“That’s enough. Let’s go about our business,” Cope said. “Make our camp, and act naturally.”
“After you, Professor,” Cookie said.
It was difficult to act naturally with a thousand teepees spread on the plains below, and the associated horses, fires, people. They had of course already been spotted; some of the Indians were pointing and gesturing.
By the time they had unloaded the cook wagon and started the fire for the night, a group of mounted horsemen splashed across the stream and rode up toward their camp.
“Here they come, boys,” Cookie muttered.
Johnson counted twelve riders. His heart pounded as he heard their horses approach. They were superb horsemen, riding fast and easily, trailing a cloud of dust. They whooped and shouted savagely as they came closer.
“These were my first Indians,” he later remembered, “and I was consumed in equal parts with curiosity and terror. I confess that to see the swirling dust cloud, and hear their savage shrieks, increased the latter, and for the thousandth time on this journey I regretted the rashness of my wager.”
The Indians were now close and rode in circles around the wagon, whooping enthusiastically. They knew the white men were frightened, and enjoyed it. Finally, they drew up, and their leader repeated several times, “Howah, howah.” He said it in a grunting sort of way.
Johnson whispered to Sternberg, “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘How.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, ‘I agree, everything is fine, I feel friendly.’”
Johnson could now see the Indians clearly. Like many other first-time observers of Plains Indians, he was astonished at how handsome they were—“tall and muscularly endowed, their faces possessing pleasing regular features, their bearing naturally dignified and proud, their persons and buckskin garments surprisingly clean.”
The Indians were not smiling, but they seemed friendly enough. They all said “Howah” in turn, and looked around at the camp. There was an awkward silence. Isaac, who knew some Indian language, ventured a few words of greeting.
Instantly their faces darkened. They wheeled on their horses and rode away, disappearing in an alkaline dust cloud.
Sternberg said, “You goddamn fool, what did you say?”
“I said, ‘I bid you welcome and wish you success and happiness in the journey of your life.’”
“What’d you say it in?”
“Mandan.”
“You goddamn fool, Mandan’s Sioux talk. Those’re Crows!”
Even Johnson had been long enough in the plains to know of the traditional enmity between the Sioux and the Crow tribes. The hatred between them was deep and implacable, especially since in recent years the Crows had allied themselves with the white soldiers in the fight against the Sioux.
“Well, Mandan’s all I know,” Isaac protested, “so I said it.”
“You goddamn fool,” Sternberg repeated. “If we didn’t before, now we have a problem.”
“I thought Crows never killed white people,” Morton said, licking his lips.
“That’s what the Crows say,” Sternberg said, “but they tend to exaggerate. Oh yes, lads, we have a problem.”
“Well, we’ll go down there and straighten it out,” Cope said, in his usual forthright manner.
“After our last supper?” Cookie said.
“No,” Cope said. “Now.”
The Indian Village
Aboriginal peoples had hunted on the Western plains of America for more than ten thousand years. They had seen the glaciers recede and the land become warm; they had witnessed (and perhaps accelerated) the disappearance of the great mastodons, the hippo, and the feared saber-toothed tiger. They had hunted when the land was heavily forested, and they hunted now that it was a sea of grass. Through all the thousands of years, through all the changes of game and climate, Indians had continued to live as nomadic hunters on the vast spaces of the land.
The Plains Indians of the nineteenth century were colorful, dramatic, mystical, warlike people. They captured the imagination of all who saw them, and in many ways they stood, in the popular mind, for all American Indians. The antiquity of their rituals, the intricate organization of their way of life, was much admired by liberal thinkers.
But the truth was that the Plains Indian society that Westerners saw was hardly older than the white American nation that now threatened its existence. The Plains Indians were a nomadic hunting society organized around the horse, as were the Mongols of Asia. Yet there had been no horses in America until the Spaniards introduced them three hundred years earlier, changing Plains Indian society beyond recognition.
And even the traditional tribal structures, and tribal rivalries, were less ancient than often imagined. Most authorities believed the Crow Indians were once part of the Sioux nation, living in what is now Iowa; they had migrated west toward Montana, evolved a separate identity, and become the implacable antagonists of their former kin. As one expert wrote, “The Sioux and the Crow are virtually the same in dress, manner, habits, language, customs, values, bearing. This similarity might be thought to form the basis of friendship, yet it only heightens their antagonism.”
It was these Crow Indians that they now rode down to visit.
First impressions of an Indian village were often contradictory. Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh explorer and journalist who in 1871 famously found Dr. David Livingstone in Africa, entered Black Kettle’s village with Custer and found it filthy: “so foul, indeed, as to defy description.” Robes on the teepee floors were crawling with vermin; excremental odors assailed him.
Other first-time observers were unnerved to see Indians roasting a dog over a fire, or chewing bloody buffalo steaks. But Johnson’s first impressions, riding that evening into the Crow village, seem more revealing about him than about the Crow:
“Anyone who imagines,” he wrote,
that the nomadic Indian lives a free-spirited and open life will receive a rude shock on visiting his place of habitation. The Plains Indian village is, like the life of the warrior, regimented in the extreme. Teepees are regularly designed of elk hide, regularly set out, and regularly arranged according to fixed rules; there are rules for placement of the (back) rests inside the teepees, and rugs, and rawhide containers; there are rules for the designs that decorate the robes and clothes and teepees; rules for the making of fires and the manners of cooking; rules for the behavior of the Indian at every moment and at all times in his life; rules for war and rules for peace and rules for hunting and rules for behavior before hunting; and all these rules are followed with a rigid fixity and a serious determination which forcibly reminds the observer that one is among a warrior race.