The Song of the Indian Wars + 

To Alice, Three Years Old + 

When I began the gift I bear + 

It seemed you weren’t anywhere; + 

But being younger now I know + 

How even fifty moons ago + 

The apple bloom began to seek + 

The proper tinting for a cheek; + 

The skies, aware of thrilling news, + 

Displayed the loveliest of blues + 

For whoso fashions eyes to choose. + 

And all that prehistoric spring + 

Experimental grace of wing + 

And tentatively shapen forms, + 

From crocuses to thunderstorms. + 

And happy sound and sunny glow + 

Rehearsed you fifty moons ago. + 

Why, even I was toiling too + 

Upon a little gift for youl + 

And now that we are wise and three. + 

And I love you and you love me. + 

We know the whole conspiracy! + 

Preface + 

The Song of the Indian Wars is a part of the Epic Cycle of the West upon which I have been working for eleven years. However, as the reader will note, it is complete in itself, as are the two other parts of the Cycle already published. The Song of Three Friends and The Song of Hugh Glass. + 

My purpose in writing this cycle is to preserve the great race-mood of courage that was developed west of the Missouri River in the 19th century. The period with which I am dealing is beyond question the great American epic period, beginning in 1822 and ending in 1890. The dates are neither approximate nor arbitrary. In 1822 the first Ashley-Henry band ascended the Missouri and, after Lewis and Clark, the most important explorers of the West were Ashley-Henry men. As to the exploits of those men and the epic nature of the period, the interested reader is referred to the prefatory matter of The Song of Three Friends and The Song of Hugh Glass in the Modern Readers’ Series; also to my volume entitled The Splendid Wayfaring. The year 1890 marked the end of Indian resistance on the Plains. + 

In working out my plan for the cycle I have yet to deal with the period of exploration and the period of migration. + 

The Song of the Indian Wars deals with the last great fight for the bison pastures of the Plains between the westering white men and the prairie tribes⁠—the struggle for the right of way between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. Since the period was one of crucial importance in the process of our national development, I have felt the obligation to be accurate. I have neither fictionized my material nor sentimentalized my characters. It seems unnecessary to list all the printed sources upon which I have drawn during the years I have devoted to the subject. The list would be long, and I doubt if any work of considerable significance bearing on the period has escaped me, whether a government report, a formal history or a personal narrative. But one can not safely trust the printed sources alone, and I have made it a duty to consult many veterans who were themselves a part of what I have to tell. Among these I am especially indebted to the following: + 

Brigadier-General Anson Mills of Washington, D. C., who served with conspicuous gallantry under Crook both in the Rosebud fight and in the Battle of Slim Buttes; Brigadier-General Edward S. Godfrey of Cookston, N. J., who distinguished himself in the Reno battle on the Little Big Horn; Brigadier-General Walter S. Schuyler of San Francisco, who served under Crook and rendered brilliant service under Mackenzie in the winter battle with the Cheyennes on Willow Creek; Brigadier-General Charles King of Milwaukee, the famous soldier-novelist, who was one of Crook’s lieutenants in the campaign of 1876; Major Henry R. Lemly of Washington, D. C., who was Crook’s Acting Assistant Adjutant General during the famous “horse-meat march” in pursuit of the Indians after the Custer fight, and who witnessed the death of Crazy Horse; Colonel Homer W. Wheeler of Los Angeles, rich in experience as a plainsman and as an Indian fighter; the late Captain Grant P. Marsh of Bismarck, N. D., who was in command of the steamer Far West during the campaign of 1876 and transported the wounded of Reno’s command from the mouth of the Little Big Horn to Fort Abraham Lincoln; Captain James H. Cook of Agate, Nebraska, famous plainsman and army scout, intimate friend of the great Chief Red Cloud and of most of the other notable Sioux Leaders; Mrs. George A. Forsyth of Wilkes-Barre, Penn., wife of the late Brigadier-General George A. Forsyth, the hero of Beecher’s Island; Captain Howard Morton of Palo Alto, California, who fought with Forsyth on the Rickaree Fork of the Republican and who still carries the bullet that tore out one of his eyes in that wonderful little battle; Mr. William C. Slaper of Los Angeles, who served as a private under Reno in the Battle of the Little Big Horn; Sergeant Max Littman of St. Louis and Sergeant Samuel Gibson of Omaha, both of whom were in the Wagon Box fight; Mr. Wallace of Okarche, Okla., who was one of Custer’s scouts in the winter campaign ending with the Battle of the Washita; Mr. John Hunton, still living at old Fort Laramie where he was post trader in the ’sixties; Red Hawk, an Ogalala Sioux, who knew and fought with Crazy Horse; my “brother-friend,” Curly, one of Custer’s Crow scouts, who told me only the truth, however lustily he may have drawn the long bow for the amazement of over credulous journalists. + 

Indirectly I have gotten much valuable material out of the Indian consciousness through those who were intimately acquainted with the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe during the period of the last wars. Also much valuable reminiscence of white men, other than those named, has been made accessible to me by Mr. E. A. Brininstool of Los Angeles, whose extensive collection of source material bearing on the Indian Wars has cost him many years of effort and is equalled by few private collections of the sort in the country. Dr. Grace R. Hebard of the University of Wyoming, coauthor with Mr. Brininstool of the Bozeman Trail, a work of the highest authority on the Red Cloud Wars, gave me generous and timely aid by placing important original documents in my hands before the publication of the volume named. Mr. Doane Robinson of Pierre, Secretary of the State Historical Society of South Dakota and a high authority on the whole history of the Plains, has further increased my debt to him, a debt of long standing. + 

For some of the Indian speeches I am indebted to the works of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, who, himself a Sioux, was intimately acquainted with many of the great leaders of his people. + 

My years of intimate association with the Omaha Tribe, a Siouan people, at a time when the old generation was still numerous, may have given me some insight into Indian psychology. + 

As to the country in which my story moves, I have reason to know it well. My acquaintance with it began thirty-seven years ago when I lived with my pioneering grandparents in Kansas on the upper Solomon. Signs of the vanished buffalo were still there, and I have sat by cowchip fires. Also, I have taken the trouble to study at first hand the topography of the various localities and stretches of country that I have undertaken to describe. + 

Since my interest in the period treated is not of recent origin, it is impossible to give credit to all who, in one way or another, have helped me; but the foregoing will serve to indicate the means employed by way of getting at the truth and into the mood of the time. + 

Wherever I have found various versions of particular incidents I have been careful to adopt that one which seemed best supported by the evidence. Perhaps the greatest variation of testimony is to be found in the matter of Custer’s last battle. I may say that I am quite familiar with the controversy; nor should those who may resent my account as that of a Custer partisan accuse me of having never seen the report of the Reno investigation. I spent a wonderful day and night with it and I found it a rich mine for the psychologist. + 

In the interval between a four and a half year task just finished and another soon to be assumed, I may be allowed the satisfaction of noting the steadily increasing success of The Song of Three Friends and The Song of Hugh Glass, both with the general public and in the public schools and colleges. Already the progress made would seem to justify me in devoting my twenty best years to the Cycle. + 

The Song of the Indian Wars + 

I + 

The Sowing of the Dragon + 

At last the four year storm of fratricide + 

Had ceased at Appomattox, and the tide + 

Of war-bit myriads, like a turning sea’s, + 

Recoiled upon the deep realities + 

That yield no foam to any squall of change. + 

Now many a hearth of home had gotten strange + 

To eyes that knew sky-painting flares of war. + 

So much that once repaid the striving for + 

No longer mattered. Yonder road that ran + 

At hazard once beyond the ways of Man + 

By haunted vale and space-enchanted hill, + 

Had never dreamed of aught but Jones’s Mill⁠— + 

A dull pedestrian! The spring, where erst + 

The peering plowboy sensed a larger thirst, + 

Had shoaled from awe, so long the man had drunk + 

At deeper floods. How yonder field had shrunk + 

That billowed once mysteriously far + 

To where the cow-lot nursed the evening star + 

And neighbored with the drowsing moon and sun! + 

For O what winds of wrath had boomed and + 

Across what vaster fields of moaning grain⁠— + 

Rich seedings, nurtured by a ghastly rain + 

To woeful harvest! + 

So the world went small. + 

But ’mid the wreck of things remembered tall + 

An epidemic rumor murmured now. + 

Men leaned upon the handles of the plow + 

To hear and dream; and through the harrow-smoke + 

The weird voice muttered and the vision broke + 

Of distant, princely acres unpossessed. + 

Again the bugles of the Race blew west + 

That once the Tigris and Euphrates heard. + 

In unsuspected deeps of being stirred + 

The ancient and compelling Aryan urge. + 

A homing of the homeless, surge on surge, + 

The valley roads ran wagons, and the hills + 

Through lane and by-way fed with trickling rills + 

The man-stream mighty with a mystic thaw. + 

All summer now the Mississippi saw + 

What long ago the Hellespont beheld. + 

The shrewd, prophetic eyes that peered of eld + 

Across the Danube, visioned naked plains + 

Beyond the bleak Missouri, clad with grains, + 

Jewelled with orchard, grove and greening garth⁠— + 

Serene abundance centered in a hearth + 

To nurture lusty children. + 

On they swirled, + 

The driving breed, the takers of the world, + 

The makers and the bringers of the law. + 

Now up along the bottoms of the Kaw + 

The drifting reek of wheel and hoof arose. + 

The kiotes talked about it and the crows + 

Along the lone Republican; and still + 

The bison saw it on the Smoky Hill + 

And Solomon; while yonder on the Platte + 

Ten thousand wagons scarred the sandy flat + 

Between the green grass season and the brown. + 

A name sufficed to make the camp a town, + 

A whim unmade. In spaces wide as air, + 

And late as empty, now the virile share + 

Quickened the virgin meadowlands of God; + 

And lo, begotten of the selfsame sod, + 

The house and harvest! + 

So the Cadmian breed, + 

The wedders of the vision and the deed, + 

Went forth to sow the dragon-seed again. + 

But there were those⁠—and they were also men⁠— + 

Who saw the end of sacred things and dear + 

In all this wild beginning; saw with fear + 

Ancestral pastures gutted by the plow, + 

The bison harried ceaselessly, and how + 

They dwindled moon by moon; with pious dread + 

Beheld the holy places of their dead + 

The mock of aliens. + 

Sioux, Arapahoe, + 

Cheyenne, Commanche, Kiowa and Crow + 

In many a council pondered what befell + 

The prairie world. Along the Musselshell, + 

The Tongue, the Niobrara, all they said + 

Upon the Platte, the Arkansaw, the Red + 

Was echoed word by peril-laden word. + 

Along Popo Agie and the Horn they heard + 

The clank of hammers and the clang of rails + 

Where hordes of white men conjured iron trails + 

Now crawling past the Loup Fork and the Blue. + 

By desert-roaming Cimarron they knew, + 

And where La Poudre heads the tale was known, + 

How, snoring up beyond the Yellowstone, + 

The medicine-canoes breathed flame and steam + 

And, like weird monsters of an evil dream, + 

Spewed foes⁠—a multitudinary spawn! + 

Were all the teeming regions of the dawn + 

Unpeopled now? What devastating need + 

Had set so many faces pale with greed + 

Against the sunset? Not as men who seek + 

Some meed of kindness, suppliant and meek, + 

These hungry myriads came. They did but look, + 

And whatsoever pleased them, that they took. + 

Their faded eyes were icy, lacking ruth, + 

And all their tongues were forked to split the truth + 

That word and deed might take diverging ways. + 

Bewildered in the dusk of ancient days + 

The Red Men groped; and howsoever loud + 

The hopeful hotheads boasted in the crowd, + 

The wise ones heard prophetic whisperings + 

Through aching hushes; felt the end of things + 

Inexorably shaping. What should be + 

Already was to them. And who can flee + 

His shadow or his doom? Though cowards stride + 

The wind-wild thunder-horses, Doom shall ride + 

The arrows of the lightning, and prevail. + 

Ere long whole tribes must take the spirit trail + 

As once they travelled to the bison hunt. + 

Then let it be with many wounds⁠—in front⁠— + 

And many scalps, to show their ghostly kin + 

How well they fought the fight they could not win, + 

To perish facing what they could not kill. + 

So down upon the Platte and Smoky Hill + 

Swept war; and all their valleys were afraid. + 

The workers where the trails were being laid + 

To speed the iron horses, now must get + 

Their daily wage in blood as well as sweat + 

With gun and shovel. Often staring plains + 

Beheld at daybreak gutted wagon-trains + 

Set foursquare to the whirling night-attack, + 

With neither hoof nor hand to bring them back + 

To Omaha or Westport. Every week + 

The roiling coaches bound for Cherry Creek + 

Were scarred in running battle. Every day + 

Some ox-rig, creeping California way⁠— + 

That paradise of every hope fulfilled⁠— + 

Was plundered and the homesick driver killed, + 

Forlornly fighting for his little brood. + 

And often was the prairie solitude + 

Aware by night of burning ricks and roofs, + 

Stampeding cattle and the fleeing hoofs + 

Of wild marauders. + 

II + 

Red Cloud + 

Sullenly a gale + 

That blustered rainless up the Bozeman Trail + 

Was bringing June again; but not the dear + 

Deep-bosomed mother of a hemisphere + 

That other regions cherish. Flat of breast, + 

More passionate than loving, up the West + 

A stern June strode, lean suckler of the lean, + 

Her rag-and-tatter robe of faded green + 

Blown dustily about her. + 

Afternoon + 

Now held the dazzled prairie in a swoon; + 

And where the Platte and Laramie unite, + 

The naked heavens slanted blinding light + 

Across the bare Fort Laramie parade. + 

The groping shadow-arm the flag-pole swayed + 

To nightward, served to emphasize the glare; + 

And ’mid Saharan hollows of the air + 

One haughty flower budded from the mast + 

And bloomed and withered as the gale soughed past + 

To languish in the swelter. + 

Growing loud, + 

When some objection wakened in the crowd, + 

Or dwindling to a murmur of assent, + 

Still on and on the stubborn parley went + 

Of many treaty makers gathered here. + 

Big talk there was at Laramie that year + 

Of ’sixty-six; for lo, a mighty word + 

The Great White Father spoke, and it was heard + 

From peep of morning to the sunset fires. + 

The southwind took it from the talking wires + 

And gave it to the gusty west that blew + 

Its meaning down the country of the Sioux + 

Past Inyan Kara to Missouri’s tide. + 

The eager eastwind took and flung it wide + 

To where lush valleys gaze at lofty snow + 

All summer long. And now Arapahoe + 

The word was; now Dakota; now Cheyenne; + 

But still one word: “Let grass be green again + 

Upon the trails of war and hatred cease, + 

For many presents and the pipe of peace + 

Are waiting yonder at the Soldier’s Town!” + 

And there were some who heard it with a frown + 

And said, remembering the White Man’s guile: + 

“Make yet more arrows when the foemen smile.” + 

And others, wise with many winters, said: + 

“Life narrows, and the better days are dead. + 

Make war upon the sunset! Will it stay?” + 

And some who counselled with a dream would say: + 

“Great Spirit made all peoples. White and Red, + 

And pitched one big blue teepee overhead + 

That men might live as brothers side by side. + 

Behold! Is not our country very wide, + 

With room enough for all?” And there were some + 

Who answered scornfully: “Not so they come; + 

Their medicine is strong, their hearts are bad; + 

A little part of what our fathers had + 

They give us now, tomorrow come and take. + 

Great Spirit also made the rattlesnake + 

And over him the big blue teepee set!” + 

So wrought the Great White Father’s word; and yet, + 

Despite remembered and suspected wrong, + 

Because the Long Knife’s medicine was strong, + 

Their lacked not mighty chieftains who obeyed. + 

A thousand Ogalalas Man Afraid + 

And Red Cloud marshalled on the council trail; + 

A thousand Brulés followed Spotted Tail. + 

Cheyennes, Arapahoes came riding down + 

By hundreds; till the little Soldier Town + 

Was big with teepees. + 

Where the white June drowse + 

Beat slanting through a bower of withered boughs + 

That cast a fretwork travesty of shade, + 

Now sat the peace-commissioners and made + 

Soft words to woo the chieftains of the bands. + 

“They wanted but a roadway through the lands + 

Wherein the Rosebud, Tongue and Powder head, + 

That white men, seeking for the yellow lead + 

Along the Madison, might pass that way. + 

There ran the shortest trail by many a day + 

Of weary travel. This could do no harm; + 

Nor would there be occasion for alarm + 

If they should wish to set a fort or two + 

Up yonder⁠—not against Cheyenne and Sioux, + 

But rather that the Great White Father’s will + 

Might be a curb upon his people still + 

And Red Men’s rights be guarded by the laws.” + 

Adroitly phrased, with many a studied pause, + 

In which the half-breed spokesmen, bit by bit, + 

Reshaped the alien speech and scattered it, + 

The purpose of the council swept at last + 

Across the lounging crowd. And where it passed + 

The feathered headgear swayed and bent together + 

With muttering, as when in droughty weather + 

A little whirlwind sweeps the tasseled corn. + 

Some bull-lunged Ogalala’s howl of scorn + 

Was hurled against the few assenting “hows” + 

Among the Brulés. Then the summer drowse + 

Came back, the vibrant silence of the heat; + 

For Man Afraid had gotten to his feet, + 

His face set hard, one straight arm rising slow + 

Against the Whites, as though he bent a bow + 

And yonder should the fleshing arrow fly. + 

So stood he, and the moments creeping by + 

Were big with expectation. Still and tense, + 

The council felt the wordless eloquence + 

Of Man Afraid; and then: + 

“I tell you no! + 

When Harney talked to us ten snows ago + 

He gave us all that country. Now you say + 

The White Chief lied. My heart is bad today, + 

Because I know too well the forkèd tongue + 

That makes a promise when the moon is young, + 

And kills it when the moon is in the dark!” + 

The Ogalalas roared; and like a spark + 

That crawls belated when the fuse is damp, + 

The words woke sequent thunders through the camp + 

Where Cheyennes heard it and Arapahoes. + 

Then once again the chieftain’s voice arose: + 

“Your talk is sweet today. So ever speak + 

The white men when they know their hands are weak + 

That itch to steal. But once your soldiers pitch + 

Their teepees yonder, will the same hands itch + 

The less for being stronger? Go around. + 

I do not want you in my hunting ground! + 

You scare my bison, and my folk must eat. + 

Far sweeter than your words are, home is sweet + 

To us, as you; and yonder land is home. + 

In sheltered valleys elk and bison roam + 

All winter there, and in the spring are fat. + 

We gave the road you wanted up the Platte. + 

Make dust upon it then! But you have said + 

The shortest way to find the yellow lead + 

Runs yonder. Any trail is short enough + 

That leads your greedy people to the stuff + 

That makes them crazy! It is bad for you. + 

I, Man Afraid, have spoken. Hetchetu!” + 

How, how, how, how! A howl of fighting men + 

Swept out across the crowd and back again + 

To break about the shadow-mottled stand + 

Where Colonel Maynadier, with lifted hand, + 

Awaited silence. “As a soldier should, + 

He spoke straight words and few. His heart was good. + 

The Great White Father would be very sad + 

To know the heart of Man Afraid was bad + 

And how his word was called a crooked word. + 

It could not be that Man Afraid had heard. + 

The council had not said that Harney lied. + 

It wanted but a little road, as wide + 

As that a wagon makes from wheel to wheel. + 

The Long Knife chieftains had not come to steal + 

The Red Men’s hunting ground.” + 

The half-breeds cried + 

The speech abroad; but where it fell, it died. + 

One heard the flag a-ripple at the mast, + 

The bicker of the river flowing past, + 

The melancholy crooning of the gale. + 

Now ’mid the bodeful silence, Spotted Tail + 

Arose, and all the people leaned to hear; + 

For was he not a warrior and a seer + 

Whose deeds were mighty as his words were wise? + 

Some droll, shrewd spirit in his narrowed eyes + 

Seemed peering past the moment and afar + 

To where predestined things already are; + 

And humor lurked beneath the sober mien, + 

But half concealed, as though the doom foreseen + 

Revealed the old futility of tears. + 

Remembering the story of his years, + 

His Brulé warriors loved him standing so. + 

And some recalled that battle long ago + 

Far off beside the upper Arkansaw, + 

When, like the freshet of a sudden thaw, + 

The Utes came down; and how the Brulés, caught + 

In ambush, sang the death-song as they fought, + 

For many were the foes and few were they; + 

Yet Spotted Tail, a stripling fresh from play, + 

Had saved them with his daring and his wit. + 

How often when the dark of dawn was lit + 

With flaming wagon-tops, his battle-cry + 

Had made it somehow beautiful to die, + 

A whirlwind joy! And how the leaping glare + 

Had shown by fits the snow-fall of despair + 

Upon the white men’s faces! Well they knew + 

That every brave who followed him was two, + 

So mighty was the magic of his name. + 

And none forgot the first time Harney came⁠— + 

His whetted deaths that chattered in the sheath, + 

The long blue snake that set the ground beneath + 

A-smoulder with a many-footed rage. + 

What bleeding of the Brulés might assuage + 

That famished fury? Vain were cunning words + 

To pay the big arrears for harried herds + 

And desolated homes and settlers slain + 

And many a looted coach and wagon-train + 

And all that sweat of terror in the land! + 

Who now went forth to perish, that his band + 

Might still go free? Lo, yonder now he stood! + 

And none forgot his loving hardihood + 

The day he put the ghost paint on his face + 

And, dressed for death, went singing to the place + 

Where Harney’s soldiers waited. + 

“Brothers, friends!” + 

Slow words he spoke. “The longest summer ends, + 

And nothing stays forever. We are old. + 

Can anger check the coming of the cold? + 

When frosts begin men think of meat and wood + 

And how to make the days of winter good + 

With what the summer leaves them of its cheer. + 

Two times I saw the first snow deepen here, + 

The last snow melt; and twice the grass was brown + 

When I was living at the Soldier’s Town + 

To save my Brulés. All the while I thought + 

About this alien people I had fought, + 

Until a cloud was lifted from my eyes. + 

I saw how some great spirit makes them wise. + 

I saw a white Missouri flowing men, + 

And knew old times could never be again + 

This side of where the spirit sheds its load. + 

Then let us give the Powder River road, + 

For they will take it if we do not give. + 

Not all can die in battle. Some must live. + 

I think of those and what is best for those. + 

Dakotas, I have spoken.” + 

Cries arose + 

From where his band of Brulé warriors sat⁠— + 

The cries that once sent Panic up the Platte, + 

An eyeless runner panting through the gloom. + 

For though their chief had seen the creeping doom + 

Like some black cloud that gnaws the prairie rim, + 

Yet echoes of their charges under him + 

Had soared and sung above the words he said. + 

Now silence, like some music of the dead + 

That holds a throng of new-born spirits awed, + 

Possessed the brooding crowd. A lone crow cawed. + 

A wind fled moaning like a wildered ghost. + 

So clung that vatic hush upon the host + 

Until the Bad Face Ogalala band + 

Saw Red Cloud coming forward on the stand, + 

Serene with conscious might, a king of men. + 

Then all the hills were ululant again + 

As though a horde of foes came charging there; + 

For here was one who never gave despair + 

A moral mien, nor schooled a righteous hate + 

To live at peace with evil. Tall and straight + 

He stood and scanned the now quiescent crowd; + 

Then faced the white commissioners and bowed + 

A gracious bow⁠—the gesture of a knight + 

Whose courage pays due deference to might + 

Before the trumpets breathe the battle’s breath. + 

Not now he seemed that fearful lord of death, + 

Whose swarm of charging warriors, clad in red, + 

Were like a desolating thunder-head + 

Against an angry sunset. Many a Sioux + 

Recalled the time he fought alone and slew + 

His father’s slayers, Bull Bear and his son, + 

While yet a fameless youth; and many a one + 

About the fort, remembering Grattán + 

And all his troopers slaughtered by a man + 

So bland of look and manner, wondered much. + 

Soft to the ear as velvet to the touch, + 

His speech, that lacked but little to be song, + 

Caressed the fringing hushes of the throng + 

Where many another’s cry would scarce be clear. + 

“My brothers, when you see this prairie here, + 

You see my mother. Forty snows and four + 

Have blown and melted since the son she bore + 

First cried at Platte Forks yonder, weak and blind; + 

And whether winter-stern or summer-kind, + 

Her ways with me were wise. Her thousand laps + 

Have shielded me. Her ever-giving paps + 

Have suckled me and made me tall for war. + 

What presents shall I trade my mother for? + 

A string of beads? A scarlet rag or two?” + 

Already he was going ere they knew + 

That he had ceased. Among the people fled + 

A sound as when the frosted oaks are red + 

And naked thickets shiver in the flaws. + 

Far out among the lodges keened the squaws, + 

Shrill with a sorrow women understand, + 

As though the mother-passion of the land + 

Had found a human voice to claim the child. + 

With lifted brows the bland commission smiled, + 

As clever men who share a secret joke. + 

At length the Brulé, Swift Bear, rose and spoke, + 

’Twixt fear and favor poised. He seemed a man + 

Who, doubting both his ponies, rode the span + 

And used the quirt with caution. Black Horse then + 

Harangued the crowd a space, the words, Cheyenne, + 

Their sense, an echo of the White Man’s plea, + 

Rebounding from a tense expectancy + 

Of many pleasing gifts. + 

But all the while + 

These wrestled with the question, mile on mile + 

The White Man’s answer crept along the road⁠— + 

Two hundred mule-teams, leaning to the load, + 

And seven hundred soldiers! Middle May + 

Had seen their dust cloud slowly trail away + 

From Kearney. Rising ever with the sun + 

And falling when the evening had begun, + 

It drifted westward. When the low-swung moon + 

Was like a cradle for the baby June, + 

They camped at Julesburg. Yet another week + 

Across the South Platte’s flood to Pumpkin Creek + 

They fought the stubborn road. Beneath the towers + 

Of Court House Rock, awash in starry showers, + 

Their fagged herd grazed. Past Chimney Rock they crawled; + 

Past where the roadway narrows, dizzy walled; + 

Past Mitchell Post. And now, intent to win + 

Ere dusk to where the Laramie comes in, + 

The surly teamsters swore and plied the goad. + 

The lurching wagons grumbled at the road, + 

The trace-chains clattered and the spent mules brayed, + 

Protesting as the cracking lashes played + 

On lathered withers bitten to the red; + 

And, glinting in the slant glare overhead, + 

A big dust beckoned to the Soldier’s Town. + 

It happened now that Red Cloud, peering down + 

The dazzling valley road with narrowed eyes, + 

Beheld that picture-writing on the skies + 

And knitted puzzled brows to make it out. + 

So, weighing this and that, a lonely scout + 

Might read a trail by moonlight. Loudly still + 

The glib logicians wrangled, as they will, + 

The freer for the prime essential lacked⁠— + 

A due allowance for the Brutal Fact, + 

That, by the vulgar trick of being so, + 

Confounds logicians. + 

Lapsing in a flow + 

Of speech and counter-speech, a half hour passed + 

While Red Cloud stared and pondered. Then at last + 

Men saw him rise and leave his brooding place, + 

The flinty look of battle on his face, + 

A gripping claw of wrath between his brows. + 

Electric in the sullen summer drowse, + 

The silence deepened, waiting for his word; + 

But still he gazed, nor spoke. The people heard + 

The river lipping at a stony brink, + 

The rippling flag, then suddenly the clink + 

Of bridle-bits, the tinkling sound of spurs. + 

The chieftains and the white commissioners + 

Pressed forward with a buzzing of surprise. + 

The people turned. + 

Atop a gentle rise + 

That cut the way from fort to ford in half, + 

Came Carrington a-canter with his staff, + 

And yonder, miles behind, the reeking air + 

Revealed how many others followed there + 

To do his will. + 

Now rising to a shout, + 

The voice of Red Cloud towered, crushing out + 

The wonder-hum that ran from band to band: + 

“These white men here have begged our hunting land. + 

Their words are crookèd and their tongues are split; + 

For even while they feign to beg for it, + 

Their soldiers come to steal it! Let them try, + 

And prove how good a warrior is a lie, + 

And learn how Ogalalas meet a thief! + 

You, Spotted Tail, may be the beggar’s chief⁠— + 

I go to keep my mother-land from harm!” + 

He tapped his rifle nestled in his arm. + 

“From now I put my trust in this!” he said + 

With lowered voice; then pointing overhead, + 

“Great Spirit, too, will help me!” + 

With a bound + 

He cleared the bower-railing for the ground, + 

And shouting “Bring the horses in,” he made + 

His way across the turbulent parade + 

To where the Ogalala lodges stood. + 

So, driving down some hollow in a wood, + 

A great wind shoulders through the tangled ruck + 

And after it, swirled inward to the suck, + 

The crested timber roars. + 

Then, like a bird + 

That fills a sudden lull, again was heard + 

The clink of steel as Carrington rode through + 

The man-walled lane that cleft the crowd in two; + 

And, hobbling after, mindless of the awe + 

That favors might, a toothless, ancient squaw + 

Lifted a feeble fist at him and screamed. + 

III + 

The Council on the Powder + 

Serenely now the ghost of summer dreamed + 

On Powder River. ’Twas the brooding time, + 

With nights of starlight glinting on the rime + 

That cured the curly grass for winter feed, + 

And days of blue and gold when scarce a reed + 

Might stir along the runnels, lean with drouth. + 

Some few belated cranes were going south, + 

And any hour the blizzard wind might bawl; + 

But still the tawny fingers of the Fall, + 

Lay whist upon the maw of Winter. + 

Thrice + 

The moon had been a melting boat of ice + 

Among the burning breakers of the west, + 

Since Red Cloud, bitter-hearted, topped the crest + 

Above the Fort and took the homeward track, + 

The Bad Face Ogalalas at his back + 

And some few Brulés. Silently he rode, + 

And they who saw him bent as with a load + 

Of all the tribal sorrow that should be, + 

Pursued the trail as silently as he⁠— + 

A fateful silence, boding little good. + 

Beyond the mouth of Bitter Cottonwood + 

They travelled; onward through the winding halls + 

Where Platte is darkened; and the listening walls + 

Heard naught of laughter⁠—heard the ponies blow, + 

The rawhide creak upon the bent travaux, + 

The lodge-poles skid and slidder in the sand. + 

Nor yet beyond amid the meadowland + 

Was any joy; nor did the children play, + 

Despite the countless wooers by the way⁠— + 

Wild larkspur, tulip, bindweed, prairie pea. + 

The shadow of a thing that was to be + 

Fell on them too, though what they could not tell. + 

Still on, beyond the Horseshoe and La Prele, + 

They toiled up Sage Creek where the prickly pear + 

Bloomed gaudily about the camp. And there + 

The Cheyenne, Black Horse, riding from the south, + 

Came dashing up with sugar in his mouth + 

To spew on bitter moods. “Come back,” he whined; + 

“Our good white brothers call you, being kind + 

And having many gifts to give to those + 

Who hear them.” But the braves unstrung their bows + 

And beat him from the village, counting coup, + 

While angry squaws reviled the traitor too, + 

And youngsters dogged him, aping what he said. + 

Across the barren Cheyenne watershed + 

Their ponies panted, where the sage brush roots + 

Bit deep to live. They saw the Pumpkin Buttes + 

From Dry Fork. Then the Powder led them down + 

A day past Lodge Pole Creek. + 

Here Red Cloud’s town, + 

With water near and grass enough, now stood + 

Amid a valley strewn with scrubby wood; + 

And idling in the lazy autumn air + 

The lodge-smoke rose. The only idler there! + 

For all day long the braves applied their hate + 

To scraping dogwood switches smooth and straight + 

For battle-arrows; and the teeth that bit + 

The gnarly shaft, put venom into it + 

Against the day the snarling shaft should bite. + 

Unceasingly from morning until night + 

The squaws toiled that their fighting men might eat, + 

Nor be less brave because of freezing feet. + 

By hundreds they were stitching rawhide soles + 

To buckskin uppers. Many drying-poles + 

Creaked with the recent hunt; and bladders, packed + 

With suet, fruit and flesh, were being stacked + 

For hungers whetted by the driving snow. + 

Fresh robes were tanning in the autumn glow + 

For warriors camping fireless in the cold. + 

And noisily the mimic battles rolled + 

Among the little children, grim in play. + 

The village had been growing day by day + 

Since Red Cloud sent a pipe to plead his cause + 

Among the far-flung Tetons. Hunkpapas, + 

Unhurried by the fear of any foe, + 

Were making winter meat along Moreau + 

The day the summons came to gird their loins. + 

The Sans Arcs, roving where the Belle Fourche joins + 

The Big Cheyenne, had smoked the proffered pipe + 

When grapes were good and plums were getting ripe. + 

Amid the Niobrara meadowlands + 

And up the White, the scattered Brulé bands, + 

That scorned the talk at Laramie, had heard. + 

Among the Black Hills went the pipe and word + 

To find the Minneconjoux killing game + 

Where elk and deer were plentiful and tame + 

And clear creeks bellowed from the canyon beds. + 

Still westward where the double Cheyenne heads, + 

The hunting Ogalalas hearkened too. + 

So grew the little camp as lakelets do + 

When coulees grumble to a lowering sky. + 

Big names, already like a battle cry, + 

Were common in the town; and there were some + 

In which terrific thunders yet were dumb + 

But soon should echo fearsome and abhorred: + 

Crow King, Big Foot, the younger Hump, and Sword, + 

Black Leg and Black Shield, Touch-the-Cloud and Gall; + 

And that one fear would trumpet over all⁠— + 

Young Crazy Horse; and Spotted Tail, the wise; + 

Red Cloud and Man Afraid, both battle-cries; + 

Rain-in-the-Face, yet dumb; and Sitting Bull. + 

’Twas council time, for now the moon was full; + 

The time when, ere the stars may claim the dark, + 

A goblin morning with the owl for lark + 

Steals in; and ere the flags of day are furled, + 

Pressed white against the window of the world + 

A scarred face stares astonished at the sun. + 

The moonset and the sunrise came as one; + 

But ere the daybreak lifted by a span + 

The frosty dusk, the teepee tops began + 

To burgeon, and a faery sapling grove + 

Stood tall, to bloom in sudden red and mauve + 

And gold against the horizontal light. + 

Still humped, remembering the nipping night, + 

The dogs prowled, sniffing, round the open flaps + 

Where women carved raw haunches in their laps + 

To feed the kettles for the council feast. + 

Amid the silence of the lifting east + 

The criers shouted now⁠—old men and sage, + 

Using the last sad privilege of age + 

For brief pathetic triumphs over youth. + 

Neat saws and bits of hortatory truth + 

They proffered with the orders of the day. + 

And names that were as scarlet in the gray + 

Of pending ill they uttered like a song⁠— + 

The names of those who, being wise or strong, + 

Should constitute the council. ’Round and ’round, + 

The focal centers of a spreading sound, + 

The criers went. The folk began to fuse + 

In groups that seized the latest bit of news + 

And sputtered with the tongue of fool and seer. + 

A roaring hailed some chanted name held dear; + 

Or in a silence, no less eloquent, + 

Some other, tainted with suspicion, went + 

Among the people like a wind that blows + 

In solitary places. + 

Day arose + 

A spear-length high. The chattering became + 

A bated hum; for, conscious of their fame, + 

And clad in gorgeous ceremonial dress, + 

The Fathers of the Council cleft the press + 

In lanes that awe ran on before to clear; + 

And expectation closed the flowing rear + 

Sucked in to where the council bower stood. + 

Long since the busy squaws had fetched the wood + 

And lit the council fire, now smouldering. + 

The great men entered, formed a broken ring + 

To open eastward, lest the Light should find + 

No entrance, and the leaders of the blind + 

See darkly too. With reverential awe + 

The people, pressed about the bower, saw + 

The fathers sit, and every tongue was stilled. + 

Now Red Cloud took the sacred pipe and filled + 

The bowl with fragrant bark, and plucked a brand + 

To light it. Now with slowly lifted hand + 

He held it to the glowing sky, and spoke: + 

“Grandfather, I have filled a pipe to smoke, + 

And you shall smoke it first. In you we trust + 

To show good trails.” He held it to the dust. + 

“Grandmother, I have filled a pipe for you,” + 

He said, “and you must keep us strong and true, + 

For you are so.” Then offering the stem + 

To all four winds, he supplicated them + 

That they should blow good fortune. Then he smoked; + 

And all the Fathers after him invoked + 

The Mysteries that baffle Man’s desire. + 

Some women fetched and set beside the fire + 

The steaming kettles, then with groundward gaze + 

Withdrew in haste. A man of ancient days, + 

Who searched a timeless dusk with rheumy stare + 

And saw the ghosts of things that struggle there + 

Before men struggle, now remembered Those + 

With might to help. Six bits of meat he chose, + 

The best the pots afforded him, and these + 

He gave in order to the Mysteries, + 

The Sky, the Earth, the Winds, as was their due. + 

“Before I eat, I offer this to you,” + 

He chanted as he gave; “so all men should. + 

I hope that what I eat may do me good, + 

And what you eat may help you even so. + 

I ask you now to make my children grow + 

To men and women. Keep us healthy still, + 

And give us many buffalo to kill + 

And plenty grass for animals to eat.” + 

Some youths came forth to parcel out the meat + 

In order as the councillors were great + 

In deeds of worth; and each, before he ate, + 

Addressed the mystic sources of the good. + 

The feast now being finished, Red Cloud stood + 

Still pondering his words with mouth set grim; + 

But men felt thunder in the hush of him + 

And knew what lightning struggled to be wise + 

Behind the hawklike brooding of the eyes, + 

The chipped flint look about the cheek and jaw. + 

The humming of a hustling autumn flaw + 

In aspen thickets swept the waiting crowd. + 

It seemed his voice would tower harsh and loud. + 

It crooned. + 

“My friends, ’twas many snows ago + 

When first we welcomed white men. Now we know + 

Their hearts are bad and all their words are lies. + 

They brought us shining things that pleased the eyes + 

And weapons that were better than we knew. + 

And this seemed very good. They brought us too + 

The spirit water, strong to wash away + 

The coward’s fear, and for a moment stay + 

The creeping of old age and gnawing sorrow. + 

My friends, if you would have these things tomorrow, + 

Forget the way our fathers taught us all. + 

As though you planned to live till mountains fall, + 

Seek out all things men need and pile them high. + 

Be fat yourself and let the hungry die; + 

Be warm yourself and let the naked freeze. + 

So shall you see the trail the white man sees. + 

And when your teepee bulges to the peak, + 

Look round you for some neighbor who is weak + 

And take his little too. Dakotas, think! + 

Shall all the white man’s trinkets and his drink, + 

By which the mind is overcome and drowned, + 

Be better than our homes and hunting ground, + 

The guiding wisdom of our old men’s words? + 

Shall we be driven as the white man’s herds + 

From grass to bitter grass? When Harney said + 

His people, seeking for the yellow lead, + 

Would like an iron trail across our land, + 

Our good old chieftains did not understand + 

What snake would crawl among us. It would pass + 

Across our country; not a blade of grass + 

Should wither for that passing, they were told. + 

And now when scarce the council fire is cold, + 

Along the Little Piney hear the beat + 

Of axes and the desecrating feet + 

Of soldiers! Are we cowards? Shall we stand + 

Unmoved as trees and see our Mother Land + 

Plowed up for corn?” + 

Increasing as he spoke. + 

The smothered wrath now mastered him, and ’woke + 

The sleeping thunder all had waited for. + 

Out of a thrilling hush he shouted: “War!”⁠— + 

A cry to make an enemy afraid. + 

The grazing ponies pricked their ears and neighed, + 

Recalling whirlwind charges; and the town + 

Roared after like a brush-jam breaking down + 

With many waters. + 

When the quiet fell + 

Another rose with phrases chosen well + 

To glut the tribal wrath, and took his seat + 

Amid the crowd’s acclaim. Like chunks of meat, + 

Flung bloody to a pack, raw words were said + 

By others; and the rabble’s fury, fed, + 

Outgrew the eager feeding. Who would dare + 

To rise amid the bloodlust raging there + 

And offer water? + 

Spotted Tail stood up; + 

And since all knew no blood was in the cup + 

That he would give, dumb scorn rejected him. + 

He gazed afar, and something seen made dim + 

The wonted quizzic humor of the eyes. + 

The mouth, once terrible with battle-cries, + 

Took on a bitter droop as he began. + 

“Hey⁠—hey’-hey! So laments an aging man + 

Who totters and can never more be free + 

As once he was. Hey⁠—hey’-hey! So may we + 

Exclaim today for what the morrow brings. + 

There is a time, my brothers, for all things, + 

And we are getting old. Consider, friends, + 

How everything begins and grows and ends + 

That other things may have their time and grow. + 

What tribes of deer and elk and buffalo + 

Have we ourselves destroyed lest we should die! + 

About us now you hear the dead leaves sigh; + 

Since these were green, how few the moons have been! + 

We share in all this trying to begin, + 

This trying not to die. Consider well + 

The White Man⁠—what you know and what men tell + 

About his might. His never weary mind + 

And busy hands do magic for his kind. + 

Those things he loves we think of little worth; + 

And yet, behold! he sweeps across the earth, + 

And what shall stop him? Something that is true + 

Must help him do the things that he can do, + 

For lies are not so mighty. Be not stirred + 

By thoughts of vengeance and the burning word! + 

Such things are for the young; but let us give + 

Good counsel for the time we have to live, + 

And seek the better way, as old men should.” + 

He ended; yet a little while he stood + 

Abashed and lonely, seeing how his words + 

Had left as little trace as do the birds + 

Upon the wide insouciance of air. + 

He sat at length; and round him crouching there + 

The hostile silence closed, as waters close + 

Above the drowned. + 

Then Sitting Bull arose; + 

And through the stirring crowd a murmur ’woke + 

As of a river yielding to the stroke + 

Of some deft swimmer. No heroic height + 

Proclaimed him peer among the men of might, + 

Nor was his bearing such as makes men serve. + 

Bull-torsed, squat-necked, with legs that kept a curve + 

To fit the many ponies he had backed, + 

He scarcely pleased the eyes. But what he lacked + 

Of visible authority to mould + 

Men’s lives, was compensated manifold + 

By something penetrating in his gaze + 

That searched the rabble, seeming to appraise + 

The common weakness that should make him strong. + 

One certainty about him held the throng⁠— + 

His hatred of the white men. Otherwise, + 

Conjecture, interweaving truth and lies, + 

Wrought various opinions of the man. + 

A mountebank⁠—so one opinion ran⁠— + 

A battle-shirking intimate of squaws, + 

A trivial contriver of applause, + 

A user of the sacred for the base. + 

Yet there was something other in his face + 

Than vanity and craft. And there were those + 

Who aw him in that battle with the Crows + 

The day he did a thing no coward could. + 

There ran a slough amid a clump of wood + 

From whence, at little intervals, there broke + 

A roaring and a spurt of rifle-smoke + 

That left another wound among the Sioux. + 

Now Sitting Bull rode down upon the slough + 

To see what might be seen there. What he saw + 

Was such as might have gladdened any squaw⁠— + 

A wounded warrior with an empty gun! + 

’Twas then that deed of Sitting Bull was done, + 

And many saw it plainly from the hill. + 

Would any coward shun an easy kill + 

And lose a scalp? Yet many saw him throw + 

His loaded rifle over to the Crow, + 

Retreat a space, then wheel to charge anew. + 

With but a riding quirt he counted coup + 

And carried back a bullet in his thigh. + 

Let those who jeered the story for a lie + 

Behold him limping yet! And others said + 

He had the gift of talking with the dead + 

And used their clearer seeing to foretell + 

Dark things aright; that he could weave a spell + 

To make a foeman feeble if he would. + 

Such things the people pondered while he stood + 

And searched them with a quiet, broad-browed stare. + 

Then suddenly some magic happened there. + 

Can men grow taller in a breathing span? + 

He spoke; and even scorners of the man + 

Were conscious of a swift, disarming thrill, + 

The impact of a dominating will + 

That overcame them. + 

“Brothers, you have seen + 

The way the spring sun makes the prairie green + 

And wakes new life in animal and seed, + 

Preparing plenty for the biggest need, + 

Remembering the little hungers too. + 

The same mysterious quickening makes new + 

Men’s hearts, for by that power we also live. + 

And so, till now, we thought it good to give + 

All life its share of what that power sends + 

To man and beast alike. But hear me, friends! + 

We face a greedy people, weak and small + 

When first our fathers met them, now grown tall + 

And overbearing. Tireless in toil, + 

These madmen think it good to till the soil, + 

And love for endless getting marks them fools. + 

Behold, they bind their poor with many rules + 

And let their rich go free! They even steal + 

The poor man’s little for the rich man’s weal! + 

Their feeble have a god their strong may flout! + 

They cut the land in pieces, fencing out + 

Their neighbors from the mother of all men! + 

When she is sick, they make her bear again + 

With medicines they give her with the seed! + 

All this is sacrilegious! Yet they heed + 

No word, and like a river in the spring + 

They flood the country, sweeping everything + 

Before them! ’Twas not many snows ago + 

They said that we might hunt our buffalo + 

In this our land forever. Now they come + 

To break that promise. Shall we cower, dumb? + 

Or shall we say: ‘First kill us⁠—here we stand!’ ” + 

He paused; then stooping to the mother-land, + 

He scraped a bit of dust and tossed it high. + 

Against the hollow everlasting sky + 

All watched it drifting, sifting back again + 

In utter silence. “So it is with men,” + 

Said Sitting Bull, his voice now low and tense; + 

“What better time, my friends, for going hence + 

Than when we have so many foes to kill?” + 

He ceased. As though they heard him speaking still, + 

The people listened; for he had a way + 

That seemed to mean much more than he could say + 

And over all the village cast a spell. + 

At length some warrior uttered in a yell + 

The common hate. ’Twas like the lean blue flash + 

That stabs a sultry hush before the crash + 

Of heaven-rending thunder and the loud + 

Assault of winds. Then fury took the crowd + 

And set it howling with the lust to slay. + 

The councillors were heard no more that day; + 

And from the moony hill tops all night long + 

The wolves gave answer to the battle-song, + 

And saw their valley hunting-grounds aflare + 

With roaring fires, and frenzied shadows there + 

That leaped and sang as wolves do, yet were men. + 

IV + 

Fort Phil Kearney + 

Long since the column, pushing north again + 

With Carrington, had left the little post + 

On Laramie; unwitting how the ghost + 

Of many a trooper, lusty yet and gay, + 

Disconsolately drifting back that way, + 

Should fill unseen the gaps of shattered ranks. + 

Scarce moved to know what shadows dogged their flanks, + 

Till all the winds that blew were talking spies + 

And draws had ears and every hilltop, eyes, + 

And silence, tongues, the seven hundred went. + 

How brazenly their insolent intent + 

Was flaunted! Even wolves might understand + 

These men were going forth to wed the land + 

And spawn their breed therein. Behold their squaws! + 

Could such defend the Great White Father’s laws? + 

So weak they were their warriors hewed the wood, + 

Nor did they tend the pots, as women should, + 

Nor fill them. + 

Powder River caught the word + 

Of how they swam their long-horned cattle herd + 

At Bridger’s Ferry. Big Horn and the Tongue + 

Beheld through nearer eyes the long line flung + 

Up Sage Creek valley; heard through distant ears + 

The cracking lashes of the muleteers + 

The day the sandy trail grew steep and bleak. + 

The Rosebud saw them crossing Lightning Creek, + 

Whence, southward, cone outsoaring dizzy cone, + 

Until the last gleamed splendidly alone, + 

They viewed the peak of Laramie. When, high + 

Between the head of North Fork and the Dry + 

They lifted Cloud Peak scintillant with snows, + 

The Cheyenne hunters and Arapahoes, + 

Far-flung as where the Wind becomes the Horn, + 

Discussed their progress. Spirits of the morn, + 

That watched them break the nightly camp and leave, + 

Outwinged the crane to gossip with the eve + 

In distant camps. Beyond the Lodge Pole’s mouth + 

Relentless Red Cloud, poring on the south, + 

Could see them where the upper Powder ran + 

Past Reno Post, and counted to a man + 

The soldiers left there. Tattlings of the noon + 

Were bruited by the glimmer of the moon + 

In lands remote; till, pushing northward yet + 

Past Crazy Woman’s Fork and Lake DeSmedt, + 

They reached the Big and Little Piney Creeks. + 

Some such a land the famished hunter seeks + 

In fever-dreams of coolness. All day long + 

The snow-born waters hummed a little song + 

To virgin meadows, till the sun went under; + 

Then tardy freshets in a swoon of thunder, + 

That deepened with the dark, went rushing by, + 

As ’twere the Night herself sang lullaby + 

Till morning. Cottonwoods and evergreens + 

Made music out of what the silence means + 

In timeless solitudes. And over all, + 

White towers dizzy on a floating wall + 

Of stainless white, the Big Horn Mountains rose. + 

Absoraka, the Country of the Crows, + 

A land men well might fight for! + 

Here they camped, + 

Rejoicing, man and beast. The work-mule champed + 

The forage of the elk, and rolled to sate + 

His lust for greenness. Like a voice of fate, + 

Foretelling ruthless years, his blatant bray + 

With horns of woe and trumpets of dismay + 

Crowded the hills. The milk cow and the steer + 

In pastures of the bison and the deer + 

Lowed softly. And the trail-worn troopers went + 

About their duties, whistling, well content + 

To share this earthly paradise of game. + 

But scarcely were the tents up, when there came⁠— + 

Was it a sign? One moment it was noon, + 

A golden peace hypnotic with the tune + 

Of bugs among the grasses; and the next, + 

The spacious splendor of the world was vexed + 

With twilight that estranged familiar things. + 

A moaning sound, as of enormous wings + 

Flung wide to bear some swooping bat of death, + 

Awakened. Hills and valleys held their breath + 

To hear that sound. A nervous troop-horse neighed + 

Shrill in the calm. Instinctively afraid, + 

The cattle bellowed and forgot to graze; + 

And raucous mules deplored the idle day’s + 

Untimely end. Then presently there fell + 

What seemed a burlesque blizzard out of hell⁠— + 

A snow of locusts⁠—tawny flakes at strife, + 

That, driven by a gust of rabid life, + 

Smothered the windless noon! The lush grass bent, + 

Devoured in bending. Wagon-top and tent + 

Sagged with the drift of brown corrosive snow. + 

Innumerable hungers shrilled below; + 

A humming fog of hungers hid the sky, + 

Until a cool breath, falling from the high + 

White ramparts, came to cleanse the stricken world. + 

Then suddenly the loud rack lifted, swirled + 

To eastward; and the golden light returned. + 

Now day by day the prairie people learned + 

What wonders happened where the Pineys flowed; + 

How many wagons rutted out a road + 

To where the pines stood tallest to be slain; + 

What medicine the White Man’s hand and brain + 

Had conjured; how they harnessed up a fog + 

That sent a round knife screaming through a log + 

From end to end; how many adzes hewed; + 

And how the desecrated solitude + 

Beheld upon a level creek-side knoll + 

The rise of fitted bole on shaven bole, + 

Until a great fort brazened out the sun. + 

And while that builded insolence was done, + 

Far prairies saw the boasting banner flung + 

Above it, like a hissing adder’s tongue, + 

To menace every ancientry of good. + 

Long since and oft the workers in the wood + 

Had felt the presence of a foe concealed. + 

The drone of mowers in the haying-field + 

Was silenced often by the rifle’s crack, + 

The arrow’s whirr; and often, forging back + 

With lash and oath along the logging road, + 

The scared mule-whacker fought behind his load, + 

His team a kicking tangle. Oft by night + 

Some hill top wagged a sudden beard of light, + 

Immediately shorn; and dark hills saw + 

To glimmer sentient. Hours of drowsy awe + 

Near dawn had heard the raided cattle bawl, + 

Afraid of alien herdsmen; bugles call + 

To horse; the roaring sally; fleeing cries. + 

And oft by day upon a distant rise + 

Some naked rider loomed against the glare + 

With hand at brow to shade a searching stare, + 

Then like a dream dissolved in empty sky. + 

So men and fate had labored through July + 

To make a story. August browned the plain; + 

And ever Fort Phil Kearney grew amain + 

With sweat of toil and blood of petty fights. + 

September brought the tingling silver nights + 

And men worked faster, thinking of the snows. + 

Aye, more than storm they dreaded. Friendly Crows + 

Had told wild tales. Had they not ridden through + 

The Powder River gathering of Sioux? + 

And lo, at one far end the day was young; + 

Noon saw the other! Up along the Tongue + 

Big villages were dancing! Everywhere + 

The buzzing wasp of war was in the air. + 

October smouldered goldenly, and gray + 

November sulked and threatened. Day by day, + 

While yet the greater evils held aloof, + 

The soldiers wrought on wall, stockade and roof + 

Against the coming wrath of God and Man. + 

And often where the lonely home-trail ran + 

They gazed with longing eyes; nor did they see + 

The dust cloud of the prayed-for cavalry + 

And ammunition train long overdue. + 

By now they saw their forces cut in two, + 

First Reno Post upon the Powder, then + 

Fort Smith upon the Big Horn needing men; + 

And here the center of the brewing storm + 

Would rage. + 

Official suavities kept warm + 

The wire to Laramie⁠—assurance bland + 

Of peace now reigning in the prairie land; + 

Attest the treaty signed! So said the mail; + 

But those who brought it up the Bozeman Trail + 

Two hundred miles, could tell of running fights, + 

Of playing tag with Terror in the nights + 

To hide by day. If peace was anywhere, + 

It favored most the growing graveyard there + 

Across the Piney under Pilot Hill. + 

December opened ominously still, + 

And scarce the noon could dull the eager fang + 

That now the long night whetted. Shod hoofs rang + 

On frozen sod. The tenuated whine + 

And sudden shriek of buzz-saws biting pine + 

Were heard far off unnaturally loud. + 

The six-mule log-teams labored in a cloud; + 

The drivers beat their breasts with aching hands. + 

As yet the snow held off; but prowling bands + 

Grew bolder. Weary night-guards on the walls + 

Were startled broad awake by wolf-like calls + 

From spots of gloom uncomfortably near; + 

And out across the crystal hemisphere + 

Weird yammerings arose and died away + 

To dreadful silence. Every sunny day + 

The looking-glasses glimmered all about. + 

So, clinging to the darker side of doubt, + 

Men took their boots to bed, nor slumbered soon. + 

It happened on the sixth December noon + 

That from a hill commanding many a mile + 

The lookout, gazing off to Piney Isle, + 

Beheld the log-train crawling up a draw + 

Still half way out. With naked eye he saw + 

A lazy serpent reeking in the glare + 

Of wintry sunlight. Nothing else was there + 

But empty country under empty skies. + 

Then suddenly it seemed a blur of flies + 

Arose from each adjacent gulch and break + 

And, swarming inward, swirled about the snake + 

That strove to coil amid the stinging mass. + 

One moment through the ill-adjusted glass + 

Vague shadows flitted; then the whirling specks + 

Were ponies with their riders at their necks, + 

Swung low. The lurching wagons spurted smoke; + 

The teams were plunging. + 

Frantic signals woke + 

The bugles at the fort, the brawl of men + 

Obeying “boots and saddles.” + 

Once again + 

The sentry lifts his glass. ’Tis like a dream. + 

So very near the silent figures seem + 

A hand might almost touch them. Here they come + 

Hell-bent for blood⁠—distorted mouths made dumb + 

With distance! One can see the muffled shout, + 

The twang of bow-thongs! Leaping fog blots out + 

The agitated picture⁠—flattens, spreads. + 

Dull rumblings wake and perish. Tossing heads + 

Emerge, and ramrods prickle in the rack. + 

A wheel-mule, sprouting feathers at his back, + 

Rears like a clumsy bird essaying flight + 

And falls to vicious kicking. Left and right + 

Deflected hundreds wheel about and swing + 

To charge anew⁠—tempestuous galloping + 

On cotton! Empty ponies bolt away + 

To turn and stare high-headed on the fray + 

With muted snorting at the deeds men do. + 

But listen how at last a sound breaks through + 

The deathly silence of the scene! Hurrah + 

For forty troopers roaring down the draw + 

With Fetterman! A cloud of beaten dust + 

Sent skurrying before a thunder-gust, + 

They round the hogback yonder. With a rush + 

They pierce the limpid curtain of the hush, + 

Quiescing in the picture. Hurry, men! + 

The rabid dogs are rushing in again! + 

Look! Hurry! No, they break midway! They see + 

The squadron dashing up. They turn, they flee + 

Before that pack of terriers⁠—like rats! + 

Yell, yell, you lucky loggers⁠—wave your hats + 

And thank the Captain that you’ve kept your hair! + 

Look how they scatter to the northward there, + 

Dissolving into nothing! Ply the spurs, + 

You fire-eaters! Catch that pack of curs + 

This side the Peno, or they’ll disappear! + 

Look out! They’re swooping in upon your rear! + 

Wherever did they come from? Look! Good God! + 

The breaks ahead belch ponies, and the sod + 

On every side sprouts warriors! + 

Holy Spoons! + 

The raw recruits have funked it! Turn, you loons, + 

You cowards! Can’t you see the Captain’s game + 

To face them with a handful? Shame! O shame! + 

They’ll rub him out⁠—turn back⁠—that’s not the way + 

We did it to the Johnnies many a day + 

In Dixie! Every mother’s baby rides + 

As though it mattered if they saved their hides! + 

Their empty faces gulp the miles ahead. + 

Ride on and live to wish that you were dead + 

Back yonder where the huddled muskets spit + 

Against a sea! + 

Now⁠—now you’re in for it! + 

Here comes the Colonel galloping like sin + 

Around the hill! Hurrah⁠—they’re falling in⁠— + 

Good boys! It’s little wonder that you ran. + 

I’m not ashamed to say to any man + 

I might have run. + 

Ah, what a pretty sight! + 

Go on, go on and show ’em that you’re white! + 

They’re breaking now⁠—you’ve got ’em on the run⁠— + 

They’re scattering! Hurrah! + 

The fight was done; + 

No victory to boast about, indeed⁠— + 

Just labor. Sweat today, tomorrow, bleed⁠— + 

An incidental difference. And when + 

The jaded troopers trotted home again + 

There wasn’t any cheering. Six of those + 

Clung dizzily to bloody saddle-bows; + 

And Bingham was the seventh and was dead; + 

And Bowers, with less hair upon his head + 

Than arrows in his vitals, prayed to die. + 

He did that night. + 

Now thirteen days went by + 

With neither snow nor foe; and all the while + 

The log-trains kept the road to Piney Isle. + 

Soon all the needed timber would be hauled, + 

The work be done. Then, snugly roofed and walled, + 

What need for men to fear? Some came to deem + 

The former mood of dread a foolish dream, + 

Grew mellow, thinking of the holidays + 

With time for laughter and a merry blaze + 

On every hearth and nothing much to do. + 

As for the bruited power of the Sioux, + 

Who doubted it was overdrawn a mite? + 

At any rate, they wouldn’t stand and fight + 

Unless the odds were heavy on their side. + 

It seemed the Colonel hadn’t any pride⁠— + 

Too cautious. Look at Fetterman and Brown, + 

Who said they’d ride the whole Sioux nation down + 

With eighty men; and maybe could, by jing! + 

Both scrappers⁠—not afraid of anything⁠— + 

A pair of eagles hungering for wrens! + 

And what about a flock of butchered hens + 

In Peno valley not so long ago + 

But for the Colonel? Bowers ought to know; + 

Go ask him! Thus the less heroic jeered. + 

These Redskins didn’t run because they feared; + 

’Twas strategy; they didn’t fight our way. + 

Again it happened on the nineteenth day + 

The lookout saw the logging-train in grief; + 

And Captain Powell, leading the relief, + 

Returned without a single scratch to show. + 

The twentieth brought neither snow nor foe. + 

The morrow came⁠—a peaceful, scarlet morn. + 

It seemed the homesick sun in Capricorn + 

Had found new courage for the homeward track + 

And, yearning out across the zodiac + 

To Cancer, brightened with the conjured scene + 

Of grateful hills and valleys flowing green, + 

Sweet incense rising from the rain-soaked sward, + 

And color-shouts of welcome to the Lord + 

And Savior. + 

Ninety took the logging-road + 

That morning, happy that the final load + 

Would trundle back that day, and all be well. + 

But hardly two miles out the foemen fell + 

Upon them, swarming three to one. And so + 

Once more the hilltop lookout signalled woe + 

And made the fort a wasp-nest buzzing ire. + 

The rip and drawl of running musket fire, + 

The muffled, rhythmic uproar of the Sioux + 

Made plain to all that what there was to do + 

Out yonder gave but little time to waste. + 

A band of horse and infantry soon faced + 

The Colonel’s quarters, waiting for the word. + 

Above the distant tumult many heard + 

His charge to Powell, leader of the band; + 

And twice ’twas said that all might understand + 

The need for caution: “Drive away the foe + 

And free the wagon-train; but do not go + 

Past Lodge Trail Ridge.” + 

A moment’s silence fell; + 

And many in the after-time would dwell + 

Upon that moment, little heeded then⁠— + 

The ghostly horses and the ghostly men, + 

The white-faced wives, the gaping children’s eyes + 

Grown big with wonder and a dread surmise + 

To see their fathers waiting giant-tall; + 

That mumbling voice of doom beyond the wall; + 

The ghastly golden pleasance of the air; + 

And Fetterman, a spectre, striding there + 

Before the Colonel, while the portals yawn. + 

As vivid as a picture lightning-drawn + 

Upon the night, that memory would flash, + 

More vivid for the swooping backward crash + 

Of gloom. ’Twas but the hinges of the gates + 

That shrieked that moment, while the eager Fates + 

Told off the waiting band and gloated: Done! + 

He asked for eighty⁠—give him eighty-one! + 

Then Fetterman, unwitting how the rim + 

Of endless outer silence pressed on him + 

And all his comrades, spoke: “With deference due + 

To Captain Powell, Colonel, and to you, + 

I claim command as senior captain here.” + 

So ever is the gipsy Danger dear + 

To Courage; so the lusty woo and wed + 

Their dooms, to father in a narrow bed + 

A song against the prosing after-years. + 

And now the restive horses prick their ears + 

And nicker to the bugle. Fours about, + 

They rear and wheel to line. The hillsides shout + 

Back to the party. Forward! Now it swings + 

High-hearted through the gate of common things + 

To where bright hazard, like a stormy moon, + 

Still gleams round Hector, Roland, Sigurd, Fionn; + 

And all the lost, horizon-hungry prows, + 

Eternal in contemporary nows, + 

Heave seaward yet. + 

The Colonel mounts the wall, + 

And once again is heard his warning call: + 

“Relieve the wagon-train, but do not go + 

Past Lodge Trail Ridge.” And Fetterman, below, + 

Turns back a shining face on him, and smiles + 

Across the gap that neither years nor miles + 

May compass now. + 

A little farther still + 

They watched him skirt a westward-lying hill + 

That hid him from the train, to disappear. + 

“He’ll swing about and strike them in the rear,” + 

The watchers said, “and have the logging crew + 

For anvil.” + 

Now a solitary Sioux + 

Was galloping in circles on a height + 

That looked on both the squadron and the fight⁠— + 

The prairie sign for “many bison seen.” + 

A lucky case-shot swept the summit clean, + 

And presently the distant firing ceased; + 

Nor was there sound or sight of man or beast + 

Outside for age-long minutes after that. + 

At length a logger, spurring up the flat, + 

Arrived with words of doubtful cheer to say. + 

The Indians had vanished Peno way; + 

The train was moving on to Piney Isle. + 

He had no news of Fetterman. + 

V + 

Rubbed Out + 

Meanwhile + 

Where ran the Bozeman Road along the bleak + 

North slope of Lodge Trail Ridge to Peno Creek, + 

Big hopes were burning. Silence waited there. + 

The brown land, even as the high blue air, + 

Seemed empty. Yet the troubled crows that flew + 

Keen-eyed above the sunning valley knew + 

What made the windless slough-grass ripple so, + 

And how a multitude of eyes below + 

Were peering southward to the road-scarred rise + 

Where every covert was alive with eyes + 

That scanned the bare horizon to the south. + 

The white of dawn had seen the Peno’s mouth + 

A-swarm with men⁠—Cheyennes, Arapahoes, + 

Dakotas. When the pale-faced sun arose⁠— + 

A spectre fleeing from a bath of blood⁠— + 

It saw them like a thunder-fathered flood + 

Surge upward through the sounding sloughs and draws⁠— + 

Afoot and mounted, veterans and squaws, + 

Youths new to war, the lowly and the great⁠— + 

A thousand-footed, single-hearted hate + 

Flung fortward. Now their chanted battle-songs + 

Dismayed the hills. Now silent with their wrongs + 

They strode, the sullen hum of hoofs and feet, + 

Through valleys where aforetime life was sweet, + 

More terrible than songs or battle cries. + 

The sun had traversed half the morning skies + 

When, entering the open flat, they poured + 

To where the roadway crossed the Peno ford + 

Below the Ridge. Above them wheeled and pried + 

The puzzled crows, to learn what thing had died, + 

What carcass, haply hidden from the ken + 

Of birds, had lured so large a flock of men + 

Thus chattering with lust. There, brooding doom, + 

They paused and made the brown December bloom + 

With mockeries of August⁠—demon flowers + 

And lethal, thirsting for the sanguine showers + 

That soon should soak the unbegetting fields⁠— + 

The trailing bonnets and the pictured shields, + 

The lances nodding in the warwind’s breath, + 

And faces brave with paint to outstare Death + 

In some swift hush of battle! + 

Briefly so + 

They parleyed. Then the spears began to flow + 

On either side the Ridge⁠—a double stream + 

Of horsemen, winking out as in a dream + 

High up among the breaks that flanked the trail. + 

Amid the tall dry grasses of the vale + 

The footmen disappeared; and all the place + 

Was still and empty as a dead man’s face + 

That sees unmoved the wheeling birds of prey. + 

The anxious moments crawled. Then far away + 

Across the hills a muffled tumult grew, + 

As of a blanket being ripped in two + 

And many people shouting underground. + 

The valley grasses rippled to the sound + 

As though it were a gusty wind that passed. + 

Far off a bugle’s singing braved the vast + 

And perished in a wail. + 

The tall grass stirred. + 

The rumor of the distant fight was heard + 

A little longer. Suddenly it stopped; + 

And silence, like a sky-wide blanket, dropped + 

Upon the landscape empty as the moon. + 

The sun, now scarce a lance-length from the noon, + 

Seemed waiting for whatever might occur. + 

Across the far Northwest a purplish blur + 

Had gathered and was crawling up the sky. + 

Now presently a nearer bugle cry + 

Defied the hush⁠—a scarlet flower of sound + 

That sowed the sterile silences around + 

With futile seed of music. + 

Once again + 

The sound of firing and the cries of men + 

Arose; but now ’twas just beyond the place + 

Where, climbing to the azure rim of space, + 

The roadway topped the Ridge and disappeared. + 

The tongueless coverts listened, thousand-eared, + 

And heard hoof-thunders rumbling over there. + 

Then suddenly the high blue strip of air + 

Was belching warriors in a wind of cries. + 

In breakneck rout they tumbled from the skies, + 

Wheeled round to fling more arrows at a foe, + 

And fled to where the breast-deep grass below + 

Swayed wildly. + 

Now a crow-black stallion ’rose, + 

And looming huge against the blue noon doze, + 

Raced back and forth across the Ridge’s rim, + 

While, shooting from beneath the neck of him, + 

The Cheyenne Big Nose held the roaring rear; + 

Nor did the snarling musket-balls come near, + 

So mighty was his medicine, they say. + 

Now presently the high blue wall of day + 

Spewed cavalry along the Ridge; and then + 

A marvel for the tongues and ears of men + 

Amazed the hidden watchers of the height. + 

For like a thunder-stridden wind of night + 

That rages through a touselled poplar grove, + 

The rider of the stallion charged, and drove + 

Straight through the middle of the mounted crowd. + 

Men saw his bonnet tossing in a cloud + 

Of manes and tails; and sabre lightnings played + 

About it. Then, emerging undismayed, + 

He charged back through and galloped down the hill + 

With bullets that were impotent to kill + 

Spat-pinging all around. + 

The firing ceased. + 

The fugitives were half a mile at least + 

Beyond the Peno ford. There, circling wide + 

With bows and lances brandished, they defied + 

The foe to come and fight with them. By now + 

The infantry had crossed the Ridge’s brow. + 

It joined the troop a little way below; + 

Then all together, cautiously and slow, + 

Came down the hated road. And silence lay + 

On summit, slope and valley, deep as day + 

And doomful, as they came. The flat could hear + 

The murmur of the straining saddle-gear, + 

The shuffling feet, the clinking of the bits; + 

And when a nervous troop-horse neighed by fits, + 

The ponies, lurking in the broken lands + 

That flanked the Ridge, kept silence for the hands + 

That gripped their nostrils. + 

Now the eighty-one + 

Were half way down the hill. The nooning sun + 

Slipped fearfully behind a flying veil, + 

And from the gray northwest a raw-cold gale + 

Came booming up. The fugitive decoys, + 

Off yonder in the flat, like playing boys + 

Divided now and waged a mimic fight. + 

Immediately half way up the height + 

Among the breaks appeared a warrior’s torse. + 

A thousand hidden eyes knew Little Horse, + 

The Cheyenne chieftain; saw him wave a spear + 

Left-handed; pass it round him in the rear + 

To seize it with the right. + 

The whole flat swarmed + 

With footmen. Mounted warriors thunder-stormed + 

By hundreds from the breaks above; and one + 

Came dashing down the ridge-road at a run + 

And plunged among the soldiery to die + 

Beneath the frantic sabres. With a cry + 

That set the horses wild, the swarm closed in. + 

The cavalry, as hoping yet to win + 

The summit of the Ridge, wheeled round and hewed + 

A slow way upward through the solitude + 

Of lances, howling in the arrow-storm. + 

The rest, already circled by the swarm, + 

Took cover in a patch of tumbled rock + 

Where, huddled like a blizzard-beaten flock, + 

They faced the swirling death they could not stem. + 

A little while before it smothered them + 

The dwindling few toiled mightily, men say, + 

With gun-butts swinging in the dim melee + 

Of battle-clubs and lances; then were still. + 

The wave broke over, surging up the hill; + 

For yonder yet the battle smoked and roared + 

Where, midway ’twixt the summit and the ford, + 

The little band of troopers held the height⁠— + 

Green manhood withering in a locust flight + 

Of arrows! Aye, a gloaming of despair + 

The shuttling arrows wove above them there, + 

So many were the bows. Cheyenne and Sioux + 

Went down beneath the shafts their brothers drew; + 

Arapahoes struck down Arapahoes + 

Unwittingly. And many a red gout froze + 

Along the slopes, so keen had grown the gale. + 

A little while those makers of a tale + 

Gave battle like a badger in a hole; + 

Nor could the ponies charge the narrow knoll, + 

For either slope was steep and gully-scrawled. + 

Still up and up the cautious bowmen crawled, + 

And still the troopers overawed the field. + 

Then presently, men say, a white chief reeled; + 

Rolled from his saddle; like a man gone daft + 

Got up and doddered, tugging at a shaft + 

That sprouted from his belly. Then a yell + 

Of many bowmen mocked him as he fell, + 

His writhing body feathered like a goose. + 

The troops began to turn their horses loose, + 

Retreating up the ridge, a hopeless crowd. + 

A lull of battle thinned the arrow-cloud + 

Above them; for the mounted warriors knew + 

The soldiers doomed whatever they might do, + 

And fell to rounding up the runaways. + 

Meanwhile the broken troopers in a daze + 

Of desperation scrambled up the slope. + 

Strewn boulders yonder woke a lying hope, + 

And there they waited, living, in their grave. + 

The horse-chase ended. Once again the wave + 

Began to mount the steep on either side, + 

While warriors hailed their fellows and replied: + 

Be ready!⁠—We are ready, brothers! + 

Then + 

The hillsides bellowed with a surf of men + 

Flung crowding on the boulders. ’Twas the end. + 

Some trooper’s wolfhound, mourning for his friend, + 

Loped fortward, pausing now and then to cry + 

His urgent question to the hostile sky + 

That spat a stinging frost. And someone said: + 

“Let yonder dog bear tidings of the dead + 

To make the white men tremble over there.” + 

“No, teach them that we do not even spare + 

Their dogs!” another said. An arrow sang + 

Shrill to the mark. The wolfhound yelped and sprang, + 

Snapped at the feather, wilted, and was still. + 

And so they perished on that barren hill + 

Beside the Peno. And the Winter strode + 

Numb-footed down that bloody stretch of road + 

At twilight, when a squadron came to read + 

The corpse-writ rune of battle, deed by deed, + 

Between the Ridge’s summit and the ford. + 

The blizzard broke at dusk. All night it roared + 

Round Fort Phil Kearney mourning for the slain. + 

VI + 

The Wagon Boxes + 

Besieging January made the plain + 

One vast white camp to reinforce the foe + 

That watched the fort. Mad cavalries of snow + 

Assaulted; stubborn infantries of cold + 

Sat round the walls and waited. Wolves grew bold + 

To peer by night across the high stockade + 

Where, builded for the Winter’s escalade, + 

The hard drifts leaned. And often in the deep + 

Of night men started from a troubled sleep + 

To think the guards were fighting on the wall + 

And, roaring over like a waterfall, + 

The wild hordes pouring in upon the lost. + 

But ’twas the timber popping in the frost, + 

The mourning wolves. Nor did the dawn bring cheer. + 

Becandled like a corpse upon a bier + 

The lifeless sun, from gloom to early gloom, + 

Stole past⁠—a white procession to a tomb + 

Illumining the general despair. + 

Meanwhile Omniscience in a swivel chair, + 

Unmenaced half a continent away, + 

Amid more pressing matters of the day + 

Had edited the saga of the dead. + 

Compare the treaty where it plainly said + 

There was no war! All duly signed and sealed! + 

Undoubtedly the evidence revealed + 

The need of an official reprimand. + 

Wherefore stern orders ticked across the land + 

From Washington to Laramie. Perhaps + 

No blizzard swept the neat official maps + 

To nip a tracing finger. Howsoe’er, + 

Four companies of horse and foot must bear + 

To Fort Phil Kearney tidings of its shame. + 

Through ten score miles of frozen hell they came⁠— + 

Frost-bitten, wolfish⁠—with the iron word + 

Of Carrington dishonored and transferred + 

To Reno Post. The morning that he went, + 

The sun was like a sick man in a tent, + 

Crouched shivering between two feeble fires. + 

Far off men heard his griding wagon tires + 

Shriek fife-like in the unofficial snow, + 

His floundering three-span mule-teams blaring woe + 

Across the blue-cold waste; and he was gone. + 

Without a thaw the bitter spell wore on + 

To raging February. Days on days + 

Men could not see beyond the whirling haze + 

That made the fort’s the world’s wall fronting sheer + 

On chaos. When at times the sky would clear + 

And like a frozen bubble were the nights, + 

Pale rainbows jigged across the polar heights + 

And leafy rustlings mocked the solitude. + 

Men sickened with the stale and salty food, + 

For squadrons hunt at best with ill success; + 

And quiet days revealed the wilderness + 

Alert with fires, so doggedly the foe + 

Guarded the deer and elk and buffalo + 

That roamed the foothills where the grass was good. + 

A battle often bought a load of wood; + 

And arrows swept the opening water-gate + 

From where the wily bowmen lurked in wait + 

Along the brush-clad Piney. + 

March went past, + 

A lion, crouched or raging, to the last; + 

And it was April⁠—in the almanac. + 

No maiden with the southwind at her back + 

Ran crocus-footed up the Bozeman Road. + 

A loveless vixen swept her drear abode + 

With brooms of whimsic wrath, and scolded shrill. + 

Men pined to think of how the whippoorwill + 

Broidered the moony silences at home. + 

There now a mist-like green began to roam + 

The naked forest hillward from the draws; + 

The dogwood’s bloom was vying with the haw’s; + 

The redbud made a bonfire of its boughs. + 

And there, perchance, one lying in a drowse + 

At midnight heard the friendly thunder crash, + 

The violet-begetting downpour lash + 

The flaring panes; and possibly one heard + 

The sudden rapture of a mocking bird + 

Defy the lightning in a pitch-black lull. + 

Here dull days wore the teeth of Winter dull. + 

Drifts withered slowly. Of an afternoon + 

The gulches grumbled hoarsely, ceasing soon + 

When sunset faded out. The pasque flower broke + 

The softened sod, and in a furry cloak + 

And airy bonnet brazened out the chill. + 

The long grave yonder under Pilot Hill, + 

Where eighty lay, was like a wound unwrapped. + 

The cottonwoods, awaking sluggish-sapped, + 

Prepared for spring with wavering belief. + 

May stole along the Piney like a thief. + 

And yet, another sun made summer now + 

In wild hearts given glebe-like to the plow + 

Of triumph. So miraculously fed + 

With slaughter, richly seeded with the dead, + 

The many-fielded harvest throve as one. + 

And Red Cloud was the summer and the sun. + 

In many a camp, in three great tribal tongues, + 

That magic name was thunder in the lungs + 

Of warriors. Swift, apocalyptic light, + 

It smote the zenith of the Red Man’s night + 

With dazzling vision. Forts dissolved in smoke, + 

The hated roadway lifted, drifted, broke + 

And was a dust; the white men were a tale; + 

The green, clean prairie bellowed, hill and vale, + 

With fatted bison; and the good old days + 

Came rushing back in one resistless blaze + 

Of morning! + 

It was good to be a youth + 

That season when all dreaming was the truth + 

And miracle familiar! Waning May + 

Could hear the young men singing on the way + 

To Red Cloud. Pious sons and rakehell scamps, + 

Unbroken colts, the scandals of their camps, + 

And big-eyed dreamers never tried by strife, + 

One-hearted with the same wild surge of life, + 

Sang merrily of dying as they came. + 

Aloof amid his solitude of fame, + 

The battle-brooding chieftain heard, to dream + 

Of great hordes raging like a flooded stream + 

From Powder River to the Greasy Grass, + 

That never after might a wagon pass + 

Along that hated highway of deceit. + 

The meadows of Absoraka grew sweet + 

With nursing June. War-ponies, winter-thin, + 

Nuzzled the dugs of ancient might therein + 

Against the day of victory. July + 

Poured virile ardor from a ruthless sky + 

To make stern forage⁠—that the hardened herds + 

Might speed as arrows, wheel and veer as birds, + 

Have smashing force and never lack for breath, + 

Be fit for bearing heroes to their death + 

In that great day now drawing near. + 

Meanwhile + 

Once more the solitude of Piney Isle + 

Was startled with a brawl of mules and men. + 

The LongKnives’ wagons clattered there again; + 

The axes bit and rang, saws whined and gnawed; + 

And mountain valleys wakened to applaud + 

The mighty in their downfall, meanly slain. + 

Now close to Piney Isle there lay a plain + 

Some three long bow-shots wide. Good grazing land + 

It was, and empty as a beggar’s hand. + 

Low foothills squatted round with bended knees, + 

And standing mountains waited back of these + 

To witness what the hunkered hills might view. + 

They saw a broad arena roofed with blue + 

That first of August. Where the mid-plain raised + 

A little knoll, the yellow swelter blazed + 

On fourteen wagon-beds set oval-wise⁠— + 

A small corral to hold the camp supplies, + 

Flour, salt, beans, ammunition, grain in sacks. + 

Therein, forestalling sudden night attacks, + 

The mules were tethered when the gloaming starred + 

The laggard evening. Soldiers, sent to guard + 

The logging crew, had pitched their tents around. + 

And all of this was like a feeble sound + 

Lost in the golden fanfare of the day. + 

Across the Piney Fork, a mile away, + 

Unseen among the pines, the work-camp stood; + 

And trundling thence with loads of winter wood, + 

Stript wagon-trucks creaked fortward. + 

Twilight awe + 

Among the pines now silenced axe and saw. + 

With jingling traces, eager for their grain, + 

Across the creek and up the gloaming plain + 

The work mules came, hee-hawing at the glow + 

Of fires among the tents. The day burned low + 

To moonless dusk. The squat hills seemed to lift, + 

Expectant. Peaks on shadow-seas adrift, + 

Went voyaging where lonely wraiths of cloud + 

Haunted the starry hushes. Bugs grew loud + 

Among the grasses; cynic owls laughed shrill; + 

Men slept. But all night long the wolves were still, + 

Aware of watchers in the outer dark. + 

And now and then a sentry’s dog would bark, + 

Rush snarling where it seemed that nothing stirred. + 

But those who listened for a war-cry, heard + 

The skirling bugs, the jeering owls, the deep + 

Discordant snoring of the men asleep + 

Upon their guns, mules blowing in the hay. + 

At last the blanching summits saw the day. + 

A drowsy drummer spread the news of morn. + 

The mules began to nicker for their corn + 

And wrangle with a laying back of ears. + 

Among them went the surly muleteers, + 

Dispensing feed and sulphurous remarks. + 

The harness rattled, and the meadow larks + 

Set dawn to melody. A sergeant cried + 

The names of heroes. Common men replied, + 

Sing-songing down the line. The squat hills heard + 

To seize and gossip with the running word⁠— + 

Here! Here! Here! Coffee steaming in the pot, + 

Woodsmoke and slabs of bacon, sizzling hot, + 

Were very good to smell. The cook cried “chuck!” + 

And when the yellow flood of sunrise struck + 

The little prairie camp, it fell on men + 

Who ate as though they might not eat again. + 

Some wouldn’t, for the day of wrath arose. + 

And yet, but for a cruising flock of crows, + 

The basking world seemed empty. + 

Now the sun + 

Was two hours high. The axes had begun + 

Across the Piney yonder. Drowsy draws + 

Snored with the lagging echoes of the saws. + 

The day swooned windless, indolently meek. + 

It happened that the pickets by the creek + 

Were shaken from a doze by rhythmic cries + 

And drumming hoofs. Against the western skies, + 

Already well within a half a mile, + 

Came seven Indians riding single file, + 

Their wiry ponies flattened to the quirt. + 

A sentry’s Springfield roared, and hills, alert + 

With echoes, fired a ghostly enfillade. + 

The ball fell short, bit dust and ricocheted. + 

The foremost pony, smitten in the breast, + 

Went down amid the rearing of the rest + 

And floundered to a dusty somersault. + 

Unhurt, the tumbled brave emerged to vault + 

Behind a comrade; and the seven veered + 

To southward, circling round the spot they feared + 

Where three far-stinging human hornets stood. + 

Now one of these went running to the wood + 

To see what made the logging camp so still. + 

Short breath sufficed to tell the tale of ill + 

He brought⁠—the whole crew making off in stealth + 

And going to the mountains for their health, + 

The mules stampeded! + 

Things were looking blue. + 

With shaking knees, uncertain what to do, + 

The pickets waited. Whisperings of death + 

Woke round them, and they felt the gusty breath + 

Of shafts that plunked and quivered in the sod. + 

As though men sprouted where the ponies trod, + 

The circling band now jeered them, ten to one. + 

They scanned the main camp swinking in the sun. + 

No signal to return! But all the men + 

Were rushing round there, staring now and then + 

To where the foothills, northward, broke the flat. + 

A pointing sentry shouted: “Look at that! + 

Good God! There must be thousands over there!” + 

Massed black against the dazzle of the air, + 

They made the hilltops crawlingly alive⁠— + 

The viscid boiling over of a hive + 

That feels the pale green burning of the spring. + 

Slow-moving, with a phasic murmuring + 

As of a giant swarm gone honey-wild, + 

They took the slope; and still the black rear piled + 

The wriggling ridges. What could bar the way? + 

Dwarfed in the panorama of the day, + 

The camp was but a speck upon the plain. + 

And three remembered eighty lying slain + 

Beside a ford, and how the Winter strode + 

Numb-footed down a bloody stretch of road + 

Across strange faces lately known and dear. + 

“I guess we’d better hustle out of here,” + 

The sergeant said. To left, to right, in front, + 

Like starving kiotes singing to the hunt, + 

Yet overcautious for a close attack, + 

Scores pressed the fighting trio, falling back + 

Across the Piney campward. One would pause + 

To hold the rear against the arrow-flaws, + 

The pelting terror, while the two ran past; + 

Then once again the first would be the last, + 

The second, first. And still the shuttling hoofs + 

Wove closelier with gaudy warps and woofs + 

The net of death; for still from brush and break + 

The Piney, like a pregnant water snake, + 

Spewed venomous broods. + 

So fleeing up the slope + 

The pickets battled for the bitter hope + 

Of dying with their friends. And there was one + 

Who left the wagon boxes at a run + 

And, dashing past the now exhausted three, + 

Knelt down to rest his rifle on his knee + 

And coolly started perforating hides. + 

Bare ponies, dragging warriors at their sides + 

And kicking at the unfamiliar weight, + 

Approved his aim. The weaving net of hate + 

Went loose, swung wide to southward. + 

So at last + 

They reached the camp where, silent and aghast, + 

The men stood round and stared with haunted eyes. + 

’Tis said a man sees much before he dies. + 

Were these not dying? O the eighty-one + 

Bestrewn down Lodge Trail Ridge to Peno Run + 

That blizzard evening! Here were thirty-two! + 

And no one broached what everybody knew⁠— + 

The tale there’d be and maybe none to tell + 

But glutted crows and kiotes. Such a spell + 

As fastens on a sick room gripped the crowd⁠— + 

When tick by tick the doctor’s watch is loud, + 

With hours between. And like the sound of leaves + 

Through which a night-wind ominously grieves, + 

The murmur of that moving mass of men + 

To northward rose and fell and rose again, + 

More drowsing music than a waking noise. + 

And Captain Powell spoke: “Get ready, boys; + 

Take places; see their eyes, then shoot to kill.” + 

Some crouched behind the boxes, staring still + 

Like men enchanted. Others, seeming fain + 

To feel more keenly all that might remain + 

Of ebbing life, paced nervously about. + 

One fortified the better side of doubt + 

With yokes of oxen. That was Tommy Doyle. + 

(Alas, the total profit of his toil + 

Would be a hot slug crunching through his skull!) + 

And Littman yonder, grunting in the lull, + 

Arranged a keg of salt to fight behind; + 

While Condon, having other things in mind + 

Than dying, wrestled with a barrel of beans. + 

And others planned escape by grimmer means. + 

Old Robertson, with nothing in his face, + 

Unlaced a boot and noosed the leather lace + 

To reach between a trigger and a toe. + 

He did not tell, and no one asked to know + 

The meaning of it. Everybody knew. + 

John Grady and McQuarie did it too, + 

And Haggirty and Gibson did the same, + 

And many others. When the finish came, + 

At least there’d be no torturing for them. + 

Now as a hail-cloud, fraying at the hem, + 

Hurls ragged feelers to the windless void, + 

The nearing mass broke vanward and deployed + 

To left and right⁠—a dizzy, flying blear, + 

Reek of a hell-pot boiling in the rear. + 

And now, as when the menaced world goes strange + 

And cyclone sling-shots, feeling out the range, + 

Spatter the waiting land agape with drouth, + 

The few first arrows fell. Once more the south + 

Was humming with a wind of mounted men + 

That wove the broken net of death again + 

Along the creek and up the campward rise. + 

Then suddenly, with wolfish battle-cries + 

And death-songs like the onset of a gale + 

And arrows pelting like a burst of hail, + 

The living tempest broke. There was no plain; + 

Just headgear bobbing in a toss of mane, + 

And horses, horses, horses plunging under. + 

Paunch-deep in dust and thousand-footed thunder, + 

That vertigo of terror swarmed and swirled + 

About the one still spot in all the world⁠— + 

The hushed cyclonic heart. Then that was loud! + 

The boxes bellowed, and a spurting cloud + 

Made twilight where the flimsy fortress stood; + 

And flying splinters from the smitten wood + 

And criss-cross arrows pricked the drifting haze. + 

Not now, as in the recent musket days, + 

The foe might brave two volleys for a rush + 

Upon the soldiers, helpless in a hush + 

Of loading. Lo, like rifles in a dream + 

The breech-fed Springfields poured a steady stream + 

That withered men and horses roaring in! + 

And gut-shot ponies screamed above the din; + 

And many a wounded warrior, under-trod + 

But silent, wallowed on the bloody sod⁠— + 

Man piled on man and horses on the men! + 

They broke and scattered. Would they come again? + 

Abruptly so the muted hail-storm leaves + 

Astonished silence, when the dripping eaves + 

Count seconds for the havoc yet to come. + 

Weird in the hush, a melancholy hum, + 

From where the watching women of the Sioux + 

Thronged black along the circling summits, grew + 

And fell and grew⁠—the mourning for the dead. + 

One whispered hoarsely from a wagon-bed, + 

“Is anybody hit?” But none replied. + 

Awe-struck at what they did and hollow-eyed, + 

All watched and waited for the end of things. + 

Then even as the fleeing hail-cloud swings + 

Before some freakish veering of the gale, + 

Returning down its desolated trail + 

With doubled wrath, the howling horsemen came. + 

Right down upon the ring of spurting flame + 

The quirted ponies thundered; reared, afraid + 

Of that bad medicine the white men made, + 

And, screaming, bolted off with flattened ears. + 

So close the bolder pressed, that clubs and spears + 

Were hurled against the ring. + 

Again they broke, + 

To come again. Now flashing through the smoke, + 

Like lightning to the battle’s thunder-shocks, + 

Ignited arrows, streaming to the nocks, + 

Fell hissing where the fighting soldiers lay; + 

And flame went leaping through the scattered hay + 

To set the dry mule-litter smouldering. + 

Half suffocated, coughing with the sting + 

Of acrid air, like scythemen in a field + 

The soldiers mowed. And gaudy man-flower reeled + 

To wriggling swaths. And still the mad Sioux fought + 

To break this magic that the white men wrought⁠— + 

Heroic flesh at grapple with a god. + 

Then noon was glaring on the bloody sod; + 

And broken clouds of horsemen down the plain + 

Went scudding; hundreds, heavy with the slain + 

And wounded, lagging in the panic rout. + 

Again the ridges murmured round about + 

Where wailed the wives and mothers of the Sioux. + 

Some soldier whispered, asking for a chew, + 

As though he feared dread sleepers might arise. + 

Young Tommy Doyle with blood upon his eyes + 

Gaped noonward and his fighting jaw sagged loose. + 

Hank Haggirty would never need a noose + 

To reach between a trigger and a toe. + 

Jenness would never hear a bugle blow + 

Again, so well he slept. Around the ring + 

Men passed the grisly gossip, whispering⁠— + 

As though doomed flesh were putting on the ghost. + 

A sound grew up as of a moving host. + 

It seemed to issue from a deep ravine + 

To westward. There no enemy was seen. + 

A freak gust, gotten of a sultry hush, + 

May mumble thus among the distant brush + 

Some moments ere a dampened finger cools. + 

But still the smudgy litter of the mules + 

Plumed straight against the dazzle of the day. + 

Upon a hilltop half a mile away + 

To eastward. Red Cloud presently appeared + 

Among his chieftains, gazing where the weird + 

Susurrus swelled and deepened in the west; + 

And to and from him dashed along the crest + 

Fleet heralds of some new-begotten hope. + 

Once more the Piney spread along the slope + 

A dizzy ruck of charging horse. They broke + 

Before those stingers in a nest of smoke, + 

Fled back across the creek, and waited there. + 

For what? + 

The voice of it was everywhere⁠— + 

A bruit of waters fretting at a weir. + 

The woman-peopled summits hushed to hear + 

That marching sound. + 

Then suddenly a roar, + 

As from the bursting open of a door, + 

Swept out across the plain; and hundreds, pressed + 

By hundreds crowding yonder from the west, + 

Afoot and naked, issued like a wedge, + 

With Red Cloud’s nephew for the splitting edge, + 

A tribe’s hot heart behind him for a maul. + 

Slow, ponderously slow, the V-shaped wall + 

Bore down upon the camp. The whirlwind pace + 

Of horsemen seemed less terrible to face + 

Than such a leisure. Brave men held their breath + 

Before that garish masquerade of Death + 

Aflaunt with scarlets, yellows, blues and greens. + 

Then Condon there behind his barrel of beans, + 

Foreseeing doom, afraid to be afraid, + 

Sprang up and waved his rifle and essayed + 

Homeric speech according to his lights. + 

“Come on!” he yelled, “ye dairty blatherskites, + 

Ye blitherin’ ijuts! We kin lick yez all, + 

Ye low-down naygurs!” Shafts began to fall + 

About him raging. Scattered muskets roared + 

Along the fraying fringes of the horde. + 

“Get down there, Jim!” men shouted. “Down!” But Jim + 

Told Death, the blackguard, what he thought of him + 

For once and all. + 

Again the Springfields crashed; + 

And where the heavy bullets raked and smashed + 

The solid front and bored the jostling mass, + 

Men withered down like flame-struck prairie grass; + 

But still the raging hundreds forged ahead + 

Pell mell across their wounded and their dead, + 

Like tumblebugs. The splitting edge went blunt. + 

A momentary eddy at the front + 

Sucked down the stricken chief. The heavy rear, + 

With rage more mighty than the vanward fear, + 

Thrust forward. Twenty paces more, and then⁠— + 

’Twould be like drowning in a flood of men. + 

Already through the rifts one saw their eyes, + 

Teeth flashing in the yawn of battle-cries, + 

The sweat-sleek muscles straining at the bows. + 

Forgotten were the nooses for the toes. + 

Tomorrows died and yesterdays were naught. + 

Sleep-walkers in a foggy nowhere fought + 

With shadows. So forever from the first, + 

Forever so until this dream should burst + 

Its thin-blown bubble of a world. And then, + 

The shadows were a howling mass of men + 

Hurled, heavy with their losses, down the plain + 

Before that thunder-spew of death and pain + 

That followed till the last had disappeared. + 

The hush appalled; and when the smoke had cleared, + 

Men eyed each other with a sense of shock + 

At being still alive. + 

’Twas one o’clock! + 

One spoke of water. Impishly the word + 

Went round the oval, mocking those who heard. + 

The riddled barrel had bled from every stave; + 

And what the sun-stewed coffee-kettles gave + 

Seemed scarcely wet. + 

Off yonder on the hill + 

Among his chieftains Red Cloud waited still⁠— + 

A tomcat lusting for a nest of mice. + 

How often could these twenty-nine suffice + 

To check his thousands? Someone raised a sight + 

And cursed, and fell to potting at the height; + 

Then others. Red Cloud faded into air. + 

What fatal mischief was he brewing there? + 

What ailed the Fort? It seemed beyond belief + 

That Wessels yonder wouldn’t send relief! + 

The hush bred morbid fancies. Battle-cries + 

Were better than this buzzing of the flies + 

About Jenness and Haggirty and Doyle. + 

Wounds ached and smarted. Shaken films of oil + 

Troubled the yellow dazzle of the grass. + 

The bended heavens were a burning glass + 

Malevolently focused. Minutes crawled. + 

Men gnawed their hearts in silence where they sprawled, + 

Each in the puddle of his own blue shade. + 

But hear! Was that a howitzer that bayed? + 

Look! Yonder from behind the eastward steep + 

Excited warriors, like a flock of sheep + 

That hear the wolves, throng down the creekward slope + 

And flee along the Piney! + 

Slow to hope, + 

Men searched each other’s faces, silent still. + 

A case-shot, bursting yonder on the hill, + 

Sent dogging echoes up the foe-choked draws. + 

And far hills heard the leather-lunged hurrahs + 

And answered, when the long blue skirmish line + 

Swept down the hill to join the twenty-nine + 

Knee-deep in standing arrows. + 

VII + 

Beecher’s Island + 

Summer turned. + 

Where blackbirds chattered and the scrub oaks burned + 

In meadows of the Milk and Musselshell, + 

The fatted bison sniffed the winter-smell + 

Beneath the whetted stars, and drifted south. + 

Across the Yellowstone, lean-ribbed with drouth, + 

The living rivers bellowed, morn to morn. + 

The Powder and the Rosebud and the Horn + 

Flowed backward freshets, roaring to their heads. + 

Now up across the Cheyenne watersheds + 

The manless cattle wrangled day and night. + 

Along the Niobrara and the White + 

Uncounted thirsts were slaked. The peace that broods + 

Aloof among the sandhill solitudes + 

Fled from the bawling bulls and lowing cows. + 

Along the triple Loup they paused to browse + 

And left the lush sloughs bare. Along the Platte + 

The troubled myriads pawed the sandy flat + 

And snorted at the evil men had done. + 

For there, from morning sun to evening sun, + 

A strange trail cleft the ancient bison world, + 

And many-footed monsters whirred and whirled + 

Upon it; many-eyed they blinked, and screamed; + 

Tempestuous with speed, the long mane streamed + 

Behind them; and the breath of them was loud⁠— + 

A rainless cloud with lightning in the cloud + 

And alien thunder. + 

Thus the driving breed, + 

The bold earth-takers, toiled to make the deed + 

Audacious as the dream. One season saw + 

The steel trail crawl away from Omaha + 

As far as ox-rigs waddled in a day⁠— + 

An inchworm bound for San Francisco Bay! + 

The next beheld a brawling, sweating host + 

Of men and mules build on to Kearney Post + 

While spring greens mellowed into winter browns, + 

And prairie dogs were giving up their towns + 

To roaring cities. Where the Platte divides, + 

The metal serpent sped, with league-long strides, + 

Between two winters. North Platte City sprang + 

From sage brush where the prairie sirens sang + 

Of magic bargains in the marts of lust; + 

A younger Julesburg sprouted from the dust + 

To howl a season at the panting trains; + 

Cheyenne, begotten of the ravished plains, + 

All-hailed the planet as the steel clanged by. + 

And now in frosty vacancies of sky + 

The rail-head waited spring on Sherman Hill, + 

And, brooding further prodigies of will, + 

Blinked off at China. + 

So the man-stream flowed + 

Full flood beyond the Powder River road⁠— + 

A cow path, hardly worth the fighting for. + 

Then let grass grow upon the trails of war, + 

Bad hearts be good and all suspicion cease! + 

Beside the Laramie the pipe of peace + 

Awaited; let the chieftains come and smoke! + 

’Twas summer when the Great White Father spoke. + 

A thousand miles of dying summer heard; + 

And nights were frosty when the crane-winged word + 

Found Red Cloud on the Powder loath to yield. + 

The crop from that rich seeding of the field + 

Along the Piney flourished greenly still. + 

The wail of many women on a hill + 

Was louder than the word. And once again + 

He saw that blizzard of his fighting men + 

Avail as snow against the August heat. + 

“Go tell them I am making winter meat; + 

No time for talk,” he said; and that was all. + 

The Northwind snuffed the torches of the fall, + 

And drearily the frozen moons dragged past. + 

Then when the pasque-flower dared to bloom at last + 

And resurrected waters hailed the geese, + 

It happened that the flying word of peace + 

Came north again. The music that it made + 

Was sweet to Spotted Tail, and Man Afraid + 

Gave ear, bewitched. One Horn and Little Chief + 

Believed; and Two Bears ventured on belief, + 

And others who were powers in the land. + 

For here was something plain to understand: + 

As long as grass should grow and water flow, + 

Between Missouri River and the snow + 

That never melts upon the Big Horn heights, + 

The country would be closed to all the Whites. + 

So ran the song that lured the mighty south. + 

It left a bitter taste in Red Cloud’s mouth, + 

No music in his ears. “Go back and say + 

That they can take their soldier-towns away + 

From Piney Fork and Crazy Woman’s Creek + 

And Greasy Grass. Then maybe I will speak. + 

Great Spirit gave me all this country here. + 

They have no land to give.” + 

The hills went sere + 

Along the Powder; and the summer grew. + 

June knew not what the white men meant to do; + 

Nor did July. The end of August came. + 

Bullberries quickened into jets of flame + 

Where smoky bushes smouldered by the creeks. + 

Grapes purpled and the plums got rosy cheeks. + 

The nights were like a watching mother, yet + 

A chill as of incipient regret + 

Foretold the winter when the twilight fell. + 

’Twas then a story wonderful to tell + 

Went forth at last. In every wind it blew + 

Till all the far-flung bison hunters knew; + 

And Red Cloud’s name and glory filled the tale. + 

The soldier-towns along the hated trail + 

Were smoke, and all the wagons and the men + 

Were dust blown south! Old times had come again. + 

Unscared, the fatted elk and deer would roam + 

Their pastures now, the bison know their home + 

And flourish there forever unafraid. + 

So when the victor’s winter-meat was made + 

And all his lodges ready for the cold, + 

He listened to the word, now twelve moons old, + 

Rode south and made his sign and had his will. + 

Meanwhile the road along the Smoky Hill + 

Was troubled. Hunters, drifting with the herd + 

The fall before, had scattered wide the word + 

Of Red Cloud’s victory. “Look north,” they said; + 

“The white men made a road there. It is red + 

With their own blood, and now they whine for peace!” + 

The brave tale travelled southward with the geese, + 

Nor dwindled on the way, nor lacked applause. + 

Comanches, South Cheyennes and Kiowas, + 

Apaches and the South Arapahoes + 

Were glad to hear. Satanta, Roman Nose, + 

Black Kettle, Little Raven heard⁠—and thought. + 

Around their winter fires the warriors fought + 

Those far-famed battles of the North again. + 

Their hearts grew strong. “We, too,” they said, “are men; + 

And what men did up yonder, we can do. + 

Make red the road along the Smoky too, + 

And grass shall cover it!” + 

So when the spring + 

Was fetlock-deep, wild news ran shuddering + 

Through Kansas: women captured, homes ablaze, + 

Men slaughtered in the country north of Hays + 

And Harker! Terror stalking Denver way! + 

Trains burned along the road to Santa Fe, + 

The drivers scalped and given to the flames! + 

All summer Panic babbled demon names. + 

No gloom but harbored Roman Nose, the Bat. + 

Satanta, like an omnipresent cat, + 

Moused every heart. Out yonder, over there, + 

Black Kettle, Turkey Leg were everywhere. + 

And Little Raven was the night owl’s croon, + 

The watch-dog’s bark. The setting of the moon + 

Was Little Rock; the dew before the dawn + 

A sweat of horror! + 

All that summer, drawn + 

By vague reports and captive women’s wails, + 

The cavalry pursued dissolving trails⁠— + 

And found the hotwind. Loath to risk a fight, + 

Fleas in the day and tigers in the night, + 

The wild bands struck and fled to strike anew + 

And drop the curtain of the empty blue + 

Behind them, passing like the wrath of God. + 

The failing year had lit the goldenrod + 

Against the tingling nights, now well begun; + 

The sunflowers strove to hoard the paling sun + 

For winter cheer; and leagues of prairie glowed + 

With summer’s dying flare, when fifty rode + 

From Wallace northward, trailing Roman Nose, + 

The mad Cheyenne. A motley band were those⁠— + 

Scouts, hunters, captains, colonels, brigadiers; + 

Wild lads who found adventure in arrears, + 

And men of beard whom Danger’s lure made young⁠— + 

The drift and wreckage of the great war, flung + 

Along the brawling border. Two and two, + 

The victor and the vanquished, gray and blue, + 

Rode out across the Kansas plains together, + 

Hearts singing to the croon of saddle leather + 

And jingling spurs. The buffalo, at graze + 

Like dairy cattle, hardly deigned to raise + 

Their shaggy heads and watch the horsemen pass. + 

Like bursting case-shot, clumps of bluejoint grass + 

Exploded round them, hurtling grouse and quail + 

And plover. Wild hens drummed along the trail + 

At twilight; and the antelope and deer, + 

Moved more by curiosity than fear, + 

Went trotting off to pause and gaze their fill. + 

Past Short Nose and the Beaver, jogging still, + 

They followed hot upon a trail that shrank + 

At every tangent draw. Their horses drank + 

The autumn-lean Republican and crossed; + 

And there at last the dwindled trail was lost + 

Where sandhills smoked against a windy sky. + 

Perplexed and grumbling, disinclined to try + 

The upper reaches of the stream, they pressed + 

Behind Forsyth, their leader, pricking west + 

With Beecher there beside him in the van. + 

They might have disobeyed a lesser man; + 

For what availed another wild goose chase, + 

Foredoomed to end some God-forsaken place + 

With twilight dying on the prairie rim? + 

But Fame had blown a trumpet over him; + 

And men recalled that Shenandoah ride + 

With Sheridan, the stemming of the tide + 

Of rabble armies wrecked at Cedar Creek, + 

When thirty thousand hearts, no longer weak, + 

Were made one victor’s heart. + 

And so the band + 

Pushed westward up the lonely river land + 

Four saddle days from Wallace. Then at last + 

They came to where another band had passed + 

With shoeless ponies, following the sun. + 

Some miles the new trail ran as lean creeks run + 

In droughty weather; then began to grow. + 

Here other hoofs had swelled it, there, travaux; + 

And more and more the circumjacent plains + 

Had fed the trail, as when torrential rains + 

Make prodigal the gullies and the sloughs, + 

And prairie streams, late shrunken to an ooze, + 

Appal stout swimmers. Scarcity of game + 

(But yesterday both plentiful and tame) + 

And recent pony-droppings told a tale + 

Of close pursuit. All day they kept the trail + 

And slept upon it in their boots that night + 

And saddled when the first gray wash of light + 

Was on the hill tops. Past the North Fork’s mouth + 

It led, and, crossing over to the south, + 

Struck up the valley of the Rickaree⁠— + 

So broad by now that twenty, knee to knee, + 

Might ride thereon, nor would a single calk + 

Bite living sod. + 

Proceeding at a walk, + 

The troopers followed, awed by what they dared. + 

It seemed the low hills stood aloof, nor cared, + 

Disowning them; that all the gullies mocked + 

The jingling gear of Folly where it walked + 

The road to Folly’s end. The low day changed + 

To evening. Did the prairie stare estranged, + 

The knowing sun make haste to be away? + 

They saw the fingers of the failing day + 

Grow longer, groping for the homeward trail. + 

They saw the sun put on a bloody veil + 

And disappear. A flock of crows hurrahed. + 

Dismounting in the eerie valley, awed + 

With purple twilight and the evening star, + 

They camped beside the stream. A gravel bar + 

Here split the shank-deep Rickaree in two + 

And made a little island. Tall grass grew + 

Among its scattered alders, and there stood + 

A solitary sapling cottonwood + 

Within the lower angle of the sand. + 

No jesting cheered the saddle-weary band + 

That night; no fires were kindled to invoke + 

Tales grim with cannon flare and battle smoke + 

Remembered, and the glint of slant steel rolled + 

Up roaring steeps. They ate short rations cold + 

And thought about tomorrow and were dumb. + 

A hint of morning had begun to come; + 

So faint as yet that half the stars at least + 

Discredited the gossip of the east. + 

The grazing horses, blowing at the frost, + 

Were shadows, and the ghostly sentries tossed + 

Their arms about them, drowsy in the chill. + 

Was something moving yonder on the hill + 

To westward? It was there⁠—it wasn’t there. + 

Perhaps some wolfish reveller, aware + 

Of dawn, was making home. ’Twas there again! + 

And now the bubble world of snoring men + 

Was shattered, and a dizzy wind, that hurled + 

Among the swooning ruins of the world + 

Disintegrating dreams, became a shout: + 

“Turn out! Turn out! The Indians! Turn out!” + 

Hearts pounding with the momentary funk + 

Of cold blood spurred to frenzy, reeling drunk + 

With sleep, men stumbled up and saw the hill + 

Where shadows of a dream were blowing still⁠— + 

No⁠—mounted men were howling down the slopes! + 

The horses, straining at their picket ropes, + 

Reared snorting. Barking carbines flashed and gloomed, + 

Smearing the giddy picture. War drums boomed + 

And shaken rawhide crackled through the din. + 

A horse that trailed a bounding picket pin + 

Made off in terror. Others broke and fled. + 

Then suddenly the silence of the dead + 

Had fallen, and the slope in front was bare + 

And morning had become a startled stare + 

Across the empty prairie, white with frost. + 

Five horses and a pair of pack mules lost! + 

That left five donkeys for the packs. Men poked + 

Sly banter at the mountless ones, invoked + 

The “infantry” to back them, while they threw + 

The saddles on and, boot to belly, drew + 

Groan-fetching cinches tight. + 

A scarlet streak + 

Was growing in the east. Amid the reek + 

Of cowchip fires that sizzled with the damp + 

The smell of coffee spread about the camp + 

A mood of peace. But ’twas a lying mood; + 

For suddenly the morning solitude + 

Was solitude no longer. “Look!” one cried. + 

The resurrection dawn, as prophesied, + 

Lacked nothing but the trump to be fulfilled! + 

They wriggled from the valley grass! They spilled + 

Across the sky rim! North and south and west + 

Increasing hundreds, men and ponies, pressed + 

Against the few. + 

’Twas certain death to flee. + 

The way left open down the Rickaree + 

To where the valley narrowed to a gap + 

Was plainly but the baiting of a trap. + 

Who rode that way would not be riding far. + 

“Keep cool now, men! Cross over to the bar!” + 

The colonel shouted. Down they went pell-mell, + 

Churning the creek. A heaven-filling yell + 

Assailed them. Was it triumph? Was it rage? + 

Some few wild minutes lengthened to an age + 

While fumbling fingers stripped the horses’ backs + 

And tied the horses. Crouched behind the packs + 

And saddles now, they fell with clawing hands + 

To digging out and heaping up the sands + 

Around their bodies. Shots began to fall⁠— + 

The first few spatters of a thunder squall⁠— + 

And still the Colonel strolled about the field, + 

Encouraging the men. A pack mule squealed + 

And floundered. “Down!” men shouted. “Take it cool,” + 

The Colonel answered; “we can eat a mule + 

When this day’s work is over. Wait the word, + 

Then see that every cartridge wings a bird. + 

Don’t shoot too fast.” + 

The dizzy prairie spun + 

With painted ponies, weaving on the run + 

A many colored noose. So dances Death, + 

Bedizened like a harlot, when the breath + 

Of Autumn flutes among the shedding boughs + 

And scarlets caper and the golds carouse + 

And bronzes trip it and the late green leaps. + 

And then, as when the howling winter heaps + 

The strippings of the hickory and oak + 

And hurls them in a haze of blizzard smoke + 

Along an open draw, the warriors formed + 

To eastward down the Rickaree, and stormed + 

Against the isle, their solid front astride + 

The shallow water. + 

“Wait!” the Colonel cried; + 

“Keep cool now!”⁠—Would he never say the word? + 

They heard the falling horses shriek; they heard + 

The smack of smitten flesh, the whispering rush + 

Of arrows, bullets whipping through the brush + 

And flicked sand phutting; saw the rolling eyes + 

Of war-mad ponies, crooked battle cries + 

Lost in the uproar, faces in a blast + 

Of color, color, and the whirlwind last + 

Of all dear things forever. + 

“Now!” + 

The fear, + 

The fleet, sick dream of friendly things and dear + 

Dissolved in thunder; and between two breaths + 

Men sensed the sudden splendor that is Death’s, + 

The wild clairvoyant wonder. Shadows screamed + 

Before the kicking Spencers, split and streamed + 

About the island in a flame-rent shroud. + 

And momently, with hoofs that beat the cloud, + 

Winged with the mad momentum of the charge, + 

A war horse loomed unnaturally large + 

Above the burning ring of rifles there, + 

Lit, sprawling, in the midst and took the air + 

And vanished. And the storming hoofs roared by. + 

And suddenly the sun, a handbreadth high, + 

Was peering through the clinging battle-blur. + 

Along the stream, wherever bushes were + 

Or clumps of bluejoint, lurking rifles played + 

Upon the isle⁠—a point-blank enfilade, + 

Horse-slaughtering and terrible to stand; + 

And southward there along the rising land + 

And northward where the valley was a plain, + 

The horsemen galloped, and a pelting rain + 

Of arrows fell. + 

Now someone, lying near + 

Forsyth, was yelling in his neighbor’s ear + 

“They’ve finished Sandy!” For a giant whip, + 

It seemed, laid hot along the Colonel’s hip + 

A lash of torture, and his face went gray + 

And pinched. And voices boomed above the fray, + 

“Is Sandy dead?” So, rising on a knee + 

That anyone who feared for him might see, + 

He shouted: “Never mind⁠—it’s nothing bad!” + 

And noting how the wild face of a lad + 

Yearned up at him⁠—the youngest face of all, + 

With cheeks like Rambeau apples in the fall, + 

Eyes old as terror⁠—“Son, you’re doing well!” + 

He cried and smiled; and that one lived to tell + 

The glory of it in the after days. + 

Now presently the Colonel strove to raise + 

The tortured hip to ease it, when a stroke + 

As of a dull ax bit a shin that broke + 

Beneath his weight. Dragged backward in a pit, + 

He sat awhile against the wall of it + 

And strove to check the whirling of the land. + 

Then, noticing how some of the command + 

Pumped lead too fast and threw their shells away, + 

He set about to crawl to where they lay + 

And tell them. Something whisked away his hat, + 

And for a green-sick minute after that + 

The sky rained stars. Then vast ear-hollows rang + 

With brazen noises, and a sullen pang + 

Was like a fire that smouldered in his skull. + 

He gazed about him groggily. A lull + 

Had fallen on the battle, and he saw + 

How pairs of horsemen galloped down the draw, + 

Recovering the wounded and the dead. + 

The snipers on the river banks had fled + 

To safer berths; but mounted hundreds still + 

Swarmed yonder on the flat and on the hill, + 

And long range arrows fell among the men. + 

The island had become a slaughter pen. + 

Of all the mules and horses, one alone + 

Still stood. He wobbled with a gurgling moan, + 

Legs wide, his drooping muzzle dripping blood; + 

And some still wallowed in a scarlet mud + 

And strove to rise, with threshing feet aloft. + 

But most lay still, as when the spring is soft + 

And work-teams share the idleness of cows + 

On Sunday, and a glutted horse may drowse, + 

Loose-necked, forgetting how the plowshare drags. + 

Bill Wilson yonder lay like bundled rags, + 

And so did Chalmers. Farley over there, + 

With one arm limp, was taking special care + 

To make the other do; it did, no doubt. + 

And Morton yonder with an eye shot out + 

Was firing slowly, but his gun barrel shook. + 

And Mooers, the surgeon, with a sightless look + 

Of mingled expectation and surprise, + 

Had got a bullet just above the eyes; + 

But Death was busy and neglected him. + 

Now all the while, beneath the low hill rim + 

To southward, where a sunning slope arose + 

To look upon the slaughter, Roman Nose + 

Was sitting, naked of his battle-gear. + 

In vain his chestnut stallion, tethered near, + 

Had sniffed the battle, whinnying to go + 

Where horses cried to horses there below, + 

And men to men. By now a puzzled word + 

Ran round the field, and baffled warriors heard, + 

And out of bloody mouths the dying spat + 

The question: “Where is Roman Nose, the Bat? + 

While other men are dying, where is he?” + 

So certain of the mighty rode to see, + 

And found him yonder sitting in the sun. + 

They squatted round him silently. And one + 

Got courage for a voice at length, and said: + 

“Your people there are dying, and the dead + 

Are many.” But the Harrier of Men + 

Kept silence. And the bold one, speaking then + 

To those about him, said: “You see today + 

The one whom all the warriors would obey, + 

Whatever he might wish. His heart is faint. + 

He has not even found the strength to paint + 

His face, you see!” The Flame of Many Roofs + 

Still smouldered there. The Midnight Wind of Hoofs + 

Kept mute. “Our brothers, the Arapahoes,” + 

Another said, “will tell of Roman Nose; + 

Their squaws will scorn him; and the Sioux will say + 

‘He was not like the men we were that day + 

When all the soldiers died by Peno ford!’ ” + 

They saw him wince, as though the words had gored + 

His vitals. Then he spoke. His voice was low. + 

“My medicine is broken. Long ago + 

One made a bonnet for a mighty man, + 

My father’s father; and the good gift ran + 

From sire to son, and we were men of might. + 

For he who wore the bonnet in a fight + 

Could look on Death, and Death would fear him much, + 

So long as he should let no metal touch + 

The food he ate. But I have been a fool. + 

A woman lifted with an iron tool + 

The bread I ate this morning. What you say + 

Is good to hear.” + 

He cast his robe away, + 

Got up and took the bonnet from its case + 

And donned it; put the death-paint on his face + 

And mounted, saying “Now I go to die!” + 

Thereat he lifted up a bull-lunged cry + 

That clamored far among the hills around; + 

And dying men took courage at the sound + 

And muttered “He is coming.” + 

Now it fell + 

That those upon the island heard a yell + 

And looked about to see from whence it grew. + 

They saw a war-horse hurtled from the blue, + 

A big-boned chestnut, clean and long of limb, + 

That did not dwarf the warrior striding him, + 

So big the man was. Naked as the day + 

The neighbors sought his mother’s lodge to say + 

“This child shall be a trouble to his foes” + 

(Save for a gorgeous bonnet), Roman Nose + 

Came singing on the run. And as he came + 

Mad hundreds hailed him, booming like a flame + 

That rages over slough grass, pony tall. + 

They formed behind him in a solid wall + 

And halted at a lifting of his hand. + 

The troopers heard him bellow some command. + 

They saw him wheel and wave his rifle high; + 

And distant hills were peopled with the cry + 

He flung at Death, that mighty men of old, + 

Long dead, might hear the coming of the bold + 

And know the land still nursed the ancient breed. + 

Then, followed by a thundering stampede, + 

He charged the island where the rifles brawled. + 

And some who galloped nearest him recalled + 

In after days, what some may choose to doubt, + 

How suddenly the hubbuboo went out + 

In silence, and a wild white brilliance broke + 

About him, and the cloud of battle smoke + 

Was thronged with faces not of living men. + 

Then terribly the battle roared again. + 

And those who tell it saw him reel and sag + 

Against the stallion, like an empty bag, + 

Then slip beneath the mill of pony hoofs. + 

So Roman Nose, the Flame of Many Roofs, + 

Flared out. And round the island swept the foe⁠— + 

Wrath-howling breakers with an undertow + 

Of pain that wailed and murmuring dismay. + 

Now Beecher, with the limp he got that day + 

At Gettysburg, rose feebly from his place, + 

Unearthly moon-dawn breaking on his face, + 

And staggered over to the Colonel’s pit. + 

Half crawling and half falling into it, + 

“I think I have a fatal wound,” he said; + 

And from his mouth the hard words bubbled red + 

In witness of the sort of hurt he had. + 

“No, Beecher, no! It cannot be so bad!” + 

The other begged, though certain of the end; + 

For even then the features of the friend + 

Were getting queer. “Yes, Sandy, yes⁠—goodnight,” + 

The stricken muttered. Whereupon the fight + 

No longer roared for him; but one who grieved + 

And fought thereby could hear the rent chest heaved + 

With struggling breath that couldn’t leave the man. + 

And by and by the whirling host began + 

To scatter, most withdrawing out of range. + 

Astonished at the suddenness of change + 

From dawn to noon, the troopers saw the sun. + 

To eastward yonder women had begun + 

To glean the fallen, wailing as they piled + 

The broken loves of mother, maid and child + 

On pony-drags; remembering their wont + 

Of heaping thus the harvest of the hunt + 

To fill the kettles these had sat around. + 

Forsyth now strove to view the battleground, + 

But could not for the tortured hip and limb; + 

And so they passed a blanket under him + 

And four men heaved the corners; then he saw. + 

“Well, Grover, have they other cards to draw, + 

Or have they played the pack?” he asked a scout. + 

And that one took a plug of chewing out + 

And gnawed awhile, then spat and said: “Dunno; + 

I’ve fit with Injuns thirty year or so + 

And never see the like of this till now. + 

We made a lot of good ones anyhow, + 

Whatever else⁠—.” + 

Just then it came to pass + 

Some rifles, hidden yonder in the grass, + 

Took up the sentence with a snarling rip + 

That made men duck. One let his corner slip. + 

The Colonel tumbled, and the splintered shin + 

Went crooked, and the bone broke through the skin; + 

But what he said his angel didn’t write. + 

’Twas plain the foe had wearied of the fight, + 

Though scores of wary warriors kept the field + 

And circled, watching for a head revealed + 

Above the slaughtered horses. Afternoon + 

Waned slowly, and a wind began to croon⁠— + 

Like memory. The sapling cottonwood + 

Responded with a voice of widowhood. + 

The melancholy heavens wove a pall. + 

Night hid the valley. Rain began to fall. + 

How good is rain when from a sunlit scarp + 

Of heaven falls a silver titan’s harp + 

For winds to play on, and the new green swirls + 

Beneath the dancing feet of April girls, + 

And thunder-claps applaud the meadow lark! + 

How dear to be remembered⁠—rainy dark + 

When Youth and Wonder snuggle safe abed + 

And hear creation bustling overhead + 

With fitful hushes when the eave drip-drops + 

And everything about the whole house stops + 

To hear what now the buds and grass may think! + 

Night swept the island with a brush of ink. + 

They heard the endless drizzle sigh and pass + 

And whisper to the bushes and the grass, + 

Sh⁠—sh⁠—for men were dying in the rain; + 

And there was that low singing that is pain, + 

And curses muttered lest a stout heart break. + 

As one who lies with fever half awake + 

And sets the vague real shepherding a drove + 

Of errant dreams, the broken Colonel strove + 

For order in the nightmare. Willing hands + 

With knife and plate fell digging in the sands + 

And throwing out a deep surrounding trench. + 

Graves, yawning briefly in the inky drench, + 

Were satisfied with something no one saw. + 

Carved horse meat passed around for wolfing raw + 

And much was cached to save it from the sun. + 

Now when the work about the camp was done + 

And all the wounds had got rude handed care, + 

The Colonel called the men about him there + 

And spoke of Wallace eighty miles away. + 

Who started yonder might not see the day; + 

Yet two must dare that peril with the tale + 

Of urgent need; and if the two should fail, + 

God help the rest! + 

It seemed that everyone + 

Who had an arm left fit to raise a gun + 

And legs for swinging leather begged to go. + 

But all agreed with old Pierre Trudeau, + 

The grizzled trapper, when he “ ’lowed he knowed + 

The prairie like a farmer did a road, + 

And many was the Injun he had fooled.” + 

And Stillwell’s youth and daring overruled + 

The others. Big he was and fleet of limb + 

And for his laughing pluck men honored him, + 

Despite that weedy age when boys begin + 

To get a little conscious of the chin + 

And jokers dub them “Whiskers” for the lack. + 

These two were swallowed in the soppy black + 

And wearily the sodden night dragged by. + 

At last the chill rain ceased. A dirty sky + 

Leaked morning. Culver, Farley, Day and Smith + 

Had found a comrade to adventure with + 

And come upon the country that is kind. + 

But Mooers was slow in making up his mind + 

To venture, though with any breath he might. + 

Stark to the drab indecency of light, + 

The tumbled heaps, that once were horses, lay + 

With naked ribs and haunches lopped away⁠— + 

Good friends at need with all their fleetness gone. + 

Like wolves that smell a feast the foe came on, + 

A skulking pack. They met a gust of lead + 

That flung them with their wounded and their dead + 

Back to the spying summits of the hills, + 

Content to let the enemy that kills + 

Without a wound complete the task begun. + 

Dawn cleared the sky, and all day long the sun + 

Shone hotly through a lens of amethyst⁠— + 

Like some incorrigible optimist + 

Who overworks the sympathetic role. + 

All day the troopers sweltered in the bowl + 

Of soppy sand, and wondered if the two + 

Were dead by now; or had they gotten through? + 

And if they hadn’t⁠—What about the meat? + 

Another day or two of steaming heat + 

Would fix it for the buzzards and the crows; + 

And there’d be choicer banqueting for those + 

If no one came. + 

So when a western hill + 

Burned red and blackened, and the stars came chill, + 

Two others started crawling down the flat + 

For Wallace; and for long hours after that + 

Men listened, listened, listened for a cry, + 

But heard no sound. And just before the sky + 

Began to pale, the two stole back unhurt. + 

The dark was full of shadow men, alert + 

To block the way wherever one might go. + 

Alas, what chance for Stillwell and Trudeau? + 

That day the dozen wounded bore their plight + 

Less cheerfully than when the rainy night + 

Had held so great a promise. All day long, + 

As one who hums a half forgotten song + 

By poignant bits, the dying surgeon moaned; + 

But when the west was getting sober-toned, + 

He choked a little and forgot the tune. + 

And men were silent, wondering how soon + 

They’d be like that. + 

Now when the tipping Wain, + 

Above the Star, poured slumber on the plain, + 

Jack Donovan and Pliley disappeared + 

Down river where the starry haze made weird + 

The narrow gulch. They seemed as good as dead; + 

And all next day the parting words they said, + 

“We won’t be coming back,” were taken wrong. + 

The fourth sun since the battle lingered long. + 

Putrescent horseflesh now befouled the air. + 

Some tried to think they liked the prickly pear. + 

Some tightened up their belts a hole or so. + 

And certain of the wounded babbled low + 

Of places other than the noisome pits, + 

Because the fever sped their straying wits + 

Like homing bumblebees that know the hive. + 

That day the Colonel found his leg alive + 

With life that wasn’t his. + 

The fifth sun crept; + 

The evening dawdled; morning overslept. + 

It seemed the dark would never go away; + 

The kiotes filled it with a roundelay + 

Of toothsome horses smelling to the sky. + 

But somehow morning happened by and by. + 

All day the Colonel scanned the prairie rims + 

And found it hard to keep away the whims + 

That dogged him; often, wide awake, he dreamed. + 

The more he thought of it, the more it seemed + 

That all should die of hunger wasn’t fair; + 

And so he called the sound men round him there + 

And spoke of Wallace and the chance they stood + 

To make their way to safety, if they would. + 

As for himself and other cripples⁠—well, + 

They’d take a chance, and if the worst befell, + 

Were soldiers. + 

There was silence for a space + 

While each man slyly sought his neighbor’s face + 

To see what better thing a hope might kill. + 

Then there was one who growled: “The hell we will! + 

We’ve fought together and we’ll die so too!” + 

One might have thought relief had come in view + 

To hear the shout that rose. + 

The slow sun sank. + 

The empty prairie gloomed. The horses stank. + 

The kiotes sang. The starry dark was cold. + 

That night the prowling wolves grew over bold + 

And one was cooking when the sun came up. + 

It gave the sick a little broth to sup; + 

And for the rest, they joked and made it do. + 

And all day long the cruising buzzards flew + 

Above the island, eager to descend; + 

While, raucously prophetic of the end, + 

The crows wheeled round it hungrily to pry; + 

And mounted warriors loomed against the sky + 

To peer and vanish. Darkness fell at last; + 

But when the daylight came and when it passed + 

The Colonel scarcely knew, for things got mixed; + 

The moment was forever, strangely fixed, + 

And never in a moment. Still he kept + 

One certain purpose, even when he slept, + 

To cheer the men by seeming undismayed. + 

But when the eighth dawn came, he grew afraid + 

Of his own weakness. Stubbornly he sat, + 

His tortured face half hidden by his hat, + 

And feigned to read a novel one had found + 

Among the baggage. But the print went round + 

And wouldn’t talk however it was turned. + 

At last the morning of the ninth day burned. + 

Again he strove to regiment the herds + 

Of dancing letters into marching words, + 

When suddenly the whole command went mad. + 

They yelled; they danced the way the letters had; + 

They tossed their hats. + 

Then presently he knew + 

’Twas cavalry that made the hillside blue⁠— + 

The cavalry from Wallace! + 

VIII + 

The Yellow God + 

Autumn’s goad + 

Had thronged the weed-grown Powder River Road + 

With bison following the shrinking green. + 

Again the Platte and Smoky Hill had seen + 

The myriads nosing at the dusty hem + 

Of Summer’s robe; and, drifting after them, + 

The wild marauders vanished. Winter came; + 

And lo! the homesteads echoed with a name + 

That was a ballad sung, a saga told; + 

For, once men heard it, somehow it was old + 

With Time’s rich hoarding and the bardic lyres. + 

By night the settlers hugged their cowchip fires + 

And talked of Custer, while the children heard + 

The way the wild wind dramatized the word + 

With men and horses roaring to the fight + 

And valiant bugles crying down the night, + 

Far-blown from Cedar Creek or Fisher’s Hill. + 

And in their sleep they saw him riding still, + 

A part of all things wonderful and past, + 

His bright hair streaming in the battle blast + 

Above a surf of sabres! Roofs of shale + 

And soddy walls seemed safer for the tale, + 

The prairie kinder for that name of awe. + 

For now the Battle of the Washita + 

Was fought at every hearthstone in the land. + 

’Twas song to talk of Custer and his band: + 

The blizzard dawn, the march from Camp Supply, + 

Blind daring with the compass for an eye + 

To pierce the writhing haze; the icy fords, + 

The freezing sleeps; the finding of the hordes + 

That deemed the bitter weather and the snows + 

Their safety⁠—Kiowas, Arapahoes, + 

Cheyennes, Comanches⁠—miles of river flat + 

One village; Custer crouching like a cat + 

Among the drifts; the numbing lapse of night; + 

The brass band blaring in the first wan light, + 

The cheers, the neighing, and the wild swoop down + 

To widow-making in a panic town + 

Of widow-makers! O ’twas song to say + 

How Old Black Kettle paid his life that day + 

For bloody dawns of terror! Lyric words + 

Dwelt long upon his slaughtered pony herds, + 

His lodges burning for the roofs that blazed + 

That dreadful year! Rejoicing Kansas raised + 

Her eyes beyond the days of her defeat + 

And saw her hills made mighty with the wheat, + 

The tasselled com ranks marching on the plain; + 

The wonder-working of the sun and rain + 

And faith and labor; plenty out of dearth; + 

Man’s mystic marriage with the virgin Earth, + 

A hard-won bride. + 

And April came anew; + 

But there were those⁠—and they were human too⁠— + 

For whom the memory of other springs + 

Sought vainly in the growing dusk of things + 

The ancient joy. Along the Smoky Hill + 

The might they could no longer hope to kill + 

Brawled west again, where maniacs of toil + 

Were chaining down the violated soil, + 

And plows went wiving in the bison range, + 

An alien-childed mother growing strange + 

With younger loves. May deepened in the sloughs + 

When down the prairie swept the wonder news + 

Of what had happened at the Great Salt Lake, + 

And how, at last, the crawling iron snake + 

Along the Platte had lengthened to the sea. + 

So shadows of a thing that was to be + 

Grew darker in the land. + 

Four years went by, + 

And still the solemn music of a lie + 

Kept peace in all the country of the Sioux. + 

Unharried yonder, still the bison knew + 

The meadows of Absoraka and throve; + 

But now no more the Hoary Herdsman drove + 

His countless cattle past the great Platte road. + 

Still honoring the treaty, water flowed, + 

And grass grew, faithful to the plighted word. + 

Then yonder on the Yellowstone was heard + 

The clank of sabers; and the Red Men saw + 

How Yellow Hair, the Wolf of Washita, + 

Went spying with his pack along the stream, + 

While others, bitten with a crazy dream, + 

Were driving stakes and peeping up the flat. + 

Just so it was that summer on the Platte + 

Before the evil came. And devil boats + 

Came up with stinking thunder in their throats + 

To scare the elk and make the bison shy. + 

So there was fighting yonder where the lie + 

Was singing flat; though nothing came of it. + 

And once again the stunted oaks were lit, + 

And down across the prairie howled the cold; + 

And spring came back, exactly as of old, + 

To resurrect the waters and the grass. + 

The summer deepened peacefully⁠—alas, + 

The last of happy summers, cherished long + 

As Sorrow hoards the wreckage of a song + 

Whose wounding lilt is dearer for the wound. + 

The children laughed; contented mothers crooned + 

About their lodges. Nothing was afraid. + 

The warriors talked of hunting, in the shade, + 

Or romped with crowing babies on their backs. + 

The meat was plenty on the drying racks; + 

The luscious valleys made the ponies glad; + 

And travellers knew nothing that was bad + 

To tell of any village they had known. + 

No white men yonder on the Yellowstone, + 

Nor any sign of trouble anywhere! + 

Then once again the name of Yellow Hair + 

Was heard with dread; for Summer, turning brown, + 

Beheld him lead a thousand horsemen down + 

To pierce the Hills where Inyan Kara towers, + 

Brawl southward through that paradise of flowers + 

And deer and singing streams to Frenchman Creek; + 

Beheld him even climbing Harney Peak + 

To spy the land, as who should say him no! + 

Had grasses failed? Had water ceased to flow? + 

Were pledges wind? + 

Now scarce the sloughs were sere + 

When Custer, crying in the wide world’s ear + 

What every need and greed could understand, + 

Made all men see the Black Hills wonderland + 

Where Fortune waited, ready with a bow. + 

What fertile valleys pining for the plow! + 

What lofty forests given to the birds, + 

What luscious cattle pastures to the herds + 

Of elk and deer! What flower-enchanted parks, + 

Now lonely with the quails and meadowlarks, + 

Awaited men beneath the shielding peaks! + 

And in the creeks⁠—in all the crystal creeks⁠— + 

The blessèd creeks⁠—O wonder to behold!⁠— + 

Free gold⁠—the god of rabbles⁠—holy gold⁠— + 

And gold in plenty from the grass-roots down! + 

The Black Hills Country! Heard in every town, + 

That incantation of a wizard horn + 

Wrought madness. Farmers caught it in the corn + 

To shuck no more. No glory of the sward + 

Outdazzled yonder epiphanic Lord⁠— + 

The only revelation that was sure! + 

And through the cities went the singing lure, + 

Where drearily the human welter squirms + 

Like worms that lick the slime of other worms + 

That all may flourish. Squalor saw the gleam, + 

And paupers mounted in a splendid dream + 

The backs of luckless men, for now the weak + 

Inherited the earth! The fat, the sleek + 

Envisaged that apocalypse, and saw + 

Obesity to put the cringe of awe + 

In knees of leanness! + 

Sell the family cow! + 

Go pawn the homestead! Life was knocking now! + 

There might not ever be another knock. + 

Bring forth the hoarding of the hidden sock, + 

Poor coppers from the dear dead eyes of Joy! + 

Go seek the god that weighs the soul by troy; + 

Be saved, and let the devil take the rest! + 

The West⁠—the golden West⁠—the siren West⁠— + 

Behold the rainbow’s end among her peaks! + 

For in the creeks⁠—in all the crystal creeks⁠— + 

The blessèd creeks⁠—! + 

So wrought the rueful dream. + 

Chinooks of hope fed full the human stream, + 

Brief thawings of perennial despair. + 

And steadily the man-flood deepened there + 

With every moon along the Sioux frontier, + 

Where still the treaty held⁠—a rotten wier + 

Already trickling with a leak of men. + 

And some of those came drifting back again, + 

Transfigured palmers from the Holy Lands, + 

With true salvation gleaming in their hands + 

Now cleansed of labor. Thus the wonder grew. + 

And there were flinty hearts among the Sioux + 

That fall and winter. Childish, heathen folk, + 

Their god was but a spirit to invoke + 

Among the hushes of a lonely hill; + 

An awfulness when winter nights were still; + 

A mystery, a yearning to be felt + 

When birds returned and snow began to melt + 

And miracles were doing in the grass. + 

Negotiable Divinity, alas, + 

They had not yet the saving grace to know! + 

Nor did the hard hearts soften with the snow, + 

When from the high gray wilderness of rain + 

Johannine voices of the goose and crane + 

Foretold the Coming to a world enthralled; + 

For still along the teeming border brawled + 

The ever growing menace. + 

Summer bloomed; + 

But many, with the prescience of the doomed, + 

Could feel the shaping of the end of things + 

In all that gladness. How the robin sings + 

The sweeter in the ghastly calm that aches + 

With beauty lost, before the cyclone breaks! + 

And helpless watchers feel it as a pang, + 

Because of all the times the robin sang + 

Scarce noted in the melody of then. + 

About the lodges gray and toothless men + 

Bemoaned the larger time when life was good. + 

Hey-hey, what warriors then, what hardihood! + 

What terror of the Sioux among their foes! + 

What giants, gone, alas, these many snows⁠— + 

And they who knew so near their taking off! + 

Now beggars at the Great White Father’s trough + 

Forgot the bow and waited to be swilled. + 

The woman-hearted god the White Man killed + 

Bewitched the people more with every moon. + 

The buffalo would join the fathers soon. + 

The world was withered like a man grown old. + 

A few more grasses, and the Sioux would hold + 

A little paper, dirtied with a lie, + 

For all that used to be. ’Twas time to die. + 

Hey-hey, the braver days when life was new! + 

But there were strong hearts yet among the Sioux + 

Despite the mumbling of the withered gums. + 

That summer young men chanted to the drums + 

Of mighty deeds; and many went that fall + 

Where Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Gall + 

Were shepherding their people on the Tongue + 

And Powder yet, as when the world was young, + 

Contemptuous of alien ways and gods. + 

Now when the candles of the goldenrods + 

Were guttering about the summer’s bier, + 

And unforgetting days were hushed to hear + 

Some rumor of a lone belated bird, + 

It came to pass the Great White Father’s word + 

Assembled many on the White to meet + 

The Long Knife chieftains. Bitter words and sweet + 

Grew rankly there; and stubbornly the wills + 

Of children met the hagglers for the Hills, + 

The lust for gold begetting lust for gold. + 

The young moon grew and withered and was old, + 

And still the latest word was like the first. + 

Then talking ended and the man-dam burst + 

To loose the living flood upon the West. + 

All winter long it deepened, and the crest + 

Came booming with the February thaw. + 

The torrent setting in through Omaha + 

Ground many a grist of greed, and loud Cheyenne + 

Became a tail-race running mules and men + 

Hell-bent for Eldorado. Yankton vied + 

With Sidney in the combing of the tide + 

For costly wreckage. Giddily it swirled + 

Where Custer City shouted to the world + 

And Deadwood was a howl, and Nigger Hill + 

A cry from Pisgah. Unabated still, + 

Innumerable distant freshets flowed. + 

The bison trail became a rutted road + 

And prairie schooners cruised the rolling Spring. + 

In labor with a monstrous farrowing, + 

The river packets grunted; and the plains + 

Were startled at the spawning of the trains + 

Along the Platte. + 

So, bitten by the imp + 

Of much-for-nought, the gambler and the pimp, + 

The hero and the coward and the fool, + 

The pious reader of the golden rule + 

By decimals, the dandy and the gawk, + 

The human eagle and the wingless hawk + 

Alert for prey, the graybeard and the lad, + 

The murderer, the errant Galahad, + 

Mistaken in the color of the gleam⁠— + 

All dreamers of the old pathetic dream⁠— + 

Pursued what no pursuing overtakes. + 

IX + 

The Village of Crazy Horse + 

Meanwhile among the Powder River breaks, + 

Where cottonwoods and plums and stunted oaks + 

Made snug his village of a hundred smokes, + 

Young Crazy Horse was waiting for the spring. + 

Well found his people were in everything + 

That makes a winter good. But more than food + 

And shelter from the hostile solitude + 

Sustained them yonder when the sun fled far + 

And rustling ghost-lights capered round the Star + 

And moons were icy and the blue snow whined; + 

Or when for days the world went blizzard blind + 

And devils of the North came howling down. + 

For something holy moved about the town + 

With Crazy Horse. + 

No chieftainship had run, + 

Long cherished in the blood of sire and son, + 

To clothe him with the might he wielded then. + 

The Ogalalas boasted taller men + 

But few of fairer body. One might look + 

And think of water running in a brook + 

Or maybe of a slender hickory tree; + 

And something in his face might make one see + 

A flinty shaft-head very keen to go, + 

Because a hero’s hand is on the bow, + 

His eye upon the mark. But nothing seen + 

About his goodly making or his mien + 

Explained the man; and other men were bold. + 

Unnumbered were the stories that were told + 

(And still the legend glorified the truth) + 

About his war-fond, pony-taming youth + 

When Hump the Elder was a man to fear; + 

And where one went, the other would be near, + 

For there was love between the man and lad. + 

And it was good to tell what fights they had + 

With roving bands of Utes or Snakes or Crows. + 

And now that Hump was gone these many snows, + 

His prowess lingered. So the legend ran. + 

But neither Hump nor any other man + 

Could give the gift that was a riddle still. + 

What lonely vigils on a starry hill, + 

What fasting in the time when boyhood dies + 

Had put the distant seeing in his eyes, + 

The power in his silence? What had taught + 

That getting is a game that profits naught + 

And giving is a high heroic deed? + 

His plenty never neighbored with a need + 

Among his band. A good tough horse to ride, + 

The gear of war, and some great dream inside + 

Were Crazy Horse’s wealth. It seemed the dim + 

And larger past had wandered back in him + 

To shield his people in the days of wrong. + 

His thirty years were like a brave old song + 

That men remember and the women croon + 

To make their babies brave. + 

Now when the moon + 

Had wearied of December and was gone, + 

And bitterly the blizzard time came on, + 

The Great White Father had a word to say. + 

The frost-bit runners rode a weary way + 

To bring the word, and this is what it said: + 

“All bands, before another moon is dead, + 

Must gather at the agencies or share + 

The fate of hostiles.” Grandly unaware + 

Of aught but its own majesty and awe, + 

The big word blustered. Yet the people saw + 

The snow-sift snaking in the grasses, heard + 

The Northwind bellow louder than the word + 

To make them shudder with the winter fear. + 

“You see that there are many children here,” + 

Said Crazy Horse. “Our herd is getting lean. + 

We can not go until the grass is green. + 

It is a very foolish thing you say.” + 

And so the surly runners rode away + 

And Crazy Horse’s people stayed at home. + 

And often were the days a howling gloam + 

Between two howling darks; nor could one tell + 

When morning broke and when the long night fell; + 

For ’twas a winter such as old men cite + 

To overawe and set the youngsters right + 

With proper veneration for the old. + 

The ponies huddled humpbacked in the cold + 

And, dog-like, gnawed the bark of cottonwood. + 

But where the cuddled rawhide lodges stood + 

Men laughed and yarned and let the blizzard roar, + 

Unwitting how the tale the runners bore + 

Prepared the day of sorrow. + 

March boomed in, + 

And still the people revelled in their sin + 

Nor thought of woe already on the way. + 

Then, when the night was longer than the day + 

By just about an old man’s wink and nod, + 

As sudden as the storied wrath of God, + 

And scarce more human, retribution came. + 

The moony wind that night was like a flame + 

To sear whatever naked flesh it kissed. + 

The dry snow powder coiled and struck and hissed + 

Among the lodges. Haloes mocked the moon. + 

The boldest tale was given over soon + 

For kinder evenings; and the dogs were still + 

Before the prowling foe no pack might kill, + 

The subtle fang that feared not any fang. + 

But ever nearer, nearer, shod hoofs rang + 

To southward, unsuspected in the town. + 

Three cavalry battalions, flowing down + 

The rugged canyon bed of Otter Creek + 

With Reynolds, clattered out across the bleak + 

High prairie, eerie in the fitful light, + 

Where ghostly squadrons howled along the night, + 

Their stinging sabers gleaming in the wind. + 

All night they sought the village that had sinned + 

Yet slept the sleep of virtue, unafraid. + 

The Bear swung round; the stars began to fade; + 

The low moon stared. Then, floating in the puffs + 

Of wind-whipped snow, the Powder River bluffs + 

Gloomed yonder, and the scouts came back to tell + 

Of many sleeping lodges. + 

Now it fell + 

That when the bluffs were paling with the glow + 

Of dawn, and still the teepee tops below + 

Stood smokeless in the stupor of a dream, + 

A Sioux boy, strolling down the frozen stream + 

To find his ponies, wondered at the sound + 

Of many hoofs upon the frozen ground, + 

The swishing of the brush. He paused to think. + 

The herd, no doubt, was coming for a drink; + 

He’d have to chop a hole. And while he stood, + 

The spell of dawn upon him, from the wood⁠— + 

How queer!⁠—they issued marching four by four + 

As though enchanted, breasts and muzzles hoar + 

With frozen breath! Were all the ponies dead, + 

And these their taller spirits? + 

—Then he fled, + 

The frightened trees and bushes flowing dim, + 

The blanching bluff tops flinging back at him + 

His many-echoed yell. A frowsy squaw + 

Thrust up a lodge flap, blinked about her⁠—saw + 

What ailed her boy, and fell to screaming shrill. + 

The startled wolf-dogs, eager for a kill, + 

Rushed yelping from the lodges. Snapping sharp, + 

As ’twere a short string parting in a harp, + 

A frosty rifle sounded. Teepees spilled + 

A half clad rabble, and the valley filled + 

With uproar, spurting into jets of pain; + 

For now there swept a gust of killing rain + 

From where the plunging horses in a cloud + 

Of powder smoke bore down upon the crowd + 

To set it scrambling wildly for the breaks. + 

The waddling grandmas lost their precious aches + 

In terror for the young they dragged and drove; + 

Hysteric mothers staggered as they strove + 

To pack the creepers and the toddlers too; + 

And grandpas, not forgetting they were Sioux, + 

Made shift to do a little with the bows, + 

While stubbornly the young men after those + 

Retreated fighting through the lead-swept town + 

And up the sounding steeps. + 

There, looking down + 

Along the track of terror splotched with red + 

And dotted with the wounded and the dead, + 

They saw the blue-coats rage among their roofs, + 

Their homes flung down and given to the hoofs + 

Of desecrating wrath. And while they gazed + 

In helpless grief and fury, torches blazed + 

And teepees kindled. Casks of powder, stored + 

Against a doubtful future, belched and roared. + 

The hurtled lodge poles showered in the gloom, + 

And rawhide tops, like glutted bats of doom, + 

Sailed tumbling in the dusk of that despair. + 

Not long the routed warriors cowered there + 

Among the rocks and gullies of the steep. + 

The weakness of a panic-broken sleep + 

Wore off. Their babies whimpered in the frost. + 

Their herd was captured. Everything seemed lost + 

But life alone. It made them strong to die. + 

The death-song, stabbed with many a battle cry, + 

Blew down the flat⁠—a blizzard of a sound⁠— + 

And all the rocks and draws and brush around + 

Spat smoke and arrows in a closing ring. + 

There fell a sudden end of plundering. + 

Abruptly as they came the raiders fled, + 

And certain of their wounded, men have said, + 

Were left to learn what hells are made of wrath. + 

Now, gleaning in that strewn tornado path + 

Their dead and dying, came the mourning folk + 

To find a heap for home, a stinking smoke + 

For plenty. Senseless to the whirling snow, + 

About the bitter honey of their woe + 

They swarmed and moaned. What evil had they done? + 

Dear eyes, forever empty of the sun, + 

Stared up at them. These little faces, old + 

With pain, and pinched with more than winter cold⁠— + 

Why should they never seek the breast again? + 

A keening such as wakes the wolf in men + 

Outwailed the wind. Yet many a thrifty wife, + 

Long used to serve the urgencies of life + 

That make death seem a laggard’s impudence, + 

Descended in a rage of commonsense + 

Upon the wreck, collecting what would do + 

To fend the cold. + 

Now while the village grew, + 

A miracle of patches, jerry-built, + 

The young men, hot upon the trail of guilt + 

With Crazy Horse, found many a huddled stray + 

Forlorn along the thousand-footed way + 

The stolen herd had gone. And all day long + 

Their fury warmed them and their hearts were strong + 

To meet with any death a man might die; + 

For still they heard the wounded children cry, + 

The mourning of the women for the dead. + 

Nor did they deem that any hero led + 

The raiders. Surely nothing but the greed + 

Of terror could devour at such a speed + 

That pony-laming wallow, drift on drift. + 

The blue dusk mingled with the driven sift, + 

And still it seemed the trail of headlong flight + 

Was making for the wilderness of night + 

And safety. Then, a little way below + 

The mouth of Lodge Pole Creek, a dancing glow + 

Went up the bluff. Some few crept close to see, + 

And what they saw was listless misery + 

That crouched and shivered in a smudge of sage. + 

How well they cooled their baby-killing rage, + 

Those tentless men without a bite to eat! + 

And many, rubbing snow upon their feet, + 

Made faces that were better to behold + 

Than how their shaking horses took the cold + 

With tight-tailed rumps against the bitter flaw. + 

Beyond the camp and scattered up the draw + 

The hungry ponies pawed the frozen ground, + 

And there was no one anywhere around + 

To guard them. White-man medicine was weak. + 

Now all the young men, hearing, burned to wreak + 

Their hate upon the foe. A wiser will + 

Restrained them. “Wait a better time to kill,” + 

Said Crazy Horse. “Our lives are few to give + 

And theirs are many. Can our people live + 

Without the herd? We must not die today. + 

The time will come when I will lead the way + 

Where many die.” + 

Like hungry wolves that prowl + 

The melancholy marches of the owl + 

Where cows and calves are grazing unafraid, + 

The pony stalkers went. A stallion neighed, + 

Ears pricked to question what the dusk might bring; + 

Then all the others fell to whinnying + 

And yonder in the camp the soldiers heard. + 

Some rose to point where many shadows, blurred + 

With driven snow and twilight, topped a rise + 

And vanished in the smother. Jeering cries + 

Came struggling back and perished in the bruit + 

Of charging wind. No bugles of pursuit + 

Aroused the camp. Night howled along the slough. + 

X + 

The Sun Dance + 

Now wheresoever thawing breezes blew + 

And green began to prickle in the brown, + 

There went the tale of Crazy Horse’s town + 

To swell a mood already growing there. + 

For something more than Spring was in the air, + 

And, mightier than any maiden’s eyes, + 

The Lilith-lure of Perilous Emprise + 

Was setting all the young men’s blood astir. + 

How fair the more than woman face of her + 

Whose smile has gulfed how many a daring prow! + 

What cities burn for jewels on her brow; + 

Upon her lips what vintages are red! + 

Her lovers are the tallest of the dead + 

Forever. When the streams of Troas rolled + 

So many heroes seaward, she was old; + 

Yet she is young forever to the young. + 

’Twas now the murmur of the man-flood, flung + 

Upon the Hills, grew ominously loud. + 

The whole white world seemed lifted in a cloud + 

To sweep the prairie with a monstrous rain. + 

Slay one, and there were fifty to be slain! + 

Give fifty to the flame for torturing, + 

Then count the marching multitude of Spring + 

Green blade by blade! + 

Still wilder rumors grew; + 

They told of soldiers massed against the Sioux + 

And waiting till the grass was good, to fall + 

On Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Gall + 

That all the country might be safe for theft, + 

And nothing of a warrior race be left + 

But whining beggars in a feeding pen. + 

Alas, the rights of men⁠—of other men⁠— + 

That centenary season of the Free! + 

No doubt the situation wanted tea + 

To make it clear! But long before the green + 

Had topped the hills, the agencies grew lean + 

Of youth and courage. Did a watch dog bark + 

Midway between the owl and meadowlark?⁠— + 

Then other lads with bow and shield and lance + 

Were making for the Region of Romance + 

Where Sitting Bull’s weird medicine was strong + 

And Crazy Horse’s name was like a song + 

A happy warrior sings before he dies, + 

And Gall’s a wind of many battle cries + 

That flings a thousand ponies on the doomed. + 

So where the Powder and the Rosebud boomed, + 

Men met as water of the melting snows. + 

The North Cheyennes and North Arapahoes, + 

Become one people in a common cause + 

With Brulés, Minneconjoux, Hunkpapas, + 

Sans Arcs and Ogalalas, came to throng + 

The valleys; and the villages were long + 

With camp on camp. Nor was there any bluff, + 

In all the country, that was tall enough + 

To number half the ponies at a look. + 

Here young June came with many tales of Crook, + 

The Gray Fox, marching up the Bozeman Road. + 

How long a dust above his horsemen flowed! + 

How long a dust his walking soldiers made! + 

What screaming thunder when the pack-mules brayed + 

And all the six-mule wagon teams replied! + 

The popping of the whips on sweaty hide, + 

How like a battle when the foe is bold! + 

And from the North still other tales were told + 

By those who heard the steamboats wheeze and groan + 

With stuffs of war along the Yellowstone + 

To feed the camps already waiting there. + 

Awaiting what? The might of Yellow Hair + 

Now coming from the Heart’s mouth! Rumor guessed + 

How many Snakes were riding from the West + 

To join the Whites against their ancient foes; + 

How many Rees, how many of the Crows + 

Remembered to be jealous of the Sioux. + 

Look north, look south⁠—the cloud of trouble grew. + 

Look east, look west⁠—the whole horizon frowned. + 

But it was better to be ringed around + 

With enemies, to battle and to fail, + 

Than be a beggar chief like Spotted Tail, + 

However fattened by a hated hand. + 

Now when the full moon flooded all the land + 

Before the laughter of the owls began, + 

They turned to One who, mightier than Man, + 

Could help them most⁠—the Spirit in the sun; + 

For whatsoever wonder-work is done + 

Upon the needy earth, he does it all. + 

For him the whole world sickens in the fall + 

When streams cease singing and the skies go gray + 

And trees and bushes weep their leaves away + 

In hopeless hushes empty of the bird, + 

And all day long and all night long are heard + 

The high geese wailing after their desire. + 

But, even so, his saving gift of fire + 

Is given unto miserable men + 

Until they see him face to face again + 

And all his magic happen, none knows how. + 

It was the time when he is strongest now; + 

And so a holy man whose heart was good + 

Went forth to find the sacred cottonwood + 

Belovèd of the Spirit. Straight and high, + 

A thing of worship yearning for the sky, + 

It flourished, sunning in a lonely draw; + 

And there none heard the holy man nor saw + 

What rites were done, save only one who knows + 

From whence the new moon comes and whither goes + 

The old, and what the stars do all day long. + 

Thereafter came the people with a song, + 

The men, the boys, the mothers and the maids, + 

All posy-crowns and blossom-woven braids, + 

As though a blooming meadow came to see. + 

And fruitful women danced about the tree + 

To make the Spirit glad; for, having known + 

The laughter of the children of their own, + 

Some goodness of the earth, the giving one, + 

Was in them and was pleasing to the Sun, + 

The prairie-loving nourisher of seed. + 

A warrior who had done the bravest deed + 

Yet dared that year by any of the Sioux + 

Now struck the trunk as one who counts a coup + 

Upon a dreaded foe; and prairie gifts + 

He gave among the poor, for nothing lifts + 

The heart like giving. Let the coward save⁠— + 

Big hoard and little heart; but still the brave + 

Have more with nothing! Singing virgins came + 

Whose eyes had never learned to droop with shame, + 

Nor was there any present, man or youth, + 

Could say them aught of ill and say the truth, + 

For sweet as water in a snow-born brook + 

Where many birches come and lean to look + 

Along a mountain gorge, their spirits were. + 

And each one took the ax they gave to her + 

And smote the tree with many a lusty stroke; + 

And with a groan the sleeper in it ’woke + 

And far hills heard the falling shout of him. + 

Still rang the axes, cleaving twig and limb + 

Along the tapered beauty of the bole, + 

Till, naked to the light, the sacred pole + 

Lay waiting for the bearers. + 

They who bore + 

Were chieftains, and their fathers were before, + 

And all of them had fasted, as they should; + 

Yet none dared touch the consecrated wood + 

With naked fingers, out of pious fear. + 

And once for every season of the year + 

They paused along the way, remembering + 

With thanks alike the autumn and the spring, + 

The winter and the summer. + 

Then it fell + 

That many warriors, lifting up a yell + 

That set their ponies plunging, thundered down + 

Across the center of the circled town + 

Where presently the holy tree should stand; + 

For whosoever first of all the band + 

Could strike the sacred spot with bow or spear + 

Might gallop deep among the dead that year + 

Yet be of those whom busy Death forgot. + 

And sweaty battle raged about the spot + 

Where screaming ponies, rearing to the thrust + 

Of screaming ponies, clashed amid the dust, + 

And riders wrestled in the hoof-made gloam. + 

So, having safely brought the sun-tree home, + 

The people feasted as for victory. + 

And on the second day they dressed the tree + 

And planted it with sacred songs and vows, + 

And round it reared a wall of woven boughs + 

That opened to the mystic source of day. + 

And with the next dawn mothers came to lay + 

Their babies down before the holy one, + 

Each coveting a hero for a son + 

Or sturdy daughters fit to nurse the bold. + 

Then when the fourth dawn came the war drums rolled; + 

And from their lodges, lean and rendered pure + 

With meatless days, those vowing to endure + 

The death-in-torture to be born again, + 

Came naked there before the holy men + 

Who painted them with consecrated paint. + 

And if a knee seemed loosened, it was faint + 

With fast and weary vigil, not with dread; + 

For lo! the multitudinary dead + 

Pressed round to see if heroes such as they + 

Still walked the earth despite the smaller day + 

When ’twas not half so easy to be brave. + 

Now, prone beneath the pole, as in a grave, + 

Without a wince each vower took the blade + 

In chest or back, and through the wound it made + 

Endured the passing of the rawhide thong, + 

Swung from the pole’s top; raised a battle song + 

To daunt his anguish; staggered to his feet + 

And, leaning, capered to the war drum’s beat + 

A dizzy rigadoon with Agony. + 

So all day long the spirit-haunted tree + 

Bore bloody fruitage, groaning to the strain, + 

For with the dropping of the ripe-in-pain, + 

Upon the stem the green-in-courage grew. + 

And seldom had there fallen on the Sioux + 

So great a wind of ghostly might as then. + 

Boys tripped it, bleeding, with the tortured men. + 

The mothers, daughters, sisters, sweethearts, wives + 

Of those who suffered, gashed their flesh with knives + 

To share a little of the loved one’s pang; + 

And all day long the sunning valley rang + 

With songs of courage; and the mother sod + 

Received the red libation; and the god + 

Gave power to his people. + 

XI + 

The Seventh Marches + 

Far away, + 

One foggy morning in the midst of May, + 

Fort Lincoln had beheld the marshalling + 

Of Terry’s forces; heard the bugle sing, + 

The blaring of the band, the brave hurrah + 

Of Custer’s men recalling Washita + 

And confident of yet another soon. + 

How gallantly in column of platoon + 

(So many doomed and given to the ghost) + 

Before the weeping women of the post + 

They sat their dancing horses on parade! + 

What made the silence suddenly afraid + 

When, with a brazen crash, the band went whist + 

And, dimmer in the clinging river mist, + 

The line swung westward? Did the Ree squaws know, + 

Through some wise terror of the ancient foe, + 

To what unearthly land their warriors led + 

The squadrons? Better suited to the dead + 

Than to the quick, their chanting of farewell + 

Grew eerie in the shadow, rose and fell⁠— + 

The long-drawn yammer of a lonely dog. + 

But when at length the sun broke through the fog, + 

What reassurance in the wide blue air, + 

The solid hills, and Custer riding there + 

With all the famous Seventh at his heel! + 

And back of those the glint of flowing steel + 

Above the dusty infantry; the sun’s + 

Young glimmer on the trundled Gatling guns; + 

And then the mounted Rees; and after that + 

The loaded pack mules straggling up the flat + 

And wagons crowding wagons for a mile! + 

What premonition of the afterwhile + 

Could darken eyes that saw such glory pass + 

When, lilting in a muffled blare of brass + 

Off yonder near the sundering prairie rim, + 

“The Girl I Left Behind Me” floated dim + 

As from the unrecoverable years? + 

And was it nothing but a freak of tears, + 

The vision that the grieving women saw? + 

For suddenly a shimmering veil of awe + 

Caught up the van. One could have counted ten + 

While Custer and the half of Custer’s men + 

Were riding up a shining steep of sky + 

As though to join the dead that do not die + 

But haunt some storied heaven of the bold. + 

And then it seemed a smoke of battle rolled + 

Across the picture, leaving empty air + 

Above the line that slowly shortened there + 

And dropped below the prairie and was gone. + 

Now day by day the column straggled on + 

While moody May was dribbling out in rain + 

To make a wagon-wallow of the plain + 

Between the Muddy and the upper Heart. + 

Where lifeless hills, as by demonic art, + 

Were hewn to forms of wonderment and fear, + 

Excited echoes flocked about to hear, + 

And any sound brought riotous applause, + 

So long among the scarps and tangled draws + 

Had clung that silence and the spell of it. + 

Some fiend-deserted city of the Pit + 

The region seemed, with crumbling domes and spires; + 

For still it smoked with reminiscent fires, + 

And in the midst, as ’twere the stream of woe, + 

A dark flood ran. + 

June blustered in with snow, + 

And all the seasons happened in a week. + 

Beyond the Beaver and O’Fallon creek + 

They toiled. Amid the wilderness of breaks + 

The drainage of the lower Powder makes, + 

They found a way and brought the wagons through; + 

Nor had they sight or sign of any Sioux + 

In all that land. Here Reno headed south + 

With packs and half the troopers for the mouth + 

Of Mispah, thence to scout the country west + 

About the Tongue; while Terry and the rest + 

Pushed onward to the Yellowstone to bide + 

With Gibbon’s men the news of Reno’s ride. + 

Mid June drew on. Slow days of waiting bred + 

Unhappy rumors. Everybody said + 

What no one, closely questioned, seemed to know. + 

Enormous numerations of the foe, + 

By tentative narration made exact + 

And tagged with all the circumstance of fact, + 

Discredited the neat official tale. + 

’Twas well when dawn came burning down the vale + 

And river fogs were lifting like a smoke + 

And bugles, singing reveille, awoke + 

A thousand-throated clamor in the herd. + 

But when the hush was like a warning word + 

And taps had yielded darkness to the owl, + 

A horse’s whinny or a kiote’s howl + 

Made true the wildest rumors of the noon. + 

So passed the fateful seventeenth of June + 

When none might guess how much the gossip lacked + 

To match the unimaginative fact + 

Of what the upper Rosebud saw that day: + 

How Crook, with Reno forty miles away, + 

Had met the hordes of Crazy Horse and Gall, + 

And all the draws belched cavalries, and all + 

The ridges bellowed and the river fen + 

Went dizzy with the press of mounted men⁠— + 

A slant cyclonic tangle; how the dark + 

Came not a whit too early, and the lark + 

Beheld the Gray Fox slinking back amazed + 

To Goose Creek; what a dust the victors raised + 

When through the Cherish Hills by many a pass + 

They crowded down upon the Greasy Grass + 

To swell the hostile thousands waiting there. + 

Alas, how wide they made for Yellow Hair + 

That highway leading to the shining Past! + 

Now came the end of waiting, for at last + 

The scouring squadrons, jogging from the south, + 

Had joined their comrades at the Rosebud’s mouth + 

With doubtful news. That evening by the fires, + 

According to their dreads or their desires, + 

The men discussed the story that was told + 

About a trail, not over three weeks old, + 

That led across the country from the Tongue, + 

Struck up the Rosebud forty miles and swung + 

Again to westward over the divide. + 

Some said, “We’ll find blue sky the other side, + 

Then back to Lincoln soon!” But more agreed + 

’Twould not be so with Custer in the lead. + 

“He’ll eat his horses when the hardtack’s gone + 

Till every man’s afoot!” And thereupon + 

Scarred veterans remembered other days + 

With Custer⁠—thirsty marches in the blaze + 

Of Texas suns, with stringy mule to chew; + 

And times when splinters of the North Pole blew + 

Across the lofty Colorado plains; + 

And muddy going in the sullen rains + 

Of Kansas springs, when verily you felt + 

Your backbone rub the buckle of your belt + 

Because there weren’t any mules to spare. + 

Aye, there were tales to make the rookies stare + 

Of Custer’s daring and of Custer’s luck. + 

And some recalled that night before they struck + 

Black Kettle’s village. Whew! And what a night! + 

A foot of snow, and not a pipe alight, + 

And not a fire! You didn’t dare to doze, + 

But kept your fingers on your horse’s nose + 

For fear he’d nicker and the chance be lost. + 

And all night long there, starry in the frost, + 

You’d see the steaming Colonel striding by. + 

And when the first light broke along the sky, + 

Yet not enough to make a saber shine, + 

You should have seen him gallop down the line + 

With hair astream! It warmed your blood to see + 

The way he clapped his hat beneath his knee + 

And yelled “Come on!” “Go ask him if we came!” + 

And so they conjured with a magic name; + 

But, wakeful in the darkness after taps, + 

How many saddened, conscious of the lapse + 

Of man-denying time! + 

The last owl ceased. + 

A pewee sensed the changing of the east + 

And fluted shyly, doubtful of the news. + 

A wolf, returning from an all-night cruise + 

Among the rabbits, topped a staring rim + 

And vanished. Now the cooks were stirring dim, + 

Waist-deep in woodsmoke crawling through the damp. + 

The shadow lifted from the snoring camp. + 

The bugle sang. The horses cried ha! ha! + 

The mule herd raised a woeful fanfara + 

To swell the music, singing out of tune. + 

Up came the sun. + 

The Seventh marched at noon, + 

Six hundred strong. By fours and troop by troop, + 

With packs between, they passed the Colonel’s group + 

By Terry’s tent; the Rickarees and Crows + 

Astride their shaggy paints and calicoes; + 

The regimental banner and the grays; + 

And after them the sorrels and the bays, + 

The whites, the browns, the piebalds and the blacks. + 

One flesh they seemed with those upon their backs, + 

Whose weathered faces, like and fit for bronze, + 

Some gleam of unforgotten battle-dawns + 

Made bright and hard. The music of their going, + 

How good to hear!⁠—though mournful beyond knowing; + 

The low-toned chanting of the Crows and Rees, + 

The guidons whipping in a stiff south breeze + 

Prophetical of thunder-brewing weather, + 

The chiming spurs and bits and crooning leather, + 

The shoe calks clinking on the scattered stone, + 

And, fusing all, the rolling undertone + 

Of hoofs by hundreds rhythmically blent⁠— + 

The diapason of an instrument + 

Strung taut for battle music. + 

So they passed. + 

And Custer, waking from a dream at last + 

With still some glory of it in his eyes, + 

Shook hands around and said his last goodbyes + 

And swung a leg across his dancing bay + 

That champed the snaffle, keen to be away + 

Where all the others were. Then Gibbon spoke, + 

Jocosely, but with something in the joke + 

Of its own pleasantry incredulous: + 

“Now don’t be greedy, Custer! Wait for us!” + 

And Custer laughed and gave the bay his head. + 

“I won’t!” he cried. Perplexed at what he said, + 

They watched the glad bay smoking up the draw + 

And heard the lusty welcoming hurrah + 

That swept along the column. When it died, + 

The melancholy pack mules prophesied + 

And ghost-mules answered. + 

XII + 

High Noon on the Little Horn + 

Now it came to pass, + 

That late June morning on the Greasy Grass, + 

Two men went fishing, warriors of the Sioux; + 

And, lonesome in the silence of the two, + 

A youngster pictured battles on the sand. + 

Once more beneath the valor of his hand + 

The execrated troopers, blotted out, + 

Became a dust. Then, troubled with a doubt, + 

He ventured: “Uncle, will they find us here⁠— + 

The soldiers?” ’Twas a buzzing in the ear + 

Of Red Hawk where he brooded on his cast. + 

“The wind is coming up,” he said at last; + 

“The sky grows dusty.” “Then the fish won’t bits,” + 

Said Running Wolf. “There may be rain tonight” + 

Said Red Hawk, falling silent. Bravely then + 

The youngster wrought himself a world of men + 

Where nothing waited on a wind of whim, + 

But everything, obedient to him, + 

Fell justly. All the white men in the world + 

Were huddled there, and round about them swirled + 

More warriors than a grownup might surmise. + 

The pony-thunder and the battle-cries, + 

The whine of arrows eager for their marks + 

Drowned out the music of the meadowlarks, + 

The rising gale that teased the cottonwoods + 

To set them grumbling in their whitened hoods, + 

The chatter of a little waterfall. + 

These pebbles⁠—see!⁠—were Crazy Horse and Gall; + 

Here Crow King raged, and Black Moon battled there! + 

This yellow pebble⁠—look!⁠—was Yellow Hair; + 

This drab one with a little splotch of red, + 

The Gray Fox, Crook! Ho ho! And both were dead; + 

And white men fell about them every place⁠— + 

The leafage of the autumn of a race⁠— + 

Till all were down. And when their doom was sealed, + 

The little victor danced across the field + 

Amid the soundless singing of a throng. + 

The brief joy died, for there was something wrong + 

About this battle. Mournfully came back + 

That other picture of a dawn attack⁠— + 

The giant horses rearing in the fogs + 

Of their own breath; the yelping of the dogs; + 

The screaming rabble swarming up the rise; + 

The tangled terror in his mother’s eyes; + 

The flaming lodges and the bloody snow. + 

Provokingly oblivious of woe, + 

The two still eyed the waters and were dumb. + 

“But will they find us, Uncle? Will they come?” + 

Now Red Hawk grunted, heaving at his line, + 

And, wrought of flying spray and morning-shine, + 

A spiral rainbow flashed along the brook. + 

“Hey hey!” said Red Hawk, staring at his hook, + 

“He got my bait! Run yonder to the bluff + 

And catch some hoppers, Hohay. Get enough + 

And you shall see how fish are caught today!” + 

Half-heartedly the youngster stole away + 

Across a brawling riffle, climbed the steep + 

And gazed across the panoramic sweep + 

Of rolling prairie, tawny in the drouth, + 

To where the Big Horns loomed along the south, + 

No more than ghosts of mountains in the dust. + 

Up here the hot wind, booming gust on gust, + 

Made any nook a pleasant place to dream. + 

You could not see the fishers by the stream; + 

And you were grown so tall that, looking down + 

Across the trees, you saw most all the town + 

Strung far along the valley. First you saw + 

The Cheyennes yonder opposite the draw + 

That yawned upon the ford⁠—a goodly sight! + 

So many and so mighty in a fight + 

And always faithful brothers to the Sioux! + 

Trees hid the Brulé village, but you knew + 

’Twas half a bow-shot long from end to end. + 

Then Ogalalas filled a river bend, + 

And next the Minneconjoux did the same. + 

A little farther south the Sans Arc came, + 

And they were neighbors to the Hunkpapas.⁠— + 

The blackened smoke-vents, flapping in the flaws, + 

Were like a startled crow flock taking wing.⁠— + 

Some Ogalalas played at toss-the-ring + 

And many idlers crowded round to see.⁠— + 

The grazing ponies wandered lazily + 

Along the flat and up the rolling west. + 

Now, guiltily remembering his quest, + 

He trotted farther up the naked hill, + 

Dropped down a gully where the wind was still⁠— + 

And came upon a hopping army there! + 

They swarmed, they raged⁠—but Hohay didn’t care; + 

For suddenly it seemed the recent climb + 

Had been a scramble up the height of time + 

And Hohay’s name was terror in the ears + 

Of evil peoples. Seizing weeds for spears, + 

He charged the soldiers with a dreadful shout. + 

The snapping of their rifles all about + 

Might daunt a lesser hero. Never mind; + 

His medicine made all their bullets blind, + 

And ’twas a merry slaughter. Then at last + 

The shining glory of the vision passed, + 

And hoppers were but hoppers as before, + 

And he, a very little boy once more, + 

Stood dwarfed and lonely on a windy rise. + 

The sun was nearly up the dusty skies. + 

’Twas white with heat and had a funny stare⁠— + 

All face! The wind had blown away its hair. + 

It looked afraid; as though the sun should fear! + 

Now, squinting downward through the flying blear, + 

He scanned the town. And suddenly the old + 

Remembered dawn of terror struck him cold. + 

Like startled ants that leave a stricken mound + 

In silence that is felt as panic sound + 

By one who sees, the squaws and children poured + 

Along the valley northward past the ford; + 

And men were chasing ponies every place, + 

While many others ran, as in a race, + 

To southward. + 

Hohay, taking to his heels, + 

Made homeward like a cottontail that feels + 

A kiote pant and whimper at his tail. + 

He reached the bluff rim, scrambled to the vale + 

And crossed the stream. The fishermen were gone. + 

A hubbub in the village led him on + 

Pell-mell among the snatching underwood, + 

Till, checked as by a wall of sound, he stood + 

Apant and dripping in the howling town. + 

A bent old man there hobbled up and down + 

Upon a staff and sang a cackling song + 

Of how his heart was young again and strong; + 

But no one heeded. Women ran with guns + 

And bows and war clubs, screaming for their sons + 

And husbands. Men were mounting in a whirl + 

Of manes and tales to vanish in a swirl + 

Of scattered sand; and ever louder blew + 

The singing wind of warriors riding through + 

To battle. Hohay watched them, mouth agape, + 

Until he felt a hand upon his nape + 

That shoved him north, and someone shouted “Run!” + 

He scampered. + 

Meanwhile, nearer to the sun, + 

A rifle shot beyond the village end, + 

Came Reno’s troopers pouring round a bend, + 

Their carbines ready at their saddle bows. + 

A bugle yammered and a big dust rose + 

And horses nickered as the fours swung wide + 

In battle order; and the captains cried, + 

And with a running thunder of hurrahs + 

The long line stormed upon the Hunkpapas + 

Strung thin across the open flat. They fled + 

Like feeble ghosts of men already dead + 

Beneath the iron feet that followed there; + 

For now they deemed the far-famed Yellow Hair, + 

The Wolf of Washita, with all his pack + 

Potential in the dust cloud at his back, + 

Bore down upon them. + 

Flame along a slough + 

Before a howling wind, the terror grew + 

As momently increased the flying mass, + 

For all the others running up were grass + 

Before that flame; till men became aware + 

Of how another voice was booming there, + 

Outsoaring Panic’s, smashing through the brawl + 

Of hoofs and wind and rifles. + 

It was Gall. + 

A night wind blowing when the stars are dim, + 

His big black gelding panted under him; + 

And scarce he seemed a man of mortal race, + 

His naked body and his massive face + 

Serene as hewn from time-forgotten rock, + 

Despite the horse’s rearing to the shock + 

Of surging men. Boy-hearted warriors took + 

New courage from the father in his look + 

And listened in a sudden lull of sound. + 

“The foe is there!” he shouted. “Turn around! + 

Die here today!” And everywhere he rode + 

A suck of men grew after him and flowed + 

To foeward. + 

Now it seemed the routed fear + 

Had joined the halted troops. They ceased to cheer. + 

Dismounting with their right upon the trees + 

Along the river, and the Rickarees + 

Upon their left, they flung a blazing dam + 

Across the valley. Like a river jam + 

The eager rabble deepened on the front, + 

For other hundreds, howling to the hunt, + 

Were dashing up with ponies. Then they say + 

A sound was heard as when a jam gives way + 

Before a heaped up freshet of the Spring, + 

And ponies in a torrent smote the wing + 

Where, mounted yet, the little Ree band stood. + 

Now those, remembering where life was good, + 

Regretting that they ever chose to roam + 

So far from kindly faces, started home + 

Without farewells; and round the crumpled flank + 

The Sioux came thronging, bending back the rank + 

Upon the pivot of the farther troop, + 

Till, crowded in a brushy river loup, + 

The soldiers fought bewildered and forlorn. + 

Behind them from across the Little Horn + 

The long range rifles on the bluff rim spat + 

A hornet swarm among them; and the flat + 

Before them swam with ponies on the run⁠— + 

A vertigo of shadows; for the sun + 

Went moony in the dust and disappeared. + 

Inverted faces of a nightmare leered + 

Beneath the necks of ponies hurtling past; + 

And every surge of horsemen seemed the last, + 

So well their daring fed upon their rage. + 

It might have been a moment or an age + 

The troopers gripped that slipping edge of life, + 

When some along the left saw Bloody Knife, + 

By Reno, straighten from his fighting squat, + 

And heard him scream, and saw the wound he got + 

Spew brains between the fingers clutching there. + 

Then like a drowning man with hands in air + 

He sank. And some who fought nearby have said + 

The Major’s face, all spattered with the red + 

Of that snuffed life, went chalky, and his shout + 

Scarce reached the nearer troopers round about: + 

“Back to the bluffs!” But when a few arose + 

To do his will, they say he raged at those: + 

“Get down! Get down!” Then once again he cried: + 

“Get to the bluffs!”⁠—And was the first to ride. + 

Now some along the right, who had not heard, + 

But saw the mounting, passed a shouted word + 

That groped, a whisper, through the roaring smoke: + 

“We’re going to charge!” And where it fell, it broke + 

The ragged line. Men scrambled to the rear + 

Where now the plunging horses shrieked with fear + 

And fought their holding “fours”⁠—nor all in vain, + 

For whole quadrigae, fastened bit to rein, + 

Ramped down that stormy twilight of the Sioux. + 

The nearest empty saddle seat would do + 

For any lucky finder. Rout or charge⁠— + 

What matter? All along the river marge + 

The man storm raged, and all the darkened vale + 

Was tumult. To retreat was to assail, + 

Assault was flight. The craven and the bold + 

Seemed one that moment where the loud dust rolled, + 

Death-strewing, up along the Little Horn. + 

About the loup a mockery of morn + 

Broke in upon the gloaming of the noon, + 

And horseless troopers, starting from the swoon + 

Of battle, saw, and knew themselves alone + 

And heard the wounded wailing and the moan + 

Of dying men around them. Even these, + 

Forlorn among the bullet-bitten trees, + 

Were scarce less lucky than the fleeing ranks + 

With crowding furies snapping at their flanks, + 

Death in the rear and frantic hope ahead. + 

’Twas like a bison hunt, the Sioux have said, + 

When few bulls battle and the fat cows run + 

Less fleet than slaughter. Hidden from the sun, + 

How many a boy, struck motherless, belied + 

The whiskered cheek; what heroism died, + 

Fronting the wild white glory! + 

Funk or fight, + 

Lost in the noon’s anomaly of night, + 

The troopers struggled, groping for a ford. + 

But more and more the pressure of the horde + 

Bore leftward, till the steep-banked river spread + 

Before them, and the bluffs that loomed ahead + 

Were like the domes of heaven to the damned. + 

A shrinking moment, and the flood was jammed + 

With men and horses thrashing belly deep; + 

And down upon them, jostled to the leap, + 

The rear cascaded. Many-noted pain + 

Sang medley in the roaring rifle rain + 

That swept the jetting water, gust on gust. + 

And many a Sioux, gone wild with slaughter lust, + 

Plunged after. Madmen grappled in the flood, + 

And tumbling in the current, streaked with blood, + 

Drank deep together and were satisfied. + 

Now scrambling out upon the further side, + 

The hunted troopers blundered at a steep + 

More suited to the flight of mountain sheep + 

Than horses; for a narrow pony trail, + 

That clambered up a gully from the vale, + 

Immediately clogged with brutes and men. + 

Spent horses skittered back to strive again, + 

Red-flanked and broken-hearted. Many bore + 

Their riders where no horse had gone before, + 

Nor ever shall go. Bullets raked the slope, + 

And from the valley to the heights of hope + 

The air was dirty with the arrow-snow. + 

The heights of hope? Alas, that stair of woe, + 

Strewn with the bleeding offal of the rout, + 

Led only to an eminence of doubt, + 

A more appalling vision of their plight; + 

For in the rear and on the left and right + 

The nearer bluffs were filling with the Sioux, + 

And still along the flat beneath them blew + 

The dust of thousands yelping for the kill. + 

They say that good men broke upon the hill + 

And wept as children weep. And there were some + 

Who stared about them empty eyed and dumb, + 

As though it didn’t matter. Others hurled + 

Profane irrelevancies at the world + 

Or raved about the jamming of their guns. + 

And yet there lacked not level-headed ones, + 

Unruffled shepherds of the flock, who strove + 

For order in the milling of the drove + 

With words to soothe or cheer, or sting with scorn. + 

Now up the valley of the Little Horn + 

Wild news came crying from the lower town + 

Of other soldiers yonder riding down + 

Upon the guardless village from the east; + 

And every tongue that sped the news increased + 

The meaning of it. Victory forsook + 

Big hearts that withered. Lo, the Gray Fox, Crook, + 

Returning for revenge⁠—and not alone! + 

How many camps along the Yellowstone + 

Were emptied on the valley there below? + 

The whipped were but a sprinkle of the foe, + 

And now the torrent was about to burst! + 

With everything to know, they knew the worst, + 

And saw the clearer in that no one saw. + 

Then broke a flying area of awe + 

Across the rabble like a patch of sun + 

Upon the troubled corn when gray clouds run + 

And in the midst a glowing rift is blown. + 

Pressed back before the plunging white-faced roan + 

Of Crazy Horse, men brightened. How they knew + 

That lean, swift fighting-spirit of the Sioux, + 

The wizard eyes, the haggard face and thin, + 

Transfigured by a burning from within + 

Despite the sweat-streaked paint and battle grime! + 

Old men would ponder in the wane of time + 

That lifting vision and alluring cry: + 

“There never was a better day to die! + 

Come on, Dakotas! Cowards to the rear!” + 

Some hundreds yonder held the net of fear + 

Round Reno’s hill; but in the cloud that spread + 

Along the valley where the fleet roan led + 

Were thousands. + 

Now the feeble and the young, + 

The mothers and the maidens, terror-flung + 

Beyond the lower village to the west, + 

Had seen the soldiers loom along a crest + 

Beyond the town, and, heading down a swale + 

By fours, with guidons streaming in the gale, + 

Approach the ford. ’Twas Custer with the grays, + 

A sorrel troop and thrice as many bays⁠— + 

Two hundred and a handful at the most; + 

But ’twas the bannered onset of a host + 

To those who saw and fled. Nor could they know + 

The numbers and the valiance of the foe + 

Down river where the bulls of war were loud; + 

For even then that thunder and the cloud + 

Came northward. Were they beaten? Had they won? + 

What devastation, darkening the sun, + 

Was tearing down the valley? On it roared + 

And darkled; deepened at the lower ford + 

And veered cyclonic up the yawning draw + 

To eastward. Now the breathless people saw + 

The dusty ponies darting from the van + 

And swarming up the left. The guns began, + 

A running splutter. Yonder to the south + 

The big dust boiling at a coulee’s mouth + 

Was pouring ponies up around the right. + 

Grown dimmer in the falling battle-night, + 

The stormy guidons of the troopers tossed, + 

Retreating upward, lessened and were lost + 

Amid a whirling cloud that topped the hill. + 

And steadily the valley spouted still + 

The double stream of warriors. + 

Then a shout + 

Enringed the battle, and the scene went out + 

In rumbling dust⁠—as though a mine were lit + 

Beneath the summit and the belch of it + 

Gloomed bellowing. A windy gloaming spread + 

Across the ridges flicked with errant lead + 

And wayward arrows groping for a mark. + 

And horses, hurtled from the central dark, + 

With empty saddles charged upon the day. + 

Meanwhile on Reno’s hill four miles away + 

Men heartened to a rousing cheer had seen + 

The bays and blacks and sorrels of Benteen, + 

Hoof-heavy with their unavailing quest + 

Among the valleys to the south and west, + 

Toil upward. Unmolested by the foe, + 

The pack mules, trumpeting “We told you so,” + 

Trudged in a little later. By the cheers + 

It might have been reunion after years; + 

And was in truth; for there were graying locks, + 

That night, to mock the pedantry of clocks, + 

Untroubled by the ages life can pack + 

Between the ticks. + 

The fire had fallen slack + 

Upon the watching summits round about + 

And in a maze of wonderment and doubt + 

Men scanned the north that darkled as with war. + 

“What was it that the Major waited for? + 

He’d best be doing something pretty quick + 

Or there’d be Custer with a pointed stick + 

To look for him!” So growled a bolder few. + 

But many thought of little else to do + 

Than just to dodge the leaden wasp that kills + 

Sent over by the snipers on the hills + 

In fitful swarms. + 

Now like a bellowed word + 

The miles made inarticulate, they heard + 

A sound of volley-firing. There! and there! + 

Hoarse with a yet incredible despair + 

That incoherent cry of kin to kin + 

Grew big above the distant battle din⁠— + 

The sequent breakers of a moaning sea. + 

And twice the murmuring veil of mystery + 

Was rent and mended. Then the tearing drawl + 

Was heard no more where Fury, striding tall, + 

Made one in dust the heavens and the earth. + 

“He’s pitching into them for all he’s worth,” + 

Some ventured;⁠—“was there nothing else to do + 

But hug that hill?” + 

Then suddenly there grew + 

A voice of wrath, and many lying near, + 

Who heard it, looked⁠—and it was Captain Wier + 

By Reno yonder; and the place went still: + 

“Then, Major, if you won’t, by God I will, + 

And there’ll be more to say if we get back!” + 

They saw him fling a leg across his black + 

And take the northward steep with face set grim; + 

And all the black horse troop rode after him + 

Across the gulch to vanish on a rise. + 

Two miles away from where the smudgy skies + 

Of afternoon anticipated night, + 

They halted on a space-commanding height + 

And, squinting through the dusty air ahead, + 

Were puzzled. For the silence of the dead + 

Had fallen yonder⁠—only now and then + 

A few shots crackled. Groups of mounted men⁠— + 

Not troopers⁠—by the rifting dust revealed, + 

Were scattered motionless about the field, + 

As wearily contented with a work + 

Well done at last. + 

Then suddenly the murk + 

Began to boil and murmur, like a storm + 

Before the wind comes. Ponies in a swarm + 

Were spreading out across the ridgy land + 

Against the blacks. + 

By now the whole command + 

Was coming up, and not a whit too soon; + 

For once again the sun became a moon + 

Amid the dust of thousands bearing down. + 

Now farther back upon a bleak bluff crown + 

The troop of Godfrey waited for the fight, + 

Not doubting that their comrades held the right, + 

When orders, riding with an urgent heel, + 

Arrived with more of prudence to reveal + 

Than pluck: Withdraw at once! A startled stare + 

Made plain how all the flanking hills were bare + 

And not a sign of Reno in the rear! + 

Just then the fleeing troops of French and Wier + 

Came roaring down across a ridge in front + 

And, close upon their heels, the howling hunt + 

Made dimmer yet the summit of the slope. + 

And Godfrey, seeing very little hope + 

If all should flee those thousands, overjoyed + 

With some great coup, dismounted and deployed + 

To fight on foot, and sent the horses back. + 

And so he dared the brunt of the attack, + 

Retreating slowly like a wounded bear + 

With yelping dogs before him everywhere + 

Regardful of the eager might at bay. + 

And so the whole command got back that day + 

Of big despairs; and men remember still. + 

Then all the ridges circling Reno’s hill + 

Were crowded. In among the flattened men, + 

Now desperately fighting one to ten, + 

Hell hornets snarled and feathered furies crooned + 

A death song; and the sun was like a wound + 

Wherewith the day bled dizzy. Yet from all + 

The muddled nightmare of it, men recall + 

Deeds brighter for the years: how Captain French, + 

Like any stodgy tailor on his bench, + 

Sat cross-legged at the giddy edge of life + 

Serenely picking with a pocket knife + 

The shell-jammed guns and loading them anew; + 

How, seemingly enamoured of the view, + 

Deliberate, Johnsonian of mien, + 

His briar drawing freely, strolled Benteen + 

Along his fighting line; how Wallace, Wier + 

And Godfrey yonder, fearing only fear, + 

Walked round among the troopers, cheering them. + 

And some remember Happy Jack of M, + 

The way his gusty laughter served to melt + 

The frost of terror, though the joy he felt + 

Seemed less to mark a hero than a fool. + 

And once, they say, an ammunition mule + 

Broke loose and bolted, braying, as he went, + 

Defiance and a traitorous intent + 

To quit the Whites forever. Then they tell + 

How Sergeant Hanley with an Irish yell + 

Took horse and followed, jealous for the pack; + 

And all the line roared after him, “Come back! + 

Come back, you fool!” But Hanley went ahead. + 

At times you hardly saw him for the lead + 

That whipped the dust up. Blindly resolute, + 

The traitor with the Irish in pursuit + 

Struck up along a hostile ridge that burned + 

And smoked and bellowed. Presently he turned + 

And panted home, an image of remorse; + 

And Hanley, leaping from his winded horse, + 

Lay down and went to work among the rest. + 

The wounded day bled ashen in the west; + 

The firing dwindled in the dusk and ceased; + 

The frightened stars came peeking from the east + 

To see what anguish moaned. The wind went down⁠— + 

A lull of death. But yonder in the town + 

All night the war drums flouted that despair + 

Upon the hill, and dancers in the glare + 

Of fires that towered filled the painted dark + 

With demon exultation, till the lark + 

Of doom should warble. Heavy-lidded eyes + 

Saw often in the sage along a rise + 

The loom of troops. If any shouted “Look!” + 

And pointed, all the others cheered for Crook + 

Or Terry coming; and the bugles cried + 

To mocking echoes. When the sick hope died, + 

They fell to sullen labor, scraping up + 

The arid earth with plate and drinking cup + 

Against the dreaded breaking of the day. + 

And here and there among the toilers lay + 

The winners of an endless right to shirk; + 

While many panted at a harder work, + 

The wage whereof is nothing left to buy. + 

It seemed that all were men about to die, + 

Forlornly busy there among the dead⁠— + 

Each man his sexton. Petulant with dread, + 

They talked of Custer, grumbling at a name + 

Already shaping on the lips of Fame + 

To be a deathless bugle-singing soon. + 

For no one guessed what now the tardy moon + 

Was poring over with a face of fright + 

Out yonder: naked bodies gleaming white + 

The whole way to the summit of the steep + 

Where Silence, brooding on a tumbled heap + 

Of men and horses, listened for a sound.⁠ ⁠… + 

A wounded troop horse sniffed the bloody ground + 

And ghosts of horses nickered when he neighed. + 

Now scarcely had the prairie owls, afraid + 

Of morning, ceased, or waiting hushes heard + 

A timid, unauthoritative bird + 

Complain how late the meadowlarks awoke, + 

When suddenly the dreaded fury broke + 

About the sleepless troopers, digging still. + 

It raked the shallow trenches on the hill; + 

It beat upon the little hollow where + 

The mules and horses, tethered in a square + 

About the wounded, roared and plunged amain, + 

Tight-tailed against no pasture-loving rain; + 

And many fell and floundered. What of night + 

From such a morning? For the hostile light + 

Increased the fury, and the battle grew. + 

That day it seemed the very sun was Sioux. + 

The heat, the frenzy and the powder gas + 

Wreaked torture. Men were chewing roots of grass + 

For comfort ere the day had well begun. + 

Bare to the grim mid-malice of the sun, + 

The wounded raved for water. Far below, + 

Cool with the melting of the mountain snow, + 

The river gleamed; and, queasy with the smell + 

Of bodies bloating in a stew of hell, + 

Men croaked about it. Better to be killed + 

Half way to yonder joy than perish grilled + 

Between that grid of earth and burning air! + 

So nineteen troopers volunteered to dare + 

A grisly race. The twentieth who ran, + 

Invisible and fleeter than a man, + 

With hoofs of peril flicked the dusty sod + 

Where pluckily the sprinting water squad + 

Made streamward. Giddy with a wound he got, + 

A trooper tumbled, and his cooking pot + 

Pursued the others with a bounding roll. + 

A second runner crumpled near the goal. + 

And when the sprawling winners drank, they say + 

The bullets whipped the water into spray + 

About their heads; for yonder in the brush + 

The Sioux kept watch, but dared not make a rush + 

Because of marksmen stationed on the bluff. + 

And when the greedy drinkers had enough, + 

With brimming kettles and the filled canteens + 

They toiled along the tortuous ravines + 

And panted up a height that wasn’t Fame’s. + 

Men still recall the water; but the names + 

Enrich that silence where the millions go. + 

The shadows had begun to overflow + 

Their stagnant puddles on the nightward side, + 

When presently the roar of battle died + 

On all the circling summits there. Perplexed + 

With what the wily foe might purpose next, + 

The troopers lay and waited. Still the swoon + 

Of silence held the stifling afternoon, + 

Save for a low monotony of pain, + 

The keening of the gnats about the slain + 

That festered. Nothing happened. Shadows crept + 

A little farther nightward. Many slept, + 

Dead to the sergeant’s monitory shake; + 

And some, for very weariness awake, + 

Got up and dared to stretch a leg at last, + 

When from the summits broke a rifle blast + 

That banished sleep and drove the strollers in. + 

Abruptly as it started, ceased the din + 

And all the hills seemed empty as before. + 

And, breath by breath, the weary waiting wore + 

The hours out. Every minute, loath to pass, + 

Forewarned the next of some assault in mass + 

Preparing in the hush. A careless head + 

Above a horse’s carcass drew the lead + 

Of lurking marksmen. What would be the end? + 

The prayed-for dark itself might prove no friend + 

For all its pity. + 

Now the early slant + 

Of evening made the thirsty horses pant + 

And raise a running whimper of despair, + 

When, seemingly ignited by the glare, + 

The very prairie smouldered. Spire by spire, + 

Until the whole fat valley was afire, + 

Smoke towered in the windless air and grew + 

Where late the league long village of the Sioux + 

Lay hidden from the watchers on the hill; + 

And like the shadow of a monster ill + 

Untimely gloaming fell across the height. + 

Yet nothing but the failing of the light + 

Upon the distant summits came to pass. + 

The muffled murmur of the burning grass + 

Was all the reeking valley had of sound; + 

And when the troopers dared to walk around, + 

No spluttering of rifles drove them back. + 

The shadows in the draws were getting black + 

When someone lifted up a joyous cry + 

That set the whole band staring where the sky, + 

To southward of the smoke, remembered day. + 

And there they saw, already miles away⁠— + 

A pictographic scrawl upon the glow⁠— + 

The tangled slant and clutter of travaux + 

By crowding hundreds; ponies that pursued, + 

A crawling, milling, tossing multitude, + 

A somber river brawling out of banks; + 

And glooms of horsemen flowing on the flanks⁠— + 

The whole Sioux village fleeing with the light + 

To where the Big Horn Mountains glimmered white + 

And low along the south! + 

The horses neighed + 

To swell the happy noise their masters made. + 

The pack mules sang the only song they knew. + 

And summits, late familiar with the Sioux, + 

Proclaimed a new allegiance, cheer on cheer. + 

For who could doubt that news of Terry near + 

Had driven off the foe? + 

XIII + 

The Twilight + 

Moon wore by, + 

And in the rainless waning of July + 

Ten thousand hearts were troubled where the creeks, + 

Young from the ancient winter of the peaks, + 

Romped in the mountain meadows green as May. + 

The very children lost the heart to play, + 

Awed by the shadow of an unseen thing, + 

As covies, when the shadow of a wing + 

Forebodes a pounce of terror from the skies. + 

They saw it in the bravest father’s eyes⁠— + 

That shadow⁠—in the gentlest mother’s face; + 

Unwitting how there fell upon a race + 

The twilight of irreparable wrong. + 

The drums had fallen silent with the song, + 

And valiant tales, late eager to be told, + 

Were one with all things glorious and old + 

And dear and gone forever from the Sioux. + 

For now the hunted prairie people knew + 

How powerful the Gray Fox camp had grown + 

On Goose Creek; how along the Yellowstone + 

The mounted soldiers and the walking ones⁠— + 

A multitude⁠—had got them wagon guns, + 

Of which the voice was thunder and the stroke, + 

Far off, a second thunder and a smoke + 

That bit and tore. A little while, and then + 

Those open jaws, toothed terribly with men, + 

Would move together, closing to the bite. + 

What hope was left in anything but flight? + 

And whither? O the world was narrow now! + 

South, east, the rat-like nibbling of the plow + 

Had left them but a little way to go. + 

The mountains of the never melting snow + 

Walled up the west. Beyond the northern haze, + 

There lay a land of unfamiliar ways, + 

Dark tongues and alien eyes. + 

As waters keep + 

Their wonted channels, yearning for the deep, + 

The homeless rabble took the ancient road. + 

From bluff to bluff the Rosebud valley flowed + 

Their miles of ponies; and the pine-clad heights + 

Were sky-devouring torches in the nights + 

Behind them, and a rolling gloom by day; + 

And prairies, kindled all along the way, + 

Bloomed balefully and blackened. Noon was dark, + 

Night starless, and the fleeing meadowlark + 

Forgot the morning. Where the Bluestone runs + 

Their dust bore east; and seldom did the suns + 

Behold them going for the seed they strewed + 

To crop the rearward prairie solitude + 

With black starvation even for the crow. + 

Creeks, stricken as with fever, ceased to flow + 

And languished in a steaming ashen mire. + 

But more than grass was given to the fire⁠— + 

O memories no spring could render young! + 

And so it was that, marching down the Tongue, + 

The Gray Fox, seeking for the hostile bands, + 

Saw nothing but the desolated lands + 

Black to the sky; and when a dreary week + 

Had brought him to the mouth of Bluestone Creek, + 

Lo, Terry with another empty tale! + 

Broad as a road to ruin ran the trail + 

Of driven pony herds, a livid scar + 

Upon a vast cadaver, winding far + 

To eastward as the tallest hill might look. + 

And thither pressed the horse and foot of Crook, + 

Their pack mules, lighter for a greater speed, + 

With scant provisions for a fortnight’s need + 

Upon their saddles. + 

Burning August waned + 

About the toiling regiments. It rained⁠— + 

A sodden, chill monotony of rains⁠— + 

As though the elements had cursed the plains, + 

And now that flame had stricken, water struck. + 

The scarecrow horses struggled with the suck + 

Of gumbo flats and heartbreak hills of clay; + 

And many a bone-bag fell beside the way + 

Too weak to rise, for still the draws were few + 

That were not blackened. Crows and buzzards knew + 

How little eager claws and whetted beaks + 

Availed them where so many hollow cheeks + 

Had bulged about a brief and cookless feast. + 

Still wearily the main trail lengthened east + 

By hungry days and fireless bivouacs; + 

And more and more diverging pony tracks, + 

To north and south, and tangent lodge pole trails + 

Revealed the hunted scattering as quails + 

Before a dreaded hunter. Eastward still + 

They staggered, nourished by a doggèd will, + 

Past where a little river apes in mud + 

And name the genius of a titan flood + 

That drinks it. Crumbling pinnacles of awe + 

Looked down upon them; domes of wonder saw + 

The draggled column slowly making head + 

Against the muck; the drooping horses, led, + 

Well loaded with their saddles; empty packs, + 

Become a cruel burden on the backs + 

Of plodding mules with noses to the ground. + 

Along the deeps of Davis Creek they wound, + 

To where the Camel’s Hump and Rosebud Butte + 

Behold the Heart’s head. + 

Here the long pursuit, + 

It seemed, had come to nothing after all. + 

The multitude of Crazy Horse and Gall + 

Had vanished in that God-forsaken place + 

And matched their fagged pursuers for a race + 

With something grimmer than a human foe. + 

Four marches east across the dim plateau + 

Fort Lincoln lured them. Twice as many days + 

Beyond the dripping low September haze, + 

Due south across the yet uncharted lands, + 

Lay Deadwood, unprotected from the bands + 

Of prowling hostiles. ’Twas enough for Crook. + 

Half-heartedly the ragged column took + 

The way of duty. + 

And the foe appeared! + 

Where, like a god-built stadium, the tiered + 

Age-carven Slim Buttes watch the Rabbit’s Lip + 

Go groping for the ocean, in the drip + 

And ooze of sodden skies the battle raged; + 

And presences, millennially aged + 

In primal silence, shouted at the sight. + 

Until the rifles gashed the front of night + 

With sanguinary wounds, they fought it out; + 

And darkness was the end of it, and doubt + 

And drizzle. Unrejoicing victors knew + 

What enemy, more mighty than the Sioux, + 

Would follow with no lagging human feet; + 

And early morning saw them in retreat + 

Before that foe. Above their buried slain + 

A thousand horses trampled in the rain + 

That none might know the consecrated ground + 

To violate it. + 

Up and up they wound + 

Among the foggy summits, till the van + 

Was checked with awe. Inimical to Man, + 

Below them spread a featureless immense, + 

More credibly a dream of impotence + 

Than any earthly country to be crossed⁠— + 

A gloomy flat, illimitably lost + 

In gauzes of the downpour. + 

Thither strove + 

The gaunt battalions. And the chill rain drove + 

Unceasingly. Through league on league of mire + 

Men straggled into camps without a fire + 

To wolf their slaughtered horses in the red; + 

And all the wallow of the way they fled + 

Was strewn with crowbaits dying in the bogs. + 

About them in the forest of the fogs + 

Lurked Crazy Horse, a cougar mad for blood; + 

And scarce the rearguard-battles in the mud + 

Aroused the sullen plodders to the fore. + 

The Deer’s Ears loomed and vanished in the pour; + 

The Haystack Buttes stole off along the right; + 

And men grew old between a night and night + 

Before their feeble toil availed to raise + 

The Black Hills, set against the evil days + 

About a paradise of food and rest. + 

Now Crazy Horse’s people, turning west, + 

Retraced the trail of ruin, sick for home. + 

Where myriads of the bison used to roam + 

And fatten in the golden autumn drowse, + 

A few rejected bulls and barren cows + 

Grew yet a little leaner. Every place + 

The good old earth, with ashes on her face, + 

Was like a childless mother in despair; + 

Though still she kept with jealous, loving care + 

Some little hoard of all her youth had known + 

Against the dear returning of her own; + 

But where the starving herd of ponies passed, + 

The little shielded hollows, lately grassed, + 

Were stricken barren even as with fire. + 

And so they reached the place of their desire, + 

The deep-carved valley where the Powder flows. + 

Here surely there was peace. + 

But when the snows + 

Came booming where the huddled village stood + 

And ponies, lean with gnawing cottonwood, + 

Were slain to fill the kettles, Dull Knife came, + 

The great Cheyenne. The same⁠—O not the same + 

As he who fought beside the Greasy Grass + 

And slew his fill of enemies! Alas, + 

The beggar in his eyes! And very old + 

He seemed, for hunger and the pinch of cold + 

Were on him; and the rabble at his back⁠— + 

Despairing hundreds⁠—lacked not any lack + 

That flesh may know and live. The feeble wail + 

Of babies put an edge upon the tale + 

That Dull Knife told. + 

“There was a fight,” he said. + 

“I set my winter village at the head + 

Of Willow Creek. The mountains there are tall. + 

A canyon stood about me for a wall; + 

And it was good to hear my people sing, + 

For there was none that wanted anything + 

That makes men happy. We were all asleep. + 

The cold was sharp; the snow was very deep. + 

What enemy could find us? We awoke. + 

A thunder and a shouting and a smoke + 

Were there among us, and a swarm of foes⁠— + 

Pawnees, Shoshones and Arapahoes, + 

And soldiers, many soldiers. It was night + 

About us, and we fought them in the light + 

Of burning lodges till the town was lost + 

And all our plenty. Bitter was the frost + 

And most of us were naked from the bed. + 

Now many of our little ones are dead + 

Of cold and hunger. Shall the others die?” + 

There was a light in Crazy Horse’s eye + 

Like moony ice. The other spoke again. + 

“As brothers have Dakota and Cheyenne + 

Made war together. Help us. You have seen + 

We can not live until the grass is green, + 

My brother!” + 

Then the other face grew stone; + 

The hard lips moved: “A man must feed his own,” + 

Said Crazy Horse, and turned upon his heel. + 

But now the flint of him had found the steel + 

In Dull Knife, and the flare was bad to see. + 

“Tashunka Witko, dare to look at me + 

That you may not forget me. We shall meet. + 

The soldiers yonder have enough to eat, + 

And I will come, no beggar, with the grass!” + 

And silently the people saw him pass + 

Along the valley where the snow lay blue, + 

The plodding, silent, ragamuffin crew + 

Behind him. So the evil days began. + 

Now Crazy Horse, they say, was like a man + 

Who, having seen a ghost, must look and look + 

And brood upon the empty way it took + 

To nowhere; and he scarcely ate at all; + 

And there was that about him like a wall + 

To shut men out. He seemed no longer young. + 

Bleak January found them on the Tongue + 

In search of better forage for the herd⁠— + 

A failing quest. And hither came the word + 

Of many walking soldiers coming down + 

With wagon guns upon the starving town + 

That might not flee; for whither could they go + 

With ponies pawing feebly in the snow + 

To grow the leaner? Mighty in despair, + 

They waited on a lofty summit there + 

Above the valley. + 

Raw gray dawn revealed + 

A scaly serpent crawling up a field + 

Of white beneath them. Leisurely it neared, + 

Resolving into men of frosty beard + 

With sloping rifles swinging to the beat + 

And melancholy fifing of their feet + 

Upon the frost; and shrill the wagon tires + 

Sang rearward. Now the soldiers lighted fires + 

And had their breakfast hot, as who should say: + 

“What hurry? It is early in the day + 

And there is time for what we came to do.” + 

With wistful eyes the rabble of the Sioux + 

Beheld the eating; knew that they defied + 

In vain their own misgivings when they cried: + 

“Eat plenty! You will never eat again!” + 

It was not so; for those were devil men + 

Who needed nothing and were hard to kill. + 

The wagon-guns barked sharply at the hill + 

To bite the summit, always shooting twice; + 

And scrambling upward through the snow and ice + 

Came doggedly, without a sign of fear, + 

The infantry of Miles. They didn’t cheer, + 

They didn’t hurry, and they didn’t stop, + 

For all the rifles roaring at the top, + 

Until the gun-butt met the battle-ax. + 

Still fighting with their children at their backs + 

The Sioux gave slowly. Wind came on to blow, + 

A hurrying northwester, blind with snow, + 

And in the wild white dusk of it they fled. + 

But when they reached the Little Powder’s head, + 

So much of all their little had been lost, + 

So well had wrought their hunger and the frost, + 

One might have thought ’twas Dull Knife coming there. + 

The country had a cold, disowning stare; + 

The burned-off valleys could not feed their own. + 

The moon was like a frozen bubble, blown + 

Along the rim of February nights, + 

When Spotted Tail, the lover of the Whites, + 

Came there with mighty words. His cheeks were full, + 

His belly round. He spoke of Sitting Bull + 

And Gall defeated, driven far away + 

Across the line; of Red Cloud getting gray + 

Before his time⁠—a cougar in a cage, + 

Self-eaten by a silent, toothless rage + 

That only made the watching sentry smile. + 

And still the story saddened. All the while + 

The scattered Sioux were coming in to save + 

Their children with the food the soldiers gave + 

And laying down their guns and making peace. + 

He told how Dull Knife’s fury did not cease + 

But grew upon the soldier food he ate; + 

And how his people fattened, nursing hate + 

For Crazy Horse. And many more than these + 

But waited for the grass⁠—the Loup Pawnees, + 

The Utes, the Winnebagoes and the Crows, + 

Shoshones, Bannocks and Arapahoes, + 

With very many more Dakotas too! + 

“Now what could Crazy Horse’s people do + 

Against them all?” said Spotted Tail, the Wise. + 

And with the ancient puzzle in his eyes + 

That only death may riddle; gazing long + 

Now first upon the fat one in the wrong + 

And now upon the starving in the right, + 

The other found an answer: “I could fight! + 

And I could fight till all of us were dead. + 

But now I have no powder left,” he said; + 

“I can not fight. Tell Gray Fox what you saw; + 

That I am only waiting for a thaw + 

To bring my people in.” + 

XIV + 

The Death of Crazy Horse + 

And now ’twas done. + 

Spring found the waiting fort at Robinson + 

A half-moon ere the Little Powder knew; + 

And, doubting still what Crazy Horse might do + 

When tempted by the herald geese a-wing + 

To join the green rebellion of the spring, + 

The whole frontier was troubled. April came, + 

And once again his undefeated name + 

Rode every wind. Ingeniously the West + 

Wrought verities from what the East had guessed + 

Of what the North knew. Eagerly deceived, + 

The waiting South progressively believed + 

The wilder story. April wore away; + 

Fleet couriers, arriving day by day + 

With but the farthing mintage of the fact, + 

Bought credit slowly in that no one lacked + 

The easy gold of marvelous surmise. + 

For, gazing northward where the secret skies + 

Were moody with a coming long deferred, + 

Whoever spoke of Crazy Horse, still heard + 

Ten thousand hoofs. + 

But yonder, with the crow + 

And kiote to applaud his pomp of woe, + 

The last great Sioux rode down to his defeat. + 

And now his people huddled in the sleet + 

Where Dog Creek and the Little Powder met. + 

With faces ever sharper for the whet + 

Of hunger, silent in the driving rains, + 

They straggled out across the blackened plains + 

Where Inyan Kara, mystically old, + 

Drew back a cloudy curtain to behold, + 

Serene with Time’s indifference to men. + 

And now they tarried on the North Cheyenne + 

To graze their feeble ponies, for the news + 

Of April there had wakened in the sloughs + 

A glimmering of pity long denied. + 

Nor would their trail across the bare divide + 

Grow dimmer with the summer, for the bleach + 

Of dwindled herds⁠—so hard it was to reach + 

The South Cheyenne. O sad it was to hear + 

How all the pent-up music of the year + 

Surged northward there the way it used to do! + 

In vain the catbird scolded at the Sioux; + 

The timid pewee queried them in vain; + 

Nor might they harken to the whooping crane + 

Nor heed the high geese calling them to come. + 

Unwelcome waifs of winter, drab and dumb, + 

Where ecstasy of sap and thrill of wing + 

Made shift to flaunt some color or to sing + 

The birth of joy, they toiled a weary way. + 

And giddy April sobered into May + 

Before they topped the summit looking down + 

Upon the valley of the soldier’s town + 

At Robinson. + 

Then eerily began + 

Among the lean-jowled warriors in the van + 

The chant of peace, a supplicating wail + 

That spread along the clutter of the trail + 

Until the last bent straggler sang alone; + 

And camp dogs, hunger-bitten to the bone, + 

Accused the heavens with a doleful sound; + 

But, silent still, with noses to the ground, + 

The laden ponies toiled to cheat the crows, + 

And famine, like a wag, had made of those + 

A grisly jest. + 

So Crazy Horse came in + 

With twice a thousand beggars. + 

And the din + 

Died out, though here and there a dog still howled, + 

For now the mighty one, whom Fate had fouled, + 

Dismounted, faced the silent double row + 

Of soldiers haughty with the glint and glow + 

Of steel and brass. A little while he stood + 

As though bewildered in a haunted wood + 

Of men and rifles all astare with eyes. + 

They saw a giant shrunken to the size + 

Of any sergeant. Now he met the glare + 

Of Dull Knife and his warriors waiting there + 

With fingers itching at the trigger-guard. + 

How many comrade faces, strangely hard, + 

Were turned upon him! Ruefully he smiled, + 

The doubtful supplication of a child + 

Caught guilty; loosed the bonnet from his head + 

And cast it down. “I come for peace,” he said; + 

“Now let my people eat.” And that was all. + 

The summer ripened. Presages of fall + 

Now wanted nothing but the goose’s flight. + 

The goldenrods had made their torches bright + 

Against the ghostly imminence of frost. + 

And one, long brooding on a birthright lost, + 

Remembered and remembered. O the time + 

When all the prairie world was white with rime + 

Of mornings, and the lodge smoke towered straight + 

To meet the sunlight, coming over late + 

For happy hunting! O the days, the days + 

When winds kept silence in the far blue haze + 

To hear the deep-grassed valleys running full + 

With fading cows, and thunders of the bull + 

Across the hills! Nights given to the feast + 

When big round moons came smiling up the east + 

To listen to the drums, the dancing feet, + 

The voices of the women, high and sweet + 

Above the men’s! + 

And Crazy Horse was sad. + 

There wasn’t any food the white man had + 

Could find his gnawing hunger and assuage. + 

Some saw a blood-mad panther in a cage, + 

And some the sulking of a foolish pride, + 

For there were those who watched him narrow-eyed + 

The whole day long and listened for a word, + 

To shuttle in the warp of what they heard + 

A woof of darker meaning. + 

Then one day + 

A flying tale of battles far away + 

And deeds to make men wonder stirred the land: + 

How Nez Perce Joseph led his little band, + 

With Howard’s eager squadrons in pursuit, + 

Across the mountains of the Bitter Root + 

To Big Hole Basin and the daylong fight; + 

And how his women, fleeing in the night, + 

Brought off the ponies and the children too. + 

O many a heart beat fast among the Sioux + 

To hear the way he fled and fought and fled + 

Past Bannack, down across the Beaverhead + 

To Henry’s Lake, relentlessly pursued; + 

Now swallowed by the dreadful solitude + 

Where still the Mighty Spirit shapes the dream + 

With primal fires and prodigies of steam, + 

As when the fallow night was newly sown; + 

Now reappearing down the Yellowstone, + 

Undaunted yet and ever making less + 

That thousand miles of alien wilderness + 

Between a people’s freedom and their need! + 

O there was virtue in the tale to feed + 

The withered heart and make it big again! + 

Not yet, not yet the ancient breed of men + 

Had vanished from the aging earth! They say + 

There came a change on Crazy Horse the day + 

The Ogalala village buzzed the news. + 

So much to win and only life to lose; + 

The bison making southward with the fall, + 

And Joseph fighting up the way to Gall + 

And Sitting Bull! + 

Who knows the dream he had? + 

Much talk there was of how his heart was bad + 

And any day some meditated deed + 

Might start an irresistible stampede + 

Among the Sioux⁠—a human prairie-fire! + 

So back and forth along the talking wire + 

Fear chattered. Yonder, far away as morn, + 

The mighty heard⁠—and heard the Little Horn + 

Still roaring with the wind of Custer’s doom. + 

And there were troopers moving in the gloom + 

Of midnight to the chaining of the beast; + 

But when the white light broke along the east, + 

There wasn’t any Ogalala town + 

And Crazy Horse had vanished! + 

Up and down + 

The dusty autumn panic horsemen spurred + 

Till all the border shuddered at the word + 

Of how that terror threatened every trail. + 

They found him in the camp of Spotted Tail, + 

A lonely figure with a face of care. + 

“I am afraid of what might happen there” + 

He said. “So many listen what I say + 

And look and look. I will not run away. + 

I want my people here. You have my guns.” + 

But half a world away the mighty ones + 

Had spoken words like bullets in the dark + 

That wreak the rage of blindness on a mark + 

They can not know. + 

Then spoke the one who led + 

The soldiers: “Not a hair upon your head + 

Shall suffer any harm if you will go + 

To Robinson for just a day or so + 

And have a parley with the soldier chief.” + 

He spoke believing and he won belief, + 

So Crazy Horse went riding down the west; + 

And neither he nor any trooper guessed + 

What doom now made a rutted wagon road + 

The highway to a happier abode + 

Where all the dead are splendidly alive + 

And summer lingers and the bison thrive + 

Forever. + 

If the better hope be true, + 

There was a gate of glory yawning through + 

The sunset when the little cavalcade + 

Approached the fort. + 

The populous parade, + 

The straining hush that somehow wasn’t peace, + 

The bristling troops, the Indian police + 

Drawn up as for a battle! What was wrong? + 

What made them hustle Crazy Horse along + 

Among the gleaming bayonets and eyes? + 

There swept a look of quizzical surprise + 

Across his face. He struggled with the guard. + 

Their grips were steel; their eyes were cold and hard⁠— + 

Like bayonets. + 

There was a door flung wide. + 

The soldier chief would talk with him inside + 

And all be well at last! + 

The stifling, dim + 

Interior poured terror over him. + 

He blinked about⁠—and saw the iron bars. + 

O nevermore to neighbor with the stars + 

Or know the simple goodness of the sun! + 

Did some swift vision of a doom begun + 

Reveal the monstrous purpose of a lie⁠— + 

The desert island and the alien sky, + 

The long and lonely ebbing of a life? + 

The glimmer of a whipped-out butcher knife + 

Dismayed the shrinking squad, and once again + 

Men saw a face that many better men + 

Had died to see! Brown arms that once were kind, + 

A comrade’s arms, whipped round him from behind, + 

Went crimson with a gash and dropped aside. + 

“Don’t touch me! I am Crazy Horse!” he cried, + 

And, leaping doorward, charged upon the world + 

To meet the end. A frightened soldier hurled + 

His weight behind a jabbing belly-thrust, + 

And Crazy Horse plunged headlong in the dust, + 

A writhing heap. The momentary din + 

Of struggle ceased. The people, closing in, + 

Went ominously silent for a space, + 

And one could hear men breathing round the place + 

Where lay the mighty. Now he strove to rise, + 

The wide blind stare of anguish in his eyes, + 

And someone shouted “Kill that devil quick!” + 

A throaty murmur and a running click + 

Of gun-locks woke among the crowding Sioux, + 

And many a soldier whitened. Well they knew + 

What pent-up hate the moment might release + 

To drop upon the bungled farce of peace + 

A bloody curtain. + 

One began to talk; + 

His tongue was drunken and his face was chalk; + 

But when a half-breed shouted what he spoke + 

The crowd believed, so few had seen the stroke, + 

Nor was there any bleeding of the wound. + 

It seemed the chief had falleasick and swooned; + 

Perhaps a little rest would make him strong! + 

And silently they watched him borne along, + 

A sagging bundle, dear and mighty yet, + 

Though from the sharp face, beaded with the sweat + 

Of agony, already peered the ghost. + 

They laid him in an office of the post, + 

And soldiers, forming in a hollow square, + 

Held back the people. Silence deepened there. + 

A little while it seemed the man was dead, + 

He lay so still. The west no longer bled; + 

Among the crowd the dusk began to creep. + 

Then suddenly, as startled out of sleep + 

By some old dream-remembered night alarm, + 

He strove to shout, half rose upon an arm + 

And glared about him in the lamp-lit place. + 

The flare across the ashes of his face + 

Went out. He spoke; and, leaning where he lay, + 

Men strained to gather what he strove to say, + 

So hard the panting labor of his words. + 

“I had my village and my pony herds + 

On Powder where the land was all my own. + 

I only wanted to be let alone. + 

I did not want to fight. The Gray Fox sent + 

His soldiers. We were poorer when they went; + 

Our babies died, for many lodges burned + 

And it was cold. We hoped again and turned + 

Our faces westward. It was just the same + 

Out yonder on the Rosebud. Gray Fox came. + 

The dust his soldiers made was high and long. + 

I fought him and I whipped him. Was it wrong + 

To drive him back? That country was my own. + 

I only wanted to be let alone. + 

I did not want to see my people die. + 

They say I murdered Long Hair and they lie. + 

His soldiers came to kill us and they died.” + 

He choked and shivered, staring hungry-eyed + 

As though to make the most of little light. + 

Then like a child that feels the clutching night + 

And cries the wilder, deeming it in vain, + 

He raised a voice made lyrical with pain + 

And terror of a thing about to be. + 

“I want to see you, Father! Come to me! + 

I want to see you, Mother!” O’er and o’er + 

His cry assailed the darkness at the door; + 

And from the gloom beyond the hollow square + 

Of soldiers, quavered voices of despair: + 

“We can not come! They will not let us come!” + 

But when at length the lyric voice was dumb + 

And Crazy Horse was nothing but a name, + 

There was a little withered woman came + 

Behind a bent old man. Their eyes were dim. + 

They sat beside the boy and fondled him, + 

Remembering the little names he knew + 

Before the great dream took him and he grew + 

To be so mighty. And the woman pressed + 

A hand that men had feared against her breast + 

And swayed and sang a little sleepy song. + 

Out yonder in the village all night long + 

There was a sound of mourning in the dark. + 

And when the morning heard the meadowlark, + 

The last great Sioux rode silently away. + 

Before the pony-drag on which he lay + 

An old man tottered. Bowed above the bier, + 

A little wrinkled woman kept the rear + 

With not a sound and nothing in her eyes. + 

Who knows the crumbling summit where he lies + 

Alone among the badlands? Kiotes prowl + 

About it, and the voices of the owl + 

Assume the daylong sorrow of the crows, + 

These many grasses and these many snows. + 