debate.
“It is good to keep the soldiers far from our village,” He Dog declared. “The women and children, our old and our sick, would panic if they knew the soldiers were close to our camp!”
“Bear Coat’s soldiers will never reach our village,” the Horse repeated. “We will lure them to the place
“You will lead the decoys yourself?” asked The Yearling.
“No, this time I will pick a young warrior,” Crazy Horse answered. “As I was given that honor by Red Cloud and Afraid of His Horses when I was a young warrior.”
“They have become tired old women now!” shouted Bad Leg.
“Yes,” No Neck agreed. “Both of them are like old women before the
“Whipped dogs!”
“But they were not always whipped dogs!” Crazy Horse attempted to defend his old friends. “They drove the soldiers away from the Pine Woods Fort,† and from the Mud-Wall Fort# in those days. Remember what they did—because the
“They may have been powerful warriors once,” said Rising Sun. “But now they take the white man’s scummy meat and his thin blankets. They even gave up their horses and their weapons to the soldiers!”*
Spotted Elk cried, “We will never give up, will we, Crazy Horse?”
“No, a warrior never gives up his pony. Never lays down his weapons. The old ones too frail, the little ones too small, the sick ones too weak to fight—these we must protect from the
“You will lead us in this fight?”
“I will lead you,” he promised them.
His words were answered by an immediate and thunderous roar as both men and women screeched, shouted, trilled their tongues and cried out their praises to the blue sky above, frost lying in a wreath about every head.
“This soldier chief Bull Eagle trusted,” Crazy Horse told that great crowd of his Lakota people and the wounded Shahiyela, “the one Bull Eagle called the Bear Coat … he talks to you of peace with one hand while his other hand grips a war club that he swings at your head. I think we should convince this Bear Coat that it is time to leave Lakota country forever.”
Again the crowd roared its approval, women shaking their knives in the air, each blade coated with a frozen film of blood, the hundreds of warriors rattling guns and shields.
“Yes, it is time that we teach this Bear Coat what we taught the Hundred in the Hand, what we taught Long Hair and his soldiers at the Greasy Grass!”
“Remember the Greasy Grass!” came the echo from that great assembly.
But as he turned away, Crazy Horse knew there was no prophetic vision the likes of which Sitting Bull had experienced last summer at the Deer Medicine Rocks.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time until there were more soldiers in Lakota country than there were Lakota. One summer soon … perhaps one winter very soon—his people would not be able to hold back the
But for now Crazy Horse would do as his people wanted, as they expected of a Shirt Wearer: lead them against this Bear Coat and his soldiers—cut a swath up and down the Buffalo Tongue River to avenge the deaths of the five chiefs. Perhaps even drive the soldiers from their fort on the Elk River. For now the heart of Crazy Horse beat strong once more. For now Crazy Horse would again be a war chief.
And when the time came for him to hand over his pony and his weapons … as he knew that time would come, down in the marrow of him … Crazy Horse hoped he would again have the courage to do what was best for his people.
As brave as he had been in battle, could he be just as brave in surrendering?
Perhaps, if he was fortunate, Crazy Horse decided as he led the chiefs back to his lodge—he would never have to find out.
Perhaps this would be the winter to die as a warrior, fighting the
Come the winter to die as a warrior.
BY TELEGRAPH
More Murders by Indians on
Hat Creek
THE INDIANS
More Murders in Wyoming—A Coloradan
among the Victims.
HAT CREEK via CHEYENNE, December 20.—Four freight teams accompanied by five men were attacked by Indians in camp on Indian creek, six miles north of this place, about 9 o’clock last night. Three of the party escaped and arrived here at midnight barefooted and half clothed. A detachment of soldiers and a party of citizens repaired to the scene of the fight early this morning and found the bodies of two men—B. C. Steppens of Salt Lake, and a German named Fritz of Colorado—terribly mutilated with a butcher’s cleaver taken from one of the wagons. The contents of the wagons were scattered over the ground, the flour and corn in piles as it had been emptied from the sacks. The horses were missing and over forty bullet holes were in one wagon. The dead were brought here and buried.
Two hundred and forty-eight Arapahoes and Sioux scouts from the agency, in charge of Louis Richards, a half breed, passed here on Sunday, en route to join General Crook.
Samantha found her tea had gone cold the next time she sipped it.
There was so much going on around her there with the officers’ wives in hand-knitted shawls, and buffalo- coated soldiers whirling in and out of the parlor, through the dining room and out into the vestibule, that she really hadn’t noticed that her tea was growing cold, the cup sitting there nearby on the tiny table made from an old crate.
Samantha was simply paying all her attention to the child on her lap.
She had wrapped the boy as warmly as possible before coming downstairs just after dawn this Christmas morn. It had been near impossible to sleep last night—what for all the disappointment that had caused her to sob silently in her pillow, for all the memories of parents and home, of family and these special holidays. Remembering how her father always killed a big fat tom for National Thanksgiving Day, how he fattened a goose for Christmas dinner.
There in the cold and the dark just before dawn she had smelled it all the way up to her narrow rope-and-tick bed—those fragrances rising from the kitchen below her tiny room with the single frosted window. Someone was up early, baking already, loading kindling into the stoves, closing the iron door with a muffled clang. Samantha recalled how she and Rebecca would lie in bed side by side on Christmas morning, waiting impatiently to hear the sounds their mother would make in her kitchen. Then it was finally time to scurry out to greet parents with hurried hugs and kisses before they would sip hot tea and eat tiny rum cakes around the tree they had decorated just the night before with tinsel and tissue and a paper star on top.
And each time Samantha had remembered those holidays of the past, she had sobbed all the harder … until she would again put her hand beneath the pillow, and her fingertips would touch the two folded sheets of paper.
They had been carried south to her from that land where he had written those words trying to explain why he
