AN INDIAN COUNCIL.
The Indians came several times from the reservations for counsel, but
the occasion that made the greatest impression upon me was towards
the spring. They came to implore the general for food. In the fall
the steamer bringing them supplies was detained in starting. It had
hardly accomplished half the required distance before the ice impeded
its progress, and it lay out in the channel, frozen in, all winter.
The suffering among the Indians was very great. They were compelled to
eat their dogs and ponies to keep from starving. Believing a personal
appeal would be effectual, they asked to come to our post for a council.
The Indian band brought their great orator Running Antelope. He was
intensely dignified and fine-looking. His face when he spoke was
expressive and animated, contrary to all the precedents of Indian
oratory we had become familiar with. As he stood among them all in
the general’s room, he made an indelible impression on my memory.
The Indians’ feet are usually small; sometimes their vanity induces
them to put on women’s shoes. The hands are slender and marvellously
soft considering their life of exposure. Their speech is full of
gesture, and the flexible wrist makes their movements expressive.
A distinguished scholar, speaking of the aid the hand is to an
orator, calls it the “second face.” It certainly was so with Running
Antelope. He described the distressing condition of the tribe with real
eloquence. While he spoke, lifting his graceful hands towards Heaven
in appeal, one of my husband’s birds that was uncaged floated down and
alighted on the venerable warrior’s head. It had been so petted, no
ordinary movement startled the little thing. It maintained its poise,
spreading its wings to keep its balance, as the Indian moved his head
in gesture. The orator saw that the faces of the Indians showed signs
of humor, but he was ignorant of what amused them. His inquiring eyes
saw no solution in the general’s, for, fearing to disconcert him,
General Custer controlled every muscle in his face. Finally the bird
whirled up to his favorite resting-place on the horn of the buffalo
head, and the warrior understood the unusual sight of a smile from his
people.
His whole appeal was most impressive, and touched the quick sympathies
of my husband. He was a sincere friend of the reservation Indian. The
storehouses at our post were filled with supplies, and he promised
to telegraph to the Great Father for permission to give them rations
until spring. Meantime, he promised them all they could eat while they
awaited at the post the answer to the despatch. Not content with a
complaint of their present wrongs, Running Antelope went off into an
earliest denunciation of the agents, calling them dishonest.
One of the Indians, during the previous summer, with fox-like cunning
had lain out on the dock all day apparently sleeping, while he watched
the steamer unloading supplies intended for them. A mental estimate was
carefully made of what came off the boat, and compared as carefully
afterwards with what was distributed. There was an undeniable deficit.
A portion that should have been theirs was detained, and they accused
the agent of keeping it. The general interrupted, and asked the
interpreter to say that the Great Father selected the agents from among
good men before sending them out from Washington. Running Antelope
quickly responded, “They may be good men when they leave the Great
Father, but they get to be desperate cheats by the time they reach us.”
I shall have to ask whoever reads, to substitute another more forcible
adjective, such as an angry man would use, in place of “desperate.” The
Indian language is not deficient in abusive terms and epithets.
When the council was ended and the Indians were preparing to leave, my
husband asked me to have Mary put everything we had ready to eat on the
dining-room table. The manner in which Running Antelope folded his robe
around him and strode in a stately way down the long parlor was worthy
of a Roman emperor.
I had been so impressed by his oratory and lordly mien that I could
hardly believe my eyes when I saw him at table, and descend from the
lofty state of mind into which he had taken me to realize what he was
doing. After gorging himself, he emptied the plates and swept all the
remains from before the places of the other chiefs into the capacious
folds of his robe. This he rebelted at the waist, so that it formed a
very good temporary haversack. With an air signifying to “the victor
belong the spoils,” he swept majestically out of the house.
The answer came next day from the Secretary of War that the Department
of the Interior which had the Indians in charge refused to allow any
army supplies to be distributed. They gave as a reason that it would
involve complexities in their relations with other departments. It
was a very difficult thing for the general to explain to the Indians.
They knew that both army and Indians were fed from the same source,
and they could not comprehend what difference it could make when a
question of starvation was pending. They could not be told, what we all
knew, that had the War Department made good the deficiencies it would
have reflected discredit on the management of the Department of the
Interior. The chiefs were compelled to return to their reservations,
where long ago all the game had been shot and their famishing tribe
were many of them driven to join the hostiles. We were not surprised
that the warriors were discouraged and desperate, and that the
depredations of Sitting Bull on the settlements increased with the new
accessions to his numbers.