Those had been good days to die! The very best his people had ever known.
Now roaming scouts kept the camps informed of where the two armies were marching. They knew each time the two armies were reinforced by more soldiers. And they knew when the two joined into one. It wasn’t long, however, that reports came saying that half of the soldiers were staying along the Elk River.* And the others were coming east, heading for the Owl River,† led by the traders’ sons‡ who were scouting for the soldiers. Traitors such as they would likely follow any trail they could find.
It was not a hard thing to find a trail, American Horse scoffed. After all, all the big clans were here. Crazy Horse’s people were but a few miles away to the south. Even Sitting Bull had come down from Killdeer Mountain in the north with his Hunkpapa faithful, camped close by to the east a ways, where the old medicine man mourned the death of a son who never recovered after he was kicked in the head by a pony during the waning of the last moon.
In his Miniconjou camp of more than twenty-six-times-ten, the chief even included a handful of Shahiyena who had splintered off from Dull Knife, a few Oglalla under war chief Roman Nose, and even some Brule lodges— all drifting south for Bear Butte in the Paha Sapa.* Among these other bands he was known as Iron Plume, sometimes called Iron Shield or Black Shield. But among his people, his own familial clan, he had long been known as American Horse. While his mother had been Miniconjou, his father, Smoke, had been Oglalla. Long ago in the dawn of the white man’s Holy Road far to the south, Smoke had been one of the first Lakota met by Francis Parkman. After his father’s death American Horse had remained with his mother, living with her people.
Not long ago at twilight he had gone out to look over the village, to look beyond the hide lodges and brush wickiups at the knotting of the ponies here and there on the surrounding hillsides. American Horse liked this time of day best, when the lodges lit up from inside, beckoning a man into their warmth—like a woman raising the buffalo robe to show her naked body to her man. Three-times-ten, plus seven more … those buffalo-hide lodges stood close together in a narrow, three-pronged depression of coulees running toward the Rabbit Lip Creek, all of it sheltered from the cold north winds by a grassy ridge. Across the timbered stream to the south another grassy embankment rose into the broken countryside at the base of steep clay and limestone buttes. For the most part the lodges themselves would stand concealed from soldier eyes, hidden by the chalk-colored ridges that rose on the north, west, and south of their camp. Those bluffs*lay in a near perfect north-to-south line for some twenty miles, and spreading anywhere from two to six miles in width, all of them covered for nearly half their height with an emerald cap of pine and cedar. Here in the bottom his people camped out of the wind, with good timber for their fires, plenty of grass for their horses, and cold, clear water flowing down from the high places.
In this camp on the Mashtincha Putin† lived warriors who like hundreds of others had made one by one the hundreds of the soldiers of Sitting Bull’s vision fall on that sunny ridge back in the Moon of Fat Horses. Here lived Miniconjou war chiefs named Red Horse, Dog Necklace, and Iron Thunder. Men who in these greatest days of their people were at the peak of their power.
But why was it that American Horse saw little future in fleeing to the reservations for the harsh winter and escaping to the free prairie come spring? How long could they go on like this? The great herds were shrinking, just as the clear, pure water holes in the last hot breathless days of summer shrank to muddy wallows.
American Horse shuddered with the chill gust of wind here on this high ground where he looked down upon the lamplike lodges, beckoning him with their warmth. The cold and the wet had driven his people south toward the agencies earlier than usual this hunting season. Unrelenting storms and drenching rain had convinced them they should make for Bear Butte, from there an easy journey on to Red Cloud’s and Spotted Tail’s agencies to make ready for winter.
To go in and beg the white man for flour and pig meat for their families … what utter humiliation that was for warriors whose eyes had witnessed such greatness in turning back Three Stars on the Rosebud, such victory in crushing the nameless soldier chief who brought his white men prancing down on their great village beside the Greasy Grass.
With the rise of the wind American Horse pulled the heavy buffalo robe about his shoulders, enjoying the sensuous feel of its hairy warmth on his cheeks. Into his lungs he drew the fragrance on the wind, smelled the smoke from those many fires below him, kettles on the boil, supper warming.
Up from the creek bottom floated the agonized cry of Little Eagle’s daughter.
Her time had come. Her child ready to be born. What pain he heard in her cries drifting all the way up here, where they reverberated from the chalky walls. This was the only crying he wanted to hear from the lips of his people: the birth of their children into freedom. No more did American Horse want to hear the wails of women in mourning, the whimper of little children so hungry and cold that their eyes sank into their sockets. No more did he want to hear the cries of the old ones unable to keep up on their bloodied feet as the villages fled from the marching soldiers.
Never before had they so soundly defeated the white man. Perhaps it was true that these were their finest days. But, he thought, if this was indeed their finest season, then it could mean only one thing: that from here on life would only get worse for the Lakota.
The wind shifted again, a strange sound carried on it.
American Horse looked back to the north, smelling that wind a moment, wondering. Then peered to the west. No, not from the west. Only from the north. If they ever came at all, he convinced himself, they would come out of the north.
Then he pulled the buffalo fur over his ears and trudged down the sodden hillside to that small gathering of lodges. Thinking, hoping, and praying to the Great Mystery that His people had not yet seen their zenith.
Knowing in the pit of him that perhaps they had already visited the last of those finest days.
*The Big Horn Mountains.
† The Little Missouri River.
*The Yellowstone River.
† The Moreau River.
‡ Baptiste Garnier, Frank Grouard, and Baptiste Pourier.
* Slim Buttes
† Rabbit Lip or Hairy Lip Creek, present-day Gap Creek, a tributary of Rabbit Creek, itself a tributary of the nearby Moreau River
Chapter 38
9 September 1876
His nose felt like it was as big as his boot. Dribbling, Seamus wiped it on the sleeve of his canvas mackinaw.
God, did that hurt!
Raw and angry, sore beyond belief. His nose itself was as red as these buffalo berries clinging to the nearby bushes.
But at least he wasn’t so sick that he couldn’t climb into the saddle. Not so immobilized with pain that the only way he could move was to lie on a travois pulled along by one of Tom Moore’s mules.
“Ready, boys!” whispered Lieutenant Schwatka as he rode along their front.
Atop a sloping ridge formed by two shallow coulees that eventually united at the north edge of the village, the cavalry horses pawed the earth. Weary, all but done in—the animals wanted to move, or get the damned weight off their backs. One or the other. The animals had waited out most of the night grazing. They should have enough bottom in them to make this short charge through the village.