9/15/2005:
Yesterday we introduced you to the life of the Hunkpapa Chief Rain in the Face. Two months before his death, in September 1905, he told historian Charles Eastman about a daring raid he and some friends made against Fort Totten in 1866.
“Their big gun talked very loud,” he said, “but my [‘brother-friend’] Wapaypay was leading on, leaning forward on his fleet pony like a flying squirrel on a smooth log!... Our warwhoop was like the coyotes singing in the evening, when they smell blood! The soldiers’ guns talked fast, but few were hurt. Their big gun was like a toothless old dog, who only makes himself hotter the more noise he makes. How much harm we did I do not know, but we made things lively for a time...”
Rain in the Face and others – especially Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse – were against signing peace treaties with the U.S. government, and two years later, almost every band of the Sioux nation took part in an attack on Fort Phil Kearny, WY. They lured the military into an ambush, leaving none alive to tell what happened.
“But even this did not stop the peace movement,” said Rain in the Face. “The very next year a treaty was signed at Fort Rice, Dakota Territory, by nearly all the Sioux chiefs, in which it was agreed on the part of the Great Father in Washington that all the country north of the Republican River in Nebraska, including the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountains, was to be always Sioux country, and no white man should intrude upon it without our permission,” he said.
“...It was when the white men found the yellow metal in our country, and came in great numbers, driving away our game, that we took up arms against them for the last time. I must say here that the chiefs who were loudest for war were among the first to submit and accept reservation life,” he said. “Spotted Tail was a great warrior, yet he was one of the first to yield, because he was promised by the Chief Soldiers that they would make him chief of all the Sioux. Ugh! he would have stayed with Sitting Bull to the last had it not been for his ambition.
“About this time we young warriors began to watch the trails of the white men into the Black Hills...and kill them all...to discourage the whites from coming into our country without our permission. It was the duty of our Great Father at Washington...to keep his white children away.”
Soon after, Rain in the Face and Wapaypay killed a white soldier who’d left the fort. “There were a few Indians who were liars,” he said, “...playing ‘good Indian’ with the Indian agents and the war chiefs at the forts. Some of this faithless set betrayed me... I was seized and taken to the fort near Bismarck [by General Custer’s brother] and imprisoned there. These same lying Indians, who were selling their services as scouts to the white man, told me that I was to be shot to death, or else hanged upon a tree. I answered that I was not afraid to die.
“However,” said Rain in the Face, “there was an old soldier who used to bring my food and stand guard over me – he was a white man, it is true, but he had an Indian heart! He came to me one day and unfastened the iron chain and ball with which they had locked my leg, saying by signs and what little Sioux he could muster: ‘Go, friend! take the chain and ball with you. I shall shoot, but the voice of the gun will lie.’
“When he had made me understand, you may guess that I ran my best! I was almost over the bank when he fired his piece at me several times, but I had already gained cover and was safe. I have never told this before, and would not, lest it should do him an injury, but he was an old man then, and I am sure he must be dead long since. That old soldier taught me that some of the white people have hearts.”
Source:
Eastman Charles A. (Ohiyesa). Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1918.
Dakota Datebook written by Merry Helm