The Westerners

by Stewart Edward White

After the massacre at the battle of the Little Big Horn, a vast number of Indian refugees fled over the borders into Canada. There they dwelt, drawing three pounds of beef a day from arbitrary uniformed individuals, who were strangely lacking in sympathy, and very observant of the few rules and regulations which a mysterious White Mother over the sea had seen fit to impose. Three pounds of meat a day is not much. Still it is enough to get along on, and with the necessity, and indeed, the opportunity of the chase gone, the bucks were able to wax lazy, drunken, and generally shiftless to their hearts' content. All this was frowned on by the uniformed individuals, but opportunities were not far to seek.

There has never been a nation more warlike, brave, and hardy than the Sioux in its native environment of war and hunting. These two furnished every point of leverage—physical, moral, intellectual—which the savage required to lift him to the level of his greatest efficiency. From the buffalo itself the Sioux family obtained its supply of wigwams, robes, food, fuel, light, harness, bow-strings, instruments of industry—in fact almost every article of necessity or luxury appertaining to its everyday life. From the chase of the animal the young Dacotah learned to ride, to shoot, to risk his life. And then in his constant strife with his neighbors, the Blackfeet or the Crows or the Pawnees, he was forced, if he would survive, to develop to the last degree his cunning, his observation, his strategy, his resourcefulness, his patience, his power to endure, his personal courage. Habituated to these two, the chase and war, from his early youth, he came at last to be the coolest, most dangerous warrior of the plains. He could ride anything, bareback, in any position. With his short, powerful bow he could launch a half-dozen arrows into the air before the first reached the ground, or could drive one of his shafts quite through the body of a buffalo. When necessity required, he was brave to the point of recklessness; but again, when expediency advised, he could worm his way for miles through the scantiest cover, flat on his face, by the laborious use alone of his elbows and toes. He could read a whole history in a trail which another might not even distinguish. He could sit absolutely motionless for hours in the hottest sun or the bitterest cold. And he could bear, as he was often called upon to do, the severest physical pain without a quiver of the eyelid.

But when the buffalo vanished, the Sioux passed the meridian of his powers. No other means of subsistence offered. He was forced to plunder, or go to the reservation for Government beef. Thence came much whisky and much loafing. The new young man had not the training of his father. So, in a little, the Teton nation was subdued and brought to reservations, and herded in an overall-plug-hat-blanket-wearing multitude, even now but half-tamed, and fiercely instinct with hereditary ferocity and resourcefulness. Other Indians go to Carlisle, learn to plough, and become at least partially civilized. The Sioux, fierce, hawk-eyed, wide-nostrilled, sits in solitary dignity before his lodge, brooding. Occasionally he has to be rounded up with a Gatling, as witness Wounded Knee. I have never been able to envy the agents of Dakota reservations.

When the statute of limitations ran out, or whatever mysterious time-limit the Government puts on its displeasure against Indian murderers, Sitting Bull and a horde of his fellow-warriors came back. Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill's show, where he had a good time until he began ghost-dancing and was killed in the Wounded Knee campaign. But some, Lone Wolf's band among them, remained in Canada. They had various reasons for doing so.

Lone Wolf stayed because he was in hard luck. He had barely settled down in his new home before the great Manitou had seen fit to strike his children with the Spotted Sickness. When finally the last case had been buried hastily, and its clothes and belongings burned under the distant eye of the uniformed man, the formerly powerful band found itself reduced by almost half. By dint of sitting innumerable days naked in a circle on the prairie and beating a tom-tom until the agent prayed for rain, the survivors managed to secure for themselves immunity from the Spotted Sickness at least. Then some of the ponies were stolen. Then a schism occurred in the community; and Three Knives took with him a dozen families and established a new clan within plain sight of the old. Lone Wolf was powerless because of the uniformed individual, who frowned on the Indian idea of patriarchal chastisement. A very young man of the band killed the agent, hoping thus to earn praise, but almost before the embers were cold and before the scalp of Three Knives had clotted dry, there appeared an astounding number of uniforms, who promptly decimated Lone Wolf's warriors and took away all their arms. Lone Wolf discovered that these uniformed men were in reality nothing but soldiers—a disgusting fact which he had not before suspected. They hung six of his young men, and that night a number of things happened, such as the unprovoked fall of Lone Wolf's standard from over his lodge, which showed plainly that Gitche Manitou was still angry.

Lone Wolf gathered his remnants about him and journeyed south to Spotted Tail.

There he enjoyed the discontented tranquillity of a United States reservation, with occasional privileges if he was good.

Lone Wolf had gone into the north country at the head of three hundred efficient fighting men, well armed with rifles, rich in ammunition, ponies, and the luxuries of daily existence. He came back as the nominal chief of thirty-five warriors, with few firearms, and less wealth. Counting in the women, children, and old men, his original band had numbered nearly a thousand souls—a large camp even for the old days. Now there remained barely a tenth of that number.

Misfortunes such as these must have a reason. Gitche Manitou is stern, but he is not unjust. Everybody knows that. And the reason Lone Wolf's band was so afflicted, Big Thunder, the medicine man, had discovered, lay in the fact that the defiling of the tribe's token, after the Little Big Horn, had been done by a member of the tribe itself. Until the culprit should be brought to justice the wrath of Gitche Manitou would continue to be visited impartially on the entire band.

The recognition of Rippling Water made a profound impression on those standing about. There flashed into Lone Wolf's eagle face a gleam of satisfaction so intense that Black Mike started. He had not the remotest notion that he was in any actual danger, for his dealings with the tribe in those old times when he had been a member of it had always been rather to its advantage than to his own. That it was unfriendly to him because of his unceremonious desertion of it, he did not doubt. Nor did he hope to escape a typical Indian tirade from the two old hags who, so short a time ago, had been his not unattractive young wives. But beyond this, and perhaps—as he glanced over the motley indications of their poverty—the promise of gifts, he anticipated nothing more serious in the end than a delay. A delay, however, was what he could not at present afford.