IIWhen the Hundred Died
“—And what became of the little girl, Grandfather?” I asked at length. “Did you marry her when you got a little bigger?”
For some time the old man had seemed unconscious of me as he sat there studying the ground, blowing softly now and then upon an eagle-bone whistle suspended from his neck by a rawhide thong. He fixed a squinting, quizzical gaze upon me and said: “That is a story, Grandson, and so is this whistle. I can hear it crying across many snows and grasses. Why are Wasichus always in a hurry? It is not good.”
Then he lapsed into meditation as before, blowing softly now and then upon the wing-bone, polished with the handling of many years.
“Sheetsha!” he said at last in an explosive whisper.
“What is bad, Grandfather?” I asked.
“I was thinking of all that is gone,” he answered, the meditative mood still strong upon him. “When I was a boy I heard the old people tell about a greatwichasha wakon[holy man] who did wonderful things; and his name was Wooden Cup. He had a vision of the Great Mysterious One, and that is how he got this power. He could make fire with his fingers, just by touching the wood; and he could see far off into the days that were going to be when babies that were not yet born would be walking with their canes. He saw it and he said it. A strange people would come from the sunrise, and there would be more of them than the bison. Then the bison would turn to white bones on the prairie. The mother earth would be bound with bands of iron. The sacred hoop of our people would be broken by the evil power of the strangers, and in that time we would live in little square gray houses, and in those houses we would starve. He said it, and we have seen it. I will not live in them, for the Great Mysterious One meant all things to be round—the sky and the prairie, the sun and the moon, the bodies of men and animals, trees and the nests of birds, and the hoop of the people. The days and the seasons come back in a circle, and so do the generations.The young grow old, and from the old the young begin and grow. It is the sacred way.
“My daughter in the little gray house yonder is good, but her heart is half Wasichu. She feeds me of the little that she has, and her man brings me wood. They say it is warmer in there; but I was born a Lakota, and I will die in a tepee. It would be well if my young bones had been scattered on the prairie to show where a warrior fell and to make a story, for it is not good to grow old.”
For a while the bone whistle called plaintively to him as from a great distance, and he listened, staring at the ground.
“I think I did not believe what Wooden Cup said,” he continued; “for I was young and the world was new. There was strangeness everywhere so that maybe something wonderful was going to happen. I remember, before I had sharp arrows for my bow, the way I would be in a valley all alone, and there would be no sound, and all at once the hills would be wrinkled grandfathers looking down at me and saying something good that I could almost hear.
“When we were camped near the soldiers’ town on Duck River that time, I heard the old people talking about the iron road the Wasichus were making all along Shell River [Platte]. And there was a long high dust of Wasichu wagons full of people always going and going to the sunset. It was part of what Wooden Cup saw. Little boys talked about it, and they said afterwhile all the bad Wasichus in the world would be yonder where the sun goes down; or if there were any left when we got big, we would just kill them all, and then everything would be the way it was when our grandfathers were boys.
“I remember there was a big meeting at the soldiers’ town [Fort Laramie] the day before we broke camp and went north to fight. It was the day more soldiers came to steal the road up Powder River if our people said, ‘no.’ I can see Red Cloud talking to the people and the Wasichu chiefs who came from the Great Father in Washington. They came to ask for the road through our hunting country; but the soldiers came to take it. When I remember, Red Cloud is standing on a high place made of wood, and he is taller than a man. I cannot hear his words, but he is very angry at the Wasichu chiefs. The men cry, ‘how,’ and ‘hoka-hey,’ and the women make the tremolo. We are going to fight, and I am scared; but I am glad too.
“So our people broke camp and we traveled fast with Red Cloud until we came to the Powder River country. There many others came to us. Much of what I remember about that time is like something I have dreamed, but some of it is clear; and I have heard much that is like remembering.But I can see my father going away with a band of warriors; and I can see them riding on a hill into the sky, until the sky is empty and the hill looks afraid. I can see warriors coming back, and my father is among them. They are driving many mules that they had taken from the soldiers, and some big Wasichu horses. I can see the warriors riding about the circle of the village with Wasichu scalps on their coup sticks. I can see my father making a kill-talk, and I can hear the drums beat between his tellings of brave deeds, while the people cry out to praise him. And while I listen, far away now, I can see Wasichu wagons burning yet and the people in them dying on the road that was not theirs.
“The big sun dance that summer made the hearts of the people strong to fight and die; and my heart was strong too. When I got a little bigger I would be a great warrior like my father. The little boys played killing Wasichus harder than ever; and we had victory dances and made kill-talks about the brave deeds we were going to do.
“Then it is winter. The snow is deep and heaped along the creek. The wind howls in the night, and the smoke whirls round inside the tepee. Maybe it is afraid to go out there. I crawl deep under the buffalo robe, for there are angry spirits crying in the dark.
“Then there are nights when the wind is dead and something big is crawling close outside without making any noise. If I peek out through the tepee flap, the stars are big and sharp, and everything is listening. Trees pop in the cold. It is the Moon of Popping Trees [December].
“That was the time when the hundred soldiers died. Lodge Trail Ridge is steep and narrow where it goes down to Peno Creek. It is near to where the soldiers built their town of logs, and that is where they died. I heard it told so often that when I think about it I must tell myself it was my father who was there and I was just a little boy at home with my mother.
“We had our village where Peno Creek runs into the Tongue, and Big Road was the leader of our band. The day was just coming when our warriors rode away to fight the soldiers and many others rode with them—Cheyennes, Arapahoes. They rode up Peno Creek; and when the sun was halfway up the sky, they stopped where the Wasichu road came down the steep, narrow ridge to the ford.
“It was a good place to fight; so they sent some warriors up the road to coax the soldiers out of their town; and while those were yonder, we hid in the gullies and the brush all along the sides of the ridge. No, I was just a little boy at home, but so our warriors did.
“And when they had waited and waited, there were shots off yonderand the sound of horsebacks riding fast. It is our warriors coming back. I can see them there at the top of the hill, and they have stopped to shoot at the soldiers. Then they turn and gallop down the ridge.
“The road is empty. It is still. We hear iron hoofs yonder. Now the soldiers come out of the sky up there. They stop and look. Now they are riding two together down the ridge, walking their big horses. There is a long blue line of them. Their breaths are white; their horses’ breaths are white. They are looking here and looking there, and they are seeing nothing. They are listening and listening. They are hearing their saddles whine. They are hearing iron hoofs on the frozen road. Maybe a horse shakes its head, and they hear the bridle bit.
“It is still. There is no sound in the gullies and the brush. We are holding our ponies’ noses so that they cannot cry out to the big Wasichu horses.
“The first soldiers are at the bottom of the ridge.”
Eagle Voice paused. Leaning forward tensely, with a hand at his brow, he gazed beyond the tepee wall, listening open-mouthed and breathless.
“What do you see, Grandfather?” I urged.
He threw both hands aloft and in a high excited voice, cried:
“Yonder! He is standing up! He is waving a spear! It is the Cheyenne, Little Horse!Hoka-hey! Hoka-hey!It is a good day to die! It is a good day to kill and die! Poof!” He clapped his hands like gunshots. “The brush and the gullies are alive! There is noise everywhere—cries everywhere. We are swarming up along the sides of the ridge. The arrows are a cloud. They are grasshoppers clouding the sun. The soldiers’ horses are feathered. They are screaming in the evening that the arrows make. They are crowding back up the hill in the smoke of the guns. Saddles are empty; feathered soldiers are falling. They are fighting hard and falling, full of arrows, and the kicking horses upon them are sprouting feathers.
“They are all dead at the ford.... Halfway up the ridge they are dead.... They are huddled together fighting at the top with the dead around them—and they are dying. A great cry goes up and they are covered with warriors swarming in.
“It is over.”
The old man strove to light his pipe, his bony hands trembling as with palsy. I steadied the bowl and held a lighted match to it. “Thank you, Grandson,” he said, in a voice gone thin and quavering on a sudden. For some time he sat studying the ground through the slowly emitted smoke. Then, handing the pipe to me, he continued. His voice had lost its formertone of harsh immediacy and seemed weary with its burden of dead days remembered.
“There was a dog—a soldier-chief’s dog. He was tall and thin and long-legged, and he was crying and running towards the soldiers’ town. Somebody shouted: ‘Let him go and tell the other dogs back there!’ But many bow-thongs twanged, and he went down rolling in a cloud of feathers.
“A storm was coming on. The sun was covered, and the wind came very strong and very cold.
“I remember when the warriors came back to the village. The night was cold and dark and the wind was howling. There were many voices shouting louder than the wind out there, and the sound of many hoofs. When I ’woke, I thought the soldiers had come to kill us all when our warriors were away, and I was afraid. But my mother said: ‘It is our people, and they have killed many enemies. Do you not hear them singing?’ She stirred the fire and fed it, so that it would be bright and warm for my father. Then she went out into the dark full of shouting and singing and the wind; and I listened and was afraid again, for I could hear women’s high voices mourning.
“But my father was not dead. There was one at his head and one at his feet when they brought him in and laid him on a robe beside the fire. His face looked queer when he smiled at me, and it was not the war paint. He was almost somebody else. His hands and feet were frozen and there was an arrow deep in his hip—a Cheyenne arrow. When they cut it out, he grunted but he did not cry. He shivered and shivered by the hot fire until awichasha wakoncame and made sacred medicine. Then it was morning and my mother was still sitting there beside my father, and he was sleeping.
“There was mourning in many of the lodges—high, sharp voices of the women crying for those who died in the battle and the wounded who died coming home.Oosni! Lela oosni!It was cold, very cold.”
For some time the old man sat with his eyes closed and his chin on his chest. At length he said, as though muttering to himself:
“They all died, a hundred soldiers died in the country that was ours. But the forked-tongued ones who sent them did not die. I think they are living yet.”