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Prairie Imperialists. Katharine Bjork
Читать онлайн.Название Prairie Imperialists
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812295641
Автор произведения Katharine Bjork
Серия America in the Nineteenth Century
Издательство Ingram
The anniversary of Custer’s defeat the previous year found Scott on the Big Horn battlefield, where his troop was assigned the task of recovering the bones of Custer and the other officers who had died there for reburial elsewhere as well as reburying the best they could the remains of others, which had been exposed by erosion in the intervening year. Following this detail, Scott and the rest of his troop reunited with their regiment near Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone. “The whole of the Northwest seemed very peaceable and the talk of the Seventh was that we should soon go back to Fort Lincoln. Everybody built sunshades over their tents and generally made themselves comfortable,” Scott recalled.34
Soon, however, word of hostilities erupting between the army and several Nez Percé tribal groups, who were being forced from their lands in Eastern Oregon, reached the command on the Yellowstone. As a Nez Percé group of some 250 warriors and 500 women and children along with thousands of horses and other livestock began an arduous trek through some of the wildest and most challenging terrain in the country, the Seventh Cavalry was split up and sent in various directions in an attempt to stop Chief Joseph and his dispossessed people from reaching sanctuary, like Sitting Bull, with the Canadian “Grandmother” across the border.
During the summer of 1877, Scott deepened his experience of working with scouts. He also developed an abiding interest in the way of life and customs of the indigenous nations with which the army brought him in contact. In July Miles sent him out to search for a Sioux war party on the Musselshell rumored to have come down from Canada. Scott accompanied some Northern Cheyenne scouts who had fought against Custer the previous summer and had only recently surrendered. The party included Two Moons, Little Chief, Hump, Black Wolf, Ice (or White Bull), Brave Wolf, and White Bear. Scott’s friends warned him against accompanying them, saying they would kill him and escape across the border to Canada, but Scott did not share these fears. Instead, he admired and learned from the Cheyenne warriors: “They were all keen, athletic young men, tall and lean and brave, and I admired them as real specimens of manhood more than any body of men I have ever seen before or since. They were perfectly adapted to their environment and knew just what to do in every emergency and when to do it, without any confusion or lost motion. Their poise and dignity were superb; no royal person ever had more assured manners. I watched their every movement and learned lessons from them that later saved my life many times on the prairie.”35
Scott also spent a lot of time with Crow scouts and observing life in the large Crow villages. On one occasion, exposure to the heat and insects of a Montana summer, against which his army issue tent provided insufficient protection, led him to seek hospitality in the lodge of Iron Bull. Seeking respite from sun, dust, and flies, Scott presented himself at the entrance of the huge buffalo-hide lodge of the Crow chief. The hide lodge cover, which was made in two pieces from the hides of twenty-five buffalo, was well smoked from the fire, so that the sun did not penetrate. Scott estimated the poles supporting the covering to be twenty-five feet long and five inches in diameter. It took six horses to transport them. Entering the lodge, Scott wrote, was like “passing at once into a new world.” Inside, it was cool and there were no flies. “Beds of buffalo robes were all around the wall, and the floor was swept clean as the palm of one’s hand.” Addressing Iron Bull, who was lying on his back in bed wearing only a breechclout, Scott said, “Brother, I want to come and stay in here with you until we leave.” Ac cordingly, Scott abandoned the porous white canvas of his “bit of a tent,” and instead was made “most welcome” in the lodge of the Crow chief and his wife.36
On this and other occasions, Scott paid close attention to the village life taking place around him. Besides providing ethnographic information and military intelligence, Indian village life on the prairie was a source of intense interest and often delight. During the summer of 1877, he traveled with a large village of Crow Indians near the Big Bend of the Musselshell. Encompassing about three thousand people from various mountain and river bands of Crows, the camp moved often to find grass for their large herd of horses. They hunted buffalo about once a week to provide meat for such a large group. Scott was fascinated by the great village and the life he observed there:
The camp had meat drying everywhere. Everybody was care-free and joyous in a way we do not comprehend in this civilized day. All the life of a nation was going on there before our eyes. Here the head chiefs were receiving ambassadors from another tribe. Following the sound of drums, one would come upon a great gathering for a war-dance, heralding an expedition to fight the Sioux. Or one came to a lodge where a medicine-man was doctoring a patient to the sound of a drum and rattle. Elsewhere a large crowd surrounded a game of ring and spear, on which members of the tribe were betting everything they owned: the loser lost without dispute or quiver of an eyelid. In another place a crowd was witnessing a horse race with twenty-five horses starting off at the first trial…. All day and far into the night there was something happening of intense interest to me.37
After the army, led by Nelson Miles, finally caught up with Chief Joseph and the exhausted bands of Nez Percé in the foothills of the Bears Paw mountains and fought them to defeat, Scott spent time in the Big Open country of Montana searching for Nez Percé who had escaped capture. From Fort Buford to Bismarck—225 miles along the Missouri River—Scott’s Troop I served as an escort for Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé prisoners who were being transported to the end of the railroad to be shipped to prison from Bismarck by rail. In spite of Miles’s promise to Chief Joseph that he and his people would spend the winter at the Tongue River Cantonment and then return to the Pacific Northwest in the spring, they were not allowed back to their homeland. Instead, they were forced to go to Fort Leavenworth. After a terrible winter at Fort Leavenworth, they were sent first to the Quapaw Reservation in Indian Territory (present-day northern Oklahoma), which they called “Eikish Pah” or hot place. Chief Joseph remained in exile until his death in 1904.38
From a Nez Percé called Tippit, Scott was able to learn some Chinook, an intertribal language used on the Columbia River and up the Pacific Coast. As they rode along the Musselshell River toward its confluence with the Missouri, where the Seventh Cavalry was camped, Scott induced Tippit to pose questions in Chinook followed by answers aimed at conveying their English translations.39 On the same trip, he spent time in the wagons with Sioux and Cheyenne scouts, working on improving both spoken and sign language. Another part of each day he spent in Chief Joseph’s wagon, along with a Nez Percé translator from Idaho named Arthur Chapman. During a stop at Fort Berthold, members of the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Gros Ventre tribes gathered in a large council to learn of the tribulations of Chief Joseph, who spoke in sign language to some fifteen hundred people representing eight different languages (Nez Percé, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Mandan, Arikara, Gros Ventre of the Village, and English). Scott wrote that Chief Joseph was “completely understood by all that vast concourse.”40
A couple of months after returning to Fort Lincoln for the winter, Scott resumed his study of the sign language under the tutelage of White Bear and other members of the Cheyenne band captured by Miles the previous year, who had been brought as prisoners to spend the winter at the post. Scott visited the Cheyenne prisoners’ village regularly. There, in exchange for his language lessons, he subsidized White Bear with coffee, sugar, and other rations. During one visit to the Indian camp, White Bear told Scott that the group was planning to run away that night to go back to the buffalo country leaving all their lodges standing. He complained that the rations their families were issued for ten days were not sufficient to feed them even for three. Therefore, they had packed their belongings and were prepared to make a break. Not entirely believing what he was hearing, Scott moved as casually as he could among other lodges of the village and confirmed that, indeed, the Cheyennes had packed up their movable property and were preparing to leave. Scott quickly returned to the post and reported the plans for escape to his commanding officer. A squadron of cavalry were then dispatched to guard the camp and prevent them from leaving as planned. Scott received formal commendation for his discovery of the planned escape and for his “knowledge of the Indian’s character, his human nature, his method and thought of action, and of the Indian Sign Language.”41
Scott’s