Part 21

What could such a man know of the despair into which my people had fallen? He was hard, unimaginative, and jealous of his authority. He was also a bigot and it is hard for anyone not a poet or philosopher to be just to a people holding a different view of the world. Race hatred and religious prejudices stand like walls between the red man and the white. The Sioux cannot comprehend the priest and the priest will not tolerate the Sioux. Our agent became angry, arrogant, and unreasonable. He felt that his government was in question. His pride was hurt.

For a few days after I reported the departure of Mato all was quiet and the agent believed that the frenzy was over so far as his wards were concerned. He was only anxious that The Sitting Bull and his followers should not know how deeply their dances had stirred the settlements. Nevertheless, the chief knew, and it helped him to retain some faith in the magic he was testing. He did not refer to the breaking of his peace pipe, but he declined to give up the dance.

To his friend, John Carignan, the teacher, he said: “The agent complains that I feed my cattle to those who come to dance. What does it matter? If the buffalo come back I will not need them. If the new religion is a lie then I do not care to raise cattle. The Great Spirit has sent me a message. He has said, ‘_If you wish to live join the dance I have given_.’ Whether this message is true or not I cannot yet tell. I am seeking proof.”

Against the bitter words of the agent I will put the words of John Carignan, who kept the school near The Sitting Bull’s home. This man speaks our language. “I knew the chief well,” he said, “and I saw no evil in him. He was an Indian, but I can’t blame him for that.”

During this troublesome period my chief went often to see the teacher of his children. Jack was the one white man with whom he could talk freely, and together they argued upon the new religion. Jack liked my chief and told me so one day as we were discussing the agent’s attitude toward the dance. “Often the chief came to eat with my family and he has always borne himself with dignity and honor. I have always found him considerate and unassuming.”

“Our religion seems foolish to you, but so does yours to me,” my chief said. “The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and Catholics all have a different God. Why cannot we have one of our own? Why does the agent seek to take away our religion? My race is dying. Our God will soon die with us. If this new religion is not true, then what does it matter? I do not know what to believe. If I could dream like others and visit the spirit land myself, then it would be easy for me to believe, but the trance does not come to me. It passes me by. I help others to see their dead, but I am not aided.”

“That is it precisely,” replied the teacher. “See the kind of men who go into the trance. Your strong, clear-headed men do not believe.”

“That is true,” the chief admitted, “but I am hoping some of my head men may yet enter the trance. Perhaps we do not know how to prepare the way.”

By this he meant that they had not learned how to hypnotize, for that is what the dance became. It was like a meeting of spiritualists who sit for visions. It was like the revival meetings of the Free Methodists or the old-time Shakers or Quakers. My friend Davies wrote me a long letter wherein he said: “It is foolish, as you say, but no more absurd to my mind than scores of other forms of religious ecstasy. My advice is let it run; it will wear itself out. Movements of this kind grow by opposition.”

All that he said was true, but, like the chief, I could not help hoping something would happen, for when they sang their songs warmed my heart and made my learning of little weight. The painted arrows, the fluttering feathers, the symbolic figures—every little thing had its appeal to me. When they raised their quivering palms in the air and cried to the Messiah in the west, I could scarcely restrain myself from joining in their supplication. This may seem strange, but it is true and you will never comprehend this last despairing cry of my race if I do not tell you the truth.

We believed in what we were. We had the pride of race. We were fulfilling our destiny as hunters and freemen. Do you think that in ten years you can make my proud people bow the neck to the scourge of a white man’s daily hatred? Is the Great Spirit a bungler? Does he draw a figure on the earth, only to wipe it away as a child writes upon a slate?

“Why are we so thrust upon and degraded? It must be that we have angered the Great Spirit. We must go back to the point wherein our old trail is found,” so my father argued.

The line that divides the mysterious and the commonplace is very slender, in the minds of my people. You do not realize that. They take up a cartridge. How wonderful it is! How is it made? A knife—what gives the point its gleam and its spring? The grass blade, what causes it to thrust from the earth? The clouds, where do they go—what are they? To the west of us is the Crow country; beyond that, who knows? You must put yourself in the place of those who think in this way before you judge them harshly. Many of these things I now understand, but I do not know why men are born and why they die. I do not know why the sun brings forth the grass.

My chief comprehended more than most men of his tribe, but to him the world was just as mysterious as to me. It did him no good to study the white man’s religions. They were so many and so contradictory that he was confused. He had always been a prayerful man—and had kept the Sun Dance, and all the ceremonials of the Uncapappas carefully. He was a grave soul, doing nothing thoughtlessly. He always asked the Great Spirit for guidance, yet he was never a medicine man, as the white men say. He did not become so during this dance. He helped to hypnotize the dancers, but so did others; that did not mean that they were priests or medicine men—it only meant they had the power to induce these trances.

It was a time of great bewilderment, of question and of doubt. No one thought of the present; all were dreaming of the past, hoping to bring the past. The future was black chaos unless the Great Spirit should restore their world of the buffalo.

The dance went on with steadily growing excitement. The autumn remained very mild and favorable to the ceremony, and yet there were fewer people in it than the agent supposed. Those most active continued to be the mourners. Those who had lost children crowded to the dance, as white people go to spiritualistic seances, in the hope of touching the hands of their babes and hearing the voices of their daughters. They sincerely believed that they met their dead and they deeply resented the brutal order of the agent who would keep them from this sweet reunion.

It was deeply moving to look upon their happy faces as they stood and called in piercing voices: “I saw my child—my little son. He was playing with his small bow and arrows. I called him and he ran to me. He was very happy with his grandfather. The sun was shining on the flowers and no one was hungry. My boy clung to my hand. I did not wish to come back. Oh, teach me the way to go again!”

I think the number of those who believed that the new world of the buffalo was coming, that the white man would be swept away, were few, but hundreds considered it possible to go to the spirit land and see those who were dead, and they resented, as my chief, the interference of the government. There was nothing worth while left in the world but this, and they used bitter words when they were commanded to lay this comforting faith aside. “Why should our spirit meetings be taken from us?” they asked of me.

In spite of the wind, the dust, and the blazing October sun, a veil of mysterious passion lay over the camp. The children were withdrawn from school to participate in the worship. Nothing else was talked of. During the day, as the old chiefs counciled, the women gathered together and told their experiences. There were deceivers among those who took part in this, and many who were self-deceived, but for the most part they were in deadly earnestness; the exultation on their faces could not be simulated. They moved in a cloud of joyous memories, with no care, no thought of the Great Father’s commands. They were borne above all other considerations but this—“How may we bring back the vanished world of the fathers?”

Up at the agent’s office was an absolutely different world. There hate and cynical coarseness ruled. To go from the dance to the agent was a bitter experience for me. I was forced into deception. No one dared to speak of the dance, except in terms of laughter or disbelief. All the renegades in the pay of the government joined in the jests and told ribald stories of the chief and of the ceremonies. They could not understand what it meant. As for me, I said little, but I foresaw trouble for my people and sorrow for myself.

The chief clerk hated me and all Indians. He was a most capable man, but sour and sullen to everyone who did not appeal to him. He had no children, no wife, and no faith. His voice was a snarl, his face a chill wind. He never spoke to an Indian that he did not curse. The agent was not so, but he was a zealot impatient of the old, eager to make a record for himself and the post. Loyal to the white man’s ideal, he was unsympathetic and harsh and materialistic in dealing with the traditional prejudices of my race.

He sent for Jack, the teacher, and asked him to come up and talk with him. “Tell me all about it,” he said, “What is the meaning of it?”

In reply Jack said, soberly: “They are very much in earnest about this new religion of theirs, but they are peaceable. The Sitting Bull talked with me a long time yesterday, and I found it a hard matter to meet his arguments, which he bases on the miracles of the Bible. The dancers are told to lay aside all that the white man has made and fix their minds on what they wish to see most of all. They go into a trance and lie for hours. When they wake they are very happy. They come and tell me their dreams and some of them are very beautiful. My advice is to let them alone. It is a craze like the old-fashioned Methodist revival. It will die out as winter comes on.”

This testimony by a man who understood our language and was in daily contact with The Sitting Bull band led the agent to pursue a calmer course. He decided to wait the ebbing of the excitement.

Unfortunately, a long letter he had written to Washington about “the Messiah craze” was given to the reporters, and the daily papers were instantly filled with black headlines introducing foolish and false accounts of what was taking place. Writers hurried to the Standing Rock and wired alarming reports of what they heard, and all this reacted unfavorably upon the dancers.

The agent then laid the burden of the blame upon my chief. “He is a reactionary,” he said; “he is a disturber and has been from the first. He has opposed every treaty and has insisted at all times on being treated as a chief,” and in all his letters and talks he continued to speak ill of him.

He sent word by me and by Jack, saying to The Sitting Bull: “Come to the agency. I want to talk with you. Stop this foolish dance and come here and camp for a while where I can talk with you. The white people are alarmed and you must stop this dance.”

The chief, embittered by the agent’s attack upon him, refused to go to the Standing Rock. “I am not a dog to be whistled at. I will not go to the agent to be insulted and beaten,” and he called his old guard of “Silent Eaters” around him. “The agent threatens to imprison me and break up the dance. If he comes to fight he will find us ready.”

Day by day the feeling between the agency and its police on the one side, and the chief and the dancers on the other, got more alarming, and the agent was obliged to send many telegrams to Washington and the outside world to quiet the fears of the settlers, and at last he decided to go down to Rock Creek and see for himself what was going on. He should have done so before.

He asked me to go as interpreter, and this I did, but very reluctantly, for it put me too much on his side.

He planned to come upon the scene of the dance suddenly, and many were dancing as we rode up to the outer circle of lodges. The word went about that the agent was come, but no one stopped dancing on that account. They were too much in earnest to give heed to any authority. Some of those to whom he called replied with words of contempt, defying his command, and I, who knew the terrible power of the President’s army, trembled as I saw the face of the agent blacken.

“What foolery!” he said to me. “This has got to stop! Go tell The Sitting Bull to come to me.”

I made my way to where the chief sat, and told him what the agent had demanded.

I could see that he associated me with the renegades who fawned upon the agent, and he listened to what I said with cold, stern face. I pleaded with him to do as he was commanded. I informed him of the fury of fear which had fallen upon the settlers and I warned him that the soldiers would come to put a stop to the dance.

To all this he made no reply other than to say: “Since the agent has come to see me, tell him I will talk with him in the morning. I am busy now. I cannot leave the dance.”

The agent was furious when I told him this, and as we drove off down to the school muttered a threat, “I’ll make him suffer for this, the insolent old dog.” We found Carignan, the teacher, almost alone at the school. The Sitting Bull had said: “If this religion is true, then it is more important than your books,” and had told his people to withdraw their children from their studies. “If the white man’s world is coming to an end, of what use is it to learn his ways?” he argued.

To Carignan the agent talked freely of the chief. “He must be brought low,” he declared, wrathfully. “His power must be broken. I will see him in the morning and give him one more chance to quit peaceably. If he does not I will arrest him. He will find he can’t run this reservation.”

To this Carignan replied: “I don’t think he means to make trouble, but he is profoundly interested in this new religion. I think he will yield to reason.”

[Illustration: Scouts

_These Indian scouts are on the trail of a Chiricahua Apache named Massai, famous in the ’nineties as the wildest and most cruel of the Apaches. So crooked was Massai’s trail that even the Indians themselves could not follow it._

_Illustration from_ MASSAI’S CROOKED TRAIL _by_ Frederic Remington

_Originally published in_ HARPER’S MAGAZINE, _January, 1898_]

[Illustration: On the Little Big Horn

_When Cheschapah, son of the aged Crow chief, Pounded Meat, became a medicine man and aspired to leadership of the tribe, a party of Sioux came on a visit to the Crows. Fearing that the feasting and eloquence of Cheschapah might turn their thoughts to war, troops were sent to bring the visitors home. The Sioux started for home meekly enough, but Cheschapah, with a yelling swarm of his young friends, began to buzz about the column, threatening to attack the troopers who had so rudely broken up their dinner party, and did not desist even when the soldiers had forded the river. Whereupon the chief of the Crow police rode out to Cheschapah, commanding him to turn back, and received for an answer an insult that with Indians calls for blood. But for old chief Pounded Meat, who then rode out to his son and cowed him with a last flare of command, firing would have begun then and there._

_Illustration from_ LITTLE BIG HORN MEDICINE _by_ Owen Wister

_Originally published in_ HARPER’S MAGAZINE, _June, 1894_]

There had already been a great deal of talk of the War Department sending someone to quiet the disturbance, and this the agent did not relish. He had been an Indian agent for many years and prided himself on knowing how to handle his people, and was especially anxious to keep the chief authority entirely in his own hands. Poor and despised as The Sitting Bull had become, even the agent considered it an honor to arrest and imprison him. Furthermore, I could see that he did not care to attempt this except as a last resort.

The following morning the agent, Carignan, and myself went up to see The Sitting Bull. He was in his tepee, smoking beside a small smoldering fire. He was very cold and quiet, and looked tired and weak. His hair parted in the middle and the sad look of his face made him resemble an old woman. To me he was only a tragic wraith of his former self. His eyes were dull and heavy. He was a type of my vanishing race as he sat there, and my heart went out to him.

He greeted us with a low word and shook hands. We all sat about in the lodge. Few people were stirring.

“Tell the chief I have come to talk with him about this dance,” began the agent.

I told the chief, and he said: “Speak on, my ears are open.”

“Tell him I hear he is dancing this foolish dance almost every day, making his people tired, so that they neglect their cattle and have taken their children from school. Tell him that all the people are getting excited. Therefore, Washington says the dance must stop!” continued the agent.

I told the chief this. His face did not change, but his eyes fired a little. “Are the white people afraid of this new religion? Why do they wish to stop it?” he scornfully asked, in answer.

“Say to him that I do not fear the dance—I consider it foolish—but I do not want him wasting the energies of the people. He must stop it at once!”

To this the chief replied: “I am a reasonable man and a peacemaker. I do not seek trouble, but my people take comfort in this dance. They have lost many dear ones and in this dance they see them again. Whether it is true or not I have not yet made up my mind, but my people believe in it and I see no harm in it.” Here he paused for a moment. “I have a proposition to make to you,” he said firmly. “This new religion came to me from the Brulé Reservation; they got it from the west. The Mato and Kios claim to have seen the Messiah. Let us two, you and I, set forth together with intent to trail down this story of the Messiah. If, when we reach the last tribe in the land where the story originated, they cannot show us the Messiah or give us satisfactory proof, then we will return and I will tell my people that they have been too credulous. This report will end the dance forever. It will not do to order my people to stop; that will make them sure the dance is true magic.”

The chief was very serious in this offer. He knew that he could not, by merely ordering it, stop the dance; but if he should go on this journey with the agent and make diligent inquiry, then he could on his return speak with authority. He made this offer as one reasonable man to another, and, had the agent met him halfway or even permitted him to send my father or Slohan, the final tragedy might have been averted, but the agent was too angry now to parley. His answer was contemptuous.

“Tell him I refuse to consider that. It is as crazy as the dance. It would only be a waste of time.”

I urged him to accept, for in the months to follow the excitement would die out, but he would not listen.

“I will not consider it. It would be like trying to catch up the wind that blew last year. I do not care to argue here. Tell him to come to my house to-morrow and I will give him a night and a day to prove to me that he is not a foolish old man, chasing a will-o’-the-wisp.”

To this the chief replied: “Are there miracles only in the white man’s religion? I hear you believe there was once a great flood and all the people were drowned but a man and a woman, who took all the animals, male and female, into a big steamboat. When did this happen? How do you know it? Is the ghost dance more foolish? Are my people to be without a religion because it does not please the white man?”

To this the agent answered, impatiently: “I refuse to debate. I have orders to stop the dance, and these orders must be carried out. Tell him to come to the agency to-morrow and we will talk it out there. I can’t do it now.”

To my surprise, the chief pacifically responded: “I will come. My people are few and feeble, I do not wish to make trouble. Let us speak wisely in this matter. You are angry now and my people are excited. I will come and we will talk quietly together.”

But the faces of the old guard were dark, and Black Bull, who stood near, cried out, saying: “Let us alone. We will not give up the dance. We are afraid. Send the coyote away! Is The Sitting Bull afraid?”

This touched the chief to the quick, and he said, “I am not, but I do not desire trouble.”

My father spoke and said: “Do not go. The white man will imprison you if you do.”

Black Bull again shouted: “The white man is a liar! His tongue is double. He has set a trap. Will you walk into it?”