Dalva (50 page)

Grandfather was born late that year in a tipi on December 11, 1886, on the verge of the worst weather in the history of the Republic, a fact he always relished as a closet romantic. The drought followed by this severe winter drove literally hundreds of thousands of farmers back east, abandoning much of western Kansas and Nebraska, though only for a short time, and freezing a million or so cattle on the hoof. The Dawes Act became effective in 1887 but due to the impoverished nature of the area it was a few years before the land grabbers took full advantage of Indian innocence in matters of property. Even William Tecumseh Sherman defined a reservation as “a worthless parcel of land surrounded by white thieves.”

Michael's litany contained nothing new except the names of Kicking Bear's children, which enabled me to figure out that Rachel had been Kicking Bear's granddaughter. Kicking Bear had ridden alone out to Nevada where he met Wovovka, and consequently began the Ghost Dance movement among the Sioux, joined by Iron Hail and Ben American Horse and others. The great chief Sitting Bull was noncommittal on the Ghost Dance but was murdered as a direct result of the controversy. During this period the government sought greater control over the Sioux by banning the Sun Dance (the ban wasn't lifted until 1934) and forbidding the killing of wild game on reservations, a rule so eccentric it could only have emerged from Washington. But this is all a matter of public record, of well-documented history.

Northridge himself drowned as an Indian in his Badlands camp. He lost the checks and balances of his religion and education, though he continued his journal in the few but intermittent periods of lucidity. Were it not for his wife and the occasionally noted responsibility of his son he would have surely died from his foolhardiness. He had sold one of his tree nurseries located in Omaha to support his charges, buying cattle, grain, and whiskey.

June 1889

I have been drinking far too much in this heat and have been led to fear for my mind. I have learned that so many years ago when Crazy Horse was murdered my classmate the Lieutenant ordered that his legs be broken in many places so he could be jammed into a small wooden coffin. Perhaps God was telling me that day to shoot this man and I did not listen to His voice, thus insuring greater indignities.

My little son takes great joy in riding on the saddle with me & weeps with rage when he is not allowed it. When the cattle are killed he tugs at the guts with the rest of the children & I was a little troubled. To some extent or range I have become what the Sioux are in terms of custom and language. But I am also Quite different and I am not allowed by my soul to forget this. My love for these people whom my gov't and religion have abandoned is great, but I have begun to fear that becoming a Sioux is an illusion I may not indulge. . . .

This was the first time in several years he had expressed such doubts, which actually were perceptions of the limits of how much he could do to help. In effect, he had become a privately endowed Indian agent and the logistics were becoming impossible. When you are traveling west on Interstate go in South Dakota and look off to the left at the country between Kadoka and Box Elder the term “badlands” becomes euphemistic. Yet this group which grew smaller in the blistering heat of summer stayed there as the location exhausted their options. The oldest of them also knew that it was the secret burial spot of Crazy Horse, a place so alien that his bones were safe there, though there is some speculation that the bones were eventually moved.

There is another consideration that took years to occur to me though Michael noticed it immediately: the journals tended to form Northridge's conscience which became a good deal more idiosyncratic as the years passed. By 18go he had spent a full twenty-five years “in the field” as missionaries call it, and his sense of accomplishment had become as brutalized as the landscape itself. His secretive business dealings had always provided a semi-schizoid overtone, a restrained bet-hedging,
the orphan always mindful of his future nest. As an obvious instance, the business documents show that he met with his nursery agents who had been summoned to Rapid City in August of 1889. One of these, a Swede from Illinois, stayed on for three days with Northridge and received the design and instructions for the building of the current homestead. For reasons of his inherent secrecy the entire carpentry crew was secured in Galesburg, Illinois, and they worked with little or no contract with the local Nebraska population.

Still, the farm was there for more than a year before Northridge moved in with his wife and son and spent virtually the rest of his life, a little over twenty years, planting trees. Eighteen eighty-nine was the year the Great Sioux Reservation was further broken up through the efforts of General Crook and the most powerful of the area's land grabbers, with the loss of eleven million acres. Northridge saw that the twilight was quickly fading into dark. By the onset of winter in November he was back in Buffalo Gap alone with Small Bird and his son. He leased his pasture to a local rancher for two steers for the winter's meat. He kept separate from the far-flung ranching community by saying that he was doing a fresh translation of the New Testament into the Sioux language. ae was regarded as peculiar rather than dangerous except by the lieutenant, now a lieutenant colonel under General Miles, who was aware-through his network of surveillance by the “metal breasts,” Sioux police in the employ of the government—of the power Northridge held among the Sioux. Despite his sense of his own abysmal failure, the Sioux thought of Northridge as a holy man in his many roles as one who fed them, who taught them to grow things no matter that they despised it, and who had become a capable if amateur doctor over the years.

The beginning of the end was a visit from Kicking Bear in mid-January of 1890.

Jan. 13, 1890

Kicking Bear made a not altogether pleasant visit this morning before daylight. I have met this great warrior several times over the years & have always found him friendly though somewhat frightening. In his presence Small Bird is nearly rigid with fear though she warmed for him last evening's stew & went out in the
snow to feed his horse. He is said to have inherited the powers of Crazy Horse and wears around his neck a stone worn by that greatest of men. He is lonesome for his own children and holds my son on his knee & stares long and hard at Aase's doll as if it were a religious artifact similar to the Kachina dolls brought up by traders from the Southwest. He tells me of a vision that came to him on Jan. 1st when the sun was eclipsed. I draw him an involved picture of why the sun was eclipsed & he is not interested in this morsel of science. He is on his way to Nevada to see the renowned shaman, Wowavka, who has devised the Ghost Dance much talked about for years. Grinnell in a letter has given me a description of this & I attempt to dissuade Kicking Bear from his travels as the Dance appears a mishmash of heretical Christianity and Paiute beliefs. He is sure of himself & sleeps the day, leaving at dark as he has been forbidden to leave the reservation though the metal breasts are awed by him, and avoid contact.

Michael and Frieda wakened me by midmorning, neither of them wanting to do it by themselves. I had slept in my clothes in a sprawl of his manuscript, part of which had fallen on the floor and been stained by pup pee. This amused him as did the sight of the brandy bottle on the night table. I accepted the coffee tray from Frieda and shooed them away. She looked a bit bleary herself from her evening with Gus. I burned my mouth on a quick cup of coffee, stuffed the manuscript in my purse, and made my way out of the house without the civility of a goodbye.

Back at the homestead Lundquist was sitting on a milk stool in the open door of the barn saddle-soaping the draft-horse harness for the second time in a month. The geese were watching attentively and the fact that the harness had not been used in forty years, and very probably wouldn't be used again did not decrease the thoroughness of the job he was doing. He had prepared a little joke about Frieda's having spent the night with Gus in a motel and perhaps there should be a shotgun marriage. I agreed, noting that the distant motel I had stayed in with Michael was a synonym for sinfulness with
the elders in the community. They all seemed to know about the “naked” movies and two friends of Naomi had gone so far as to actually see one at the motel. Before I could get away Lundquist wondered if his sore tooth might justify a cold beer.

It was a relief to be home and my energies returned despite my bedraggled sleep. I ignored the mail except for a postcard from Naomi saying she would be home by late Friday which was this evening, in order to get ready for the arrival of Paul and Ruth. She and her friend had been offered the possibility of a National Science Foundation grant for their work, which she was reticent about accepting.

Lundquist gulped his beer in a trice and went back to work, after requesting a pat of butter for Roscoe, the dog's favorite treat. I made a pot of coffee, and Hopped on the den couch in order to finish Michael's manuscript, knowing that he was eager for a response. I was in a hurry because the day was pleasantly cool and I wanted to take Peach on a long ride.

Michael wrote well, if eccentrically, on the “threat of dance,” and the irony that after all the years of the Indian Wars the settlers and government had now whipped themselves into a virtual frenzy over the fact that many tribes, but foremost the Sioux, were being allowed to perform this new Ghost Dance. The attitude can be best summarized by an editorial in the Chicago
Tribune
in the spring of 1890 that stated, “If the United States Army would kill a thousand or so of the dancing Indians there would be no more trouble.” This presented the solution rather succinctly though it was difficult to get that many Sioux to stand still in one place to be shot. The most the government was able to manage were the three hundred or so Sioux men, women, and children, though two-thirds women and children, who were massacred at Wounded Knee later that year in December during the moon of the popping trees. But again this was a matter of the frequently ignored public record. One can imagine a Caucasian witness to hundreds, perhaps thousands of Sioux joining hands and dancing slowly in a circle for days on end, wildly painted but dancing without the accompaniment of drums, quietly with rain falling, then by late November with snow covering the perfect circle. Wovovka had assured them that if they continued to dance “the earth would shake like a rattle” and all dead warriors and
ancestors would return to life, and the great herds of buffalo would sweep back across the prairie.

April 3, 1890

Kicking Bear' returned in the night from his trip to the Paiutes, rather gaunt & fatigued, though in haste after a few hours' rest to be on his way home. I dissuaded him from this as his health needs mending & in private Small Bird is angry as she sees him as a threat to our peace. I tell her she has become a mother first and a Sioux second, though the difficulties of her life justify this.

Late in the afternoon Kicking Bear prepares a jug of water & takes an elk-calf bag & we walk across a field and up the same draw where I shot an elk winters before. We sit on adjoining rocks & he draws from his bag a dozen small cacti which I recognize from my correspondence with Grinnell to be
Lophophora williamsii
or “peyote” as it is commonly called. We ate these bitter fruit as one would crabapples, then gathered wood for a fire. When we had a fair-sized heap of wood we both began to bitterly retch & flush ourselves with the jug of water. Soon enough the plant took over & I was inside the skull of my mother looking into the eyes of my father & out the back of his head into the prairie. I was the thoughts of my mother & father and through the evening and night I was a buffalo, a rattlesnake, a badger deep in his hole. I was the open sewer at Andersonville & the guts of horses, I was a woman in the city of Chicago, and then, alas, I was with my beloved Aase flying slowly over the continents & oceans looking down at whales & ice floes & great white bears. Intermixed with our visions we chanted before the fire, oftentimes new songs:

The world of the dead is returning,

over the earth I see them coming,

our dead drive before them

elk and deer and herds of buffalo,

as the Father has promised.

Near dawn in my last vision I was with Crazy Horse and his daughter & we played with her toys on the burial platform & the sky was thick with birds. He told me not to take the cacti again which troubled me into consciousness . . . .

As a missionary of the Wesleyan Methodists, a sect that forbade dancing, Northridge now began seven months of dancing, and the ingestion of the cactus whenever his spirits flagged or whenever it was available, or so he wrote later—there are no journal entries until a month after Wounded Knee when he had traveled to the homestead with his wife and son. He had been brought to his senses by a grotesque event: When he arrived late on the scene of the massacre at Wounded Knee with Black Elk and twenty warriors, Black Elk had instructed him to stay well back from the gunfire. Northridge later reflected that Black Elk's sense of the appropriate never left him, and he wouldn't allow Northridge, who was ill with pneumonia, to offer himself up in this manner. Consequently, Northridge watched the cessation of rifle fire for a few minutes through his telescope, which then caught the dozen or so small children, none of them over five, emerging birdlike from a covert, thinking the battle was over. All of the children were sliced to ribbons by the resumption of fire, so light in their bodies that the bullets sent them rolling and tumbling down the hill toward their dead parents. After the “battle” Northridge was arrested by the army during his maddened efforts to bandage back together what was left of these children. He was incarcerated, then put under medical care, then released on orders by General Miles under the condition that he not return to the Dakotas or make further contact with the Sioux.