Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 (3 page)

Four Horns smiled. “We used to say that before the Chippewa traded beaver skins for the white
man’s guns. Then when they had guns and we did not, we had to move. I still remember the old men talking about such things. I think maybe now that the Blackfeet and the Crows and the Hohe are trading to get guns, we have to do the same.”

Sitting Bull wasn’t so sure. “If we get the white man’s guns, then we will always need to trade with him. We will need the powder and the balls and will have to get them from the white men, or from other people who got them from the white man. We will be dependent on one enemy to be able to fight another.”

“But you say yourself,” Four Horns reminded him, “that our enemies are getting such things. If the Crows have guns, we will need guns, too. Already, Elk-Who-is-Afraid and Standing Deer have been killed by the guns of the Crows. They are getting the guns from across the mountains, from the Flatheads, because the white men come down from the Grandmother Country and trade guns and knives and beads for beaver pelts and horses.”

Sitting Bull nodded. “I will go, but I still don’t think it is a good idea.”

“I don’t think it is a good idea, either,” Four Horns agreed. “But I think not doing it is a bad idea. And when you have to choose between a bad idea and another one that is not a good one, the choice is still clear. It is not even really a choice.”

“I don’t like killing more buffalo than we need, just to get skins to trade to the white man.”

“We have nothing else he wants, except maybe our land, and we will not trade that, not for all the guns he has. And I say again, if we want to keep
our land, if we want to keep hunting the buffalo, and living the way we have always lived, soon we will need guns to do it. That is just the way it is.”

Slow was still confused. He understood trade, knew that sometimes even the Crows and the Hohe would enter into a truce with the Hunkpapa so they could exchange goods. But they didn’t stop being enemies, they just stopped fighting long enough to trade things. Sometimes, too, they went to the Pawnees, and traded horses or buffalo skins for the maize the Pawnee grew near their villages. But trading with the white man was something different, something new.

Slow had seen only one white man, and he had not been that white. Burned bronze by the sun, with many dark whiskers on his face, he had spoken a strange language to his companions, and a creaky kind of Lakota that was just good enough to make himself understood. The white man had had only some cloth and some glass beads to trade. The beads were pretty and lasted longer than the quills that Her Holy Door used to decorate moccasins and clothing. The man had not wanted skins, only meat, because he had been traveling for a long time and had used up the food he had brought with him. Slow had been six years old then and could not understand why the white man had not hunted for his own food. Sitting Bull had tried to make him understand that some white men didn’t hunt but ate food that others hunted for them, and that they grew food out of the ground the way the Pawnee and the Mandan and Hidatsa did.

To Slow, that had seemed a strange way to live.

But he knew already that the Crow did not live exactly like the Hunkpapa. And the Arikara did not live like the Crow or the Hunkpapa. If it worked for the white man, that was fine … but only for the white man. As he had grown older, spending more time with his father and with Standing Bear, the medicine man, he learned more about the
wasichus,
which is what they called the white man. But he still didn’t think he understood them, really, and wasn’t sure his father did either. It was one thing to learn about what someone did, and another altogether to truly know it, to
understand.
And Slow wanted to understand.

As soon as the buffalo skins were packed on the travois, the lodges were disassembled, and a half hour later they were ready for the long trek to Fort Laramie. The fort was on the western edge of Lakota land, and it would take several days to get there.

On the way, Slow listened to the men talking about the fort. Few of them had actually ever seen it, and it was difficult for him to visualize. As near as he could picture it, there was a high wooden fence surrounding buildings where the white men kept their trade goods and lived. But that wasn’t much to go on.

He listened, too, to the talk about the buffalo skins. Sitting Bull said they were good skins, taken in the winter when the hair was thick and long. Four Horns had heard that those were the kind of skins the white men wanted. He also said they prized beaver pelts, which they got in abundance from the western tribes. Slow didn’t know why the
skin of the beaver should be worth anything. Beaver were small, and it would take dozens of skins to make a decent robe for sleeping—hundreds to make a lodge. And the skin was not thick or strong like buffalo hide, so it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to give something of value for so fragile a thing as a beaver pelt.

They traveled for six days, camping at night and setting up the lodges, but not unpacking their belongings. Only the food and the things needed to prepare it were taken from the travois. Even though the countryside was beautiful, and they were going someplace he had never been before, Slow found the trip boring. Every day was the same: wake up, wash, eat, and help pack, then start walking. At night, they did everything in reverse, slept, and started all over again the next day when the sun came up.

But just when it seemed the trip would never end, the scouts came back with news that the fort was not far, half a day more. And when they came over the last rise, Slow was stunned by the scene. There, looking nothing like what he had pictured, was the famous fort. But the fort itself was nothing compared to what surrounded it. Hundreds of lodges, not all of them Lakota, were arranged in a dozen circles or more. After they rested on the hilltop, Sitting Bull took Slow a little way down and sat in the grass. He pointed out the Crow camp, and the Arikara, and the Cheyenne. There were Hohe lodges, Flathead lodges, and Arapaho lodges, too. More tribes of Indians than he had ever heard of could be found here.

Slow wondered how his father could tell one from another. “Every people has its own style, its own designs. You can tell the Crow lodges by the way they paint them. You can tell the Hunkpapa from the Arapaho the same way. You can even tell the Oglala from the Miniconjou, if you know what to look for.”

“Won’t we have trouble with the Crows?” Slow asked.

Sitting Bull laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “No. At the fort, there is always a truce. The white men want the skins and we want what they have to trade, so we forget about our enemies for a few days. That doesn’t mean that we should turn our backs to them, only that we don’t have to kill them when we meet them. They might even have some things to trade for what we have.”

“I don’t understand.”

Sitting Bull didn’t laugh this time. It was a hard thing to explain. He wasn’t even sure he understood it himself, but he knew that that was the way it had been since he was a boy, and probably long before that.

Then Sitting Bull told Slow about the dentalium shells, gathered by coastal tribes from the bottom of the Great Water and transported all the way across the western mountains. “Have you ever seen the Great Water, Father?” Slow asked.

Sitting Bull shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”

“How do you know it’s there?”

“You can’t believe only in things you see with your eyes, Slow. Some things you never see, but you believe in them because you see them with
your heart. Or the eye in here.” He tapped his head. “When you get older, you will make a vision quest and you will see things you have never seen before. You might see things that no man has ever seen. But that won’t mean that these things weren’t there all along, waiting for the right time to make themselves known to you. And it is the same with these shells and the Great Water.”

Sitting Bull reached up and removed the choker of dentalium he wore around his neck and dropped it over his son’s head. It was too large for the boy and hung down over his chest a little. Slow ran his fingers over the smooth shells, cool even in the sunlight, and looked down at his chest where the dentalium glittered white as snow.

He was about to ask another question, but Black Moon shouted the command to start down to the fort, and the
akicitas,
the warriors who were in charge of the march, were busy getting everyone moving again. The Hunkpapa wanted to make a good showing as they arrived at the campground. It would not do to straggle in like some rag-tag bunch of fugitives. It was important to carry yourself well, especially since you were under the scrutiny of warriors who were your enemies and might try to kill you the next time they saw you. It was important to show them that you were strong and proud.

Once on the flatland, they quickened their pace and headed for an open space near the circle of Oglala lodges. It was late afternoon by the time they had set up their own tipis, and the first order of business was a feast to show how well the Hunkpapa were doing. They invited warriors they
knew from the other Lakota circles, and some Cheyennes, too, who had long been friends in the war against the Crow and the Pawnee.

Slow watched the welter of color as Indians mingled. Some Crows and Arikara visited during the celebration, and, as usual, warriors on both sides took the opportunity to ask for missing friends. More often than not, the enemies knew one another by name and reputation, and it was not uncommon to talk over old battles, double-checking on outlandish claims of battle exploits.

Occasionally an enemy warrior was asked to show a scar from a wound allegedly inflicted by one of the Lakotas, and sometimes a Lakota warrior was asked to do the same. In the absence of written records, the plains warriors were very concerned that their oral histories be accurate, and that no man claim credit for a thing he had not done.

The celebrating went on long into the night, and Slow was too tired to stay awake until it ended. When he awoke early the next morning, the adults were already preparing for their trip to the fort, where the traders would be waiting for them. Slow shadowed Sitting Bull, determined not to be left behind.

Approaching the fort’s high palisade, Slow looked at the hills beyond for a moment, trying to measure the size of the place. It was the largest structure of any kind he had ever seen. As they drew close to Fort Laramie, the place the whites called Fort William, he saw why the warriors disparaged the stockade walls. The vertical timbers
had been exposed to many years of weathering and truly looked like they were close to falling down.

Entering the gate, skipping behind Sitting Bull’s travois, he looked up at the blockhouse directly over the opening in the wall and saw a strange black eye staring back at him. He moved to the side a little and saw that it was a long metal tube, like a Crow musket Sitting Bull had once taken in battle, only longer and very much larger. It looked as if it could swallow him whole.

Once inside, he stared in awe at a single pole standing in the middle. A strange cloth he had never seen before fluttered in the breeze, making a snapping sound that he could hear even over the hum of conversation as other Indians argued with the traders. Sitting Bull was directed to a line of Indians and told to wait. There were three ahead of him, and Slow climbed onto the travois to rest while they waited for the traders to finish their business with two Crow warriors and a Hohe.

The Crows had a stack of buffalo robes which the traders dumped on the ground and pawed through, one making strange noises, another scraping a stick on a white skin so thin Slow could see through it. When the trader had looked at all twelve skins, he said something in broken Crow, which made the two warriors laugh. They looked at Sitting Bull and smiled, then back at the white man, who repeated what he had said.

The Crows shook their heads, as if saying that they disagreed with the white man, who then said another thing in the same broken Crow. This time the two Crows nodded their heads. The trader
walked away, returning with two muskets and a leather bag. Another man followed behind him, a round thing like a piece of tree trunk on his shoulder. The round thing was set on the ground, and the white man handed the two muskets to his customers, then tossed the leather bag into the air. One of the Crows snatched it and pulled open the drawstring. He stuck his hand inside the bag and pulled out a fistful of dull gray spheres, which Slow recognized as musket balls.

The second Crow broke open the end of the piece of tree, and Slow saw that it was hollow, filled with shiny black powder. The Crows seemed satisfied now. One of them picked up the hollow log filled with the black powder while the other shouldered both muskets and tied the bag of musket balls to his belt. The two Crows grinned at Sitting Bull then, who watched them angrily until they had walked out of the fort.

The next customer, the Hohe, had only two skins to trade. Both were excellent robes, and he seemed to know just what he wanted for them. The trader made a sign of some kind, and the Hohe nodded. The trader picked up a clay pot and poured some liquid that looked like water from a jug into it, keeping his fingers inside. Then he took a second pot and poured more of the liquid into it. The Hohe took the first pot and drank it off in what looked like one long swallow. The second mug was emptied just as quickly, and the Hohe belched, dropping the mug and starting to walk away, his legs not working all that well anymore.

Now it was Sitting Bull’s turn. The trader’s Lakota was no better than his Crow, but it didn’t take long for Sitting Bull to explain what he wanted. Slow climbed down from the travois and the trader slit the rawhide holding the buffalo robes in place. Once more, the skins were dumped to the ground and pawed over. When the count was finished, all eight skins were tossed onto the pile of skins the Crows had traded, and once more the man walked away, coming back with another musket and another leather bag. This time, he had a second bag, made of thick cloth, and when Sitting Bull looked inside, Slow saw the same black powder the Crows had carried away in the hollow log.