Sitting Bull's War, page 43
Many of the Nez Perces remained in the Sioux camp in the coming years. One married a Sioux woman. Another, an odd, compelling figure in his own unique way, was an individual named Cut Off or No Feet or Steps. Steps was likely in his early thirties, probably a Yakama and aligned now by way of contact with the Bannock-Shoshones. It was not his bloodline that drew attention, however, but the fact that when in his teens both feet and his right hand were horribly frozen and he hobbled now on his knees. But when mounted, Steps was also an exceptional rider who possessed a unique ability to communicate with horses—in another day one might call him a horse whisperer. He easily caught Sitting Bull’s attention, and the chief, with his own innate ability to recognize and embrace forlorn ones, welcomed him into his personal household as his family’s herder, providing his newfound wrangler with his own lodge and a young Hunkpapa woman to care for it, and him. Steps remained with the Hunkpapas forevermore, is seen in numerous later photographs with the chief, and died on Oak Creek on the Standing Rock Reservation in 1903.34
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Bedraggled Nez Perces were not the only war-weary, deceit-frazzled Indians embracing the belief that Sitting Bull and Canada were a last hope for independence in the buffalo country. In the Pine Ridge in the days surrounding the killing of Crazy Horse, Lame Deer’s long-hunted coalition of mostly Miniconjous surrendered at Spotted Tail Agency, some seventy-five people appearing on September 4 and another 250 on September 11. Since their clash with Miles on Muddy Creek on May 7, those holdouts, led principally after Lame Deer’s death by Fast Bull, one of his sons, had eluded the US troops flooding the northern buffalo range throughout the summer. But the murder of Crazy Horse weighed heavily upon these new arrivals, and on the night of September 23 Fast Bull led forty lodges—some 192 people—northward again, this time boldly declaring the intent to take refuge with Sitting Bull.35
The Lame Deer coalition was not the only distraught body of Pine Ridge people embracing Canada as a possible haven. That fall the government formally denied the long hoped-for agency in the buffalo country even while successfully inducing the relocation of the two Nebraska agencies from the Pine Ridge to the Missouri River in Dakota and failing to grasp or accept the reluctance of those Oglalas and Brulés, people of the old Buffalo South, to move that far to the east. When meeting with the president in September the chiefs succeeded in gaining yet another concession, a move somewhere else on the White in the coming spring. But in the meantime, supplies had already been stockpiled on the Missouri and an interim move to the river was obliged. In due course, in October the western oyates were forcibly trailed eastward out of Nebraska, with the Brulés eventually reaching the old Ponca Agency on Ponca Creek just below Fort Randall (the Poncas themselves having been relocated to the Indian Territory earlier that year), and the Oglalas trailing the White but stopping well short of the Missouri. Along the way small bands broke free from both caravans and consolidated in what eventually resembled a Northerners camp of old at the forks of the Cheyenne River, joining there many of Crazy Horse’s followers who likewise had trailed off after the chief’s death. Their intent at the moment was not a flight to Canada but merely stepping beyond the immediate grasp of agency officials.36
In daily councils, the allied Pine Ridge refugees, Oglalas and Miniconjous mostly, concluded to flee to Canada, one among them telling government agents that “they belong to the North and not to either Spotted Tail or Red Cloud Agency.” Skunk Horse, an Oglala in Big Road’s band, interviewed several years later, put the matter in pragmatic terms. “Our band concluded that they did not wish to eat beef anymore, but would prefer to go north, live in a big country, hunt buffalo and be free to do as we pleased.” Big Road had been away when that consensus was reached. He had been one of the Washington delegates who actually spoke with and shook the Great Father’s hand. When he returned, he pleaded with his followers to turn back, but they were firm. Instead of resisting, Big Road joined the flight. Young Black Elk remembered that “we traveled fast and soldiers did not follow us.” The refugees trailed northward in two separate parties, skirting the Slim Buttes, safely crossing the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, and eventually following Frenchman’s Creek straight to the Medicine Line and to Sitting Bull’s people. Reports of raiding in the northern Black Hills country and Yellowstone Valley circulated among military authorities, but conscious haste and inclement weather made troop sorties inconsequential.37
In Canada, Big Road emerged as the most influential leader of the exiled southern people, amidst such other notables as He Dog, Red Bear, Low Dog, and Little Hawk. By the spring of 1878 some 200 lodges of Pine Ridge people had aligned with Sitting Bull, whose own immediate coalition then numbered some 109 lodges, bringing the tally of recent refugees to just short of two thousand people, about half the size of the great Sun Dance camp of early June 1876. Not far off were 150 lodges of Canadian Santee Sioux led by White Eagle, refugees of another day who were now well-settled in the Wood Mountain uplands. And buried within that camp were Inkpaduta and his small lot of followers, survivors in their own way of a second American Indian war.38
The exiled Lakotas found their first winter in Grandmother’s Land appealing. For the first time they were beyond the reach of the hated blue coats. Some still worried that US soldiers might cross the border and attack them, but the Red Coats calmed them. That could not happen, Walsh and others assured, and if it did the Red Coats would protect them. And while the weather was rugged in the prairie country along Frenchman’s River, the essentials—buffalo, wood, water, access to trade—were at hand. “Our relatives… took care of us,” Black Elk remembered. “They had made plenty of meat, for there were many buffalo in that country, and it was a good winter.”39
Appealing too were the long-standing relationships the Lakotas enjoyed with the Métis, people whose services as facilitators, interpreters, and important trading partners were invaluable during this unique sojourn in Canada. One trader in particular, Jean Louis Legaré, had operated a thriving trading post in the Wood Mountain country since 1871. The tall, bearded mixed-blood had a gentle, courteous mien and cultivated these Lakotas, who quickly saw that he was a man of fair play. Some knew him already from the days of the borderland surveys, and he and the chief particularly developed a sympathetic and productive rapport. From Legaré, especially now, came the munitions Walsh authorized and that were much needed to hunt the buffalo that sustained the people, with buffalo robes again the natural denominator of trade.40
But even in this apparent calm occasional ominous signs were noted. In late November the US commanding officer at Fort Shaw, located between Fort Benton and Helena, reported that “large parties of Sioux from across the line” were hunting buffalo in the Sweet Grass Hills southwest of the Cypress Hills, and the Piegan Indians in that locale were frightened away from their natural hunting grounds. Those intruders may or may not have been newly arrived US Sioux, but such reports soon became commonplace and affirmed several borderland realities: buffalo paid no heed to the stone heaps, and intertribal conflicts were rife and endlessly explosive.41
In this unique period when hundreds of US Sioux were flocking to Sitting Bull’s camp, it also became apparent, at least to some, that this otherwise seemingly becalmed spiritual one had not surrendered all hope for regaining his traditional Lakota homeland and a lifeway in the familiar Buffalo North. In fact, perhaps an opportunity was presenting itself to renew this war with the United States. The new arrivals had stories to tell of the fervor in the south. Some recounted the death of Lame Deer and the incessant hounding suffered by those survivors since then. Those from the Pine Ridge shared stories of promises made and betrayed, including the commitments to allow them to hunt buffalo and to have a northern agency. From Pine Ridge they also heard of the forced uprooting now of the Oglalas and Brulés from home country and their being forced toward the Missouri. Topping all, of course, was the most egregious twist yet, the outright killing of Crazy Horse, a revered, tradition-bound ally, the great chief’s alter-ego in this war. One in the camps, Eagle Elk, among the few Oglalas accompanying Sitting Bull when he first went north, remembered that “bad stories came to us that summer, and just before winter we heard that the wasicus had murdered Crazy Horse at the Soldier’s Town. We did not go home.”42
Quietly, Sitting Bull momentarily renewed his call for others to join him, dispatching couriers to the south with news and encouragement. There were plenty of buffalo and game in the British Possessions, the couriers told, and already seven different Indian nations had joined the chief’s camp. Small bands of Assiniboines and Yanktonais were also joining. While such words, in truth, were greatly overdrawn, Sitting Bull’s avowed intention, they insisted, was to lead this coalition south in the middle of winter and make war on the United States.43
Word of Sitting Bull’s invitation not only circulated among agency people but also among the borderlands people, Americans and Canadians, and while an edginess tempered relations that winter so did countering news that spread equally quick and wide. Inspector Walsh visited with Colonel John Gibbon at Fort Shaw in late January 1878. He had just come from Sitting Bull’s camp and gained from him assurances that neither he nor any of his people had any idea of coming south of the line. Inspector A. G. Irvine of the mounted police likewise quickly passed word through Canadian channels of having recently visited the chief’s camp, and learned that there was no foundation whatsoever for rumors that Assiniboines and Yanktonais were joining him or that he intended to move south. In truth, a reality had settled across the Indian camps north of the Medicine Line. The buffalo country of old was indeed lost. The Black Hills were lost. Wasicus controlled the rivers. New army forts dotted the buffalo range and more were foretold. In the United States, an existence on the Great Sioux Reservation was a central fact of life now for all Lakotas, save these in Canada.44
An interloper in this period of seeming calm provided an interesting perspective on the chief’s thinking. Father Jean Baptiste Marie Genin, a Catholic priest long active in mission work in northern Minnesota and Dakota who in an earlier day had frequented Hunkpapa camps on the Missouri, spent twenty-five days that fall proselytizing among the Plains Indians in Canada. Where Father Martin Marty’s intercessions six months earlier were expressly intent on convincing the Hunkpapas to submit at their agency, Genin’s simple ambitions were baptizing and preaching the bible. (Whites also suspected him of trafficking in munitions, charges which were disproved.) He was fluent in the Dakota language, and at an appropriate moment he expressly sought out the chief. Sitting Bull, perhaps remembering those contacts from long ago, was receptive. The two smoked together and talked at length, in part even about the Custer battle and considerably on the glowing prospects of the Grandmother’s Land. Sitting Bull admitted to being particularly harsh with Father Marty on the occasion of that visit, thinking that he was a disguised Yankee there only to deceive him. As their conversation drew to a close, Sitting Bull spoke openly of his hopes for the future.45
My brother, Black Gown, when you go back to my lands in Dakota, the White people will ask you what Sitting Bull says, and what he means to do. Please tell them that I want none of their gold or silver, none of their goods, but that I desire to come back and live upon my lands; for there is plenty of game and grass, and we can live well if they will only let us alone. As to my going to war again they need not be troubled, for I never fight except when I cannot avoid it.46
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Winter count keepers documented several key episodes that recall a traumatic year, 1877. Many in the Pine Ridge country, Oglalas and Brulés mostly but also the Miniconjous residing there, commonly remembered this as the year when Crazy Horse was killed. Their glyphs were sometimes striking. Oglala chief American Horse’s winter count, for instance, showed an army rifle fixed with a long bayonet on its end and penetrating the great war chief. Cloud Shield, another Oglala, uniquely remembered this as the year when Crazy Horse’s band fled the agency and went north.47 But Northern Lakotas more commonly remembered this as the year when Sitting Bull made an agreement with the Red Coats at Fort Walsh, ensuring their ability to stay safely north of the Medicine Line. At year’s end, the flight to Canada was proving itself a glowing triumph after years of struggle. It all seemed so wholly righteous.48
16 The Starving Years
“I cannot help but like it, if they are going to treat us this way.”
—Old Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota
War never returned to the Lakotas, scattered that winter of 1877–78 from Pinto Horse Butte to the Wood Mountain uplands, and when the cold season gave way to spring a sense of the old ways seemed largely intact. Life as always centered on buffalo, and the herds seemed yet substantial. The people were soon in motion, family groups and bands scattering across the prairielands north of the Medicine Line, some even venturing to the grasslands north and west of the Cypress Hills, and others hovering dangerously close to the border, and even momentarily crossing beyond the stone heaps.
Hunting put the Lakotas in steady contact with Canadian natives, and that itself brought a certain unease to life and its routines. But such was daily existence throughout the lands of the buffalo. The herds of the Big Open and Powder River country in United States were similarly preyed upon by various groups of people, some friendly, some not friendly at all. Canadian authorities fretted provincially, of course, since these Lakota interlopers were hunting Canadian animals, the primary food source for their own native peoples. While more northerly herds existed in Canada, the animals under the greatest pressures now were those that paid no heed to the stone heaps and roamed freely from the Canadian prairies to the Milk River, a cross-border meander mirrored by the native peoples of the north and south who hunted them. The real issue increasingly focused on how long those buffaloes could last.1
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The Lakota people north and south of the Medicine Line were plainly aware of the many forces intent on killing buffalo. All knew of the mindless slaughter of buffaloes occurring throughout the United States’ Buffalo South, and some had even witnessed it, triggered as it was by the influx of railroads and White hunters seemingly intent solely on taking tongues and hides. Some among them acknowledged similar forces poised to strike the animals of the Buffalo North. They may not have acknowledged or understood that their own hunting demands contributed to this fateful demise. Since the coming of the fur traders, their own seasonal take had well exceeded that needed for daily consumption, and this in a world where buffalo robes—tanned skins—were money, a point evident even now in the free trade occurring at Legaré’s post. The Hunkpapas, moreover, commonly stepped through the crushed-bone detritus scoring countless Métis hunting camps dotting the entire Upper Missouri country. Those people were “market hunters,” taking skins and crushing bones to render fats. When seen on an even larger scale, with a world-wide demand for buffalo hides—untanned skins—that were now being commercially tanned and fashioned into clothing, lap robes, and industrial leathers, one was witnessing the unconscionable destruction of a core North American animal species.
But that mass slaughter, while looming, had not yet reached the far northern plains, where steamboats plied navigable waters but as yet no railroad crossed the land, and agents still reported, as did Fort Buford’s commanding officer in January 1878, that “the whole country” north and west of Wolf Point “is full of buffalo.” But how full? The well-traveled Inspector Walsh, for one, understood this native dependency on those animals, but also plainly witnessed the intense robe trade at hand, evident in the trading houses at Fort Benton, and north of the border in the realm of Forts Macleod and Walsh and in the Wood Mountain. At one point he even dared to admonish Sitting Bull not to kill buffaloes less than one year of age. The chief scoffed. “Who gave you this land and all the buffalo in it? You have not as much right here as we have, and the Americans put all these mischief making laws in your head. I will cross the line and kill what I like.” Walsh, it seems, was an ironic voice for buffalo reproductive and self-sustaining health, at a time when most of the world did not care.2
Simple routines, a traditional Sun Dance and cycles of hunting, marked the Lakota’s first year in British America. And so did a general calm. In midsummer 1878 MacLeod at Fort Walsh was visited by Whirlwind Bear, one of the Oglala chiefs with Sitting Bull at the time of the Commission, who came solely, the inspector believed, to express his satisfaction with the protection afforded his people since crossing the border. Macleod was gratified. The Red Coats had indeed been paying close heed to the Lakotas, Macleod having gone so far as to place a trusted informant in their camps, charging him with reporting from time to time their locations and temperament. A short while later Macleod wrote again, providing his government with a clear sense of the general sprawl of US Sioux on British soil. Sitting Bull with eighty lodges was noted at Pinto Horse Butte. Black Moon with 200 lodges was on Frenchman’s River just downstream. Two hundred and fifty lodges of Miniconjous were moving toward Old Wives’ Lake, north of Wood Mountain, while Spotted Eagle, the dynamic Sans Arc chief with fifty lodges, was then headed from Old Wives’ Lake toward Pinto Horse Butte, intent on linking with Sitting Bull. Separately, A. G. Irvine at Fort Macleod reported a camp of two hundred lodges of Crazy Horse’s people north of that post west of the Cypress Hills. Both agents also acknowledged other Indians in those same margins, Plains Cree, Santee Sioux, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Yanktonai, Nez Perce, and Métis, all somehow peaceably crowding an utterly unique prairieland in a truly distinctive summer. But sadly, it was nearly all an illusion.3
