Red Cloud, the Solitary Sioux: A Story of the Great Prairie

by Sir William Francis Butler

[His eyes all at once became fixed upon one object set within the mid-distance.]

It yet wanted about half an hour of sunset, and by riding hard we would reach the spot ere night had closed in; for darkness comes quickly on the heels of the day in the prairie, and though a lustrous after-glow lives sometimes in the western sky, the great plain instantly grows dim when the sun has gone beneath the horizon. From the lower level of the plain at the foot of the hills no sign was visible of the object which he had seen from the summit; but this mattered little to the Sioux, whose practised eye had taken in the line of direction by other objects, and his course was now held straight upon his mark.

When we reached the neighbourhood of the spot in which he had last seen the moving object, he pulled up his horse and looked around him on every side. There was nothing to be seen. The plain lay around us motionless and silent, already beginning to grow dark in the decreasing light. A man gifted with less acute sight would have rested satisfied that the moving object which he had looked upon was a wild animal—a wolf or a wolverine, whose sharp sense of sound alarmed at the approach of man, had caused it to seek concealment; but the Indian had noticed certain peculiarities in the object that led him to form other conclusions regarding its nature. In a loud, clear voice he called out in an Indian language that he was a friend, and that whoever was near need have no fear to discover himself.

“It is the Red Cloud who speaks,” he said. “No Indian need fear to meet him.” Scarcely had he thus spoken when from a dry watercourse near at hand there rose up a figure which seemed in the twilight to be that of a man who was unable to lift himself fully upon his feet. He was distant about one hundred yards from us, and it was evident from the manner in which he drew himself out of the depression in which he had lain concealed from sight, that he had difficulty in making any movement. As the figure emerged from the hollow, it resumed the crouching attitude which had been first noticed. We were soon beside this strange apparition. It proved to be a young Indian of the Cree nation, a man so spent and worn, so thin in face and figure, and so tattered in dress, that he scarcely resembled a human being. He was utterly unable to rise from a kneeling position. One arm hung at his side, broken below the elbow; one leg was painfully dragged after him along the ground; his leather dress hanging in tatters upon his back showed many cuts and bruises upon his body. The Sioux spoke a few words to this wretched object; but the man answered in such a broken voice and rambling manner that little could be gleaned from what he said.

The Sioux having dismounted for a better examination of this maimed creature, now lifted him without difficulty on to his own horse; then mounting himself, we set off at an easy pace for the camp. The man now appeared quite senseless, his head and feet hanging down the horse’s sides like that of a dead body. The night had quite closed in when we rounded the base of the outer line of hills and came full into the firelight of the camp. Donogh was astonished to see us bearing back to camp an apparently lifeless body, which was immediately taken from the horse and laid on the ground before the fire.

The warmth of the fire, and a drink of hot tea which was soon given him, brought consciousness back again to the poor creature. For a while he looked wildly and vacantly around, seemed slowly to take in the new state of existence that had so quickly come to him, then he seized the vessel of tea that Donogh was holding near his lips and drained it to the dregs. Some time elapsed, however, ere he could answer in a collected manner the questions put to him by the Sioux, but by degrees the following story was elicited. It ran thus:—

“More than forty days ago I quitted a camp of Crees near the Lone Mountain prairie to go south on the war-trail, there were fourteen of us in all; our horses were fat, and we travelled fast. On the fifth day we reached the woody hills. There were no Indians near, and we began to hunt buffalo, which were numerous over all the prairies south of the Qu’appelle river.

“It was about the tenth day that one of our party, who had gone out with the horses in the morning, came back to camp saying that he had struck the trail of a large grizzly bear some little distance from where we lay. Four of us started out with him to hunt the bear; I was one of them. We soon struck the trail. The bear had crossed a ravine and ascended a steep bank beyond; the side of this bank was covered with cotton-wood thicket. We followed the trail right into the thicket; we were all on foot. All at once we heard, as we walked in file along the trail, a heavy tread sounding close at hand, and a loud breaking of branches and dry sticks. Then appeared in front the object of our chase. He was a very large grizzly, and so wicked that he did not wait for us to attack him, but came all at once full upon us.