“We’re made men among the Sioux,” he said. “The main thing is not the fighting we did, it seems. Standing Bear has just left me. He has been telling me that the sun would never have risen in his life again, if Sitting Wolf had died of bleeding, as he would have done if it hadn’t been for you. Those were his words, or something like those words, except that he was a lot more grand. He put in that Spotted Buck is both a young man and a young fool, and that it is best to forget him. He, Standing Bear, is my father, it seems, and Three Buck Elk is yours. I am to have the gray mare back, if I’ll take her. Anything else we want is ours. If we want to touch a match to the whole village, we’re free and welcome to it. Now, old son, the thing for us to do is to speak soft and walk small, because they may change their minds about us.”
STANDING BEAR HEAPS HONORS
I want to say why the Sioux made such a fuss over us. In the first place, those who have never been on the prairies in the old days must understand that the Indian is the most generous person in the world. He is a white man turned inside out. The white man is aiming to collect more and more all the time; the Indian wants to give away. It’s more honorable for an Indian to give away a thousand dollars than it is for a white man to make a million. And that is not an exaggeration. If you give an Indian one horse, he immediately wants to give you two, and yet horses mean more to Indians than anything in the world, except their children.
Now the great point was that Standing Bear was already a little ashamed, as well as I can understand it, because, after taking our best horse, he had contemplated turning us out on the prairie for the benefit of the Cheyennes. Just when his remorse was beginning to work on him, the Pawnees jumped the town, and Chuck and I saved the horses and the women and children from a massacre, whereas the logical thing was for us to join the Pawnees and help them gut the town. In addition, Sitting Wolf had been saved from bleeding to death, and the total result was such a number of benefactions heaped upon that tribe by the pair of us that Standing Bear was in an agony of humiliation. He wanted to give us all his earthly possessions, and, in conclusion, he offered to adopt us into the tribe.
“Of course, you’ll join,” said Chuck in the most matter-offact way, “and I think I’ll join, too.”
I was astonished and also a little irritated, because I felt that Chuck was talking down to me.
“Why should I join?” I asked him.
“Well, you want to find your father, don’t you? That’s your whole reason for coming out here on the prairies, isn’t it?”
I admitted that it was.
“What better chance could you have than with these Sioux? If your father is the sort of man you tell me he is, he’s probably out here, trading or trapping, or some such thing. He’s in the out-of-the-way corners where the law doesn’t bother a man too much and where questions aren’t asked. That’s just where the Sioux will take you, or, if you want to cut away from them, you’re free to do that whenever you please and make a search by yourself.”
“But why should you join?” I asked him.
“Because I like the life,” he said frankly. “I’m not quite nineteen. It doesn’t much matter what I do with the next few years. They’re pretty sure to be wasted. If I go back among our own people, I’ll still be treated like a boy for three or four years. Out here among the Sioux I’ll be treated like a man, and a chief at that.”
The first naming of the idea had shocked me, I admit. After I had listened to Chuck’s reasons, it seemed rather a natural thing to do. I liked the life, too, as well as any white man who was ever born. The prairies were made for just such men as I, and the unchecked freedom was the purest heaven to me after a life with Uncle Abner and Uncle Abner’s whip.
We told Standing Bear the next day that we had made up our minds to become Sioux, and he seemed to be delighted. He let the news go around the village, and we had to hold a reception that lasted all this day and the next. Everyone down to the children came to us and gave us some sort of present, saying the name of each article over and over until it was fixed in our minds. That was the way we began to learn the Sioux language. We were given a teepee, and it was completely fitted up with the best that the tribe could offer. Everything from dried meat to buffalo robes of the finest quality were in it, and we were told to select what horses we wanted from the herds of Standing Bear and Three Buck Elk. It was quite a temptation, but we limited ourselves to three horses apiece. Morris always advised moderation.
After this, there had to be a ceremony. The mere saying of a word could not make us members of the tribe. First, they sent away for several famous chiefs of the Sioux nations. I think that there were five, altogether, who responded. They came, bringing some of their principal braves, and, when they had all arrived, there was a great feast of roasted venison - and dogs. It was a real celebration. Some of the chiefs had been trading with whites lately, and they carted in a supply of firewater. Five Indians were dead and a number of others wounded before that firewater had been used up. For five days the racket continued, and, when it ended, the visiting chiefs came to me, and each made a little speech, welcoming me into the tribe and telling me that his teepee was my teepee and his horses were mine, and vice versa. Standing Bear and Three Buck Elk did the same thing, and so the ceremony ended. We were Sioux Indians.
It was very odd, and not at all unpleasant. I looked on the whole thing as a mere experiment and felt that in a year or two I would turn my back on them and never see any more of my red brothers. But two whole years passed like a drawn breath. That is to say, I was nearly seventeen when we joined the Sioux, and I was nineteen before the next great event happened in my life.
I say that the two years passed like a drawn breath, and I mean just that. There was never a simpler nor, in a way, a more beautiful life than that of those prairie Indians. The summer was a long frolic. The fall was the season of laying in heavy buffalo robes and trapping beaver - also watching those wise little animals, for if they stored a great deal of food against the cold season, we knew that the snow would be deep and the winds outrageous. And the beavers never fail as weather prophets.
Those winters were sometimes a bit monotonous, but there was usually something to amuse us in the village, and all winter long there was always buffalo hunting to keep us active. What a waste of valuable food were those buffalo hunts. I have seen fifteen hundred animals cut off from the outer edge of one of the vast black herds and then shot down to the last bull in the lot. Of the whole carcass nothing would be taken except the tongue and that tenderloin on the inside over the kidney. Even this we considered too much trouble to carve out half the time, and only the tongues were taken. If the skins were prime, they were ripped away. The rest of the animal remained for the buzzards and the eagles.
I suppose that in those two years I should have been forming my mind with hard work. But I have always looked back to that period as the golden season of my life. All the bitterness of my boyhood was melting out of my soul. Also I was busy on the trail of my father. Whenever I heard of a solitary trapper, I made a point of looking him up, although he never turned out to be the man. For some reason I was sure that my father would live alone like an outcast buffalo bull. Whenever we met traders, I described Will Dorset and asked if they had heard of such a man, but I never received a satisfactory answer.
Those were prosperous days for Standing Bear and his tribe. Chuck and I were a great windfall for him. He already had the backing of his brother, who was talented enough to have led a tribe on his own account. Now, in addition, he had two white Indians who were famous enough to have drawn a select band of warriors to follow them. This does not have a modest sound, but it is very true. As a rule, one important action is enough to make the fame of an Indian. The Cheyenne, Black Feather, was always celebrated because in his youth he had killed two Pawnees in one battle. If other braves were inclined to forget a warrior’s achievements, he freshened their minds by whooping it up on his own account at a feast. Such tales were not considered boasting but were necessary statements of fact, proving that a warrior had self-respect and reflecting credit on the whole tribe, and these narratives were supposed to fill the brains of the young braves with a noble emulation.