The chief, embittered by the agent’s attack upon him, refused to go to the Standing Rock. “I am not a dog to be whistled at. I will not go to the agent to be insulted and beaten,” and he called his old guard of “Silent Eaters” around him. “The agent threatens to imprison me and break up the dance. If he comes to fight he will find us ready.”
Day by day the feeling between the agency and its police on the one side, and the chief and the dancers on the other, got more alarming, and the agent was obliged to send many telegrams to Washington and the outside world to quiet the fears of the settlers, and at last he decided to go down to Rock Creek and see for himself what was going on. He should have done so before.
He asked me to go as interpreter, and this I did, but very reluctantly, for it put me too much on his side.
He planned to come upon the scene of the dance suddenly, and many were dancing as we rode up to the outer circle of lodges. The word went about that the agent was come, but no one stopped dancing on that account. They were too much in earnest to give heed to any authority. Some of those to whom he called replied with words of contempt, defying his command, and I, who knew the terrible power of the President’s army, trembled as I saw the face of the agent blacken.
“What foolery!” he said to me. “This has got to stop! Go tell The Sitting Bull to come to me.”
I made my way to where the chief sat, and told him what the agent had demanded.
I could see that he associated me with the renegades who fawned upon the agent, and he listened to what I said with cold, stern face. I pleaded with him to do as he was commanded. I informed him of the fury of fear which had fallen upon the settlers and I warned him that the soldiers would come to put a stop to the dance.
To all this he made no reply other than to say: “Since the agent has come to see me, tell him I will talk with him in the morning. I am busy now. I cannot leave the dance.”
The agent was furious when I told him this, and as we drove off down to the school muttered a threat, “I’ll make him suffer for this, the insolent old dog.” We found Carignan, the teacher, almost alone at the school. The Sitting Bull had said: “If this religion is true, then it is more important than your books,” and had told his people to withdraw their children from their studies. “If the white man’s world is coming to an end, of what use is it to learn his ways?” he argued.
To Carignan the agent talked freely of the chief. “He must be brought low,” he declared, wrathfully. “His power must be broken. I will see him in the morning and give him one more chance to quit peaceably. If he does not I will arrest him. He will find he can’t run this reservation.”