Wolf Mountain Moon (7 page)

“If you are going to kill him, then kill him,” Sitting Bull had said to the angry Hunkpapa warriors that first day last autumn. “But if you are not, then feed this man and make him welcome.”

The Lakota had made a home for Johnny, and because of those chaps he wore, they had come to call him Big Leggings. And on more than half a dozen occasions his ability to speak both Lakota and the white man's tongue proved invaluable. But now, like all the rest of Sitting Bull's once-great confederation, he was on the run again.

Not long after fleeing the Bear Coat's soldiers on the Yellowstone, Sitting Bull's thirty lodges had moseyed north to camp some twenty-five miles south of Fort Peck in the valley of the Big Dry Creek. With him were Four Horns and Black Moon, all three bands hoping to trade with the Yanktonais and Red River Slota, who traditionally hung close to the agency.

In addition, another 125 Hunkpapa lodges—under chiefs Long Dog, Crow, Little Knife, and Iron Dog—had eventually marched north after the Cedar Creek fight and camped together a few miles below the agency in the Missouri River bottoms. Poor in clothing and shelter against the coming winter,
the chiefs reluctantly gathered in council with agent Thomas J. Mitchell to discuss peace terms.

As Johnny listened, Mitchell's interpreter told the Lakota, “The agent cannot offer you anything but complete surrender. You must turn over your weapons and all government booty taken from the soldier dead at the Greasy Grass.”

Angrily the Sioux leaders argued among themselves for much of that day, but in the end they guaranteed Mitchell they would surrender their people, arms, and ponies. In turn the agent distributed some rations as night began to fall, then instructed the chiefs to have their people return in the morning for the actual surrender. The chiefs had barely gotten to their feet when a runner from downriver at Wolf Point burst into the crowd, jabbering so excitedly that Johnny had trouble making sense of his electrifying news at first.

“Soldiers! They come up the river on the house that walks on water! Many soldiers come this way!”

Sure enough, the following morning of 1 November, Colonel William B. Hazen and 140 of his Sixth Infantry from Fort Buford docked their paddle-wheel steamer at Fort Peck to unload supplies and forage for Miles's column expected up any day from Tongue River. Hazen left Second Lieutenant Russell H. Day and a company of thirty-one soldiers behind with Agent Mitchell, then turned the paddle wheeler about and started downriver to return to his post at the mouth of the Yellowstone.

No matter.

The damage to Mitchell's efforts at diplomacy was already done. Moments after the news burst through the nearby camps, there wasn't a Hunkpapa lodge left within miles of Fort Peck.

But Johnny Bruguier had stayed behind.

Having been raised by his mother on the Standing Rock, Bruguier thirsted to see this Fort Peck, to hear the familiar sounds, smell the familiar fragrances, maybe cure a little of his own homesickness. For more than a week now he had stayed among the agency Indians, neglecting to return to Sitting Bull's camp, eating and talking, singing and flirting with the young doe-eyed women.

For many years the place had been a fur-trading post before becoming the agency for the Yanktonais, Gros Ventre,
Assiniboine, and any assorted Lakota bands who wandered about in search of buffalo north of the Yellowstone in Missouri River country. Rough-hewn log cabins stood fortresslike on the riverbank, themselves shadowed by the bluffs towering more than a hundred feet over the stockade walls. Mitchell provided annuities for more than seven thousand Indians, not to mention the recent additions who were scattering to the four winds, fleeing the soldiers in this year of the Great Sioux War.

Curious, Johnny watched the arriving soldiers work from dawn to dusk that Wednesday and Thursday snaking their supplies to their bivouac on the south bank using a rope and baskets suspended from a system of pulleys because the river ice was not yet thick enough to support the weight of loaded wagons. Then on Friday the white men continued their labors as a small band of riders came down to the bank to cautiously cross the Missouri's frozen surface.

The closer the soldiers came to the stockade, the more certain Bruguier grew that he had seen some of those bearded fur-wrapped white men during those Cedar Creek parleys.
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Especially the long-haired white scout, those two dark-skinned half-breeds who rode with him, and that tall soldier chief now known among the Lakota as the “Bear Coat.” Johnny snorted, readily recalling just how angry the soldier chief had become during the inconclusive, roundabout talks with Sitting Bull and the other Lakota headmen.

At least the Bear Coat was true to his word, Johnny brooded. The soldier chief had promised the Sioux they would get no rest. He had promised he would make war on them again soon if they did not go in to their reservations, even if it meant fighting through the coming winter.

Bruguier adjusted the blanket over his head and watched the soldiers approach from the shadows he made over his face. As the group ascended the icy riverbank and approached the stockade's open gates, the long-haired scout gazed in Johnny's direction. Then looked away. And then glanced again. But the white man did not stop as the horsemen passed on by. Instead, it looked as if the long-haired one murmured something to the two half-breeds who rode on either side of him.

Johnny waited for the riders to enter the gate before he turned to follow, keeping to the shadows as the wind kicked up the old snow around his wool leggings. He stopped, hugging the stockade wall as the soldiers dismounted. Then his belly flopped. Bruguier grew frightened as the long-haired scout handed his reins over to one of the soldiers and stepped up to Bear Coat, saying something as he nodded toward Johnny.

The soldier chief turned slowly, raising a hand to shade his eyes, and peered at the gate they had just entered. He said something to the scout, and together the two of them started in Bruguier's direction.

With his heart rising in his throat, Johnny's eyes flicked this way, then that—not certain where he could go or how he would escape.

Now the rest of the soldiers in the group were following the Bear Coat, their hands on their belt weapons. If Johnny tried to run, it was certain one of them would shoot.

Perhaps that fate was better than hanging at the end of a rope for killing a worthless white man.

As Bruguier was slipping his hand inside the blanket, wrapping his fingers around the butt of the big army pistol he had stuffed into his belt, the soldier chief said something to the scout.

Gesturing, the long-haired civilian shouted in English, “Bruguier! Is that you, half-breed?”

Beneath the folds of his blanket, Johnny pulled the long barrel free of the belt and began to click back the hammer.

“By Jupiter—it is him, isn't it, Kelly!” exclaimed the Bear Coat.

And he was smiling. The soldier chief was smiling!

“Bruguier!” the Bear Coat bellowed, yanking off a mitten and holding out his hand as he came up. “You're just the man I could hope to see!”

Chapter 3
Waniyetu Wi
1876

A
ll the good that Bear Coat Miles had done at Cedar Creek was gone—evaporated like a puff of smoke in this Winter Moon.

First Hazen's soldiers had scattered the Sioux bands right at the very moment they had decided to abandon Sitting Bull and surrender. And now Miles himself had shown up in that Fort Peck country—convincing the chiefs that the government spoke with two tongues: agent Mitchell with one voice, promising blankets and bacon … while the soldiers crept up to speak with the throats of their weapons.

So just about the time Sitting Bull was feeling the most isolated and disconsolate with his thirty paltry lodges of loyal followers, suddenly there were more than four times that number camped with him in the valley of the Big Dry as the Fifth Infantry reached Fort Peck. Once again Gall of the Hunkpapa, Lame Red Skirt, Small Bear, and Bull Eagle of the Miniconjou were convinced that instead of surrendering, their only hope lay in running, their only salvation lay in fighting.

“We will never give up,” Sitting Bull told them solemnly when the chiefs informed him of the soldiers' arrival at the agency. “Even if it means that we keep running all the way north to the Land of the Grandmother. No matter that it may
mean I will have to live on the scrawny flesh of prairie dogs—I will never surrender!”

The shouts, war cries, and death songs grew deafening in the valley of the Big Dry that night as the sun went down and the wind came up.

Those who had been fortunate enough to tear their lodges down before the Bear Coat's soldiers invaded their camp at Cedar Creek had been taking in all of the very old and the very young they could shelter, while the rest simply made do under bowers of blankets and robes—anything at all that would turn the hoarfrost and even the light snow of another night of winter-coming.

These were a wounded people. They had been robbed of all the greatness that had been theirs for so long. But we will survive, Sitting Bull vowed in private. As long as we do not allow the
wasicu
to divide Lakota against Lakota.

“The people, they are hungry,” Gall tried to explain, a man who had lost wives, whose children had been killed by soldiers. “So many little ones with their empty bellies.”

The Bull looked at the muscular war chief who had lost so much to the pony soldiers at the Greasy Grass, and felt a sharp pang of sadness for his old friend. “From the very same moment of my vision of those soldiers falling into camp—I warned our people not to take anything from the dead. I told all who could hear my voice that we must not take any of the spoils from that battle.”

Lame Red Skirt bent his head, and his eyes did not meet Sitting Bull's when he admitted, “I remember.”

“I told all who could hear that
Wakan Tanka
instructed me not to plunder those dead soldiers. That we had defeated them, that we had killed them all, was gift enough.”

“What happens now?” asked Bull Eagle. “What's done is done! What happens now that so many of our people did take the soldier spoils from the Greasy Grass?”

For some time Sitting Bull thought and thought, staring at the fire while he heard the sounds of dogs and children at play in the cold, women at their work with supper fires and boiling kettles, the faint rustle of the wind through the bare branches of the cottonwoods outside his smoke-blackened lodge. An infant crying. An old woman keening softly as her man slipped beyond into death. He listened to these sounds of
his people before he listened to what he knew rested in his heart—put there as a gift from the Great Mystery.

“Now that so many have disobeyed
Wakan Tanka,
” he sighed, “our fate is sealed. We will be driven before the winds like the down of the cottonwood tree. Without a home in our own land.”

“But we can hunt the buffalo that will make us a strong people once again!” Gall cried out in growing despair, his face flushed in anger. “These soldiers cannot follow us for all of winter!”

Quietly the Bull replied, “Bear Coat's walk-a-heaps do not need to hunt buffalo to survive as we do. They carry what they need in their many wagons. Because of that they can follow us right on into the winter—giving our warriors little time to hunt, our women no time to dry meat and scrape hides.”

“We can gather the bands once more and be strong as we were in the summer moons. We can defeat these soldiers!” Gall screamed in sheer desperation, his eyes glistening.

“Once we could defeat all those
wasicu
soldiers, yes,” Sitting Bull admitted dolefully. “When we did as
Wakan Tanka
told us to do—He was on our side. Now some small Lakota chiefs have even sold away our sacred hills, the He Sapa.
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Now it hurts my heart to see how many of the people in this camp have turned their backs on the Great Mystery and robbed the soldier dead. They are so proud of their trophies that they forget my warnings!”