He took up the conversation just where it had left off.
“I do not understand exactly what happened to you at the Battle of the Long Knives, at which the horse soldiers did not know how to fight properly,” he said. “We all went away on account of the wrong medicine. But when the Human Beings collected again and you were not there in your own body, we saw a swallow who flew above us for a long time. It was natural to assume that was you. It was also pleasant to think so, for you were a man for whom the Human Beings felt honor and affection. Later I dreamed about the long-nosed animal that gave you a drink in the village of the whites, but I did not tell anybody because it might have meant bad luck for you to do that.
“Therefore,” he said, “Burns Red in the Sun cannot be blamed for his ignorance.” He got up from the robe and, indicating I should follow, went out in front of the tepee, where the whole camp had been waiting all this while. The sun was setting across the infinity of prairie to the west, in streaks of orange, vermilion, pink, and rose, and this light give a glow to all the colors on the people there.
Old Lodge Skins looked right smart in that sombrero. Standing there in his red blanket, with me alongside, he give quite a harangue, as you might expect. I won’t go into it, except for the conclusion.
“I have thought and talked and smoked and eaten on this matter,” he said. “And my decision is that Little Big Man has returned.”
He went back into his lodge and the rest of the camp come and greeted me dear as I ever experienced, with embraces and compliments and every type of affectionate chatter, and I had to eat five or six times more and talk for hours, and I reckon I was affected by this, for I knowed nonetheless that I could never be an Indian again.
Well, I got filled in on what those people had done since that Solomon battle: just about what they had been doing from time immemorial, been up north as usual during most of the year and come down south for the tribal get-together both summers since. Hadn’t had no more trouble with the soldiers, for they had kept out of their way. And it seemed they was still acceptable to the main tribe, which meant that Old Lodge Skins hadn’t got his hands on anybody else’s wife.
What an Indian chooses to characterize a whole twelvemonth is something like: “That was the time that Running Wolf broke his leg,” or, “During the winter a cottonwood tree fell on Bird Bear’s tepee.” Insofar as they kept a mental diary, it was events of that sort that filled it up, and there might be no remark whatever of something real important. For example, that Solomon retreat was only mentioned to me by Burns Red and Old Lodge Skins; everybody else had forgot it soon as possible. If you’d have asked a Cheyenne what he did that summer that was notable, he might have said something like: “My chestnut won a race against Cut Belly’s black.”
As Old Lodge Skins had said, they was in this area now because of the peace-treaty conference called by the Government at Bent’s Fort. The Indian Commissioner himself had promised to show up, so I gathered, and this impressed the chief no end. He expected to get another medal and maybe a new plug hat. Beyond that, however, he was undecided on the prospects.
One of the many meals of celebration give for me was in the tepee of Hump, who was still war chief and hadn’t changed at all.
“Welcome, my friend,” he says to me when we met. “You wouldn’t by any chance have brought me a gift of powder and shot?” So I presented him the extra paper cartridges and percussion caps I carried for my Dragoon pistol, retaining only the loads already in the chambers. I could have been hanged for doing that if the Army found out, I reckon.
“Come and eat,” says he. Old Lodge Skins was also invited, and Shadow That Comes in Sight, Burns Red, and several others of my old friends, and that is where we talked about the treaty.
“I do not know,” said Old Lodge Skins after we finished the boiled buffalo tongue, “whether it is right for a Human Being to become a farmer, though Yellow Wolf had that idea, and he was a wise man.”
Hump said: “Yellow Wolf was a great chief, but the white men put him under an evil spell or he would never have got that idea. He loafed around the forts too much”
“I want to speak now,” said Shadow That Comes in Sight. “I think I would rather die than plant a potato.”
Burns Red in the Sun was still sore about the dirty deal he got from them gold hunters. He said: “No matter what we do, the white men will cheat us. If we plant potatoes, they will steal them. If we try to hunt buffalo, they will scare the game away. If we fight, they will not make war properly.” He didn’t come to no conclusion, but fell into one of them depressed moods that stayed with him for the rest of the day and next morning, during which he set right there in Hump’s tepee, never speaking nor drinking nor eating, and Hump’s family let him alone, walking around him.
“That may be so,” said Old Lodge Skins. “On the other hand, the white men are coming in ever greater numbers and building permanent dwelling places. If they do not find wood, they cut bricks from the earth or burrow into the ground like prairie dogs. Whatever else you can say about the white man, it must be admitted that
“But to survive if the white men drive away the buffalo will not be easy. Maybe we should try this farming. Other red men have done so. When I was a boy a people called Mandan farmed along the Big Muddy River. It is true that the Lakota were always attacking their villages and killed a lot of them. And then the Mandan caught smallpox from visiting white traders and died every one. There are no more Mandan.” Old Lodge Skins raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps they were not a great people.”
“I never heard of farmers who were,” said Hump. He then asked me: “I suppose you have a lot of powder and lead in your wagons?”
I didn’t answer, not wanting to get into that. Which was all right, for I was getting ready to make a speech myself. I ranked pretty high in these quarters, not because I was important enough to lead a wagon train-the Cheyenne didn’t care about that, nor had they asked me how I spent the time since we had last seen one another-no, I was influential here because though I had apparently been killed on the Solomon’s Fork, I had returned.
Here’s what I was thinking: Old Lodge Skins had spent more than seventy years on the prairies and what did he have to show for it? Indians loved their land, but the peculiarity was that the most miserable cabin of a white man had a relation to the earth that no nomadic redskin could claim. One way of looking at it was that in any true connection, each thing being joined makes a mark on the other: a tree, say, is fastened to the earth, and vice versa. In Denver they was erecting buildings now with foundations: not only on the ground but in it; so that if one day the whites left that place again, it would still bear their brand for a long time. I never heard of a natural force that would tear cellar walls from the earth.
Maybe white men was more natural than Indians! was what I had got to thinking. Even prairie dogs had fixed villages.… Now I know that every living thing is neither more nor less of Nature than the next, but I was young then and them distinctions bothered me, what with the conflicting claims: Indians believing they was more “natural” than white men, and the latter insisting they themselves was more “human.”
Whatever the judgment on that, I knowed right then that the Cheyenne way was finished as a mode of life. I saw this not in the present camp, but back in Denver; for truths are sometimes detected first in a place remote from the one to which they apply. Think of how if you was standing in China when gunpowder had been invented, you could have known that thousands of mile away stone castles and armor was finished.
So what I said in that speech of mine had practicality as its point of view. I stood up in Hump’s tepee. I wore Burns Red’s best red blanket. We had exchanged gifts, and he in his Indian way give me his finest possession.
“Brothers,” I says, “when I sit among you, I think of the beautiful Powder River country where we did so many happy things when I was a boy. Do you recall the time Little Hawk was sleeping in his tepee and suddenly was awakened by the smell of beaver-gland perfume and raised the lodge cover and saw a Crow stealing his horse and killed him? And when Two Babies returned from his lone war trail against the Ute, after staying away a whole year, his belt full of scalps and singing the song an eagle had taught him as he lay wounded in a dry wash.
“Do you remember how lovely Cloud Peak looks with its cap of white and shoulders of purple and blue? And
