“Presents will be brought,” answered the general.
The preliminaries having been concluded, Satanta majestically arose, for his speech. With shoulders back he stood, facing the half circle of white men, his arms folded. He began to speak. As he proceeded, Romeo the Mexican translated sentence by sentence, the chief each time waiting for him to do so.
“I call on the sun to witness that I will talk straight,” said Satanta. “My tongue is not forked. It cannot tell lies. I understand that you were coming down to see us. My heart is glad and I shall hide nothing from you. I have moved away from those Indians who want war, and I have come also to see you and speak with you. The Kiowas and the Comanches are not those who have been fighting. The Cheyennes are the ones who fight. They fight in the day, and not in the night. If I had been fighting, I would have fought by day, too. Two years ago I made peace with your chiefs, Harney, Sanborn and Leavenworth, at the mouth of the Little Arkansas. This peace I have never broken. I have not done anything and I am not afraid. I am ready to listen to good words. We have been waiting a long time to see you, and we were getting tired. All the land south of the Arkansas belongs to the Kiowas and Comanches, and I don’t want to give any of it away. I love the land and the buffalo, and will not part with it. When your soldiers come through the land, they kill many buffalo and let them lie. Is the white man a child, that he should recklessly kill and not eat? When the red men kill game, they do so that they may live and not starve. I want you to understand well what I say. Put it on paper. Let the Great Father at Washington see it, and let me know what he says. I hear a great deal of good talk from the teachers that the Great Father sends to us, but they never do what they say they will do. I don’t want any of the medicine lodges (schools and churches) in my country. I want my children raised as I was. We thank you for your presents. We know you are doing the best you can. I and my head men also will do the best we can. You are all big chiefs. When you are in the country we go to sleep happy and are not afraid. I have heard that you intend to settle us on a reservation. I don’t want to settle,” and Satanta’s voice was high. “I love to roam the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die. I have laid aside my lance and shield and bow, because I feel safe in your presence. I have told you the truth. I have no little lies hid about me, but I don’t know how it is with you. Are you as clear as I am? A long time ago all this land belonged to our fathers. Now when I go beside the river I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting. As I came here to-day, upon the trail I picked up a little switch that had been torn up and thrown away. It hurt me to see this. I thought, if this little twig had been allowed to grow, it would have made a mighty tree, to shelter my people and supply them with shade and wood. The white men destroyed it.” Satanta here made a wide gesture. “But as I look around over the prairie I see that it is large and good, and I do not want it stained with the blood of the whites. If the treaty brings to us prosperity, as you say, we will like it all the better. But if it brings us good or ill, we will not abandon it. When I make a peace, it is a long and lasting peace. I have spoken.”
When Satanta had finished, a murmur of approval, in satisfied grunts, arose from the other Indians; and even the officers exchanged words of admiration. Satanta had made a great speech.
“Tell him,” quoth General Hancock, to Romeo, “that we have heard, and are glad to know that he is our friend. We do not come in war, but in peace. Tell him that in token of our friendship we give him the uniform of a great white chief.”
At a sign by the general another officer brought forward, to Satanta, the coat and sash and hat of a major-general. They were of a style that had been changed by later regulations but this made no difference to Satanta, who seemed much pleased with the epaulets and the double row of brass buttons, and the red silk sash, and the cocked hat adorned by a black curling plume. He immediately donned the new rig, to strut about, bare-legged, in it, dragging his sabre.
Presently he and all his braves, after procuring what they could at the fort, took the trail whence they had come.
“That, gentlemen, was a marvelous speech. It would be a credit to a white man,” commented General Hancock, impressively, to the assembled audience.
“I’ve known Satanta or White Bear ever since I was a small boy and followed my father about, out here on the plains,” said Colonel Leavenworth. “I regard him as the greatest Indian. He lives in style at his tipi. Has a brass horn that he blows for meals, and a carpet, and brass-studded lapboards to eat from.”