Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 by Sitting Bull

Author:Sitting Bull
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061006609
Publisher: HarperTorch
Published: 1994-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Missouri River Valley

1864

SITTING BULL LED FOUR HORNS to safety as the Sioux bands scattered, leaving Sully and his men in possession of the village … or what was left of it. For miles, Sitting Bull kept looking over his shoulder at the thickening black smoke as the Sioux lodges were reduced to cinders. He was worried about the loss of food. Then, too, with the buffalo harder and harder to find, lodges were going to be more difficult to replace. It took several skins for a single lodge, and there had been hundreds of lodges in the village, most of them abandoned to the enemy. How difficult it might be to hunt enough buffalo to replace them was something he could only imagine.

But he had more important things on his mind on this ride. Every glance at the dense black smoke reinforced the impression he had gained that a new way to fight had to be found. The white men did not fight like the Crows or the Hohe. They had tactics that the Hunkpapas had never encountered, and they fought for different reasons. They were not interested in glory. They did not care whether they managed to touch an enemy with a hand or something held in the hand, the only thing that really mattered to a Sioux warrior. As it was, the white soldiers seemed content to remain at a distance and fire their guns. Killing Sioux was all that mattered to them.

Intuitively, Sitting Bull understood that the gap between his culture and that of the white soldiers was enormous, and since the white soldiers were not going to cross over to his ways, he would have to find a way to convince the Sioux to adjust to the white man’s way of making war. If he couldn’t, then the Sioux would be pressed further and further west, something the Crows were unlikely to accept. And he knew that it would be increasingly difficult for the Sioux to get guns, because the white men would try to prevent their modern weapons from falling into Sioux hands. That would put the Lakota at a further disadvantage against the Crows and the other tribes to the west. But he knew that changing the habits of a lifetime would take a great deal of persuasion. Killdeer Mountain had convinced him, and he had to find a way to teach the others what he had learned.

On the long ride, he had plenty of time to mull it over. He also had more immediate concerns to attend to. Four Horns was in great pain, but managed to stay on his horse. “I can feel the bullet inside,” he said.

“Can you ride?”

“Do I have a choice? We have to find the women and children. We can’t leave them unprotected with the Long Knives on the warpath.”

The wound had stopped bleeding, and Sitting Bull knew that the herbs he had applied would help it heal and prevent infection, but he wished he had been able to remove the bullet.

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