Black Hills (60 page)

—
Yes, Father. I am listening with all of my heart.

Paha Sapa nodded. He took a drink and passed the canteen to Robert, who also drank. High above them, a red-tailed hawk circled on a thermal. For one of the few times in his life, Paha Sapa did not wonder what the bird was seeing from that altitude—his thoughts were purely on Limps-a-Lot’s ending-story and on how to tell it well but simply.

—Washtay.
I should have stayed with my
tunkašila,
but he did not want to go back to Pine Ridge with me at the time. He only wanted to join Big Foot’s band of Minneconjous where they were spending the winter—it was a cold, snowy winter, Robert—at their camp at Cherry Creek, not too far from Standing Rock. I escorted Limps-a-Lot, who was coughing very badly again, to Big Foot’s camp and then I left him, sure that his old friend would watch over him. About a hundred other Hunkpapas had also come to join Big Foot. I thought the camp was safe and promised to come back to check on Limps-a-Lot in a month, with the thought that I would then insist that my
tunkašila
join me at Pine Ridge for the spring. I should have stayed with him.

I was not gone a day when Big Foot, certain that the soldiers and tribal police would be coming for him, told his people and the Hunkpapa refugees to break camp—he had decided to lead them all to Pine Ridge after all, hoping that Red Cloud, who was friendly with the Fat Takers, would protect them all.

Soon, Big Foot was so ill and hemorrhaging so badly that he had to travel on blankets laid out in the back of a wagon. Limps-a-Lot, who was also coughing blood again, rode in the wagon as well, but alongside the young man Afraid-of-the- Enemy, who was driving the wagon. On December 28, as the long line of men, old men, women—mostly old women—and a few children were approaching Porcupine Creek, they saw four troops of the Seventh Cavalry approaching.

Paha Sapa paused, half expecting to hear words from the ghost hiding in his head. None came. Nor did Robert say anything, although at the words “Seventh Cavalry,” the fourteen-year-old boy had sighed like an old man. He knew something of his father’s experiences with the cavalry.

—
Big Foot had a white flag raised over his wagon. When the cavalry major rode up to talk—the
wasichu
was named Whitside—Big Foot had to free
himself from his blankets encrusted with frozen blood from his own bloody coughing. Limps-a-Lot and Afraid-of-the-Enemy and others helped the old Minneconjou stand and limp toward Major Whitside on his horse.

Whitside told Big Foot that he, the major, had orders to escort Big Foot and his people to a camp the cavalry had set up on the creek called
Chankpe Opi Wakpala.
Big Foot and Limps-a-Lot and the others were sorry that they would not see Red Cloud and be under his protection at Pine Ridge, but they thought that going to
Chankpe Opi Wakpala
was a good omen. Have I told you the importance of that place, Robert?

—
I do not believe so, my father.

—
You remember the story I told you years ago of how the war chief Crazy Horse died at Fort Robinson?

—
Yes.

—
Well, when Crazy Horse was killed there, a few of his friends and relatives took his body away. They would tell no one exactly where they had buried Crazy Horse’s heart, only that it was somewhere along
Chankpe Opi Wakpala.

—
So that creek was sacred?

—
It was… important. Big Foot, Limps-a-Lot, and most of the others thought that Crazy Horse had been our people’s bravest leader. It seemed a good sign that they were going to the place where Crazy Horse’s spirit might watch over them.

—
Please go on with the story, Father.

—
We learned afterward, mostly from their half-breed scout that day, John Shangreau, that Major Whitside’s orders had been to… Did I say something amusing, Robert? You’re smiling.

—
I’m sorry, Father. It is just that when a boy or man in Denver says that word, I have to knock him down.

Paha Sapa rubbed the scar on his forehead. He was not wearing a hat that hot July day and the sun was making him a little dizzy. When the story was finished, he would suggest that they go in under the shade of the trees and down the hill to the campsite to begin preparing dinner.

—
Says what word, Robert?

—WaśicuNeiNea.
Half-breed.

—
Oh. Well, you’re not a half-breed in any case. Your mother was half white. You’re a… quarter-breed, at most.

Mathematics had never been Paha Sapa’s strong suit and fractions had always annoyed him. Racial fractions annoyed him more than most.

—
Please continue, my father. I shall not smile again.

—
Where was I? Oh, yes… the scout John Shangreau knew that Major Whitside’s orders were to capture and disarm and dismount all of Big Foot’s band. But Shangreau convinced the major that any attempt right then to take the men’s guns and horses away would almost surely start a fight. So Whitside decided to do nothing until Big Foot’s band was at
Chankpe Opi Wakpala
and where the cavalry could deploy the Hotchkiss guns they had in the rear of their column. What is it? You’re frowning.

—
I don’t want to interrupt again, but I have no idea what Hotchkiss guns are… or were.

—
I saw them when I rode with the Third Cavalry in 1877… rode as the worst scout in Army history. I led them to nothing. The new Hotchkiss guns used to be brought along behind the main detachment, pulled by mules or horses. They were like the Gatling guns used in the Civil War, only faster, deadlier—they were a sort of Gatling gun cannon. The revolving Hotchkiss cannon had five thirty-seven-millimeter barrels and was capable of firing forty-three rounds per minute with accuracy out to, I remember, a range of about two thousand yards. Each feed magazine held ten rounds and weighed about ten pounds. I remember the weight because when I was twelve and thirteen summers old, I had to carry and lift and load the damned things onto the supply wagons. Each wagon carried hundreds of magazines, tens of thousands of thirty-seven-millimeter rounds.

—
Jesus Christ.

Robert had whispered those two words. Paha Sapa knew that the boy’s mother and grandfather would have been upset at the casual blasphemy, but it meant nothing to Paha Sapa.

—
You can guess the rest of the story, my son. They reached the army tent camp at
Chankpe Opi Wakpala—
it was very cold, as I said, and the stream was frozen, the willows and cottonwood trees along it all outlined in frost. The frozen grass stood up like daggers and cut into moccasins. There were a hundred and twenty men, including Limps-a-Lot, in Big Foot’s band and about two hundred and thirty women and children. But I didn’t mean to give the impression that all the men were feeble old men—a lot of the warriors there were still warriors and had been at the Greasy Grass and part of the rubbing out of Long Hair. As these men looked at the cavalry and infantry drawn up the next morning, the Hotchkiss guns aimed down at them from the hilltop, they must have wondered if the Seventh Cavalry had revenge on its mind and in its heart.

Robert opened his mouth as if ready to ask or say something, but in the end did not speak.

—
As I say, you can guess the rest, Robert. It seemed that the
wasichu
leaders—the rest of the regiment had arrived that first night at the
Chankpe Opi Wakpala
and a Colonel Forsyth had taken command—were being helpful. They’d brought Big Foot to this place in the regiment’s ambulance and provided a tent that was supposed to be warmer than the tipis for the old chief to sleep in. Limps-a-Lot slept in a tipi nearby because he did not want to spend the night in a Seventh Cavalry tent. Major Whitside’s own surgeon had looked at Big Foot, but there was nothing to be done for what they thought was pneumonia then—even less for consumption. Limps-a-Lot, friends later told me, was also coughing more there at that cold, windy place.

In the morning, the bugle blew and Big Foot was helped out of his tent and the soldiers began the disarming. The warriors and old men handed over their rifles and old pistols. Not satisfied, the soldiers went into the tipis and threw axes and knives and even tent stakes onto the big pile in the center of the circle of disarmed men.

Most of the Hunkpapas and Minneconjous wore their inpenetrable Ghost Shirts that day, but not in anticipation of a fight. They’d given up their guns.

But there is always one who won’t. In this case, I was told, it was a very young Minneconjou named Black Coyote. Some told me that Black Coyote was deaf and couldn’t hear the commands from the soldiers and his own chiefs to put his rifle down. Others said that Black Coyote could hear all right, but that he was a stupid pain in the ass and a show-off. At any rate, Black Coyote danced around with his rifle held out, not aiming it but not putting it down with the other weapons. Then the soldiers grabbed him and spun him around and there was a shot—some thought it came from Black Coyote’s rifle; others told me it hadn’t. But it was enough.

You can imagine what happened next, Robert, on that sunny, very cold day near the end of the Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns. Many of the warriors snatched up their rifles and tried to fight. Eventually the Hotchkiss guns began firing down into them. When it was over, more than half of Big Foot’s people were dead or very seriously wounded… a hundred and fifty-three were dead on the snowy battlefield. More crawled away to die in the bushes or stream. Louise Weasel Bear, who told me the story, said that almost three hundred of the original three hundred and fifty men, women, and children who’d followed Big Foot there died at
Chankpe Opi Wakpala.
I remember that something like twenty-five
wasichu
soldiers died that day. I don’t know how many were wounded, but not that many more. The
young woman Hakiktawin told me that most of the Seventh Cavalry soldiers had been shot by their own men or hit by shrapnel from rounds from the Hotchkiss guns striking rock or bone. I’ve always preferred to think that this is not the truth—that the warriors and old men and women who died there that day did fire back with some effect.

I was not quite to Pine Ridge when I heard and I turned around and hurried to
Chankpe Opi Wakpala.
Limps-a-Lot had taken me to that place many times when I was a boy, simply because it was beautiful and had many legends and stories about it.

There was a blizzard. My horse died, but I kept walking, then stole another horse from a cavalry detachment I came across in the storm. When I arrived at
Chankpe Opi Wakpala
I saw that the Seventh had left the Indian dead and severely wounded behind, and now the bodies were frozen in strange postures and covered with snow from the storm. I found Big Foot first—his right arm and right leg were bent as if he were pushing himself up to a sitting position, his back was off the ground, the fingers of his left hand were raised and frozen as if in the act of opening, with only the little finger curled shut—and he was wearing a woman’s scarf around his head. His left eye was closed but his right eye was open—the crows and magpies had not taken his eyes yet, probably because they were frozen as hard as marbles—and there was snow on his open eye.

Limps-a-Lot was lying no more than thirty feet from Big Foot. Something, probably a thirty-seven-millimeter round from one of the Hotchkiss guns, had taken his right arm off, but I found it lying nearby in the snow, rising almost vertically from a snowdrift, as if my
tunkašila
were waving at me. His mouth was wide open as if he had died screaming—but I prefer to think that he was singing his Death Song loudly. Either way, his gaping mouth had filled with snow until the snow overflowed, running out in all directions like some pure, white vomit of death, filling his eye sockets and outlining his sharp cheekbones.

I knew the
wasichu
cavalry would be back, probably that same day, to take photographs and to bury the dead there, probably in a single mass grave, and I could not leave Limps-a-Lot’s body there for that. But I had no shovel with me, not even a knife, and my
tunkašila’s
body was frozen to the cold earth. They were as one. Nothing bent—not his arm, not his twisted legs, not even the separate arm rising from the snowdrift. Even his left ear was one with the frozen earth. With only my cold, bare hands, it was like trying to lift a rooted tree out of the ground.

Eventually I sat down, panting, freezing, my hands numb, knowing that the cavalry detachment would be there soon and that they would take me prisoner as well—the word I’d
heard was that the few Hunkpapa and Minneconjou survivors were being sent to a prison in Omaha, where they had planned to send Big Foot and all his men—and I began walking that murder field, I refuse to this day to call it a battlefield, until I found a woman’s corpse with a dull, flat-bladed cooking knife in her clenched hand. I had to snap all her fingers like twigs to get the knife free. With that knife to chip away at the ice between Limps-a-Lot’s frozen coat and frozen flesh and the frozen soil, I freed his body from the earth’s grip in less than half an hour. I brought the severed arm with the white bone protruding as well. I propped Limps-a-Lot’s body on the saddlehorn in front of me—it was like carrying a long and twisted and unwieldy, but almost weightless, cottonwood branch—and I lashed his right arm across his chest with long strips of cloth torn from my shirt.

With only that dull knife, I could not bury Limps-a-Lot in the frozen soil that day, but I took him far away from what I thought of that day as that evil field and buried him miles and miles away along the
Chankpe Opi Wakpala
where it undercut a tall bluff and where larger, older cottonwoods—the kind of beautiful
waga chun,
“rustling tree,” of the kind Limps-a-Lot or Sitting Bull would have chosen to stand in the center of the dancing circle—and there I made the best burial scaffold I could for my
tunkašila
up there in the branches of one of those rustling-tree perfect cottonwoods.