Sitting Bull's War, page 17
The four smoked the pipe in communion, and when they finished Sitting Bull wiped his face with the sage and they set off for camp. Yet again the great chief invoked themes close to his heart: peace and plenty for his people, sacrifice for Wakan Tanka. That evening in a grand council, it was announced that the Hunkpapas would hold a Sun Dance.31
In early June the great village moved south, the Cheyennes again leading and the Hunkpapas trailing. They filled a campsite below the Deer Medicine Rocks, some forty-five miles above the Yellowstone. The six camp circles sprawled on both sides of the creek for nearly a mile. Early in the move, the chief and his nephew White Bull rode off and hunted for buffalo. The pair soon killed three. Sitting Bull selected the fattest cow and asked White Bull to help him turn her onto her stomach with her bushy chin on the ground and her legs propping just so. He then filled his pipe, observed the sacred ritual of lifting it to the sky, the four quarters of the world, and then to the earth, and prayed to Wakan Tanka. “Here is the whole buffalo I promised. In three days I will perform the Sun Dance and you will have the red blanket.” By red blanket, he meant his own blood.32
As promised, a unique Sun Dance was organized. It was distinctly a Hunkpapa Sun Dance, one remembered ever after as Sitting Bull’s Sun Dance. Hunkpapas largely undertook the ritualistic preparation of the site, first selecting a dance arena on the valley floor just downstream of their own camp. Then the Hunkpapas cut, delivered, and raised a cottonwood tree in the center of the grounds, a tree some thirty-five feet tall by one observation. To that sacred tree, with branches and heart-shaped leaves still fluttering in the crown, preparers and attendants affixed rawhide cut-outs of a man and a buffalo. Surrounding the pole at its base were buffalo skulls, and around those centerpieces the Hunkpapas erected a circular arbor large enough for participants and their attendants, drummers, and onlookers. The entryway faced east. Although this was a Hunkpapa Sun Dance, participants were invited from the entire camp, and throngs of observers came, pressing the arbor all around.33
On June 6 Sitting Bull purified himself in a sweat lodge ceremony and entered the arena. He was plainly dressed. He performed the ritualistic pipe ceremony and then sat down, his back against the pole, his legs outstretched and his arms resting against his thighs. As friends and family members sat nearby, Jumping Bull stepped forward and commenced a piercing operation, beginning at the wrist of the chief’s left arm. Jumping Bull pricked skin with a trade awl, raised the flesh, and sliced off a bit the size of a match head. Working upward, he repeated the cuttings forty-nine more times. Jumping Bull then grasped Sitting Bull’s right arm and repeated the ritualistic cuttings fifty more times. Bleeding profusely and with tears streaming down his face, Sitting Bull cried out, not in pain but in sacrifice and supplication to Wakan Tanka. After about thirty minutes, Sitting Bull’s offering of a “red blanket” was complete.34
The revered traditional raised himself, his hands dripping with blood, turned to his right, and commenced a slow, methodical dance around the pole. It rained hard later that day, but still the great chief danced through the day and into the night. As the sun rose the next morning, Sitting Bull maintained his pace, slower now, trance-like. He had not eaten or taken water for more than a day. In his stupor came a great dream. Soldiers coming, upside down, falling from the sky like so many grasshoppers. And a voice spoke to him: “I give you these, because they have no ears.” The soldiers would suffer a great loss. “They are to die.” But the voice also delivered a stark warning. His people must not touch the spoils of their victory. If they violated that command they would forever be at the mercy of the White man.35
At about midday the chief faltered as if about to faint. Several rushed forward and eased him to the ground. Someone sprinkled him with water. When he awakened he spoke in a low voice to Black Moon, his cousin and fellow Hunkpapa band leader, telling of his vision and asking that he share it with the pressing onlookers. Black Moon stepped forward and in a loud voice repeated Sitting Bull’s words of soldiers coming down like grasshoppers, their heads down and hats falling off. They would die as they “have no ears.” Each of Sitting Bull’s words and phrases were heavy with thought, but the people knew exactly what he meant. The wasicus would not listen; they never listened, as demonstrated again and again in decades of one-sided treaty councils and commissions. Wrote a later chronicler, a “murmur of wonder built to exultant cries.” A great victory was coming. Sitting Bull had seen the finale. Wakan Tanka would care for its own.36
On the morning of June 8 the great village packed and moved upstream a few miles to the mouth of Muddy Creek (today’s Lame Deer Creek), a small affluent draining the pine-covered highlands south of Rosebud Creek. The Hunkpapa Sun Dance arbor and centerpiece cottonwood pole remained, with a “Whiteman’s scalp not quite dry” fluttering from the pole. A later observer was sure that it belonged to one of the soldiers in the Yellowstone River army camp killed several weeks earlier. Scattered elsewhere was a litter of signs. In the bare earth, a drawing of hoof prints and figures of soldiers and Indians, and between them dead men facing the Indians. Stones painted red. A buffalo calfskin stretched over four sticks and tied with cloth and tobacco offerings. These were intentional signs that the Sioux medicine was strong, or so many thought later, including the Arikara scouts accompanying a soldier column following the same course.37
* * *
Hunting again largely occupied the men of the six circles. Buffalo remained abundant in the countryside west of the Rosebud, and the large camp needed to eat. Wooden Leg remembered hunting, but he also remembered that he and ten others struck off on a unique quest of their own, seemingly as much interested in finding soldiers as buffalo. Since some of them had been in Old Bear’s camp, the warning from the Cheyennes arriving with Big Road that soldiers in the south were coming to fight them resonated powerfully. The eleven, with pack horses in tow, departed the Greenleaf Creek camp just ahead of the Sun Dance. They trailed east, up Greenleaf, over the low divide to the Tongue, and up the Tongue to Hanging Woman Creek, opposite today’s Birney, Montana. Hunting was meager, merely four buffaloes at the start, so the party determined to cross to the Powder and follow it upstream. They passed the charred ruin of Old Bear’s camp along the way and for a while followed the same course in reverse that Big Road’s people took in coming from Red Cloud Agency. This was familiar ground to Wooden Leg. After their attack on Old Bear’s camp, the soldiers had driven the Cheyenne pony herd up this same stretch of the Powder to Lodge Pole Creek, where on March 18 trailing Cheyenne wolves, Wooden Leg among them, stole most of them back.38
Wooden Leg and the Cheyennes now reached the mouth of Lodge Pole Creek and turned west, again apparently much more intent on discovering soldiers. One of them, Lame Sioux, ranging the hills far northwest of the others, indeed found the enemy. He beckoned for the others to hurry along. In the headlands of Prairie Dog Creek in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains was a soldier camp. It was nearing dark, and the hunters turned wolves hid until well into the night. Then they dressed, painted themselves, and ventured onward. In the distance they saw soldier campfires burning brightly, but it was a big sprawl and they dared not get too close.39
Late in the night the party edged closer. Fires still smoldered but when the wolves could see the entire scene, the soldiers were gone. The soldier trail led down Prairie Dog Creek. The abandoned camp was rich with booty, including a beef carcass with many fragments of meat remaining on the bones, and close by a box of army hard crackers. It had been raining, but Wooden Leg said that this made the crackers all the better. He and his party ate what they wanted and cooked beef shreds on the fire coals. “We enjoyed a fine breakfast,” he boasted, and they then set off on the soldier trail.40
The shod horse prints and wagon ruts led to another camp, this located where Prairie Dog Creek empties into the Tongue. The wolves did not venture close but skirted widely to the west. The Tongue was a raging river but they rode their ponies and led their pack animals through the swift current and hid overnight among the cottonwoods on the stream’s north bank. In the breaking morning light they climbed the high sharp cliffs on the Tongue’s left and approached the massive encampment. The activities below were puzzling. People were riding this way and that, and soldier horses seemed within grasp. Wooden Leg and his friends momentarily contemplated crossing the river again and stealing some of those horses but in the end agreed that such a move was too risky. Anyway, conveying this news of soldiers advancing northward had to be carried to the great camp on Rosebud Creek.41
The hunter-wolves momentarily divided. Wooden Leg and five others commenced a hurried overland ride to Sitting Bull’s camp while the remaining five agreed to shadow the soldiers, but in short order they, too, rejoined the party. Their trail took them northward from the Tongue onto the headlands of Rosebud Creek. There, late in the day, they killed a buffalo and after sharing the raw liver, built a small fire and roasted pieces of meat. They then moved on until late in the night when they stopped to eat again and rest their ponies. No soldiers or soldier scouts trailed them. In the breaking day of June 8, they continued down Rosebud Creek until reaching the great camp of their people nestled at the mouth of Muddy Creek.42
“We wolf-howled,” Wooden Leg recalled, and Cheyennes from the upstream camp flocked to them “to learn why we had given the alarm.” The wolves advanced into the Cheyenne circle and told their story to the elders. Some Sioux were at hand, and they in turn hurriedly rushed the news to their own circles. Soon the entire massive village was in a frenzy, with heralds riding about shouting: “Soldiers have been seen. They are coming in our direction.”43
Councils were called. Young men wished to go out and meet the threat, but the chiefs would not allow it. The notion of soldiers in the south was an ominous one, but so too was the lingering presence of soldiers on the Yellowstone. At the moment neither force appeared imminently threatening. Still, these new soldiers needed watching, and the Cheyennes appointed twenty-eight-year-old Little Hawk and his friend Crooked Nose to lead a party in that direction. Several Sioux warriors joined the band, which may ultimately have numbered around ten.44
Wooden Leg’s return was not the only excitement this day. From the east came another band of allies, some 130 Two Kettles in perhaps 20 lodges from Cheyenne River Agency, all under Runs the Enemy. The newly arrived Two Kettles folded in with the Miniconjous. As the Miniconjou circle was near the Cheyennes, Runs the Enemy recalled being drawn to the commotion there as the Cheyennes selected warriors to shadow this new enemy in the south.45
* * *
Little Hawk’s party traveled south through the night and most of the next day, following the same course along the Rosebud just taken by Wooden Leg’s hunter-wolves. On approaching the mouth of Prairie Dog Creek across the Tongue, they found that the soldier camp had not moved. As dusk settled across the scene the warriors advanced to the brink of the towering bluffs lining the river’s north side and commenced shooting into the camp, particularly aiming at the wagons and profusion of canvas tents below. The wolves’ gunfire was startling but managed only to riddle canvas and splinter ridge poles and wagon boxes. We “thought [the] soldiers were sleeping,” Little Hawk recalled, but they “must have been sitting up with guns in their hands for a rain of bullets met [us].” 46
The momentary clash was spontaneous and inconsequential. When it subsided, the tally was but two soldiers and some horses wounded. Yet it served as an eye-opening notice to the veʹhoʹes—the Cheyenne name for White people—that the lands beyond the Tongue belonged to the Northern People. The soldiers rallied and drove the attackers off, but not beyond their ability to continually watch the camp. Doubtless they were startled when, the next morning, the soldier camp broke and commenced moving to the south, as if intent on distancing itself from the great enclave on Rosebud Creek. That Indian target was imagined but not yet precisely understood by those soldiers, or those invaders on the Yellowstone.
Word of the soldier withdrawal reached Sitting Bull’s camp quickly as it continued up the Rosebud from Muddy Creek to just short of the mouth of Davis Creek, an otherwise inconsequential drainage coming from the west. But that same mostly dry wash was the timeless pathway west to the Little Big Horn Valley. Reports of good hunting had come from the west.47
In evening councils, the elders renewed their debate over fighting the soldiers, whether those in the south or the north. Foolish Elk, a twenty-two-year-old Oglala among Crazy Horse’s people, wondered whether the soldiers had come to fight or perhaps make a treaty, a notion not particularly farfetched for one who had already seen much from the wasicus in his years. As before, a consensus was embraced to defer any aggressive movement against these known enemies, particularly an action that might jeopardize the cohesiveness of the allied camps or endanger its numerous dependents and worldly possessions. But perhaps the soldiers were scared. As Wooden Leg expressed it: “We supposed that the combined camps would frighten off the soldiers.” Besides, word had come of still other soldiers sighted in the east.48
* * *
Whether precisely sensed or not by those in the great enclave, soldiers were invading buffalo country from all directions. The people in Sitting Bull’s camp, meanwhile, had drawn tightly together and, in fact, were growing stronger, as dribbles of warriors from the agencies continued to find their way to the Northerners. But the villagers also seemed to have missed much. Already weeks ago a column of soldiers diverting from the Yellowstone had ventured up the Big Horn River and down the Little Big Horn and Tullock Creek. Those soldiers acknowledged seeing abandoned Indian campsites but no Sioux or Cheyenne Indians. From that same Yellowstone River camp Crow army scouts had ventured across the river and ascended high ground between the Rosebud and Tongue and reported observing telltale evidence—agitated buffaloes, campfire smoke—of Sitting Bull’s people in motion. But nothing came of it. The villagers seemed wholly oblivious to those incursions. Even now as the six circles continued southward from Muddy Creek up the Rosebud other soldiers were on a new trail, exploring the Lower Powder and Tongue River valleys and in due course would discover the wide imprint of the great Indian trail itself. In later life, Wooden Leg mused at that notion, quipping, “Our trail… that summer could have been followed by a blind man.” And farther north and east a steamboat was plying the Lower Yellowstone, having advanced beyond Wolf Rapids to the mouth of the Powder. Soldiers in the west and south and now east were pressing the core of Sioux Country. Fully comprehended or not, a lifeway hung in the balance.49
7 STOPPING THE GRAY FOX
“Remember the helpless ones at home! This is a good day to die!”
—Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota
It was now the middle of June. Sitting Bull’s camp of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne traditionals had grown to more than 600 lodges and 3,800 people, men, women, and children committed to sustaining a way of life in the buffalo country. The odds against them were growing. Most had ignored the Great Father’s unfathomable summons to the reservation in Dakota, invariably proclaiming that they were non-treaty people intending to live a free life wherever they wished, as generations before them had. But the brutal strike on Old Bear’s Cheyennes on the Powder River three months earlier, and the repeated ominous warnings from agency kin that more and more soldiers were headed for the Yellowstone country, foreshadowed a different tale. All the while, Sitting Bull repeatedly proclaimed that he wanted no war, but would fight to protect families, homes, and this lifeway. His own visions lately suggested a great battle ahead, but also an astonishing Indian victory, and he was ever more intent on staying this course.
Little Hawk’s news of the soldiers in the south turning and apparently marching away from the Tongue was a momentary relief in the great camp as it continued its deliberate ascent of the Rosebud Valley. By June 12 the Cheyenne circle, leading a well strung-out procession, reached the mouth of Davis Creek, some eighteen miles above their previous camp at Muddy Creek. Young Two Moon remembered those movements and how the Cheyennes and Oglalas, leading the spectacle, often had their lodges set up at the day’s destination well before the final bands arrived. Scouts continually protected the margins of the body, a duty that rotated daily among all the bands.1
This was familiar ground, especially to the Cheyennes, who considered the Wolf Mountains of the upper Tongue and upper Rosebud as their own unique domain. It was a land rich with roots, berries, and game that they knew well. It was also a land reluctantly ceded by the Crows as the more populous Cheyennes and Sioux pushed them farther west in recent decades, though the Crows, merely now living beyond the Big Horn River, were near enough, and ceaselessly annoying.2
Joining the expansive camp about now was Medicine Cloud, an Assiniboine from Fort Peck, and seven other Assiniboines and Hunkpapas. Dispatching them on May 21, their agent had sent them on a quizzical, if not well-intended, mission to lure Sitting Bull away from this explosive predicament. The messengers reached the village in the middle of June and offered Sitting Bull the agent’s assurances that he and the Hunkpapas would be treated well at Fort Peck. The appeal was predictably rebuffed, and Sitting Bull’s akicitas restrained the couriers in camp. The Assiniboines may have had no desire to become entangled in a war, but in coming days, they would witness much.3
Sitting Bull’s akicitas restrained other reluctant visitors, too. In late May a small band of Brulés from Spotted Tail Agency made their way to the ascendant village solely for the purpose of bringing home relatives and children belonging to the wife of a band leader, Bear Stands Up. Like Medicine Cloud’s small party, Bear Stands Up was keenly aware that Sitting Bull’s soldiers watched the camps closely and kept the people together, but he had no intention of joining the war and unhesitatingly told Sitting Bull so. Sitting Bull, puzzlingly asked how the Brulés were being treated at their agency and inquired about two notorious traders there, Bissonette and Boucher, meaning the old-time trader Joseph Bissonette, and the lately better known Francis Boucher. “If the troops come out to him he must fight them,” the chief admitted, “but if they do not come out, he intends to visit this agency [meaning, evidently, the Spotted Tail Agency], and he will counsel his people for peace.” In this instance Sitting Bull did allow Bear Stand Up and his small band to depart, but they did so by dark of night and shrewdly took a roundabout way home, traveling well east of the Black Hills to avoid making contact with anyone, Indian or White.4
