Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

wasicu coffee boiling. There had been no coffee in the camp of his people for a long, long time. Perhaps as long ago as last summer, when they had destroyed the soldiers and took a little from the leather pouches on the big American horses. Maybe a little coffee stolen here and there from the crazed wasicus who scratched in the ground for the yellow rocks they found in the sacred He Sapa.

No, there hadn’t been any coffee in the village for a long time now. There hadn’t been much to truly celebrate either. With soldier armies roaming on either side of them, north and south, it had been only a matter of time before the white man would come to raid the hunting camps. As far back as he could remember, the buffalo had been chivied—stirred up, driven here and there, right on out of the traditional hunting grounds. No longer could his Hunkpatila count on finding the huge herds that used to blanket this country between the Shifting Sands River^* and the Greasy Grass.^†

What good days those had been! Hides and meat and happy times when men and women courted, babes were born, and the old ones took their last breath knowing their bones would bleach beneath the sun that blazed down upon their homeland as the endless hoop of the seasons turned.

All that celebration was gone now. Like ash from a long-dead fire, like the ash he had smeared on his face after his young daughter had died of the wasicu’s dreaded spotted sickness. All the celebration gone now, gone like the dust of this land he would toss into the wind. The dust of this land—the very bones of his ancestors.

Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, and the others … they had sold the land that was the bones of his ancestors! How could one sell that to the white man?

But Crazy Horse knew the white man would take it anyhow.

The wasicu was just that way, he thought as he drank deep of the numbing cold wind and sent off another group of warriors to cross the ice and join those on the west side of the river. Eleven summers ago the white peace talkers were at the Laramie fort speaking the words of treaty with the Lakota peoples, asking that white man could use the thieves’ road^# north along the White Mountains.^@ But at the same time that the peace talkers were trying to buy safety along that road, the white man’s government was also sending soldiers to seize it by force.^{^}

The wasicu always came to take what he wanted, no matter that the Indian did not want to sell … no matter that it was not the Indians’ to sell.

Where was there left to run now? With Three Stars troubling the land north from the Holy Road, and now this angry Bear Coat punching his way south from the Elk River—there would be little peace for the Crazy Horse people. Too few buffalo left for meat to dry and hides to make their lodges. Too little time to savor the joy in life … what with having to pack up and flee, running all the time. Just tattered shreds and broken pieces of the old life left.

Was the Land of the Grandmother the only place to go now where the soldiers would not follow, fight, and kill his people? He wondered if the runner would find Sitting Bull, if the Hunkpapa chief would bring the rifles and bullets and his warriors south again to join the Crazy Horse people in taking another stand against the wasicu.

But maybe Sitting Bull was already gone—fleeing north instead of fighting. More and more Crazy Horse believed he was the last fighting Lakota left.

His wife, Black Shawl, had turned away from the great gathering around him last night in that moment Crazy Horse prepared to lead the others away from their camp to do battle with Bear Coat’s soldiers. She had disappeared, pushing away through the crowd, dropping her wet eyes in sadness, going off to pack up their few belongings without saying a word to him before Crazy Horse led the warriors north. How heavy that had made his heart; how cold it was still. Black Shawl and so many other wives and mothers, sisters and daughters, all had turned away in resignation, knowing they must be about their packing, calling together the children and catching up the ponies, lashing the travois to the horses’ backs, dismantling the smoke-blackened lodges and loading everything up so they would be ready to flee when the soldiers came.

No matter that the warriors were riding out to fight the Bear Coat’s soldiers. The women knew that even if the warriors defeated the wasicus this time … more would come. There would be more packing and running and frightened dreams in the night.

“The soldiers are coming! The soldiers are coming!”

More running. More blood. More dead to mourn.

Just before dawn that morning the young, hot-blooded decoys did exactly what the decoys had done that first winter morning at the Pine Woods Fort when they had become too anxious, too eager to count the first coup and lift the first scalps … and the trap did not work.

They should have stayed hidden longer from the Bear Coat’s soldiers. Waited longer, tucked away and out of sight behind the ridge until the soldiers were lured south past Belly Butte into the narrowing throat of the canyon.

So the grand design of the war chiefs had turned to so much ash. All that was left now was to hold the soldiers back from the village while the camp of women and children fied upriver into the Panther Mountains.^* Unless … by some blessing of the Great Mystery these warriors could stop the Bear Coat’s soldiers and turn them back to their Elk River post with their tails tucked between their legs like whipped dogs.

For a moment his heart leaped with hope … then Crazy Horse once more remembered the admonishment of Sitting Bull. In his vision at the Deer Medicine Rocks last summer Wakan Tanka had told the Hunkpapa leader that the Lakota people were to take nothing from the soldier dead at the Greasy Grass. If they disobeyed, then the blessings of the Great Mystery would not surround the Lakota peoples for the rest of their days upon the earth.

Instead, in a fever of blood lust, the Hunkpapa, the Oglalla, the Sans Arc, the Miniconjou, and all the bands had joyously collected the spoils of that battle beside the Greasy Grass.

Now the Titunwan must all suffer for disobeying the Great Mystery.

At dawn the walk-a-heaps crossed the frozen river to confront the ten-times-ten horsemen Crazy Horse sent up the west bank along the foot of the buttes and ravines. Those men could have eventually swallowed up the soldiers on their own, but the Bear Coat fired both of his wagon guns as the cold fog rose off the river. Earth and snow and a dusting of frost blown from the grass every time a big shell exploded—the way a man would hold a handful of flour in his palm, then blow on it.

Warriors scattered, tried again to regather, only to hear the whistle of another shell from the wagon guns. Was there any way to silence the loud, booming roar of those weapons?

Finally he knew there was no heart in fighting those soldiers Bear Coat sent across the river, so Crazy Horse called his warriors back and they hurried to join the many others who were just then spreading out along on the hilltops looking down at the wasicus and their wagons and their tents.

For the moment there would be no thoughts of the reservation land, no thoughts of the agencies. For now there could be no thoughts of surrendering to the white man’s ways.

Still, Crazy Horse wondered if Hump and Little Big Man, if White Bull and Two Moon, all felt these first real pangs of doubt the way he had suffered them this winter. Perhaps they, like he, had decided in their own hearts that the best path now was to protect the women and children … just as many of the chiefs were saying the wisest path might eventually be for them to take their women and children into the agencies.

Better that than to watch the faces of the women grow sunken and old before their time. Better that than to watch the eyes of the children grow hollow with despair, their bellies swollen from hunger, their fingers and toes blackened with winter’s cold.

There were no buffalo left anyway.

This would be a good day to die.

For all the gunfire coming from the warriors gathered on the heights above the soldiers, there had been only two casualties so far—a couple of mules wounded by stray bullets fired from those Indians across the river from the supply train. The noisy animals brayed and bawled, kicking in their harness there among the wagons until some men came to calm them.

Seamus brooded there on the knoll over just how ineffective this sort of long-distance fighting truly was—for either side. Most of these soldiers weren’t worth a tinker’s dam at shooting their unfamiliar weapons—especially