Six Guns Straight From Hell - Tales Of Horror And Dark Fantasy From The Weird Weird West (15 page)

Ghost Dancers

by

Sam Kepfield

Over by one of the hovels that housed the reservation’s inhabitants, a group of young men danced in a circle, chanting rhythmically. They wore buckskin leggings, their hair long, and identical shirts made of a light-colored fabric, decorated with beads and other baubles.

“
Do they sleep?” Himmel asked.

“
They’ve been going at it a couple days now.” Daniel Royer was the agent for Pine Ridge. The Indians called him Young-Man-Afraid-of-Indians. Savages or not, Himmel reflected, they’d pegged this greenhorn. Royer looked and acted the title, so it was no wonder the situation had deteriorated this far.

“
Whole idea is to keep dancing without stopping. They do it long enough, it starts them hallucinating, they get wild. It’s scary.”

Which is why Royer had wired the Commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington, the telegram womanishly hysterical, begging for assistance. The 7th Cavalry had been dispatched, a fine bit of irony, Himmel observed. The tables were turned this time; the 7th had towed Hotchkiss guns into the reservation, which had temporarily frightened the Redskins into relative quietude for now. Some had fled, others were laying low, but not this bunch.

“
Look upon them, Major,” said Brian O’Meara, a faint trace of Kilkenny in his voice. “The last degraded remnants of a once proud race. Starved and miserable and captive.”

Sherman was right, thought Major Augustus Himmel. Reporters should be hanged. How in God’s name had anyone at Army Headquarters in Minneapolis thought toting the press along was a good idea? The last thing he needed was some damned ink-stained wretch spreading panic among the settlers near Pine Ridge. Both the natives and the Army units sent to quell the unrest were on a hair-trigger, had been since this nonsense had begun several months ago.

“
You actually feel sorry for them?”
“Let’s just say I identify with them,” O’Meara replied. “A supposedly conquered and subdued people–much like my ancestors back in Ireland.” O’Meara squinted, put his hand to his forehead. He was a short man, stocky in build, with the round smiling face of his race. He wore a heavy woolen coat against the descending chill of winter, so was tolerably warm.

“
Nonsense,” Himmel said, drawn into a conversation with this pestiferous blatherskite. “They’re treated well enough back at Pine Ridge. The Dawes Act –“

O’Meara’s hard laugh cut him off. “Killing them with good intentions,” he said. “Really, Major, the methods of John Bull are brutal–Bobby Peel threw a few bags of cornmeal at it, Johnny Russell let the landlords throw us off our land, and Queen Victoria sat on her fat arse the whole time, all of them calculating it would mean a million less Irishmen to poke the soft underbelly of the empire. Brutal, but unpretentious. The contempt is easier to take unvarnished.”

“
You’d have us merely kill them all?”
“Having wronged them for three hundred years, what’s one more? It might let the settlers hereabouts sleep easier at night, knowing that there are no malevolent Redskins plotting revenge for centuries of ill-treatment.”

“
You can’t be serious!” Royer exclaimed, his voice rising to a squeak.

“
What’s the alternative?” O’Meara asked casually. “Make them pray to our God, speak our language, learn our trades, take our names, wear our clothing, cut their hair, forget their past and denounce their ancestors as brutes and barbarians? What I think is irrelevant, but I daresay if you asked one of the braves yonder, he would rather that death come from one of your bullets on a battlefield than pneumonia or starvation in a hut on a reservation. And that is the crux of the problem, isn’t it?”

Himmel sighed. “All I want now is to get things back in order, end this Ghost Dance foolishness, get the settlers quieted down.”

“
It’s not going to be that easy, Major. The Ghost Dance isn’t going away.”

“
It’s a temporary insanity that will pass.”

“
No more than Christianity was,” O’Meara said.

“
Blasphemy!” Himmel was a devout Lutheran, a regular attendant at the Sunday services when back in Minneapolis, at Army Headquarters.

“
It’s the only thing giving hope to people who have nothing else.”

“
It’s a recipe for another Indian war,” Himmel countered. “All those braves dancing around, whooping and hollering–if we weren’t here they would have been off the reservation and running amok throughout the countryside, burning farms and murdering fathers, taking wives and daughters and subjecting them to a fate worse than death. You would have that?”

“
I can’t say as I would, Major. But I understand it, which is a different thing. It’s been spreading through the West like a wildfire, started last year with the Paiute in Nevada. Wovoka–whose ‘Christian’ name is Jack Wilson, by the way–preached peace between the red man and the white man–this, after all we’ve done to them–or for them. The Ghost Dance, he said, would bring back the buffalo, and resurrect the dead, and let all live in a paradise where there was no sickness or old age or death.” He looked again at the circle. “Somewhere along the way, the Sioux appear to have forgotten the part about living in peace.”

“
You know a lot about this,” Himmel grunted.

“
I’ve been covering it since the summer,” O’Meara said. “I came here, talked with the delegation that went to see Wovoka. I even talked with Sitting Bull.” That brought the conversation to a halt. Sitting Bull was less than a week dead. The tribal police had arrested him after the chief had hinted, quite loudly, that he would join the Ghost Dancers, an event that would have put the situation beyond the ability of the government to control. Someone–O’Meara theorized it was one of the tribal police who had fired a shot when Sitting Bull resisted his arrest. A general melee ensued. When the gun smoke cleared, six of the police and nearly a dozen tribal members lay dead. The feared uprising had failed to materialize, with most of Sitting Bull’s people lighting out for other parts of the reservation, possibly to Big Foot’s band.

“
Pagan nonsense,” Himmel said.

“
And what does your Bible say about the Last Trump? Or the afterlife? Are they really so different?” O’Meara’s face was mirthful.

“
Some of them, like Big Foot, have been calling for war, dance or no dance,” Royer said. “Doesn’t sound so peaceful to me.”

“
And Christ’s call to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbors, eventually begat the Crusades. I imagine that if their dance achieves its desired effect, it would be closer to Big Foot’s vision than Wovoka’s. Put yourself in their place for a moment,” Himmel snorted in derision. “Humor me. Imagine waking up and finding the Stars and Bars flying over the Capitol building, some former Reb major sitting in the Executive Mansion, the West populated, not by freeholders, but by plantation owners and their slaves, Lincoln dead at the end of a Reb noose and his name a curse. Wouldn’t you be ready for the warpath?”

Himmel pursed his lips in disgust. “Damned Fenian,” he swore silently. Had enough problem with them in the war, when they weren’t rioting trying to shirk their duty and when they did their duty they were unreliable and drunk.

But he kept silent, and the three men stood on the porch of the ramshackle wooden office watching the young men dancing away, a lonely dot of activity in the middle of the great vast nothingness that surrounded them.

They were still at it the next morning, O’Meara saw as he awoke. He heard the dancers outside the frost-etched window of the transient quarters next to the agent’s office and quarters. Remarkable stamina, he reflected, rolling out of bed and rubbing his hands to get blood flowing. He piled kindling from a tin bucket into the stove and lit a Lucifer to set it burning, following that with a hard-won piece of cottonwood, no doubt hauled in a wagon from some river or creek bottom miles away, the only place one could get timber in these parts. He made a small pot of coffee on the stove, and sufficiently fortified, he ventured outside.

The circle had grown, more than a dozen men in the circle, and as he stood there on the porch a few more wandered in from the collection of huts and joined in. Women and children stood nearby, watching. Pencil and pad tucked in his coat, O’Meara joined the onlookers.

He stood next to an older man wrapped in a buffalo robe. As a boy, O’Meara thought, he’d likely known a world where the white man was an occasional odd visitor, like the early explorers or the fur traders. He’d grown to manhood watching his people die from disease and them from bullets. The man’s eyes were watching the dancers intently; did he see redemption or a lost cause before him?
“How long do they dance?” he asked, chancing that the old man knew some bit of English.

“
Five sunrises,” the man replied in a raspy voice, looking at O’Meara.

“
And then what?” But the man merely shrugged and turned his head.

O’Meara watched silently, waiting for the old man to speak in vain. More men joined the circle, the intensity becoming a palpable thing, almost electrical, reaching the onlookers. Some of the younger children began to mimic the dancers, and a few of the boys disappeared into the ever-widening circle. “You’re the newsman?” A voice came from over his shoulder. O’Meara turned to see a young Indian man standing behind him. He was about the same height, hair worn long, a prominent nose and a strong jaw. And the eyes–the eyes burned with fire in the soul.

“
I am. Brian O’Meara, Minneapolis
Star
.”

“
White Buffalo,” the Indian said. “But your kind knows me as Thomas Donoghue.”

“
Ah,” O’Meara said with a wry expression. “It’s always a pleasure to meet another son of Erin. Cork? Wexford? No, I think Donegal, by the accent.”

White Buffalo/Donoghue’s expression said he got the joke, but he wasn’t giving O’Meara the pleasure of it. “You come here for knowledge of our ways.”

“
It’s my job,” O’Meara said, and Donoghue motioned him away from the dancers and onlookers. They walked among the row of rickety wooden houses that held some of the Pine Ridge Sioux who had made a token effort to assimilate; others refused to bend and lived in tipis out of sight of the agency station.

“
I already know about the background of the Dance. Started with the Paiutes; in fact, they had a similar movement back just after the War that came to nothing.”

“
And you’re wondering why this should be any different?” White Buffalo/Donoghue asked, with a command of English as good as O’Meara’s, with less of an accent.

“
I am, and I’ve been here several times since last summer and I don’t recall seeing you here before.”

“
It’s a big land.”

“
Someone like you would stand out. You’re not likely to hide away in a tipi in the middle of nowhere with a squaw and a few ponies.”

“
Don’t underestimate the simple pleasures, O’Meara.” White Buffalo said with a smile that showed flawless teeth. “I’m not from here. My people were the Hunkpapa. We lived near the Yellowstone.”

“
Sitting Bull...“

“
Is–was one of us, yes. I was sixteen summers when I rode with him at the Greasy Grass and met Yellow Hair, the man you know as Custer.” The sounds of the dance had faded to a whisper now, and the men kept walking, past the last hut, onto the flat sea of grass and sage that surrounded the small man-made island. “And you’re right. I haven’t been here before. For the last year I have traveled across the country, to reservations, spreading the word of the Dance to all who would listen.”

“
Successfully?”

“
With one exception, yes.”

“
Who?”

“
The Navajo.” White Buffalo/Donoghue shook his head. “They’re afraid of ghosts. Don’t want any part of it.” He chuckled. “I wonder how they’ll react when all of their dead ancestors come back?”

“
I imagine it wasn’t such a hard sell here,” O’Meara said.

“
Your government gave us all the land west of the Missouri River, not twenty years ago at Fort Laramie,” White Buffalo said. “We were free to do with it what we wanted. But Yellow Hair found that yellow metal that makes your kind so crazy, and they took a little land from us. Of course, we extracted a price from Yellow Hair,” he said with a sardonic grin. “And this year, you changed your minds again, took all the land, gave us these small reservations, made us farmers. But no rain fell, even the white man couldn’t make the corn grow. And when we starved, your government cut our rations in half, and agents sold what we did get and pocketed the money.” White Buffalo took a cigar from his coat, and lit it. “I didn’t need to talk much,” he said.

O’Meara cleared his throat. “Well, it’s not my government. I’d vote for the devil himself before I’d vote for a Republican, even Harrison. But what do you expect to accomplish?”