WHEN AMAYI WAS SEVENTEEN she made her first visit to Fort Laramie with Dane and Sweet Medicine Woman. The reason for the journey was a special council called by the peace commissioners for the Northern Cheyennes and Arapahos, who had not been included in the treaty with the Teton Sioux tribes. All the chiefs and warriors went, taking their families with them, so that for several days there was an enormous village of tipis along the Laramie River.
Not long after they returned to the Lower Tongue and made summer camp, Amayi started a calendar on a buffalo hide that Sweet Medicine Woman dressed soft and smooth for her. Using bright blue and red and yellow paints, Amayi drew tiny pictures of the things she had seen at Fort Laramie—the great tipi village, the soldiers, the buildings, and the big tent where the chiefs and her father parleyed with the Veheos who spoke for the Great Father in Washington.
What Amayi did not show in her Fort Laramie drawing was the apprehension of the Southern Cheyennes who were at the council. When the commissioners discovered that some of the chiefs were not northerners—such as War Shirt (Big Star’s successor) and Big Shin (of Black Kettle’s band) and two of the Southern Arapaho leaders—these chiefs were told that they must take their people south to the Indian Territory. Another treaty had been made for them at Medicine Lodge in Kansas, assigning all the Southern Cheyennes and Southern Arapahos a reservation in Indian Territory between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers. None of the southerners, however, wanted to go back to the country in which they had suffered so much at the hands of the Bluecoats, and the night after they learned of the other treaty, they struck their tipis and hurried back north to the sanctuary of the sweet-watered Tongue. The southerners never forgave Dull Knife, Little Wolf, and the other chiefs for signing a treaty that gave only the northerners the right to roam and hunt north of the Platte, as well as a home in the same lands assigned the Teton Sioux. If Amayi had been able to forecast the future in her calendar drawings she might have depicted the irony of Dull Knife’s and Little Wolf’s Northern Cheyennes being driven south as prisoners to Indian Territory ten years later, while her own southern people were escaping to Canada.
Amayi was not a seer, however, but only a picture chronicler of the events of each passing moon in her young life. In her second moon-drawing she portrayed the Sun Dance held by the Uncpapas in which the neighboring Cheyennes were invited to participate. She drew a black buffalo bull seated atop the Sun Dance pole to represent Sitting Bull. He was defeating the sun by gazing steadfastly into it. She also painted figures of young women in bright shawls dancing, and several young men around a Sun Dance pole, tugging at leather thongs running from the pole to skewers in their bleeding breasts. The face of one handsome young man was turned toward the dancing girls.
Amayi kept her buffalo-skin calendar above her bed, fastened to the inner lining of the family tipi. Dane began to notice that in each moon-drawing there was usually a handsome young man in the foreground looking out of the picture. When the Cheyennes followed a buffalo herd west to Rosebud Creek and camped with the Oglalas, Crazy Horse was the young man whose face was turned to look out of Amayi’s moon-picture instead of at the buffalo he was pursuing on horseback.
Then after they rejoined the Two Moon Cheyennes for winter camp, Young Two Moon’s smiling round face began appearing in Amayi’s drawings—in the foreground of the tipi village with large snowflakes falling around him, or leading his soldier society members off toward the tall lodgepole pine forest, or returning with a captured horse herd. Young Two Moon was courting Amayi in earnest that winter, but she seemed to be only amused by his overtures.
Her pattern of drawings changed somewhat the next spring when her half brother, Pleasant, paid them an unexpected visit, bringing along Maga, his Oglala widow, and entertaining everyone with his tales of wrecking one of the Iron Horses on the railroad. With a mixed band of Oglala warriors and Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, Pleasant had gone far down into Nebraska to raid wagon trains and stagecoaches. When they discovered that the railroad had penetrated into their old hunting grounds, they pried up some of the iron rails with an ax and waited nearby until the Iron Horse came puffing along. It ran off the track with a great noise, and some of the wagons on wheels behind it fell on their sides. Pleasant said they found many bottles of whiskey and bolts of multicolored cloth in one of the Iron Horse’s wagons.
After Pleasant and Maga left, Amayi tried to draw a moon-picture of Pleasant’s adventure, but she had never seen an Iron Horse and her drawing of a locomotive resembled a living monster breathing fire and smoke through its teeth. In this drawing, Pleasant was in the foreground looking out with smiling blue eyes above a tawny beard he had let grow during the winter. Amayi obviously did not care for the Oglala wiwazica, who stood on the edge of the picture appearing older than she was, a vulpine expression upon her profiled face.
One of Amayi’s summer moon-drawings recorded the birth of her brother Swift Eagle’s first son. Swift Eagle, his wife, Buffalo Calf Woman, and the baby wrapped in a cradle, were all smiling out of the picture. In the background was Buffalo Calf Woman’s tipi that Amayi had decorated with figures of horses and antelopes, and the moon, sun, and stars.
Later in that year, while the Cheyennes were camping on the Bighorn River near Spotted Elk’s Minneconjous, a handsome young man began returning to the foreground of Amayi’s calendar drawings. In each picture, the figure and face were always the same, easily recognized by Dane and Sweet Medicine Woman because they saw the young man almost every evening. He was Bull Bear, a Minneconjou warrior with friendly eyes and a strong jaw, the handsomest of all the young men who paid court to Amayi or appeared in her drawings.
The last drawing that Dane remembered seeing on his daughter’s calendar was of Bull Bear with his head shaved, vermilion rings circling his eyes, pendants of beads around his neck, copper bracelets on his wrists, and wearing a white cincture, beaded moccasins, and leggings decorated with porcupine quills. In the background were the dancers and musicians at the wedding of Amayi and Bull Bear, painted so that it was almost possible to hear the little bells on the dancers’ skirts and the sound of the drums and tambourines.
When Amayi left her parents’ tipi with Bull Bear, to go with the Minneconjous, she rolled up her calendar to carry with her. At the last moment of leavetaking, Dane warned her never to forget that her blood was the blood of Akusa Amayi. He had told her many stories of her great-grandmother, and now he begged her to keep Creek Mary’s name always in her memory. As he spoke, Sweet Medicine Woman removed the silver Danish coin from around her neck, and placed it around the neck of her daughter. “Wear this in remembrance,” Sweet Medicine Woman said. “It has been kept for you since the days of the old grandmother.”
Dane blinked, looking away because he did not want his surprise and pleasure to show in his face. He had said nothing to Sweet Medicine Woman about Creek Mary’s gorget. He supposed that she must have read his thoughts. They both spent much time now in the world of dreams and magic where no unspoken thoughts could be kept hidden from another, and he had often thought strongly that his daughter Amayi should wear the silver coin when she went away from them forever.