“My son, that is long ago and Red Thunder’s blood is no longer made from buffalo meat. His muscles are weak. He prefers to sit in his wagon and drive his ponies. The Great Spirit has forgotten his red children and the White Father is in command over us. I do the best I can. The old trails are closed; only one remains—the one made by Washington.”
I drove on, my exultation utterly gone. If Red Thunder was of this bitter mood, how would I find the Uncapappas who had been the conservatives of the tribe?
I passed close by some of the cabins and they disheartened me, they were so small and dirty. I was glad to see that some of them still retained the sweat lodge. Each home consisted of a shack and two or three tepees of canvas, and women were cooking beneath bowers made of cottonwood as of old. Their motions, and the smell of smoke, awoke such memories in me that I could hardly keep from both shouting and weeping.
The farther I went the more painful became the impression made upon me by these captives. They were like poor white farmers, ragged, dirty, and bent. The clothes they wore were shoddy gray and deeply repulsive to me. Their robes of buffalo, their leggins of buckskin, their beaded pouches—all the things I remembered with pride—had been worn out (or sold). Even the proud warriors of my tribe were reduced to the condition of those who are at once prisoners and beggars. My heart was like lead as I reached the agency.
It hurt me to do so, but I reported at once to the agent and asked leave to visit my father and mother.
“They are expecting you,” he said. “You’ll find them camped just beyond the graveyard.”
I am glad that I saw my father and mother first in their tepee. My mother was cooking beneath a little shed of canvas. I called to her, and when she looked at me, without knowing me, something moved deep down in my heart. How brown and old and wrinkled she looked! Then I said, “Don’t you know me, mother!”
Then her voice rose as she came hurrying to me, calling: “My son! My son has returned.”
She took my hand, not daring to put her arms around me, for I looked, she said, exactly like the white man, but I pressed her hands, and then, while she sang a little song of joy, my father came out of his lodge and came slowly toward me.
I will not dwell on this meeting. I inquired at once concerning our chief. “He is still living in the same place near Rock Creek, and wishes to see you at once,” said my father. “The white men are trying to get our land again and the chief wants to have a talk about it with you.”