Among a group of braves, I ducked in through the tepee entrance. Inside it was darker than of old, for no fire was lit and my eyes hadn’t been accustomed for some time to coming into gloom out of burning sunshine. We turned to the right and paused for a minute, as was the proper manners, and the guttural voice of Old Lodge Skins come out of the twilight ahead.
“I wish you would go outside,” he said to them Indians, “and let me talk to the white man alone.”
They left and I went around the circle to where the old chief was setting. You might think it would have made more sense to cut straight across the diameter, but this was never done: a person traveled circumferentially in a lodge.
It was a while before my eyes was adjusted and I could make him out. Meanwhile he just set there quietly. I noticed he was bareheaded, and remembering how I had thrown away his loaned hat at the Solomon battle, I felt right bad about it. Now I was carrying my Mexican sombrero, which I had fetched along and worn on the ride. It was a real pretty thing with its band of silver medallions and embroidered brim.
“Grandfather,” I said, “I brought you this present.” And handed him the hat.
Now I had done my limit. If the Cheyenne was determined to put me to death as an impostor, there wasn’t nothing more I could do about it.
“My son,” said Old Lodge Skins, “to see you again causes my heart to soar like a hawk. Sit here beside me.”
That was some relief. I took a seat upon the buffalo robe to his left, and he leaned over and embraced me. I tell you I was right touched by it. Then he took the sombrero, quickly cut out the crown with his knife, stuck a single eagle feather into that silver band, and put it on his head.
“Is this the same hat that I used to own?” he asked. “Which grew soft of skin and fatter?”
“No, Grandfather, it is another.”
“We must smoke your return,” he said, and went through the rigamarole of filling the pipe, lighting it, offering it to the four points of the compass and so on, so it was quite a while before I got a drag of that spicy mix of red-willow bark.
“I saw you in a dream,” he said after a time. “You were drinking from a spring that came out of the long nose of an animal. I did not recognize the animal. Alongside this nose he grew two horns. The water that gushed from his nose was full of air.”
I don’t care if you believe me or not, but you might reflect that if I was going to make up something out of the whole cloth, it’d probably be more ambitious than that. What he was talking about was of course that elephant-head soda-water fountain in Kane’s establishment. I can’t explain it.
We set there maybe an hour before getting around to what was to me the important issue, but you can’t rush things with an Indian.
Finally Old Lodge Skins said: “Do not be angry with Burns Red in the Sun and the others. They had unhappy experiences last year with some white men they found wandering, sick and hungry, in a place without water. These white men had lost their minds in the search for the yellow dust, and our people took pity on them, fed them and treated them for the illness of the mind, and then when they were well, these white men stole twenty-six of our horses and the rifle of Spotted Dog and ran away during the night.”
Old Lodge Skins calmly dragged on the pipe and let the smoke waft from his mouth and nostrils.
“What particularly annoyed some of the Human Beings,” he went on, “was that we had come down here to attend the peace conference at the fort of Bent, which the Father of the whites asked us to, and that is why we are dressed in our good clothing, and then Burns Red in the Sun and the others came upon your mule wagons and saw the pinto which had been among those stolen last year.”
I took the pipe from him. “I don’t understand why they did not recognize me.”
“Yes,” said Old Lodge Skins. “Do you want to eat?”
He never said anything lightly, so I knew I was supposed to take refreshment at this point by the etiquette and said yes, and in come Buffalo Wallow Woman who started the fire and boiled some puppy dog and served it up in bowls with the little paws sticking out over the rim as a mark of special distinction. Still, she kept her eyes down, and we never greeted each other, for Old Lodge Skins had not yet pronounced his O.K. of me to her. By time this was finished, it was nigh evening.
The chief wiped the grease off his mouth with the brim of the sombrero. This was not a case of slovenliness, however: after several meals, that piece of headgear would be so impregnated with fat that rain could never soak it.
He took up the conversation just where it had left off.
“I do not understand exactly what happened to you at the Battle of the Long Knives, at which the horse soldiers did not know how to fight properly,” he said. “We all went away on account of the wrong medicine. But when the Human Beings collected again and you were not there in your own body, we saw a swallow who flew above us for a long time. It was natural to assume that was you. It was also pleasant to think so, for you were a man for whom the Human Beings felt honor and affection. Later I dreamed about the long-nosed animal that gave you a drink in the village of the whites, but I did not tell anybody because it might have meant bad luck for you to do that.
“Therefore,” he said, “Burns Red in the Sun cannot be blamed for his ignorance.” He got up from the robe and, indicating I should follow, went out in front of the tepee, where the whole camp had been waiting all this while. The sun was setting across the infinity of prairie to the west, in streaks of orange, vermilion, pink, and rose, and this light give a glow to all the colors on the people there.
Old Lodge Skins looked right smart in that sombrero. Standing there in his red blanket, with me alongside, he give quite a harangue, as you might expect. I won’t go into it, except for the conclusion.
“I have thought and talked and smoked and eaten on this matter,” he said. “And my decision is that Little Big Man has returned.”
He went back into his lodge and the rest of the camp come and greeted me dear as I ever experienced, with embraces and compliments and every type of affectionate chatter, and I had to eat five or six times more and talk for hours, and I reckon I was affected by this, for I knowed nonetheless that I could never be an Indian again.
Well, I got filled in on what those people had done since that Solomon battle: just about what they had been doing from time immemorial, been up north as usual during most of the year and come down south for the tribal get-together both summers since. Hadn’t had no more trouble with the soldiers, for they had kept out of their way. And it seemed they was still acceptable to the main tribe, which meant that Old Lodge Skins hadn’t got his hands on anybody else’s wife.
What an Indian chooses to characterize a whole twelvemonth is something like: “That was the time that Running Wolf broke his leg,” or, “During the winter a cottonwood tree fell on Bird Bear’s tepee.” Insofar as they kept a mental diary, it was events of that sort that filled it up, and there might be no remark whatever of something real important. For example, that Solomon retreat was only mentioned to me by Burns Red and Old Lodge Skins; everybody else had forgot it soon as possible. If you’d have asked a Cheyenne what he did that summer that was notable, he might have said something like: “My chestnut won a race against Cut Belly’s black.”
As Old Lodge Skins had said, they was in this area now because of the peace-treaty conference called by the Government at Bent’s Fort. The Indian Commissioner himself had promised to show up, so I gathered, and this impressed the chief no end. He expected to get another medal and maybe a new plug hat. Beyond that, however, he was undecided on the prospects.
One of the many meals of celebration give for me was in the tepee of Hump, who was still war chief and hadn’t changed at all.
“Welcome, my friend,” he says to me when we met. “You wouldn’t by any chance have brought me a gift of powder and shot?” So I presented him the extra paper cartridges and percussion caps I carried for my Dragoon pistol, retaining only the loads already in t
he chambers. I could have been hanged for doing that if the Army found out, I reckon.
“Come and eat,” says he. Old Lodge Skins was also invited, and Shadow That Comes in Sight, Burns Red, and several others of my old friends, and that is where we talked about the treaty.
“I do not know,” said Old Lodge Skins after we finished the boiled buffalo tongue, “whether it is right for a Human Being to become a farmer, though Yellow Wolf had that idea, and he was a wise man.”
Hump said: “Yellow Wolf was a great chief, but the white men put him under an evil spell or he would never have got that idea. He loafed around the forts too much”
“I want to speak now,” said Shadow That Comes in Sight. “I think I would rather die than plant a potato.”
Burns Red in the Sun was still sore about the dirty deal he got from them gold hunters. He said: “No matter what we do, the white men will cheat us. If we plant potatoes, they will steal them. If we try to hunt buffalo, they will scare the game away. If we fight, they will not make war properly.” He didn’t come to no conclusion, but fell into one of them depressed moods that stayed with him for the rest of the day and next morning, during which he set right there in Hump’s tepee, never speaking nor drinking nor eating, and Hump’s family let him alone, walking around him.
“That may be so,” said Old Lodge Skins. “On the other hand, the white men are coming in ever greater numbers and building permanent dwelling places. If they do not find wood, they cut bricks from the earth or burrow into the ground like prairie dogs. Whatever else you can say about the white man, it must be admitted that you cannot get rid of him. He is in never-ending supply. There has always been only a limited number of Human Beings, because we are intended to be special and superior. Obviously not everybody can be a Human Being. To make this so, there must be a great many inferior people. To my mind, this is the function of white men in the world. Therefore we must survive, because without us the world would not make sense.
“But to survive if the white men drive away the buffalo will not be easy. Maybe we should try this farming. Other red men have done so. When I was a boy a people called Mandan farmed along the Big Muddy River. It is true that the Lakota were always attacking their villages and killed a lot of them. And then the Mandan caught smallpox from visiting white traders and died every one. There are no more Mandan.” Old Lodge Skins raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps they were not a great people.”
“I never heard of farmers who were,” said Hump. He then asked me: “I suppose you have a lot of powder and lead in your wagons?”
I didn’t answer, not wanting to get into that. Which was all right, for I was getting ready to make a speech myself. I ranked pretty high in these quarters, not because I was important enough to lead a wagon train—the Cheyenne didn’t care about that, nor had they asked me how I spent the time since we had last seen one another—no, I was influential here because though I had apparently been killed on the Solomon’s Fork, I had returned.
Here’s what I was thinking: Old Lodge Skins had spent more than seventy years on the prairies and what did he have to show for it? Indians loved their land, but the peculiarity was that the most miserable cabin of a white man had a relation to the earth that no nomadic redskin could claim. One way of looking at it was that in any true connection, each thing being joined makes a mark on the other: a tree, say, is fastened to the earth, and vice versa. In Denver they was erecting buildings now with foundations: not only on the ground but in it; so that if one day the whites left that place again, it would still bear their brand for a long time. I never heard of a natural force that would tear cellar walls from the earth.
Maybe white men was more natural than Indians! was what I had got to thinking. Even prairie dogs had fixed villages.… Now I know that every living thing is neither more nor less of Nature than the next, but I was young then and them distinctions bothered me, what with the conflicting claims: Indians believing they was more “natural” than white men, and the latter insisting they themselves was more “human.”
Whatever the judgment on that, I knowed right then that the Cheyenne way was finished as a mode of life. I saw this not in the present camp, but back in Denver; for truths are sometimes detected first in a place remote from the one to which they apply. Think of how if you was standing in China when gunpowder had been invented, you could have known that thousands of mile away stone castles and armor was finished.
So what I said in that speech of mine had practicality as its point of view. I stood up in Hump’s tepee. I wore Burns Red’s best red blanket. We had exchanged gifts, and he in his Indian way give me his finest possession.
“Brothers,” I says, “when I sit among you, I think of the beautiful Powder River country where we did so many happy things when I was a boy. Do you recall the time Little Hawk was sleeping in his tepee and suddenly was awakened by the smell of beaver-gland perfume and raised the lodge cover and saw a Crow stealing his horse and killed him? And when Two Babies returned from his lone war trail against the Ute, after staying away a whole year, his belt full of scalps and singing the song an eagle had taught him as he lay wounded in a dry wash.
“Do you remember how lovely Cloud Peak looks with its cap of white and shoulders of purple and blue? And think of the clear, cold water of the Crazy Woman’s Creek, which runs fresh all summer from the melting snows of the mountains. The forests full of lodgepoles and firewood, the elk with his great antlers, the bear in his coat of fur.…
“I think it is better up on the Powder River than it is here in this place.
“I know nothing of this treaty, but I do I now that more and more white men will come through this place where we are now camped, because it is as the bird flies from a white village called Denver to a big white place called Missouri. I have been to both of these places and I know that neither will go away but will rather grow larger. It is my opinion that as they do, they and the land between will be less and less pretty to the eyes of a Human Being.”
I took a breath; it ain’t easy to get supernatural when you are out of practice. “I had a dream,” I says, “after the Battle of the Long Knives. I flew above all this country and saw below me white men building square houses, but to the north, along the Powder River, I saw the great nation of Human Beings living happily, fighting the Crow and Mountain Snakes, killing buffalo and elk, and stealing horses.”
Old Lodge Skins spoke: “I believe that I have heard wisdom,” he said. “We had intended to talk of this treaty in support of our southern brothers. Black Kettle and White Antelope will go there, and they are great chiefs. I understand that the Arapaho, Kiowa, and Snake People will also talk. It is a very pretty sight to see all the tribes at a treaty conference with their countless ponies and in their best clothes. The Father of the whites gives presents to everybody. Just because you go to a treaty council, that does not mean you have to touch the pen.
“The Father wants to buy from the Human Beings and others the land where the yellow dust lies. Bent will be there and he is a good man who has married a woman of the Human Beings. I was willing to go and talk about farming because Black Kettle and White Antelope, who are wise men, have said the Human Beings must think about settling down.
“But dreams do not speak two ways, and there must be some reason why Little Big Man has been returned to us to tell of his vision.”
I hadn’t give him a new idea. Indians wasn’t necessarily fools about what they should or shouldn’t do. They sometimes just had reasons that a white would find difficult to understand. Old Lodge Skins was going to the council mainly to get another silver medal and to see the entertainments put on when all the tribes got together and showed off their prowess at riding and their best clothes so as to impress the Government representative. He might even have went so far as to sign the treaty without any intention of taking up farming as a result.
Now he had decided on my suggestion to forget about the whole thing and return to the north country. But I’ll tell you something: he n
ever did that because of my “dream”; he did it because he knowed damn well I was white and knew what I talked about as to the situation in Kansas and Colorado.
So did they all, and if you’ll look again at the myth they had built around Little Big Man, you’ll see what I mean. It hadn’t aught to do with me personally, and insofar as I was to be identified with it, I had to live up to it rather than vice versa. If I did something that would not jibe with the legend, that meant I was not Little Big Man. By this means Indians kept their concepts straight and their heroes untarnished, and did not have to lie. I guess it wouldn’t work, though, for somebody who understood the principle of such things as money and the wheel.
After the talk in Hump’s lodge, my other foster-brother Little Horse, dressed like a Cheyenne woman, come in and entertained us with very graceful singing and dancing. It did my heart good to see he made such a success of being a heemaneh.
I stayed the night in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Next morning I met another old friend. I was coming back from a wash in the little creek when I saw an Indian who seemed to be either blind or deliberately walking through sagebushes and cactus on his route from one point to another. I decided after observation that it was the latter, for only by intent could he have found such a rugged course for himself. Eventually he reached the creek, where he proceeded to wash. But not with water, with earth from the bank.
I had recognized him straightway. It was Younger Bear. So when he had finished his curious ablutions, I went over to him. I didn’t know whether he still considered himself my enemy or not. It seemed so long ago that I never even thought of it.
At my greeting he turned, not unfriendly, but instead of saying the Cheyenne hello, he says goodbye. Then, the way a person who has just took a bath will sit upon the bank to dry, he goes into the creek and sets down in the water. I guess it made sense, seeing how he had just washed with dirt. I realized he was doing everything backwards, and understood then what he had become.