“After sundown the day we left your village, we drew near what we thought was a camp of our people north of here. But something just did not feel right. We stopped short of the village and decided to investigate. Waiting until first light, we finally saw some people coming down to the river to swim. The closer we looked, the more we could tell it was not a Lakota camp.”
“Who was it?” someone cried out from the crowd.
“Were they friends?”
“Were they our enemies?”
“They were Shoshone!” one of the Lakota shouted.
“Enemies!” a woman screeched.
“How many?”
The other Lakota answered, “Not many. We can kill them all!”
“Yes! Kill them all!” was the cry taken up by the young warriors.
In a matter of moments the whole village was abuzz with battle plans and preparation. The various leaders from the warrior societies quickly decided who among them would go to fight, and who would have to be left behind to guard the village while most of the fighting men were absent. Before the sun had climbed off the bare tops of the cottonwood trees, the war party galloped off. Women went about preparing for a great feast when the men would return.
The next day their victorious warriors came home, carrying the many scalps and fingers taken from the enemy dead, as well as the hands of twelve Shoshone babies killed in the fight where they left no survivors—bringing back a lone infant they would raise as one of their own people, taken from the breast of a brave Shoshone woman. But for that victory, the People had paid a heavy price.
Because of the battle casualties, the Tse-Tsehese moved camp down the foot of the mountains, and the village remained in muted mourning that first night. The following day at sunset they began their victory dance. It began snowing again, fat flakes falling so thick that they hissed into the great skunk, that huge bonfire the warrior societies built and lighted for the celebration. Each warrior’s wife brought out the scalps her husband had taken while he recited his battle exploits—telling how the enemy had been packed and ready to move for the day when the warriors attacked; telling how the enemy ran, leaving all their goods and ponies and took to the hills where they could throw up some breastworks of rocks and brush; from there the Shoshone put up a hard fight—Little Shield, Walking Man, Young Spotted Wolf, and Twins were all seriously wounded in the fight, and the Shoshone killed nine Tse-Tsehese warriors in their desperate defense; the fighting raged until sundown, when the last of the enemy was killed. The dancing and feasting continued throughout the night as the stars whirled overhead.
And in the morning, Little Wolf, another of the Old-Man Chiefs, came to tell Morning Star that someone had stolen his ponies overnight while the camp was celebrating.
“Who could have done that?”
“Not the Shoshone,” Little Wolf speculated.
“No, not them. The attack took care of them.”
“I think the Ooetaneo-o, the Crow People. From the tracks I followed a ways, the thieves came from the north.”
“Over the mountains?” Morning Star asked.
“Yes, I think so”
“Why would they steal only your ponies?”
Little Wolf wagged his head, as if attempting to sort it out. “Perhaps to lay a trap for one of us, a few of us—whoever will go after those ponies. Not the whole band.”
“Are you going after your horses?”
“No,” Little Wolf said, gesturing with his hands moving outward from his chest. “I give the ponies to the Crow People. I will not go after them.”
Morning Star watched his old friend walk away. It was a strange feeling inside him now. For this was the only time in his long, long memory that the People allowed stolen ponies to go with the thieves without giving chase.
The village moved again that day, to the mouth of Striped Stick Creek on the Powder River. As the women raised the lodges and started the fires, many of the men rode down the Powder hunting for deer and antelope. In the evening when they returned they brought the news of finding many, many tracks of iron-shod American horses tramping through the snow and mud, finding the ruts cut by the white man’s wagon wheels too—all of them moving north by west along the divide south of the Powder River.
“Surely they go to that small soldier camp beside the Powder,” Little Wolf observed that night as the old men and war chiefs gathered to discuss what course of action to take.
“There are always wagons coming and going from that place where the soldiers live in their dirt lodges,” Yellow Eagle said. He was one of the hunters who had seen the tracks for himself. “This was not the same. Too many wagons. Too many horses and walk-a-heaps.”
Last Bull growled, “They are coming to look for us!”
“We do not know that yet,” Morning Star quieted the alarmist.
“We should find out,” Little Wolf decided.
And the rest agreed. They decided to select four wolves to investigate what the tracks truly meant. The Old-Man Chiefs instructed the two Servant Chiefs to handpick certain young men with specific talents to go on this important mission. The Servant Chiefs went first to the lodge of Hail. There they took the young man by the arms and brought him to the Council Lodge. Again they went out and returned with Crow Necklace, one of the most respected Crazy Dog little chiefs. Again they went out and brought back Young Two Moon. Finally they returned to the Council Lodge with the last of the sacred four, High Wolf.
When the wolves were seated in a line before the old chiefs, Morning Star explained, “We have selected you four because we know we can depend upon you to go out and follow the trail Yellow Eagle and the others discovered to the south. When you find the trail, stay with it. Do not leave it until you learn who made the tracks, and where they are going. Why they are in this country.”
Then Little Wolf said, “Perhaps the trail will meet another party somewhere. As Morning Star has said, we are depending upon you to find out the answers to all our questions and to return with what we must know. Now, go catch up your strongest ponies, but return to this lodge before you set out on your journey.”
When the four had returned with their horses, weapons, blankets, and coats, the chiefs led them through the village in a long procession behind the Old-Man Crier who sang out, “Behold! I come with four young men for whom we will look in the days to come. For whom our ears will listen in the days to come. They are going out to look for the tracks of those who have sneaked into our country. This sacred four will return here when they have news of these enemies!”
The four companies drawn from units of the Fourth, Ninth, and Twenty-third infantries to man Reno Cantonment certainly enjoyed their visitors and did all they could to join in on the revelry those first two days after Crook’s men were paid and all hell broke loose. The carouse allowed Pollock’s men a brief respite from the ongoing construction expanding the warehouses, cavalry corrals, teamster shed, blacksmith shack, and the company mess kitchens, each one built of logs “half-above-ground.”
During the night of the nineteenth three shots were fired in the raucous camp, leading Colonel Dodge to call upon General Crook to have the sutler’s saloon closed. Dodge came back to the infantry camp grumbling and cursing the generaclass="underline" Crook had refused because he was a personal friend of the trader, and together they were partners in an Oregon sheep ranch.
So rowdy was the nonstop celebration that Dodge himself went to appeal to Pollock, asking that the cantonment commander close down the trader’s saloon. Little did the officers know that the sutler was in cahoots with another civilian who had set up an awning over his peddler’s cart some distance upstream in a copse of cottonwood, where many of the horse soldiers had been going to cut and peel the cottonwood bark to feed to their mounts as the snowstorm continued into the night.