There were no cars or lights most of the way. Occasionally we would pass a big orange flame at a well site, throwing spokes of shadow across the prairie. When we reached the car, I held a flashlight while Lydell White Plume changed the tire. He told me that he was a Fancy Dancer, who entered dance competitions at reservations all over the West and in Mexico. He opened the hatchback of his car and carefully lifted out parts of his dance costume to show me. From the darkness, the two of us leaned into the glow from the car’s rear overhead light while he pointed out the detail in his dance bustle—the turkey feathers, the white, yellow, and ginger-colored plumes, the beaded center. Then he set the bustle back into the car, saw that no parts were going to get crushed, and pushed the hatchback shut.

  * * *

  South of the town of McLaughlin, South Dakota, on a gravel road on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, I picked up a guy who was walking in the other direction. He was short, in his fifties, wearing a white shirt with a brown paisley pattern. He got in and looked at me and said, “I remember you. You passed me by on the highway.” I said I didn’t remember seeing him. He said, “Yep. You passed me right by.” In his hand was a brown terry-cloth washrag. He mopped his face with it. The afternoon was cloudless, maybe ninety-five degrees.

  I told him I was trying to find the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin. An exhibit in a museum in Mobridge, S.D., said that it was on the Grand River on a marked road off U.S. Highway 12. I had been driving around for hours and couldn’t find any marked road. I couldn’t even find the Grand River. “I’ll take you right to him,” he said. “I’m Sioux Indian. I own all this land. This is all tribal land. I’ve walked or drove every damn inch of it.” We shook hands. His name was Jim Yellow Earring.

  I knew the actual cabin wasn’t there. The one-room log house where the famous Hunkpapa Sioux chief spent his final reservation years was disassembled some time after his death and hauled away in wagons so that it could be displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and I had read that it eventually ended up in the Chicago city dump. But I wanted to see the place Sitting Bull liked enough to live there. Places Indians liked are different from what you see while driving the grid of roads stencilled over the Great Plains. Sometimes when you find such a place it makes that grid seem to disappear.

  Jim Yellow Earring directed me from the gravel road to a one-lane dirt road. Soon a strip of grass growing between the wheels brushed under the car. Then we were on no road at all, just prairie with faint wheel tracks across it. Then we bounced into a road with deep ruts, and red dust came up through the holes in the floor. Nowhere up ahead did I see anything that looked like a river valley. Jim Yellow Earring said to keep going.

  Sitting Bull may have picked such a remote site for his cabin because he wanted to put plenty of distance between himself and Major James McLaughlin, Indian agent at Standing Rock. The two did not like each other. On McLaughlin’s part, the feeling was closer to abhorrence. By the time Sitting Bull lived here, he was a celebrity. He had travelled America and Canada with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, had met President Cleveland and former President Grant, had spoken through an interpreter to large crowds on a fifteen-city lecture tour, had carried the flag at the head of a procession celebrating the opening of the Northern Pacific Railroad. He received fan letters in English, French, and German, hate mail, and letters from lunatics. He not only had an Indian agent, he had a booking agent. He sold his autograph for a dollar each. Fame made him a lot of money, but his colleague Annie Oakley remembered that he gave all the money away to ragged little boys. McLaughlin maneuvered to undercut his influence on the reservation, and favored other chiefs over Sitting Bull and tried to humiliate him, and Sitting Bull was ornery right back. Sitting Bull was on the way to becoming one of the best-known Americans in history; the process would probably have been difficult even for someone who had not hated and fought white people most of his life.

  Jim Yellow Earring pointed to a speck across the prairie. “That’s my brother-in-law’s house,” he said. “He’s got a well with the best damn water, makes the best damn coffee in the world. I’m pretty dry. I been walking all day. Do you have anything to drink?”

  “There might be a couple of beers somewhere, but they’re hot.”

  On the floor, he spotted a plastic bottle of amber liquid with the brand name Mix-I-Go. “Hey!” he said, “what’s this? Whiskey?”

  “God, no! That’s gasoline additive! For the car!”

  He looked at the bottle for a moment, reading the small print. Then, reluctantly, he set it back on the floor.

  Another reason Sitting Bull chose to locate his cabin on the banks of the Grand River was that he was born there. In fact, one biography says that he was born in March of 1831 at a spot within a few miles of where his cabin later stood. The Grand River was called the Ree then, and the place was called Many-Caches. Sitting Bull was a quiet and deliberate child, and one of his names was Slow. Like many Westerners, he spent so much time on horseback when he was little that he grew up bowlegged. He had a good singing voice, and women always loved him. As a young man, he was in many battles with other tribes and white people. A Crow shot him in his left foot in a fight on Porcupine Creek, near the Yellowstone River. Sitting Bull killed the Crow, and limped for the rest of his life. At a skirmish near White Butte, on the Little Missouri River, a soldier shot him in the left hip with a pistol. At a battle with some Flatheads near the Musselshell River, he was shot through the bones of the left forearm with an arrow. In a standoff fight with the Army escort of a railroad surveying party in the Yellowstone valley, he sat down within range of the soldiers’ rifles and smoked a pipe while bullets hit around him. Several other Indians joined him, and when the pipe was finished, they got up and ran; Sitting Bull walked. Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull made a spiritual offering of one hundred pieces of his flesh, and sang while his adopted brother, Jumping Bull, cut fifty, each the size of a matchhead, from each arm. After that battle he eventually fled with other Sioux north to Canada, and returned to surrender at Fort Buford in 1881. The Army promised him amnesty, held him for two years at another fort, and sent him to the Standing Rock Agency in 1883.

  This is not the kind of history that breeds immediate warmth and trust between peoples. In the rearview mirror I looked at my eyes, marked by worry and second-guessing with little lines like the calibrations on a camera lens. Then I looked at Jim Yellow Earring’s eyes—calm, bloodshot, brown as a deer’s. “Keep going, I’ll take you right to him,” he said. The road had now become so deeply rutted that the trick was finding the exact moment to steer from one set of ruts into a new set to the right or left. Just as we were about to high-center, Jim Yellow Earring would yell, “My side! Come over to this side!… Okay, okay, now your side!”

  Sitting Bull naturally attracted to him the wildest and most unreconstructed Indians on the reservation, and they pitched canvas tipis and built cabins close to his, and the place became known as Sitting Bull’s camp. When the Ghost Dance religion swept the Indian reservations of the West in 1889–90, Sitting Bull’s camp was where all the reservation’s Ghost Dancers gathered. The Ghost Dance religion was one of the saddest religions of all time. It was the invention of a Paiute Indian called Wovoka, who may have been inspired by the doctrines of an earlier Paiute holy man called Tävibo. Wovoka had lived with a white family, who knew him as Jack Wilson. Part of his education had consisted of Christian religious training, and he sometimes said he was the Messiah returned, and his followers called him the Christ. It may be impossible for any white person ever to explain Ghost Dancing, but evidently the idea came to Wovoka in a vision during an eclipse of the sun on January 1, 1889. He said that he went to heaven and saw God, who told him that if the Indians did a dance which He would teach him, and danced long enough and hard enough, all white people would be submerged under a layer of new earth five times the height of a man, and the buffalo would return, and all the Indians who had ever lived would come back to life, and the land would become a paradise. Certainly, this would be an attractive philosophy for any American Indian at the end of that century, who was likely to have more friends and close relations among the dead than among the living. News of Wovoka’s vision spread among the Western tribes, and many sent delegates to meet and talk with him. One of the Sioux delegates reported later that he “saw the whole world” when he looked into Wovoka’s hat.

  The road now led down a gully so steep that Jim Yellow Earring was thrown forward. His handprints were still in the red dust on the dashboard months later. I said I wasn’t going any farther. I put the car in reverse and tried to back up. Nothing happened. So we headed on down, with bushes now scraping the side. A branch came through the open window and caught me on the side of the head. Jim identified it as a branch of the wild plum tree. He said that wild plums were delicious. The high grass bent down under the front bumper and then sprang up when we passed. In the river bottom, where we finally stopped, the grass was above the door handles.

  Ghost Dancers danced past exhaustion, and often lay on the ground in a trance, their skin shivering, for days at a time. When they regained consciousness, they told of the distant stars they had visited, and of the long-dead friends and relatives they had talked to. Sometimes they brought back white, grayish earth—a piece of the morning star—as proof. Desperate as it was, the Ghost Dance did not originally have violent implications, but among certain tribes (the Sioux in particular) it soon acquired them. Indians often painted symbols of the dance on muslin shirts, and some began to say that these paintings made the shirts bulletproof.

  “This is the place,” Jim Yellow Earring said. “It was plentiful with deer in the old days. Back then, it was all flat ground and them cottonwoods growin’ like weeds. In 1949—that’s when the river really came. That was the big flood. That’s why these banks are here. This used to be a big prairie-dog village, but the government poisoned ’em all. From here it’s about twelve miles to the town of Bullhead, ichipasisi. That means walking along a river crossing back and forth, you know, like sewing.”

  The Ghost Dance frightened white people on and near the reservations, and the Indian agents jailed its leaders and called for military support. One agent, R. F. Royer, of the Pine Ridge Reservation, whom the Indians nicknamed Young Man Afraid of the Sioux, sent so many telegrams to Washington that the Army soon responded with thousands of troops. Agent McLaughlin, as a matter of pride, preferred to handle problems at his reservation with his own Indian police, and he ordered them to arrest a fierce warrior named Kicking Bear, leader of the Ghost Dancers there. Somehow Kicking Bear caused the police to return, dazed, without him. At Sitting Bull’s camp was a wealthy widow from Brooklyn named Catherine Weldon, who was a representative of the National Indian Defense Association, and who was serving Sitting Bull as secretary. She thought the Ghost Dance was a Mormon plot, and she challenged Kicking Bear to an open debate. Apparently, Kicking Bear declined.

  The spot where Sitting Bull’s cabin stood is surrounded by a woven-wire fence with a swinging gate. Inside the fence is a stone obelisk, and a metal plaque erected by the South Dakota State Historical Society. The plaque’s inscription begins: “Sitting Bull, best known American Indian, leader of the ‘hostile groups’ for a generation, a powerful orator, a clever prophet…” A grove of bur oaks grows above the fence, and the grass is high all around. I walked over to look at the Grand River, and suddenly a three-foot-long rattlesnake reared out of the grass, rattling. I saw the white of his belly as he flopped over on his back trying to get away. Jim Yellow Earring went for him like a man chasing a bus. “I’ll snap his tongue out of his bone head for you,” he said. I asked him please not to.

  McLaughlin eventually induced Kicking Bear to leave the reservation. McLaughlin hoped that with the coming of cold weather the dance would die out. Sitting Bull told the people that this year the weather would stay fair, and they could dance all winter, and he was right. McLaughlin sent a telegram to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington recommending that rations be suspended for all Ghost Dancing Indians at Standing Rock. The Commissioner sent a telegram back asking for the names of Indian “leaders of excitement or fomenters of disturbance” who should be arrested. McLaughlin told the Indian police that they might have to arrest Sitting Bull, and they resigned. McLaughlin appointed new police, under the command of a Yankton Sioux named Henry Bullhead. Catherine Weldon could not get the Indians to listen to her, was outraged when Sitting Bull proposed marriage, and finally left Sitting Bull’s camp in disgust. Sitting Bull drove her in his wagon to the town of Cannonball. In Chicago, Buffalo Bill Cody found out that Sitting Bull was to be arrested, persuaded an Army general to give him the arrest order, took a train to Standing Rock, and was on his way to Sitting Bull’s camp with a wagonload of candy and presents, drunk, when McLaughlin delayed him long enough to get the order rescinded. McLaughlin heard that Sitting Bull planned to leave the reservation, so on the morning of Monday, December 15, he sent forty-three members of the Indian police to Sitting Bull’s camp to arrest him. About a hundred U.S. Cavalry, with a Gatling gun and a gun that shot explosive shells, waited in reserve three miles away.

  One of the Indian police said later, “Sitting Bull was not afraid; we were afraid.” In Sitting Bull’s camp were men who had killed a lot of people in the past, men who had recently decided that they were bulletproof. The police rode into the camp before dawn and found Sitting Bull in bed. The camp woke up right away and backed the police up against the cabin when they tried to put Sitting Bull on his horse. One policeman had Sitting Bull around the waist, two others had his arms. Somebody yelled something; Sitting Bull yelled something; a man named Catch the Bear shot Bullhead; Bullhead, falling, shot Sitting Bull; then, thousands of shots were fired. Sitting Bull, punctured so often in the past, was hit seven times. He, his son Crowfoot, Jumping Bull, his son Chase-Wounded, Catch the Bear, Blackbird, Spotted Horn Bull, and Brave Thunder died. The police lost Little Eagle, Hawk Man, Arm Strong, Middle, Afraid of Soldier, Bullhead, and Shavehead. Throughout the fight, no English was spoken.

  “Someone went to quite a bit to write that down,” Jim Yellow Earring said, leaning on the fence to read the plaque. “Ol’ Sittin’ Bull—he didn’t give a damn if he was comin’ or goin’.” I copied the inscriptions on the plaque and the obelisk in my notebook. Then I asked Jim Yellow Earring to write for me the Sioux words for rattlesnake, for walking-along-a-river-crossing-back-and-forth, and for yellow earring (Zewiy—“I wisht I’d’a’ used that name in the service”). The Sioux script taught at Indian schools looks as pretty as spoken Sioux sounds. The sun was now shoulder high. It made the tassels of the grass look red, and it caught the white spot under the wings of nighthawks that flew above us as erratically as the insects they were chasing.

  I made sure I had a place to turn around, and then we started out. I was afraid I’d never get up the steep gully, but I did, my rear wheels tiptoeing along the edges of the ruts. It seemed longer this way than it had coming in. Jim Yellow Earring told me about an argument he had had with the Farmers Home Administration when he asked for a loan; about his days in the Army in Fort Benning, Georgia; about his mother, who was dead; about a man named Straight Pine, a short, stocky fella who used to run the best damn Hereford cattle in the area; about how the Crow Indians in Montana drink Lysol, also known as “Montana gin,” which will sure get you drunk, but which can collapse your lungs if you don’t mix it right; about how much he loved to dance; about how his mother used to take him and his brothers down to the Grand River to play; about how he owned all the land I was looking at, and so what if they wouldn’t let him run cattle in here he’d take and run cattle in here anyway; about what a tough guy Bullhead (he pronounced it “Bull’id”) was; about how Sitting Bull pulled a good shot on Custer; about all the white people who dig ruts in this road on their way to see Sitting Bull’s camp. He kept telling me, “My side! Your side! My side!” He did imitations of different accents—Navaho, black, New York. He sang a song about being a thousand miles away from home, waitin’ for a train. He asked me, “Do you ever get lonesome? My mom died nine years ago, and we used to live—well, did you see that old washing machine we passed back there? Well, that’s where our house was.”

  “That was your washing machine?”

  “It was my mother’s washing machine.”

  4

  IN former times, Indians thought the white men’s custom of shaking hands was comical. Sometimes two Indians would approach each other, shake hands, and then fall on the ground laughing. Indians swam differently than white people, built smaller campfires, sharpened knives only on one side, and did not use the stars to guide themselves. White butchers saw through bones and cut meat across the grain, but Indians usually cut with the grain and rarely sawed bones. Some Indians would not eat meat cut across the grain. Indians usually did not (and do not) grow a lot of hair on their faces or arms or legs, and some found the hairy bodies of white men disgusting. Indians were shocked by the way white parents grabbed their children by the ears to discipline them; because of this custom, some Indians called white people “Flop Ears.” Almost all Indians, at one time or another, composed verses about events in their lives or visions they had seen, but they did not use rhyme. For many Indians, swearwords or “Whiskey!” were the first English they learned. In front of white people, Indians did not like to refer to each other by name.

 

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