Sun Going Down by Jack Todd

Author:Jack Todd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ezra left early that winter to visit Spotted War Bonnet at the Pine Ridge Agency. War Bonnet was trying to make a living the white man’s way, running a small ranch on the northwest corner of the reservation, not far from the Black Hills. He lived in a comfortable, tightly chinked log cabin with his wife and two young sons, his apparel, language, and habits an odd hodgepodge of white and Lakota. War Bonnet was mistrustful of any white man, even Ezra, but after a supper of fried cottontails, the two men talked well into the night. The Indian agent Dr. D. F. Royer, nicknamed “Man Afraid of Indians” by the Sioux after his panic helped create the atmosphere that led to the Wounded Knee massacre, had been replaced by the acting agent Captain George Leroy Brown. Brown was no Valentine McGillycuddy, the one agent who understood the Sioux and spoke their language, but he was a soldier and he was not given to panic. Captain Brown tried to encourage native ranchers like War Bonnet, mostly because he felt that if they took up white ways they were less likely to attempt another rebellion. He was also trying to supply the Lakota people with enough beef to get them through the drouth. War Bonnet himself was looking for good breeding stock, a Galloway herd bull and a dozen purebred heifers. If Eli and Ezra could provide War Bonnet with quality stock, he would swap some of the wild horses they were still capturing all the way west to the Black Hills; the Paint brothers could break the horses and sell them at a nice profit back in Brown County. They sat staring into the fire, getting comfortable with each other again through long silences. Finally Ezra said what had to be said.

—You ought to know I was workin as a scout for the Sumner command out of Camp Robinson a few winters back. Tryin to find Big Foot, get him to come in before the troopers found him first. I got to Wounded Knee Creek all right, but I got there a day late and a dollar short. It was a awful thing, and it ought never to have happened. They killed women and children and old ones along that creek for no reason at all.

—The whites were afraid. They had nothing to fear from us, but they were afraid.

—Yes, they were. They were afraid, and frightened people do stupid and vicious things. Which don’t make it right. They were afraid of the Ghost Dance.

War Bonnet got up to put more wood on the fire.

—The Ghost Dance was like a dying buffalo. The buffalo has an arrow through the heart, but he stands anyway, pawing the earth. Sometimes he stands like that for a long while. But he always falls in the end. At the time of the Ghost Dance, we Lakota and our friends the Cheyennes were already shot through the heart, but we didn’t know enough to fall over.

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