Lurked Crazy Horse, a cougar mad for blood;
And scarce the rearguard-battles in the mud
Aroused the sullen plodders to the fore.
The Deer’s Ears loomed and vanished in the pour;
The Haystack Buttes stole off along the right;
And men grew old between a night and night
Before their feeble toil availed to raise
The Black Hills, set against the evil days
About a paradise of food and rest.
Now Crazy Horse’s people, turning west,
Retraced the trail of ruin, sick for home.
Where myriads of the bison used to roam
And fatten in the golden autumn drowse,
A few rejected bulls and barren cows
Grew yet a little leaner. Every place
The good old earth, with ashes on her face,
Was like a childless mother in despair;
Though still she kept with jealous, loving care
Some little hoard of all her youth had known
Against the dear returning of her own;
But where the starving herd of ponies passed,
The little shielded hollows, lately grassed,
Were stricken barren even as with fire.
And so they reached the place of their desire,
The deep-carved valley where the Powder flows.
Here surely there was peace.
But when the snows
Came booming where the huddled village stood
And ponies, lean with gnawing cottonwood,
Were slain to fill the kettles, Dull Knife came,
The great Cheyenne. The same—O not the same
As he who fought beside the Greasy Grass
And slew his fill of enemies! Alas,
The beggar in his eyes! And very old
He seemed, for hunger and the pinch of cold
Were on him; and the rabble at his back—
Despairing hundreds—lacked not any lack
That flesh may know and live. The feeble wail
Of babies put an edge upon the tale
That Dull Knife told.
“There was a fight,” he said.
“I set my winter village at the head
Of Willow Creek. The mountains there are tall.
A canyon stood about me for a wall;
And it was good to hear my people sing,
For there was none that wanted anything
That makes men happy. We were all asleep.
The cold was sharp; the snow was very deep.
What enemy could find us? We awoke.
A thunder and a shouting and a smoke
Were there among us, and a swarm of foes—
Pawnees, Shoshones and Arapahoes,
And soldiers, many soldiers. It was night
About us, and we fought them in the light
Of burning lodges till the town was lost
And all our plenty. Bitter was the frost
And most of us were naked from the bed.
Now many of our little ones are dead
Of cold and hunger. Shall the others die?”
There was a light in Crazy Horse’s eye
Like moony ice. The other spoke again.
“As brothers have Dakota and Cheyenne
Made war together. Help us. You have seen
We can not live until the grass is green,
My brother!”
Then the other face grew stone;
The hard lips moved: “A man must feed his own,”
Said Crazy Horse, and turned upon his heel.
But now the flint of him had found the steel
In Dull Knife, and the flare was bad to see.
“Tashunka Witko, dare to look at me
That you may not forget me. We shall meet.
The soldiers yonder have enough to eat,
And I will come, no beggar, with the grass!”
And silently the people saw him pass
Along the valley where the snow lay blue,
The plodding, silent, ragamuffin crew
Behind him. So the evil days began.
Now Crazy Horse, they say, was like a man
Who, having seen a ghost, must look and look
And brood upon the empty way it took
To nowhere; and he scarcely ate at all;
And there was that about him like a wall
To shut men out. He seemed no longer young.
Bleak January found them on the Tongue
In search of better forage for the herd—
A failing quest. And hither came the word
Of many walking soldiers coming down
With wagon guns upon the starving town
That might not flee; for whither could they go
With ponies pawing feebly in the snow
To grow the leaner? Mighty in despair,
They waited on a lofty summit there
Above the valley.
Raw gray dawn revealed
A scaly serpent crawling up a field
Of white beneath them. Leisurely it neared,
Resolving into men of frosty beard
With sloping rifles swinging to the beat
And melancholy fifing of their feet
Upon the frost; and shrill the wagon tires
Sang rearward. Now the soldiers lighted fires
And had their breakfast hot, as who should say:
“What hurry? It is early in the day
And there is time for what we came to do.”
With wistful eyes the rabble of the Sioux
Beheld the eating; knew that they defied
In vain their own misgivings when they cried:
“Eat plenty! You will never eat again!”
It was not so; for those were devil men
Who needed nothing and were hard to kill.
The wagon-guns barked sharply at the hill
To bite the summit, always shooting twice;
And scrambling upward through the snow and ice
Came doggedly, without a sign of fear,
The infantry of Miles. They didn’t cheer,
They didn’t hurry, and they didn’t stop,
For all the rifles roaring at the top,
Until the gun-butt met the battle-ax.
Still fighting with their children at their backs
The Sioux gave slowly. Wind came on to blow,
A hurrying northwester, blind with snow,
And in the wild white dusk of it they fled.
But when they reached the Little Powder’s head,
So much of all their little had been lost,
So well had wrought their hunger and the frost,
One might have thought ’twas Dull Knife coming there.
The country had a cold, disowning stare;
The burned-off valleys could not feed their own.
The moon was like a frozen bubble, blown
Along the rim of February nights,
When Spotted Tail, the lover of the Whites,
Came there with mighty words. His cheeks were full,
His belly round. He spoke of Sitting Bull
And Gall defeated, driven far away
Across the line; of Red Cloud getting gray
Before his time—a cougar in a cage,
Self-eaten by a silent, toothless rage
That only made the watching sentry smile.
And still the story saddened. All the while
The scattered Sioux were coming in to save
Their children with the food the soldiers gave
And laying down their guns and making peace.
He told how Dull Knife’s fury did not cease
But grew upon the soldier food he ate;
And how his people fattened, nursing hate
For Crazy Horse. And many more than these
But waited for the grass—the Loup Pawnees,
The Utes, the Winnebagoes and the Crows,
Shoshones, Bannocks and Arapahoes,
With very many more Dakotas too!
“Now what could Crazy Horse’s people do
Against them
