7
IT WAS ALONG THE Tongue River that Louis Richard and Frank Grouard encountered the big camp of the Indians whom the military, depending on the mood of the day, had begun to cite interchangeably as “Northern Indians,” “non-agency Indians,” or “hostiles.”1 The military thought that gathered in one place they might number as many as five hundred warriors, not more. A better guess in midsummer 1875, as Richard and Grouard reported in August, would have been nineteen hundred lodges with eight or nine thousand people and two thousand fighting men.2 A big midsummer village like this one would not maintain the same population for two days running; some of the people might linger in a favored spot for weeks, all might depart in a day. Half at least would expect to spend the winter at an agency. It was the task of Young Man Afraid of His Horses to persuade some of them—with luck all—to follow him back down the travois road to the Red Cloud Agency, where the Allison commission hoped to convince three of every four adult males to touch the pen and agree to sell the Black Hills.
The leading men of the northern bands were all in the camp on the Tongue River—Sitting Bull and Black Moon of the Hunkpapas, Lone Horn of the Miniconjou, Crazy Horse and Black Twin of the Oglala, and a great many others besides. They had come together for the annual sun dance, held when the sage was in bloom. When Young Man Afraid and his delegation arrived the northern Indians were preparing a war expedition. Chances are good they were planning a raid on the Ute, who had stolen many Sioux horses that winter, or on the Crow, who were under constant pressure by the Sioux in those years. No year passed without Sioux war parties going out in midsummer to fight the Crow.
As gifts, Young Man Afraid’s delegation brought fifty Indian ponies and tobacco, the traditional gesture of peaceful intent, but they found the northern Indians in an angry mood. Some evidently resented the invitation from the wasicu and wanted to send Young Man Afraid’s delegation back south with a good soldiering or worse. Years later, Grouard told his biographer that he had gone directly to the lodge of Crazy Horse to tell him the whites wanted to talk to him down along the White River. The chief told Grouard tersely, “I don’t want to go.” He said he would rather fight than make a treaty. But he added that others were free to go if they liked; he would not try to stop them. Next Grouard went to see Sitting Bull, who volunteered little while he tried to get Grouard to say much. The two men had not met since their angry break the previous year, and Sitting Bull now felt betrayed anew by Grouard’s arrival bearing messages from the white soldiers. While Grouard was making his rounds, Waglula, the father of Crazy Horse, went out through the camp to cry the news, urging people to listen to what the visitors had come to say.3
The following day a large council gathered to consider the request to travel three hundred miles south to the Red Cloud Agency. Treaty meetings always involved big feeds at U.S. government expense, and sometimes presents were given out as well, but the northern Indians were not tempted. According to Grouard, who has left the only detailed account of the discussion, as many as a hundred Indians had something to say. There was nothing casual about a gathering of the Sioux in council to discuss an important matter. In 1857 the Sioux had all met near Bear Butte, where they decided on a common policy of fighting to keep whites out of the northern hunting grounds.4 Red Cloud was always cautious about breaking ranks with the other Oglala chiefs; before signing the Treaty of 1868 he met in council frequently with Old Man Afraid, Black Twin, Lone Horn, and others to be sure they were ready to end the war. Councils were large public affairs where every leading man was entitled to a place in the circle and the rest of the tribe gathered around to listen.
Before the talking could begin there would be an elaborate pipe ceremony. To smoke together was a gesture of harmony, the tobacco itself represented a kind of gift or sacrifice, and the rising of the smoke in the air was thought to carry the words spoken in council to the spirit being above. The bowl of the pipe was traditionally in the shape of an inverted capital T, carved from a soft red stone quarried in Minnesota. A pipe’s wooden stem, as much as three feet in length, was usually made of ash with the pith burned out in latter years with a hot wire. The flattish stem was often carved with a bas-relief figure of a turtle and the head of a buffalo, deer, mountain sheep, or elk. Wrapped around the stem might be porcupine quillwork, horse-hair dangles, bits of fur, and owl, hawk, or eagle feathers. A slender wooden tamper, painted and decorated, would be used to pack the bowl before lighting the tobacco with a hot coal. Pipes were one of the few objects which both Sioux men and women participated in making. The carving was done by men, the beading or quillwork by women. Every step in preparing the pipe for smoking was accompanied by prayers asking for guidance, for pity from the spirit being, for a blue day in which to accomplish the business at hand. The pipe stem would be directed first to the ground—that is, to Grandmother Earth, Unci—then to the four directions, and finally to the spirit being above, addressed as Tunkasila.
The last step in preparing for the council was to smoke the pipe, starting with the man in charge of its preparation, who then passed it to his left. When it came around the far side to the end of the circle it was not simply handed on to the man in charge, but sent back around the circle the way it had come. Even the very act of drawing a puff on the pipe was formal and measured. An Army wife who witnessed a circle of Oglala smoking at a council in Nebraska in February 1875 found it strangely fastidious: “They didn’t seem to take the mouthpiece in their mouths … only to hold it to their lips with a kind of kissing sound as they puffed.” Two or three puffs were enough; then the pipe was handed on.5 In keeping with the drawn-out ceremony the language that followed was sober and measured. In this way a people quick to fight established a mood of deliberation and restraint, and ensured that important decisions would be supported by consensus.
The chiefs invited Louis Richard to tell them why he had come. Richard explained the desire of the whites to buy the Black Hills, translating as he spoke from a letter that had been given to him. Big Breast spoke first and put the Oglala case in its stark form: “All those that are in favor of selling their land from their children, let them go.” Sitting Bull was flatly opposed. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell or lease any land to the governement,” he said, “—not even as much as this.”
He reached down to pick up a pinch of dirt, holding it for all to see.
At this point one of the Indians in the crowd angrily snatched away the letter Richard had been translating, crumpled it up, and threw it in the fire. Just as quickly another Indian pulled it out and said, “Don’t do things hastily. We want to consider them. Don’t destroy anything like that.” He smoothed out the paper and handed it back to Richard. If anyone argued in favor of selling the Black Hills, there is no record of it. Little Hawk, speaking as he often did for his silent nephew Crazy Horse, joined the majority in refusing to leave the Tongue River hunting grounds: “My friends,” he said, “the other tribes have concluded not to go in, and I will have to say the same thing.”6
But it was not just determination to hold the Black Hills that kept the northern Indians from going south to meet with Senator Allison. He Dog’s brother Short Bull explained that “it was late and they had to shoot for tipis”—meaning that it was midsummer, the buffalo had shed all the previous winter’s fur, and their tanned hides were ideal for making lodge covers, an annual task. That took precedence. According to Short Bull it was generally agreed that “they would come in to the agency the following spring.”7
It is apparent that feelings on the matter ran the full spectrum: some of the Indians were implacably hostile to talks with the whites, while others said not now, but maybe later. And some, for varying reasons, were ready to go back with Young Man Afraid. Over the next three days those who desired to go crossed from the northern to the southern bank of the Tongue to camp with the delegation from the south. Grouard said that hotheads in Crazy Horse’s camp wanted to attack them but the chief intervened. In his view, visitors entering the camp in peace should be given food, water, and a chance to smoke. One by one, addressing each by name, Crazy Horse told those preparing to fight, “My friends, whoever attempts to murder these people will have to fight me, too.”8
Things blew over; Young Man Afraid led his delegation back to the agencies on the White River in early August. He reported that some northern Indians had promised to follow in time for the meeting with the commissioners; how many, in what mood, he could not say. But the broad answer delivered by Young Man Afraid and the interpreters to the white officials—not just the members of the Allison commission but also the Army’s new commander in chief (since March) of the Department of the Platte, General George Crook—was not promising. Who could find a whisper of hope for a deal in the proud, even lordly words of Sitting Bull, as quoted by the interpreter Louis Richard?
Are you the great god that made me, or was it the Great God that made me who sent you? If he asked me to come see him, I will go, but the big chief of the white men must come see me. I will not go to the reservation. I have no land to sell. There is plenty of game here for us. We have enough ammunition. We don’t want any white men here.9
——
We don’t want any white men here.
Keeping their distance from whites was the bedrock of northern policy. They fought to keep whites out of the Powder River country in the Bozeman War, they never signed the Treaty of 1868, never lived at an agency, never took government rations or annuities. Their dislike of whites was visceral, and in many ways mirrored white dislike of Indians. A leading man among the northern Indians, the Sans Arc chief High Bear, born about 1840, much later attempted to explain the origin and nature of this hostility:
When the tribe first mingled with the whites, the braves [that is, the akicita or camp police, also called soldiers] would not sanction it because they did not wish to eat the white man’s food and the white man would eat all their buffalo. If the braves discovered anyone going among the white people they would intercept him and kill him and his horse. They were afraid that the smell of coffee and bacon (foreign smells) would scare the buffalo and make them stay away. However, they would allow the white traders to come in and bring merchandise but would not buy foods that created a peculiar smell. They did not want the wakpamni, the government issue, and did not want the white people coming in.10
Nothing strange is sensed more quickly than a difference in smell. It is one of the first things people note about each other. White women, especially, were offended and even frightened by the smell of Indians. “They are so dreadfully dirty,” Caroline Frey Winne wrote home from Sidney, Nebraska, in March 1875. Winne was stationed with her husband, Charles, an Army surgeon, at the Sidney Barracks on the Union Pacific Railroad line. Indians hunting south of the Platte frequently camped for a time near Sidney in the hope of trade. Winne recoiled when she encountered them in the streets. Indians filled her with terror—not fear of rape or murder, exactly, but of them—their painted faces, the animal skins in which they wrapped themselves, what they ate, their words like grunts, “their nasty little papooses,” their relentless begging, their desire to touch, their frank curiosity about her.
It was not pleasant to say the least to look up and find your windows darkened by “Lo” and his brethren and wives and children, their dirty painted faces pressed close to the glass. They are poor miserable creatures. It would be a great mercy to them if they would all freeze to death as many of them have this winter.11
This aside is breathtakingly coldhearted. It is also surprising. Winne was educated, devoted to her family back home, tried to keep current with the civilized world by subscribing to the New York Tribune and Scribner’s Monthly, complaining that “reading matter is scarce here.” She disliked the town of Sidney—“nothing but whiskey and vice and wickedness”—and keenly missed the gentle Sundays of her early life. “I haven’t been inside a church or heard a sermon since I left home,” she wrote her brother. And yet she allowed herself to wish on paper that the Indians would all die, an expression almost of panic. “They are the most horrible looking creatures I ever saw,” she wrote. To call them creatures was to deny they were human. One afternoon, she reported,
Charlie and I … saw six of them coming out of Captain Hawley’s quarters … I stood my ground … in mortal fear that they would all want to shake hands but they passed by. One was a chief, Red Fly. He nodded and said, “How be you, Doctor?” They are dreadful beggars.
The Oglala chief Red Fly had shaken hands with President Grant in Washington during Red Cloud’s first trip in 1870. A few days after the chance encounter with Red Fly, Charlie Winne met Two Lance, a leading man in Little Wound’s band of Cut-off Oglala, noted for his strength. In 1872, a member of a group of Brulé Sioux hunting in Kansas with Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, Two Lance had driven an arrow entirely through a buffalo at the request of Spotted Tail. The grand duke kept the arrow as a souvenir. Caroline Winne did not know these things about the chiefs she met in Sidney. To her, “the chiefs look no better than the others,”12 and the others were nasty, dirty, and foul-smelling.
It was smell that seemed to bother whites most. Many found the smell of Indians strong, sharp, clinging, rank. They blamed it on ignorance of soap, or on the Indians’ practice of greasing themselves with animal oils. Early travelers reported that Indians used the entrails of raccoons or polecats (meaning skunks) for this purpose. Lydia Waters, who crossed the plains in 1855, said Indians “took the greatest comfort lying in the sun rubbing themselves with these greasy insides.” It was true; Indians did use animal oils—bear fat to make their hair glisten, other oils and fats to heal scratches and rashes, or to repel insects, or to protect against magic. The Sioux believed, for example, that gophers were dangerous animals and could shoot their stiff, bristly whiskers into the necks of people who got too close. If left untreated, the throat would grow hoarse and raw; the cure at that stage was to take the fat of a dead badger and rub it over the skin.13 Arapaho women treated their hair at night with the oil that melted in a marrow bone left upright close to the fire; they braided the hair tightly before sleep, then shook it out in the morning for the “wavy appearance.”14 White women did not understand these things, or care. The Army wife Francis Roe came west full of romantic notions about Indians; she thought they would all be noble red men like the Seneca chief Red Jacket once met by Roe’s grandmother. The romance did not last. Indians, she wrote home in a letter, were “simply … painted, dirty and nauseous-smelling savages.”15
It was commonly believed that horses, dogs, and old frontiersmen could smell the approach of Indians. The Army scout Baptiste Pourier not only believed it but demonstrated it. In May 1876, scouting for a column of cavalry heading north into the Powder River country, Pourier reported to Colonel Frederick Van Vliet that there were Indians ahead. The colonel asked how he knew. The scout replied, “Colonel, I smell them.” Charles St. George Stanley, who was present as an artist and newspaper correspondent for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, later recorded,
Everybody engaged in a regular old-fashioned sniff … everybody came to the conclusion that something did smell; it might have been a dead buffalo off on the prarie or it might have been a pair of dirty socks in someone’s saddle bags, but our guide averred it was “Injun … nothing could smell like that but an Injun” … The wind was blowing directly in our faces and it certainly was laden with an odor resembling a mixture of smoked beef, muskrat and polecat.
Three miles further along they crossed a fresh trail left by a traveling group of Indians, one lodge and about fifteen people in all. St. George Stanley was writing for laughs in a manner typical for the time, but at the same time he was convinced. “It seems incredible but it was an actual fact that we had smelled a small party of these smoky creatures three miles away.”16 William Hooker, a driver of oxteams in the Fort Laramie country, said bullwhackers could all spot the odor of an Indian camp as they approached—“a smoky, burnt-leathery smell is the only way I can describe it.”17
With the word “smoke” Stanley and Hooker approached the explanation. General Crook’s aide, Lieutenant William Philo Clark, a naturalist by temperament, tried to pinpoint just what the smell was:
Most Indians have a personal exhalation, a sort of characteristic halo of atmosphere, entirely unlike that which marks a negro, but in its way just as strong, though less offensive, and which a government mule will tremblingly detect at a great distance. It is a pungent, musty odor, something like that of combined smoke and grease.18
Others identified the smoke more exactly as the smoke from tipi fires, so dense it was used to cure leather by hanging hides up near the smoke hole. White doctors later speculated that it was smoke-filled tipis that caused the blindness frequent among Indians as they aged. Ever present as well were the smell of sweetgrass and sagebrush smoke, both used to cleanse and purify. Others thought the smoky odor of Indians came from kinnikinnick—the mixture of red willow bark, fragrant herbs and roots, and the strong twist tobacco used in Indian pipes. “The smoke … made a sweet and pleasant odor,” wrote Captain J. Lee Humfreville, who attended many meetings with Indians at Fort Laramie in 1868. “The Indian’s person and all his belongings were completely saturated with it, and it lasted a long time. Horses, and particularly mules, whose sense of smell is very acute, would scent an Indian by this odor at a long distance.”19
Whites believed the characteristic Indian smell endured over time as well as distance. In the spring of 1877, under circumstances to be related later, Crazy Horse personally handed a ledger book containing eight drawings to a high-spirited young reporter for the Cheyenne Ledger who had been invited into his lodge. With Billy Garnett as interpreter, the chief told the reporter, George P. Wallihan, that the drawings illustrated war exploits in the career of a “famous warrior,” but he declined to confirm that the warrior was himself. Through a long career Wallihan held on to the small ledger book, only three and a half by eight inches. Forty years later he typed up a brief account of the gift of the ledger book while living in Pomona, California. He must have leaned over to give the book a good sniff, because he concluded his account by remarking, “It still carries the Indian odor which was with it when I got it and does not yield to fumigation.” Nothing lingers like the smell of smoke. There is evidence to suggest that what whites smelled when they smelled Indians was the smell of smoke—of pipes, of smudges and tipi fires, of leather clothing which had cured for days or weeks above a smoky fire.20
The point here is not smells sweet or sour, but difference—the unfamiliar that separated white and Indian. Difference worked both ways. Some Sioux on first encounter did not like the smell of bacon or coffee. Hardest to tolerate for the ten-year-old Brulé Sioux Ota Kte (Kills Plenty), son of Standing Bear, was the smell of cattle, first encountered at the Spotted Tail Agency.
One day we boys heard some of the men talking about going to the agency. They said the government had sent some spotted buffalo for the Indians. This was the name the Indians gave to the cows, there being no word in the Sioux tongue for the white men’s cattle … So we got on our ponies and rode over to the agency with some of the men. What a terrible odor met us! It was awful! We had to hold our noses. Then I asked my father what was the matter around there, as the stench was more than I could stand. He told me it was the odor of the spotted buffalo. Then I asked him if we were going to be obliged to eat those terrible animals. “The white people eat them,” was his reply.
Now we had several white people around us, but they were all bald-headed. I began to wonder if they got that way from eating those vile-smelling cattle. I then recalled that buzzards were bald-headed, and they lived on carrion, and I began to feel sorry for the white people who had to live on such stuff.21
For the northern Indians who wanted nothing to do with whites visceral differences like smell were only the beginning. Still more important was resentment of white treatment of Indian women. White trappers and hunters in the early years often married Indian women, remained in the Indian country to raise their families, learned to speak the language, were counted as friends and relatives by the families of their wives. Spotted Tail and Red Cloud were both close to whites who had married their sisters, daughters, or nieces. In negotiating treaties with white officials the chiefs always insisted that white men with Indian wives along with their children should be treated as full-blood Sioux. But many whites beat or abused Indian women, exploited them sexually after capture in battle, and sometimes bought them for cheap trinkets and liquor and later cast them aside. Trouble often followed. In June 1867, at about the time he loaned the young Billy Garnett a revolver so he could protect his mother, the freighter and sometime storekeeper John Bratt woke one night to hear a drunken ranch hand beating an Indian girl he had just purchased for two ponies. “When I went to get my horse the next morning I came across the poor girl,” Bratt wrote. “Her face was swollen and covered with blood, and one eye was swollen shut from his heavy blows.” Later that day relatives of the girl returned, burned one of the ranch buildings, and carried off the woman beater, who was not seen again.22
White writers of the period were curiously transparent about the attractions of Indian women. Older women were dismissed as hags and harridans but many whites said frankly enough that the younger were appealing, or not bad looking, or pretty in their way. “A not uncomely squaw she was,” the reporter Samuel Barrows had said of a daughter of Red Cloud encountered in the Black Hills. Whites rated the tribes by looks and accessibility. Cheyenne women were commonly believed to be unapproachable, Sioux women a bit easier, although the Chicago Times correspondent John F. Finerty reported in 1876 that “the girls of that race seldom yield to the seducer.”23 But with the Crow and Arapahos, by common report, it was liberty hall. “The Arapahoes do not hesitate to make merchandise of their women,” wrote a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in 1875, “and that, too, for almost anything, from a pup to a blanket.”24 Lieutenant Henry Lemly wrote that Friday, a well-known scout and leading man of the Arapahos, “was a pander of the vilest description,” whose knowledge of English helped him keep busy at Camp Robinson and the Red Cloud Agency, where the Arapahos lived with the Oglala until the fall of 1877.25 In fact, such arrangements were transactions, with willing buyers and willing sellers on either side. Even General Sheridan, when a lieutenant in the Rogue River country of Oregon, lived for a time with an Indian girl named Frances who taught him to speak Chinook.26
It was different in wartime, when whites simply took women as a spoil of war. After the Battle of Blue Water Creek in 1855 General William Harney drove a large number of captured Brulé Sioux from Little Thunder’s band from central Nebraska to Fort Laramie in Wyoming. Among them, according to the mixed-blood writer Josephine Waggoner, were seventy women who were shared out among the soldiers. “The best-looking women were taken by the officers and there were many war orphans or fatherless half-breed children born among the captive women,” Waggoner wrote. One of these exploited women was an aunt of Standing Bear taken by Harney himself, who fathered a girl. A grandson of Iron Shell, a Brulé chief who took part in the battle, said later, “Some of the Indian women got caught … After awhile they were released from the white people and they all came back pregnant. Some of the squaw women disappeared.”27
No man was safe on the plains, and no Indian woman was safe in her village. In November 1868 the 7th Cavalry under General Custer—his rank was lieutenant colonel, but everyone, and especially his wife Libbie, called him General—led an expedition west of the Indian Territory looking for Cheyenne Indians. His orders from General Phil Sheridan were simple and unambiguous: “to destroy their villages and ponies; to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.”28
All was beyond Custer, but he did well enough in a dawn attack on a large village camped on the Washita River, a traditional wintering ground for Indians on the southern plains. In the battle which followed, lasting a couple of hours after a wild ten minutes for the initial charge, Custer’s men killed 103 Cheyenne warriors, including their chiefs Black Kettle and Little Rock; captured fifty-three women and children; and killed more than eight hundred Cheyenne ponies. The ponies’ throats were cut to save ammunition. Some of the men who witnessed the slaughter remembered the blood and shrieks of the horses for the rest of their lives. Among the captured women some refused treatment for their wounds, fearing they would be killed. Later, after reaching Custer’s base at Camp Supply on the Canadian River in Oklahoma, they learned that Custer and his men had something different in mind. Raphael Romero, a Mexican who had learned the Cheyenne language while living in their camps, brought the youngest and prettiest of the captive women at night to visit the tents of the officers, who called the interpreter “Romeo.” Cheyenne in later years reported that one of these women was the daughter of a chief killed on the Washita. Mo-nah-se-tah caught the eye of General Custer, they said, and eventually gave birth to his daughter.29 Quite possibly this is true. It is certainly true that he told Sheridan he planned to take Mo-nah-se-tah and two other captive women with him when he went after the rest of the Cheyenne the following spring. When Custer and a few men, out in front, caught up with the Indians on Sweetwater Creek in mid-March 1869, Mo-nah-se-tah was with the main body of troops. There, according to Custer’s own account, he told the chiefs it was surrender or else.
The southern Cheyenne remembered this encounter in a somewhat different light, as the solemn moment in which the white soldier they (like the Sioux) had begun to call Hi-es-tzie—Cheyenne for Long Hair—told the chiefs Medicine Arrow and Little Robe that agreement meant he would fight the Cheyenne no more. “I will never harm the Cheyennes again. I will never point my gun at a Cheyenne again.”30 This pledge or promise, as the Cheyenne remembered it, was delivered in council after a formal ritual of smoking together. All were seated on the ground in Medicine Arrow’s lodge. On Custer’s left was Medicine Arrow, on his right the medicine man preparing the pipe. Custer was wearing the high, brilliantly polished boots he favored. He lay his white hat on the ground beside him. His long hair, a fine, silky gold, fell back over his shoulders. It is unlikely Custer knew that Medicine Arrow was called so after his position as keeper of the sacred arrows given to the Cheyenne people by the spirit being on Bear Butte many years earlier, or that the arrows had been in Medicine Arrow’s keeping since the killing of the previous keeper, Gray Thunder, about 1838. The Cheyenne name of Medicine Arrow was actually Stone Forehead, but it is unlikely Custer knew that, either. Nor did the general know that Medicine Arrow had invited him to sit directly beneath the sacred arrows, which were suspended high in the lodge from a forked stick.31 On these arrows the Cheyenne believed their power and well-being depended; smoking in the proper way in the presence of these arrows guaranteed the words spoken.
Custer described the smoking in Medicine Arrow’s lodge at length:
From another buckskin pouch which hung at his girdle he [the man in charge of the pipe] drew forth a handful of kinnikinnick, and placed it on a cloth spread on the ground before him; to this he added, in various amounts, dried leaves and herbs, with which he seemed well supplied. After thoroughly mixing these ingredients, he proceeded with solemn ceremony to fill the pipe with the mixture, muttering at times certain incantations, by which no doubt it was intended to neutralize any power or proclivity for harm I may have been supposed to possess … My interest perceptibly increased when the medicine man, who was sitting close to me, extended his left hand and grasped my right, pressing it strongly against his body over the region of his heart, at the same time and with complete devoutness of manner engaging in what seemed to me a petition or prayer … Finally releasing my hand, the medicine man lighted a match, and applying it to the pipe made signs for me to smoke.32
According to George Bent, a mixed-blood who lived his entire life with the Cheyenne, it was Medicine Arrow who actually held the pipe while Custer smoked, saying to him in Cheyenne, “If you are acting treachery toward us, sometime you and your whole command will be killed.”33 But Mo-nah-se-tah and Custer’s interpreter, Raphael Romero, were both absent, and the general had no idea what was being said. The ritual and prayers were all mumbo jumbo to him. Custer was not a smoker; he worried mainly, as he drew puff after puff, that the kinnikinnick would make him sick.
For the Cheyenne there was nothing perfunctory about this ceremony. In a dawn attack at the Washita Custer had already killed a hundred Cheyenne; Medicine Arrow and the other chiefs feared he might do it again and invoked the power of the sacred arrows, of prayers and spells, and of the specially prepared tobacco to guarantee Custer’s promise of peace. The unusual ritual was described many years later by Magpie, a young man present during the ceremony. When the pipe was filled in the lodge where the sacred arrows were kept it was handed to Custer to smoke, as Magpie remembered it—not just the usual puff or two, but the entire bowlful of tobacco. Custer guessed it took him a quarter of an hour. When the general was done, and after the other chiefs had smoked as well, Medicine Arrow with his tobacco stick broke up the tobacco ashes in the bowl and then sprinkled them on Custer’s boots. In the Cheyenne view that made the promise sacred and binding. Magpie related that the sprinkling of the ashes “made the peace pipe stronger … [it] meant that if he went contrary to the pipe again he would be destroyed like ashes.” This was the significance of Medicine Arrow’s words, which meant nothing to Custer.34
In the end many of the Indians followed Custer back to Camp Supply on the north fork of the Canadian River in the Oklahoma panhandle while some, including Magpie, went north to live with their relatives in the Tongue and Powder river country. By midsummer, Custer’s 7th Cavalry returned to its then-permanent post at Fort Hays in Kansas, where the women and children captured on the Washita were imprisoned in a stockade. With Custer and the 7th came Mo-nah-se-tah, close to term with a baby daughter born that summer. Of that child Custer may or may not have been the father, but he and his wife Libbie both speak openly of the Cheyenne girl in memoirs, and stress her youth and beauty. It is hard not to feel that Custer was hiding Mo-nah-se-tah in plain sight, and that Libbie sensed some strong current of sexual connection between the two.
In his memoir, My Life on the Plains, Custer remarked that Mo-nah-se-tah “preferred to live in the cavalry camp, where she was allowed to roam without the restraint of a guard.”35 His brother Tom, a captain in the 7th, grew familiar enough with the girl to give her a nickname: Sallie-Ann. Libbie conceded that the girl had “the beauty of youth, whose dimples and curves and rounded outlines are always charming.” But she disliked the looks of Indian women—“high cheekbones and square jaw being the prevailing type”36—and she was never quite free of the fear that Sallie-Ann carried a knife concealed in the folds of her dress and in a moment of anger might kill her or the general. Custer left little doubt how the girl struck him. He called her
an exceedingly comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians. She was probably rather under than over twenty years of age. Added to bright, laughing eyes, a set of pearly teeth, and a rich complexion, her well-shaped head was crowned with a luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses, rivalling in color the blackness of the raven and extending, when allowed to fall loosely over her shoulders, to below her waist.37
Maybe Custer shared his soldier’s cot with Mo-nah-se-tah. Maybe not. But about the sexual convenience supplied by the other Cheyenne women captured on the Washita there is no doubt. From Fort Hays in May, while Libbie Custer was trying to decide just how she felt about Indian girls, Captain Myles Keogh, a company commander in the 7th Regiment, wrote to his brother back in Ireland,
We have knocked the Indians up a cocked hat, yet they are still on the warpath. We have here about 90 squaws—from our last fight—some of them are very pretty. I have one that is quite intelligent. It is usual for officers to have two or three lounging around.38
What’s missing almost entirely from the record is how Cheyenne men felt about it. Very probably their feelings mirrored those of the Sioux, who considered sexual jealousy a weakness, and insisted that chiefs rise above it. The northern Sioux had contempt for the Wagluhe who idled around Fort Laramie. “They were accused of trading their daughters to the white men for loaves of light bread,” reported Josephine Waggoner. “The hostiles who did not want to mix their blood with the whites made the accusation.”39 The agency Sioux on the White River shared the feeling, and seventeen of them signed a letter to President Grant in March 1876 protesting plans for replacing civilian agents with military officers, something the Army had long been seeking to do. The Indians had plenty of experience by that time of living next door to white men. Spotted Tail and other leading men of the Brulé—Swift Bear, Looking Horse, Crow Dog, Standing Bear, No Flesh, and White Thunder among them—told the interpreter Louis Bordeaux and the Reverend William J. Cleveland what to write to the Great Father:
Soldiers generally are obnoxious to our young men and their dislike for us is so evident as always to provoke ill-feeling … They corrupt our women and introduce … the vice of drinking, gambling, etc.… They have through their trader introduced whiskey among the people here which … has already resulted in one murder and much other domestic trouble.40
The whites called the northern Indians “hostile,” but proud or standoffish would have been more accurate terms. The hunting grounds south of the Yellowstone River were their country. In 1857, Bear’s Rib had told Lieutenant G. K. Warren on the edge of the Black Hills that the Sioux had no land to sell. The chief had heard that the Yanktonai Sioux on the Missouri were preparing to sell their own land, and he asked Warren to tell the Yanktonai they were free to do as they liked, but they must not expect to move west to join the Oglala and the Hunkpapas; they would not be welcome. Other chiefs of the Hunkpapas felt Bear’s Rib had become too close to the whites. They told him to stop frequenting the forts on the Missouri, to stop accepting annuities or eating white food. In the summer of 1862 they concluded that his ears were closed to them, and they killed him “to open his ears.”41
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were the two principal men of the northern Indians. Both wanted nothing to do with whites or agencies. But Sitting Bull was the talker, and what he says is probably good evidence of what Crazy Horse thought and felt. The attitude of the Hunkpapa chief toward whites had a long history and came from the gut. He explained himself once to General Nelson Miles in council:
Sitting Bull said that Almighty God had made him an Indian and not an agency Indian and he did not intend to be one. He said there never was a white man who did not hate the Indians and there never was an Indian who did not hate the white race.42
In 1867, at Fort Union on the upper Missouri, Sitting Bull told the trader Charles Larpenteur he had no respect for the agency Indians. “I don’t want to have anything to do with people who make one carry water on the shoulders and haul manure.” Better, he said, to “have my skin pierced with bullet holes” than starve like the agency Indians, “getting as poor as snakes.” He urged them to leave the agencies, move out into the buffalo country and live on meat, and when they needed a horse, to steal one from the whites at some fort.
“Look at me,” he told the Indians who lived on free government food, “see if I am poor, or my people either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hardtack, and a little sugar and coffee.”43
In 1875 the message Sitting Bull sent south with Louis Richard to the Allison commission put it plain: “We don’t want any white men here.”
In May 1877 Crazy Horse gave a small ledger book containing ten drawings to a visiting newspaper reporter, George Wallihan of the Cheyenne Leader, but refused to say whether any of the drawings represented his own exploits. In this winter scene, a man wearing a blanket coat “counts coup” by striking a Crow enemy with the butt of his rifle. (photo credit i1.1)
After the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 an Army officer acquired a book of 116 drawings, now called the Red Hawk Ledger after the man most often portrayed. Six of the drawings depict the war exploits of Tasunka Witko (translated here as His Crazy Horse); in this one he spears a Crow warrior, dismounted after his horse was wounded with an arrow. (photo credit i1.2)
Little Big Man on horseback counts coup on a Crow warrior by striking him with his bow. On foot in the same fight he kills a Crow carrying a feathered lance, and a third Crow is apparently also killed or wounded. The artist’s name is signed in both English and by use of a name glyph—a drawing of a running bear to indicate his alternate name, Pursuing Bear. (photo credit i1.3)
Several of the drawings in the Red Hawk Ledger depict war exploits of Wakinyan Oranko (Quick Thunder), whose name does not appear on agency rolls. The Oglala chief Fast Thunder, who called Crazy Horse cousin, was probably the man shown here stealing two ponies. (photo credit i1.4)
Crazy Horse distinguished himself in both phases of the battle of the Little Bighorn, killing soldiers during Major Reno’s retreat back across the river, and later when he led the charge that split General Custer’s force in two. In this drawing by Amos Bad Heart Bull, Crazy Horse is painted all over with hail spots, and rides a paint horse said by friends to be a favorite. (photo credit i1.5)
The Minneconjou chief Red Horse recorded a history of the Little Bighorn fight in forty-one large, colored drawings. In this one he depicts the bodies of ten warriors as they lay on the field at the end of the battle. The location of their wounds is shown, and all appear to be vomiting blood, a sign the wounds were fatal. Each man is dressed distinctively and it is likely that the artist could have named them. (photo credit i1.6)
Red Horse recorded a fact that many warriors at the Little Bighorn preferred to forget—the mutilation of soldiers’ bodies. The practice derived from a Plains Indian belief that an enemy mutilated in this world would bear his wounds into the next. Many of the bodies have also been stripped of their clothes, which the Sioux valued. (photo credit i1.7)
No photograph was ever taken of Crazy Horse, but his last moments were recorded by several Oglala artists who knew him, including Standing Bear, who was at the scene, and Amos Bad Heart Bull, a nephew of He Dog. One fact was remembered with special clarity by almost every witness—Little Big Man’s effort to hold Crazy Horse as he struggled to escape, shown here in Bad Heart Bull’s drawing. (photo credit i1.8)