Boys' Book of Indian Warriors Part 44

I could not bear to see my wounded men and women suffer any longer."

So he rode out, on the morning of October 5, and surrendered. General Howard had arrived, at the end of his long thirteen-hundred-mile chase, but the surrender was made to Colonel Miles.

Chief Joseph handed over his gun.

"I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Gla.s.s is dead. Toohulhulsote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men is dead. [That was Ollicut.] It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead."

He raised his hand high, toward the sun.

"Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

White Bird had taken a company and escaped to Canada. Colonel Miles promised Chief Joseph that he would ask to have the surrendered people sent back to the Nez Perces' country. Those were the terms. The surrendered people numbered eighty-seven men, three hundred and thirty-one women and children.

"Thus," reported General Sheridan, the head of the army, "has terminated one of the most extraordinary Indian wars of which there is any record. The Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that elicited universal praise; they abstained from scalping, let captive women go free, did not commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful families, which is usual, and fought with almost scientific skill, using advance and rear guards, skirmish lines and field fortifications."

The Government did not send the Chief Joseph Pierced Noses to their own country. It was claimed that White Bird had broken the terms, by his escape. At any rate, the Joseph people were kept a long, long time in Indian Territory. Many of them sickened and died. They were mountain Indians. They missed their cold streams and their pure air. They fell away from over four hundred to two hundred and eighty.

Chief Joseph's heart broke utterly. He issued an appeal--his own story--which was published in the _North American Review_ magazine, in 1879.

"If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in some country where my people will not die so fast.... Let me be a free man--free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade, where I choose; free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself--and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty."

Not until 1884 was he permitted to return to the mountains of the Northwest. The majority of his people were located again in Idaho, among their kindred. He himself was placed upon another reservation, near Spokane, Was.h.i.+ngton.

He pleaded for the Wallowa Valley--his Valley of the Winding Waters; but that had been settled by the white men. All that he found was his father's grave. A white man had enclosed it with a picket fence.

Chief Joseph wept.

He lived to a good age. In 1903 he visited the East; he talked with President Roosevelt and General Miles. He met General Howard. The next year he exhibited himself in an Indian show at the St. Louis fair.

That hurt his pride. He was ashamed to sell his face for money.

When he went home, he was sick. This September he died, on the Was.h.i.+ngton reservation. The doctor a.s.serted that he died from a broken heart.

He was the last of the great chiefs of the American Indians. The Historical Society of the State of Was.h.i.+ngton has erected over his grave a n.o.ble monument. Under it he lies, while people read his name, translated: "Thunder-rolling-in-the-mountains."

CHAPTER XXVI

THE GHOST DANCERS AND THE RED SOLDIERS (1889-1890)

AND SITTING BULL'S LAST MEDICINE

In 1889 the Sioux, upon their reservations in South Dakota, were much dissatisfied. Their cattle were dying, their crops had failed, there were no buffalo, and the Government supplies were not being issued according to promise.

The Sioux no longer occupied the Great Sioux reservation of western South Dakota. By several treaties they had sold the greater portion of that land. The last treaty, signed only this year, had left them five tracts, as reservations.

On the Missouri River at the middle north line of South Dakota there was the Standing Rock reservation, where lived Sitting Bull and many of the Hunkpapas and Oglalas whom he had led.

Next to it, on the south was the Cheyenne River reservation, for the Miniconjous, Without Bows, Two Kettles, and others.

Then there was a wide strip of land which had been sold, with the small Lower Brule reservation in the east end of it.

Then, side by side against the Nebraska line, south, there were the Rosebud reservation, for the other Brules; and Chief Red Cloud's Pine Ridge reservation, for his Oglalas, and various bands.

The Sioux numbered twenty-five thousand. The lands left to them were the poorest of the lands. White men had failed to make a living upon such lands. The Sioux were supposed to help themselves by farming and cattle raising, but they found themselves starving.

Sitting Bull had been placed upon the Standing Rock reservation in May, 1883. His home was a log cabin with a stable and corral, on the Grand River in the southern part of the reservation. He still kept a peace pipe, as sign that he would not go to war.

He had been among those who opposed the selling of the lands. After the last sale, this year, he was asked what the Indians thought about it.

"Indians!" he angrily blurted. "There are no Indians left now but me."

He viewed the Sioux police sullenly. These were a fine company of fifty young Sioux under First Lieutenant Bull Head and Second Lieutenant Chatka. They were drilled as United States soldiers, wore the army uniform of blue, and were well armed. Their duty was that of keeping order for the Indian agent. They were proud of their trust, and faithful to it.

Now in the fall of 1889 the restless Sioux heard a voice. Their young people were being educated at the Indian schools of the East, and at the agency schools, and were learning to read and write.

The eastern school Indians exchanged letters with Indian friends whom they had met or of whom they knew; the agency school Indians in different parts of the country also wrote letters. Word came by letters from the west, to Sioux at the Pine Ridge agency, that beyond the Rocky Mountains a man who claimed to be Christ, the Son of G.o.d, had appeared upon earth.

The white people once had tried to kill him by nailing him to a cross.

He was back again, to punish them for their treatment of him, and for their treatment of the Indians. The Indians were to be his people, and possess the land. This sounded reasonable.

It aroused curiosity and hope. It was only the same old story, as spread by other prophets, and here put in a little different form; but the red people of America had never yet ceased to look forward to a miracle that would restore to them their game and their liberty and their loved country.

Old Chief Red Cloud, Young-man-whose-horses-are-feared and other head men of the Pine Ridge reservation called a council, to choose delegates who should travel into the west and find out if the Arapahos and Shoshonis of Wyoming were telling the truth.

Kicking Bear from the Cheyenne River reservation and Short Bull from the Rosebud reservation, were the leaders selected. The other men were Good Thunder, Flat Iron, Yellow Breast, and Broken Arm, from Pine Ridge.

Without permission from their agents they traveled west into Wyoming, to talk with the Arapahos and Shoshonis at the Fort Washakie reservation. Some Cheyenne delegates from the Tongue River reservation in Montana were there also, seeking information.

The Arapahos and Shoshonis said that the word was true. The Messiah had come; he did not live among them, but was living west of the mountains, among the Fish-eaters. A Bannock Indian had brought the news across to them. They had sent men to see. The men had seen the Messiah, and had talked with him. They had seen the dances that he had ordered, which would waken the dead to life and populate the earth again with Indians.

Porcupine and his Cheyennes, and Kicking Bear and Short Bull and their Sioux were much impressed. They decided to go on, and see for themselves. So they did. They got on the train at Rawlins, Wyoming, and rode all day and branched off by another train, and rode still farther, and arrived at Fort Hall of Idaho, in the Bannock country.

From here the Bannocks guided them onward, by train and by wagon, until at last they reached the country of the Fish-eaters, or Pai-Utes, at Pyramid Lake in western Nevada!

The Pyramid Lake Fish-eaters sent them south, to Walker Lake of the Pai-Utes. Here they met the Christ, listened to his talk, danced the sacred dances, and felt that everything was true.

Kicking Bear and Short Bull and their Sioux were absent from the Sioux reservations all winter. They sent back letters from Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Nevada, telling of their progress. In April, of 1890, they returned.

They reported to the council. They had seen the Messiah. Delegates from many other tribes had been there, too. The Messiah talked to each tribe in its own language. He bore the scars of nails, on his wrists.

He looked like an Indian, only lighter in color. He taught them dances called Ghost Dances, which would bring the spirit people back upon earth. He fell into a sleep, and went to heaven and saw all the spirit Indians. The earth was too old; it was to be made new and would stay green and new, and the Indians who obeyed his teachings and lived good would never be more than forty years old, themselves. This fall all the good people were to be made young; and after that they would be made young every spring. Anyone who had shaken hands with the Messiah could call him in sleep.

The Sioux delegates told their story over and over again. At the Cheyenne reservation in Montana, Porcupine talked for five days and four nights.

There was indeed a Pai-Ute prophet, named Wo-vo-ka or the Cutter. He later took the name Kwo-hit-sauq, or Big Rumbling Belly. To the white people he was known as Jack Wilson. He had worked on ranches near the Walker Lake reservation, until, when he was about thirty years old, while sick with a fever he went into a trance, during an eclipse of the sun.