Joseph M. Marshall III (6 page)

A broad-shouldered man with serious, chiseled features and a shy slender boy with wavy brown hair were an unlikely pair, but they became a familiar sight in the Hunkpatila camp. Light Hair emulated his teacher from the way he rode his horse to how he wore a quiver of arrows across the small of his back. The boy was a willing student and never failed to attempt to do anything High Back Bone asked him to do. He was slowly being shaped into a warrior in much the same way the fire-cured bow is made.

The preferred process for curing a wood stave for a bow was to cut it in winter when the sap was down, hang it high in the lodge beneath the smoke hole, and simply allow it to cure for five years. But the Lakota had made their living and protected themselves with the bow for countless generations and had learned effective shortcuts out of necessity. Using fire, it was possible to cure a green stave in a matter of days.

The summer of his eighth year, when the Hunkpatila were encamped near the southern fork of the Powder River, Light Hair and High Back Bone found a stand of young ash trees guarding a spring in a gully. A straight tree a little taller than the boy was selected. Before he instructed the boy to chop it down, High Back Bone smudged it with sage and offered tobacco bundles to the tree to acknowledge its life and the sacrifice it was about to make. With a hand axe the boy cut the tree down, marking the bottom. They hauled it to their camp where a fire with a deep bed of coals was already burning.

The slender stave, no wider than a man’s wrist, was stripped of its bark and hung over the fire. At appropriate intervals it was turned so that it dried uniformly.

“The fire is like life when it strengthens a man through hard times,” a bow maker would point out.

Over a bed of hot coals the fresh stave, mostly white in color, slowly turned a deep yellow as it became harder and harder. After the fire-cure came the tools: a hand axe, several knives, a flat piece of sandstone, and elk antler tines. An outline was carefully drawn on the stave to mark the bottom end, and to show the excess wood to be removed with the axe. That done, a knife was used for the next phase of shaving off excess wood.

The bow maker watched his pupil closely, with a patient word here and there, making sure the bow was taking shape as it should. Then he took the bow and refined it, explaining his methods as he worked. Finally, the bow had the desired shape and design. In the exact middle it was two fingers wide from side to side and tapered away to each end, which was about the size of a man’s little finger. From the top to bottom profile it gradually tapered away to each end.

On the top near the tip a single notch was carved in one side for the bowstring. On the bottom two notches were carved, one on each side. Just as it is important to mark the bottom of the tree so that as a finished bow it remains in line with the flow of life, upward from the Earth, when the bow is kept in its natural direction, it is less likely to break. Strength comes from balance, as all bow makers know. The bow stands on its feet, bow makers are quick to point out, like humans do.

With the antler tine the bow maker rubbed the wood, giving it a smooth sheen as well as closing the grains to give it more strength. With the addition of a sinew string the weapon became a force to be reckoned with. Shaping a stave into a bow was the story of any boy’s journey on the path to becoming a warrior.

High Back Bone watched the slender boy and wondered what fires of adversity lay ahead on his journey. Of one thing he was certain: the boy would become strong as a result, in the same way the ash stave became harder as it dried over the coals. The fires of adversity, as High Back Bone knew, were already smoldering along a wide, flat river far to the south known as the Shell.

The Shell River flowed north out of the Medicine Bow Mountains, turned east on the sagebrush plains, then southeasterly as it entered the short grass prairies until it emptied itself into the Great Muddy River after a slight turn to the northeast. People traveled west along this river, though they were calling it the Platte and then the North Platte. The corridor along the river was called the Oregon Trail. The travelers were a trickle the two summers past, but now the trickle grew to a thin but steady stream. These were a people strange to the Lakota, though not unknown. Their kind had been encroaching on Lakota lands for several generations, perhaps for nearly a hundred years, though only a little at a time.

These travelers along the Shell were from the nation of whites to the east beyond the Great Muddy River. They had already established outposts mostly on the fringes of Lakota lands, and traveled up and down the Great Muddy in large smoke-belching houseboats. A trading settlement northeast of the Medicine Bow Mountains along the Shell became an outpost called Fort Laramie. Soldiers in blue coats came to the fort, carrying knives as long as a man’s arm. Thus they became known as the Long Knives. And they and the travelers heading west along the Oregon Trail were the first wisps of smoke from the smoldering embers that would grow into flames of adversity for all the Lakota, and for Light Hair.

In the summer of his ninth year Light Hair’s Hunkpatila encampment moved southeast to the area northwest of Fort Laramie. They were curious about the stories coming from the southern encampments that seemed difficult to believe—stories of lines of wagons pulled by teams of cattle, mules, and horses moving west along the Shell, not unlike the migration of large buffalo herds. Men, women, and children rode in the covered wagons and many walked as well.

The corridor on either side of the Shell River had been a trail for elk and buffalo for thousands of years. Human beings used it as well. The first whites in the area were trappers and mountain men, who learned of the trail from the Ponca people to the east and the Kiowa and Blue Clouds, called the Arapaho by many, to the south as well. When one ant sets off on a trail, others follow.

Light Hair accompanied High Back Bone to the Shell. There they joined over a hundred other curious men and boys sitting on the hills and ridges north of the river to watch a line of wagons plodding westward. The stories were true.

Amusement was the predominant state of mind. Men and boys stood, sat, or reclined in the grass and among the rocks on the hills. There were many questions and much speculation. Where were these people going? And why did they obviously leave behind their homes? Some of the older men told alarming stories connected with whites. The whites, they said, likely carried illnesses that were very dangerous. The Kiowa far south of the Shell had lost half of their people in less than two months to disease brought among them by whites, it was said. Perhaps as many as four thousand Kiowa had died, it was said, and this only the past summer.

The Lakota themselves had suffered. The Sicangu living near the Great Muddy had lost over a thousand to the running-face sickness, called smallpox, just over ten years earlier. One of the large houseboats came up the Great Muddy, stopping at various landings to trade or take on wood. People and goods from the boat had come among the few Sicangu who met the boat to trade. Very soon after the boat departed upriver smallpox swept through several encampments. People became ill, their faces and chests marked with pustules. Death came in a matter of days. Though medicine men worked day and night, they were powerless against the illness that moved like a wind-driven fire. The only possible cause of the sudden and terrifying outbreak was contact with the people and goods from the houseboat. In the autumn, word came down from the upper reaches of the Great Muddy that the People of the Earth Lodges, the Mandan, had been all but wiped out by the same running-face sickness. They had also traded with the houseboat.

The men and boys who heard the stories for the first time stared somberly from the hills and ridges at the line of wagons and people. For some, curiosity turned into a sense of foreboding. Perhaps something should be done, a few suggested. Perhaps they should be prevented from coming into Lakota lands. In spite of their concerns, the Lakota men did nothing more than watch. Most, if not all, of them had never seen a white man up close.

Light Hair watched as well, but he didn’t know what to think. The distant wagons and people yielded no specific features. Though some of the Lakota described white men as having beards, it meant nothing to those on the hill because the people in the wide valley below were small, shadowy outlines. On either side of Light Hair were men and boys with brown skin, long hair flowing in the breeze or worn in tight braids, most of them dressed in leggings, breechclouts, and moccasins due to the warm weather. Dozens of pairs of curious or intense dark eyes fixed on the spectacle below. He knew them, who they were and what they were. The people below, although he was aware there were men, women, and children, were nothing more than distant shapes moving slowly to some unknown destination for unknown reasons.

Light Hair had never seen a wagon.
Canpagmiyanpi—
“Wood that is rolled,” they were called. No doubt difficult to move since four horned cattle in line two by two were needed to pull them. He returned to the Hunkpatila encampment with High Back Bone, saying little and nothing at all about the wagons and the shadowy travelers.

Four

One fact of life for the Lakota was movement. Clouds, wind, the buffalo—all were in constant motion. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn also lived a never-ending cycle. Life itself moved from infancy, to childhood, to adulthood, and to old age, and all the various layers of life also had a beginning, and an ending.

Like most Lakota boys approaching the age of twelve, Light Hair was a proficient hunter. The game trails and seasonal migration habits of white tail and black tail deer and elk in every region in which the Hunkpatila people pitched their lodges—from the Black Hills to the Powder River country—were common knowledge. Like all hunters, Light Hair learned to sit motionless in a driftwood blind along a creek for the better part of an afternoon waiting for a white tail to move within the effective killing range of his bow, which was as far as he could throw a stone with all his might. He knew to cut the jugular in the animal’s neck and the femoral arteries on either side of the back legs so that the warm carcass would bleed out profusely and so that the fresh meat wouldn’t spoil.

His skill with the bow was approaching the expert level. More than a few grasshoppers on the fly fell to the deadly flick of his arrows. Though he was not much larger than he was at the age of ten, there was the confidence of a man in the way he handled a weapon and in the manner in which his eyes appraised everything around him. More and more there was the stillness of a deep pool. If the taunts of other boys about his light hair touched a nerve, he didn’t give them the satisfaction of a reaction. Perhaps it was this characteristic that drew a thin, gangly boy to him, a boy with dark, inquisitive eyes.

Lone Bear and Light Hair became close friends and shared the usual activities of boyhood. They ranged far beyond the encampment in pursuit of adventures small and large as they yearned for the excitement they knew was waiting for them as young men. On their horses they patrolled the perimeters of the camp or hid among rocks on a hilltop to watch for enemies, wishing, almost hoping, that one would appear so they could be the first to spread the alarm, or charge forward to meet the threat.

When no enemies came, they resorted to games like the one called Knocking-Them-Off-the-Horses. Armed with thin willow or driftwood rods and sitting astride their horses, they faced one another, looking for the right opening to poke the opponent hard enough to force him off the horse. More often than not it was Lone Bear who fell to the ground. When they tired of that they would practice the wounded-man-drag. They fell from their horses pretending to be wounded, a long rope attached loosely around their chests and the other end around the horses’ necks. The horse was expected to drag the “wounded man” to safety. Sometimes the horses cooperated and other times they were more interested in grazing in a particularly lush patch of grass.

But their favorite game was imitating a buffalo chase. First one, then the other, would be the “buffalo” and gallop away on his horse from the “hunter” who approached from the right side at a full gallop, a blunt arrow held to the bow string and aimed at the running buffalo. Even in the absence of a real herd thundering across the prairie, the game did present some of the real dangers of a buffalo chase. Uneven ground, unexpected obstacles, or a horse swerving unexpectedly could cause both riders to lose balance and fall. Of course, one tumble from a galloping horse was often enough to motivate the rider to keep his seat the next time, no matter what. Skinned elbows, knees, and faces, not to mention a roll through a cactus patch, were the wounds that turned playful boys into earnest men one game and one small adventure at a time.

There were, of course, other amusements that were not as dangerous. Light Hair and Lone Bear often passed most of a quiet summer afternoon reclining on a grassy slope observing the land and the sky. Such episodes of seeming inactivity had purpose, however, because they provided intimate contact with everything around them that could be detected by any of their senses. It was this kind of connection that enabled a being like the wolf to become part of the land, not simply live on it. While boys didn’t have the wolf’s unimaginably keen sense of sight, smell, and hearing, they nevertheless like the wolf learned to connect with the land. That connection would make them skillful hunters and dangerous warriors. While the dangerous games were the substance of the preparation for the trials that lay ahead of them as the hunters and warriors they would be, moments of quiet introspection and observation would help them to understand why.