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the half-breed had clung tight as a buffalo tick to Sitting Bull and his thirty lodges. Here wasthe greatest of Lakota chiefs, the man who had single-handedly put together the largest confederation of warrior bands ever assembled on the plains … now forced to watch the Bear Coat chip away at his alliance. For the most part the Bull was alone now. And Johnny Bruguier knew what alone meant.
    He had been running since the end of last summer, ever since killing a white man near the Standing Rock Agency. A sure-as-hell dance at the end of a rope for a half-breed like Johnny. So he had stolen a horse in Whitewood City and scampered off to the west—heading for Injun country, where the law and posses would not dare come looking for him. On down that outlaw trail he discovered the chaps tied up behind the saddle on that stolen horse, the chaps he had been wearing when he had bravely ridden right into the Hunkpapa village and dashed into what he had hoped would be the headman’s lodge.
    It turned out to belong to White Bull, the nephew of Sitting Bull himself.
    â€œIf you are going to kill him, then kill him,” Sitting Bull had said to the angry Hunkpapa warriors that first day last autumn. “But if you are not, then feed this man and make him welcome.”
    The Lakota had made a home for Johnny, and because of those chaps he wore, they had come to call him Big Leggings. And on more than half a dozen occasions his ability to speak both Lakota and the white man’s tongue proved invaluable. But now, like all the rest of Sitting Bull’s once-great confederation, he was on the run again.
    Not long after fleeing the Bear Coat’s soldiers on the Yellowstone, Sitting Bull’s thirty lodges had moseyed north to camp some twenty-five miles south of Fort Peck in the valley of the Big Dry Creek. With him were Four Horns and Black Moon, all three bands hoping to trade with the Yanktonais and Red River Slota, who traditionally hung close to the agency.
    In addition, another 125 Hunkpapa lodges—under chiefs Long Dog, Crow, Little Knife, and Iron Dog—had eventually marched north after the Cedar Creek fight and camped together a few miles below the agency in the Missouri River bottoms. Poor in clothing and shelter against the coming winter,the chiefs reluctantly gathered in council with agent Thomas J. Mitchell to discuss peace terms.
    As Johnny listened, Mitchell’s interpreter told the Lakota, “The agent cannot offer you anything but complete surrender. You must turn over your weapons and all government booty taken from the soldier dead at the Greasy Grass.”
    Angrily the Sioux leaders argued among themselves for much of that day, but in the end they guaranteed Mitchell they would surrender their people, arms, and ponies. In turn the agent distributed some rations as night began to fall, then instructed the chiefs to have their people return in the morning for the actual surrender. The chiefs had barely gotten to their feet when a runner from downriver at Wolf Point burst into the crowd, jabbering so excitedly that Johnny had trouble making sense of his electrifying news at first.
    â€œSoldiers! They come up the river on the house that walks on water! Many soldiers come this way!”
    Sure enough, the following morning of 1 November, Colonel William B. Hazen and 140 of his Sixth Infantry from Fort Buford docked their paddle-wheel steamer at Fort Peck to unload supplies and forage for Miles’s column expected up any day from Tongue River. Hazen left Second Lieutenant Russell H. Day and a company of thirty-one soldiers behind with Agent Mitchell, then turned the paddle wheeler about and started downriver to return to his post at the mouth of the Yellowstone.
    No matter.
    The damage to Mitchell’s efforts at diplomacy was already done. Moments after the news burst through the nearby camps, there wasn’t a Hunkpapa lodge left within miles of Fort Peck.
    But Johnny Bruguier had