Seize the Sky

activity.

“One Bull!”

Turning, he saw Sitting Bull emerge from his tall red-and-black lodge, carrying a shield and stone war club.

“Give me your rifle, young one,” the chief ordered quietly.

Obediently One Bull handed over his old muzzle loader. “Yes, Uncle.”

“You will ride with these into battle, One Bull,” the Hunkpapa mystic declared evenly. “My shield and my war club are my symbols of authority, my power in battle. Take these in my place and go meet the soldiers. Talk with them, if they will talk, so we can end this killing. Tell them I will talk peace to save the lives of our children. Go now! You carry the power of your chief. Lead your men wisely, Nephew!”

The young warrior leapt on The Bull’s pony secured with a rawhide bridle and let fly a shrill war cry. He held high the coveted war shield of Sitting Bull, then vaulted away, leading close to a hundred warriors into the skirmish with Reno’s charging troops.

After he watched the warriors gallop off to the fight, Sitting Bull buckled on his leather cartridge belt, stuffing an old cap-and-ball revolver in the holster. He then took up his Winchester carbine.

Yet before he would fight this day, The Bull knew he must find his old mother. He tore off into the choking dust kicked up by a thousand hooves galloping out of the Hunkpapa village. Before his eyes his own mystic vision swam with frightening reality.

At the center of all the screeching pandemonium, some camp guards were busy at their important task. One at a time the buffalo-hide sections of the huge Teton Sioux council lodge came down from their poles. It would not do to let the enemy cast their defiling eyes on this sacred lodge. As each section was bundled, it was hefted aboard the back of a pony and the animal led west into those coulees and hills, where the white soldiers would not find the lodge.

Past this calm, deliberate crew of Hunkpapa guards raced a middle-aged Cheyenne warrior, holding aloft a blue jacket he had stripped from one of the first soldiers killed as Reno began his frantic retreat into the timber at the river. Stone Calf wanted his Sioux cousins to see this battle trophy—and remember well.

“Look, my friends!” he bellowed with rage. “Heed this marking on the pony soldier’s clothing!”

His gnarled finger pointed out the crossed sabers and that 7 nestled atop their apex.

“This is a good day for the Shahiyena, my cousins!” he roared. “A good day for the Cheyenne!”

A crowd of the curious gathered, slowing their dash to the battle or their flight into the hills for a moment to listen to the old Cheyenne’s story.

“These soldiers are the same who attacked my village—when Black Kettle camped us along the Washita many years ago! Aiyeee! These are the very same pony soldiers who killed my mother! The ones who butchered my wife and children when they could not escape the soldier bullets that winter dawn before the sun rose above the blood and stink of our dead people! I have been alone since these soldiers murdered my family!”

Shouts of praise and wails of despair arose all round Stone Calf as he continued. “This day my heart is once again made whole. The circle is complete, my cousins! The circle begun on the Washita is now made whole once more!”

“Hear it! The circle is healed!” roared another warrior who took the bloody cavalry blouse from Stone Calf and brandished it aloft on his rifle.

A woman raised a fiery limb from her midday cookfire, torching the torn blue tunic. Once flames enveloped it, the blouse fell in shreds to the ground amid cheers and shouts of both Sioux and Cheyenne celebrating the thrashing given those white soldiers down in the timber at the river.

“Let us go show these soldiers what we do to evil men who attack a village of women and children!” one woman shrieked, in one hand brandishing a bloody knife and in the other an old cap-and-ball revolver. “Women! Do not run. We will fight and die alongside our men!”

Before she could lead the throng away, an Oglalla horseman galloped up and reined in his pony, cascading dust over them all.

“More horse soldiers!” he rasped hoarsely, pointing to the sun-bleached ridges to the east beyond the river. “More soldiers riding on the hills above! Come fight, or they will overrun the villages!”

“Where?” many asked, panic rising in their voices.

“We cannot see any horse soldiers!” an old man declared with some sarcasm.

“This is only wild talk,” someone suggested. “Come, we must go kill those soldiers cowering in the timber to the south!”

“Wait! Aiyeee!” It is true! Look!” a woman screamed, pointing at the grassy hills across the river.

Pouring out of the mouth of the upper Medicine Tail Coulee and into the lower gully that reached all the way to the Greasy Grass itself, rode a long column of pony soldiers.

“Soldiers come!” The Oglalla messenger beat frantic heels against his pony’s flanks and tore off to carry his warning to the north.

“We must stop these soldiers,” one of the Santee Sioux warriors shouted, rallying those around him. “To the ford! We will cut off their charge!”

As most of this crowd dashed off toward the river, a small, ugly mob rumpled into camp from south of the Hunkpapa circle. These Santees had just captured an old friend who long ago had married a Santee woman. Now that this prisoner rode with the pony soldiers, the Sioux realized they had every right to consider Isaiah Dorman a traitor.

A big black-skinned Arikara interpreter, Dorman begged for his captors to kill him quickly and be done with it, savvy enough to know what fate awaited him if they did not.

“Just kill me now and throw me away! Kill me!” he shouted in Sioux at his tormentors.

Instead, one of the Santee men spit into his shiny black face and rubbed his spittle on the soldier’s eyes.

“You do not deserve to die like a man, Teat!” a warrior shouted Dorman’s Santee name, given him because of the dark color to his skin, like a nursing mother’s nipple. “Instead, we will give you over to the women for their amusement. A traitor like you deserves no better than a camp dog’s death.” He turned to the women. “Tie him to a tree!”

After they lashed Dorman’s arms and legs to a cottonwood so he could not fall, they started using the soldier for target practice. The Santees filled his legs with so many bullets, he could no longer stand, collapsing suspended against his rope bindings. Only then did the archers begin their grisly work. Again and again they fired arrows into Dorman’s body, but none of them enough to kill him right off.

“We don’t want you to die quickly—not the death of an honorable man,” an old man growled into the black face shiny with beads of sweat and pain. “You must die like a dog butchered for the pot. I want to hear you whine and whimper!”

When at last they cut him down from his tree, the Santees dragged the black soldier onto the prairie, where they stretched his body out among the hills of a prairie-dog town. Here the squaws continued their gruesome work, hacking little pieces of black-pink flesh from arms or legs or chest, bleeding him into tin cups that they repeatedly poured into an old blackened and battered coffee pot.

“Wasichu sapa must die slow!” one old hag spat into his face. “Black white man must die hard!”

In the midst of his painful torture, Isaiah Dorman harkened back to that last morning at Fort Lincoln, remembered his Santee wife tearfully telling him of her nightmare, begging him not to ride with Custer.

Now all the Negro soldier could do was die alone. His was a one-man job if ever there was one. Isaiah didn’t have the strength to cry out anymore, not with all the pain he had to endure, not with all the blood seeped from his body, drop by tormented drop.

Dorman just didn’t have the strength to do anything but die. And he did that just as bravely as he could.

Oglalla warrior White-Cow-Bull had stayed up into the early morning hours celebrating with the others their victory over Red Beard Crook.

His head ached from too little sleep and too much dancing as he lumbered up from the timber by the river, where he kept his wickiup with other young bachelors. The Cow wandered to a fire tended by an old woman, its