Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Rain is frowning for the first time since they met at the Wild West Show.

— Your ancestors would come back? Like ghosts?

— No, I don’t think so. More like resurrected real people, like your Bible promises in Heaven. But not nagi, not spirit people, just people. We would see all our ancestors again, which is a promise that held tremendous power to us, Rain. And the return of the buffalo and the departure… deaths… of all the wasichus in our land, in the West. Well, you can see why this scared the whites, all the way up to President Harrison.

— Yes.

Her voice is flat, emotionless, for the first time this day. Paha Sapa has no idea what she is thinking. He rubs his jaw with his bare hand and goes on.

— Anyway, the summer of 1889, Ghost Dancers had appeared on all six agencies where the Lakota lived. They just… appeared. They wore shirts—special sacred shirts, Ghost Shirts, that Wovoka had promised them would stop any bullet. The whole idea was that the Ghost Dance itself, if all the Indians in all the tribes believed in it and danced it, would itself provoke the disaster that would take away all the wasichus and give the red men back their land, their old world, their universe, even their gods and protective spirits. And, if the wasichus tried to interfere, there were always the Ghost Shirts to protect the warriors….

— Did you believe in this prophecy and in the Ghost Dance, Paha Sapa?

— No.

Paha Sapa actually considers telling her the reason he could not believe in it—his own Sacred Vision from 1876, the wasichu Stone Giants rising out of the Black Hills and consuming all the buffalo and the Natural Free Human Beings themselves—but then he comes to his senses. He knows he will love this young woman for the rest of his life, whatever that life brings him, but why have her thinking that he, Paha Sapa, is as crazy as that crazy old Paiute Wovoka?

He sips the last of his cold drink and goes on.

— Anyway, the local Indian agents got very nervous—as well they should—and then the politicians got nervous and finally the army, the cavalry, got very nervous. The agents on all the reservations were ordered to use the tribal police to break up any gatherings of Ghost Dancers. The dance itself was outlawed on every reservation except little Standing Rock, way over on the Missouri River, where Sitting Bull and my tunkašila were living in little cabins rather than tipis.

— Did Sitting Bull believe in the Ghost Dance and the prophecy?

Rain’s voice is still flat, emotionless, save for curiosity.

— I don’t think so. I don’t think he’d made up his mind about it. At least he hadn’t said he had when I arrived there on the fourteenth of December, the day before they… the day before he died. But a lot of Lakota were sure that Sitting Bull was the messiah that Wovoka was preaching about. A lot of Lakota men were ready to follow Sitting Bull if the old chief had proclaimed himself that messiah. So, right at the end of November, Buffalo Bill showed up at Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation with orders signed by Bear Coat… our name for General Miles… authorizing the arrest of Sitting Bull and…

— Mr. Cody arrest Sitting Bull? They were close friends! Mr. Cody talks about him with great respect and affection to this day! Father has always said that the two men were close.

Now there is emotion in her voice… true shock.

— Yes, well… perhaps that’s why the wasichus… the agents and the president… sent Mr. Cody with the arrest warrant. Mr. Cody had just returned from the successful tour in Europe with the Wild West Show. But anyway, he arrived too drunk to carry out the arrest and…

— Mr. Cody? Drunk? I thought Mr. Cody never touched spirits or liquor. I am sure that Father believes this to be the case! Good heavens!

Paha Sapa is not sure if he should—or can—continue. He starts to drink from his glass, sees that it is empty, and sets it down to consult his cheap watch. He is so disturbed that he thinks of checking the time in Lakota— Mazaškanškan tonackca hwo? —literally “Metal-goes-goes what?”

— It is twenty minutes to six, Miss de Plachette. We should cross the bridge to the west side of the Great Basin just in case your father is early and…

— Oh, no. Please finish your story, Paha Sapa. I insist… no, no, I have no right to insist… but I beseech you. Tell me how Sitting Bull died. Mr. Cody was too drunk to arrest him?

— Yes. And the wasichu military men there kept him drunk for several days. Those officers were terrified that arresting Sitting Bull, much less hurting him, would cause the very catastrophe that Wovoka was prophesying about. Anyway, after about three days, Mr. Cody sobered up and headed down the road to arrest Sitting Bull. He was traveling with another Wild West Show fellow, whom we called Pony Bob…

— Oh, my! Father and I know Pony Bob. He used to come to Father’s sermons.

— Anyway, Mr. Cody and Pony Bob ran into the agency’s interpreter, a fellow named Louis Primeau, who lied to them… told them that Sitting Bull wasn’t on the reservation. That he was on another road. By the time Mr. Cody and Pony Bob figured things out, President Harrison himself had… I’m sorry, what is the word for changing orders one has given? Reversing them?

— Rescinded?

— Yes, that’s it. The president himself had rescinded the arrest orders. Sitting Bull was safe. For the time being. That was around the first of December.

— But he died in December… did he not?

— He did. Bear Coat… General Miles… was so angry that his old adversary Sitting Bull was getting away that he sent the Seventh Cavalry in…

“Do not say anything to libel the Seventh Cavalry,” rasps a familiar voice deep in Paha Sapa’s skull.

Silence! The ghost is like a prisoner who gets out of his cell from time to time but can never escape the prison.

— Is something wrong, Paha Sapa?

— No, no, I was just gathering my thoughts. At any rate, I arrived at Standing Rock on the fourteenth of December. Sitting Bull and my tunkašila were leaving with me and a few other younger men the next day, going back to Pine Ridge—and then planning to go to Rosebud—to visit these Ghost Dance leaders and finally decide what he thought, what Sitting Bull thought, of the whole prophesy thing. But he was skeptical. I know he was skeptical.

— Didn’t you say that the Ghost Dancers were banned from all the other reservations?

Paha Sapa nods. She is obviously paying close attention.

— That’s true. The leaders Sitting Bull wanted me to meet with had taken about twelve hundred Oglala and Brulé to a place we call the Stronghold—a mesa way up in the Badlands part of the Pine Ridge Reservation surrounded by sheer cliffs on three sides. The Natural Free Human Beings have fled there in threatening times since before we had horses.

— And the cavalry pursued Sitting Bull there?

— No, he never got out of Standing Rock. The next day, the fifteenth, around six a.m…. we should have left earlier, but Sitting Bull was an old man and packed and acted slowly… the army sent more than forty local Indian policemen to his cabin on the Grand River. It was a very small cabin. My tunkašila and I were sleeping in a sort of lean-to out back where Sitting Bull kept his horse.

— So it was a tribal policeman… another Indian… who killed Sitting Bull?