Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (48 page)

I
N THE MOON OF
Greening Grass, 1877, when Crazy Horse brought his Oglala Sioux to surrender at Fort Robinson, various bands of Cheyennes who had joined him during the winter also gave up their horses and arms, placing themselves upon the mercy of the soldiers. Among the Cheyenne chiefs were Little Wolf, Dull Knife, Standing Elk, and Wild Hog. Together their people numbered about one thousand. Two Moon and 350 Cheyennes, who had been separated from the others after the Little Bighorn fight, went down the Tongue River to Fort Keogh and surrendered to Bear Coat Miles.

The Cheyennes who came to Fort Robinson expected to live on the reservation with the Sioux in accordance with the treaty of 1868, which Little Wolf and Dull Knife had signed. Agents from the Indian Bureau informed them, however, that the treaty committed them to live either on the Sioux reservation
or on a reservation set apart for the Southern Cheyennes.
The agents recommended that the Northern Cheyennes be transferred to Indian Territory to live with their kinsmen, the Southern Cheyennes.

“Our people did not like this talk,” Wooden Leg said. “All of us wanted to stay in this country near the Black Hills. But we had one big chief, Standing Elk, who kept saying it would be better if we should go there. I think there were not as many as ten Cheyennes in our whole tribe who agreed with him. There was a feeling that he was talking this way only to make himself a big Indian among the white people.”
¹

While the government authorities were deciding what to do with the Northern Cheyennes, the Bluecoat chiefs at Fort Robinson recruited some of the warriors to serve as scouts to help find scattered bands which were still out and were unwilling to accept the inevitability of surrender.

William P. Clark, a cavalry lieutenant, persuaded Little Wolf and a few of his warriors to work with him. Clark wore a white hat while in the field, and that was the name the Cheyennes gave him—White Hat. They soon discovered that White Hat genuinely liked Indians, was interested in their way of life, their culture, language, religion, and customs. (Clark later published a scholarly treatise on the Indian sign language.)

Little Wolf could have stayed on at Fort Robinson with White Hat, but when orders came from Washington for the Cheyennes to be marched overland to Indian Territory, he decided to go with his people. Before leaving, the apprehensive Cheyenne chiefs asked for a final council with Three Stars Crook. The general tried to reassure them, telling them to go down and have a look at the Indian Territory; if they did not like it they could come back north. (At least that was the way the interpreters translated Crook’s words.)

The Cheyennes wanted White Hat to go south with them, but the Army assigned the escort duty to Lieutenant Henry W. Law-ton. “He was a good man,” Wooden Leg said, “always kind to the Indians.”
²
They called Lawton the Tall White Man, and were pleased when he let the old and sick people ride in the soldier wagons during the day and gave them Army tents to sleep in at night. The Tall White Man also saw that everyone received enough bread and meat and coffee and sugar.

On the way south they followed familiar hunting trails, keeping away from towns, but they could see that the Plains were changing, filling up with railroads and fences and buildings
everywhere. They sighted a few small herds of buffalo and antelope, and the Tall White Man issued rifles to thirty warriors chosen by the chiefs so they could go out and hunt.

There were 972 Cheyennes who started from Fort Robinson in the Moon When the Ponies Shed. After traveling for almost a hundred sleeps, 937 of them reached Fort Reno on the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation, August 5, 1877. A few old people had died along the way; a few young men had slipped away to turn back north.

Three Fingers Mackenzie was at Fort Reno to meet them. He took away their horses and what few weapons they had, but this time he did not shoot their horses, promising that their agent would return them after they had settled down to farming on their new land. Then he transferred the Cheyennes to the care of the agent, John D. Miles.

After a day or so the Southern Cheyennes invited their northern relatives to a customary tribal feast for newcomers, and it was there that Little Wolf and Dull Knife first discovered that something was wrong. The feast consisted of little more than a pot of watery soup; this was all that the southerners had to offer. There was not enough to eat in this empty land—no wild game, no clear water to drink, and the agent did not have enough rations to feed them all. To make matters worse, the summer heat was unbearable, and the air was filled with mosquitoes and flying dust.

Little Wolf went to the agent and told him they had come only to take a look at the reservation. Now, because they did not like it, they were ready to go back north as Three Stars Crook had promised they could do. The agent replied that only the Great Father in Washington could decide when or whether the Northern Cheyennes could go back to the Black Hills country. He promised to get more food; a beef herd was being driven up from Texas for them.

The Texas Longhorns were scrawny, and their meat was as tough as their hides, but at least the Northern Cheyennes could now make soup as their relatives did. In late summer, the northerners began to fall sick with shaking chills, hot fevers, and an aching of bones. The sufferers wasted away in their misery. “Our
people died, died, died, kept following one another out of this world.”
³

Little Wolf and Dull Knife complained to the agent and the soldier chief at Fort Reno until the Army at last sent Lieutenant Lawton, the Tall White Man, to make an inspection of the Northern Cheyenne camp. “They are not getting supplies enough to prevent starvation,” Lawton reported. “Many of their women and children are sick for want of food. A few articles I saw given them they would not use themselves, but said they would take them to their children, who were crying for food. … The beef I saw given them was of very poor quality, and would not have been considered merchantable
for any use.”

The post surgeon had no quinine to alleviate the epidemic of malaria which was decimating the northerners. “He frequently locked up his office because he had no medicines and went away, because he did not want to be called upon by the Indians when he could do nothing for them.”
⁴

The Tall White Man called the chiefs together, not to talk to them but to listen. “We came down on the word of General Crook,” Dull Knife said. “We are still strangers in this country. We wish to get settled down where we are to live permanently and then we will send our children to school.”

The other chiefs and head men indicated their impatience with Dull Knife’s words. He was not talking strong enough. They held a short consultation and then chose Wild Hog to speak for them.

“Since we have been at this agency,” Wild Hog said, “we have drawn from the agent no corn, hard bread, hominy, rice, beans, or salt; yeast powder and soap only once in a while. The sugar and coffee we get only lasts about three days, and is issued for seven; and beef about the same. The flour has been very bad, very black, and we cannot make it rise.” As for the beef cattle, Wild Hog added, “a good many were lame, and looked as though they had been starved to death.”

Other chiefs spoke up then and told of the sickness and death among the people. The Cheyennes had agreed to use the white man’s medicine, but they could find no doctor who would give them any. If the Tall White Man would let them go hunting,
they said, they could have buffalo meat to make them well again.

Only their agent could give them permission to hunt buffalo, Lawton replied, but he promised to ask Three Fingers Mackenzie (then commanding at Fort Sill) to intercede for them.

Mackenzie, who had made a career of killing Cheyennes and their horses, was able to afford compassion for the survivors now that they were defenseless. After receiving Lieutenant Lawton’s reports, Three Fingers complained strongly to General Sheridan: “I am expected to see that Indians behave properly whom the government is starving—and not only that, but starving in flagrant violation of agreement.” At the same time, he advised the commander at Fort Reno, Major John K. Mizner, to cooperate with the agent in obtaining rations for the Cheyennes. “If the Indians from hunger run off contrary to the wishes of the agent to get buffalo, do not attempt to cause their return, or the troops will be placed in the position of assisting in a great wrong.”
⁵

Not until the coming of the cold moons did agent Miles grant permission for the Northern Cheyennes to go out for a buffalo hunt, and then he put some of the southerners to spy on them to make certain they would not run away to the north on the horses he had returned to them. The buffalo hunt was so miserable a failure that the hunters would have joked about it had not everyone been starving for meat. Buffalo bones were everywhere on the southern Plains, ghostly heaps of bones left by white hunters, but the Cheyennes could find nothing to hunt but a few coyotes. They killed the coyotes and ate them, and before the winter was over they had to eat all their dogs to supplement the agency’s meager rations of beef. Some talked of eating the horses given to them by the agent for hunting, but the chiefs would not hear of this. If they decided to go back north they would need every horse they could get.

All this while, Three Fingers and the Tall White Man had been trying to get more food for the Cheyennes, but no response came from Washington. When pressed for an explanation, the new Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz, said that “such details do not in the nature of things come to the knowledge of the Secretary. It is the business of the Indian Office.” Yet Schurz
had been appointed Secretary for the express purpose of bringing reforms to the Indian Office. He declared that the discontent among the Northern Cheyennes was traceable to chiefs who wanted “to keep up the old traditions and to keep the other Indians from work.” He admitted that appropriations were not sufficient to purchase enough rations to comply with treaty provisions, but hoped that through “utmost economy” and “careful management” the Indian Office would be able to get through the year with only a small deficiency. (Some of the Indian Territory chiefs who went to Washington that year found Schurz amazingly ignorant of Indian matters. The Cheyennes called him Mah-hah Ich-hon, Big Eyes, and marveled that a man with such enormous organs of vision could know so little.
⁶
)

33. Dull Knife. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

With the coming of the warm moons, mosquitoes began swarming in the reservation bottomlands, and soon the Northern Cheyennes were again afflicted with fever and chills. To add to the illnesses, a measles epidemic struck the children. In the Moon of Red Cherries, there were so many burial ceremonies that Little Wolf decided the chiefs must go and confront agent Miles. He and Dull Knife were both getting old—well past the half-century mark—and they knew it did not matter very much what happened to them. But it was their duty to save the young people, the tribe itself, from being blotted off the earth.

Miles agreed to meet them, and Little Wolf was spokesman. “Since we have been in this country, we are dying every day,” he said. “This is not a good country for us, and we wish to return to our home in the mountains. If you have not the power to give us permission to go back there, let some of us go to Washington, and tell them there how it is here, or do you write to Washington and get permission for us to go back north.”

“I cannot do this now,” the agent replied. “Stay here for one more year, and then we will see what we can do for you.”

“No.” Little Wolf spoke firmly. “We cannot stay another year; we want to go now. Before another year has passed, we may all be dead, and there will be none of us left to travel north.”

Some of the young men then asked permission to add their voices to the council. “We are sickly and dying here,” one said, “and no one will speak our names when we are gone.”

“We will go north at all hazards,” another said, “and if we
die in battle our names will be remembered and cherished by all our people.”
⁷