IN THE SPRING OF 1849, WHEN Big Star’s Cheyennes left their winter camp in the Ghost Timbers and started north, they noticed more than the customary activity on the Great Medicine Road. Wagons drawn by oxen and mules, and many men on horseback, moved along at a swifter pace than usual, and the Cheyennes wondered why the Veheos were in such a hurry.
What Dane and his friends were witnessing was the first mad rush of white easterners toward the goldfields of California. This human flood was also a signal of doom for their way of life, but on that fine spring morning in the Moon When the Ponies Shed, the Cheyennes were unaware of the ominous meaning of the dust-clouded trail.
They kept to the south side of the Platte, across from the wagon trains, until they sighted Fort Carrothers. There they crossed the river at a sandy-bottomed ford so shallow they did not have to unload the travois. Dane rode near the head of the column. Beside him was five-year-old Swift Eagle on a gentle gray pony. Little Cloud, still too young to ride horseback, was strapped on the travois behind Sweet Medicine Woman’s bay mount.
As he swung around to the front of the trading post, Dane was annoyed to find a dozen Conestogas drawn up there, with white men, women, and children swarming in and out of the entrance and chattering like a flock of hungry birds. He had been looking forward to camping there for a day or so, making a few leisurely trades, and talking with old Jim Carrothers. But an overnight stop was out of the question because all the young grass for as far as he could see had been grazed to the roots by passing teams of mules and oxen.
He glanced back and saw that Big Star’s face reflected the same feelings of disappointment and aversion. Dane noticed then that blacksmith equipment had been installed under an open shed beside the main building. To his amazement he recognized Bibbs, who was shoeing a horse, and Pleasant, who was assisting a big solemn-faced immigrant in resetting a wagon tire. Dane dropped off his horse in an instant, his eyes meeting those of the black man. “Holy Ghost!” Bibbs cried out. “Dane! They told me you’d turned into a wild Injun, and damn if you ain’t done it.” Bibbs dropped his tools on the ground and offered a sweaty hand. Pleasant quickly joined them, staring at his father’s Cheyenne clothing with intense interest.
Soon they were all there, Jotham bounding excitedly about and running back inside to bring Griffa, who seemed uncertain as to whether she should embrace her old friend Dane or keep a respectful distance from what appeared to be a wild Indian in buckskins. Dane helped Sweet Medicine Woman dismount to shake hands shyly with her husband’s relatives. After that the children had to be shown, Swift Eagle and Little Cloud, and then Griffa quickly rounded up her and Jotham’s pair. They had named their boy Opothle after Jotham’s father, but called him Young Opothle. He was a year older than Swift Eagle. Meggi, the little girl, was only four, and she broke into screams of fright when Dane reached out his arms for her. “She has Grandmother Mary’s voice,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” Jotham agreed proudly. “She is much like Akusa Amayi.”
“I wish she were with us,” Dane said. “If William’s family and Prissie were here, all Mary’s blood would be together again.”
Jotham laughed. “William and Prissie think I’m a madman for taking on this post in the wild West. I don’t know which of them is the worst old woman.”
Meanwhile the whites had all come outside the trading post, gathering for mutual protection around their wagons. Most of their attention was upon Big Star and the Cheyennes, who had moved off about a hundred yards with their travois. The whites were gaping and pointing and murmuring among themselves.
Jim Carrothers appeared suddenly out of the entrance. “Damn me!” he cried, “so it’s Big Star’s people caused all this commotion. Dane, old friend, me and Jotham been meanin’ to ride over to the Timbers, but every day we get crowds of these crazy fool gold hunters. I oughta be on the trail to Westport right now, but I can’t bring myself to forsake this greenhorn lad.” Carrothers blew out a breath of air that fluttered the ends of his drooping yellow mustache. “Now you’re here, old friend, you can take my place. Stay at Fort Carrothers and grow rich with your cousin. These daft gold hunters bound for Californ-i-a seem well supplied with money. They’ll pay three dollars a horse for shoein’, and if you’d largen my corral and stock it with good horses you could do right good at tradin’ for their wore-out animals.”
“What I need right now,” Jotham broke in, “is a wagon man to bring supplies from Westport. We’re out of soap and brandy, getting low on gunpowder. I need you, Dane.”
While they were talking, Sweet Medicine Woman had moved in close beside Dane, and when he felt her hand on his arm, he turned and saw the distress on her face. She had learned enough English from him to get the meaning of what Carrothers and Jotham were proposing. “E-have-se-va,” she whispered. “It is bad. Maka-eta, money. It is bad. I will not stay here. If you stay, I will go with my people.” He caught her hand in his, pressing it reassuringly.
“Na-tsi-sta,” he said to Jotham, using the Cheyenne so that Sweet Medicine Woman would understand what he was saying. “I am Cheyenne now. Zes-tan. Cheyenne. Cherokee only by blood. This is not my life, Jotham.”
“I told you, greenhorn,” Carrothers said, slapping Jotham on the back. “Your Cherokee cousin’s gone pure wild Indian.”
Before the Cheyennes left Fort Carrothers, Dane met one more member of the “family” that had been transplanted so quickly from the Cherokee Nation. At the last minute, while Dane was tightening saddles and travois, Bibbs brought his new wife out to the horses. “Wewoka,” he said proudly. Wewoka was half Seminole, half black, a slave who had escaped from her Seminole owner and made her way across Indian Territory to the Cherokees, where Bibbs had met her. “Reverend Crookes, he married us, Dane, so we all proper and legal. Then Mr. William and Jotham made me a freedman and they say Wewoka is freedwoman, too.”
Wewoka had strange luminous eyes with a violet sheen in them, but Dane could see fear in them, too, and it disturbed him when he realized that he and the Cheyennes were the objects of her fear. What tales, what lurid falsehoods had she heard of the savage tribes of the Plains that inspired her ill-concealed terror?
Later that day, he was reminded of this again when they approached another of their favorite camping stops, a willow-shaded greensward along Lodgepole Creek. A number of covered wagons were already there, arranged in a semicircle, and when the outer guards saw the Cheyennes approaching, they arose with rifles at the ready. Dane heard Big Star’s exclamation of disgust as the chief raised an arm in a signal for his caravan to turn away. There was plenty of room along the creek for the Cheyennes to have camped there, too, but the white men feared them. The Cheyennes left the Oregon Trail and the Platte behind them and went into the sanctuary of the dry sandhills, camping at nightfall without water.
That was the summer they followed a great buffalo herd from the Powder River country down to the North Platte, and it was the summer that Dane met Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux. The Oglalas followed the same herd, and they camped nearby the Cheyennes all through the Moon of Red Cherries. Both tribes ran short of ammunition, and a dozen or so young men from each camp, including Dane and Red Cloud, decided to travel to Fort Laramie for gunpowder and musket balls. They were three days on the journey and they made of it a summer pleasure outing—that is, until they reached Fort Laramie. There they were told quite firmly by the licensed trader that he was forbidden by the U.S. Army to trade either guns or ammunition to “hostile” Indians.
They were angered by such treatment. After all, they had been dealing with traders most of their lives, giving double value for half value in most cases, and now to be suddenly denied the use of firearms they took as a gross insult. Dane at last calmed them down by suggesting that they ride on another two days to Fort Carrothers.
On this part of the journey, Dane spent most of his time with Red Cloud, learning Lakota words, and teaching English words to his companion. The future leader of the Oglalas was then in his late twenties, a few years younger than Dane, and when he learned of Dane’s origins he began plying him with numerous questions about the White Nation in the East, expressing a desire to visit there sometime to see the great villages.
After they turned into the trail along the Platte, they met several long wagon trains. Red Cloud’s reaction was somewhat the same as Jim Carrothers’s when he and Dane were traveling to Westport Landing—that the numerous white emigrants must be leaving the East empty of people. “Count the blades of grass on these plains,” Dane said to him, “and you will know the numbers of the whites.”
Traveling on toward Fort Carrothers, Red Cloud was dismayed by the overgrazed prairies that were already beginning to erode, by the destruction of cottonwood groves where his people had wintered when he was a boy, and by the total absence of wild game where it had once been so plentiful. When they reached the Lodge-pole Creek camping site, it was Dane’s turn to express disgust. The friendly willows had all been cut away and the once pure waters of the creek were fouled by dead oxen, broken wagons, discarded kegs, harness, tins, boxes, and other offscourings of the passing whites.
“They are worse than summer locusts,” Red Cloud said, “like maggots eating at the heart of our land.”
At Fort Carrothers, Jotham and the others were delighted to see Dane again, although they seemed to be wary of his fierce and demanding companions. Jotham also had been ordered to trade no arms or ammunition to “hostile” Indians, but as Dane was a “civilized” Cherokee and therefore not “hostile,” a sale of a considerable quantity was made to him. They left under the cover of night, their saddlepacks filled with powder and lead.
All the way to their camps on the North Platte, Red Cloud and Dane discussed the lengthening shadow over their way of life, agreeing that the only hope of survival for their people was to keep the whites from invading the north—the valleys of the Powder, Tongue, and Yellowstone, and the sacred Black Hills.