Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (3 page)

Our shield design, our wotawe, looks like this:

TWO BULLETS-TWO ARROWS
CROW DOG FAMILY CREST
(WOTAWE)

It stands for the two arrow wounds and two bullet wounds the first Crow Dog received in battle. All the wounds were in front. From the first fight, where he was hit by the arrows, he got his final name. Before that he had a bear name. He then took the name Kangi Shunka Manitou, or Crow Coyote, not Crow Dog. The interpreter misunderstood it. His Lakota was poor. It should have been Crow Coyote. The coyote was my grandfather’s sacred animal. It has to do with wounds he received in a
fight. Without the coyote he would have died and it would all have ended right there.

One time Crow Dog took a war party north to Cedar Valley. The party was made up of young men from the Kit Fox warrior society. They are the sash wearers who pin themselves to the ground and fight it out where they stand. But Crow Dog did not go out to fight. He went for a ceremony he wanted to hold at that place, he went there for a vision. The young men he took along because this was close to Crow country. The Sioux and that tribe were at war most of the time because the Crow worked for the white soldiers as scouts. At this time they even had a white man fighting among them. So that party was out and roaming. Crow Dog made out the figure of a man standing on a hill. Crow Dog’s horse raised its ears forward, and the two eagle feathers my grandfather was wearing caught the wind and the feathers began to talk, telling Crow Dog, “There are enemies over there, behind those hills.” So they all stopped. They saw this man hiding. Then Crow Dog sent two young men ahead to find out, one to the north and one to the south. Soon the scouts were back. They had not seen anything. The wind, the feathers, told Crow Dog that something was wrong. He told his men, “We’ll not go on. We’ve got to find out what’s beyond those hills. We’ll camp right here.” He also told them, “Put the tipis right up to the riverbank so that horse riders can’t go around, so that on one side the river will be your shield.” They did this. They put up the camp so that nobody could run a circle on them. But still my grandfather smelled the danger, and the eagle feathers did not stop whispering. Then a coyote was whooping four times. Crow Dog understood that the coyote was saying, “Something is going to happen to you.”

Just as it was getting light, a large party of Crow was riding up, coming from behind. They had found a ford upriver. Suddenly, there they were. Hollow Horn Bear was with Crow Dog that day, and so were Hollow Horn Bear’s son, and Kills in Water, and Kills on Sight. Kills on Sight was wounded early on. He was hit bad; they unhorsed him. Two Crow came at him from both
sides. Crow Dog came up at a dead run and killed the two Crow. He put Kills on Sight on one of the enemy horses, and Kills on Sight took off, so badly hurt he could hardly stay on that pony. In the meantime, two more Crow were going after Crow Dog. He had his hands so full with the others and with helping Kills on Sight that he had not even noticed them. As he turned around, they were already very close. They had bows. Crow Dog took two arrows, one below the collar bone and one in his side. That one went into his water bag, his bladder, but it didn’t really penetrate. The one under the collar bone was the bad one. It went very deep and he couldn’t pull it out. He could not fight well with that arrow sticking out in front. So he broke it off at the point where it was going into his body. He had dismounted to help Kills on Sight get onto his pony and now he got on his own horse again. They came at him from front and back. Crow Dog had a sacred warrior stick, a coup stick. One end was crooked and the other end had an iron spear point. He used that on those Crow. More Crow went after him, and he got very weak from his wounds. A large part of the arrow with the point was still in his body. The point was barbed and pulling only made it worse. He fell off his horse. He couldn’t do much then. I’m not going to make it, he thought. He was looking death in the face.

The Crow left him where he fell, thinking that they had killed him. Crow Dog crawled under some stinkwood bushes—that’s coyote medicine. Then he blacked out. He couldn’t move. He was lying like that for a long time, for days even. He was thirsty but had nothing to drink. He was too weak to make it to the nearby creek. He was cold inside and outside. He wasn’t even sure that he was still alive. Then he heard the coyote whooping, “Huuuuuh, huuuuuh, Crow Dog, I’m coming! Human being, listen, I’m coming over.”

Pretty soon that coyote came and cuddled up to Crow Dog and warmed him. He whooped like one coyote speaking to another, “Huuuuuh, Crow Dog, I’ve come to doctor you. I brought you a special kind of sage. Pick it up. Doctor yourself with it.”
Crow Dog had the wolf and the coyote power. He could understand their language, understand it spiritually. Then a second coyote came, and then a third, and, finally, the fourth. This one told Crow Dog to eat that special sage and to roll up some of it in a ball. And the coyote carried that ball of sage in his mouth and went to the creek. He dipped it in the water and soaked it and brought it back that way to Crow Dog, who used it like a sponge, drinking the water, and when it went dry, the coyote carried it back to the creek and soaked it some more and brought it, again and again, to keep Crow Dog from dying of thirst.

One of the other coyotes brought Crow Dog taopi tawote, wound medicine. The coyote chewed it up into a mush and told Crow Dog to put it on the spot where the arrow had gone in. It made the flesh tender, so that Crow Dog could pull the point out. And he put the same medicine on the wound in his side and it began to heal fast. He told all this himself to my father, Henry.

On the fourth day after the coyotes had come to help, they made Crow Dog understand that he was well enough to walk. They talked among themselves and Crow Dog understood them. And they whooped, indicating that he should follow them. The coyotes scouted ahead for Crow Dog, warning him if enemies were close by. These coyotes were wakan. A message from such a sacred coyote could reach New York faster than a telegram.

And a crow appeared, caw-cawing, flying ahead, also showing the way. Crow Dog followed that bird and followed the coyotes’ tracks on that spiritual trail, followed them all the way home to his people’s camp. When Crow Dog came back the tribe honored him with okicize wacipi, a warrior dance, and a waktegeli wacipi, a men-coming-back-in-one-piece-after-killing-an-enemy dance. After returning from death to life, Crow Dog changed his name to Kangi Shunka Manitou, meaning Crow Coyote, in order to honor these wakan animals who had helped him to survive. But years later those damn census takers misunderstood it. Maybe their half-blood interpreter mistranslated it, and they put his name down as Crow Dog. And because by then everybody also had to have a
Christian first name they wrote him down as Jerome and he was stuck with that. He grumbled for a while, but now we are proud to be called Crow Dog.

Now about the two bullets Crow Dog took. He was a little over forty years old, maybe forty-five or -six, when he was in the Custer fight. Not much is known of what he did there. He might have been wounded early in the fight or there could have been some other reason. We just don’t know. Spotted Tail was the head chief of the Brulé at that time and he forbade his men to leave the reservation to make war upon the white soldiers. He was Crow Dog’s cousin and had been a great warrior once. He had often fought side by side with Crow Dog. But then the whites had taken him prisoner and brought him east, where he had seen big cities with their crowds of people, and he had been shown the factories turning out a thousand guns in one day, and when they let him go back home he was no longer a warrior. He told the people, “There are too many wasichu to fight. Don’t leave the reservation.” So those men who left and joined Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull did it secretly and did not talk much about it.

After the Custer fight, Sitting Bull took the Hunkpapa people to Unci Makoce, Grandmother’s Land—that is, Canada. Crow Dog and a few others went to join Sitting Bull there. They told the people on the reservation that they were going hunting. But what they really wanted was to join Sitting Bull to honor him. On the way they came across a lone buffalo bull, but they did not kill him. Crow Dog told his friends, “We’re going to Sitting Bull, so we’re not going to kill and eat tatanka on this journey. We will eat deer instead.” So they went hunting, and every day they brought back two deer. They stopped at a place called the holy Medicine Rocks, where Sitting Bull had held a sun dance just before the Custer fight. There Sitting Bull had received a vision that the white soldiers would be defeated. These medicine rocks are covered with designs scratched into them—figures of men, horses, and buffalo. These holy rocks are now part of a Montana ranch.

It was near Medicine Rocks that Crow Dog ran into a party of white soldiers. Crow Dog tried to talk to them in sign language, but they didn’t understand it and opened up on him with their guns. He was on his horse, riding without a saddle. Crow Dog took two bullets, one in his belly near the groin; the other I am not sure where it hit. I was a young boy when my father told me and I forgot. It is such a long time. He had a fast horse and made it back to camp. There a medicine man named Sitting Hawk took care of him. Sitting Hawk told Crow Dog, “The two bullets are still there inside you. I’m not going to try to take them out because that would kill you. You will carry these bullets until the day you die. Someday you will go back to this earth, and long after your body has turned to dirt these two white man’s bullets will remain there in your grave. They’ll be the evidence that you fought for your people. So I’ll leave those bullets alone, but I will put a medicine into you that will help you.” And that is why Crow Dogs use the sign of two arrows and two bullets.

That happened between Standing Rock and the sacred Stone Hills, as we called them at that time when more and more white settlers came into our country and hardly a buffalo could be found anymore. The sad part was that Crow Dog had gone to this place to negotiate with the commander of the U.S. cavalry, which had a camp nearby. But he couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand him and just started shooting. The soldiers were building forts all over the country, and Crow Dog and his friends had gone to the sacred rocks to hold a ceremony that would help them to find a way to deal with the soldiers. That was also a time when missionaries, backed by the army, made Sitting Bull and Crow Dog accept the white man’s religion and take Christian first names. But Crow Dog and Sitting Bull went on praying with the pipe and holding their ceremonies as before in places where the missionaries couldn’t watch them.

There are different ways this story is told, depending on whether Henry told it or some of the other old men who had known the first Crow Dog. There was one old man who said it
was not Crow but Pawnee arrows that had wounded Crow Dog. That’s the only difference. It doesn’t matter much. All of the old, long-dead storytellers agreed on the main points, and the legend of Crow Dog is now part of our Lakota history.

I shall now tell how my great-grandfather killed the tribe’s head chief, Spotted Tail, and how he was the first Indian to win a case in the Supreme Court of the United States. Crow Dog was a leader of the Wablenicha, the Orphan band, a part of our Brulé tribe. As the tiyoshpaye is a clan, so the Wablenicha is like a few clans put together. In a way the Orphans are all Crow Dogs, all related, all coming from a common ancestor. The most famous of the Wablenicha chiefs was Pankeshka Maza, Iron Shell.

My father told me, “Jerome Crow Dog lived at this creek north of here, where we are now. A place called White Thunder, after a chief killed in battle one hundred fifty years ago. The first chief of the Wablenicha, Kangi Tanka Sapa, Black Raven, led his warriors on a raid against the Pawnee and was killed together with some of his men. So his people became orphans, in a way, and
were called by this name from then on. The famous chiefs were Iron Shell, Two Strikes, and Iron Shell’s son, Hollow Horn Bear, and my grandfather, too. They were all related and did everything together.

“So they were all part of our bloodline. The Fool Bulls, too, and the Eagle Elks, all related, all friends. Iron Shell was the head chief. He was a great warrior who counted many coups. He killed eleven Pawnee in one day. His thumbprint is on the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868. My grandfather rode and fought alongside him. Crow Dogs, Iron Shells, and Two Strikes always act together. They fight on the same side, to preserve the old ways. At this time the Crow Dogs had their camp at White Thunder Creek.

“Those early reservation days were hard. People lived on wild turnips, fish, and roots. That was all. We were real orphans then. The buffalo were gone. Hard times for Mister Indian. The agents cheated on the meat issue: kept half and sold it and got rich that way. The meat came walking, on the hoof, the stringiest, sorriest animals they could find. My grandfather said that if he had boiled his old, stiff moccasins that would have been better eating.

“Iron Shell Number One, son of Chief Bull Tail, had seven wives. He was a big chief and had to entertain, so there was too much work for just one wife. He took an extra wife, and then another, and then another and kept going like this. He had to, because people came visiting, wanting meat, hides, trade cloth, and all kinds of stuff from him. He was a great chief and had to be a sharing man. So the wives had to tan and bead and cook and do quillwork for enough gifts to go around. They all had children. There was a whole community of Iron Shells. Iron Shell got his name, Pankeshka Maza, from wearing shells in his braids. Iron Shell was from the purity of color in those shells. Other people couldn’t find such a shell.

The great-grandfather on my mother’s side was Nahca Cica, Little Chief. He was small, but he brought in more buffalo meat than anyone else. He got his own good medicine to heal. He had
some luzan horses who could run faster than any other. He was still fighting the whites when all others had given up. He was out hunting and met a white scout and a cavalry man, who knew he was a fierce fighting Sioux. They hunted for water, but it was all iced over. Little Chief had an ax and chopped up some ice. He melted it for a drink, drink for the horses, too. He fixed a fire so that the cavalry had a fire on the ice. He fed his enemies and watered them and they tried to pay him with bullets for having saved them. But he got away from them and escaped to Mni Chumpa, the Smoking Waters.

“Iron Shell’s son was Hollow Horn Bear. I knew him well. He had a real full-blood face, the kind you don’t find anymore. He had his portrait on a fifteen-cent stamp and on a five-dollar bill. He got a peace medal from the president once, to make him a peaceful, turn-the-other-cheek Christian, but it didn’t work. He remained an unregenerate aborigine. Chief Two Strikes was the same, a great warrior who earned eagle feathers left and right, fighting the whites, the Pawnee, and the Omaha. The Arikara, too. He was a full-blood of the full-bloods. He became a ghost dance leader together with Crow Dog in the Badlands.

“Crow Dog, too, had two wives at one time, when he was young. You need a big bed for two wives. Jerome Crow Dog’s wife’s name was Jumping Elk. She was a Blackfoot woman with curly hair. He built a log cabin for her. It was very small, just one room with a dirt floor, but it was one of the first log houses among the Brulé. He had another wife before that, a Lakota winyan. I think her name was Catches Her. He had two brothers, one of whom was called Brave Bull, and one half brother, named Yellow Horse. This one was a huge one-and-a-half man. The other brother died in Pahaska, Oklahoma. We have relatives there in what used to be called Indian Territory. Some of our relations married Osage and Comanche and settled down in Oklahoma, close to the Kansas line. One daughter took up with a Kiowa. Low Dog, Red Dog, Fool Bull, Eagle Elk—these are all our relatives. Fools Crow, our oldest medicine man, was a grandson of our
tiyoshpaye. He settled in Pine Ridge. He seemed to go on living forever, but he died two years ago. In 1974, Frank Fools Crow ran our sun dance at Crow Dog’s Paradise, and we helped him several times running the sun dance at Pine Ridge. So we are everybody’s cousins. We were also relatives and allies of the Wazhazha band, the Loafers. The Wazhazha and our Wablenicha often camped together.

“At this time, Spotted Tail, Sinte Gleshka, was the head chief of our tribe. He was proud, fearless, and very handsome. Even when he was surrounded by other chiefs, Spotted Tail stood out. He got his name from a raccoon tail that was part of his headdress. It was his wotawe, his medicine. He was a Brulé of the Red Lodge band, who were hunting buffalo near the Platte River. His father was Tangle Hair. His mother was called Walking with Pipe; she was a Siha Sapa, of the Blackfoot Teton band. Spotted Tail was about twenty years older than Crow Dog. He was a cousin of Chief Brave, who was killed in 1854, during the fight with Lieutenant Grattan’s soldiers. Crow Dog was the chief’s nephew. So he and Spotted Tail were relatives. The place Spotted Tail’s people picked to do their buffalo hunting belonged to the Pawnee, old-time enemies of the Sioux. The Lakota people looked down on the palani, folks who planted corn like white farmers, living in permanent earth lodges, bad-smelling, we thought. We changed our campsite when it was no longer sweet. They didn’t. We also hated the Pawnee for practicing human sacrifice. In 1838, the Skidi Pawnee had stripped a young Sioux woman naked, spread-eagled her on a wooden frame, and shot her full of arrows as a sacrifice to the morning star. The Lakota showed little mercy to any Pawnee falling into their hands and slowly pushed their enemies off their hunting grounds.

“In this long war Spotted Tail did great deeds. He was already counting coups while still in his teens. He was only fifteen years old during his first fight against the Ute, but most of the time he fought against the Pawnee. Blowing on his eagle bone whistle he charged into a Pawnee village and went right into their earth
lodges to get at his enemies. Together with Two Strikes he was in the midst of the Grattan fight, riding down and killing the soldiers. Sometimes he fought alongside Red Cloud, and years later, side by side with Crow Dog. While still not yet thirty, Spotted Tail was made an Ogle Tanka Un, a Shirt Wearer. This was a great honor. It meant that he was looked up to as a war leader. From then on he wore a painted war shirt fringed with Pawnee scalp locks.

“During the Grattan fight the lieutenant himself and all his thirty-one soldiers had been killed. In 1855, General Harney came out with many soldiers to punish us for this, even though the battle had been started by the whites. Our people called Harney the hornet, because he stung us so badly. The soldiers had guns and cannons. Our people had only bows and arrows. So we were beaten. Many warriors were killed, their camp overrun, and the women and children taken prisoner, among them two wives of Spotted Tail and Iron Shell, who had led the fight. Iron Shell was lucky to escape. Spotted Tail was not so lucky; his horse was shot from under him. On foot, he put up a good fight and he killed two dragoons. But he came away with two bullets in him, besides two deep saber slashes. It was like Crow Dog’s four wounds. This happened in 1855, at Mni to Wakpala, or Blue Water Creek. General Harney said he would let his dragoons loose on the Brulé unless the tribe gave up its best-known warriors. So Spotted Tail and two others surrendered themselves and were taken to Fort Leavenworth and there put in the ‘iron house’ as prisoners. Two of Spotted Tail’s four wives stayed with him through all this. The whites wanted to try and hang Spotted Tail, but in the end he was pardoned and they let him go back to his tribe. He had been treated well and he’d made friends with some of the officers at the fort. After he came back he told the people, ‘We shouldn’t fight the wasichu anymore. They are too powerful. There are too many of them. They have bigger weapons.’

“He went on fighting the Pawnee but stayed clear of trouble with the whites, who called him a friendly and a progressive. In
1865, he fought the wasichu for the last time. The whites built the railroad straight through our hunting country, so his own people forced him to take up the gun again. He couldn’t stand aside when it was a case of life or death for the tribe. He took part in the burning of Julesburg, which the whites themselves called a helltown, full of scalp hunters, gamblers, pay women, buffalo skinners, and whiskey sellers. Again they dragged him to prison in chains, and again he was let go after a year. In 1866, the government made him head chief of the whole Brulé tribe. From then on, he worked with them. The whites put him up in a white, two-story clapboard house. They put him in a starched shirt and a black suit, taking him to Washington to meet President Grant. He fooled them by going to the White House in his black suit, all right, but with a Hudson’s Bay blanket over his shoulders. The ‘Great White Father’ treated him and Swift Bear to a train ride. They weren’t impressed.

“The government gave him and his people a reservation, then called an agency, at Whetstone, near Fort Randall. It was on the Missouri River, in the eastern part of South Dakota. Later the agency was put where it is now, at Rosebud, in the western part of the state. During 1876, the year of the Custer fight, he kept most of his young men on the reservation. He was a big chief supported by the government. But he was not just a yes-man.

“He had given his sons to Captain Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School for Indians in Pennsylvania. For this the whites called him a ‘wise, education-loving Indian, helping to make little heathen savages into civilized Christian boys.’ But when he went east to visit the school and found that his sons had to wear stiff collars that chafed their necks raw, and were beaten with a cane for speaking their own language, and were trained to repair shoes instead of becoming chiefs, he got mad. He took his sons out of the school and back to Rosebud.

“Spotted Tail had to walk a very fine line. He tried to save his people from being wiped out. He tried to preserve their old beliefs and ceremonies. So he tried to beat the wasichus at their
own game, playing politics. He had been three times to Washington. He had seen that the whites were as grains of sand at the seashore. He had seen factories turning out a thousand rifles a day. He knew that he had to fight the white man with his mind and not with weapons. He played a cat-and-mouse game in which the white man always turned out to be the cat. It could not be helped. He did the best he could. He managed to save our tribe from being shipped to Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. Crow Dog had never been taken prisoner. He had not seen the big cities of the East with their factories. He had never been on a train. He could not imagine the numbers and the power of the whites. He thought that Spotted Tail was too soft on the wasichus, too ready to give in. Crow Dog became the head of those who wanted to live in the old Indian way, the ones the government called ‘hostiles who stood in the way of civilization.’ Spotted Tail became the leader of those the whites called friend-lies and progressives. Crow Dog and Spotted Tail had been friends, but little by little they became rivals and, finally, enemies. It was not their fault, but the fault of the situation they found themselves in, a situation forced upon them by the whites.

“After they put us on the reservation and fenced us in, Crow Dog was made chief of the akicita, the tribal police. One day he was out scouting all over the reservation. He had another policeman with him, a half-breed who could speak a little English. Crow Dog saw smoke and went to look and see. It came from a campfire. Around it sat some white ranchers and cowhands drinking coffee. They were running a large herd of cattle on tribal land. Crow Dog couldn’t speak English, or write, or read, but he knew a thing or two. He told those ranchers, ‘You are running your steers on our land. You should pay us for this.’ He had his policeman translate it. The white men said, ‘We have already paid to your chief, Spotted Tail. Look, here’s the receipt for three hundred dollars. Here’s your chief’s X mark and his thumbprint.’

“Crow Dog accused the chief in front of the people. He said that Spotted Tail had kept the money for himself instead of giving
it to the tribe. He told the great head chief to his face, ‘You are just a white man’s stooge.’

“Spotted Tail said, ‘I am the chief. I have many mouths to feed. I have to entertain many visitors, both Indian and white. It is for this that I kept the money.’ This was true, but Crow Dog didn’t see it that way. He thought that he, or Iron Shell, or Two Strikes, had a better right to lead the tribe. Both men were proud and strong-willed. So there was bad blood between them.

“Spotted Tail was a great chief. He did not drink or use the white man’s tobacco. But he had a weakness for women. He could not resist them, and they could not resist him. One of his nicknames was Speaking With Women. In our language that meant as much as ‘making love with women.’ When he was young, Spotted Tail fell in love with a pretty girl who was about to marry a wealthy chief named Mato Makuwa, or Running Bear. Running Bear had already paid many horses for her, but she liked Spotted Tail better. The two men got into a fight over her, going at each other with knives. When it was over, Spotted Tail was badly wounded and Running Bear was dead. After Spotted Tail was healed, he took the girl as his first wife. Altogether he had four wives, each with a fine tipi for herself and her children. He was a good husband, a good provider, and a loving father. But he had the elk power, which charms women. There was nothing wrong with this from the Indian point of view at that time. We do not think about such matters as white missionaries do. A man called Medicine Bear had a pretty wife, whom Spotted Tail wanted for his fifth wife. Medicine Bear was a cripple and no longer young. The woman went to live with Spotted Tail. Crow Dog was angry, because Medicine Bear was a relative and friend of his. When Crow Dog and Spotted Tail next met, they quarreled. They dared each other, ‘Go ahead and shoot!’ In the end they walked away from each other. This is one of many such stories about them, and it’s hard to tell which of them are true. The anger between the two men had grown so hot that it became a matter of life and death.