NOW I COULD SPEND a lot of time here on what feelings was caused to arise in me by the sight of Amanda, meanwhile growing even older, but suffice it to say I had a good many and at a rush, and for a while I was on my own with these, for attending to her job like the Sioux woman she was, so to speak, impersonating, she never met my eyes.
Also, since I quickly poked my chin into my chest, lowering the brim of my hat, she couldn’t of seen my face for more than a second even if she had looked. I should mention here that I continued to wear the hat indoors not in any disrespect but because Sitting Bull lived in the cabin as if it was a tepee, and in the latter you wore any head covering you wanted to. In other words, taking off your hat indoors was just a white man’s way, and the Bull might of even been insulted if I did it in his lodge.
So Amanda put that platter on the floor between us and went out the door.
I didn’t know what to think, and there wasn’t anything I could of said that wouldn’t sound improper, so I kept silent. I also must of ate some of that food, but I wasn’t even aware of doing so, such was the turmoil in my mind.
The Bull chewed with great gusto, smacking his old seamed lips. Since this would of been real late for his first breakfast, it must of been the second, and I reckon he was pleased by my arrival if only for the excuse to eat again while feeding a guest.
He chewed for a time and then said, “That is the first white woman I ever knew who could cook a good meal.”
As I say I hadn’t even noticed let alone tasted what I guess I too was eating.
He went on. “The other one wasn’t any good at cooking, but she could paint nice pictures. I’ll show you one of them afterwards.”
I was grateful for a peg to hang my attention on. “There was another white woman?”
“She went away,” he said. “She did not approve of the Ghost Dance, and like a white woman, had to tell me as much though it was not her place to do so, even after Seen by the Nation and Four Robes explained it was not proper.”
Them last two named was his Indian wives of many years, and they was sisters. Annie Oakley never liked to hear they was bought by him for one horse each, though Frank always got a big laugh out of that fact. Annie never had trouble understanding that it was quite a high price at the time, but what she couldn’t believe was that a man could care for a wife obtained in this manner, let alone two. But she wasn’t an Indian.
“I didn’t run her out,” the Bull says, I guess in case I would think him a mean man. “She got mad and left.”
I remembered why I come here. My personal feelings had to be put aside. “Bear Coat thinks you are causing trouble with the Ghost Dance, and so do the agent and the soldiers at the fort. They all agree you should be arrested. Good as this food is, I think we should get out of here as soon as possible.”
Sitting Bull nodded and chewed some more. “Don’t worry about it. Everything has been decided.”
I had been afraid he would come to some such conclusion, based on my early experiences with Old Lodge Skins: you couldn’t talk an Indian out of what he seen in a dream or heard from an animal. In the present case it turned out to be a meadowlark, sdosdona, for that breed is, as everyone knows, fluent in Lakota (and he took time out here, even on this solemn subject, to kid me about my supposed faulty command of that language). Birds had always been his friends, since one saved his life once as a boy when he was attacked by a grizzly bear, by telling him to play possum.
“If Sdosdona saved my life by speaking truly, he can prepare me for my death,” said he. “He did not say when I would be killed, but he told me who would do it.”
It didn’t matter if I believed it or not, and I tell you I did and I didn’t, for I had been raised Indian but had since went to many of the major cities of the world and met queens and popes and went up in the Eiffel Tower and rid on railroads and steamboats and stood next to someone talking on the telephone, while here he was, setting on the floor of a crude log cabin eating with his hands, damn superstitious dumb redskin—tears come to my eyes as I’m telling this, as they might of at the time, for I feared he knowed what he was talking about, for at bottom we each live in our own situation.
“You believe the soldiers will finally kill you?” It might be the way he wanted to go, in one last fight.
He shook his heavy head, braids swinging, and he snorted. “The soldiers have never concerned me my entire life. They are only another enemy, one much stronger than the Crow and Pawnee, but still just enemies. Those who will kill me, the meadowlark said, are my own kind.”
This I could not believe. “He could not mean the Lakota.”
“Yes,” said Sitting Bull, “and he spoke the truth.”
It didn’t matter if I believed him or not, for he sure did, which of course could and maybe should of been the end of the matter for me. I liked him but I doubt he had any special attachment to me, and I never owed him nothing the way I would of had he been Cheyenne: he weren’t family.
But I have always admired a man of whatever color for standing up for his own point of view while the rest are falling all around him. You will recall that principle applied to my feeling for George Armstrong Custer, who I otherwise never cared for. The attitude he had of regarding as pathetic everyone who could not be Custer stood him in good stead at the end. So with Sitting Bull: if a bird told him how he would die, he regarded that as one more proof he was spiritually superior to his enemies, white or red, in which case being killed could be seen as the greatest success.
But I wasn’t going to stand by and let another of my friends get slaughtered after having had a premonition of approaching death. If I let myself think about it, I still could not evade some blame for failing to stop Wild Bill Hickok’s murder.
But before I could deal further with this matter, Amanda come in the door. My back was to her, but I could feel as much as see her shadow.
Sitting Bull said, “Yellow Hair has not learned much Lakota. Therefore it’s difficult to tell her what to do. Two Robes and Seen by the Nation have taught her some things, of course, but if she wants to be useful she should speak our language.”
Notice he did not ask me to interpret between her and him. It was up to me to offer, but I could hardly get out of it, and anyway I’d have to identify myself to her sooner or later, dreading the moment though I did.
So I asked Sitting Bull what he wanted to say to her now, and he asked me if I wanted more food, and when I replied I did not, he said, “Henana.”
So without turning my head, I says to Amanda, who was still behind me, “He don’t want no more.”
So she comes and squats to pick up the platter, and this time she looks at me, being low enough to see under the brim of my hat, but she still didn’t say a word.
“Good day, Amanda,” I says.
“Good day, Jack,” says she, and rises without visible effort and leaves.
Sitting Bull didn’t comment, either, but I felt I should explain. “We know each other, she and I.” And then since he still said nothing and for all I knowed might of assumed we belonged to some white tribe of which all the members was acquainted with one another, like his Hunkpapas was, I expanded on it in a simplified way, saying we had met in New York, which after all he had himself visited with the Wild West in ’85.
“If you’d like to take her with you, you may,” he said. Though old and fairly portly due to meals of the kind he just ate, he too rose to his feet in quite an effortless style.
Whereas I, who was still slender as a boy, felt my years and lack of recent practice at sitting on the ground to feed. My knees was not as flexible as they once had been, and I had walked around thirty miles overnight and was stiff. I wasn’t sure of how to respond to his offer when I finally got to the standing position.
So I says, “I’ll talk to her later, if you don’t mind.”
“That would please me,” said the Bull. “I did not invite her to come here, but I can’t very well throw her out. She seems to be an agreeable person, but having her around makes me uncomfortable, and the other Hunkpapas don’t like the idea, particularly at this time of the Ghost Dance.”
Now I got to explain why this famous chief and wise man of the fearsome warrior nation of the Sioux found himself not able to expel an unwanted guest: it was them laws of hospitality. An Indian of the old days was at a disadvantage if his bitterest enemy got inside his lodge: he might slaughter him anywhere else, but he was forced inside his own home to treat him as a guest, feeding him and putting him up as long as he wanted to stay. One of the worst sins to a Plains Indian was lack of generosity.
You take that bunch in Italy called the Borgias, who I heard about when the Wild West was over there, for they had a lot of power around the time some of them old palaces and churches we visited was built, supposedly they was famous for inviting folks in for a meal and then dropping poison in the food and drink. No Indians I ever knowed would do such a thing, which should be pointed out along with their failure to contribute much to the history of architecture.
“You must take a look at the picture the other white woman painted of me.” No doubt he referred to Amanda’s predecessor. “It is in the other cabin, where the women can look at it.”
“What was her name?”
“I can’t remember,” says he, “because it’s hard to pronounce. But you will see it written on the picture when you look at it.”
“Yellow Hair’s white name is Amanda Teasdale.” I don’t know where the impulse come to mention that: it wouldn’t mean much to him.
“I would be happy if she went away,” said he. “If you want to, you might suggest that to her.”
“All right,” I said, and knowing what he meant, I added, “I’ll let her think it is my idea. I’ll do that right now so I don’t forget.” I stepped outside.
I welcomed the excuse to go talk to Amanda, now that I seen I wouldn’t get anywhere in urging Sitting Bull to get out of there before Cody showed up, which by the way ought to of been pretty soon, judging from the position of the sun. That meal, at which I couldn’t remember eating anything, had obviously taken quite a while nevertheless.
There was some Indian women coming and going at the other nearby buildings or lounging about if they was men, and young kids running around at play, all of them closely related to Sitting Bull as it would turn out, wives, daughters, sons, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, though some of the youngsters was of his own offspring. It was just like all the Indian camps I ever knowed, except the lodges was square, made of wood, and not portable, and the Sioux no longer was allowed to do the two activities all Indian life had previously been arranged to further, namely, hunting and war—unless of course they joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and did them in make-believe.
I found Amanda around the corner, tending a cookfire. Now I could see her in full daylight, her face was smudged with soot on one cheek, I guess when she cleared a lock of wispy hair from her eyes with a dirty hand as she bent over the embers. The hem of her skirt showed dried and hardened mud, being too long for this life, dragging on the ground, and I reckon the whole dress was filthier than it looked, for twice while I approached she wiped her fingers on the skirt, but luckily it was so dark nothing black showed though anything lighter did, such as the yellowish mud and then in back was something looked like one of the babies had spit up where she last set down.
She was poking at the glowing coals with a stick, separating them so they’d burn out quicker. I guess Sitting Bull’s women taught her that. A white person would be likely to drench the fire with water, plenty of which flowed in the nearby Grand, but if you done that the charcoal wouldn’t be of any use till it dried out and you might need it sooner, and you would also squander the water which had to be fetched by bucket. The stick kept catching fire at its end, at which she would pull it away and extinguish the flame by screwing it vigorously into the ground.
I tell you, I couldn’t spare the time for anything but the most important question, at least to me. “Amanda,” I says, “where’s that husband of yours?”
She straightened up, swiping at her cheek again with her left hand, leaving behind more smudge. “Husband?” says she, them deep blue eyes looking real puzzled. “I don’t have one.”
“You never got married back in New York?”
She made a face like a little girl’s, corners of the mouth turned up, eyes rolling, an expression of hers I never seen before and a specially unusual one to see in her present situation. “Jack,” she says, “I did not get married in New York.”
“I went to that Friends of the Red Man office,” I says, “and there was a sign on the door saying it was closed, and the janitor told me—”
“Oh,” says she, “now I know what you’re referring to. When my associate Agatha Wetling was married, the wedding took place in Boston. I was maid of honor. We had to close the office for a few days. Aside from a secretary, there were only the two of us on the executive staff.” She sniffed. “All too many people were on our governing board, though, most of them men. It wasn’t long afterward that the organization was dissolved.” She lowered her head, scratched the still smoldering stick on the earth, and murmured, but then raised it and managed to look proud though disheveled. “So I finally decided to do what I probably should have done in the first place instead of trying to deal with the Indian problem at a distance: go to the heart of the matter.”
I immediately returned to my old sympathy for Amanda, while actually thinking she was misguided. “Well,” I says, “you come to the right fellow. There ain’t nobody alive who’s more one hundred percent Indian than Sitting Bull, but he’s involved in something now that probably nobody can help him with. Not even his old friends like Buffalo Bill, who by the way is heading here right at this moment.”
“Oh, not that awful charlatan,” Amanda said in cold disdain. But then she give me an appealing look. “Jack, can’t you do something to get rid of Cody? You know him.”
I was torn in several ways. Amanda could get to me usually, plus I didn’t approve of Cody’s mission as specified by General Miles, but I couldn’t believe he would ever try to arrest Sitting Bull and just maybe he could talk him into returning to the show after all. Beyond all this of course was the unlikelihood of Cody’s listening to me unless I was agreeing with him, and whatever he did would be preferable to having them Indian soldiers show up, anxious to prove they could do a good job of controlling their own kind.
“Amanda, I’m saying this for your own good, believe me. I know you mean well, as always, but forgive me for asking this, it ain’t no criticism. I was wondering what you hoped to accomplish coming here and working like an Indian wife.”
Thank heavens she didn’t seem offended by the question. “I suddenly realized,” she said, “that I have previously been morally fraudulent. I had been looking at these people from an enormous distance. That was true even at the Major’s school.” She sneered. “And to work for the cause as far away as New York was grotesque.”
A great need to defend her, in this case from herself, come over me. “Well,” I says, “that’s where I think anybody’d have to go to raise the most money, wouldn’t they? It’s true there ain’t many Indians to be seen there, aside from Cody’s show, but out here in the West, with plenty of Indians around, the whites generally hate them and ain’t going to look kindly on you.”
This found a mark with her. “They’re horrible. Poor Catherine Weldon! The newspaper called her Sitting Bull’s white squaw, living in sin with an old savage. And she was given worse names at Fort Yates—by the white wives, of course.”
“There you are,” I says. “I bet you was doing a swell job back East, right near Wall Street too.” I had no real idea of what I was talking about, but I did so want to buck her up.
She sneered again, though as before it was not at me but at herself, nor was such an expression an unattractive one with a face like Amanda’s. “I did such a good job that the money we laboriously collected managed to disappear without a trace, though neither Agatha nor I took any of it beyond administrative expenses.”
“I doubt you’re the only person to run into crooks on the money side of an enterprise,” I pointed out. “Next time you’ll know what to look for.”
“There won’t be a next time,” Amanda said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
First it was Sitting Bull who exasperated me. Now it was her. Why is it people you like are always the most stubborn? It was time for me to get stern. “Now, Amanda,” I says, “how long are you going to hang around here working like a flunky? You ain’t an Indian woman and you’ll never be one. What you’re doing is just make-believe, for the reason you can go back to the white world any time you get tired of this.” She had throwed her head back and looked away. “And I expect you will do that soon enough, for Indian wives perform all the hard labor of the camp while the men don’t do much of anything, and to the white way of thinking that’s wrong.”
Now she looked at me and said, “Ha!”
“All right,” I says, “so amongst whites except for rich people the women do a lot of chores too, but the husbands go out to work. All I’m saying is it’s different with Indians, but so is most everything else, except for the fact that they seem to like what they do, which includes, or used to in the recent past, being merciless towards their enemies, torturing, killing, scalping, and mutilating. If you think you can become a squaw as your latest project, then you really ought to think about what it took to cut the guts out of a wounded cavalryman laying on the field at the Little Bighorn.” Even talking turkey as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her sometimes it wasn’t guts but the private parts of such a poor devil, after which they stuffed them in his mouth. “Yet there ain’t no mother more tender to her offspring than an Indian, so they’re not always different in everything. But it takes a long time to see Indians as a whole, as well as a real strong stomach.”
I could never get one up on Amanda. She smiled at me now and, though her face was dirty, spoke with her old assurance. “That was an eloquent lecture, Jack, but as it happens, I already agreed with its points before you made it. I have no intention of impersonating a Lakota woman. I’m just trying to understand what it means to be one, admittedly in white terms. And I think I’ll learn more here, though no doubt never enough, than in some Indian-betterment organization, or at some university under the direction of white men.”
That was reasonable enough, I figured. But then what?
“Write about it,” says she.
I was always impressed by anybody who could just read and write in the common way, being fairly shaky at both all my life, but to write about something meant more than a postcard or list of camp supplies. “For a newspaper?”
“Well, maybe,” said she. “Or a book.”
“Excuse my ignorance, Amanda,” I says, “but that would likely take you a few days, would it not?”
“At least.” She seemed amused by my question.
“Yeah, well, I doubt you’re going to have that long, here anyway. They’re aiming to put Sitting Bull out of business in one way or another, and none will be pretty. Please get out right away. I know what I’m talking about!”
One thing this accomplished, if nothing else: she took more personal notice of me than ever before. “Jack,” she says quite warmly, “you’ve always tried your best to help, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by me. You have a good heart.”
Hearing that, my good heart fell. Who wants to be praised for his kindness by a woman he takes to? I wasn’t no preacher nor settlement worker. But she wouldn’t of been Amanda without adding a twist, which brung back my hopes after all.
“I wonder whether you would do me still another favor?”
“Anything at all, Amanda.”
“My greatest difficulty here has been due to my ignorance of the language. I had expected some of the Sioux to know more English than it turns out any of them do. Of course I have learned a little by pointing and asking what it’s called, but that’s a laborious process and useless for nonmaterial things such as thoughts and feelings.” Her smile though with a dirty face was as beautiful as I ever seen. She gestured towards me, putting out a slim hand. “Could you teach me to speak Lakota?”
“You ain’t going to leave?”
“Sitting Bull,” said she, “is the greatest living Indian leader. My study is not simply of what it is to be a Lakota woman but what it is to be a wife of Sitting Bull. I’m going to stay near him.”
Which meant she as usual wasn’t really taking me seriously. However, I had no choice but to say, sure, I would start the lessons soon as she wanted, and she said it would have to wait a little, for she had other chores to do. Now you might wonder, like me, how that had come about if she couldn’t communicate no better with the Indians, but I found it was her idea to hang around the women and imitate them, and if it turned out she was in their opinion pretty good at something, like cooking food to please the Bull, why, she was welcome to do it. As odd as Indians often was by our lights, they could also be totally practical.
I don’t want to be indelicate, but I admit when Amanda mentioned learning about being a wife to Sitting Bull, I hoped she wasn’t referring to sharing his bed as part of her research. Of course I couldn’t openly pursue that matter. I’d just have to watch where she slept that night, if in fact I was to know that night as a free or even a living person. I figured Sitting Bull would just politely turn Cody down, but violently resist any attempt by Indian police or white troops to take him away as a prisoner, and while, had I been acting on my own behalf, I would of left before this happened, having done what I could to warn him and thus discharged my moral obligation to a friend, Amanda’s presence made it necessary for me to remain and help him, and maybe get myself arrested or even killed in the process.
But so as not to keep you in further suspense, let me go through what did and did not occur that evening and for the next couple weeks.
First, I waited all day for Buffalo Bill’s arrival, but he never come. What happened, as I learned afterwards, was that Agent McLaughlin and Colonel Drum had been able to stop him after all by that emergency appeal to President Harrison, who sent a return order telling Cody to lay off and go home.
Nor during that same period did anybody appear who was unfriendly to Sitting Bull, but a number of Hunkpapas did get the Ghost Dance proceedings set up in a nearby field, fallow now in winter and suitably flat for dancing, with an associated sweat lodge, an old-fashioned hide tepee where water was poured on hot stones, creating a steam that would make the naked bodies of the sitting participants perspire, purifying the spirit for the ceremonies. Afterwards they would put on special Ghost shirts of what to a white man would be real good quality deerskin, specially decorated, but finally just leather and not the bulletproof material an ordinary Sioux might well work himself up to believe. But I didn’t think Sitting Bull would go that far, and I’m not saying he did, though he went into the lodge and sweated with the others.
It wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask him about directly, but just being in the same camp I could pick up enough on the subject to get a general sense of the situation, and most of it come from Sitting Bull himself. He wasn’t sold on the Ghost Dance, but he wasn’t against it either. What he wanted to do was give it an opportunity. Probably it wouldn’t work, but maybe it would, and meanwhile it offered people something beyond the limited existence imposed on them by the victorious whites.
He had heard quite a bit about Christianity, from all sorts of missionaries, including even one who was female, and in fact sometimes wore as personal decoration that crucifix give him by a Catholic priest. But most of what it pertained to was quite distant from him and the Lakota way. What good was a Spirit up to who told you to turn the other cheek to an enemy with a raised hatchet?
He did not condemn white people for having beliefs that to him seemed lunatic, for obviously they derived great power from them, though he did observe that the whites who enjoyed the most power was those who acted as if they believed in nothing but force, which is to say, against the religious teachings he had heard, and this made even less sense and could not be explained by the missionaries except by the idea that this present life wasn’t the important one, but just preparation for a better one to come for them what was the losers now, and torment for those who at present was the winners. But it seemed to Sitting Bull that to believe in such an arrangement you had to hate the life at hand, the one you could see and hear and touch and taste, in favor of another that seemed real vague, and it was strange that the very people who controlled the world would have a religion that despised it.
But he admitted there was much here he never understood, and maybe many white people didn’t either, for it was on its face a lot simpler than it was underneath, and that’s why he was interested in studying the Ghost Dance, to see if it had the profitable complication for Indians that Christianity had for the Americans. For example, the magic shirt might not repel a lead bullet in the simple sense, but give the wearer so much spiritual strength that he would be harder to hit. As was proved in every battle, the bravest warriors was least likely to be wounded or killed. And the predicted great flow of earth that would cover white people while Indians rose above the surface might happen not in a literal fashion but rather be a visionary way of seeing the red man elevate himself over the whites by some means yet to be developed.
I tell you, Sitting Bull would of come to the top of any race he belonged to. I’m sorry he never met Queen Victoria, for I bet they would of admired each other as wise leaders, the best of their kind. I’m not saying he didn’t have no weaknesses, of which the main one was vanity, and he did not go without the “envyings” my foster father the Reverend Pendrake used to mention. The Bull believed himself principal chief of all the Sioux, and since the tribe didn’t have elections or hereditary titles, that position had to be self-bestowed, which never endeared him to the other claimants, who he then accused of selling out to the white man. I never heard him praise any other chiefs but Crazy Horse, who of course was safely dead. He was least fond of Gall, one of the main combat leaders at the Greasy Grass, where Sitting Bull never took the field. That the Bull was represented as the killer of Custer when he appeared with the Wild West was embarrassing to him on the one hand but probably gratifying as well, putting him one up on the lesser-known Gall, who got revenge by doing better in the complex politics amongst Sioux factions on the reservations.
Which brings us up to date on Sitting Bull’s predicament. He had finally gotten on bad terms with every bunch, red or white, and except for the family and friends at his camp, everybody was plotting for his ruination, including some Sioux visitors to the place, hospitably received as guests, who was actually spying for the Indian police.
But before I go on with this, I should say I had been giving Amanda them lessons in Lakota she wanted, but with the chores she had took upon herself she didn’t have a lot of time and so had not learned much except a number of names of things she thought it most practical to know first, like “beef,” tado; “stick,” can; “pot,” cega; and so on, mostly pertaining to domestic affairs, along with a few simple phrases, like “he comes,” which is just u; “we eat,” unyutapi; “you drink,” datkan.
I had to try to explain to Sitting Bull why I had not gotten her to leave, but this turned out easier than I thought, for when I brought up the subject he smiled and said, “It’s no surprise to me. White men can never control their women.”
Well sir, I was stung by this, and I says she was not “my” woman but just somebody I knowed, a friend, almost a kind of sister.
“But you would like to make her your woman,” says he. “Anybody can see that from the way you look at her. My wives and daughters giggle about this and wonder why you don’t make her yours. But unlike me, they don’t know the ways of the whites.” That was another of his vanities, that he was an authority on the Americans. I expect he might of been so, in comparison with the others, but he was also not shy about representing himself as such to a white man.
“If you’re saying what I think, it’s against the law,” I pointed out.
“American law, perhaps,” says he. “But this is Hunkpapa land.”
Now to dispute him on that would be nasty, so I swallowed my pride and just mumbled something about how it wasn’t really the way he thought, about me and Amanda; it was just difficult to explain in Sioux.
“I hope you are teaching her to speak good Lakota,” he says, grinning, “even though you don’t speak it correctly yourself.” And he adds that he heard her ask a question using hwo instead of he, which was to say the male form instead of the female. She might of done so, for I admit I was not always as careful as I should of been—and look at my English—but he also might of been kidding, for he was given to that, as I like to give reminders of due to his reputation, like that of most Indians, for being humorless.
As for Amanda, I told the Bull she stayed on not to be annoying but to study him and write a book in which he would be celebrated (though I didn’t know it was true she would admire him without condition especially when it come to the woman question, but I expect he was safe, for if he survived the current trouble, he couldn’t read anyhow).
If I thought he would seem flattered by this news, I was wrong. His opinion of himself was so high that he naturally assumed everybody else shared it unless they was naturally wicked or crazy, especially women, and being he was illiterate, a book didn’t mean to him what it would to someone who could make out what the marks on its pages said. He preferred the paintings of that earlier white woman whose name, according to Amanda, was Catherine Weldon, which he could understand, and he was also a pretty good artist himself, in the Sioux way, having sometime before made a long pictorial account of his exploits in battle as a young warrior. He give that to his adopted son Jumping Bull, originally captured as a boy from the Assiniboine and now grown up, who I got to show them to Amanda, which he wouldn’t of done otherwise, being like most of the others, real shy of her.
Me and her slept under the same roof, in the main cabin, though not together. Not real far apart, though, either, for you couldn’t be in a place of that size, given all the others who also spent the night there: a couple of Sitting Bull’s kids, his nephew’s wife, and often enough a man or two from the Ghost Dance, as well as the Bull himself and his wife Seen by the Nation. Being square, the house wasn’t as suited to purposes of lodging as a tepee would of been, where the sleepers was arranged neatly like the spokes of a wheel without the problem of corners, but everybody found a place for his or her blankets. Amanda usually bedded down not far from me though could not of been touched unless she extended her own arm towards mine, and there wouldn’t of been any call for that.
Naturally I never told her what the Indians had been saying about us—and not out of concern for her feelings so much as my own: I was afraid she too would find it amusing from her own angle.
So that was the state of affairs down on the Grand as of a couple weeks after Cody left Fort Yates. No authorities of any kind showed up at Sitting Bull’s settlement, and far from waiting around for the axe to fall, he was going about his life as if he had no enemies in the world. Not only had he been studying the local Ghost Dance at close hand, but now a man come from the Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge inviting him to go down there and visit their own dance, for they expected it was close to the time for victorious results of the kind predicted.
Sitting Bull decided to accept the invite, but to do so, since he was still in effect a prisoner of war, he had to ask McLaughlin, the agent, for a permit.
“I’m going to do this properly,” he told me, “by writing a letter that will make my reasons clear for wanting to visit Pine Ridge.”
I thought this was a good idea for a change, and I says if he told me what he wanted to say, I would be glad to translate it for Amanda, who would then write it down in perfect English.
Sitting Bull thanked us for the offer, but said with all honor to us, he nevertheless had to turn it down. As the matter was a Lakota thing concerning religion, it would not be proper for him to speak through white people however friendly, so he had decided to have his son-in-law Andrew Fox do the translating and writing.
Now it was all I could do not to groan out loud, for Fox had learned what he thought was English in reservation schools, the same place he got first-named Andrew, probably by somebody like the Major, but was actually near-gibberish, but I couldn’t tell that to Sitting Bull, who put great store in the young man, whose wife, the Bull’s daughter, had took sick and died only a few years earlier.
Here’s what Sitting Bull told Andrew Fox in Lakota, near as I can remember, though I have cut back on some of the rhetoric, which the Bull would of been wise to do himself.
I met with my people today, and I send you this message. Wakantanka made all of us, white and red, and the whites have been more powerful, but now the Father of us all has decided to help the red man. Therefore we are praying to find the right road, and do not want anyone to come with a gun or a knife to disturb those prayers. Praying does not make me a fool. You think that if I were not here, my people would be civilized, but because I am here they too are fools. You did not always think that way. When you came to visit me, you said my praying was good, but now you have changed. Be that as it may, this letter is to inform you I must go to Pine Ridge to look into what they are doing with their own Ghost Dance. I hear you want to take away our horses and guns. Is that true? I will thank you for answering promptly.
Now here’s what Andrew Fox come up with for an English version, and he was right proud of it when he showed the laboriously penciled text to me and Amanda. I would say his handwriting was awful hard to read in the first place, but then I never myself been noted for penmanship so ain’t criticizing that, just pointing out that we might of misread some of the scribble. Once again I give only the gist and not the entire message, which was even more of the same.
I meeting with my Indians today and writing to you this order. God made you all the white race and also the red race, but white high then the Indians, but today our Father is help us Indians. So we all the Indians knowing. I wish no one to come in to my pray with they gun or knife. You think I am fool. If I did not here, then the Indians will be civilization. But because I am here, all the Indians fool. When you was here in my camp you was give me good word about my pray, and today you take all back from me. I will let you know some thing. I got to go Pine Ridge and to know this pray. A police man told me you going to take all our ponies, guns also, so want you let me know that. I want answer back too.
Sitting Bull
After Amanda read this and then me, both in silence, Sitting Bull beamed proudly on Andrew Fox and says, “You can now see why I wanted my son-in-law to write this letter. It is no reflection on you. He not only knows English so well, but also how to speak to the Americans in a voice that gets their respect.”
I was worried Amanda might not of been so diplomatic as me, and spoke up quick so as to forestall any expression of dubiousness from her.
I didn’t see no choice but to tell Sitting Bull, “I understand what you mean. Let’s just hope McLaughlin does the right thing.” Though I for one didn’t know what the right thing would of been. I was real fond of Sitting Bull, but I wasn’t sure he should be allowed to visit Pine Ridge. He would be taking a chance: with him away from the Grand River, his settlement would be at the mercy of his enemies.
Well, only one of the requests made in the letter was answered in the affirmative: McLaughlin was prompt in responding. Next day he sent back a quick refusal to the main point. No, the Bull was definitely not allowed to go to Pine Ridge or anyplace else. Instead he was supposed to cease and desist from engaging in any more Ghost Dance activities of his own, and to send away all Indians presently engaged in them at the Grand River.
What McLaughlin did not say was him and Colonel Drum had finally set in motion the plans to make the arrest. At daybreak next day, without warning, the entire contingent of Indian police, led by Lieutenant Bull Head and Sergeants Red Tomahawk and Shave Head, was to invade the settlement and take Sitting Bull into custody living or dead.
Bull Head had been at the Greasy Grass fight fourteen years earlier—I guess I should specify, on the Indian side.