from Burkman to gallop back to the front of the columns.
He stood in the stirrups, waving an arm and signaling the start down off the divide, as if it were no more than a march across Lincoln’s parade.
Most of the officers who waited nearby found themselves staring after their flamboyant commander with his fringe flying and gold spurs flashing. Time to move now.
Quickly they gulped at canteens of stale alkali water or pulled long at some trail-warm whiskey before swiping dirty fingers round the sticky sweatbands of their hats.
The Seventh Cavalry was moving into the valley.
CHAPTER 17
AGAIN and again across the short-grass time The Bull had taunted the agency Indians at Red Cloud or Spotted Tail, daring them to jump their reservations and join him in their old way of life.
“See, I am rich while you are poor … having to beg for the white man’s coffee and sugar. I need none of that. I need none of the
Like the mighty gathering of the shaggy buffalo itself into herds with numbers beyond count, all the more Sioux came to the Rosebud those first cool days of early June. The tribes gathered on the prairie uplands, marching but a few miles each day toward that ages-blessed crescent of the Mountains of the Wolves.
There this year the cool waters of the Rosebud had trickled beside the great Sun Dance ceremony and given The Bull his electrifying vision.
Here the people celebrated anew at each camp among the hills and bluffs, mesas and bottomlands strewn with conifers and aspen, birch and alder, all lifting their heady perfumes to the summer blue above. Here the people joined in races and wrestling, the dancing and singing, the drumming and always the courting by the young ones.
As was custom the head men hosted great councils of war, welcoming in each new band as it arrived, opening their arms to the visiting cousins: more Northern Cheyenne and even some Arapaho who had wandered north to remain free of the white invasion of their ancient tribal lands.
This last great council of war, declaring the People’s adherence to the old ways.
They would follow the buffalo.
At the age of twenty-eight summers, Oglalla warrior White-Cow-Bull had yet to marry. But of late he had set his roving eye on a very pretty Cheyenne woman living this summer with her relatives among the Shahiyena, or Northern Cheyenne, camp circle. Ever since Old Bear’s people had escaped Red Beard Crook’s soldiers during the Black Night March of the Sore-Eye Moon, White-Cow-Bull had hungered to make young Monaseetah his wife.
Cheyenne chiefs Ice Bear and Two Moons had many times told the brave Oglalla warrior that the woman had once belonged to the white man all Sioux called the Long Hair. The story the chiefs told said this soldier-chief had wanted to keep the young Cheyenne maiden as his second wife, but that his first wife had grown angry, commanding him to throw the Indian girl away.
Monaseetah had two boys, each by a different husband. One Indian, a full-blood Cheyenne through and through, and Yellow Bird, the son of Hiestzi, the Yellow Hair.
None of that really mattered to White-Cow-Bull. Undaunted, he persisted in courting the young mother now in her twenty-fifth summer. Yet it was difficult for him to spend time alone with Monaseetah. Never far from her side was young Yellow Bird with his hypnotically pale eyes and his light-colored curly hair. Only at night after her sons had fallen asleep would Monaseetah speak at all with the Oglalla warrior, talking through the lodge skins, for she refused to come out, afraid to come to his blanket.
At long last in what his Sioux people called the Moon When Chokecherries Grow Ripe, she had at last worked up the strength to tell the young warrior that she had something important to say to him when the sun rested behind the mountains.
Giddily, flushed with the promise, White-Cow-Bull promised he would return that evening as the stars whirled in the foamy sky overhead.
Eagerly he dressed in his finest buckskins and brushed his hair until it gleamed like his well-oiled rifle. He was as certain as he had ever been about anything that tonight Monaseetah would finally profess her love for him. Across four moons the young warrior had courted her, ever since that camp of Old Bear’s over on the headwaters of the Powder. Ever since that cold Black Night March.
But instead of giving her heart to White-Cow-Bull as he had hoped, Monaseetah declared that, though it hurt her to tell him, the Oglalla warrior must court another for his wife.
“In my heart,” she explained, “it is not right for me to let you pursue me while I belong to another.”
“Who is this other?” the warrior snapped, ready to challenge that man.
“I am waiting for Hiestzi to return for me as he promised.” The memories were still fresh and raw, like a wound kept from healing.
The thick pain behind her words made the young Oglalla wonder if she truly believed the soldier-chief would actually come back for her.
“Only death will keep him from coming for me as he promised. Someday, he will come,” she told him.
Monaseetah straightened and muffled her sobbing bravely. “You are very kind to offer your life to me, White- Cow-Bull. It is an honor for any woman to hear your words of love. But still—I must wait for Hiestzi to fulfill his promise to me. I can take no other. I must wait for my husband to return.”
The great, shaggy horned uncle Pte had brought the tribes to this place. And it was the buffalo the great village now followed.
Tens of thousands carpeted the plains some ten miles south of the camps pitched along the Greasy Grass. The warriors could hunt at leisure each summer day following the massive herd north until it came time to hunt antelope up on the Yellowstone. Even a young child couldn’t mistake where the great herd grazed in its journey— the dust hung like a thick winter blanket above the curly dark humps of these animals that spelled life itself for the nomads of the prairie.
So much like the dust of this great migration of the tribes. From their first camp along the Greasy Grass, the tribes moved a few miles north. That dust from their journey rose into the bone yellow sky above a trail a half mile wide and many more times that long.
In the van of the march rode those courageous young warriors, each wearing his finest feathers and scalps, brandishing their shields and new rifles aflutter with eagle feathers and hair. Behind that watchful vanguard of warriors came the women and children riding or walking among pack-laden and travois-dragging horses. Then behind the old ones tramped the huge pony herd, watched over by the boys too young to go to war, but old enough to show their bravery in caring for the thousands beyond count of Sioux ponies.
They had crossed the divide from the Rosebud, not in fear, but to find the buffalo. Not in fear that Red Beard Crook would find their great village. No, not in fear had they come to the valley of the Greasy Grass. For they had already whipped the soldiers across the time it took the sun to walk over the sky.
Like a bolt of summer lightning sent into the huge encampment that sixteenth day of June, 1876, as white men would reckon time—Crazy Horse’s scouts had come tearing among the lodge circles on the Rosebud with their electrifying news.
“Soldiers! Soldiers! Sitting Bull told us of this—his vision! The soldiers come!”
So it was that Crazy Horse gathered his young warriors and sped out to greet the soldiers under Red Beard Crook, who had been marching north with thirteen hundred men to rendezvous with General Terry from Dakota and Colonel Gibbon of Montana. Some twenty-five miles south of their combined villages, the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts located the long blue columns along the Rosebud. They would wait till morning to throw themselves on these foolish white men.
Come daylight, Crazy Horse led the screaming, shrieking riders into battle.
It was battle as Red-Beard Crook had never seen it: naked brown horsemen whirling madly about his grim
