Great Plains (6 page)

McLaughlin eventually induced Kicking Bear to leave the reservation. McLaughlin hoped that with the coming of cold weather the dance would die out. Sitting Bull told the people that this year the weather would stay fair, and they could dance all winter, and he was right. McLaughlin sent a telegram to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington recommending that rations be suspended for all Ghost Dancing Indians at Standing Rock. The Commissioner sent a telegram back asking for the names of Indian “leaders of excitement or fomenters of disturbance” who should be arrested. McLaughlin told the Indian police that they might have to arrest Sitting Bull, and they resigned. McLaughlin appointed new police, under the command of a Yankton Sioux named Henry Bullhead. Catherine Weldon could not get the Indians to listen to her, was outraged when Sitting Bull proposed marriage, and finally left Sitting Bull's camp in disgust. Sitting Bull drove her in his wagon to the town of Cannonball. In Chicago, Buffalo Bill Cody found out that Sitting Bull was to be arrested, persuaded an Army general to give him the arrest order, took a train to Standing Rock, and was on his way to Sitting Bull's camp with a wagonload of candy and presents, drunk, when McLaughlin delayed him long enough to get the order rescinded. McLaughlin heard that Sitting Bull planned to leave the reservation, so on the morning of Monday, December 15, he sent forty-three members of the Indian police to Sitting Bull's camp to arrest him. About a hundred U.S. Cavalry, with a Gatling gun and a gun that shot explosive shells, waited in reserve three miles away.

One of the Indian police said later, “Sitting Bull was not afraid;
we
were afraid.” In Sitting Bull's camp were men who had killed a lot of people in the past, men who had recently decided that they were bulletproof. The police rode into the camp before dawn and found Sitting Bull in bed. The camp woke up right away and backed the police up against the cabin when they tried to put Sitting Bull on his horse. One policeman had Sitting Bull around the waist, two others had his arms. Somebody yelled something; Sitting Bull yelled something; a man named Catch the Bear shot Bullhead; Bullhead, falling, shot Sitting Bull; then, thousands of shots were fired. Sitting Bull, punctured so often in the past, was hit seven times. He, his son Crowfoot, Jumping Bull, his son Chase-Wounded, Catch the Bear, Blackbird, Spotted Horn Bull, and Brave Thunder died. The police lost Little Eagle, Hawk Man, Arm Strong, Middle, Afraid of Soldier, Bullhead, and Shavehead. Throughout the fight, no English was spoken.

“Someone went to quite a bit to write that down,” Jim Yellow Earring said, leaning on the fence to read the plaque. “Ol' Sittin' Bull—he didn't give a damn if he was comin' or goin'.” I copied the inscriptions on the plaque and the obelisk in my notebook. Then I asked Jim Yellow Earring to write for me the Sioux words for rattlesnake, for walking-along-a-river-crossing-back-and-forth, and for yellow earring (
Zewiy—
“I wisht I'd'a' used that name in the service”). The Sioux script taught at Indian schools looks as pretty as spoken Sioux sounds. The sun was now shoulder high. It made the tassels of the grass look red, and it caught the white spot under the wings of nighthawks that flew above us as erratically as the insects they were chasing.

I made sure I had a place to turn around, and then we started out. I was afraid I'd never get up the steep gully, but I did, my rear wheels tiptoeing along the edges of the ruts. It seemed longer this way than it had coming in. Jim Yellow Earring told me about an argument he had had with the Farmers Home Administration when he asked for a loan; about his days in the Army in Fort Benning, Georgia; about his mother, who was dead; about a man named Straight Pine, a short, stocky fella who used to run the best damn Hereford cattle in the area; about how the Crow Indians in Montana drink Lysol, also known as “Montana gin,” which will sure get you drunk, but which can collapse your lungs if you don't mix it right; about how much he loved to dance; about how his mother used to take him and his brothers down to the Grand River to play; about how he owned all the land I was looking at, and so what if they wouldn't let him run cattle in here he'd take and run cattle in here anyway; about what a tough guy Bullhead (he pronounced it “Bull'id”) was; about how Sitting Bull pulled a good shot on Custer; about all the white people who dig ruts in this road on their way to see Sitting Bull's camp. He kept telling me, “My side! Your side! My side!” He did imitations of different accents—Navaho, black, New York. He sang a song about being a thousand miles away from home, waitin' for a train. He asked me, “Do you ever get lonesome? My mom died nine years ago, and we used to live—well, did you see that old washing machine we passed back there? Well, that's where our house was.”

“That was your washing machine?”

“It was
my mother's
washing machine.”

4

I
N
former times, Indians thought the white men's custom of shaking hands was comical. Sometimes two Indians would approach each other, shake hands, and then fall on the ground laughing. Indians swam differently than white people, built smaller campfires, sharpened knives only on one side, and did not use the stars to guide themselves. White butchers saw through bones and cut meat across the grain, but Indians usually cut with the grain and rarely sawed bones. Some Indians would not eat meat cut across the grain. Indians usually did not (and do not) grow a lot of hair on their faces or arms or legs, and some found the hairy bodies of white men disgusting. Indians were shocked by the way white parents grabbed their children by the ears to discipline them; because of this custom, some Indians called white people “Flop Ears.” Almost all Indians, at one time or another, composed verses about events in their lives or visions they had seen, but they did not use rhyme. For many Indians, swearwords or “Whiskey!” were the first English they learned. In front of white people, Indians did not like to refer to each other by name.

Indian children played with toy bows and arrows, and often put each other's eyes out. There were many one-eyed Indians. Indian children did not have to be in bed by a certain hour, and often stayed up through the night. The historian Francis Parkman, when he lived in a Sioux camp in 1846, kept a short stick for punching the heads of kids who climbed on him in his sleep. An Indian camp in no danger of attack was likely to be noisy all night long. People chanted, dogs howled, women mourned, gamblers shouted. Many Indians loved to gamble, and played guessing games with objects hidden in one hand or the other. Many also knew card games like monte, poker, and seven-up. In winter camps, gambling was sometimes about all the men did.

Most Indians did not know how old they were. They measured time in days, moons, and winters, but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes. On the eve of an important event, when they were afraid they might oversleep in the morning—for example, when a war party discovered an enemy camp and wanted to make sure to wake up and attack it at first light—Indians would drink a lot of water before going to bed.

Indians loved crowbars. They used them for digging prairie turnips, bitterroot, tobacco root, and holes for tipi poles. When freshly pitched, tipis were nice inside, with the grass still green and fresh. It took twelve to fourteen tanned buffalo hides to make an average-sized tipi, and as many as fifty to make a big one. As the hides aged, they became like parchment, and let more light through. At night, a tipi with a cooking fire inside was a cone of light. A fully equipped tipi had almost as many ropes, lines, pegs, and parts as an old-time sailing vessel. Women were in charge of putting up and taking down tipis; Kit Carson, the famous frontier scout, lived for years in a tipi with no idea how to pitch one. Tipi poles were made of the slender trunks of young lodgepole pines, and were rare items on the treeless plains. Tribes made special trips to the Rockies or the Black Hills to get them. Since the poles dragged on the ground behind horses during moves, they quickly wore down. All plains tribes constructed tipis with poles set one after the other in a central framework of three or four poles. If you lay on your back and looked out the smoke hole in the top of the tipi, the poles made a spiral going up into the sky.

In the barter system of the plains, five tipi poles might equal one horse. Price in this system varied with circumstance, but the horse served as a loose standard. One good horse might be worth a panther skin, an eagle tail of twelve feathers, eight or ten peyote beans, two gallons of shucked corn, or six tanned buffalo robes. Mules were hardier and rarer than horses, so one mule was worth at least two horses. Indian women liked to decorate their dresses with the smooth lower incisors of the elk; one horse was worth 100 to 150 elk teeth. Two knives, a pair of leggings, a blanket, a gun, a horse, and a tipi might be the price of one wife. A wife, if she worked hard, could prepare ten buffalo robes for trade in a season. At the traders', one buffalo robe was worth from seven to nine cups of sugar. A white mackinaw blanket with a black stripe—Indians preferred that style, so it was more expensive—cost two or three robes. Indian men learned that the more wives they had, the more robes they had to trade. A dressed deer skin equalled from fifteen to twenty rifle balls and powder, an elk skin from twenty to twenty-five. All the meat of one buffalo cow was worth from twenty to forty balls and powder, depending on how far away the herds were. A prime beaver pelt was worth $6 to $8 a pound. For ten months of work, setting traps in cold water, dodging Indians, starving, freezing, getting attacked by bears, a trapper made about $150. The boatmen who brought trade goods up the Missouri as far as the Yellowstone made $220 for the round trip. Prices at the trading posts averaged nine times higher than back East. There were no pennies on the Great Plains—west of St. Louis, the nickel was the smallest coin. Indians used gold and silver coins for buttons on their shirts. When a band of Indians plundered a Missouri River keelboat carrying $25,000 worth of gold dust in buckskin sacks, they poured the gold dust onto the sand and kept the buckskin sacks.

All kinds of Indians lived on the plains. In fact, after the coming of the horse, iron, and colored beads, but before smallpox, alcohol, and the Army, Indians generally prospered and multiplied on the plains. The Sioux, who moved there from the lake region of present-day Minnesota in the mid-eighteenth century, were also called the western or the Teton Sioux, to distinguish them from the Yankton and the Santee Sioux, who remained in the East. On the plains, the Teton Sioux soon numbered seven bands: the Hunkpapa, the Oglala, the Miniconjou, the Oohenonpa, the Sihasapa, the Sicanju, and the Itazipcho. The Sioux's favorite enemy, the Crows, were originally Hidatsa who had moved west from the Missouri River in the 1700s after an argument between two chiefs. The Crows were also called the Absaroka, and they hunted in the Yellowstone valley. Later, other bands of Crows moved even farther west, to the Rockies, so then there were River Crows and Mountain Crows. To the north of the Crows were the Blackfeet, a tribe which killed white trappers by the score, and which ranged into the Canadian plains. The Blackfeet divided themselves into the Bloods, the Piegans, and the Northern Blackfeet. To the northeast of the Blackfeet were the Atsinas, who did not trap beaver, and the Crees, who did. Traders liked the Crees better than the Atsinas, which made the Atsinas hate the Crees. There were Plains Crees, Woodland Crees, and Swampy Crees.

The Cheyenne, who also once lived in Minnesota, hunted the region of the Black Hills and the central plains. In the early nineteenth century, many Cheyenne moved south, to the present-day Oklahoma and Kansas, so the tribe became the Northern Cheyenne and the Southern Cheyenne. To the west of the Cheyenne were their allies the Arapahos, also divided into Northern and Southern branches, and to the west of the Arapahos, roughly speaking, were the Shoshone, sometimes called the Snakes. In the southwest were the Kiowa, the Kiowa Apache, and the Comanche. The Comanche lived mainly in present-day Texas, and raided as far south as Central America. There were five major bands of Comanche, with names that meant Honey Eaters, Those Who Turn Back, Antelope, Buffalo Eaters, and Root Eaters. Lots of other tribes, like the Pawnee, the Miami, the Otoes, the Osages, the Arikara, the Delawares, the Tonkawas, the Kansas, sometimes came to the plains to hunt or fight from the south and east, as the Flatheads and the Nez Percé and the Utes and the Apaches came from the west. I pass over which several of the plains tribes were also known at one time or another as the Gros Ventre (Big Bellies). Often, bands within the tribes were further divided into sub-groups along kinship lines. Most of the tribes would steal horses from or fight most of the others. The fact that their culture tended to fragment itself into so many different tribes and bands was probably a disadvantage to the Indians in the long run. But it certainly was a big help to early pioneers trying to come up with colorful place-names.

The Sioux disinfected the navels of newborn babies with the powder from a puffball. The Hidatsa, when travelling in winter, packed babies in cattail down. Sioux (and other Indian) children nursed until they were as old as four or five. White observers of Indian encampments were surprised to see children standing on the ground and nursing at women going about their chores. The Crows thought long hair was fashionable, and sometimes gummed horsetails into it to increase its length. In the 1830s, the Crows had a chief called Long Hair whose hair (all his own) was eleven feet six inches long. Measuring Long Hair's hair was a favorite pastime of white travellers. The Crows were skilled horse thieves, and stole from everybody, including each other. They claimed never to have killed a white man except in self-defense. They explained to one trader that if they killed white men there would be fewer to rob.

When the Crows killed a buffalo cow, they sometimes raped it. Crow men and women sometimes made love in public, in broad daylight. The Cheyenne were famous for their chastity. Many Cheyenne women belonged to a housewives' guild, which taught domestic arts and decoration. Cheyenne women got together and bragged of their tanning or decorating feats the way the men bragged of feats of war. Many pieces of Cheyenne hide decoration and beadwork survive in modern museums. The Plains Cree never washed their clothes, just bought new ones at the trader's twice a year. The Blackfeet, when their leather shirts got dirty, repainted them. The Blackfeet let each thumbnail grow long, until it crooked like a claw. They often made presents of their relatives' corpses to whites. Cheyenne men, as an exercise in spiritual devotion, sometimes stood on a hill from sunrise to sunset without moving except to keep their faces turned to the sun, or stood in water up to their necks all day. The Crows chopped joints off their fingers in mourning so often that they hardly had a whole hand among them. The men generally saved their thumbs and one or two trigger fingers.