The Powder River (26 page)

The rest of the Cheyennes were presumed scattered, and likely wounded or dead. Scouts were able to find no trace of anyone getting to Red Cloud’s camp, sixty miles to the northwest. Without food, clothing, and blankets, the Indians wouldn’t be able to hold out long, the news dispatches agreed.

Some of the news stories spoke of the Cheyennes as an inhuman problem, like beasts enduring a hard winter. A few struck a tone of romantic nostalgia for these “last of the free-roaming Redmen of the Plains.” Most seemed more interested in chuckling at the ineptitude of the government than in the human predicament of the Indians. Imagine letting a few starving Indians outwit the U.S. Army! they hooted. Imagine having mismanaged the poor creatures into this embarrassing dilemma!

Mr. Miller had written a ringing editorial about the matter that seemed really to understand the Cheyennes. “They will never return to Indian territory unless tied hand and foot and dragged there like so many dead cattle. It means starvation to them. I implore you for justice and humanity to those wronged red men. Let them stay in their own country.”

When Elaine got up to stump to the front door, she thanked Mr. Miller for his editorial. She had to resist touching him on the arm in gratitude.

“Yes,” he said in his rapid-fire speech, “this business shows the bankruptcy of Grant’s Indian policy. I think the administration will retire next year in humiliation.” He smiled wolfishly. “Are you a Democrat?” he asked.

Taken aback, she could think of nothing to say and started for the door. She made a point of walking as gracefully as she could.

“Say,” Mr. Miller called after her, “what’s your interest in this?”

She spoke simply, without turning around. “My husband is one of the Cheyennes.”

He pounced. “Can we talk? Do an interview? Will you make a statement?” He rummaged on a desktop for paper and lead pencil. “Were you there? Did you”—he fumbled for words—“get your injury in the fighting?”

She pegged painfully away from him. She resisted saying, “Human blood and bones to you are just a way to sell newspapers.” She shook her head emphatically. “I have nothing to say.”

“Then come back tomorrow, will you? There’ll be more news tomorrow. It may be over tomorrow.”

Elaine tried to incline her head toward him in a way that was polite, and even thankful.

Smith pondered. Raven sat silent, the pipe gone out now, resting on its beaded skin bag in front of the fire.

Though he did not understand, he had the strong feeling that telling Raven his dream was part of his way, part of laying down his old life and taking up the new. And part of his new life was that he was trusting such feelings.

He looked at Raven, the older man’s face patient, neutral, leaving the decision entirely to Smith. Yes, he wanted Raven to know what they had wrought together. He wanted what he saw and whatever it meant to be shared, to become part of the power of the Human Beings.

“Yes, I dreamed,” he said. “I dreamed of water.”

Smith considered for a while and decided to skip over the images that had come to him that night in passing, fragmented, incomplete. “I think water was in all my dreams,” he said. “I want to tell you of two episodes that seem like one large one.

“I was in a day of tribulation. I was walking in Bighorn Canyon,” which Raven knew was the deep, walled canyon of the Bighorn River above the trading house where Smith grew up. “I had walked along the river for a while, clambering over the boulders on the steep sides, laboring over the various difficulties, never able to move fast, or freely. Then I had to start walking up, up toward the walls. I walked up and up the talus, up further than there was to go, up forever, struggling, slipping back, getting nowhere, and I would never get anywhere. Yet I was doomed to this walk. I knew the doom, felt the hopelessness in every step, and knew I would ever claw my way upward, pointlessly, stupidly.

“Suddenly I came to the rock wall.” Raven would know these yellow walls, hundreds of feet high. “The end. Nowhere to go. I had not the courage and energy to cry out. I gave up. I fell to my knees. I put my head down where the gravel met the rock wall, and lay my body down flat on the hard, dry gravel, and wept. Wept and wept.

“And then noticed. At last noticed. Water. I raised my face out of the dirt and looked. Water. Water had sprung forth from where I had laid my head, the barren point where the gravel joined the rock. Water, real, live water.

“I turned and looked. It trickled down toward the river. It made its way around rocks and cactus and across patches of dry sand, and into swales of grass, and past and around and through every sort of obstacle, toward the river. I couldn’t see where it flowed into the river.

“I laid down in the water, facedown, full length, tried to get every inch of myself into this little, gorgeous trickle. Facedown, I knew I would suck in the water in a moment, and I would drown. And that was OK, that was even lovely, to drown in this gift of water. And after a few moments, I did suck it in, deeply and confidently, and the miracle took place. I breathed it. It was water, and it gave life, like the air.

“I breathed into that miracle, drew it into my body, wanting to be alive now, truly alive, and the water came into me and over me and washed me completely. It even picked me up and rocked me like a baby. I lolled in it, luxuriated in it, I may even have fallen asleep there, rocking in that water like a great, warm bed.

“When I felt like I was waking up, I was an otter. Not an otter of the river, an otter of the sea, which is similar but bigger. Delicious, so delicious, to be sleek and slender, and agile as the wind. I played. I played. For hours, I cavorted in the water. My mate and cubs came out of our den in the earth and we played together, we darted and did loops and nuzzled against one another and dived through the waves and … We were acrobats of the sea.

“I dived down and got something to eat, a creature off the ocean sand with a spiny back called a sea urchin. I brought several up for the cubs and my mate, and one for myself—they were orange, as orange as the yolk of the duck egg. At the same time we plopped them whole into our mouths and got the taste. It was the best taste imaginable. I savored it and closed my eyes and rolled over and over in the water, and over and over again, flying high in the sea, until I had sucked all the taste away.

“And then I looked at my mate with a gigantic eye and whistled raucously at her.” Smith smiled at Raven. An otter’s whistle was a mating call. “Horny old otter. Horny
young
otter, full of the seed of life and wanting to hump the world full of it.” He chuckled at himself, his mind back there feeling horny in the water.

“I have no idea why I was an otter. I had no inkling that there was a message in it. And still have none. I
was
the otter. It felt like … just for the crazy, wild-hair, blue-sky joy of being an otter.” He looked up at Raven, met his eye, spoke directly. “I felt like that otter feeling was what life …” He shook his head firmly. Wrong way.

He thought, and said at last, “Those moments were the most pleasurable of my life. Praise be to Maheo for granting them to me.”

The newspapers indicated two days later that it was over, or at least over as a hot news event. Elaine went back to the
Herald
office and pointedly ignored Mr. Miller as she read the stories. Now the accounts were full, dwelling on the bloody details.

The main group of escaped Cheyennes crossed a divide one bitter night and took refuge in some bluffs along Hat Creek. They were led, it said again, by Little Finger Nail, who seemed to Elaine too young for such responsibility. Captain Wessells pounded their position with cannon all the next day, getting no response other than two or three random shots. When he went to inspect the site, expecting to find nothing but tattered corpses, Wessells found nothing. Before the barrage the Cheyennes under Nail had slipped away to the next ridge, unseen.

But the next day the soldiers caught up with them again, this time in a dry gulch known as Warbonnet Creek, in a hole in the cutbank, where the Indians threw up a little breastworks. Since the Cheyennes had no chance, and knew it, Wessells went out front and called to them several times to give up. No answer.

Finally the shooting began, and Little Finger Nail cried out, “If we die, our names will be remembered. They will tell the story and say, ‘This is the place.’”

The soldiers fired for about an hour with only a few answering shots—the Cheyennes had almost no ammunition—then went up close to the breastworks and fired through. When no one inside could be living, they jumped on top of the breastworks, but one more shot came, grazing Wessells’ head.

The soldiers fell back. From the hole in the cutbank came the high beautiful voice of Finger Nail, singing his death song. Then a few other thin voices joined it.

The soldiers charged the breastworks and cut loose a withering fire. When they fell back, waiting for the smoke to clear, the last three Cheyenne warriors leapt forth brandishing their weapons—Finger Nail, Roman Nose, and Bear. The soldiers dutifully shot them down.

The dead were eighteen men, five women, and two children. Among the bodies lay six other women and children, hurt but alive. Blood stood pooled on the frozen earth.

A soldier looked into the hole and muttered, “God, these people die hard.”

The remnant of Cheyennes, the wounded and frozen who had lived when they wanted to die, named that miserable piece of cutbank the Last Hole.

Elaine Cummings wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, gave the spying Mr. Miller a volcanic look, and stumped out.

She had made up her mind.

In the new year, 1879, a couple of weeks after Smith’s piercing sacrifice, Raven and Lisette walked through the Cheyenne camp in Lost Chokecherry Valley, speaking quietly to each family in the various brush huts. They walked around about dusk, because people would be assembled at their homes preparing the evening meal, or eating, and the two could find nearly everyone. They didn’t walk together, but a little separately, Lisette behind. Raven would come into camp, and the man of the house would offer him the honored seat of the visitor behind the fire. Raven would decline the offer, speak a few more words, and move on. Lisette would step close a few moments later, and likewise speak a few words, and move on.

Raven said to each group of people, “Vekifs has—become Whistling Otter.” They nodded, and accepted this news with a calm that belied its magnitude. The words meant, the man we knew as Vekifs, the son of Dancer and Annemarie who turned into a white man, has learned by his sacrifice, and the powers have granted him a vision. He has laid down his old life and taken up a new one, a life right for a Human Being. I, Raven, declare him a new Human Being, Whistling Otter.

Lisette said to each group of people, “Whistling Otter will take Rain as his wife.”

These pieces of news quickened the people with hope. Though Whistling Otter kept his chest covered, they had all heard about his sacrifice and dared to hope that it went well. Perhaps it was a sign that the old powers moved among the people again. Even the name Raven had chosen, an otter calling lustily to his mate, suggested renewal.

The Sweet Medicine chief, Little Wolf, said nothing, but he thought maybe this one, schooled in the ways of the white man but deeply a man of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio, this Whistling Otter might be cut out for leadership. In the transition to a new time, a time dominated by white men, Whistling Otter might be the best guide.

After dark, though, three of Red Cloud’s Lakotas came in from Fort Robinson. They went straight to talk to Little Wolf, and their demeanor told everyone the news was bad. Whistling Otter stood in the circle with the others and listened to the horrors. Half of Morning Star’s people were killed or wounded, the other half scattered across the plains and fleeing for their lives. No one needed to be told what this cold spell was doing to people who didn’t have adequate clothing, much less enough blankets.

Whistling Otter, known to the whites as Smith, gathered his family and told them simply and regretfully. He had to go to Fort Robinson to minister to the wounded and the frostbitten. He promised not to let the soldiers lock him up and keep him. His marriage to Rain would have to wait until he got back.

Then Whistling Otter borrowed a horse (he had given his mounts to Raven in return for guiding him through the sacrifice) and set out through the night alone. He did not even wait for the three Lakotas, who might go back tomorrow. He must get where he was needed. Later, he promised himself, he would ask the Powers to let him do his helping not all over the Great Plains but at home, at the post on Powder River at the mouth of the Little Powder. He said in his head, I’ll be home in the spring, Mother.

Chapter 4

Elaine held the account book. Her hand felt the texture of the canvas cover, but her mind was out on the frozen plains, beside a gully known as Warbonnet Creek. She was seeing the wounds and hearing the blood-choked cries of the Cheyennes who died there a few days ago.

She kept her fingers away from the tattered edges of the two bullet holes that ripped through the book front to back. They cried out too eloquently what had happened to the man who created the book, Little Finger Nail. Nail had been wearing this book strapped to his back when he was shot. Shot from the front, they said.

These items were his, the account book filled with his beautiful drawings done with colored pencils, the shell-core necklace, the bird he had worn in his hair. She picked up the bird. It had looked so alive on his head, alert and watchful, and possibly capable of endowing Nail with that sweet voice, as he thought it did. Now it was just a dead thing.

Captain Wessells had permitted her to look over the belongings the soldiers had taken from the dead. Nail’s book was going back to Washington City with Wessells’ report, as a document that spoke for the Cheyennes. The other items would be returned to relatives, if the dead owners could be identified.

Elaine set the bird down. She tried not to picture what had happened. Since they refused to go back to Indian territory, Wessells decided to force them into submission. He locked them up. Then he deprived them of food. Then of water. And when they broke out in desperation, headed into the January night without even decent clothing and blankets, he ordered them shot down. And then tracked down.

A man as stupid as Wessells didn’t deserve to live.

Elaine shook with rage.

She had to get out before Wessells came back.

She pegged out of post headquarters without even a word to the orderly. Vernon May’s new leg or not, it hurt. She imagined the orderly watching her walk from behind, laughing at the cripple.

She went down a few buildings, to where Lieutenant Hancock and his wife Ruth had their quarters. The door stuck. She grabbed the door jamb, balanced on her peg, and whammed the door with her good foot. Still stuck. She kicked it furiously again. It banged open, and she burst into tears.

Luckily, no one was home. She stumped over to a chair by the wood stove, half fell into the chair, and held her palms flat to the heat, bawling.

People here had been kind to her. They had understood that she was exhausted from her long trip, by train from Omaha to Sidney and then by stage to Fort Robinson. James Hancock and Ruth had been superb, offering her a place to stay. The post surgeon, Dr. Moseley, had been gracious and considerate. Even Wessells had been respectful. No one had asked her how in hell she could go so crazy as to marry an Indian, especially an Indian who was about to make war on the entire U.S. government. And unarmed.

But it was all so awful. About half of Morning Star’s Cheyennes were dead, half of one hundred and thirty human beings, and most of the others wounded or frostbitten. The post hospital was full, and more would die. The bodies of the dead were stacked outdoors, frozen, like cordwood. Hideous.

She had asked the living who was dead. Many she knew—Morning Star’s son and daughter, for instance, Nail, and the woman Nail loved, Singing Cloud. Many, she was sad to acknowledge, were only names to her. How could she have lived with them, traveled with them, fought the soldiers with them, slept beside them, and never learned their names? Never once touched them when they were alive, and warm?

She believed now that Adam was not among the dead. The living Cheyennes all said that he had gone with Little Wolf, who had made a hidden camp somewhere, no one knew where, because the soldiers couldn’t find it. Little Wolf’s band intended to go on north when they’d recuperated, to Powder River. So Adam was not exactly safe, but he was probably alive.

A great comfort, she thought bitterly, to be a divorcée, not a widow. She supposed she would have to make herself a divorcée in the white man’s legalities soon. Gay, brittle, awful word,
divorcée
.

She took control of herself. She must begin to write her report for Captain Wessells. She got up and fetched the pen and paper James Hancock was loaning her from the kitchen table. Wessells had asked her to write down her experiences with the fleeing Cheyennes, including whatever plea on their behalf she might want to put in. He would send it to Washington City with his reports, he said. She sat at the little kitchen table, reminding herself not to make a mess with the ink.

Good, she thought. Splendid. She intended to beat Wessells, the army, the Indian Service, and the entire Interior Department over the head with their own stupidity until they bled from their eyes and ears.

“Who’s asking?” challenged the orderly.

Whistling Otter resisted smiling to himself. “Dr. Adam Smith Maclean.”

The orderly nodded suspiciously. He surely didn’t know his mouth was hanging open. And he surely thought he was being mocked by the big Indian. Doctor, indeed. “I don’t know if Captain Wessells is here.” The orderly wheeled and disappeared into another room with a semblance of military snap.

Well, Whistling Otter didn’t look much like a doctor. He’d left his Prince Albert coat, gray trousers, and Jefferson boots at home. He was wearing a breechcloth, leggings, and moccasins, and his hair was greased. Breechcloth and leggings incensed the white folks because they showed a half-moon of ass cheek on either side. If you wore one, you were sure to get treated like a dirty savage.

The orderly held the door open and jerked his head at Whistling Otter.

“Yes,” said the man behind the desk. Captain Wessells, who ordered all the butchery, was a little man, and had the bland face of an anonymous functionary.

Whistling Otter stepped close, so he could tower over the officer. “I am Dr. Adam Smith Maclean,” said Whistling Otter in his best enunciation. Look at me, soldier, and you’ll see what I am. But Wessells kept his head down, like he was looking at his papers. “I am a Cheyenne. I was the physician at the Cheyenne-Arapaho Agency.” Now Wessells looked up at him suddenly. “I came north with the people of Little Wolf and Morning Star. I have heard that I’m wanted by the law. I didn’t do it, and I want to face whatever charges are out against me.”

“The Cheyenne doctor?” Wessells asked.

“Yes.”

“Your father was a white-man trader on the Yellowstone?”

“Yes.”

“Just a moment.” Wessells jumped out and scurried into the outer room. Whistling Otter heard his voice but couldn’t make out the words through the closed door.

Wessells came back into the room and stood behind his desk, awkward and uncertain. “I did have some papers on you,” he said, “but not anymore. What were the charges?”

Whistling Otter shrugged. “I heard kidnapping and murder. But the girl I’m supposed to have kidnapped is my daughter, and her father died of a heart attack.”

“In Kansas, is that right?”

Whistling Otter nodded.

Wessells got some papers out of a drawer and rummaged through them. He took a lot of time and didn’t seem to find anything. Either he was disorganized or he was stalling. Why would he be stalling? Whistling Otter wasn’t avoiding arrest.

At last the captain found a document he could read from. Eight names, he sounded off. Whistling Otter recognized Wild Hog, Tangle Hair, Left Hand, Porcupine, and Blacksmith. “Those men are being extradited to Kansas at the request of the governor. They will be tried for various crimes, including murder. They’re leaving tomorrow.”

Wessells looked Whistling Otter in the eye for a change. “Your name’s not here. These are the only men the governor thinks there’s enough evidence to get an indictment on.”

So. Whistling Otter took a deep breath and let it out. So. What else he saw was that little Wessells had no more appetite for blood. Too late, little man, too late.

“May I go? I want to examine the people in the hospital, and talk with them, and bring them some comfort.”

Wessells nodded slowly. Nodded again. He’s going to ask me where Little Wolf is, thought Whistling Otter. And I’m going to lie baldly.

Captain Wessells said, “Of course, Doctor. Would you wait in front of headquarters first, please? Someone wants to see you.”

“Ready to go now?” Ruth Hancock said from the front door. She was a bright, pert woman in her middle twenties, the sort of woman who lights up a room with her vivacity and is unaware of it. “Shangreau is ready, and I’ve brought the horses around.”

Elaine pushed her writing materials away and nodded yes. She wasn’t eager to go, her mood was too somber, but her mood wouldn’t change as long as she was at Fort Robinson. Ruth had suggested that Elaine might like to see where Crazy Horse, the great Lakota leader, had been bayoneted, and later died, and hear the story of how it happened. Elaine did want to see it before she left the Western country for good.

Elaine accepted a boost into the saddle from the half-breed scout who held the horses, the fellow named Shangreau. Elaine studied his face a little. She would never again look at a half-breed, or an Indian or a Negro, as though he were furniture, or livestock, or landscape, as she regrettably had done in her youth. At least Adam had given her that. Amazing, she thought, how much you put into a marriage, and how little you may take away from it.

They clucked to the horses and were off. It was Ruth’s idea that since Elaine was self-conscious about how she looked walking, she should ride everywhere, even a couple of hundred yards from quarters to the guardhouse and the adjutant’s office. “A lady’s got to make em look,” Ruth said saucily. Ruth did make em look. With her wooden leg and her hair hacked off at the shoulders, Elaine felt far past that point, and was painfully amused that Ruth would say it.

In front of the adjutant’s office, Shangreau recounted the affair. The winter after the Greasy Grass fight, where the Sioux and Cheyennes wiped out Custer’s men two and a half years ago, Crazy Horse had kept his people away from the soldiers. But it had been a hungry winter, the hungriest any but the old could remember, and in the spring Crazy Horse had felt he had no choice but to bring his band to Fort Robinson and surrender their arms in exchange for rations. His people were the last of all the wild Lakotas to surrender, except for Sitting Bull, who went to Canada rather than capitulate.

The following September, Shangreau said, the army asked Crazy Horse to help scout against the Nez Perces, who were then fleeing through Montana Territory toward Canada. Crazy Horse answered that he would fight the Nez Perces until the last one was dead. But the interpreter, Frank Grouard, mistranslated his words, reporting that he threatened to fight the white troops until the last soldier was dead. Some people thought Grouard made this mistake intentionally because he was afraid of Crazy Horse.

General Crook then ordered Crazy Horse arrested. When the chieftain came to Fort Robinson under assurances of his personal safety, the commanding officer, Colonel Bradley, ordered him put into the guardhouse, the little building Shangreau now nodded to. Crazy Horse was escorted toward the building under heavy guard, both soldiers and Indian police. Many other Indians were crowded around. The Indians were excitable. Crazy Horse had become a symbol among the Sioux. The young reservation Indians idolized him as the last representative of the romantic idea of the old life, of the buffalo days. To others he was a dangerous throwback, and still others were jealous of his influence. All groups were afraid something bad might happen now.

As they walked toward the jail, Crazy Horse’s arms were held fast by Indian police, and the troopers had their bayonets bared and pointed at him. When Crazy Horse saw the jail cells, he made a quick motion, grabbing for a concealed knife. Alarmed, the Indian police held him tight, and one of the soldiers ran him through from behind. He died that night, and his parents took his body into the nearby hills.

“I think he wanted to die,” said Shangreau simply. “I think he chose to die rather than live the new way, on the reservation.”

Elaine sat her horse with her head down. For the Plains Indians, these days, nothing but tragedy. Intentions, plans, good will, effort—everything came somehow, perversely, guided by a malignant fate, to tragedy.

Then she realized someone was calling her. “Mrs. Maclean,” shouted a voice. “Mrs. Maclean.” It was one of the orderlies from the hospital, trotting toward them and waving. “Captain Wessells says for you to come quick.”

Wessells? What for? Was he getting in a hurry for her report? Maybe she’d finally rouse the courage to spit in his face. Elaine kicked her horse to a lope—she rode much better now—and cantered back toward headquarters.

In front of the building stood Adam Smith Maclean, her husband. Former husband. Good Christ.

The first thought she was aware of was that this time she was glad she looked down at him, because looking up at him would shake her control. Her second thought was that he couldn’t see, beneath her skirt, that shed lost a leg. She reined her horse to a stop with her legs on the side away from him so he wouldn’t get any idea. She wasn’t ready for this.

My God, Adam.

He wished desperately she would speak.

They stared at each other.

“Elaine,” he said. Feelings roiled in him, uncertain and contradictory—they surged, out of control. That little son of a bitch Wessells, not telling him, setting him up. I could have come and gone without her knowing.

“I love you,” he did not say. But it occurred to him. She looked magnificent, erect in her saddle, manifestly well healed, radiant, beautiful. She had cut her hair off to her shoulders in the traditional sign of mourning of Cheyenne women. With the hurt and dying in the hospital, and the dead stacked nearby, that gesture reached him, touched him nearly beyond his control.

Goose pimples ran down his arms.

He also did not say, “How is Sheriff Masterson?” He noticed the temptation to utter those mockingly bitter words and thought, The old Vekifs is still within Whistling Otter. And Vekifs is strong. Observe the humiliation you feel. Observe the gall. Observe that you do want to know where Masterson is, and why.