trying to get her released to him. She saw Hog burst out with soldiers on him like dogs hanging to a grizzly, and the irons on his hands. She threw her head back and gave her penetrating woman’s cry of danger, high and thin on the wind.
Immediately there was great excitement in the barracks. Some of the Indians made a rush for one of the doors and broke past the guards, but were driven back by a company of mounted troops charging in around them. Young Hog, with his sheet blanket over his head, shouted for everybody to get out of the way, for he was coming to get his father. But there were so many guns against him, their bayonets meeting together over his gaunt belly, that he was pushed back and finally the door was closed on them all.
A long time Hog looked where his son had had the sharp steel of the soldiers pushed against his flesh, so close to the place where their relative Crazy Horse had died of the lance-pointed gun. With the water of sorrow jumping down his dark, stony cheeks, Hog held out his manacled wrists. “Take them off,” he said. “I will go back and tell my people it is hopeless. They must give up and go back south.”
But the little veho Wessells gave no such order. Standing silent before the powerful Indian, he stared up into his face, the soldiers who came from the barracks stopped by the long looking. After a while the officers around Wessells began to move a little, uneasily, making noises with their boots on the frozen ground.
“I cannot let you go in there,” the captain finally said. “You would not be permitted to come out again.”
So the two Indians stood together beside the shoveled drifts, their old blankets whipping loose, now that their hands were ironed, waiting for the ambulance to take them to the soldier prison down at the encampment. Once there was a disturbance at the barracks door and Left Hand came hurrying out. “I cannot see my brothers taken away with the irons on them and stay behind,” he said, as he held out the hands that could fell a buffalo with a thrown rock.
At the barracks the roaring increased; the noise of boards ripped off somewhere and hammered across the doors; the sound of digging, breastworks thrown up, holes made to protect the women and children even now if the soldiers charged the building. Then there was drumming, dancing, and singing, singing that those who knew Cheyenne said were songs of war and strength and death.
“We have quite a powwow started now,” Wessells said casually, as another company of troops came up on the trot to take over the guard. He had the inside doors from the barracks to the cook and guard rooms boarded up too, and then he rode after Hog and the others to see that they were manacled foot and hand, safe, in the tent that was the encampment’s guard-house.
At the prison the three Cheyennes were turned over to Lieutenant Chase.
“I am grieved to see what has happened,” their young friend said, when water had been brought them and he saw the men drink cup after cup, jerking themselves back harshly now and then, as they would long-thirsted horses, and then drinking deeply again.
“Ahh-h, it is a bad thing that has been done,” Hog finally agreed. “They all want to die up there now. They will break out tonight and die fighting.”
This was repeated in the presence of Wessells at Chase’s request, with Rowland interpreting and many soldiers around to hear, so everyone could know and be prepared and there would be no excuse to butcher the people like fleeing buffalo. Then the three Cheyennes were fed and told they could go back up there and call their families out.
There was talk of Wessells taking the handcuffed men into the barracks but Hog was against that. “No! Then the warriors must make a fight and everybody will be killed,” he said sternly, as though in command here.
And truly it was dangerous to go in to the Indians now. That morning before Hog was taken, a Cheyenne living with Red Cloud came into the barracks room to talk to his relatives and he would have been killed if his friends had not hurried him out. And when the Sioux scout, Woman’s Dress, came in, even Tangle Hair shouted against him.
“You want to get us killed like you helped kill Crazy Horse! We have been told how you did it, coming to spy, sneaking around, then telling lies!”
The young men lifted more than their voices against Woman’s Dress, and he ran from the door with his arms about his head, the Cheyennes quirting him clear out to the guards, even though he had relatives among them here, and they knew that this would not be forgotten.
When Hog would not go shackled into the barracks, they talked through cracks where the chinking was gone from the logs. After a while the wives of the prisoners and some of their small children were allowed to come out, and two very old women, but only after much angry talk and noise. Young Hog stayed, and the elder of his sisters, the one called Hog’s Daughter. She would not leave her brother.
“Tell them all to come out,” Wessells urged. “They will not be harmed.”
Hog said this, but held his hands out before him, showing the iron that bound them together. He received no reply. Rowland talked to Great Eyes through the blanket-covered window and asked him to let his nephew, the young Red Bird, come out. The boy’s angry voice answered for himself. He would stay and die with the rest.
Once Wessells tried it himself. “Dull Knife! Dull Knife!” he called. “Why don’t you come out?”
Without waiting for the interpreter, the old chief answered that he could not, and knowing that this would not be understood by the whites, who would think it was the warriors who were against it, not the strong wall built by his own heart, he said it once more: “I will die before I go south. . . .”
But it was the captain’s request that Tangle Hair come out that brought the greatest excitement, a roaring and shouting against his going that was unusual, coming from the soft-spoken Cheyennes, who were suddenly as noisy as Tangle Hair’s own born brothers, the Sioux. It seemed very strange to the white men who knew that the Hair had said little in the troubles at Chadron Creek, and then was not heeded.
Finally Little Shield made himself heard outside. “It is plain this man cannot go out,” he called to Wessells. “He owns us now like a silver dollar in the veho palm, and he can do with us as he likes! Most of us are Dog soldiers and he is the leading chief of the society. With Wild Hog taken from us we now must follow this Sioux. We cannot let him go!”
When it was night the Indians in the dark barracks saw the post blacksmith come over the moonlit snow dragging heavy chains and make a hammering as he fastened them across the doors that led to the cook and guard rooms of the barracks. The outside doors he fastened more securely too, one with an iron bar screwed down. Now the Cheyennes were shut in tight, not in a stone house as in Florida but in wood that could be fired, burned to the ground. Some of the warriors said this among themselves, whispering it over a little glow of fire to warm their trigger fingers. The women had heard the hammering and huddled closer together in the darkness, their eyes where the doors were—watching for the coming of the guns. Perhaps no one would be allowed out any more for any purpose. Perhaps they were meant to die here, humiliatingly, in the smell of imprisoned people who had no privacy and no room for it. They were to die of thirst, trapped together like antelope in the pits, with no one coming to slit the throats, none to make it quick and easy.
But one woman back in the dark could think only of the chained doors. She began to rock herself, “We are to burn!” she moaned, softly at first, then lifting the words louder and louder as she repeated them. “They will put fire to us all here!” she finally cried, thin and high, like a hunting panther, over and over.
The others tried to stop her, to quiet her, doing it gently, remembering that she had seen her baby thrown into the flames at the Sappa. But suddenly the woman sprang up and felt for a sleeping child in a mother’s arms, those around trying to hold her back, take the knife from her hand in the darkness.
“No, no! Help me!” she pleaded. “Quick, your knives—let us help the little ones here to die easily, before the burning soldiers come!”
Now the old men hurried to the woman, Dull Knife speaking so harshly to her that she crumpled down, sobbing. Quickly Red Feather and Brave One forced her helpless against the wall and twisted her wrist back until her knife dropped in the darkness, while Bridge started his sleep chant and his slow rattle to quiet her. Gradually she settled down to the floor, her head in Medicine Woman’s lap, and seemed to sleep, but the fear she saw was still there in the night and the silence.
So Little Shield called the warriors together. “You see how the people sicken. They cannot wait longer, not even to midnight,” he whispered. “While some watch that the building is not fired, the rest will dress in our best clothing. We will die outside, fighting.”
Stooped over the little fires that had been saved to light this preparation, they painted their faces and put on the few good things left. Dull Knife drew the beaded lizard outside his shirt, and Little Finger Nail put on his shell-core collar and tied the watchful, clear-voiced bird in his hair, the bird that brought him the sweet singing. Most of them had new beaded moccasins that the women had made, or were presents from the Sioux. Then they tied their blankets at the neck and around the waist to leave the arms free, but they took no other notice of the cold that made the smoky logs creak and was a sparkling of frost along every chink and knot in the light of the little fires.
So the 130 Indians prepared for the going, only 44 men, including the eleven-year-olds, and with very little in their hands. They brought out the five guns hidden in the holes and the pistols too, nine of these, and one more that worked part of the time. Then they divided the cartridges as well as they could, and the lead and caps and powder. It was so pitifully little; one man had only two cartridges and one of those so poor in powder it was only for the noise. Dull Knife sat down by himself when he saw how it was, brooding alone. But Black Bear had his lucky Custer carbine that his wife had carried through the searches, and others the two good ones that had been found in the brush of the White River by the women where the warriors from Little Wolf had signaled them to look. Now even the knives were divided, those with broken blades whetted to points these last few weeks. Four men had war clubs to use in the Sioux way, clubs made from wood out of the barracks with spikes from the floor driven straight through until the points stuck out of each club head like spines from a great cactus.
As silence settled over the post and there was only the far howl of the coyote and the slow clump of the sentries on the stony winter earth, one man after another went quietly to the women’s end of the room, whispered a name here or there in the darkness, touching a braided head perhaps, or a child fretting for water. Then at the signal they took their places at the windows, with Little Shield and Little Finger Nail to lead, but good men at the other windows too and one ready to get into the guardroom for a gun or two, if possible. Behind them waited such men as Singing Wolf with his Sharps rifle, the powerful buffalo gun, to stand against the soldiers when the first warriors went down. Next there were a few men without guns but carrying children. These were the fast men. Whatever happened some of these little ones must get away, some must live as seed so the people here would not be lost forever. With these a few women were to run too, strong women like the wives of She Bear and White Antelope, to rear any children that might be saved in this pitiless light of the moon, teach them the Cheyenne way. Perhaps somewhere they could find the good path, walk with the Great Powers once more.
