misunderstanding
and white that is mostly what set the
prairie on fire
white faced bad hearts said the indian
and the crime committed by the last
white man he saw
would be avenged against the next white
man he saw
the only good indian is a dead indian
and the best indian
is one who was good and dead said the
white man
and few of them bothered to distinguish
between one bit of a tribe and another
or for that matter between tribes the
friendly indian was often punished for
the misdeeds of the hostiles
because being friendly he was easiest to
find
all this time the different tribes were
still fighting each other
at first the whites encouraged this the
one thing that worried them
was anything that would unify the indian
nations like the sundance
the plains indians danced to the beat of
many different drums
but the sundance was common to the
entire culture as east to all christians
and is sacred it united all the bands of
a tribe
and increasingly one tribe with another
it was dedicated to the renewal of the
earth
the making over again of the whole world
fences were fulfilling pledges made
during the year
and the depth of their piety was in the
degree of self-torture they endured
fastened by thongs skewered through
their muscles
they whirled around the pole staring at
the sun for as long as their flesh could
bear it
or until they tore themselves loose
the dancer's endurance brought honor to
them and divine favor to their people
but the whites horrified at this
paganism were also concerned lest the
sundance large become a rallying point
and they hasten to press their own
religion on the indian
benevolent hard-working and well-meaning
missionaries were shocked to discover
that their wards wore the cross as a
symbol
of the four cardinal points of their own
theology and they were reluctant to
abandon it
for one locked in a black book they
could not read
it is a good book i'm sure why does the
white man not follow it
if there is only one true religion why
do the methodists
and the baptists and the black coats all
fight each other
i do not want your heaven when i die and
please keep your hell
there will be no room for indians it'll
be too full of white bad hearts
determined to save the indian by
de-indianizing him
the good people from the east decided to
concentrate on the children
boarding schools were established safely
removed from tribal areas and family
influence
many parents had to be bribed or
intimidated to enroll their children
sometimes the students were simply
kidnapped
complained the father of one homesick
scholar
they gave him a white man's name he
could not say
and hard moccasins that hurt his feet
and they cut his hair short to shame him
when he could not read the painted
speech he was beaten like a pony as they
do to white boys
my son will have to learn all over again
how to be an indian
when he returns to my lodge
but where would the lodge be tribal
hunting grounds were being planted out
into municipal lots
and where they had been prairie dog
towns cities sprang up
the architecture was outhouse provincial
but each one bragged it was the athens
of the prairie
the bees had built hives and were ready
to sell honey
trading posts had wetted the indian
appetite for anything tinged with white
men's medicine
and the townsmen found him a
pathetically ideal customer
there's some who top a whole river
bottom for a cup of beets and a bucket
of axe heads
taken as a single article the indian's
not worth the salt to pickle his eye
though there is some profit in
skinningham wholesale
here then was another solution to the
indian problem
teach them contempt for the things they
had which were of value
and to covet the things they didn't need
but the one thing the warsaw jews sold
which the indian coveted most
was the fire stick its medicine would
make any tribe the equal of any other
and while it would never make the indian
the same color as the white man
the day might come when it would make
him the same size
but the white man had another weapon
that would make sure this day
never came recipe
to one barrel of missouri river water
add two gallons of raw alcohol
two ounces of strychnine three plugs of
tobacco and five bars of soap
boil it in sagebrush until it's brown
this was the elixir for the indian trade
and no one who drank it lived long
enough to become addicted
wrote a newspaper their thirst for
whiskey is matched only by an inability
to accommodate it
not a day passes but what our better
class of citizen is affronted by the
sight of blanketed vagabonds
who for a bottle of the vilest liquor
will even ransom their women as brides
of the multitude
just as he had no tolerance for white
men's whiskey
the indian had no immunity to his
diseases
a people to whom good health had
actually been a virtue
found themselves weakened and disfigured
by the silent tomahawk of unfamiliar
sickness
the few who succumbed to the temptations
of the towns
were inevitably degraded into street
corner curiosities
shuffling through counterfeit war dances
for whiskey money
some went off to pose in moldy charades
and dime museums
always cast as the villain
only when advertised as a congress of
painted fiends with some traveling wild
west show
did most city people ever see a real
live indian
they considered them if at all in the
1870s
with apathy ignorance and prejudice
if there was a place left in america for
the aboriginal american
it was hardly a place of dignity
the wild tribes of the west were being
inconsiderate
they refused to follow the buffalo into
oblivion just to accommodate people who
were
only passing through my father sent for
me and said
my son never forget my dying words
this country holds your father's body
never sell the bones of your father and
your mother
but somebody had sold along with the
land
it had taken 100 years of bribery and
intimidation
and dishonest treaties to legalize the
trespass
no matter that the party of the first
part could not read and often was not
told what he had signed
or that the government sometimes decreed
a man a chief
so it would bind a whole tribe with his
signature
or that no indian could dispose of any
land without the consent of all the
two-leggeds
and the four-leggeds and the ghosts and
the gods to whom it rightfully belonged
but consent was no longer of interest to
the party of the second part
i'm afraid that the agreements which we
had made before did not make allowances
for the rapid growth of the white race
you must submit to our forward progress
and do the best you can
say the party the first part what treaty
that the white man has made
has he ever kept not one
indian tribes are merely domestic
defendants not sovereign nations
a parent may abrogate an agreement with
his own children
when it is for their own good
because your lies have squirmed across
our land like snakes
it does not make it the snake's land
this country does not belong to the
indians but to the almighty and all his
children have an interest in it
so meets and bounds must be set
meets and bounds were set and in such a
way that the almighty's white children
would have all the choice land while a
few scrub acres were reserved for his
red chill
general sherman defined a reservation
a worthless parcel of ground set aside
for indians
and completely surrounded by white
thieves
but the indian bureau considered them
way stations between two cultures
where in isolation indians could somehow
learn to be white men
here warriors were coerced into doing
squaw work
their leaders were humiliated and
replaced by hand-picked chiefs
they sickened between four walls forced
to build houses
they erected teepees behind them in
which to die
unwilling to farm and unable to hunt the
indians were fed government rations
doled out at starvation level to keep
them docile
that is what wasn't so to enrich the
agents of the indian
agency beef was issued on the hook and
killed by the indian sympathetic
imitation of the buffalo hunt
that is if it didn't die first much of
it was so diseased it couldn't be
when the indians complained they were
punished by rations so sickening
that one sympathetic agent said the
government had better issue arsenic and
get the poisoning process finished with
decent expedition
then the government ordered the sundance
lodge torn down
and gradually outlawed pagan ceremonies
for the first time since the bill of
rights free exercise of religion was
being denied an entire people
under penalty of federal law
the black hills here the great mystery
had strewn visions for the souls of
dakota warriors
to prepare them for the beyond place
this was
holy land so sacred that a special
treaty forbade the entry of white men
or so long as the grass shall grow
then a scientific expedition invaded the
hills with secret orders to discover
gold
to deliberately set off such a stampede
of miners that the treaty would be
unenforceable
overnight the indians precious large
pole timber was turned into charcoal
for the gold smellers they had called
the hills
their meat pack but the two leggeds
drove away the game
having profaned the sacred place the
whites offered to pay for it
at a discount of course then they sent
word to all the tribes
the government is determined that all
tribal americans shall be consolidated
into two reserved areas
all who do not submit peacefully will be
deemed to be hostile
and will be hunted down and brought in
by force
a new policy all indians of the plains
are to be re-reservated regardless of
tribal differences now
all are to be herded together into two
big reservations
a sterile wasteland in oklahoma and
another in dakota
there they would be domesticated broken
like broncos in a corral
the wild indian was expected to purr
instead he started to growl
i do not want to settle down in the
houses you would build for us
i love to roam over the wild prairie
there i am free and happy
when we sit down we grow pale and die
why do you ask us to leave the rivers
and the sun and the wind
and live in a house
i have only one heart although you say
go to another country
my heart is not that way i am here
and here's where i am going to be
i will not part with my lands and if you
come again
i will say the same thing i will not
part with my land
my people have never drawn the first bow
against the whites
the blue dress soldiers come from out of
the night and for campfires they light
our lodges
instead of hunting game they kill my
braves
they make sorrow come into our camps
they are asking for war
in the camp of the blue dress soldiers
they were expecting war
but not asking for it this truant
chasing is at best an inglorious
business
without any compensating advantage
but there would be advantage for one man
george custer under a portrait of his
favorite person
and also under a cloud and facing a
board of inquiry for insubordination
custer had just heard from eastern
politicians that a flashy victory in the
field would not only restore his fated
civil war glory
it would guarantee him the democratic
nomination for the presidency of the
united states
one man at least was anxious to hear the
bugle call
boots and saddles
the call came and with it orders to
round up some runaway
sioux under sitting bull refusing to be
reservated
they had to finally gone off buffalo
hunting
june 1876 the seventh united states
cavalry
slow trotted off to search for some
half-naked savages
who had also been described as the
finest light cavalry in the world
they arrived about here deep in montana
territory
when custer scouts reported a large
indian encampment
down there in the greasy grass river to
engage them here
would have been a violation of orders
instead he was to report back to his
superiors
who would dispatch a larger force to
bring in the fugitives
but this would mean sharing the glory
and that was no way to get to be
grandfather in washington
besides custer was afraid his troops had
been discovered and the indians might
escape
anyway a hunting camp never held more
than a handful of warriors
so custer decided to attack he divided
his command and he sent 136 men
on the majorino along the other bank of
the river to hit the camp from the left
then custer took five companies 225 men
along this side of the river
meaning to cross it and simultaneously
attack the other end of the
one thing between the prince's jaws were
not the few hundred indians he supposed
but closer to ten thousand the last
scene of custer
he was riding along these bluffs looking
for a way to the white house
by crossing the greasy grass or as it
was marked on his map
the little big horn the only
eyewitness account of what happened
after that is contained in the drawings
and actual words of the only qualified
reporters
the survivors everything happened fast
it was hardly time to paint our faces
and catch our ponies
the wasatch soldiers charged the upper
end of our camp
where the hunk for power lodges were and
we were ready for them
our men were calling to each other brave
up brothers
it is a good day to die the white man
soldiers were surprised that we fought
back so hard
they got off their horses and hid in the
woods to shoot
then they did a foolish thing they were
either drunk or crazy
but they ran out of the woods and into
the river to get to the other side
we killed many in the water but most of
them got up on a hill
where we kept shooting at them to let
them run out of bullets and water
we had seen the other soldiers riding
downstream before the fighting started
maybe they thought to catch us running
away we left a few boys and warriors to
keep the first soldiers on the hill
then we all went to surprise the men who
wanted to surprise us
we knew the other soldiers would try to
cross the river at the best boarding
place
so we got there first and crossed the
river before they did
brave up brothers the earth is all the
glass
when the soldiers got off their horses
to shoot the men who hold the horses
could not hold them
and they ran all over we got many horses
that day
and the bullets that were in the bundles
tied to the horses
the shooting was close together like the
tearing of a blanket
we had warriors as plenty as leaves on
trees
and we got behind the white soldiers and
all around them
they broke up into little groups which
made them easy to kill
like cutting off buffalo from the herd
many white soldiers fought bravely and
our people did not go near them
but hid to shoot at them from far away
some of the wasatch went crazy and ran
around in circles or shot their guns in
the air
finally there were only a few left they
went up a hill a little way and stopped
there
forever the fight was over quick
it took no longer than the sun takes to
travel between two large poles
when the fighting was over the women
came and cut up the soldier dead
so that none of them could return from
the beyond place
and fight again
our blood was hot and we wanted to rub
out the other soldiers on the other hill
but our chiefs said they are trying to
live
let them go we have killed enough
let the others live it was over
we took our lodges and our women and
children and went into the mountains
then they said we washed off our paint
in the river
and put the water back in the bag but we
knew it would not stay there
we would not have peace
and they were right they hadn't sought
this battle
and all that the victory brought them
was 12 years of a war they could not win
on this field the blue dress soldiers
marked where each of their dead had
fallen
but without meaning to be these were
monuments to something else too
they indicate the high water mark of a
culture a way of life
and they are the last milestones on the
last journey
of the people who were here first
the trail is still there the indians say
but it's like the road of the dead
where all the footprints point the same
way and alongside it
are strewn the discarded dreams of
warriors and young men
who had asked the everywhere spirit to
let a good thing happen
and the trail is littered too with the
worn out visions of the old ones
full of winters who turned whirly off
toward the camp in the stars
into the land of many lodges
they say the trail is still there dimly
traced across the whole of the great
plains by the poles of many pony drags
and marcus and prince branch off in roys
and cooley's
where children have strayed to stalk the
butterfly and chase the kid fox
and search for the fallen feather of a
hawk
it is mark two they say where the grass
is slashed by the unshared hooves of the
buffalo ponies
and by the war pony with their painted
flanks
and the plumes of eagles woven in their
manes
this is the way a people went and a way
of life
an old indian reading the trail can
still see it
it's in the flesh of the firefly in the
night and the breath of the buffalo in
the winter
and in our little shadow that runs
across the grass
until it is lost in the sunset
you
