That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Fool Soldiers A True Story Around 1860 in what is now South Dakota, Wanatan, or Martin Charger, a young mixed-blood member of the Lakota Sioux nation, lived in the Indian village across the Missouri River from the old Ft. Pierre trading post. Charger , a member of the Two Kettles band, was reputed to be the grandson of Meriwether Lewis. According to one Two Kettle Lakota oral tradition, Lewis had had a liaison in late September 1804 with the daughter of Buffalo Robe, a Lakota subchief along the Missouri trek where the Corps of Discovery had camped for four days of tense negotiations and conciliatory feasting at the mouth of the Teton River. The result of that union was Zomie, or Turkey Head, also known as Long House, who in turn was the father of Martin Charger . Another story makes Charger the grandson of an early trader named Reuben Lewis.1 Whichever story is real, it is clear that this young man grew up with a unique perspective as a mixed-blood, yet traditional, Lakota. Just prior to 1862, Charger, along with his kola (beloved friend) Kills Game and Returns Triumphant, had organized a band of akicita, a soldier society. Their uncomplicated mandate, “to help others,” had come from Kills Game’s vision of ten black deer. In the dream, one among the black stags who spoke to Kills Game had said simply and forcefully, “Do good for the people.” Charger and Kills Game felt their lives were lined up together in this vision. They joined with a small number of companions, among them Swift Bird and Four Bears, to respond to frontier events in the spirit of traditional Lakota 2 Introduction values of courage, fortitude, generosity, and respect for wisdom, to be a peaceful center in the growing storm. The late summer and fall of 1862 brought the full force of that storm down upon them. Just east of Dakota Territory, their woodland cousins the Santee Sioux had been squeezed for decades by white settlements into a narrow corridor along the Minnesota River. The Santees’ treaty rights to annuity supplies had been trampled by corrupt agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They were starving, and the now famous retort by the agent had been, “Let them eat grass.” After a violent incident over a settler’s cow in July, the Santees finally ransacked the settlements in Minnesota, more populous than the Dakotas, killing more than eight hundred men, women, and children and driving off the other settlers. To put down the so-called Minnesota Uprising, a local militia, backed by the U.S. Army in the midst of its own war farther east and south, retaliated and defeated the Santees, imprisoning around two thousand warriors. But many Santees escaped and scattered, both to Canada and to the Dakotas along the Missouri River. One starving Santee band of fugitives, led by White Lodge, arrived that fall near the trading post called Ft. Pierre on the Missouri, where Charger, his family and friends, and their akicita society made their home in the permanent Sans Arc and Two Kettles camp. Though the Santees were defeated and bedraggled, they still were looking for allies to fight the whites. White Lodge’s band paraded their secret weapon: white hostages, two women and four children. Saying the whites wouldn’t fire on them as long as they held captives, White Lodge challenged the Two Kettles and Sans Arcs to join them in war against the whites so that what had happened in Minnesota would not happen in the Dakotas. Many older Two Kettles wanted to join White Lodge, but some of the warrior youths were against it, partly because the Santees had previously encroached on their hunting grounds. So the Two Kettles said no thanks to the prospect of war and sent the disappointed Santees and their hostages upriver with some provisions. Charger’s young akicita society saw here an opportunity to fulfill their vision. They spoke in council to rally their people to join them in freeing the white hostages from the Santees. Yet their words did not move their fellow Lakotas. Unsuccessful in persuading the rest of the skeptical camp to support them, they loaded up goods donated from Charlie Primeau’s trading post at Ft. Pierre and headed upriver on horseback, about ten days behind Introduction 3 the Santees. They found White Lodge’s band camped on the...