Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 (15 page)

While the rest of the Crow war party beat a hasty retreat, Sitting Bull and his half of the force chased after them at a full gallop. But as they had charged on past, one brave—or foolish—Crow warrior decided to stand and fight. He stayed on his pony, riding back and forth across the line of Lakota, his rifle braced across his thighs. Sitting Bull had left mostly younger men behind, merely as a precaution, while he took the more experienced men with him, trying to catch the retreating band of Crows.

The young Hunkpapa warriors seemed confused, uncertain what to do about the solitary Crow guard who had brought them to a temporary halt. Jumping Bull rode up, his gray-streaked hair looking almost white in the bright sun. He was too old for this kind of combat, but it galled him to see a single Crow warrior making a mockery of his people.

“If you won’t take him, I will,” he shouted to the young Lakotas, and pushed his horse toward the lone Crow. “For a long time, I have had a terrible toothache and wished I were dead. Now is my chance.” Without another word, he kicked his horse again and rumbled toward the dismounting enemy warrior.

On the ground now, the Crow raised his rifle. Jumping Bull leaped from his own horse, notching
an arrow as he hit the ground running. The Crow fired, hitting the old warrior in the shoulder and forcing him to lose his grip on the bow and arrow.

Jumping Bull didn’t slow down. He charged ahead as the Crow tried to fire again but found his gun empty and instead drew his knife. Jumping Bull reached for his own knife as he closed in, but his sheath had slipped around to the small of his back. As he fumbled for the hilt, the Crow was on him, stabbing him above the collarbone.

The Crow stabbed again and again, holding Jumping Bull by his hair and grunting with every blow of the knife. The old man tried to defend himself, but the vicious swipe of the razor-sharp blade slashed him again and again, until his hands and wrists were slippery with blood and he could no longer ward off the attack. For some reason, not one of the other Hunkpapa warriors made an attempt to come to Jumping Bull’s defense. They were frozen in place, some wringing their hands, others just staring dumbly, until Many Horses, a friend of Sitting Bull, rode up and saw what was happening.

He charged toward the grappling men, but before he could do anything to help, the Crow made one more vicious stab with the knife, driving the blade straight down and burying it deep in Jumping Bull’s skull, snapping it off as the old man fell to the ground. In a flash, the Crow vaulted onto his pony and made his escape.

Many Horses pursued Sitting Bull, who was still chasing the fleeing Crows, and told him what had happened. “Jumping Bull has been killed,”

he shouted, waving his bow to get the chiefs attention.

Sitting Bull rode back, leaving Many Horses in the dust. When he saw Jumping Bull spread-eagled on the ground, his hair soaked with blood, he looked at the sky for a moment, then at the other Hunkpapas, as if daring them to tell him how this had been allowed to happen, how none of them had had the courage to lift a finger to help an old man. One of the cowed warriors pointed toward the fleeing Crow who was responsible for the murder, and Sitting Bull wheeled his warhorse and galloped after him.

In his frenzy, he lashed at his horse with his quirt, and the big dun seemed to fly over the ground, eating up the distance between him and his quarry. The Crow apparently realized he was in trouble, and kept turning to look over his shoulder. Cry after cry welled up in Sitting Bull’s chest, some of rage and some of grief, but to the Crow they were indistinguishable. He was running for his life, and he knew it.

Two miles later, Sitting Bull caught up to him and fired his musket, hitting the Crow on the shoulder and knocking him from his horse. The man tried to scramble away as Sitting Bull circled him once, then again, then a third time, still on his horse, daring the man to get up.

The Crow finally managed to stagger up, and Sitting Bull launched himself through the air, drawing his knife at the same instant. He snaked an arm around the killer’s neck and sliced the blade once across the Crow’s throat. Then something
murderous and uncontrollable came over him.

He slashed and hacked at the Crow, who was already dead, as if he wanted to reduce him to an unrecognizable mass of ribboned flesh and slivered bone. Again and again and again, the knife rose and fell, and with every stab, Sitting Bull howled like an animal, venting his rage and his grief toward a blank and indifferent sky. He no longer looked at his victim, but craned his head up as if daring something in the sky to stop his murderous rage.

He felt a hand on his shoulder then and whirled to find himself staring at Many Horses’s tear-streaked face.

“It’s finished,” Many Horses said. “The Crow is dead, Sitting Bull. It’s finished.”

Sitting Bull rode back to the scene of his father’s death and dismounted. Her Holy Door was sitting in the grass with Jumping Bull’s head in her lap, rocking back and forth and singing. Her voice was almost a croon, as if she were singing to a sleepy child, but as she saw Sitting Bull walking toward her, she lost control and the words of the death song became a mournful wail.

Her Holy Door raised her hands in the air, whether to show her son his father’s blood or to berate
Wakantanka
for his father’s death, Sitting Bull wasn’t sure. The blood began to run down her wrists and forearms to her elbows, some dripping back into the clotted gray hair from which it had seeped. Sitting Bull knelt in the grass beside his mother, draped an arm around her shoulders, and rocked her like a baby while she sang. The words
tore at his heart, and tears coursed down his cheeks. He saw teardrops land on his mother’s bloody skin, leaving small lighter colored ponds in the horrible crimson.

When she was done with her chant, he closed his eyes and tilted his head back to sing his own death song, improvising the words as he went. The rest of the Hunkpapa gathered around the trio, closing in until there was not a break in their ranks, and when Sitting Bull was done, he looked for Many Horses, finding him standing on the inner edge of the circle.

“We will camp here,” he said. Many Horses nodded and picked a handful of warriors to supervise,

Sitting Bull lifted his mother to her feet, then bent to pick up his father’s body. He looked into the old man’s face, the wrinkled skin that once had been as smooth as his own, the eyes closed now forever, and chewed at his lower lip. The moment he had known would come, and had hoped he would not live to see, had come at last.

It was time to prepare Jumping Bull for the burial scaffold.

Missouri River Valley
1864

AS SETTLEMENT CONTINUED IN THE COUNTRY east of the Missouri River, pressure on the eastern Sioux, the Dakota, grew intolerable. Reduced to reservations and dependent on the whim of a United States Congress that seemed to have no idea of the conditions on the reservations, they needed the annuities promised them in a series of treaties. But the treaties were honored only sporadically, and the Dakota grew desperate. A Santee Dakota chief, Inkpaduta, began to lead covert raids against the white settlements, and officials were unable to locate him.

In 1861, a hard winter had ravaged the Santee, who were waiting for the promised annuities, only to find they had been delayed by low water on the river routes to the Indian agency. While they waited, they were unable to hunt; and when the annuities finally arrived, they amounted to the
princely sum of two dollars and fifty cents per person. When there was no food, the agency was forced to feed more than a thousand people for the entire winter. The following year the government, with questionable wisdom, decided to subtract the cost of that food from annuities due for the year 1862.

The Santee and the Sisseton people pressed the agency for fair treatment, but Congress was slow to act, and once again there were food shortages. In an aborted attempt to get the food they needed, a small band of warriors attacked the agency, intending to take the food they felt belonged to them. But a squad of soldiers, with the aid of a howitzer, was able to drive them off.

Once more, the Dakota were reduced to begging for their sustenance. One insensitive trader was overheard suggesting that the Indians should learn to eat grass. The remark enraged the younger men, but the chiefs were still trying to preserve the peace and restrained the hot-blooded young warriors. They knew their control was precarious, and they tried with little success to convince the government to respond to the needs of both the northern and southern Dakota.

On the way home from an unsuccessful hunt, four young warriors approached the settlement of Acton, Minnesota, and asked several whites for whiskey, which was refused them. They left angry, spoiling for a fight, and soon came upon a farm in an outlying area. Once more, they asked for whiskey, and again they were refused. The settler was accompanied by two friends, and the four
young Dakota challenged them to a marksmanship contest.

The nervous settlers reluctantly agreed. After the first round of firing, the Dakota reloaded faster than the three settlers and turned their guns on their opponents. When the smoke had cleared, the three white men were dead, along with the wife and daughter of one of them.

The four warriors returned home, fully expecting punishment. Instead they were greeted like heroes. Many other young warriors wanted to rise up against the whites and take back their native land by force, since pleas and prayers had proven ineffective. Little Crow, a chief of the Santee, tried to persuade the young hotheads to be patient, but the warriors were in no mood for moderation. Already in a precarious position because of his advocacy of peace, Little Crow did his best, but when it became apparent that he was not going to prevail, he agreed to go along with the younger men.

On April 16, 1862, the uprising began. The agency post for the lower Santee was attacked. The trader who had made the insulting remarks was one of the first to die, and as he lay on the ground, the enraged warriors crammed his mouth full of grass—a message for the rest of the whites. But the main object of the raid was food, not punishment of the whites, and while the warriors were busy stripping the storehouse, several whites escaped from the agency and fled to Fort Ridgely, fifteen miles down the Minnesota River.

Captain John S. Marsh was the military commander of Fort Ridgely, and he immediately led a column of fifty men out of the fort, intent on taking back the agency and capturing the raiders. But as he crossed the Minnesota River, the Santee attacked, killing half of the soldiers. Marsh himself was wounded and drowned in the river crossing.

The news spread quickly, and apparently the discontent was so general that more and more Santee joined the uprising. Repeated raids destroyed the town of New Ulm, not far from the agency and the fort, and the Santee then turned their attention to Ridgely itself. Three times they attacked and three times they were driven off. The howitzers at the fort gave the defenders the advantage, but the Santee managed to inflict casualties and considerable damage. Before they were able to capture the fort, however, reinforcements under the command of Henry Sibley—who had been commissioned a colonel by Alexander Ramsey, the governor of Minnesota Territory—arrived and drove off the attackers.

Sibley, despite some serious blunders that cost him several dead and wounded, soon put an end to the rebellion. But the Santee were in no mood to submit meekly. Little Crow led a significant portion of the Santee nation westward out of Minnesota and onto the plains, where they soon set up camp with a band of Hunkpapas.

Of those who remained behind, nearly four hundred were convicted in hasty trials of crimes against the white settlers, and over three hundred of those were sentenced to be hanged. President
Lincoln reviewed the cases individually before the sentences could be carried out, however, and reduced the number of death sentences to thirty-eight. Thirsty for blood, the settlers pushed for the executions, and on December 26, all thirty-eight Indians were hanged on a massive scaffold. It was learned the next day that two of those hanged had been mistakenly executed, but the white settlers did not seem overly concerned about the error.

To the west, Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas, while welcoming the Santee, were now in a difficult position. Already pressed by troops from the southwest, they knew they would also now face military pressure from the east, as a punitive expedition was launched after the Santee fugitives. By the summer of 1863, the United States government had decided that the rebellious Santee had to be punished. That they were now allied with the Lakota to the west seemed not to matter. Two columns were dispatched, one under Sibley, now a general, and a second under General Alfred Sully. Sully began establishing more forts, this time in Lakota land, and this campaign marked the beginning of warfare between the Hunkpapa and the United States that would continue for the next fifteen years.

Sitting Bull, now the most prominent Hunkpapa war chief, had no choice but to fight to defend the hunting grounds. Already angry at the influx of settlers and miners along the Missouri, precipitated by the discovery of gold in the upper Missouri Valley, he had led several raids against small groups of white intruders. But those raids were a
kind of warfare that the Lakota knew well, hit-and-run guerrilla tactics that worked against small groups of invaders. Sully and Sibley were leading heavily armed columns of well-trained soldiers, and the Hunkpapa were about to encounter a kind of warfare already visited on the Oglala and other more southern Lakota by General Harney in his punitive expedition after the Grattan affair.

In July of 1863, Sibley’s column inflicted defeats on a mixed contingent of Hunkpapa, Santee, and Blackfeet Lakota—on the twenty-fourth at Big Mound, on the twenty-sixth at Dead Buffalo Lake, and again on the twenty-eighth at Stony Lake. In each battle, Sibley’s overwhelming superiority in firepower drove the Indian forces further and further west. Hampered by the need to protect their families and to move all their worldly goods or lose them to the invading white army, Sitting Bull’s forces were reduced to fighting a defensive campaign, delaying the advance of Sibley’s column just long enough to allow the women and children to pack and move the camp.