Read Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) for Free Online

a great honor. It meant that he was looked up to as a war leader. From then on he wore a painted war shirt fringed with Pawnee scalp locks.
    “During the Grattan fight the lieutenant himself and all his thirty-one soldiers had been killed. In 1855, General Harney came out with many soldiers to punish us for this, even though the battle had been started by the whites. Our people called Harney the hornet, because he stung us so badly. The soldiers had guns and cannons. Our people had only bows and arrows. So we were beaten. Many warriors were killed, their camp overrun, and the women and children taken prisoner, among them two wives of Spotted Tail and Iron Shell, who had led the fight. Iron Shell was lucky to escape. Spotted Tail was not so lucky; his horse was shot from under him. On foot, he put up a good fight and he killed two dragoons. But he came away with two bullets in him, besides two deep saber slashes. It was like Crow Dog’s four wounds. This happened in 1855, at Mni to Wakpala, or Blue Water Creek. General Harney said he would let his dragoons loose on the Brulé unless the tribe gave up its best-known warriors. So Spotted Tail and two others surrendered themselves and were taken to Fort Leavenworth and there put in the ‘iron house’ as prisoners. Two of Spotted Tail’s four wives stayed with him through all this. The whites wanted to try and hang Spotted Tail, but in the end he was pardoned and they let him go back to his tribe. He had been treated well and he’d made friends with some of the officers at the fort. After he came back he told the people, ‘We shouldn’t fight the wasichu anymore. They are too powerful. There are too many of them. They have bigger weapons.’
    “He went on fighting the Pawnee but stayed clear of trouble with the whites, who called him a friendly and a progressive. In1865, he fought the wasichu for the last time. The whites built the railroad straight through our hunting country, so his own people forced him to take up the gun again. He couldn’t stand aside when it was a case of life or death for the tribe. He took part in the burning of Julesburg, which the whites themselves called a helltown, full of scalp hunters, gamblers, pay women, buffalo skinners, and whiskey sellers. Again they dragged him to prison in chains, and again he was let go after a year. In 1866, the government made him head chief of the whole Brulé tribe. From then on, he worked with them. The whites put him up in a white, two-story clapboard house. They put him in a starched shirt and a black suit, taking him to Washington to meet President Grant. He fooled them by going to the White House in his black suit, all right, but with a Hudson’s Bay blanket over his shoulders. The ‘Great White Father’ treated him and Swift Bear to a train ride. They weren’t impressed.
    “The government gave him and his people a reservation, then called an agency, at Whetstone, near Fort Randall. It was on the Missouri River, in the eastern part of South Dakota. Later the agency was put where it is now, at Rosebud, in the western part of the state. During 1876, the year of the Custer fight, he kept most of his young men on the reservation. He was a big chief supported by the government. But he was not just a yes-man.
    “He had given his sons to Captain Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School for Indians in Pennsylvania. For this the whites called him a ‘wise, education-loving Indian, helping to make little heathen savages into civilized Christian boys.’ But when he went east to visit the school and found that his sons had to wear stiff collars that chafed their necks raw, and were beaten with a cane for speaking their own language, and were trained to repair shoes instead of becoming chiefs, he got mad. He took his sons out of the school and back to Rosebud.
    “Spotted Tail had to walk a very fine line. He tried to save his people from being wiped out. He tried to preserve their old beliefs and ceremonies. So he