Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 (29 page)

Sitting Bull did his best to adapt. He was more than a chief now, he was a statesman, and he took
his responsibility seriously. He had hundreds of people depending on him, and he knew that he was there in the Grandmother Country by sufferance of the redcoat representatives of the Grandmother herself, Queen Victoria. But that sufferance was thin ice on which to skate. He knew that the redcoats were just waiting for an excuse to expel him, and he knew, too, that if he were expelled from Canada, the soldier chief they called Bear Coat, Nelson Miles, would be waiting for him. Bear Coat himself had told him so—to his face.

He could still remember the meeting with Miles in 1876, just after Slim Buttes. At first Bear Coat had been open and conciliatory, speaking to him with respect, warrior to warrior, and Sitting Bull had thought they had worked everything out. But on the second day of the council between them, the itchy Long Knives flexed their trigger fingers and the boisterous Hunkpapa warriors had been looking for trouble, even expecting it. And as Sitting Bull knew only too well, if you are looking for trouble, it finds you.

So Miles had gotten angry and tried to blame Sitting Bull for things he had not done, and for breaking promises he had not made. The truth was that Miles had made promises he could not keep, and both men knew it. The council had broken off and Sitting Bull had headed for the border, taking his time in order to show that he was not afraid of Bear Coat or anyone else.

The next winter, news reached him that Crazy Horse had been murdered. It had happened just as
Crazy Horse had told him it would, the way it had been foretold in the great Oglala’s vision. Held by the arms by two Oglala policemen at Fort Robinson, he had been stabbed in the back by a soldier with a bayonet. That news, more than any other, had crushed Sitting Bull’s spirit. He had loved Crazy Horse like a brother, and with him gone, there was no one else left to speak for the people. Spotted Tail was just a pale shadow and Red Cloud was no better than a white man now. Only Sitting Bull was left.

The redcoats did not trust him. They watched him like hungry wolves, just waiting for him to do something wrong, or maybe not even wrong, but something they could use to send him home. They were frightened of him. His reputation as a fearsome warrior had preceded him to Canada, and they were wary of him—as if they expected him to go on the warpath at any moment; as if he would be foolish enough to make himself unwelcome in his last refuge on earth.

But it meant he had to be hard with his people, harder than he had ever been, harder than he wanted to be. He didn’t like it, but he did it because if he were not hard on them, the agents and redcoats of the Grandmother would be harder still, and that was one thing they could not afford.

When his brother-in-law, Gray Eagle, had helped three other warriors steal horses from the Slota, the Slota had complained to the redcoats, and the redcoats came to Sitting Bull’s village. They knew what had happened to the horses, that some young
warriors had taken them. The redcoat chief had demanded that the men be found and punished, warning that if Sitting Bull did not punish them, he would do it himself.

So Sitting Bull had found the men, including Gray Eagle, and punished them, because he knew that if the redcoats punished them it would be much worse. He took the responsibility seriously, because he was chief. That is what it meant to be chief—to do the hard things that no one else wanted to do. And the punishment was severe, so severe that Gray Eagle still had not forgiven him.

He could remember the time when they heard the Nez Percé were coming, when Joseph, with a thousand people and all they owned, tried to join him. That had been a tricky time, because the redcoats did not want every Indian in the United States coming to live in their country. Joseph had failed. It was Bear Coat Miles who stopped him at Bear Paw, just forty miles from the border and safety. That was a terrible time … so many Nez Percé killed, and all they had wanted was to be left alone. It had seemed especially harsh because Joseph was leaving his land, letting the white man have it, and even that was not good enough. Nothing the Indians did was ever good enough for the white man.

The white men wanted the land and they wanted the Indians too, and it made no sense at all. It was as if they were saying, “You can’t stay here because this is not your land, now. It is ours.” And you said, “Fine, then I will leave.” And they said,
“No, we won’t let you leave. You will go and live on land that we don’t want, land that is not good for anything. Except Indians.” It was so hard to understand what the white man really wanted. And just when he thought he did finally understand, it seemed to change. There were times when he thought the white man himself did not know, or maybe that the white men were fighting among themselves.

Even in his confusion, Sitting Bull was homesick. White Bull had already gone to the reservation. One Bull was still with him, along with Jumping Bull and Four Horns. But the young men were drifting away, and soon there would be no one left—no one but old men to hunt the buffalo and to feed other men now too old to hunt for themselves. It seemed as if the Lakota people were withering away, drying up like leaves on a dying tree, just waiting for the wind to blow them off and carry them away.

Sitting Bull did not want it to end that way. He did not want to be chief of a nation of old men with wrinkled skin and flabby arms, begging for food in a country that did not care whether they lived or died. But he knew that war was no longer feasible. There were too many Long Knives and too few warriors. And ahead of him lay one hard winter after another.

Sometimes he led a hunting party south of the border to hunt buffalo in Montana, but Montana was filling up with settlers and there were complaints about the Lakota hunting. They were bothering no one. There were no raids on settlements
or even on isolated farms. Just the buffalo, that’s all they wanted. And every summer there were fewer and fewer of them. Soon they would be gone altogether, and there would be no one left to mourn their passing except Sitting Bull and a handful of old men who remembered when the earth used to tremble with the pounding of a million hooves.

Maybe, Sitting Bull thought, maybe what I should do is go back, cross the border, go home. They want me to live like a white man, think like a white man, maybe I can do this. And even if I can’t, the young ones can. The children can learn to do what an old man might not be able to learn. At least then they will have a chance, as long as there is someone to look out for them, the way Red Cloud is supposed to and does not, the way Crazy Horse wanted to and was not allowed to.

He and Four Horns talked sometimes, an old man and an older man, and it seemed that maybe the world had changed too much for both of them, made them lost, strangers in a place that only looked familiar, but was not. Then he would talk to One Bull or to Jumping Bull, and they would say No, uncle, or No, brother, it has not changed so much that there is no place for you. But your place is here, not at Standing Rock. If you go home, they said, the Long Knives will kill you as they killed Crazy Horse.

He knew that One Bull and Jumping Bull were probably right. But he knew, too, that sometimes you have to stake your life on something that is
important, and if the people were not important, then nothing was. That was why Joseph, the Nez Percé, had risked everything. He had lost, but he had tried.

I can try, too, Sitting Bull told himself. There was a time when I ran like the wind, when no one, not even Crawler, could catch me. There was a time when I would ride into a Crow village by myself, count coup, and ride out again. I was afraid of nothing. I was there when we stood up to Long Hair and punished him for stealing the
Paha Sapa.
I looked Bear Coat in the eye and told him I would not let him stop my people from going where they wanted, whenever they wanted to go. There was a time when I would have looked the Great Father himself in the eye until he blinked, and I would say to him, This is my land, and you cannot take it from me because I do not wish to sell it. And I think I would still do that today, if I had the chance.

He would look at the sky then, at the vast expanse of unclouded blue, then at the green sweep of the plains stretching out in every direction, the purple smear of the hills, and the white-capped mountains sharp as the teeth of a wolf, and he would think, The world is so big, why can’t there be a place in it for me and my people to live the way we want to live?

Some of the Canadians, like the Frenchman, LeGare, looked at him as if he were trade goods, something to be sold for a few dollars. There was enough traffic back and forth across the border, small groups of warriors leaving the reservation
to hunt and visiting relatives in Canada, that Sitting Bull knew what the agents in the United States were thinking; that it would be useful to them if the great Sitting Bull could be induced to come back, to take his place in line with all the other Lakota, to stand with his hand out, waiting like a beggar for the Great Father’s annuities. They wanted to take his rifle and his lance and give him a rake. Instead of riding a buffalo runner behind a herd, they wanted him to walk behind a team of oxen and break the ground to raise corn.

Every day it got harder and harder to resist. Without his land, without the right to roam from the
Paha Sapa
to the Bighorns, up the Missouri and down the Yellowstone, what was he but just another man without a country, an unwelcome presence in a country that wished he would just go home. But he had no home to go to, not now. The reservation was not home. It was more like a prison. And some of his people, he knew, they tried to put in real prisons. That had happened to Crazy Horse, and when he said no, they killed him, stabbing him in the back because they didn’t have the courage to look him in the eye. He wondered if that was what waited for him at Standing Rock.

They sent commissioners to see him, men in stiff collars with wax on their mustaches, to paint him pretty pictures of reservation life. They told him how they would build him a house like the one they had built for Red Cloud. But what was wrong with a tipi? It kept him warm when it
snowed. In the summer, when the air was thick and the heat enough to squeeze the breath from his chest, he could roll up its sides and let in the breeze if there was one. Could Red Cloud do that? Could Red Cloud roll up the sides of his house? And if the grass was used up, could Red Cloud pack up his house and move it to some other place?

They told him that he would have to give up his horses and his guns. You will live in one place, they told him, and when you do that, you don’t need a horse. And you don’t have to shoot corn, so you don’t need a gun. They told him that, too. But it didn’t matter, because that wasn’t what he wanted.

But when he thought of the people, how they had no one to look the white men in the eye and say no, it made him sad. He knew that he could do that, and there were times when he thought that he was the only one who could. Maybe, he told himself, maybe I have to go back, even if I don’t want to. Maybe I can learn to live in a house that stays in one place like a tree.

There were long days and longer nights when he turned these thoughts over and over in his mind, like stones tumbling in a swift creek, until they were smooth and polished and pretty to look at. But after all, they were just stones like any other. It depended on what you wanted to see when you looked at them, that was all.

He prayed to
Wakantanka,
but there was no answer. These questions were too hard even for the Great Spirit to answer. He knew then that he
would have to decide for himself, and for the people. And he knew what he would have to do, because there was only one thing
to
do, just as there was only one man to speak for the Lakota, and he was that man. He could stand on the highest hill in the Grandmother Country and shout until his throat was raw, but no one would hear him.

If he wanted to be heard, he would have to go back.

Fort Buford, Dakota Territory
1881

J
EAN LOUIS LEGARE, A FRENCH-CANADIAN TRADER,
had been working on Sitting Bull so hard for so long, trying to convince him to turn himself in at Standing Rock, that the chief accused him of wanting to sell him by the pound. It was a joke, but only partly. Sitting Bull knew that LeGare stood to profit if he were the one who succeeded in bringing in the last and most significant of the Lakota chiefs.

The Canadians had refused to feed the Lakota, hoping their hunger would lead them to return to the United States. LeGare had been supplying food, not out of humanitarian concern but as a business investment. With nowhere else to turn, Sitting Bull had taken the trader’s food because he did not want to go to the reservation.

The future seemed to be shrinking around Sitting Bull like a skin drying in the sun, squeezing
the life out of him, and in early July, LeGare finally got his wish.

They left LeGare’s trading post on July 10 and headed south. To make certain the Lakota followed him, LeGare packed all the food and other supplies from his warehouse in wagons and brought everything along. He did not want anything to tempt the chief to think there was any point in staying behind. Many of the impoverished Lakota were themselves packed into wagons because they no longer had their own horses. Those few who had mounts went on horseback, as they had always done; although the horses, too, were worn to a frazzle.

As the wagons crossed the border and rolled south through buffalo country, with the melancholy procession of warriors with a few lodges trailing in their wake, Sitting Bull saw the ruins of the old way of life lying in the grass. The bones of long-dead buffalo, almost hidden by the summer growth, the plains dotted with flowers, the way the white man decorated the graves of his dead, as if in memory of Lakota freedom, stretched in every direction. These were not buffalo the Lakota had killed, but the picked-over remains of herds slaughtered by the hide hunters and soldiers. Lupine and columbine sprouted inside the rib cages of the huge beasts, looking for all the world as if they had been imprisoned in the bones. Sitting Bull could not help but wonder if these chalky hulks were all that remained of the skeletal herd of his vision; if perhaps it was here those stampeding dead had finally fallen still and silent.