Chapter XXXVI: Under the Eternal Stars

After the massacre at the battle of the Little Big Horn, a vast number of Indian refugees fled over the borders into Canada. There they dwelt, drawing three pounds of beef a day from arbitrary uniformed individuals, who were strangely lacking in sympathy, and very observant of the few rules and regulations which a mysterious White Mother over the sea had seen fit to impose. Three pounds of meat a day is not much. Still it is enough to get along on, and with the necessity, and indeed, the opportunity of the chase gone, the bucks were able to wax lazy, drunken, and generally shiftless to their hearts' content. All this was frowned on by the uniformed individuals, but opportunities were not far to seek.

There has never been a nation more warlike, brave, and hardy than the Sioux in its native environment of war and hunting. These two furnished every point of leverage--physical, moral, intellectual--which the savage required to lift him to the level of his greatest efficiency. From the buffalo itself the Sioux family obtained its supply of wigwams, robes, food, fuel, light, harness, bow-strings, instruments of industry--in fact almost every article of necessity or luxury appertaining to its everyday life. From the chase of the animal the young Dacotah learned to ride, to shoot, to risk his life. And then in his constant strife with his neighbors, the Blackfeet or the Crows or the Pawnees, he was forced, if he would survive, to develop to the last degree his cunning, his observation, his strategy, his resourcefulness, his patience, his power to endure, his personal courage. Habituated to these two, the chase and war, from his early youth, he came at last to be the coolest, most dangerous warrior of the plains. He could ride anything, bareback, in any position. With his short, powerful bow he could launch a half-dozen arrows into the air before the first reached the ground, or could drive one of his shafts quite through the body of a buffalo. When necessity required, he was brave to the point of recklessness; but again, when expediency advised, he could worm his way for miles through the scantiest cover, flat on his face, by the laborious use alone of his elbows and toes. He could read a whole history in a trail which another might not even distinguish. He could sit absolutely motionless for hours in the hottest sun or the bitterest cold. And he could bear, as he was often called upon to do, the severest physical pain without a quiver of the eyelid.

But when the buffalo vanished, the Sioux passed the meridian of his powers. No other means of subsistence offered. He was forced to plunder, or go to the reservation for Government beef. Thence came much whisky and much loafing. The new young man had not the training of his father. So, in a little, the Teton nation was subdued and brought to reservations, and herded in an overall-plug-hat-blanket-wearing multitude, even now but half-tamed, and fiercely instinct with hereditary ferocity and resourcefulness. Other Indians go to Carlisle, learn to plough, and become at least partially civilized. The Sioux, fierce, hawk-eyed, wide-nostrilled, sits in solitary dignity before his lodge, brooding. Occasionally he has to be rounded up with a Gatling, as witness Wounded Knee. I have never been able to envy the agents of Dakota reservations.

When the statute of limitations ran out, or whatever mysterious time-limit the Government puts on its displeasure against Indian murderers, Sitting Bull and a horde of his fellow-warriors came back. Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill's show, where he had a good time until he began ghost-dancing and was killed in the Wounded Knee campaign. But some, Lone Wolf's band among them, remained in Canada. They had various reasons for doing so.

Lone Wolf stayed because he was in hard luck. He had barely settled down in his new home before the great Manitou had seen fit to strike his children with the Spotted Sickness. When finally the last case had been buried hastily, and its clothes and belongings burned under the distant eye of the uniformed man, the formerly powerful band found itself reduced by almost half. By dint of sitting innumerable days naked in a circle on the prairie and beating a tom-tom until the agent prayed for rain, the survivors managed to secure for themselves immunity from the Spotted Sickness at least. Then some of the ponies were stolen. Then a schism occurred in the community; and Three Knives took with him a dozen families and established a new clan within plain sight of the old. Lone Wolf was powerless because of the uniformed individual, who frowned on the Indian idea of patriarchal chastisement. A very young man of the band killed the agent, hoping thus to earn praise, but almost before the embers were cold and before the scalp of Three Knives had clotted dry, there appeared an astounding number of uniforms, who promptly decimated Lone Wolf's warriors and took away all their arms. Lone Wolf discovered that these uniformed men were in reality nothing but soldiers--a disgusting fact which he had not before suspected. They hung six of his young men, and that night a number of things happened, such as the unprovoked fall of Lone Wolf's standard from over his lodge, which showed plainly that Gitche Manitou was still angry.

Lone Wolf gathered his remnants about him and journeyed south to Spotted Tail.

There he enjoyed the discontented tranquillity of a United States reservation, with occasional privileges if he was good.

Lone Wolf had gone into the north country at the head of three hundred efficient fighting men, well armed with rifles, rich in ammunition, ponies, and the luxuries of daily existence. He came back as the nominal chief of thirty-five warriors, with few firearms, and less wealth. Counting in the women, children, and old men, his original band had numbered nearly a thousand souls--a large camp even for the old days. Now there remained barely a tenth of that number.

Misfortunes such as these must have a reason. Gitche Manitou is stern, but he is not unjust. Everybody knows that. And the reason Lone Wolf's band was so afflicted, Big Thunder, the medicine man, had discovered, lay in the fact that the defiling of the tribe's token, after the Little Big Horn, had been done by a member of the tribe itself. Until the culprit should be brought to justice the wrath of Gitche Manitou would continue to be visited impartially on the entire band.

The recognition of Rippling Water made a profound impression on those standing about. There flashed into Lone Wolf's eagle face a gleam of satisfaction so intense that Black Mike started. He had not the remotest notion that he was in any actual danger, for his dealings with the tribe in those old times when he had been a member of it had always been rather to its advantage than to his own. That it was unfriendly to him because of his unceremonious desertion of it, he did not doubt. Nor did he hope to escape a typical Indian tirade from the two old hags who, so short a time ago, had been his not unattractive young wives. But beyond this, and perhaps--as he glanced over the motley indications of their poverty--the promise of gifts, he anticipated nothing more serious in the end than a delay. A delay, however, was what he could not at present afford.

"Ah, well," he acknowledged in the Indian tongue, "I am he, Man-who-speaks-Medicine. You have known me. It is I. It is many moons that I have not seen my brothers, but I have accomplished many things, and I have gathered gifts for my brothers which will rejoice their hearts. I go to the lodges of the white men near Swift-water now, and I haste; so I cannot linger to clasp my brothers' hands; but to-morrow I return bearing the gifts."

He took up his reins with all confidence, for in those days no one was afraid of Indians--at least when they were accompanied by their women and children. The two bucks at the horses' heads did not move, however; and at a signal from Lone Wolf three others leaped lightly into the wagon-body behind the half-breed and pinned his arms to his sides. So suddenly was it done that Lafond could not even struggle.

His captors tied his elbows together at the back and lifted him to the ground, where a number of others hustled him into a wigwam, and after tying his feet left him lying on the ground. In a moment he heard the faint sound of wheels somewhere above him, by which he knew that Billy Knapp and Buckley were passing the point of his intended ambush. He drew a deep breath and shouted. Instantly two young Sioux ran in and threw a blanket over his head, nearly smothering him. The sound of the wheels died into distance.

After perhaps two hours he heard the hoof-beats of a large party of horsemen. They, too, died away. The men composing the party were looking for him, Michail Lafond, but this he did not know. He tried to distinguish from the noises just outside what was taking place in the little camp, but he could not.

At the end of another half-hour the two young men who had been appointed as his guards led him out to a horse, on which, after his feet had been untied, he was compelled to mount. He asked them questions, to which they vouchsafed no reply. Looking about him curiously, he saw that the camp had been struck. The long teepee poles, bound on each side of the ponies, trailed their ends on the ground, and on the litters thus formed, the skins of the lodges, all the household utensils, and many of the younger children had been placed. Squaws bestrode the little animals. The warriors, ridiculously incongruous in their overalls and flannel shirts, sat motionless on their mounts. Lafond recognized his own team, but could not discover either his wagon or the harness. These had been dragged away into the bushes and left, for very good reasons.

The cavalcade took its way directly down the narrow, overgrown little canyon, riding in single file. Lafond could not understand this. The road above would have been much easier.

After an hour's hard work in dodging obstructions, getting around fallen trees or between standing timber, the party emerged on the broad, rolling foothills, grass-covered and bare of trees. Here Lone Wolf led the way south-east for several miles, and finally came to a halt on the brow of a round hill of gentle descent. The band at once dismounted. A number of the squaws deftly relieved the ponies of their burdens, and the younger boys led them away to the bottom-lands for pasture. The women then began without delay to erect the lodges in a wide circle surrounding the brow of the hill, so arranging them that the flaps or doorways opened into the common centre. After this had been done, they built in the middle of the circle a huge fire of wood brought from the Hills, but did not light it as yet. Then all silently disappeared to the bottom-lands, where they made little fires and set about supper.

Before each lodge a warrior established himself, crosslegged, and began to smoke. When the sun dipped behind the Hills and threw their long shadows silently out across to the Bad Lands, the chill of twilight struck in, and so the Indians wrapped themselves closely in their blankets. As by a stroke of enchantment, with the concealment of the shirts and overalls, the Past returned. Against the sky of evening, the silhouettes of the pointed wigwams and the suggestion of the shrouded warriors smoking solemnly, silently, their pipes, all belonged to the nomadic age before such men as Michail Lafond had "civilized" the country.

After a time they rose and departed silently to the bottom-land for a while, leaving Lafond in charge of the two young men. They had gone to eat their suppers. The half-breed had not tasted food since the early morning, nor slept for thirty odd hours.

The stars came out one by one, and the stillness of that great inland sea men call the prairies fell on the world. Such occasional sounds as rose from the creek bottom seemed but to emphasize the peace. And then suddenly, from the shadows somewhere, without disturbance, the blanketed figures appeared and took their places again. A squaw came bearing a torch, and lit the fire in the centre of the circle, and there sprang up a broad shaft of light which drew about the little scene a great canopy of imminent blackness. From hand to hand passed a great red-stone calumet or pipe. Each warrior puffed at it twice and passed it to his neighbor. It was not offered to Michail Lafond, whose bonds had now been loosened.

After each of the seated warriors had taken his part in this ceremony, and the pipe had completed the circle to Lone Wolf, that chief arose, throwing back his blanket from his shoulders.

With a sudden chill of fear, Michail Lafond saw that he was to assist at a state council of the sort held only when the tribe is to sit in judgment on one of its own number.

The savage was naked to the waist. In his hair, worn loose and unbraided after the Sioux fashion, three eagle feathers with white tips were thrust slantwise across the back of his head; and under its heavy mass his fierce bright eyes and hawk face gleamed impressively. About his neck hung a fringe of bears' claws, from which depended a round silver medal. Now as he stood there--the lithe strength of his bronze torso revealed one arm clasping the blanket about his waist, the other holding loosely at his side the feather-bedecked calumet of sandstone--the stigma of sordidness and drunkenness and squalor seemed to fall away, so that the spectator would have seen in this group of silent men under the silent western heavens only the pomp and pride of a great and savage people in the zenith of its power.

Lone Wolf stood for the space of several minutes without a sign. Then with a magnificently sweeping gesture he held the calumet aloft and began to speak.

At first his voice was low and monotonous, but as his speech continued it took on more color, until at the close it responded in modulation to every flash of his eye. He began with a recital of the tribe's ancient glory, dwelling rather on concrete examples than on broader generalities. He numbered its warriors, its ponies, its arms, and lodges. He told of the beauty of its women and the greatness of its men, whom he ran over by name. He told of its deeds in war, enumerating the enemies it had struck, the ponies it had stolen, the stratagems it had conceived and carried out. And then he swept his arm and the feather-fluttering calumet abroad as he described the boundless extent of the hunting grounds over which it had used to roam. As he continued, the warriors' expressive eyes brightened and flashed with pride, though they moved not one muscle of their faces or bodies. Beyond the circle could be dimly descried another not less interested audience of women and older children.

"These and more were ours!" cried Lone Wolf, "these and many more. The favor of Gitche Manitou was ours and the riches of the world. Where are they now?" With an indescribably graceful gesture the orator stooped to the ground and grasped a handful of the loose dry earth. "Gone!" he said solemnly, letting the sand fall from his outstretched suddenly opened palm.

Then, without pause or transition, he began, in equally vivid objective language, to detail the tribe's misery and poverty of to-day. He recounted its disasters, just as a moment before he had recounted its victories. He told of the Spotted Sickness, the dividing of forces, the battle with the red coats, all the long series of oppressions great and little which had brought them to their present condition. He counted over by name the present members, to show how their numbers had shrunken, and to each name he added others of those who had gone before. So real was the picture that the orator himself faltered, while from outside the circle rose for a single instant a long trembling wail. The warriors had half covered their faces with the folds of their blankets.

"Thus our glory went and our young men are seen no longer on the war path, but only in the white men's towns. And yet our fathers were brave before us and we have struck well in our time. Why is this so? Why has Gitche Manitou veiled his face from his children?"

Leaving the question unanswered, Lone Wolf unexpectedly took up Lafond's connection with the tribe. In the recounting of this, too, he held to the greatest minuteness of detail, showing plainly the half-breed's rise from despised squaw man to a person of influence in the councils. He gave the half-breed full credit for all he did. He even went out of his way to show that to Lafond was due much of the power that had so distinguished the Brule Sioux among the other tribes. He described again briefly that power, and told of the battle of the Little Big Horn. He dwelt on that as to some extent the culmination of the tribe's glory. It was the last and greatest of its exploits. After it misfortune commenced. Gitche Manitou that day veiled his face.

"And he turned his hand against the totem of the Turtle," said Lone Wolf impressively, "because one of its children had committed a sacrilege. The very night of that great victory, a brave from among us arose and took the sacred totem, the great Turtle, from the lodge of his chief, and slew Buffalo Voice, the medicine man favored of Gitche Manitou, and defiled the totem.

"From that time Gitche Manitou has frowned upon his children. From that time misfortune has visited the tribe of Lone Wolf. From that time the man who did these things has lost his old warrior name and has been known as the Defiler."

He paused and looked about the circle until his eye rested on Lafond. With a sudden fierce enmity he stretched his arm toward the captive.

"That is he," he concluded impressively; "and it has been revealed by Big Thunder that never will Gitche Manitou smile on his children until the Defiler dies!"