To this Carignan replied: “I don’t think he means to make trouble, but he is profoundly interested in this new religion. I think he will yield to reason.”
Scouts
These Indian scouts are on the trail of a Chiricahua Apache named Massai, famous in the ’nineties as the wildest and most cruel of the Apaches. So crooked was Massai’s trail that even the Indians themselves could not follow it.
On the Little Big Horn
When Cheschapah, son of the aged Crow chief, Pounded Meat, became a medicine man and aspired to leadership of the tribe, a party of Sioux came on a visit to the Crows. Fearing that the feasting and eloquence of Cheschapah might turn their thoughts to war, troops were sent to bring the visitors home. The Sioux started for home meekly enough, but Cheschapah, with a yelling swarm of his young friends, began to buzz about the column, threatening to attack the troopers who had so rudely broken up their dinner party, and did not desist even when the soldiers had forded the river. Whereupon the chief of the Crow police rode out to Cheschapah, commanding him to turn back, and received for an answer an insult that with Indians calls for blood. But for old chief Pounded Meat, who then rode out to his son and cowed him with a last flare of command, firing would have begun then and there.
There had already been a great deal of talk of the War Department sending someone to quiet the disturbance, and this the agent did not relish. He had been an Indian agent for many years and prided himself on knowing how to handle his people, and was especially anxious to keep the chief authority entirely in his own hands. Poor and despised as The Sitting Bull had become, even the agent considered it an honor to arrest and imprison him. Furthermore, I could see that he did not care to attempt this except as a last resort.
The following morning the agent, Carignan, and myself went up to see The Sitting Bull. He was in his tepee, smoking beside a small smoldering fire. He was very cold and quiet, and looked tired and weak. His hair parted in the middle and the sad look of his face made him resemble an old woman. To me he was only a tragic wraith of his former self. His eyes were dull and heavy. He was a type of my vanishing race as he sat there, and my heart went out to him.