With all his gentleness of manner, the old fire was in The Sitting Bull, for he said to me, when speaking of the attack of Shell Fish on him: “I am here, old and beaten—a prisoner subject to the word of a white master, but no man shall insult me. I will kill the man who strikes me. What is death to me? I will die as I have lived, a chief.” For the most part he was so quiet and unassuming that he was overlooked. He never thrust himself forward; he dreamed in silence.
He had visited the white man’s world several times, but these visions had not helped him; they had, indeed, thrown him into profound despair. “What can we do in strife with these wonder-working spirits?” he asked. “It is as foolish as trying to fly with the eagles. The white man owns all the productive land. What can we do farming on this hard soil? What are we beside these swarming settlers? We are as grasshoppers before a rushing herd of buffalo.”
He did not care to look out of the car windows on these journeys. He and his warriors sat in silence or sang the songs of the chase and the victorious homecoming, trying to forget the world outside.
“Nothing astonished them and nothing interested them very much,” said Louis to me in speaking of his trip to Washington. “The chief was at a great disadvantage, but he seldom made a mistake. He was Lakota and made no effort to be anything else.”
The chief at last said, in answer to all similar requests, “I do not care to be on show.”
He was very subjective. He had always been a man of meditation and prayer, and had scrupulously observed the ceremonials of his tribe. Now when he saw no hope of regaining his old freedom he turned his eyes inward and pondered. He was both philosopher and child. Nature was mysterious, not in the ultimate as with the educated man, but close beside him as with a boy. The moon, the clouds, the wind in the grass, all these were to him things inexplicable, as, indeed, they are to the greatest white men; only to my chief they came nearer some way.
Often during these days I saw him sitting at sunset on his favorite outlook—a hill above his cabin—a minute speck against the sky, deeply meditating upon the will of the Great Spirit, and my heart was filled with pain. I, too, mourned the world that was passing so swiftly and surely.
VII
HE OPPOSED ALL TREATIES
During my absence the white settlers had swept across the ancient home of the Dakotas and were already clamoring for the land on which Sitting Bull dwelt, and he was deeply disturbed. He knew how rapacious these plowmen were and he was afraid of them. To his mind our home was pitifully small as it stood, and he urged me to look into this threatened invasion at once.
I did so, and reported to him that a commission was already on its way to see us and that they would soon issue a call for us.