Life Was Good Here (Part 2 of 11)

The village was said to stretch for almost three miles along the west bank of the Little Big Horn as the stream looped lazily northwest to its rendezvous with the Big Horn River.  The village circles were mostly Lakota, known to the white man as the Sioux: Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Ogalala, Sans Arcs, Brule, and Blackfeet.  The village circle on the extreme north end of the gathering was Northern Cheyenne.  It was one of the largest gathering of tribes the west had ever seen.

Nestled among the cottonwood and box elder trees of the river bottom, to many it seemed the lodges numbered as many as the stars in the sky.  So many lodges, so many Indians, it made them feel safe.  For the time being they had everything they needed, water, food, good grazing for the ponies.  They would celebrate long into the night, often rising late in the morning.  The children would play, some would swim in the river.  Young men would take the pony herds to graze in the hills nearby.  Life was good here, as it had once been, as it should be.

But they knew it couldn’t last.  They had been told to report to their reservations.  Many had been to the reservation before, had listened to the white man’s promise of annuity payments, money that could be used to buy food.  But the system was corrupt, those in charge lining their pockets at the expense of the Indians.  They never received all the annuities they were promised so there was never enough money.  The food they were provided was spoiled or rancid, so there was never enough to eat.  The Indians left the reservations in droves, eager to return to their nomadic lifestyle, to roam freely, to hunt and fish as they had in the past, ready to fight if they must to defend their families and their lifestyle.  They knew that the wasichu, the white man, would come one day to herd them back to the reservations.  They didn’t want to go back, would fight if they had to.

The Sioux and Cheyenne did not fight as did their antagonist, the white man.  There was no commander, no colonels or majors, no lieutenants or sergeants, no orders given, no skirmish lines established, no battalions or companies, no troops held in reserve.  No one attended West Point.  There was no military training, no daily drills on the parade ground, no reveille, no evening taps, none of that.  Theirs was a warrior culture, the men self-taught in the warrior ways.  They fought as individuals to demonstrate their bravery.  They fought to defend their families.  Many of their customs were established long before they were introduced to firearms.  To touch an enemy with a coup stick was an act of bravery that might gain them a feather, difficult enough when the weapons were tomahawks and warclubs, spears and bows and arrows, almost impossible if the enemy was brandishing a pistol or a rifle.  Stealing an enemy’s horse was another act of bravery that might gain a warrior a feather.  They didn’t have to kill their enemy to show their bravery, but if threatened they would not hesitate to do so and do so with brutal savagery.

It wasn’t that they didn’t have leaders; they did, war chiefs who had demonstrated their bravery time and time again.  But the war chiefs didn’t necessarily issue orders.  They didn’t sit around a map and discuss tactics though they might observe circumstances and agree with each other how to respond to a threat.  War chiefs might collectively enact whatever plan was agreed upon, and those warriors eager to show their bravery followed, moving and acting as if of a single mind.  They were fierce and cunning fighters, especially when emotions of anger and hate were aroused.

The whites thought of them as barbaric.  Word of scalping, torture, and mutilation of the dead were prevalent and frightening to those who were self-described as civilized.  The rumors were true, but it was just part of their culture, misunderstood as it may have been by the wasichu.  Scalps were trophies.  White men had medals, Indians had scalps.  Mutilation of corpses was believed to incapacitate their enemies in the afterlife, to render them harmless.  It seemed appropriate to the Indians to do so, but knowledge of the practice struck terror in the minds of the wasichu.  Men who might otherwise bravely face death in battle were sometimes paralyzed with fear when faced with the grim thought of death, or worse yet, capture and torture by the Indians.