How can I make you understand? Can you not see that we were facing the end of our world? My chief was confronting captivity and insult and punishment. His bright world of danger and freedom and boundless activity was narrowing to a grave, and only the instinctive love of life kept him and his “Silent Eaters” from self-destruction. In all the history of the world there has been no darker day for a race than this when midwinter fell upon us in that strange land of the north.
V
THE CHIEF SURRENDERS HIMSELF
The first days of spring were worse than the winter. Rain and sleet followed each other, and the few remaining buffalo seemed to sink into the ground, so swiftly they disappeared. White people read in papers of wars and elections and the price of wheat; our news came by brave runners, and their tales were ever of the same dole.
“What of the buffalo? Where are the buffalo? Are the buffalo starving?” The answers always were the same. “The buffalo are gone. We are lost!”
The report of our desperate condition went out over the world and sympathetic people came to urge us to surrender. One messenger, a priest, a friend of General Sherman, the great war chief, came, and The Sitting Bull called a council to sit with him, and some Canadian officers also were there.
After they had all finished speaking, The Sitting Bull replied: “I am ready to make a peace. But as for going to Standing Rock, that is a question I must consider a long time. I am no fool. I know that the man who kills me will be rewarded and I do not intend to be taken prisoner. I have long understood the power of the whites. I am like a fly in a mountain stream when compared with this wonderful and cruel race. I do not care to have my head sold to make some man-coyote rich. Now this is my answer: I will make a peace. I will keep my people in order but I will not go to the Standing Rock. My children can go if they think best.”
The council broke up at this point, but in private the chief said to a friend: “The Gall is going back, so is The Polar Bear and many others. I shall soon be alone. Black Moon, Running Crane, all are deserting me, but I shall remain; I will not return to die foolishly for the white man’s pleasure.”
All took place as he foresaw. Chief Gall went south and surrendered. So did Red Fish and The Crane. Only a few remained, among them my father and Slohan.
The chief was pleased to know I was getting skilled in the white man’s magic. “I need an interpreter, one I can trust,” he said to me. “Go on in the road you have taken.”
One day as he sat smoking in his tepee I heard him singing in a low voice the “Song of the Chieftains,” but he had changed it to a sad ending: