Black Elk Speaks
Walking The Black Road
We stayed in that country near the Bighorn Mountains for about
a moon, maybe a little more. My father told me all the fighting
had not done any good, because the Hang-Around-the-Fort people were
getting ready to sell the Black Hills to the Wasichu anyway, and
that more soldiers were coming to fight us. He said that Three Stars
was on Goose Creek and that many other soldiers were up on the Yellowstone,
and that these would come together and have us between them.
Some of our people had been leaving us, a few at a time, and going
in to live at the agencies the Wasichus had made. But there were
many of us left, and so we started with all our ponies to get away
from the soldiers.
We traveled in a very long line down the Rosebud and camped where
the river flows through between high bluffs. Then we moved on down
stream to where we had the big sun dance before the rubbing out
of Long Hair. The soldiers had come through that way, and the holy
place was all cut up with shod hoofs and made dirty with horse droppings.
Then we moved on down stream to a sacred place where there is a
big rock bluff right beside the water, and high up on this bluff
pictures used to appear, foretelling something important that was
going to happen soon. There was a picture on it then, of many soldiers
hanging head downward; and the people said it was there before the
rubbing out of Long Hair. I do not know; but it was there then,
and it did not seem that anybody could get up that high to make
a picture.
We moved over to the Tongue River and camped a little while. When
we were there, scouts came in and said that a big fire-boat had
come up the Yellowstone with a load of corn for the soldiers' horses,
and that it was piled on the other side of the river. Some of our
young men went to see, and one of them, Yellow Shirt, got killed
by the fireboat's soldiers over there. But the others brought corn
home and they gave us some. We parched it, and it was good.
About this time, in the Moon of Black Cherries [August], the scattering
of the people began, because by now we learned that the soldiers
were coming again. Dull Knife and the Shyelas went over to Willow
Creek in the Bighorn Mountains. Many of the Lakotas stole away in
small parties and started for the agencies. The rest of us, still
a great many, started east, and the soldiers of Three Stars followed
us. Our people set fire to the grass behind us as we went, and the
smoke back there was wide as the day and the light of the fire was
wide as the night. This was to make the soldiers' horses starve.
Then it began to rain, and it kept on raining for days while we
traveled east. Our ponies had to work hard in the deep mud, and
it must have been bad for the soldiers' horses back there with nothing
to eat.
Sitting Bull and Gall with some people left us and started for
Grandmother's Land [Canada], and other people were going away from
us all the time, but Crazy Horse would not leave the country that
was ours.
In the Moon of the Black Calf [September] we were camping near
the head of the Grand River when American Horse with many tepees
had a fight with the soldiers of Three Stars by the Slim Buttes
on Rabbit Creek. They fought hard there in the rain, and the soldiers
killed American Horse and chased the women and children out of their
homes and took all the papa [dried bison meat] that they had made
to feed themselves that winter. Then Crazy Horse went over there
with a band of our warriors and chased the soldiers through the
rain. They fled southward toward the Black Hills, and many of their
horses died in the deep mud. He followed them a long way and made
them fight as they fled.
Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us, and it was all
our own country. It was ours already when the Wasichus made the
treaty with Red Cloud, that said it would be ours as long as grass
should grow and water flow. That was only eight winters before,
and they were chasing us now because we remembered and they forgot.
After that we started west again, and we were not happy anymore,
because so many of our people had untied their horses' tails and
gone over to the Wasichus. We went back deep into our country, and
most of the land was black from the fire, and the bison had gone
away. We camped on the Tongue River where there was some cottonwood
for the ponies; and a hard winter came on early. It snowed much;
game was hard to find, and it was a hungry time for us. Ponies died,
and we ate them. They died because the snow froze hard and they
could not find the grass that was left in the valleys and there
was not enough cottonwood to feed them all. There had been thousands
of us together that summer, but there were not two thousand now.
News came to us there in the Moon of the Falling Leaves [November]
that the Black Hills had been sold to the Wasichus and also all
the country west of the Hills--the country we were in then. I learned
when I was older that our people did not want to do this. The Wasichus
went to some of the chiefs alone and got them to put their marks
on the treaty. Maybe some of them did this when they were crazy
from drinking the minne wakan [holy water, whiskey] the Wasichus
gave them. I have heard this; I do not know. But only crazy or very
foolish men would sell their Mother Earth. Sometimes I think it
might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill
us all.
Dull Knife was camping with his band of Shyelas on Willow Creek
in the edge of the Bighorn Mountains, and one morning very early
near the end of the Moon of Falling Leaves the soldiers came there
to kill them. The people were all sleeping. The snow was deep and
it was very cold. When the soldiers began shooting into the tepees,
the people ran out into the snow, and most of them were naked from
their sleeping robes. Men fought in the snow and cold with nothing
on them but their cartridge belts, and it was a hard fight, because
the warriors thought of the women and children freezing. They could
not whip the soldiers, but those who were not killed and did not
die from the cold, got away and came to our camp on the Tongue.
I can remember when Dull Knife came with what was left of his starving
and freezing people. They had almost nothing, and some of them had
died on the way. Many little babies died. We could give them clothing,
but of food we could not give them much, for we were eating ponies
when they died. And afterwhile they left us and started for the
Soldiers' Town on White River to surrender to the Wasichus; and
so we were all alone there in that country that was ours and had
been stolen from us.
After that the people noticed that Crazy Horse was queerer than
ever. He hardly ever stayed in the camp. People would find him out
alone in the cold, and they would ask him to come home with them.
He would not come, but sometimes he would tell the people what to
do. People wondered if he ate anything at all. Once my father found
him out alone like that, and he said to my father: "Uncle,
you have noticed me the way I act. But do not worry; there are caves
and holes for me to live in, and out here the spirits may help me.
I am making plans for the good of my people."
He was always a queer man, but that winter he was queerer than
ever. Maybe he had seen that he would soon be dead and was thinking
how to help us when he would not be with us any more.
It was a very bad winter for us and we were all sad. Then another
trouble came. We had sent out scouts to learn where the soldiers
were, and they were camping at the mouth of the Tongue. Early in
the Moon of Frost in the Tepee [January], some of our scouts came
in and said that the soldiers were coming up the Tongue to fight
us, and that they had two wagon guns [cannon] with them.
There was no better place to go, so we got ready to fight them;
and I was afraid, because my father told me we had not much ammunition
left. We moved the village a little way off up stream, and our warriors
were ready on a high bluff when the walking soldiers and their wagons
came in the morning. The soldiers built fires and ate their breakfast
there in the valley while our people watched them and were hungry.
Then they began shooting with the wagon guns that shot twice, because
the iron balls went off after they fell. Some of them did not go
off, and we boys ran after one of these and got it.
Then the walking soldiers started up the bluff, and it began to
snow hard and they fought in the blizzard. We could not stop the
soldiers coming up, because we had not much ammunition. The soldiers
had everything. But our men used spears and guns for clubs when
the soldiers got there, and they fought hand to hand awhile, holding
the soldiers back until the women could break camp and get away
with the children and ponies. We fled in the blizzard southward
up the Tongue and over to the Little Powder River. The soldiers
followed us awhile, and there was fighting in our rear. We got away,
but we lost many things we needed, and when we camped on the Little
Powder, we were almost as poor as Dull Knife's people were the day
they came to us. It was so cold that the sun made himself fires,
and we were eating our starving ponies.
Late in the Moon of the Dark Red Calf [February] or early in the
Moon of the Snowblind [March], Spotted Tail, the Brule, with some
others, came to us. His sister was Crazy Horse's mother. He was
a great chief and a great warrior before he went over to the Wasichus.
I saw him and I did not like him. He was fat with Wasichu food and
we were lean with famine. My father told me that he came to make
his nephew surrender to the soldiers, because our own people had
turned against us, and in the spring when the grass was high enough
for the horses, many soldiers would come and fight us, and many
Shoshones and Crows and even Lakotas and our old friends, the Shyelas,
would come against us with the Wasichus. I could not understand
this, and I thought much about it. How could men get fat by being
bad, and starve by being good? I thought and thought about my vision,
and it made me very sad; for I wondered if maybe it was only a queer
dream after all.
And then I heard that we would all go into the Soldiers' Town when
the grass should appear, and that Crazy Horse had untied his pony's
tail and would not fight again.
In the Moon of the Grass Appearing [April] our little band started
for the Soldiers' Town ahead of the others, and it was early in
the Moon When the Ponies Shed [May] that Crazy Horse came in with
the rest of our people and the ponies that were only skin and bones.
There were soldiers and Lakota policemen in lines all around him
when he surrendered there at the Soldiers' Town. I saw him take
off his war bonnet. I was not near enough to hear what he said.
He did not talk loud and he said only a few words, and then he sat
down.
I was fourteen years old. We had enough to eat now and we boys
could play without being afraid of anything. Soldiers watched us,
and sometimes my father and mother talked about our people who had
gone to Grandmother's Land with Sitting Bull and Gall, and they
wanted to be there. We were camped near Red Cloud's Agency, which
was close to the Soldiers' Town. What happened that summer is not
a story.
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