Walking Wolf (17 page)

The first time I heard of it was from a Sioux brave named Young Mule. Although he had arrived at my camp as close to death as any man could be and still draw breath, when he spoke of the dance his eyes took on the fiery gleam of a fanatic.

“The Ghost Dance was dreamed by Wovoka of the Paiute. In the dream, he saw a time soon coming where the Whites will be swept from the land. The earth will be reborn and those family and friends the Whites have sent to the Spirit World will be returned whole. The buffalo will return in their numbers and we will be free to hunt and follow the herds as in the days of the Grandmother Land.”

“That's a very fine vision, Young Mule,” I agreed. “But how does this Wovoka plan to make it true?”

“We are to dance the Ghost Dance. If enough of us dance long enough, and if we please the Great Spirit, then the believers shall be suspended in midair as a flood of new soil engulfs the earth, swallowing the Whites whole. Wovoka has promised this shall come in three years' time. Wovoka has also promised that he will take away the Whites' secret of making gunpowder when the time comes, and any gunpowder the Whites might still possess will be powerless.”

I tried to listen as politely and noncommittally as possible, but I didn't like the sound of this Ghost Dance business at all. For one thing, for a religion designed to rid the Indians of Whites, it sure smacked of their beliefs. It especially reminded me of the Mormons, who I held in contempt since the night they attacked Grondeur's camp and slaughtered his wives. It did not make me feel any better to know the Ghost Dance had spread throughout the territories and had been embraced by many tribes.

Deeply disturbed by what Young Mule had told me, I decided it was time to venture onto the reservation and speak to Sitting Bull face to face and see where this nonsense was going. So I saddled up a pony and kissed my wife and son good-bye, and rode out in the direction of Sitting Bull's camp, forty miles southwest of Fort Yates.

When I arrived, I got to see firsthand the depredations of reservation life upon the Sioux. The abject poverty of the tribe shocked me. While they had lived free, they possessed none of the things that Whites consider “wealth” such as gold, precious gems, or houses full of furniture—but they had the wealth of their world: buffalo robes to keep them warm in the winter, meat to keep their families fed, ponies to ride, beads to work into their ceremonial costumes. Now they were stripped of even the most meager pleasures of their former lives, reduced to beggars panhandling crumbs and castoffs from their jailers. Still, there were those who clung to their pride, refusing to bow completely to the dictates of the White Man.

One such man was Sitting Bull.

As I rode into his camp, dozens of eyes watched me. Since I was wearing the buckskins of a mountain man, most did not recognize me as Walking Wolf, instead assuming I was just another agency employee sent by the Indian Bureau, to keep an eye on the troublesome old chief. As word of my arrival spread, Sitting Bull left his cabin to see who the intruder might be.

Although I had not laid eyes on the Hunkpapa medicine man in nearly eight years, there was no mistaking him. He was bowlegged from his years on horseback and now walked with a pronounced limp, from an old wound he received on the warpath, years ago. His thinning hair was carefully oiled and plaited, and his massive jaw and piercing eyes made him look like a great bird of prey. In defiance of the agency, he wore the traditional fringed shirt, leggings and moccasins of smoke-tanned buckskin, a trade-cloth blanket draped around his waist. As he drew closer, his thin lips pulled back into a warm smile, showing fewer teeth than I remembered.

“I dreamt last night that a wolf walked into my camp and smoked the peace pipe with me before the fire. Now here you are, old friend! Welcome to my camp, Walking Wolf!”

At the mention of my name, the braves who had been looking daggers at me began to talk excitedly amongst themselves. I got off my horse and hugged the old man.

“You look as young as the day we worked our war medicine on Yellow Hair,” he laughed. It wasn't really a joke. I had stopped aging—at least noticeably—somewhere around my thirtieth birthday. As it was, at forty-three years of age Digging Woman looked old enough to be my mother instead of my wife. “Come, sit with me before the fire and smoke tobacco. There is much we must speak of, Hand of Coyote.”

Sitting Bull's “lodge” was an exceptionally humble two-room cabin he shared with his three wives, his son Crowfoot, and one of his nephews—a deaf-mute boy named John. It smelled of grease and smoke and sweat. As we sat before the cook-fire, Sitting Bull pulled out a small bag of government-issue tobacco and placed it in his ceremonial pipe.

“Why have you come to see me, old friend?” he asked quietly, lifting an ember to the pipe's bowl.

“I would ask you about the Ghost Dance.”

Sitting Bull grunted and handed the lit pipe to me. “Kicking Bear brought the Ghost Dance back with him after visiting his cousin, Spoonhunter, in Wyoming.”

“Kicking Bear? You mean old Big Foot's nephew? He was always something of a hothead, if I remember correctly. Hardly the kind to turn prophet.”

Sitting Bull nodded, as if I were saying things he himself believed but dared not speak aloud. “This Ghost Dance is a strange thing. I have seen it performed. There is power in the dance—that, I cannot deny. But I am not certain the visions it gives are true. While I do not trust it, I do not forbid it. Kicking Bear's voice is powerful; almost as powerful as mine. His disciple, Short Bull, is as dedicated as he is—and even more headstrong. If this Ghost Dance makes my people happy and gives them something to believe in—even if it is a thing that will never be, then where is the harm?”

“What of the Whites? How do they feel about the Ghost Dance?”

“It worries them. To know that my people dance for their destruction—it makes the Whites sweat, even though they do not believe it will come to pass.”

“What about McLaughlin?”

At the mention of the Pine Ridge Agency's chief bureaucrat, Sitting Bull spat in disgust, making the meager fire sizzle. “He would have my scalp, if his chiefs in Washington would permit it. He would have all Sioux sing from the missionaries' books and chop off our braids. He knows I am against that and he fears me.”

“Perhaps he's jealous of you,” I chuckled. “I'm sure
he'll
never have the chance to perform before the Queen of England.”

Sitting Bull grinned and straightened up a little bit. “Yes. The Great White Mother. Those were good days, when I rode with Bill Cody. Not as good as when we killed Yellow Hair, but better than now.”

There was a knock on the door, and one of Sitting Bull's wives answered it. Short Bull entered and approached the old chief.

“Greetings, father,” he said. Sitting Bull was not Short Bull's father, but all Sioux used the honorific when addressing their chiefs and respected elders. “I bring word from Kicking Bear. He would hold the Ghost Dance tomorrow in honor of Walking Wolf's arrival in our camp.”

Sitting Bull lifted an eyebrow and looked at me. “Would you be interested in witnessing the dance, my friend?”

“Of course. But why tomorrow night? Why not hold it tonight?”

Short Bull looked somewhat surprised that I was unschooled in the ritual of the dance. Having grown up Comanche, I still harbored a mistrust of the Sioux's obsession with mystic rigmarole. “The leaders and dancers must fast for a full day before entering the sweat lodges for purification,” he explained.

“Tomorrow then,” Sitting Bull agreed, ending the audience. After Short Bull was gone, the old medicine man shook his head. “They will try and use you to give credence to this thing of theirs.”

“I know,” I replied. “But I still want to see it for myself, just in case there is something to it.”

Just before dusk the next day, I went with a hundred others from Sitting Bull's camp to a site a few miles away where sweat lodges had been built. The men and women divided up and crawled into separate lodges. I had not undergone the sweating ceremony in several years, and I had forgotten how the heat opened the pores and allowed the toxins trapped inside the skin to pour out. It was like purging yourself of everything holding you to the material plane. At the end of the ceremony, the dancers crawled from the lodges, after which they were painted red by medicine men and their bodies rubbed down with handfuls of sweet grass.

As I watched the others dress themselves in their finest regalia, a young Sioux medicine man called Black Elk handed me a carefully folded bundle. “You honor us with your presence, Walking Wolf. It would give me great pleasure if you wore this shirt I have made.”

“Thank you, Black Elk.” I held up the garment and studied it. It was a shirt of unbleached muslin, cut like the old-time ceremonial war shirts, with fringe on the sleeves and seams. It was marked with strange symbols and had eagle feathers tied to it. I felt there was something horribly familiar about the shirt as I put it on, but I could not recollect exactly what.

The dancers, male and female, young and old, seated themselves in a huge circle around a dead tree with colored streamers tied to its branches. Kicking Bear, the official leader of the dance, sat at the base of the tree. At his command, a young girl came forward and was handed an elk-horn bow and four arrows made with bone heads. As we watched, the maiden dipped the arrows in a bowl of steer's blood and shot them into the air, sending one each to the points of the compass. Then the bow was tied to the branches of the tree, and the maiden took up a sacred redstone pipe and held it to the West.

The dancers began to chant, their voices joining in a plaintive drone as Kicking Bear passed around a vessel of sacred meat. The dancers got to their feet as one and joined hands, shuffling slowly. As I had been raised Comanche, where the sexes were strictly segregated during any public observance, the sight of men and women dancing together was indeed shocking to me.

The dancers continued chanting and dancing, their eyes shut as they worked to conjure forth the image of a world free of Whites. A world where the buffalo ran unhindered. A world where all those slain by the White Man had come back from the Spirit World, whole and untouched.

During the next few hours, the weaker members of the dance collapsed one by one. Exhausted but exhilarated, their eyes burning with renewed hope, they spoke of having glimpsed dead loved-ones and friends.

“I saw Walks Backward, who died at Black Kettle's camp.”

“I saw Blue Drum, who died at Dull Knife's camp.”

“I saw Queen-of-Flowers, who was raped and shot by settlers.”

And so on and so forth. After the fourth hour, many of the dancers had collapsed and were recovering on the sidelines, watching the heartiest and most fanatical of their number continue the dance. Suddenly, Black Elk broke away and snatched up a rifle and, to my surprise, leveled it right at my chest.

“The Great Spirit has given to me a vision!” he crowed. “A vision of power! All who dance the ghost dance—all who wear the ghost shirts—shall be made invulnerable! The White Man's bullets will turn from us and be no more than the stinging of insects!” And with that, he shot me.

The bullet kicked me onto my back, and as I fell I remembered why Black Elk's shirt seemed so familiar. I had all but forgotten my dream of Coyote Shit and his “bulletproof” medicine shirts, but now that it was too late, it was coming back to me.

So that you will see the folly that came to the friends of your youth, so that you might warn your adopted family of the trouble that is to come.

But the realization had come too late. I could see that the damage had already been done. I knew that whatever dark path the Sioux would find themselves on in the future, there was no way I could hope to steer them from it.

The assembled ghost dancers were gasping and pointing at me in amazement. Blood stained my ghost shirt a bright crimson as I got to my feet. I glowered at Black Elk and Kicking Bear but said nothing. Both men no doubt had heard Sitting Bull's stories of my supposed immortality. While I knew they would try to make it look as though I supported the Ghost Dance, I had not guessed at the breadth of their ambition. I had been outside the tribe too long and had forgotten how ruthless medicine men could be when in search of power.

I staggered away from the dance site, brusquely shoving away those who wanted to touch the blood stain spreading across my chest. Although I was in pain and greatly angered, I did not allow myself to shapeshift in front of them. It was bad enough that Kicking Bear and his disciples had used me to validate their Ghost Shirts, but I refused to allow them to claim Coyote himself had manifested at a dance.

I left for home that very same night. As far as I was concerned, the Ghost Dance was a con job even meaner than the one run by the long-dead Professor Praetorius. If ever there was proof that the White Man's madness had finally rubbed off on the Indians, this was it.

I spent the next few months doing my best to ignore the growing movement. It was especially aggravating to discover that many of my old friends—men and women whose opinions I had once valued—had embraced the Ghost Dance. I counted myself lucky that Digging Woman was not one of those taken in.

One of the senior bureaucrats at the Pine Ridge Agency rode out to confront Chief No Water about the Ghost Dance. When he attempted to have the old chief arrested, the agent suddenly found himself faced with three hundred armed Ghost Dancers. Needless to say, his report to Washington did not sit well with his superiors. A couple of weeks later, Young Mule—the very same Sioux who had made his way to my camp the year before—and a companion named Head Swift, killed a settler. Two days later, they rode into the Lame Deer Agency and attacked the troops stationed there. It was a foolhardy gesture, as there were at least seventy armed men to their two. Both died wearing their Ghost Shirts.