“In the Moon of Dark Red Calves [February] we heard about Crazy Horse and his people. They had gone back through the burned-off land to Tongue River, and they were hungry there when the soldiers came, many soldiers. It was a bad fight in the snow and cold, and Crazy Horse had no powder; so he fled with his people in a snowstorm to Little Powder River, and there they were starving.
“The story was a moon old when it came to our village. Maybe many soldiers would attack us too. So we broke camp when a melting wind blew, as it did yesterday, and went into Grandmother’s Land. There we had relatives to visit and the soldiers could not chase us.
“I thought maybe we would go back home when the new grass came; but when the valleys were green along the creeks, another story came to us. Crazy Horse had led his starving people into the Soldiers’ Town on White River [Fort Robinson] so that they could eat. Then we thought it would be better to wait until it was time for the fall hunt. Maybe Crazy Horse and his people would be hunting, and we could join them, and be happy together again. But bad stories came to us that summer, and just before the winter we heard that the Wasichus had murdered Crazy Horse at the Soldiers’ Town.
“We did not go home.”
The old man ceased and sat with drooped head, his hands on his knees. When I held the pipestem towards him, he did not see it, and I felt alone in the tepee. “What then, Grandfather?” I said at length. He raised his head and seemed to come back slowly from a distant place. His gaze took on the crinkled, quizzical look, and what he said came with a shock of surprise: “I got married.”
He took the pipe and smoked awhile. “Dho,” he continued, “we did not go home. Our relatives were kind to us. There were bison in plenty. There were no soldiers to chase us. There were valleys and streams like ours at home; but when I rode along a valley, something was not there; and when I looked at a hill, it was a stranger. There were no great deeds to be done and no great honors to win. When I was a boy, and the sun would come up, something wonderful might happen that day. It was not so any more. Stories came from the agencies, and they were about hunger and sickness and the forked tongues of the Wasichus. The soldiers even took away the people’s horses. Pa Sapa was full of crazy Wasichus digging up the yellow metal.
“Grasses came forth and died, and the snow fell. Again the grass was new and died and there was snow. Maybe next grass everything would be better, and we would go home. We did not go home. The stories that came to us were not good. Afterwhile we got used to the strange land. Then I got married.
“She was a Hunkpapa girl and her right name was Plenty White Cows. People called her Woman Who Died, and they told about a strange power she had. She made charms for her two brothers, so that what they tried to do, they could do it; and with these charms they had won great honors in war. Also she could see things that were going to happen.
“She was older than I was, but she was a girl yet. I think maybe young men were a little afraid of her because of the stories people told, and she was not very strong—maybe because she had died once and gone to the world of spirits. I will tell you how it was, the way people told it; for it had been made into a story for anybody to tell.
“When Plenty White Cows was just a little girl, maybe five or six winters old, a strange sickness came upon her. The wichasha wakon could do nothing, and so she died. At that time her father and mother were camping with some other Hunkpapas at Slim Buttes, north of Pa Sapa. And when their girl was dead, they prepared her for the other world and put her on a scaffold, the way I have told you. Then the band broke camp and moved on towards Mini Shoshay, and the father and mother and brothers went wandering and mourning. This was when the Moon of Black Cherries [August] was young, and it was a time of no storms.