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10 WALKING THE BLACK ROAD We stayed in that country near the Bighorn Mountains for about a moon, maybe a little more. My father told me all the fighting had not done any good, because the Hang-Around-the-Fort people were getting ready to sell the Black Hills to the Wasichu anyway, and that more soldiers were coming to fight us. He said that Three Stars was on Goose Creek and that many other soldiers were up on the Yellowstone, and that these would come together and have us between them.¹ Some of our people had been leaving us, a few at a time, and going in to live at the agencies the Wasichus had made.² But there were many of us left, and so we started with all our ponies to get away from the soldiers.³ We traveled in a very long line down the Rosebud and camped where the river flows through between high bluffs. Then we moved on down stream to where we had the big sun dance before the rubbing out of Long Hair. The soldiers had come through that way, and the holy place was all cut up with shod hoofs and made dirty with horse droppings. Then we moved on down stream to a sacred place where there is a big rock bluff right beside the water, and high up on this bluff pictures used to appear, foretelling something important that was going to happen soon.⁴ There was a picture on it then, of many soldiers hanging head downward; and the people said it was there before the rubbing out of Long Hair. I do not know; but it was there then, and it did not seem that anybody could get up that high to make a picture.⁵ We moved over to the Tongue River and camped a little while. When we were there, scouts came in and said that a big fire-boat* had come up the * Steamboat. [Wáta phéta ‘fire boat.’ —rdm] 82 Walking the Black Road Yellowstone with a load of corn for the soldiers’ horses, and that it was piled on the other side of the river. Some of our young men went to see, and one of them, Yellow Shirt, got killed by the fireboat’s soldiers over there.⁶ But the others brought corn home and they gave us some. We parched it, and it was good. About this time, in the Moon of Black Cherries (August), the scattering of the people began, because by now we learned that the soldiers were coming again. Dull Knife and the Shyelas went over to Willow Creek in the Bighorn Mountains. Many of the Lakotas stole away in small parties and started for the agencies. The rest of us, still a great many, started east, and the soldiers of Three Stars followed us. Our people set fire to the grass behind us as we went, and the smoke back there was wide as the day and the light of the fire was wide as the night. This was to make the soldiers’ horses starve. Then it began to rain, and it kept on raining for days while we traveled east. Our ponies had to work hard in the deep mud, and it must have been bad for the soldiers’ horses back there with nothing to eat.⁷ Sitting Bull and Gall with some people left us and started for Grandmother ’s Land (Canada),⁸ and other people were going away from us all the time, but Crazy Horse would not leave the country that was ours. In the Moon of the Black Calf (September)⁹ we were camping near the head of the Grand River when American Horse with many tepees had a fight with the soldiers of Three Stars by the Slim Buttes on Rabbit Creek.* They fought hard there in the rain, and the soldiers killed American Horse and chased the women and children out of their homes and took all the papa (dried bison meat)¹⁰ that they had made to feed themselves that winter. Then Crazy Horse went over there with a band of our warriors and chased the soldiers through the rain. They fled southward toward the Black Hills, and many of their horses died in the deep mud. He followed them a long way and made them fight as they fled. * The Battle of Slim Buttes, September 9, 1876. [The American Horse whose village was attacked by Crook’s forces was a Minneconjou chief who was...

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