How it would have ended I don’t know, had not my friend Davies been sent again into the West. His going ended my stay in the East. Without him I was afraid to remain among the white people.
“The time has come for you to return, Iapi,” he said to me. “The white men are moving to force a treaty upon the Sioux, and now is your time to help them.”
It was very hard to say good-by to my friend, and harder yet to my Anita, who loved me, but who told me she could not go with me, though she wished to do so. “I cannot leave my poor mother, who is sick and poor,” she said.
I was not very wise, but I knew that I had no place, not even a lodge, in which to keep her, and so I said: “I will go on before you and prepare a place for you, and then sometime you will come and you will help me to teach my people how to live?”
To this she gave me promise and I went away very sad, for it seemed a long way from Standing Rock to Washington, and especially to a poor Sioux who knew of no way to earn money.
Some friends joined with my friend, the white soldier chief, to buy some clothes for me, and a few presents for my father and mother, and so, with a heart so big I thought it would burst within me, I took the cars for the West.
I sat without moving for hours—all night long—while the terrible engine of the white man’s fashioning sped into the darkness. At dawn I looked out anxiously to see if the land were familiar, but it was not. Only on the third day did it begin to awaken echoes in my brain. My command of English words will not permit me to express the wild thrill of my heart as I looked out of my window and saw again the wide-lying plains of Dakota, marked by the feet of the vanished buffalo. I was getting home!
Five years is a long time when it involves such mental changes as had come to me. It seemed that half a lifetime had passed since I sorrowfully took the steamer to go down the river to learn the white man’s language. I was a wild-eyed, long-haired lad then. Now I was returning, clipped and clothed like a white man, yet in my heart a Sioux.
There were changes in the country, but not so great as I had expected. Even the white man makes but little mark on these arid levels. The cabins were grayer, the fields a little larger, that was all. After dispossessing my people and destroying the buffalo, the white settlers had discovered that it was a grim country for their uses. Their towns seemed small and poor and sad.
My heart came into my throat as I crossed the Cannonball and entered upon Sioux land and saw the yellowed tepees of our cousins, the Yanktonaise, scattered irregularly along the river. This was still the land of my fathers; this much we had retained of all the bright world which had been ours in the olden, splendid days!