5

A Sandwich Islander appears to exercise great control in the Indian councils.

NO MAN WHO SCOUTED for the U.S. Army during the Great Sioux War excited more argument than Frank Grouard, beginning with the question of what he was. At first it was Grouard’s race that was hard to pin down; later it was his allegiance that led to argument. When first seen at the Red Cloud Agency in northwest Nebraska in the late spring or early summer of 1875, Grouard was in his mid-twenties—a good-sized man, perhaps five feet eight or nine inches tall, and weighing two hundred pounds, in the opinion of Billy Garnett. His hair was braided; he wore the long shirt, leggings, and breechcloth of a Sioux, and he was as dark-skinned as any Indian. Grouard always said he was a Sandwich Islander, but many doubted his claim that he was a Kanaka—one of the native people of Hawaii. On the White River in Nebraska, 120 miles from the nearest railroad, Grouard’s claim was improbable on its face, and besides, he looked like a mixed-blood. Some said he had a white father and an Oglala or Hunkpapa mother. Others pointed to his broad face, the wisp of mustache, the flat nose and full lips, and said his father was black. At the Red Cloud Agency were people who said they had known Grouard—or at least heard of him—up along the Missouri River. They said a black man named Brazeau or Prazo or Pravost who lived with the Standing Rock Sioux might have been his father. To Luther North, a noted captain of Pawnee scouts, “Frank looked very much like a Negro.” But North made no effort to get to know him. “I never cared much for the colored Brethren,” he said.1

The Red Cloud Agency was well established by the time Grouard arrived. A stockade of pine logs set on end enclosed office buildings, storerooms, stables, living quarters for a small staff of eight or ten, and a trader’s store run by the brothers H. C. and J. W. Dear, who had the exclusive right to sell to the Oglala. One of the Dear brothers said he had known Grouard when he was carrying mail for the Army up along the Yellowstone. The agency buildings were on a slight rise with long views over the surrounding prairie. To the north was a row of white clay buttes like a wall, and beyond that a wilderness of grass stretching to Canada. In the distance to the east was Crow Butte, where the Sioux had once trapped a party of Crow horse thieves but lost them when the Crow snuck off during the night. The Sioux were mad about it still.2 What the U.S. government liked about the agency was its distance from the railroad. It was here at the Red Cloud Agency in the spring or summer of 1875 that Frank Grouard, without occasion of any kind, arrived with his friend, the young Oglala warrior Little Wolf.

Coming and going was little remarked at the agencies at the time. The Indians picked up at pleasure to go hunting, or to visit relatives among the three or four thousand Brulé at the Spotted Tail Agency, forty miles to the north and east. Living with both bands of Sioux was a large floating population of whites married to Indians. Officials spoke of them dismissively as “squawmen,” and blamed them for stirring up trouble by advising the chiefs on what treaties actually said, or didn’t say. Agents frequently appealed to Washington for permission to expel these whites from the reservations, but the Treaty of 1868 formally recognized them as members of their wives’ tribes and permitted them to live on the reservation and to collect rations alongside the full-bloods. There were scores of such men. Many had been trapping, hunting, and trading in the region for decades. They had grown sons and daughters, and among them was no shortage of young men fluent in both English and Lakota, who looked and dressed like freighters or cattle drovers one day and Indians the next.

But Frank Grouard did not quite match the type. He spoke Lakota, but it had been learned at the age of twenty. Most mixed-bloods grew up around military posts like Billy Garnett, but Grouard had lived on the plains with the Indians for six full years—since his late teens, so he said. He spoke with authority and personal knowledge about the leading men among the northern Indians, including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. He said he had been back and forth over the whole broad expanse of mountain and prairie between the Missouri River and the Big Horn Mountains, and especially throughout the Powder and Tongue river country south of the Yellowstone, where the Indians made it dangerous for any white man to go. To whites and half-bloods working around the agencies, and later to military officers at Camp Robinson and Fort Laramie, Grouard gave a melodramatic, dime-novel account of his time with the Indians. He said he had been a captive of Sitting Bull’s people, tortured and abused, kept among them against his will for years. But gradually, as Grouard told it, he had gained the Indians’ trust, been allowed to go out with the young men on hunting and warring expeditions, and finally had seized an unguarded moment to flee his Indian captors and make his way to civilization. To Indians, this story would have appeared improbable. Indians didn’t run prisons; they killed their enemies or let them go. If a white man lived among them for years on end, it was because he had been adopted. But military officers and newspaper correspondents largely accepted Grouard’s story at face value.

Parts of the real story emerged over the course of years. Frank Grouard was not a Sandwich Islander, exactly, but he had in fact been born in 1850 in the South Seas, son of a Mormon missionary and a Polynesian woman named Nahina from a small island near Tahiti. When Nahina died, Frank’s father gave the boy for raising to another missionary family, Addison and Louisa Pratt. About 1852, the Pratts returned from Hawaii to Utah, where Frank was raised and schooled until he grew restless at fifteen or sixteen and ran away. In her diary, Louisa Pratt described Frank as naturally lazy in the island way. It may have been nothing more than weariness with classroom discipline that prompted his escape, but throughout Grouard’s life rumors followed him suggesting something more was involved—trouble with the law, possibly a killing, something about a dead schoolmate. In his “autobiography,” a volume of stories ranging from the likely to the preposterous put into print by a hard-drinking Wyoming journalist in the 1890s, Grouard himself said simply that in 1865, he “left school and hired out to a freighter named McCartney in the Big Square at old San Bernardino.”3 His job was “to drive team” to Helena, Montana, site of a gold rush. For the first few days, McCartney’s wagon master drove beside the boy, teaching him the art of mule skinning. When the boy got to Montana he stayed there.

For the next several years Grouard lived the knockabout life common on the frontier for young men on their own, working for wages when work offered, joining the militia during an Indian scare, picking up the odd bit of property left lying around, taking a job riding a mail route for the Army, stealing horses from Indians, going back to the mail route. Grouard left the disreputable parts out of his autobiography, but some who knew him at the time made sure the record was complete.4 In the winter of 1867–68, he appears to have lived with the Prairie Gros Ventres Indians on the upper Missouri, then made off with some of their horses in the spring. Later, he stayed briefly with the Assiniboines and then the Yanktonai Sioux, before resuming his career as a mail carrier.

Just after the turn of the year, on the 2nd of January in 1869 or 1870—it is not clear which—occurred the event which separated Grouard from the common run of wandering, half-literate, out-of-pocket men on the frontier. Hunkered down in a blinding snowstorm, he was heading for Fort Peck, riding one horse and leading another. Against the weather he wore a greatcoat as well as mittens, leggings, and moccasins, all of buffalo hide with the hair on. Suddenly Grouard felt a blow across his back. Till that instant he had believed himself alone. To his biographer, he described a dramatic struggle in the snow immediately following—Grouard dodging and ducking between two scrapping Indians, one trying to shoot him, the other to claim and save him. Losing patience, Grouard’s protector finally laid out the shooter with a blow over the head with a heavy bow. Years later, John Colhoff heard a more prosaic version: some northern Sioux out hunting buffalo in the Yellowstone country were told a strange man had been found nearby. They rode over to investigate and found him with his hands raised high. In his buffalo-skin greatcoat he looked like a bear getting ready to fight. They took him to camp to consult with the chief, who was the Hunkpapa holy man Sitting Bull.

Grouard says a debate followed in which two other chiefs—Gall and No Neck—argued for killing the stranger, but Sitting Bull refused, insisting he wanted to adopt the dark-skinned man in the buffalo coat as he had another man captured on the plains, a young Assiniboine later given the name of Sitting Bull’s father, Jumping Bull. Grouard once explained that Sitting Bull did not at first understand that he was an English-speaking refugee from the white world; the chief thought he belonged to some Indian tribe far to the west, across the mountains.5 Sitting Bull prevailed and named his new captive Mato Najin—Standing Bear. The other Sioux knew him more familiarly as Yugata, a word meaning “arms out,” as in the act of seizing—thus Grabber.6

For two or three years, Grouard remained with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas, living in the lodge of Sitting Bull’s sister, variously known as White Cow or Good Feather, while he learned to speak Lakota and was increasingly accepted as a member of the tribe. These were years of growing tension with the whites, but in his autobiography Grouard skated over that ground. His own account suggests he was a virtual prisoner, closely watched by members of Sitting Bull’s band. Indian accounts said he was free to come and go, but chose to live and travel with the Hunkpapas. Either version of events suggests that he must have been present in the summer of 1872 when Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had a sharp encounter with white soldiers.

The Treaty of 1868 barred whites from settling in or even crossing the “unceded” territory along the Yellowstone, but the Army and government officials brushed aside that clause without bothering to argue the matter. In the winter of 1871–72, the management of a new transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific, arranged for detachments of cavalry to accompany surveying crews the following summer as they made their way along the Yellowstone, mapping out a right of way. One of the first to tell whites that a new railroad meant war was the Sans Arc chief Spotted Eagle, who brought his band into Fort Sully that spring to sell buffalo robes. Spotted Eagle was a man of consequence; a year earlier he had been among the leaders of a Sioux war party that discovered and killed all but one of a band of thirty Crow in the Black Hills, a feat recorded in many winter counts. At Fort Sully he spoke frankly to General David S. Stanley, who paraphrased the chief’s words for the commissioner of Indian affairs:

He stated that neither himself, or any Sioux openly authorized to speak for his people had ever given their consent to this and that they never would give this consent, or listen to any proposition to that effect. He then said that he would fight the railroad people as long as he lived, would tear up the road, and kill its builders.7

Fort Sully was the military post attached to the Cheyenne River Agency, named for the confluence of that river with the Missouri. The agency was the official home of the Sans Arcs and the Miniconjou Sioux. The mother of Crazy Horse, Rattle Blanket Woman, had been a Miniconjou, and Crazy Horse had many friends in the band. If Crazy Horse set foot on only one agency, as He Dog said, and if He Dog was right when he said that it happened “the time that they were laying out the railroad across the country,” then it seems likely that it occurred when Spotted Eagle brought his 150 lodges to Fort Sully in April 1872 to sell buffalo robes. “He got into trouble about it,” He Dog added, probably referring to a fight in August near the winding waterway the Sioux called Arrow Creek.8

A large war expedition of Sioux and Cheyenne was camped near the spot where Arrow Creek, coming up from the south, emptied into the Yellowstone River. It was Crow the Sioux and Cheyenne had organized to fight, not whites, but they promptly changed plans when they discovered a large party of five hundred soldiers and civilians camped in a wood on the north bank of the Yellowstone. When news of the soldier camp was brought in by scouts, Sitting Bull wanted to ignore them. It was said he had agreed with Crazy Horse on a cautious policy for dealing with whites—leave them alone unless they started shooting first.9 But the young men were strongly tempted by the cattle, horses, and mules with the soldiers, and despite strict orders from the akicita—the camp police—to stay away from the whites, some of these young men in the hours before dawn slipped up close to the soldiers in hope of stealing animals.

The men crept into the woods and were making their way cautiously forward when a pistol shot woke the night and brought one of the raiders down. Gunfire immediately erupted generally; the wounded Indian, a Hunkpapa named Plenty Lice, was killed with a second shot, and his body was dragged into the white camp. After an hour of noisy confusion fighting died down shortly after dawn. As the sun rose a long line of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathered on bluffs overlooking the woody thicket a few hundred yards distant where the whites and their animals were well concealed. The guns of the Indians, including many Winchester and Henry repeating rifles, could not quite reach the soldiers. The .45/.70 caliber Springfield trapdoor rifles of the soldiers, however, brought the Indian lines comfortably within range.

This classic frontier battle—much shooting, few casualties—continued another few hours longer without meaningful military result. For much of the time Sioux fighters took turns making dare rides—racing in close to the soldier lines to demonstrate their bravery. Several were wounded, and at least two of them later died, including a brother of the Brulé chief Spotted Tail named Hawk Dog. Also mortally wounded was a nephew of the Miniconjou chief Lame Deer.10 But the fight was principally remembered, by the Indians at least, for two extraordinary displays of daring and physical bravery.

This was not a battle Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse had wanted, but their authority had been brought into question by the young men who ignored the agreed policy and attacked the soldiers. The whites, too, in effect challenged the Hunkpapa and Oglala chiefs after the sun came up when the soldiers brazenly dragged the body of Plenty Lice over to a campfire and threw it into the flames. The white soldiers were many and well placed; direct attack would be futile, but to do nothing would further sap the authority of the chiefs. Now Sitting Bull demonstrated why he had been chosen a leader of all the northern Sioux.

It was still well before eight in the morning. Followed by friends—White Bull, Gets the Best of Them, and two Cheyenne whose names have been lost—the chief started down the face of the bluffs toward the white soldiers, calmly walking until he reached the flat and found a comfortable spot several hundred yards from the woods where the soldiers had taken cover. He sat down. The others sat also. Sitting Bull opened his pipe bag and began the slow and methodical process of preparing a pipe, cutting the tobacco and then tamping it down with a small stick into the bowl of the pipe. It was important to take your time. When the pipe was ready the right way was to light it with an ember, then with slow recital of many prayers offer the pipe to Grandmother Earth—Unci—and Grandfather Sky—Tunkashila—and the four directions. Only then would the pipe be handed around to the left for each man to take a puff or two until the bowl was empty.

That was the right way. Whether Sitting Bull stuck rigorously to protocol was recorded by none of the Indians who smoked with him that day. But according to White Bull, they smoked until the pipe was empty while the soldiers fired at them without cease. The seated Indians could hear bullets zipping through the air. The ground was kicked up by bullets nearby and one of the Cheyenne was cut by a bullet in the shoulder. The .45/.70 cartridge of the trapdoor Springfield makes a big sound—a cracking boom. The thunder of the guns from the woods must have been terrifying. “Our hearts beat rapidly,” said White Bull, “and we smoked as fast as we could.”

A moment came when White Bull was overcome with tension; he shut his eyes and dropped his head onto his knees, waiting for the inevitable. But eventually the bowl was smoked down. Sitting Bull cleaned it with his stick, emptied the ashes, put the pipe back in his bag, and then got up and without hurry walked back up the bluffs out of range of the soldier guns.

That done, Sitting Bull wanted to call off the fight—already one man had been killed and others had been wounded. But now Crazy Horse wanted a chance to show why he too had been chosen a leader of the northern Sioux. Again White Bull was called to take part, and the two commenced yet another dare ride—wheeling in a circle on their horses at a dead run, veering close in toward the soldier line, and then pulling away as the booming of the guns followed them across the field.

As usual, Crazy Horse had his face painted all over with white spots, and wore his hair hanging loose. He wore a white buckskin shirt and leggins, but no feathers. That was the way he always dressed for battle, White Bull said; and White Bull was a close friend of Crazy Horse. That day Crazy Horse carried only a lance—nothing else.11

In battle, a dare ride had a practical purpose: to draw the fire of the enemy and empty his guns. But this was a pure dare ride—a taunting demonstration of courage and indifference to danger. The soldiers were spread along a curving line of a half mile or more, hidden among the trees that lined a looping, water-filled slough, a sluggish branch of the Yellowstone that veered out in an inverted U from the main channel before it rounded back to the river. Crazy Horse’s ride at a dead run took him within two hundred yards of the soldiers; it is probable that a hundred or more shots were fired as he raced by, White Bull hurrying just behind him. Whites hidden in the trees later related that “one young warrior rode slowly back and forth for probably twenty times, all the time taunting the soldiers with language and gesture.” White Bull thought a hundred shots were fired; the white witness said “a thousand shots must have been fired at him, but he went through unscratched.”

At the far end of a run, White Bull said, Crazy Horse turned back for another pass, but this time, as White Bull remembered it, the booming of the soldier guns came all at once in a single volley. One or more of the heavy 405-grain bullets slammed into Crazy Horse’s mount; it fell stone dead to the ground. But the chief was unhurt, and he jumped up and ran for the Indian lines, untouched by the bullets whistling after him. White Bull completed the ride breathless but unscathed.12

That ended the fight at Arrow Creek. The Indians departed, taking their wounded with them, fifteen or twenty in all. When the soldiers emerged from the woods they counted fourteen dead Indian ponies. One had belonged to Crazy Horse, another to Spotted Eagle, who had also been slightly wounded in the fight. Later in the summer Spotted Eagle sent a message into Fort Sully, where he had talked with General Stanley in the spring; he asked the interpreter there to tell the whites that he would fight them “wherever and whenever he met them.”13

Frank Grouard makes no mention of this early fight on the Yellowstone, which he must have witnessed, but confesses he was present the following year at a very similar encounter when the Northern Pacific Railroad made a second attempt to survey a route along the river. One of the officers with the soldier party (but not in command) was the man known by the Indians as Pehin Hanska, often shortened to Pahaska—Long Hair. This man with the golden curls was notorious among the southern Cheyenne for a dawn attack on a sleeping village that left scores of dead in the snow along the Washita River in November 1868. When Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, famed among whites for his cavalry exploits during the Civil War and a master of self-promotion, was transferred with the 7th Cavalry to Fort Abraham Lincoln on the upper Missouri, his reputation as an Indian killer accompanied him and was soon common knowledge among the northern tribes. While the Indians were moving in for a fight with the soldiers on August 4, 1873, Grouard, watching from a hillside, heard the Army band playing a lively tune. He would hear it often again later—“Garry Owen,” the regimental march of Custer’s 7th Cavalry.

“That was the first fight I ever saw between the Indians and troops,” Grouard told his biographer. He said he took no part, only watched, but got into trouble anyhow when he went down to the river and knelt down for a drink of water. At the jangling of horse furniture he snapped his head up to see cavalry charging straight at him across the river; Grouard’s riding mule bolted, and as the guns started popping he ran on foot for a thicket of trees. Grouard remained hidden until the shooting stopped.14

But it was not Custer and his soldiers that most threatened Grouard in mid-August 1873. It was the chief who had saved him, Sitting Bull, furious at what he considered a personal betrayal. That spring Grouard and Sitting Bull had quarreled so bitterly that in Grouard’s view “there was only one thing for me to do; I had either to kill Sitting Bull or be killed.”15 This quarrel was common knowledge among the northern Indians, but its origins, as always with Grouard, are not easily sorted out. The trouble began when the trader at Fort Peck asked Grouard to help him open trade with Sitting Bull’s band. At almost the same moment, Grouard agreed to guide a detachment of troops up the Milk River to apprehend a group of whiskey-selling Red River Metis—mixed-bloods from Canada who had in effect established their own tribe, which the Sioux called the Slota. These people sometimes fought against the Sioux, but at other times sold them arms and ammunition in addition to whiskey. Grouard brought Sitting Bull to Fort Peck so the chief might tell the trader no, but when it was time to head back for camp, Grouard told Sitting Bull to go on alone, since he was going north to steal horses. Of the expedition against the Metis, Grouard made no mention.

When Grouard returned from the Army’s raid he brought with him three Metis horses—pay for acting as guide—and gave one each to Sitting Bull and his mother and sister, saying he had stolen them from Indian enemies. But ten days later, some Santee Sioux who knew the true story told Sitting Bull all about it, and he was furious. It was not just the lie that angered him; more important was Grouard’s treachery, as Sitting Bull saw it, in secretly agreeing to guide for the wasicu, the Lakota word for whites. The two men had once been close. In the summer of 1872, white officials visiting Fort Peck had noted that the chief “has in his company a Sandwich Islander, called Frank, who appears to exercise great control in the Indian councils and who excells the Indians in their bitter hatred to the whites.”16 The quarrel over Grouard’s lie poisoned the relationship. From that moment forward, in Grouard’s view, his only choice was kill or be killed.

After the fight with Long Hair on the Yellowstone, Grouard was approached by Little Hawk, an uncle of Crazy Horse who had heard about the quarrel with Sitting Bull. To Little Hawk, it sounded like a bad situation; he urged Yugata to join the Hunkpatila band led by his nephew, and that same day the Grabber met Crazy Horse himself.

Crazy horse had somewhat peculiar features. He had sandy hair and was of a very light complexion. He didn’t have the high cheekbones that the Indians generally have and didn’t talk much. He was a young-looking Indian—appeared much younger than his age. There were a few powder marks on one side of his face.17

Grouard accepted Little Hawk’s invitation and found a place in the lodge of a young warrior who had only just married and set up his own household—the lifelong friend and fighting companion of Crazy Horse named He Dog. With this move into He Dog’s lodge in the late summer of 1873, Frank Grouard was joining one of the inner circles of Oglala life. Mitakuye oyasin, the Oglala liked to say—We are all related—a social fact which brought political as well as personal obligations, and which made political conflicts among the Oglala hard to distinguish from family quarrels. The immediate circle entered by Grouard was He Dog’s tiyospaye, who were sometimes called the Sorebacks (Cankahuran) after a gray horse afflicted with a saddle gall which refused to heal. As children, He Dog and his brothers and sisters all rode this horse, which was known for its speed and endurance despite the sore that gave the band its name.

He Dog’s father was called by several names—Black Stone, Lone Man or Only Man, and Walking Light18—and he had numerous children with his two wives, at least one and possibly both of whom were sisters of Red Cloud. In the early 1840s, when Black Stone was starting his family, he was a chief of the Bad Faces along with Fast Whirlwind and Red Cloud’s uncle Smoke. Later, this group split. After 1868 Red Cloud led many of the people south to draw rations at an agency while He Dog and Crazy Horse remained up in the Powder River country. When Frank Grouard moved in with He Dog he was not simply choosing a bed of convenience, but casting his lot with the northern Indians who were determined to have nothing to do with the whites.19

The Oglala, and more generally the Sioux, were a fluid social organism; born into one band, men or women might marry and move into another. Brulé one year, they might consider themselves Oglala the next. But over the years between 1850, let us say, and 1900, the Oglala attached themselves to a remarkably stable handful of leading men—Red Cloud, Man Afraid of His Horses father and son, Little Wound, and American Horse were all friendly to the wasicu after 1868. A similar group, rarely changing, sided with Crazy Horse, Big Road, Little Hawk, He Dog, and the Twins in trying to keep their distance from whites. Members of these two principal factions of the Oglala almost never switched sides. But it happened once, in the summer of 1877, when many of the supporters of Crazy Horse, for reasons they found hard to explain later, pulled away from him and sided with the wasicu. They regretted the switch almost immediately. Within six or eight weeks of the killing of Crazy Horse, his old friends and supporters, with one exception, had all renounced their moment of wavering. If these men had not turned aside it is likely Crazy Horse would not have been killed, and almost certainly not killed in the way that he was, alone in a crowd of rivals and enemies. He Dog was torn by this convulsion; at first a member of Red Cloud’s band, he went his own way in 1868 to side with Crazy Horse, then abandoned his friend in the summer of 1877, and finally rejoined Crazy Horse’s friends and fled with them to Canada after the death of the chief. This confused indecision was so rare among the Oglala that it is shocking.

Frank Grouard was deeply involved in these events. He rarely spoke about the killing of the chief, and never explained his own actions or motives. He was probably married to an Oglala woman for a time but formed no lasting attachment to any member of the tribe. But Grouard entered more deeply into Crazy Horse’s orbit, over a longer period of time, than any other man who was not an Indian.

By the time Frank Grouard joined the Hunkpatila band Crazy Horse had married Black Shawl Woman and their daughter, They Are Afraid of Her, had been born. Red Feather said the marriage occurred “six years before he was killed”—that would have been 1871—and that the girl died when she was “about three.” Others say she was two. Grouard, who was living with He Dog at this time, reported that the daughter was four. In any event, it was probably in the summer of 1873 or 1874 that the girl died. Crazy Horse had gone out on a war party against the Crow while the village was camped between the Little Bighorn and the Rosebud. By the time Crazy Horse caught up with his band again after the raid, it had moved seventy miles east. It was then he learned that his daughter had fallen ill and died during his absence. Sudden death was not uncommon; Indians in general and their children in particular were susceptible to a host of fevers and diseases brought by the white men, from cholera and smallpox to mumps and measles. The body of They Are Afraid of Her had been washed and wrapped in the customary manner and placed on a scaffold.20

Grief for the dead among the Sioux was unrestrained. Men and women grieving for someone especially close might cut their hair short, slash their legs, arms, or chest with a knife, pierce their flesh with wooden skewers, cut off the end of a finger with a knife or hatchet, go about bloody and filthy and crying loudly for days—generally four days. As in other cultures, grieving was sometimes spontaneous, sometimes obligatory. The Oglala Black Elk describes the grief he displayed for a cousin killed by the Crow. “It was hard work crying all day,” he said. “This is the way I had to cry: ‘Hownh, hownh—My cousin, he thought lots of me and I thought lots of him.’ I did not feel like crying, but I had to do it all day.”21

Sometimes at the end of the four days of first grief an elaborate, yearlong ceremony was undertaken called “ghost keeping.” The body would be left behind in the usual manner, on a scaffold or in a tree, but a lock of the dead one’s hair would be carried from camp to camp. This lock of hair was called “the white ghost” and was treated as almost a living person. The lock might be carried in a leather bag, or housed in a separate lodge; it would be talked to and prayed over. At the end of a year the lock of hair would be buried or perhaps burned and the surviving family would hold a giveaway—presenting blankets, beaded clothing, and even horses to friends, relatives, and the needy. The places where bodies were left were not avoided, but talked about and visited from time to time. There was no single or right way to grieve for the dead, but every expression of grief began with tears—weeping loud and long. A newspaper correspondent who spent weeks in the field with Shoshone scouts in 1876 described their grief when a boy left to watch over horses was killed in a sudden attack:

During the night a melancholy wailing arose from the Snake [another name for the Shoshone] camp down by the creek. They were waking the young warrior killed by the Cheyennes … I never heard anything equal to the despairing cadence of that wail, so savage and so dismal … the Snake Indians … had deferred the burial of their comrade until sunrise. All the relatives appeared in black paint … I had been led to believe that Indians never yielded to the weakness of tears, but I can assure my readers that the experience of that morning convinced me of my error.”22

What we know of Crazy Horse’s grief comes from Frank Grouard, who reports that on returning from his war party the chief immediately determined to visit the scaffold holding his daughter’s body, two days’ ride away. At the chief’s invitation, Grouard reports, he went along. When they reached the site Grouard began to set up camp while Crazy Horse climbed up onto the scaffold beside his daughter’s body. There he remained for three days and nights—“mourning.” Grouard describes it no further. During that time Crazy Horse did not eat or drink. On the morning of the fourth day he woke Grouard at first light and said he was done now and it was time to leave. The mourning had quieted him; Crazy Horse’s face was expressionless throughout the long ride home. The dead daughter was his first child. He never had another.23

As Frank Grouard was making his way toward the Red Cloud Agency in the spring of 1875, the agency’s young interpreter, twenty-year-old William Garnett, was fired and almost immediately rehired by J. J. Saville, who had been having a hard time maintaining control of the willful and unpredictable Indians. Garnett was a guileless young man, which got him into trouble; but he was quick-witted as well, and that got him out of it. The handful of regular agency employees—among them Mike Dunne, Paddy Simmons, a teamster known as Dutch Joe, Harry Young, and various others—were joined for meals at a common table by transients passing through, such as officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the cowboys who arrived periodically with cattle from Texas, the driver of the regular stage from Cheyenne, mail carriers, and the like. To the table talk one evening at supper Billy Garnett contributed some out-of-school stories he had heard while translating for Saville. An informer in the group repeated what he heard to the agent, and Saville promptly fired the young mixed-blood for his lack of discretion. Garnett was unwilling to accept his dismissal as final. Before departing, he shared a final dinner at the agency mess, and there he mentioned some of the things that he planned to tell General John E. Smith when he got to Fort Laramie. Beef was the subject, and waste was the theme.

The biggest single expense at the Red Cloud Agency was the monthly issue of more than a thousand beeves on the hoof to feed the Indians. Indeed, the great western cattle business found its origin in providing beef for the Army and the growing number of agencies in the territories (and later states) of Nebraska, Wyoming, and Dakota. Fortunes were made on the wild Texas cattle driven north to feed soldiers and Indians, not just by the ranchers who bought cheap in Texas and sold dear at the agencies, but by corrupt agency officials, sometimes including the agents themselves, who stood to gain when they issued a voucher for every scrawny animal as a thousand-pound steer. It was not just traderships that were bought and sold by “the Indian ring.” Agencies, too, were political plums and worth money. Within a few years of appointment, an energetic man might retire comfortably. In addition to the skim on just about everything issued to Indians, from coffee to bacon and blankets, agents routinely employed members of their own families—wives, sons, brothers, and nephews. But at the heart of the frequent scandals and official investigations very often was the beef issue—not just full payment for underweight animals, but the provision of beef to imaginary Indians. How many cattle were required was a hit-or-miss kind of calculation. In theory the Indians were issued beef based on a head count, but nobody really knew how many lived at the agency. One newspaper writer in April 1875 claimed that an astonishing 14,200 Indians depended on the 350 beef cattle issued to them three times a month.24 On issue day at the Red Cloud Agency the Indians, mainly Oglala Sioux with some Arapahos and Cheyenne, would come in from their camps dotted along the winding trickle of the White River. Every ten days during the early 1870s, about 350 animals were issued by Ben Tibbetts, who was carried on the books as a butcher but in fact held a job closer to chief herdsman. He butchered no animals; that was left to the Indians. On issue day he would call out the names of the men with families, then release one or more beeves from the corral so the Indians could run them down on horseback just as if they were killing buffalo. It was quite a sight. The artist DeCost Smith described one typical beef issue a few years later, where a warrior on a trained buffalo horse waited till a steer had almost reached the spot where he wanted to drop it, and then

he would start his horse at a run, and when nearly side by side with the animal he would lean forward, holding his gun at arm’s length in his left hand, and with the muzzle within a foot or two of his mark deliver a shot back of the ear. The effect was instantaneous … I could not help thinking what a few such men … could have done to a body of cavalry in disorganized retreat.25

The beef issue at Red Cloud was part of the tour given every visitor, and they all returned with stories of the festival atmosphere, the dramatic slaughter and quick work done by Indian women with their butchering knives; of the children and young men with blood running down their necks as they chewed into livers or kidneys plucked steaming from the freshly killed beeves; of the intestines, carelessly washed of their grassy contents, chewed on by infants and old people alike. What few visitors noticed, however, was the extraordinary waste. Garnett said he would be sure to tell General Smith of the dead and dying animals scattered over the landscape after every issue—“the choice parts taken and the remainder left to rot. There was too much issued and the Indians could not use all of it.”26

What this waste revealed was the embarrassing fact that there was more meat than Indians. The fourteen thousand souls officially reported were in fact not nearly so many. An accurate count was something the agent should have known, and could have known by conducting a simple census. But Red Cloud wanted no census, and Saville was afraid to conduct one. The over-counted Indians and wasted beef were not the only subjects which might interest General Smith, Garnett observed at dinner. The following day he was summoned by Saville, questioned severely, informed that the agency beef issue was no concern of Smith’s, and then rehired on the spot—with a raise in salary from forty to fifty dollars a month. This was good pay for a mixed-blood, twenty-year-old interpreter; privates in the Army received only thirteen dollars a month.

——

When white men and Sioux conversed it was always through an interpreter; no white officials learned Lakota, and few of the Sioux knew more than a handful of words in English. The first generation of interpreters were mainly white trappers and traders who came to the Fort Laramie region in the 1820s and ’30s, married Sioux women, and remained to raise families. These men all spoke Lakota, but the Lakota they spoke was often crude and unreliable, a kind of kitchen Lakota, suitable around the house or for trading but inadequate for negotiating treaties. Red Cloud was not the only Sioux chief who insisted he had never agreed to some point claimed later by officials; the interpreter had said nothing like that to him. In 1875 to a reporter from the New York Herald, the chief complained specifically of the Reverend Samuel D. Hinman and of Todd Randall, who “had to be corrected several times in his very loose translations.”27 Even Nick Janis, who married a Sioux in 1849 and lived among them until his death in 1902, sometimes required help from his son-in-law Billy Garnett when he got stuck in the denser thickets of Lakota.28 Garnett was an interpreter of the second generation, which meant that Lakota was his mother tongue, learned as a child. His English was fluent, but he did not learn to read and write until after his mid-twenties.29

The conduct even of ordinary business at the Red Cloud Agency could be challenging for an interpreter. Red Cloud and the other chiefs were always unhappy about something. All depended on the agent for material goods, for permission to hunt south of the Platte, for any change in the amount or kind or quality of rations they were issued. A white man who lived among the Oglala for years once remarked, “The Indians have a faculty for consuming the time of a man who will incline his ear to listen.”30 There were other second-generation Lakota speakers at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies, among them three men all named Louis: the first was John Richard’s younger brother; then Louis Shangreau, son of Jules Shangreau and an Oglala woman related to Red Cloud; and finally Louis Bordeaux, son of James Bordeaux and a Brulé woman, sister of Swift Bear. But none of the other second-generation Lakota speakers could match the fluency acquired by Garnett over years of translating for Indians and white officials alike.

Yet it was the Sandwich Islander Frank Grouard who seemed the Indian. Billy Garnett was handsome in the classic Indian way—high cheekbones, finely molded mouth and chin. But he dressed white. On an ordinary working day he wore boots, not moccasins; a felt hat, a bandana around the neck, trousers, a work shirt buttoned at the wrists and neck in the cowboy way. In 1877, when he was twenty-two, he was photographed sitting next to his friend and sometime employer Baptiste Pourier. Garnett’s hair was short and neatly parted and combed. He wore a three-piece suit, white shirt, tie. Pourier was in a coarse wool coat and stovepipe pants. Bigger, heavier, and older, with his full handlebar moustache and thick curly red hair, Pourier looks ready to enter a saloon, while Garnett might have stepped from a lawyer’s office. Seeing Garnett and Grouard side by side, knowing nothing else about the two men, officials instinctively would have turned to Grouard, fresh from the plains in his sinew-sewn buckskin garb, to ask what the Indians were thinking and saying.

If you find an error or have any questions, please email us at admin@erenow.org. Thank you!