Seize the Sky

alarm.”

“Something bad will happen!” the old man protested, not understanding his nephew’s sense of calm.

“What, Uncle? Tell me what you see.”

“Many dead. Much blood. More than any one man has ever seen with two eyes! And I hear our people crying out in joy and sadness—both.” Hump wagged his head and stared at the ridge.

“A day for celebrating, yet a day we will long remember with a stone of sadness upon our hearts.”

Blackfoot Sioux chief Red Horse had awakened his lodge early and taken the women and children of relatives into the meadows and hills west of their own camp circle. There they would spend the long summer morning using antlerdigging tools hunting for tipsina, a tasty wild turnip root filled with starch.

From those hills of their digging, they would eventually notice the dust cloud suspended above the soldiers marching north along the pony-back ridge east of the river.

And know that Bull’s mighty vision had come to pass.

A wizened Cheyenne mystic named Box Elder had been troubled all night by a recurring dream in which he watched an advancing regiment of pony soldiers marching down off the ridges to the east of the river toward the Cheyenne camp. Again and again that same dream plagued him each time Box Elder closed his eyes to fall asleep.

At dawn he hobbled from lodge to lodge among his relatives and friends, warning them of what he had seen in his troubling dream. Some kept their mouths shut, while others chuckled behind his back as he tottered off to spread the tale.

But some Cheyenne “Crazy Dog” warriors openly howled like rabid wolves at the old man—the supreme insult showing they believed the old man had finally gone mad, and it would be best if he was taken into the hills and left for wolf bait.

Since the great camp would be making another short march this day, some of the Cheyenne women had begun to dismantle their lodges and slowly pack household goods for the impending trek.

Monaseetah kept one eye on her older boy as he played with young friends near the lodge. Her younger, Yellow Bird, never wandered far. He clutched her skirt as the parade of four brave young warriors snaked its way through the Northern Cheyenne camp. Cut Belly and Noisy Walking, Close Hand and Little Whirlwind, marching proudly behind the camp crier, who sang out that these four boys would die in glory this day, die protecting their village.

“People! Look at these!” the old man cried that bright, cool morning. “You will not set eyes on them again. They go away to die this day! Never more will you look at them!”

Miles away up the Greasy Grass in the Hunkpapa camp, Rain-in-the-Face attended a late-morning feast at the lodge of a venerated old warrior. A few bites had been taken when they heard the first rattle of rifle fire and knew those many shots came not from Sioux guns. The rifles must belong to wasichu soldiers.

“They are coming into camp!” the great war chief Rain hollered as he leapt to his feet, swinging aloft the stone war club he carried at all times. “The Bull has told it. His dream has come to pass. The soldiers fall into our camp!”

Dashing back to his lodge, Rain snatched up his rifle, a bow and quiver filled with rosewood arrows, before leaping atop his favorite pony. Many of his friends clustered round him as they raced toward the valley action, catching but a brief glimpse of another group of soldiers loping north along the ridge beyond the river.

In a moment Rain’s Hunkpapa warriors overtook a young woman named Tashenamini, or Moving Robe. This did not startle Rain in the least, for she had rescued her brother’s body from the Red Beard battle a week before. Ever since that time the Hunkpapas had called the Rosebud fight “The Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.”

Rain smiled, singing out a blood-chilling greeting to the young girl. She brandished her dead brother’s coup stick above her head, shouting again that she would avenge his death this day.

“Many soldiers will fall!” she screamed into the noise and the dust. “There will be much blood on my hands before the sun has crossed this sky.”

With a deep sense of pride, Rain bellowed a war cry for all to hear. “Fear this pretty bird, wasichu soldiers! She may be pretty as a sparrow, but she carries the talons of a war eagle!”

“Behold!” shouted another. “A pretty bird rides among us!”

Rain’s grim smile broadened. The beautiful unmarried girl would make his young men fight all the harder.

One final warning before Rain and his warriors reached the soldiers falling headfirst into the Hunkpapa camp.

“Beware that no man hides behind her skirts!”

Just as Sitting Bull had dreamed that potent vision of his, soldiers were falling into the Hunkpapa camp circle.

Unbelievable.

If the village had truly believed they would be attacked by soldiers, perhaps more of them would have torn down, packed up, and tramped off without delay during the morning hours. Yet the only lodges coming down were those belonging to families who wanted to get an early head start on the day’s journey down the valley. Another five or eight miles more toward the Yellowstone.

So no more than a handful of women in each circle busied themselves pulling their lodge skins from the poles when pony soldiers charged toward the south end of camp.

As word spread through the villages, pandemonium and confusion and fear raced on its heels like prairie fire along the Greasy Grass. Women shrieked, children cried, and the old ones wailed. And in the middle of it, war ponies neighed and whinnied while warriors shouted their prayers aloft into the singing air: Sioux praying to Wakan Tanka and the young Cheyenne men to their Everywhere Spirit Above.

Dashing like water-striders across the flat surface of a pond, women scurried about to locate their children. Likewise the little ones darted in and around lodges, shrieking for their mothers. Amid the din, the old and the infirm struggled, hobbling along on their own if they could. Everyone beginning to head west, escaping from the camp circles. West, toward the hills and safety.

“Take what you can carry and flee before the pony soldiers ride into camp!”

With their frightened children in tow, the women yanked down their husband’s most potent medicine bags and sacred objects to go with them into the western hills. No white soldiers must defile the power of their men.

Heralds scooted back and forth through the eight camp circles, shouting their news and mystical omens, raising their shrill and magical wishes for those young ones heading south into the fight. Hand-held drums throbbed their primitive beat as eagle wing-bone whistles sent an ear-piercing cry to the hot summer sky overhead.

In all the frightening noise and confusion, there nonetheless arose some sense of ages-old order: The women and children and frail ones must escape. Staying behind, the warriors would hold off the attack, giving those weaker ones a chance to flee.

“Will the pony soldiers stop at nothing?”

Each time the white man attacked, he threw his soldiers against a village of women and children … against the sick, tired, old ones.

“What kind of beast is this wasichu anyway? What kind of savage makes war on women and children … and those ready to die?”

Young Hunkpapa warrior One Bull drove his ponies east toward the river for morning watering, herding them in from their pasture, when he heard the first shots. Not too far to the south.

Leaping atop a pony bareback and gripping its mane with both hands in the shape of a narrow vee, he dashed into the camp circle to find the circle already in a wild disarray. Shouting and dust and screaming and a flurry of mad