At long last in what his Sioux people called the Moon When Chokecherries Grow Ripe, she had at last worked up the strength to tell the young warrior that she had something important to say to him when the sun rested behind the mountains.
Giddily, flushed with the promise, White-Cow-Bull promised he would return that evening as the stars whirled in the foamy sky overhead.
Eagerly he dressed in his finest buckskins and brushed his hair until it gleamed like his well-oiled rifle. He was as certain as he had ever been about anything that tonight Monaseetah would finally profess her love for him. Across four moons the young warrior had courted her, ever since that camp of Old Bear’s over on the headwaters of the Powder. Ever since that cold Black Night March.
But instead of giving her heart to White-Cow-Bull as he had hoped, Monaseetah declared that, though it hurt her to tell him, the Oglalla warrior must court another for his wife.
“In my heart,” she explained, “it is not right for me to let you pursue me while I belong to another.”
“Who is this other?” the warrior snapped, ready to challenge that man.
“I am waiting for Hiestzi to return for me as he promised.” The memories were still fresh and raw, like a wound kept from healing.
The thick pain behind her words made the young Oglalla wonder if she truly believed the soldier-chief would actually come back for her.
“Only death will keep him from coming for me as he promised. Someday, he will come,” she told him.
Monaseetah straightened and muffled her sobbing bravely. “You are very kind to offer your life to me, White-Cow-Bull. It is an honor for any woman to hear your words of love. But still—I must wait for Hiestzi to fulfill his promise to me. I can take no other. I must wait for my husband to return.”
The great, shaggy horned uncle Pte had brought the tribes to this place. And it was the buffalo the great village now followed.
Tens of thousands carpeted the plains some ten miles south of the camps pitched along the Greasy Grass. The warriors could hunt at leisure each summer day following the massive herd north until it came time to hunt antelope up on the Yellowstone. Even a young child couldn’t mistake where the great herd grazed in its journey—the dust hung like a thick winter blanket above the curly dark humps of these animals that spelled life itself for the nomads of the prairie.
So much like the dust of this great migration of the tribes. From their first camp along the Greasy Grass, the tribes moved a few miles north. That dust from their journey rose into the bone yellow sky above a trail a half mile wide and many more times that long.
In the van of the march rode those courageous young warriors, each wearing his finest feathers and scalps, brandishing their shields and new rifles aflutter with eagle feathers and hair. Behind that watchful vanguard of warriors came the women and children riding or walking among pack-laden and travois-dragging horses. Then behind the old ones tramped the huge pony herd, watched over by the boys too young to go to war, but old enough to show their bravery in caring for the thousands beyond count of Sioux ponies.
They had crossed the divide from the Rosebud, not in fear, but to find the buffalo. Not in fear that Red Beard Crook would find their great village. No, not in fear had they come to the valley of the Greasy Grass. For they had already whipped the soldiers across the time it took the sun to walk over the sky.
Like a bolt of summer lightning sent into the huge encampment that sixteenth day of June, 1876, as white men would reckon time—Crazy Horse’s scouts had come tearing among the lodge circles on the Rosebud with their electrifying news.
“Soldiers! Soldiers! Sitting Bull told us of this—his vision! The soldiers come!”
So it was that Crazy Horse gathered his young warriors and sped out to greet the soldiers under Red Beard Crook, who had been marching north with thirteen hundred men to rendezvous with General Terry from Dakota and Colonel Gibbon of Montana. Some twenty-five miles south of their combined villages, the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts located the long blue columns along the Rosebud. They would wait till morning to throw themselves on these foolish white men.
Come daylight, Crazy Horse led the screaming, shrieking riders into battle.
It was battle as Red-Beard Crook had never seen it: naked brown horsemen whirling madly about his grim blue ranks, pressing the frustrated soldier-chief to a stalemate.
After nearly an entire day of fighting, during which Crazy Horse and his young field generals continually stymied Crook and his officers, both armies abandoned the field, taking their wounded and dead with them.
Crook had decided against either continuing the chase or plunging ahead to meet up with the other two columns. He preferred instead to pull back to the south where he could lick his wounds. At the same time Sitting Bull and his advisers had decided to push over the rugged divide between the Rosebud and that sparkling river just on the other side of those Mountains of the Wolves.
They would march, The Bull told them. They would march over the mountains to the Pa-zees-la-wak-pa.
The Greasy Grass.
“Let us celebrate our great victory over the soldiers!” thousands of Sitting Bull’s people shouted. “The victory you dreamed of and shared with us!”
“No! Hear me!” The Bull cried above their praises. “We go because we have not yet struggled with the battle of my vision. We must march to the Greasy Grass. This fight on the Rosebud was not the battle in my vision, brothers!”
Still the warriors, young and old alike, persisted in their celebration. They had driven Red Beard’s troops clear out of the country!
“We have won, Sitting Bull! Long it has been since there has been such singing in our camps—we have won a great, great victory!”
“Hear me! It was not the great victory still to be given us on the Greasy Grass,” The Bull answered once they had fallen silent around him, intent on every word. “The dream showed me the soldiers would fall into our camp. Not on the field of battle. The soldiers would fall into our camp. Not only that—my dream showed our camp on the Pa-zees-la-wak-pa. Bull leads his people to … the Greasy Grass!”
So it came to pass that on the next day the people tore their lodges down and began their trek west. Over the Mountains of the Wolves they would come to the Greasy Grass, where they could hunt more buffalo, slowly working their way north to the land of the Yellowstone, where they could hunt antelope for meat and hides.
From that first warm day of spring, through the long weeks of wandering, that growing camp hummed with a constant activity, a drone of comings and goings. Not only were there the constant arrivals of cousins from the reservations and agencies, but there were the incessant departures of the young men on scouts and hunts. Not to mention those bands of warriors who led away pack animals burdened under dressed hides and thick robes, returning weeks later with their ponies swaybacked beneath loads of meat and blankets, provisions and guns, from the agency traders.
From the first day of late winter, when The Bull’s warriors had been able to travel east across a trackless, frozen landscape, they had bartered for more guns and ammunition.
Too, with each trip to the reservations for provisions, the warriors returned with more men. More and more the young ones, tough like resilient sinew, came to pitch their wickiups beside the waters of the Rosebud and later the Greasy Grass. Came to enjoy that time of endless celebration: each lazy summer day filled with hunting and scouting—each long, warm night of courting and storytelling and coup counting, and planning for The Bull’s glorious fight when the soldiers would fall headfirst into their camp on the Greasy Grass.