LITTLE BIG MAN

Old Lodge Skins was sort of uneasy when we was riding in: I could see that, for an Indian’s face is as expressive as anybody’s when he is among his own, but nobody tried to stop us and nobody came up and asked: “Where are you going? What do you want?” which they would have done to someone who did not belong, and after a while I could see, beneath his chiefly dignity, that the old man was considerable relieved.

Shortly out come some headmen from the Burnt Artery band and greeted him like a brother, inviting our bunch to camp in their circle. The old crime had been washed out. So everything was perfect and they had taken buffalo on a big ritualistic hunt up on the headwaters of the Republican River, so we all had to eat six or seven consecutive meals that day because every Indian who saw you would pull you into his lodge and press a feast on you.

Then there was some speechifying by the orators and songs by the singers, and some dancing by the heemaneh-with whom Little Horse now definitely threw in his lot-which was very graceful and well received. And gossip was exchanged on every hand, Shadow That Comes in Sight told his jokes, and gifts were presented back and forth and it got to be a problem to remember what you had left to give the next guy without passing on something you had just received.

I was in the middle of all this. There were those among the new people who sized me up, and I expect some talk went on out of my hearing until they all got it straight, but I never had to undergo one embarrassing moment, except maybe owing to the excess of approval that was manifested after Old Lodge Skins, Burns Red, and Little Horse done their bragging about me.

Everything seemed to be swell, but after purely Indian matters had been pretty well gone over, up came the subject of the whites and that was like a storm sky obscuring the sun. The spring before, there had been a difficulty over four horses which the Cheye

There had been other troubles, with a chief called Big Head wounded while on a friendly visit to Fort Kearny. The Cheye

It was pretty early on that I come to realize that most serious situations in life, or my life anyway, were like that time I rubbed out the Crow: he spared me because I was white, and I killed him because I was Cheye

Anyhow, the Cheye

That was before I heard the oratory of the medicine men: two of them, named Ice and Dark. They had great powers. All they had to do was make certain motions towards the soldiers, and when the latter fired their guns the bullets would roll slowly down the barrels and fall harmless to the earth.

I used to stand along the path that Nothing took when she went to the river for water, and as she passed I’d grab the fringe on her skirt and give a little tug, then let go. About the only compensation I got for it was that she didn’t show no more attention to Coyote, who was also now stuck on her, than to me. He and I would take turns in paying her notice: such as that if I was waiting for her on the river path, he would let that go and try to approach her when she was gathering buffalo chips. Since neither of us was yet getting anywhere, we wasn’t jealous of each other and maintained the neutral relations me and Coyote had always had. You know how it is: you have your friends and enemies, and then there is that host of others you can take or leave: same way among Indians.

I also had developed an Indian sense of time. I must have been about fifteen when we was on the Solomon’s Fork, and I had this crush on Nothing but I wasn’t any more impatient in regard to it than she was: the Cheye

Well sir, it was interesting to be in that big camp with all the activities and pretty soon they held a sun dance which went on for eight days of highly elaborate doings that wouldn’t mean anything to an individual not of that persuasion, but it reaffirmed the Human Beings in their sense of superiority, if it was possible to do that when they already never believed they had even close competition. In the self-tortures Younger Bear distinguished himself of course. He ripped the pegs out of his chest within fifteen minutes after their being attached, and had them hooked into new places and hung against the rawhide lines all night long. Next day his whole upper body was like an open sore, and he didn’t treat it with salve or mud or anything but strutted around with the blood drying.

Now you might call it typical of the Cheye

The bands traveled individually but for some distance formed two general movements: northward or south, for the tribe as a whole was divided most of the year into a larger segment that roamed as separate parts about the Platte, and another that hung around the fort of William Bent the trader, on the Purgatory and Arkansas rivers down in southern Colorado.

We who followed Old Lodge Skins was of course Northern Cheye