Indians as SoldiersTo the Indian, it was the soldier—the man in blue uniform—not the civil agents sent out from Washington to dole out bad and insufficient rations to a conquered race, that represented courage, justice, and truth. Consequently the Indians took great pride in being soldiers, and experience has shown that they make not only the most efficient but also the most faithful of scouts and the best possible material for light, irregular cavalrymen.Illustrations fromINDIANS AS IRREGULAR CAVALRYbyFrederic RemingtonOriginally published inHarper’s Weekly,December 27, 1890
To the Indian, it was the soldier—the man in blue uniform—not the civil agents sent out from Washington to dole out bad and insufficient rations to a conquered race, that represented courage, justice, and truth. Consequently the Indians took great pride in being soldiers, and experience has shown that they make not only the most efficient but also the most faithful of scouts and the best possible material for light, irregular cavalrymen.
Cheering indian on horsebackAn Indian DreamIllustration fromHOW ORDER No. 6 WENT THROUGHbyFrederic RemingtonOriginally published inHarper’s Magazine,May, 1898
An Indian DreamIllustration fromHOW ORDER No. 6 WENT THROUGHbyFrederic RemingtonOriginally published inHarper’s Magazine,May, 1898
I do not think my chief counseled evil during this time, but it could not be said that he was submissive. He merely waited in his tepee the action of his captors. The news that he got of the condition of the reservation was not such as to encourage him and the roar of his falling world was still in his ears. He was not yet in full understanding of the purpose of Washington. “I do not know whether I am to live or die,” he said to my father. “Whatsoever my fate, I am happier, now that I have seen my child.”
After some three weeks of this confinement we were startled by an order to break camp and get on board the boat again. “You are to go to Fort Randall as military prisoners,” the agent explained to me. “Tell them these are my orders.”
When I told the chief he was greatly troubled and, calling his “Silent Eaters” about him, he said: “This may mean that they are going to take us into the mysterious East to kill us in sport, or to starve us in prison, far from our kind. Now listen, be ready! Our reservation ends at Fort Randall. If they attempt to carry us beyond that point let each man snatch a soldier’s gun and fight. Let no one cease battle till the last man of us is killed. I am old and broken, but I am still a chief. I will not suffer insult and I will not be chained like a wolf for the white man’s sport.”
All agreed to this plan, and as the boat neared the fort the chief gave the word, and we were scattered, tense with resolution, ready to begin our death struggle should the vessel pass beyond the line. No one faltered. Nearer and nearer we floated, and all were expecting the signal when the boat signaled to the shore and stopped. The soldiers never knew how close they came to death on that day.
Again we went into camp under guard, well cared for by the soldiers. The officers all treated The Sitting Bull with marked respect and during the day the colonel himself came to sit and smoke and talk with us.
Of him the chief abruptly asked, “Am I to be kept here all my life?”
“No. After a while you are to be sent back north. As soon as you are prepared to sign a peace and after the anger of the whites dies out. I do not hate you. Come and talk to me whenever you feel lonesome, I will do all I can to make your stay pleasant.”
To this The Sitting Bull replied: “Your kindness makes my heart warm. It gives me courage to tread the new paths that lie before me. I am very sad and distrustful, for I am like a man who enters a land for the first time. It is not easy for me to sit down as a prisoner and dream out the future. It is all dark to me. You are my friend. You are wise and your words have helped me. If we could have the aid of men like you, the new road would be less fearsome to our feet.”
The young officers came and asked us many questions about our ways of camping, our methods of fighting, and so on, and the chief was always ready to talk. Sometimes I pretended not to understand English in order that I might the better know what was being said, and often I heard white people tell ridiculous things.
“IsthatThe Sitting Bull? Why, he looks like an old woman. He can’t be a warrior.” Others remarked, “What a sad face he has!” and this was true, for he had grown old swiftly. He brooded much and there were days when he spake no word to any one, not even to my father.
These were days of enlightenment to me, as well as to my chief, but they brought no sign of hope. My father was a kind man, naturally cheerful and buoyant, and his eyes were quick to see all that the white man did. He comprehended as well as my chief the overwhelming power of the white man, but he was less tenacious of the past. “It is gone,” he repeated to me privately. “The world of our fathers is swallowed up. Go you, my son, and learn of the white man the secret power that enables him to make carts and powder and rifles. How can we fight him when we must trade with him to win his wonder-working arms and ammunition?”
And so when one of the officers, Lieutenant Davies, saw me holdinga scrap of paper and asked me if I could read, I told him I could. Thereafter he gave me books and helped me to understand them. We called him “Blackbird,” because his mustaches were dark and shaped like the wings of a bird. I came to love this man, for he was the best paleface I ever knew. He did not condemn us because we were red. He did not boast and he was a soldier. He talked much with The Sitting Bull, and his speech did more to change my chief’s mind than that of any other man.
“Submit to all that the White Father demands,” he advised, “for so it is ordered in the world. It is not a question of right, or of the will of the Great Spirit,” he went on; “it is merely a question of cannon and food.” There was something appalling in the way in which he said these things. He did not believe in any Great Spirit. I could not understand his religion, but his mind was large and his heart gracious.
“Knowledge is power,” he said to me. “Study, acquire wisdom, the white man’s wisdom, then you will be able to defend the rights of your people,” and his words sank deep into my heart.
For two years we lived here under his influence, until one day the order came for us to go back up the river, and with glad hearts we obeyed.
It was in the spring and there was joy in our blood, for these years of close captivity had made the promise of life on the reservation seem almost like freedom. We went back laughing for joy, and when we again came in sight of the hill above the Standing Rock my father lifted his hands in prayer and the women sang a song of joy. As soon as we were released my chief called his old guard about him, and said:
“My sons, my mind has changed. We are now entering upon a new life. The white man’s trail is broad and dusty before us. The buffalo are entirely gone and we must depend on the fruit of the earth. You observe that The Eagle Killer, The Fire Heart and many of our people have oxen and wagons. If they did not comeinto possession of these things by shooting them out of the sky, I think we shall be able to acquire similar goods for ourselves. The white people have promised that so long as grass grows and water runs we shall be unmolested here. Let us live in peace with our neighbors.”
The Sitting Bull was chief because he could do many things, and, though he was now a captive with his people, his power and influence remained. His “Silent Eaters” gathered round him and to them his words were law. The agent also, for a time, treated him with consideration, and was very friendly. They spoke often together.
We were at once given oxen and carts and located near the agency, where we lived for a year, but the chief longed to return to the Grand River, his native valley, and finally the agent gave his consent, and we moved to the river flat, just where the Rock Creek comes in. Here he built a little log cabin and settled down to live like a white man, but I could see that his heart was ever soaring to the hills of the West and his thoughts were busy with the past. Truly it was strange to see Gall and Crane and Slohan sitting in a small cabin, talking of the brave, free days of old.
Of what took place on the reservation during the next four years I know but little directly, for I went away to Washington to study with Lieutenant Davies, who was assigned to duty in the War Department, and I did not return to the Standing Rock for many years. I heard now and then from my father, who wrote through my friend Louie Primeau. He told me that the chief was living quietly at Rock Creek, but that he was opposing every attempt of the white man to buy our lands.
My father complained also of the decreasing rations and said: “The agent’s memory is short; he has forgotten that these rationsare in payment for land. He calls them gifts.” My mother sent word that my little sister had died and that many were sick of lung diseases. “We are very cold and hungry in the winter,” she said, and my heart bled with remorse, for I was warm and well fed.
I would have returned at once had not my friend Davies told me to stay on and learn all I could. “Go to the top,” he said. “Do not halt in the middle of the trail. You will need to be very wise to help your people.”
He was a philosopher. He had no hate of any race. He looked upon each people as the product of its conditions, and he often said, “The plains Indian was a perfect adaptation of organism to environment till the whites disturbed him.”
His speech and his thought are in all that I write. He taught me to put down my words simply and without rhetoric. He gave me books to read that were both right and honest, and in all things he was truthful. “Your life can never be happy,” he said. “You will always be a red man in the clothing of the whites, but you will find a pleasure in defending your people. Your race needs both historian and defender. Your whole life should be one of teaching your people how to live and how to avoid pain. I am not educating you to be happy. There can be no shirking your duty. On the contrary, I believe your only way to secure a moment’s peace of mind after you return to your tribe is to help them bear their burdens.”
He warned me of the change which had come to me, as to them. “Your boyish imagination idealized your people and the life they led. You saw them under heroic conditions. They are now poor and despairing and you will be shocked at their appearance and position under the agent, but do not let this dismay you. The race is there beneath its rags and dirt, a wonderful race.”
I shall never forget those long talks we had in his study, high up in his little house, for he was not rich. Sometimes I could not sleep for the disturbing new thoughts which he gave me. Often he nullified all the teaching of the schools by some quiet remark.
“I counsel you to be a Sioux, my boy,” he repeated to me one night after I had been singing some of our songs for a group of his friends. “You can never be a Caucasian. There are dusky corners in your thought. The songs you sang to-night made your heart leap with memories of the chase. A race is the product of conditions, the result of a million years of struggle. I do not expect a red man to become a white man. Those who do, know nothing of the human organism. On the surface I can make some change; but deep down your emotions, your superstitions are red and always must be; that is not a thing to be ashamed of.”
I am giving this glimpse into my school days in order that my understanding of my chief and my race may appear plain. It is due to my good friend Davies, the noblest white I ever knew. I want everyone to know how much I owe to him.
It was strange to me and very irritating to find what false ideas of us and of our chief the Washington people held. When it became known that I was a Sioux and had been with The Sitting Bull, many were eager to question me about him, but I refused to do more than say: “We fought for our lands as Washington fought for his. Now you confine my chief as if he were a wolf. But he is a wise and gentle man, a philosopher, therefore he has laid his hands to the plow. His feet are in the white man’s road.”
This story is not of me, else I could tell you how beautiful some of the white women came to seem to me, and one small girl, fair as a spring flower, ensnared my heart and kept me like an eagle bound to my perch—only I did not struggle against the golden cord that bound me. It was all very strange to me, for I still loved a girl of my own race, who sent me presents of moccasins and who wrote through Louis to say she was waiting for me. It was strange, I say—for my heart clung to Anita, also, she was so fair and slender and sweet. She was associated with all the luxury and mystery of the white man’s life. She called to me in new ways—ways that scared me—while Oma spoke to something deeper in me—somethingakin to the wide skies, the brown hills, the west wind, and the smell of the lodge fire.
How it would have ended I don’t know, had not my friend Davies been sent again into the West. His going ended my stay in the East. Without him I was afraid to remain among the white people.
“The time has come for you to return, Iapi,” he said to me. “The white men are moving to force a treaty upon the Sioux, and now is your time to help them.”
It was very hard to say good-by to my friend, and harder yet to my Anita, who loved me, but who told me she could not go with me, though she wished to do so. “I cannot leave my poor mother, who is sick and poor,” she said.
I was not very wise, but I knew that I had no place, not even a lodge, in which to keep her, and so I said: “I will go on before you and prepare a place for you, and then sometime you will come and you will help me to teach my people how to live?”
To this she gave me promise and I went away very sad, for it seemed a long way from Standing Rock to Washington, and especially to a poor Sioux who knew of no way to earn money.
Some friends joined with my friend, the white soldier chief, to buy some clothes for me, and a few presents for my father and mother, and so, with a heart so big I thought it would burst within me, I took the cars for the West.
I sat without moving for hours—all night long—while the terrible engine of the white man’s fashioning sped into the darkness. At dawn I looked out anxiously to see if the land were familiar, but it was not. Only on the third day did it begin to awaken echoes in my brain. My command of English words will not permit me to express the wild thrill of my heart as I looked out of my window and saw again the wide-lying plains of Dakota, marked by the feet of the vanished buffalo. I was getting home!
Five years is a long time when it involves such mental changes as had come to me. It seemed that half a lifetime had passed sinceI sorrowfully took the steamer to go down the river to learn the white man’s language. I was a wild-eyed, long-haired lad then. Now I was returning, clipped and clothed like a white man, yet in my heart a Sioux.
There were changes in the country, but not so great as I had expected. Even the white man makes but little mark on these arid levels. The cabins were grayer, the fields a little larger, that was all. After dispossessing my people and destroying the buffalo, the white settlers had discovered that it was a grim country for their uses. Their towns seemed small and poor and sad.
My heart came into my throat as I crossed the Cannonball and entered upon Sioux land and saw the yellowed tepees of our cousins, the Yanktonaise, scattered irregularly along the river. This was still the land of my fathers; this much we had retained of all the bright world which had been ours in the olden, splendid days!
It was in June and the grass was still green. Herds of ponies were feeding on the swells, and one of the horses I drove lifted his head and neighed; he, too, remembered the old freedom. The sky blazed with light and the hills quivered as if in ecstasy of living. The region was at its best, delusively beautiful. I knew its moods. I knew how desolate and pitiless those swells could be in midwinter, how dry and hot of breath in July.
As we topped the hill I met a man driving a small team to a heavy wagon. He wore a wide hat which lay on his shoulders, and big smoked goggles hid his eyes. As he came opposite I perceived that he was a Sioux, and I called to him in my native tongue.
“Wait, my friend. Where are you going so fast?”
He turned his big glasses on me and said:
“First of all, who are you that speak Lakota so badly?”
“I am Iapi, the son of Shato.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, with a smile. “In that case you are getting back from school? I know you, for I am Red Thunder!”
Red Thunder! I was silent with astonishment. A picture ofhim as I saw him in 1876 rose in my mind. Tall and lithe he was then, with keen, fierce eyes, the leader of the war faction among the Yanktonaise, a wonderful horseman, reckless and graceful. Now here he sat in a white man’s wagon, bent in the shoulders and clad in badly fitting agency clothing. My heart was sick as I said:
“Friend, you are changed since the council on the Powder River. I did not know you.”
He took off his glasses and put aside his hat; his smile also passed away. He looked away to the west:
“My son, that is long ago and Red Thunder’s blood is no longer made from buffalo meat. His muscles are weak. He prefers to sit in his wagon and drive his ponies. The Great Spirit has forgotten his red children and the White Father is in command over us. I do the best I can. The old trails are closed; only one remains—the one made by Washington.”
I drove on, my exultation utterly gone. If Red Thunder was of this bitter mood, how would I find the Uncapappas who had been the conservatives of the tribe?
I passed close by some of the cabins and they disheartened me, they were so small and dirty. I was glad to see that some of them still retained the sweat lodge. Each home consisted of a shack and two or three tepees of canvas, and women were cooking beneath bowers made of cottonwood as of old. Their motions, and the smell of smoke, awoke such memories in me that I could hardly keep from both shouting and weeping.
The farther I went the more painful became the impression made upon me by these captives. They were like poor white farmers, ragged, dirty, and bent. The clothes they wore were shoddy gray and deeply repulsive to me. Their robes of buffalo, their leggins of buckskin, their beaded pouches—all the things I remembered with pride—had been worn out (or sold). Even the proud warriors of my tribe were reduced to the condition of those who are at onceprisoners and beggars. My heart was like lead as I reached the agency.
It hurt me to do so, but I reported at once to the agent and asked leave to visit my father and mother.
“They are expecting you,” he said. “You’ll find them camped just beyond the graveyard.”
I am glad that I saw my father and mother first in their tepee. My mother was cooking beneath a little shed of canvas. I called to her, and when she looked at me, without knowing me, something moved deep down in my heart. How brown and old and wrinkled she looked! Then I said, “Don’t you know me, mother!”
Then her voice rose as she came hurrying to me, calling: “My son! My son has returned.”
She took my hand, not daring to put her arms around me, for I looked, she said, exactly like the white man, but I pressed her hands, and then, while she sang a little song of joy, my father came out of his lodge and came slowly toward me.
I will not dwell on this meeting. I inquired at once concerning our chief. “He is still living in the same place near Rock Creek, and wishes to see you at once,” said my father. “The white men are trying to get our land again and the chief wants to have a talk about it with you.”
“Let us go down and see him to-night,” I replied, and for this reason we broke camp and started away across the plains.
It was a strange thing to me to help my father harness a team to a wagon. He whom I had seen a hundred times riding foremost in the chase, whom I had watched at break of day leading a band of scouts up the steep side of a sculptured butte, or with gun in hand guarding The Sitting Bull as he slept, was now a teamster, and I, clothed in the white man’s garments, was sad and ashamed. I could not but perceive that we were both more admirable as red warriors than as imitation Saxon farmers. That is my red blood, you see.
But my father was proud of me and of my power to converse with the agent. “My son,” he said, “our hearts are big because you are back with us. Now this is your duty. You must listen to all that the commissioners say and tell us minutely so that we may not be deceived. We hear that a big council sent out the papers which Washington wishes us to put our mark on, but The Sitting Bull and most of our head men are agreed that we will never do so. Once before, three years ago, they tried to get us to sell, but when the white men grew angry and said, ‘If you don’t do this we will take your lands anyway!’ The Sitting Bull rose and said, ‘You are crazy,’ and with a motion of his hand broke up the council and we all went away. Now the traitorous whites are coming again and we need you to listen and tell us what they say.”
I knew of the council he spoke of—General Logan was the man who had threatened them—but I had not heard that the chief had dismissed the sitting. It showed me that The Sitting Bull was still chief. This I remarked.
“Yes,” said my father, “he is head man of all the Sioux even yet, but the agent has set his hand against him. He gives favor to The Grass and The Gall and The Gray Eagle, who are all jealous and anxious to be set above The Sitting Bull. The agent has become bitter toward our chief because he will not do as he says, and because our father works always for the good of his people. He does nothing for himself alone, like many others.”
As we came to the top of the hill and looked into the valley my father pointed at a small two-room log cabin and said, “There he lives, The Sitting Bull.”
The chief was in a big tepee which stood near the house, and as we entered we found him entertaining Slohan and Katolan. He was seated in the center, cutting tobacco, while his guests ate from a dish of bread and meat. As I stood in the presence of these my honored leaders my heart swelled with longing for the good old time. Here was the dignity and the courtesy of the days of the buffalo. Thechief was partly in white man’s dress, but his hair was worn as of old and his gestures were those of a gentle host. His dignity, as well as the gravity of all the men, impressed me deeply.
He did not at first recognize me, but greeted my father, who, turning to me, said, “This is my son, returned from Washington.”
Then the chief smiled, and cried out: “Ho, my son! I am glad to see you. I have heard you were coming. You look so like a white man my eyes were blinded. You must tell me all you have done and all you have heard.”
I shook hands with each of the old men and took a seat near the chief, to whom I said: “Is all well with you? Does the agent treat you fairly?”
His face darkened, but he filled his pipe before he replied. “The agent is no longer my friend. He orders me about as if I were a dog. He refuses me permission to leave the reservation and checks me in every way. I think he means to break me, but he will never set his foot on my neck.”
I was eager to understand the situation, and I listened carefully while the others talked of the many injustices under which they suffered. The chief urged me to write to Washington to have things changed.
I agreed to do so, but promised nothing more, for I well knew such letters might work harm to those I loved. I foresaw also that my position in my tribe was to be most difficult.
“We are ready to live the new life,” declared the chief, “but we cannot farm the soil as the agent wishes. Go look at our fields. Each year they are burned white by the sun. The leaves of the corn are even now rolled together. The wheat is beginning to dry up. There is no hay and our rations are being cut down.”
An Indian setting fire to the grass