Cry of the Hawk (45 page)

Man That Walks Under the Ground, Spotted Tail, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, Pawnee Killer, Standing Elk, and others of the Sioux. The Cheyenne came as well.

Turkey Leg motioned Shad Sweete to the doorway of the crowded Sibley tent where the peace-talkers held court. The old mountain man was there to help translate for the Cheyenne when needed.

“You are the father of High-Backed Bull?” asked the Cheyenne chief.

“I am,” Shad answered.

“Husband to Shell Woman?”

Shad had to think a moment, to remember her given Shahiyena name. “She is mother to High-Backed Bull, yes.”

Turkey Leg sighed. “I wish to speak with you, Indian-talker.”

Shad followed the old Indian out the open tent flaps stirred by the autumn breeze. Although he could not recall ever meeting Turkey Leg, Sweete knew of the man by reputation. His word was good. And right now the old trapper was figuring Turkey Leg was set on doing some wrangling over peace terms away from the soldiers.

“I don’t have any power to help you in your talks with the great father’s peace-talkers—”

Turkey Leg raised a wrinkled hand, silencing the white man. “I did not ask you to talk to me of peace with the soldiers. Years ago, when you came among Tall Crane’s village, to buy yourself a wife—I too lived in that camp.”

“We have met, Turkey Leg?”

The old man shook his head. “No. But I know of you.”

“I know of you as well. Among many honorable men—you are known as a man of honor.”

“You speak of me like I am some ancient man, Indian-talker. I cannot have more than ten winters of life on you.”

Shad liked the chief’s smile. “I remember Tall Crane’s camp. It was a good time in my life. A good time in our lives—before things got … mixed-up and confused.”

“It was a good time for us all, Indian-talker.” Now the chief’s old eyes gazed back into the tent. “You see that one at the end of the table, seated beside the one with much braid on his blue coat?”

Shad nodded. “Major Frank North. Leader of the scalped-heads. The army’s scouts.”

No emotion was betrayed in the old man’s eyes. “I know of him. He was leading the fight we had at Plum Creek Ford.”

“Yes. You wish to meet him?”

“No. It is not necessary. I only know that he is the man you must talk to for me. I have—” He bit his lip as if it were something difficult to discuss. “I have six children this North will want.”

“Prisoners?”

“They are white children. But they are no longer our prisoners. We were raising them to be Shahiyena.”

Shad sighed, trying to contain his excitement at the news. “Six children. Yes. What do you wish in return for the six children?”

Turkey Leg looked up at the scout, then back at Frank North behind the table some ten yards away where the commissioners were debating points of their peace plan through the various interpreters.

“North’s scalped-heads captured two of our people at that Plum Creek fight. I want them back.”

“A boy of ten summers. And another.”

“An old woman.”

“That is all you want?” Shad asked, not believing his ears.

“We want nothing more for the six children.”

Sweete was stirred. “They must be important to you, Turkey Leg.”

With moist eyes, the old chief gazed up at the tall white man. “All my people are important to me.”

As much as Shad wanted to touch the old man at that moment, suddenly understanding, Shad did not.

“I will see that it is done with Major North,” he replied quietly at the old man’s ear. “I understand how a man must do what he can to protect his family. It is this way with my own—this worry I have for my own blood.”

And in the old, rheumy eyes, there came a new moistness telling Shad Sweete that Turkey Leg was thankful to the white scout for his understanding about the old woman, but that the Cheyenne chief in turn sympathized about the white man’s half-breed son.

“Yes, Indian-talker. A man must always do everything he can to protect his family.”

38

Early October, 1867

A
T A RAILSIDE
eating house in North Platte, Nebraska, the formal exchange of the prisoners took place. Three young women, two aged nineteen and one girl seventeen years old, along with six-year-old twin boys and an infant.

The Cheyenne boy of ten summers was returned to his joyous people, who promptly renamed him Pawnee in commemoration of his capture by North’s scouts. In the end, Turkey Leg’s aged mother walked slowly from that eating house in North Platte, gripping her son’s arm, tears dampening both of their winter-seamed faces.

That exchange was the only productive thing to come of three days of haggling between the chiefs and the peace commissioners. As Jonah Hook and the other army scouts listened, the white men had again expressed that the Indians would be required to remain on their reservations south of the Arkansas River or north of the Platte, where the bands would be expected to settle down and become farmers, every bit as much as those white settlers moving onto the plains with their plows and spotted buffalo.

In turn, the chiefs listened attentively, but refused to budge from their trust in the old life as lived by their people for as long as any old man’s memory—season by season following the migration of the buffalo.

But the problem was, said the chiefs, the white man was crossing the buffalo ground with the iron tracks for his smoking wagons. And the buffalo would no longer cross those tracks. Instead, the great herds that once roamed the extent of the central plains were now kept far to the south, while another herd stayed far to the north.

“Our people will starve if we cannot hunt the buffalo,” Spotted Tail told the peace commissioners.

“We will go where the buffalo are,” said Cut Nose.

“Even if the buffalo graze where the white man settles, cutting at the earth and raising his spotted buffalo,” Whistler added.

“No, you must stay far away from the white man and his settlements,” General Alfred Terry warned.

“Any time your young warriors steal or kill, the soldiers will follow,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman. “We will chase your villages and find them, wherever you hide.”

“You make life hard on us,” said Cold Face.

“Yes,” agreed Turkey Leg. “We must go where we can feed our families. Doesn’t the white man understand that? Doesn’t the white man now go where he goes to settle on this buffalo ground so that he can feed his family?”

“If our two peoples stay away from one another,” General John B. Sanborn said calmly, “we will not have reason to fight.”

Standing Elk took the speaking fan from Turkey Leg. It was his turn to add words so the peace-talkers might understand before war once more erupted. “All things are good for the white man. But our people were here first. You are not wanted here in our land. Go away, and all things will be better once more.”

“We will not be leaving,” Sherman sputtered. “You will have to make room for all the white families yet to come from the east. They are as plentiful as the stars in the sky. And if you do not move aside and allow them room, the army will round you up and put you on the reservations, where you will be forced to raise your crops—or starve. There will be no more buffalo when the white man finishes pacifying this land.”

Young Man Afraid rose, taking the speaking fan made from the wing of a golden eagle. It carried not only great power, but responsibility as well for the man who spoke while holding it. “We have never been like you white men. Ever since I was born, I have eaten wild meat. Not one bite have I taken of your spotted buffalo.”

“You will grow to like it, I am sure,” said General William S. Harney, smiling benevolently.

“I think not,” Young Man Afraid continued, his face taut as a hand drum at the white soldier’s rude interruption. “My father and his father, and his father before him all ate wild meat. It is not for me to change our way of life now. It was good for my ancestors. It is good for my children, and their children, and the children to come after them.”

“Times are changing,” Sanborn said. “We must all realize progress is coming to this new land.”

“I know nothing of this progress,” Young Man Afraid said. “All I know is the taste of buffalo in my mouth, the sweetness of cold water on my tongue, and the way the clouds touch the earth as I look far away at everything the Grandfather Above has placed here for his children. No! Listen and heed me—it will not be my generation that will give up to the greedy white man all that has been given us by the Grandfather Above!”

The discussions, debate, and heated exchanges droned on and on for most of three days in that tent on the outskirts of North Platte. In the end, the commissioners said they were calling an end to the inconclusive hearings, but were asking the bands to attend another treaty talk, scheduled for later that same month, near the end of the Falling Leaf Moon.

“There we can come to agreement on the terms of our new peace treaty,” explained General Terry as he disbanded the conference.

“You put too much hope in things changing between now and the next time we come together,” Turkey Leg said as the white men rose from their chairs behind the tables.

“I put a lot of hope in each of you tribal leaders doing what is best for your people,” General Harney said.

“That is for us to decide,” Pawnee Killer growled. “Not you white soldiers and peace-talkers.”

Fully a mile
away, the young riders were gathering along the hilltops, watching Shad Sweete and the rest of his party approach along the meandering path of the creek bottom. From what the old mountain man could tell, the horsemen were mostly young boys, very likely carrying bows and quivers of arrows. No sign yet of older warriors brandishing rifles as they watched the small group of white men ride toward their village nestled among the cottonwoods and plum brush.

Sweete wondered … then caught himself hoping. It would be too great a gift, he figured, to find his half-breed son among those young men dippled along the hilltops, swirling away one by one on the off side of the knolls where the tall grass waved in the wind. Was he here? Shad wondered. Or was he still out with the Dog Soldiers of Tall Bull and White Horse, roaming and riding and raiding?

The old scout glanced at Jonah Hook riding beside him, finding the younger man most attentive to the distant spectacle, his eyes squinting into the bright autumn light this Indian summer day as the dried cottonwood leaves rattled in golden splendor, birds calling out in warning as the horsemen approached. Overhead a cloudless blue sky stretched everlasting to the far horizon in all directions. Sweete was adrift, as were these dark-skinned nomads he had come to visit, here on an inland sea of rolling, grass-covered surf.

More like paying homage, this visit was. To beg the attendance of the mighty Cheyenne of the central plains.

After the old mountain man had arranged the prisoner exchange at North Platte, General Phil Sheridan himself, that banty Irishman who commanded this part of the frontier, had personally asked Shad Sweete to lead this effort to assure that Turkey Leg and his headmen would come to Medicine Lodge Creek when the new moon had grown to half its full size. That’s when the white peace-talkers would once more assemble with the chiefs, to forge some kind of lasting agreement with the bands roaming Kansas and Nebraska—where the white man was pushing harder than ever, bringing his plow and raising sod houses and laying his iron rails.

Shad knew exactly how the bands felt. When the stench of human offal and waste in their camps grew too much to take, the bands simply took down their lodges and moved to a new campsite. Once more allowing the land and the wind and the rolling rhythm of the seasons to cleanse the breast of the mother of all things.

Such beauty, simplicity, he thought. So simple that its beauty continued to escape the white man. For only the white man squatted and never moved on. Continuing to live where he took a shit. A quarter century ago as a nomadic fur trapper, Shad had learned a better way. Man truly was not meant to live long in one place. Better that he took his shit, and moved on. Like the buffalo.

Dogs barking among the horses’ hooves announced the coming of the four white men—civilians all.

Women rose from their work at new buffalo hides that had been taken in the weeks before the village was required to move for its safety away from the white man and his Pawnee trackers. Each woman, young and old, holding an elk-handled scraper, with only the power of their resolve and muscle slowly working the flesh from the great white-and-red hides staked out like huge squares demarcating the outskirts of Turkey Leg’s village.

Old men rose from their places in the warm sun that afternoon. They had been talking of days gone by when the meat was good and fleet were the ponies a man could steal from the Pawnee or Crow or Ute. Then the young horsemen were among the lodges, making a show of themselves, more weapons in evidence now. Bows, yes—but many more rifles than Shad had expected he would see.

“This bunch been raiding to get them guns?” asked Hook from the side of his mouth as the four white men entered the outskirts of the lodge circle.

The air was strong with smoked hides and grease, pungent with wood smoke and boiling meat. Fragrant with the incense of white sage. Far better were those perfumes than any meal of boiled potatoes and red whiskey and a cigar smoked after a man had himself a full belly. Shad thought of Shell Woman, then worried for their son.

With warriors and headmen spread out from him like the sides of an arrow point, Turkey Leg waited for the white men to approach, halt, and dismount. The old chief motioned forward some young boys, who took the reins to the four horses and led the animals away.

“It is always good to see you, my friend,” Shad said, smiling at the old chief.

Turkey Leg smiled in return. “How is life for you, Indian-talker?”

“Some things could be better, I suppose. But, what life is worth living if it is not filled with lessons to be learned?”

“You always pose questions that this old man cannot easily answer.” The chief motioned for the other three white men to follow, taking Sweete by the arm as he turned toward his lodge erected at the center of the camp crescent. “Come. We will eat. Then smoke. And only then will we hear why you have journeyed here. I suppose you want me to go listen to words of the peace-talkers once more.”