Little Big Man

“The smooth-faced persons turned out to be men as well as the hairy-cheeked, and one of them wore a golden cross around his neck and when he took off his hat his head was mostly bare skin except for a fringe around his ears. He got two sticks and making a cross of them, stuck it in the earth, and then all the white men fell upon their knees while the bald one closed his eyes, folded his hands, and talked. Then the whites showed the Human Beings their lightning-and-thunder sticks and let them pull the triggers, but our people were still scared when the shots came.

“Those first white men stayed in that place for about one moon and started to build a square house of logs. Our people would visit them every day, and the man with the cross would give them presents and make signs that they should kneel upon the ground while he talked to the crossed sticks which were his medicine, and so they would do so to be polite.

“But then one night, while half of the white party was sleeping, the other half killed them and took all their things and burned up the house and went over to the Big Water, got into a boat they had there, and went away.

“That is the truth as it has come down to me,” said Old Lodge Skins. “And the same thing happened many times thereafter, whenever the white people appeared. They do not like each other, and sooner or later one will kill the next, and usually not in battle, the way our people do to prove themselves brave and to enjoy the courageous deaths of our enemies and to die on a good day, but rather by shooting in the back or stretching the neck or by infecting one another with the coughing-sickness and sores or making people lose their heads with whiskey.

“But I say they are white, and not like us, and there may be some reason why they act this way that one cannot understand unless he is himself white. If they ever attack me, I will defend myself. But until such time, I will avoid them.”

That was when we went up into the Powder River country, though we wasn’t in no hurry and first went south for a day or so along the Surprise River and took buffalo there. Them was the days before the railroad and the professional white hunters, and you could find single herds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, maybe a square mile or more of beasts crowded so thick you couldn’t see no grass between them, and the Cheyenne would get them milling and drop one after another with arrow or spear and it would make no appreciable difference in the size of the herd. Then the women would come out for the butchering and when it was done haul the usable parts back to camp on the hide, which was afterward fleshed and stretched on a frame for a robe or lodge cover. We’d eat boiled tongue and roast hump then, the finest grub in the world, alongside which your best beefsteak will taste like a singed bootsole. But it is all gone now.

Now it’s true there wasn’t no white men up on the Powder, but there was Crow Indians roundabout. The Cheyenne and the Crow was generally enemies, but made a peace some years before when the Government got most of the warring tribes together on Horse Creek east of Laramie and had them sign a treaty not to fight one another. This worked fine between tribes that never came in contact with the next, but didn’t last long with them that did, it being normal for a Cheyenne to fight a Pawnee. And if you didn’t fight, you’d turn into a woman.

So with the Crow, who was by the way friends of the whites, claiming never to have killed a white man and for that reason they was always let to keep their country. The Crow was brave men when they fought the Cheyenne and Sioux alone, but when they served as scouts for the U.S. Cavalry, they often turned coward. I don’t know why.

Anyway, we no sooner had got up to the Powder than some of our men who was out spying come in with the news that a big camp of Crow had been located on the Crazy Woman’s Creek.

“If it is a big camp, they must have a lot of ponies,” said Hump.

Shadow That Comes in Sight, one of the spies, said: “Those Crow are very rich in ponies. They are the most beautiful ponies I have ever seen. I hid all day in the scrubwood just to look at those ponies.”

“I have heard you,” said Hump and sighed. The group then went over to talk with Old Lodge Skins, a bunch of us boys following along.

“Do you need ponies?” the chief said after he had been apprised.

Shadow nodded his head very sad, saying: “Never have I been so poor.”