Five

The Lakota called it the Council at Horse Creek. The white peace talkers called it the Fort Laramie Treaty Council of 1851. One of them, known as Broken Hand³ to some of the Lakota, had sent word beyond Lakota lands and gifts had been promised. Many of the Oglala camps were the first to arrive, since this was their territory. The Sicangu were not far behind. From the middle days of summer the prairies around Fort Laramie began blossoming with lodges. In the Moon of Dark Calves, others began arriving. Ancient Lakota enemies, the Blackfeet, came from the mountains to the northwest of the Elk River, and the Crow from the north. From the west beyond the Wind River came the Snakes. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara came from the Knife River country in the upper reaches of the Great Muddy. The Sahiyela and Blue Clouds, good friends of the Lakota, came from south of the Shell. And, of course, their close relatives the Dakota and the Nakota came from east of the Great Muddy, at least those who could make the crossing.

Nearly eight thousand men, women, and children of all the nations gathered around the Long Knives. And there were fewer than three hundred of their soldiers.

Old enemies put aside ancient animosity to pitch their lodges deep in Lakota lands—mostly because the curiosity about the manner of people who could audaciously talk to them as if they were children had to be satisfied. A bit of grumbling arose because the promised gifts were late, and some began to talk about breaking camp and heading back to more familiar territories. But the Long Knives assured them the wagons loaded with gifts were on the way.

The horse herds quickly grazed down the prairies all around the fort, and the camps and the heavy smell of horse droppings soon became a constant annoyance. A few of the headmen met with the commander of the Long Knives and it was agreed to move the camps a day’s ride southeast to Horse Creek where there was fresh grass.

The Long Knives pitched a long tent and invited the various headmen to parley. In between the horse racing and trading among the various camps, the leaders from each went to sit under the tent and listen to the white peace talkers harangue. The white peace talkers were surrounded by rows of warriors from the different tribes but it was the headmen who attracted the most attention. All of them were garbed in their finest feather bonnets and their keenly decorated shirts made from elk, deer, mountain goat, and big horn sheep hides. Such a colorful or powerful assortment of leaders had never before gathered together.

It was mainly the forbearance of the old men leaders that kept the large gathering in order, for such a thing was not without its problems. The promised gifts were late in arriving, but the chief complaint was the lack of interpreters available to translate the peace talkers’ words into nine other languages. Delegations from the different tribes could not all clearly understand and agree on the intentions of the whites, but they could all agree that the white peace talkers seemed to be confused.

Yet as the various people talked among themselves and sent messengers from one camp to another, they arrived at the consensus that the whites wanted three things. First, they wanted no more fighting among the people gathered. The Blackfeet and the Crow were called upon to live in peace with the Lakota and the Lakota were in turn to live in peace with the Snakes, and so on. (Tell the wind to stop blowing, some reacted, or the rivers to stop flowing.) Second, the whites seemed to want to say where the land ended and where it began by drawing a picture on a parched hide. Beyond a certain line was Crow land and behind it was Blackfeet, but who could find that line on the earth? some wondered. Third, the travelers on the Shell River trail must not be molested, they said, for they were traveling under the protection of the “great father” who lived in some city far to the east of the Grandfather River. The “great father” would know if his - people on the trail were harmed. The trail must be holy in some fashion, suggested an old Lakota man wryly. Thereafter, the Shell River trail became known as the “Holy Road.”

For agreeing to these three things, the peace talkers said, the “great father” was empowering them to pay annuities⁴ that amounted to many, many thousands of their money in dollars. The annuities would be in the form of food (beef cattle, flour, and beans, for starters), and various other goods, such as plows, hoes, and other farm implements. There were many raised eyebrows and helpless shrugs at the listing of the “other goods,” but in the end they were accepted. Those who had seen such goods before described how they had melted down metal implements for lance points, arrowheads, and knives.

The feasting and dancing and talking went on for days. Through it all, the solemn-faced, bearded white peace talkers acted like stern fathers while their Long Knife soldiers paraded around in lines and strange squares. To show their power, they fired one of their big guns mounted on a short wagon, the shell tearing up the ground and shattering trees. It was an impressive weapon, powerful and loud. But in between the loading of it, some fighting men observed, several good men on fast horses - could charge a small contingent of soldiers and wipe them out.

Wagons filled with the promised gifts finally arrived: glass beads, small hand mirrors, butcher knives, blankets, and rolls of cloth, among other things—trinkets intended to soften the hearts of opposition. The old men leaders watched as their names were made in ink at the bottom of a paper with a feather marker. The paper held the words the peace talkers said were forever binding, once all the headmen from the various tribes touched the marker making their names.

At first the camps began to leave in scattered groups as lodges were struck and columns of people with their horses pulling drag poles disappeared over the horizons around Horse Creek. But soon enough, hundreds of drag poles raised dust. And once more, only Lakota lodges dotted the plains around the island of whites at Fort Laramie and the lines of wagons.

In time, the Blackfeet again raided the Crow, who, of course, had to retaliate. The Lakota raided Snake territory, and thus, the first condition of the binding paper of the Horse Creek Council was obliterated by the powerful winds of long-standing tradition. Try as they might, no one, not the Blackfeet nor the Lakota nor the Mandans nor anyone else, could ever find a line on the earth that showed where their lands ended and someone else’s began. It was always a mystery.

As for the Holy Road, young Lakota men stood back and watched as the wagons pulled by oxen or mules slowly creaked into Fort Laramie, took on more supplies, and creaked off to the west to some unknown place close to the setting sun. The peace talkers had said the wagons needed no more space than the width of their wheels, but the trail—the Holy Road—had more than one line of ruts because the wagons made new ruts each summer. The wagon ruts began to spread to several wagons wide. They lined the hills still, some of the young men watching with a growing anger at this strange intrusion into their lands and their lives, an uneasy feeling growing in the small of their backs. Some grumbled that it would not be difficult to gather enough warriors to turn back the wagons at the edge of Lakota lands to the east near where the Blue Water River flowed into the Shell. Then there would be no worry about how wide the wagons or ruts were then, and the land could begin to heal itself, and the buffalo would return to water in the Shell and graze along its banks. But, the old warriors counseled, remember the Kiowa and our Sicangu relatives and the sickness that killed thousands of them. How close does one have to be to the wagon people to catch one of their sicknesses? So beneath dark, angry scowls dozens and dozens of warriors watched the line of plodding wagons, keeping their hands on their weapons. The white men and their bullets they could confront, but the sicknesses that caused strong men to take to their deathbeds in a matter of days was another matter. So, for the most part, the wagons and their occupants plodded along unmolested, not because of words on a paper or the power of a “great father” but because of the fear of sickness.

Fort Laramie and the Holy Road were part of Lakota life—bothersome realities that left wise old people scratching their heads and wondering how that had come to be. Perhaps when the people in the wagons had all arrived someplace in the west there would be no more Holy Road. No more Holy Road and no more need for Fort Laramie. It was a fool’s hope, some said. The whites won’t go away of their own accord. It was a fearful thought Lone Bear and Light Hair heard many old men utter, as if they had tasted spoiled annuity meat. In time they would see firsthand how prophetic those fears were.

Three years after the Council at Horse Creek, during Light Hair’s fourteenth year, Fort Laramie remained, and more wagons crept along the Holy Road each year from late spring until summer. The fort was busier than ever as more whites bustled about. Many Lakota couldn’t ignore the annuities distributed by the whites and so they came to wait, though they were still fearful of the whites’ sicknesses. The more cautious kept their encampments half a day’s ride from the fort, the Hunkpatila among them. Some Lakota, however, pitched their lodges within bow shot of the fort, their sense of caution pushed by curiosity and a desire for white-man things. In time those careless ones would come to be known as Loaf About the Forts, or Loafers.

Red Cloud and Smoke were said to be somewhere, a sure sign that the Long Knives would be pressed over some significant concerns. Smoke was the head of an influential family, the source of many Lakota leaders in time of war and peace. Red Cloud, in spite of being part of a feud that had resulted in the death of a young Lakota, was building a reputation as a fine orator, one who was not afraid to speak his mind about the whites. And there were several concerns for Smoke and Red Cloud to drop at the feet of the whites. More dead animal carcasses were left to rot each summer along the Holy Road, more graves were left as well, and discarded possessions were scattered along the trail. The biggest worry of all was that the buffalo stayed further and further from the trail, both to the north and south.

But there was a new problem. The annuities were late and some of the Lakota who had grown to depend on the annuity cattle for meat instead of hunting were becoming nervous. Others scoffed at the foolishness of depending on the white man to feed their families, but, sadly, the white man and his annuities were like the thorn buried deep in the foot. It couldn’t be removed without some blood flowing.

Each summer’s lines and lines of wagons were not the same as those that had come the summer before. They carried a different group of whites who had never seen a Lakota or a Kiowa or a Blue Cloud, but who had been filled with stories about the dangers from brown-skinned marauders. So, wide-eyed and fearful were the whites who arrived at the fort—not comforted by the sight of scores of scowling Lakota men.

But the Lakota were likewise troubled at the sight of so many white men. Some of the old ones would shake their gray heads and speak a warning. In any land among any kind of people, three human weaknesses are at the root of trouble—fear, anger, and arrogance.

Those weaknesses were about to be mixed.