Man on Two Ponies (27 page)

“Come on,” Bull Head told Sitting Bull. “Don't listen to anyone.”

“Brother-in-law, do as the agent says,” Gray Eagle pleaded.
“Go
with the metal breasts.”

Jumping Bull, an Assiniboine Sitting Bull had adopted years before when he was a boy, also pleaded with him. “Brother, let's break camp and move to the agency. You
take
your family and I'll take mine. If you're to die, I'll die with you.”

Sitting Bull's son Crow Foot came out of the cabin. “You always called yourself a brave chief,” he sneered. “Now you're letting the metal breasts take you away.” Sitting Bull stiffened at
this
challenge to his courage. He knew his people were ready to rescue him.

“Then I won't go another step,” he said.

As the three police pushed and pulled him toward his horse, his followers shrieked and cursed the police. “You won't take our chief,” they shouted.

Catch-the-Bear threw off his blanket,
raised
his rifle, and shot Bull Head in the right side. As he was falling, Bull Head shot Sitting Bull in the chest with his pistol while Red Tomahawk's bullet struck him in the back of the head. Lone Man leaped on Catch-the-Bear, tore his rifle from his hands, knocked him down with it, then shot him.

Sitting Bull' s followers threw themselves at the police with guns, clubs, and knives, and four more police fell.
In
the midst of the wild melee and flying bullets, Sitting Dull's old trick horse thought it was back
in
the Wild West Show. It sat on its haunches and bowed its head as if praying. Seeing it the police were frightened, for it seemed that Sitting Bull's spirit had entered his boiSe. While this was going on Hawk Man mounted his pony and galloped off to find the troops, who were now only a few miles away.

After a few minutes of hand to hand fighting, the police drove the dancers dashing to a line of trees along the river. The police, not wanting more bloodshed, stopped firing at them.

With both police lieutenants out of the fight, Sergeant Red Tomahawk took charge and ordered his companions to carry the badly wounded men into the cabin. Bull Head had been shot three more times as he lay on the ground, and Shave Head was also seriously wounded. One of the police discovered Crow Foot hiding under a pile of blankets. “Uncles, don't kill me!” he begged. “I don't want to die.” The policeman asked Bull Head what to do with him.

“Do
what you like. He's one of those who caused this trouble.” The man knocked Crow Foot through the cabin door, where he sprawled half-conscious on the ground. Two other policemen, with tears streaming down their faces, shot him.

Sitting Dull's followers now began firing from behind the trees and from a knoll at fairly long range. The police sought cover and returned the fire. In the meantime, Hawk Man found the troops and reported to Capt. Fechet that all of the police had been killed, for they had been so badly outnumbered he didn't see how any could survive. While the troopers pulled off their heavy coats and gloves to be ready for action, Fechet wrote a hasty note to Col. Drum. He would, he said, hurry to the relief of any policemen who might still be alive. He handed the note to Hawk Man and sent him on
his way, then ordered the troopers to advance at a gallop. Another
policeman met the column. The police were cornered in and around
the cabin, he said, and they were low on ammunition. Fechet's decision to continue past the Oak Creek crossing saved the police from likely disaster.

In a few minutes the troops crossed a ridge and saw the village half a mile below them. In the early morning light they could see Sitting Hull's cabin shrouded in gun smoke. From the timber and the knoll came the sound of rifle fire. Fechet had a white flag raised as a pre-arranged signal, but the police hadn't seen the troops and failed to respond. Not absolutely sure where the police were, Fechet had the Hotchkiss gunners drop a shell into the open space between the cabin and the timber, where it exploded too close to the police for comfort. Lone Man tore a curtain from the window and ran out, waving it at the approaching soldiers. A few shots into the timber from the “gun that shoots twice,” as the Tetons called the Hotchkiss, and Sitting Hull's people fled.

“I saw evidence of a most desperate encounter,” Fechet reported later.
“In
front of the house, and within a radius of fifty yards, were eight dead Indians, including Sitting Bull, and two dead horses. In the house were four dead policemen and three wounded, two mortally. To add to the horror of the scene the squaws of Sitting
Bull, who were in a small house nearby, kept up great wailing.”

Relatives of policeman Strong Arm who lived at the Grand River village came looking for him. When they saw his body they, too, began to wail. One of them, Holy Medicine, picked up an ox yoke and beat Sitting Hull's corpse with it until trooper Jerry Hart stopped him. “What the hell did you do that for?” he asked. “The man's dead. Leave him alone.”

The troops now built fires to cook breakfast. About the time the coffee was ready, the police shouted a warning. Out of the timber about eighty yards away, a warrior on a splendid black horse came toward them at a gallop. He wore a Ghost Shirt and held a long
lance as he sang a Ghost Dance song. The police recognized him
as Crow Woman, one of the most fanatic of the Hunkpapa Ghost Dancers. While his people watched from hills across the river, he raced toward the soldiers determined to demonstrate the supernatural powers of his shirt.

When the police tired a volley at him, Crow Woman turned his horse and
rode
back among the
trees,
only to return again to test their
fire.
Emerging a
third
time, he dashed between two soldiers on the picket line. Both tired their single-shot carbines at
him
but
missed.
Having proved his point to his satisfaction, Crow Woman
rode
triumphantly up the valley unharmed. His deed reaffirmed the faith of many Hunkpapas in their Ghost Shirts.

Through Louis Primeau, Capt. Fechet urged Sitting Bull's widows to tell those who had fled that the soldiers were leaving and they could
return
to their cabins. He sent other Indians up and down the valley to assure any who wanted to go to the agency they could safely accompany the troops. Many took him at his word
and
came in to follow the cavalry to Standing Rock,
and
others fell in with them on the way. Still others came to the agency a few days later, but many had fled south to seek refuge with the Miniconjus.

Bull Head, Shave Head, and Middle, the
three
wounded police, were carried in the army ambulance that had followed the troops. Only one wagon was available, and Red Tomahawk, over the protests of many, ordered the dead policemen piled into it on top of the body of Sitting Bull. The man::h began after midday, and the column stopped for the night at Oak Creek crossing. At midnight Col. Drum arrived with two companies of infantry. Hawk Man had breathlessly repeated
his
story that all of the police had been killed, so Drum made a forced man::h to investigate.

Despite the efforts of the agency and army doctors, Shave Head died the next night and Bull Head succumbed the following day, but Middle survived. The dead police were buried in the cemetery next to the Catholic mission church with military honors, a firing squad, and a bugler playing “Taps.” Sitting Bull was interred in the post cemetery at Fort Yates in a grave dug by
military
prisoners.

Because of the legends that had grown up around Sitting Bull as well as what Miles and Buffalo Bill had said about him,
his
death
was seen as the final act of Indian resistance. The settlers of South Dakota who had fled their homes returned to them, confident now that the dreaded old warrior was no more. Even if they had known that 200 of his followers had fled south to join Hump, they wouldn't have worried. The fierce chief who had once been billed
as the “Killer of General Custer” in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was lying wrapped in canvas in a rough wooden box under the South Dakota sod.

Surprisingly, the news of Sitting Bull's death aroused mixed feelings outside the reservations. Although many westerners rejoiced, and some Indian reformers felt the last obstacle to progress among the Sioux had been removed, regrettably by violence, others were outraged.

“The land grabbers wanted the Indian land,” a New York minister who belonged to Bland's Indian Defense Association proclaimed. “The lying, thieving Indian agents wanted silence touching past thefts and immunity to continue their thieving. The renegades among the Indian police wanted an opportunity to show their power. And so he was murdered.”

Newspapers happily joined in the attack, accusing McLaughlin and Drum of conspiring to assassinate Sitting Bull and of having ordered the Indian police to do it. Secretary of the Interior Noble also fell under the glare of adverse publicity, although he had done his best to make it clear that the army had ordered Sitting Bull's arrest. The fact that the deed had been done by the Indian police at the agent's orders caused many to accuse him of having bloodied his hands in the affair. “McLaughlin is so proud of his exploit,”
Noble wrote Morgan, “that he rather suppressed the source of his action. But it is necessary that it be shown and understood that this was the act of the
Military, without qualification.”

McLaughlin repeatedly pointed out that he had simply obeyed Miles' instructions as relayed through Gen. Ruger and Col. Drum. The newspapers ignored his statements-the killing was the work of the white-haired agent and his Indian police. Who had ordered
it
done was irrelevant.

Far from being proud of the tragic event, McLaughlin did resent the public's ingratitude to the policemen who had risked and lost their lives to arrest one of their own race at the bidding of the whites. He immediately began a long and fruitless campaign to secure pensions for the survivors of the dead police.

Although white reactions to the killing of Sitting Bull varied, the news of his death struck terror in the hearts of all Tetons. As they heard it, Sitting Bull had been treacherously murdered
by Indian police aided by the army. Their mistrust of whites
intensified, and the fear that troops would maneuver them into a defenseless position and then shoot them down gripped many, especially the Ghost Dancers.

After arranging for Buffalo Bill to bring in Sitting Bull in late November, Miles turned his attention to the other two chiefs he considered dangerous, Hump and Big Foot.
In
1877 Hump had served him as a scout against Chief Jospeph and the Nez Perces, and during that time he and Capt.
Ezra
Ewers had become virtually blood brothers. A few days after contacting Buffalo Bill, Miles sent to Texas for Ewers. When he arrived at Fort Bennett, Miles instructed him to tell Hump that he was now in charge of
all
the Tetons and that he wanted him and his band to give up the Ghost
Dance and move
to the Cheyenne River Agency.

Ewers and Lt. Harry Hale rode up the Cheyenne River through blowing snow to Hump's village near the mouth of Cherry Creek on the southern edge of the Miniconju reservation. Hump was away, but when he learned that his friend Ewers
had
come
to
see him, he immediately returned. When told what Gen. Miles wanted him to do, he replied, “All right. If Bearcoat wants me to, I will do as you say.”

Hump had already begun to doubt the coming of the Messiah, and when he and most of his people reached the agency on December 9, he again enlisted as a scout for the anny, this time to help persuade the remaining Miniconju Ghost Dancers to give up and come in. Eighty of the most zealous dancers in his own band
had
refused to leave their cabins, and they continued dancing.

Now, except for Short Bull's people at the Stronghold and Hump's eighty, only Big Foot's people remained away from the
agencies. Big Foot's village was twenty miles from Hump's, below the forks of the Cheyenne; it was already under surveillance by a small force of cavalrymen at Camp Cheyenne a few miles to the west. On December 3 Lt. Col. Edwin Sumner arrived from the Black Hills area with more cavalry and infantry, and took command at Camp Cheyenne.

Big Foot, a prominent warrior with a broad forehead, was most respected for his skill in settling quarrels between rival factions. When such disputes came dangerously close to erupting into violence, Big Foot was usually called on to pacify and bring together the contending parties. But to whites he was a diehard nonprogressive who kept his people as far from the agency as possible and whose young men were unruly troublemakers. As one who clung resolutely to the old ways, he had been immediately attracted to the Ghost Dance and the hope it promised for a new world.

All fall his people had danced furiously to prepare for the Messiah's coming. They had made no threatening gestures or even considered molesting whites in nearby Cheyenne City or elsewhere in the ceded lands. Settler George McPherson had been allowed to watch them dance. It reminded him, he said, of a Methodist revival, and he saw no reason to fear it. Big Foot would have been astonished to know that Agent Palmer had repeatedly declared that friendlies around the agency had assured him both Hump's and Big Foot's people wanted to fight and would fight. There was no doubt, they said, that the dancers were preparing for an uprising–Big Foot's men
had
recently been trading for arms and ammunition. The friendlies didn't add that it was to defend themselves against troops that might
try
to suppress the dancing, not to take the offensive against whites. It was Palmer's overblown statements that had convinced Miles that both chiefs were menaces and must be eliminated.