Far as the Eye Can See by Robert Bausch Page A

was named Tall Bull. They had a huge camp west of Fort Sedgwick and they’d been threatening the fort and any travelers who might wander from there all summer. They had not killed nobody yet, but they’d raided a few trains, stolen some horses, and counted coups among the bands of soldiers who was sent out to keep the peace. They was, according to Major Carr, “a confounded nuisance.” He said he was going to have to get them to go back to Fort Laramie, about a hundred fifty miles west and north of Fort Sedgwick. We was going to be headed that way, so Theo volunteered to leave the train at Fort Sedgwick and accompany the major on his mission. He wanted me to go with him.
    “We’ll get a look at the country between here and there,” he said, “before we have to lead the wagons across it.”
    I hoped it would be a peace mission of some kind, or at least that we’d run them off without much of a fight. Theo said that happened a lot with the Indians because they was not too concerned with occupying a position, or land, or no place in particular. The Indians believed that land was like light, or air, or the weather: it belonged to everybody alike. They picked where they fought, and it was usually not so much a place as a good opportunity. It could be a decision any one or two of them might make.
    “Tall Bull is probably a man with good medicine,” Theo said, “and a lot of Indians follow him, but he ain’t no ‘general’ in our sense of the word. There ain’t never been a people anywhere in the world as free as Indians. I mean absolutely free. The braves running with Tall Bull don’t belong to him, they ain’t in his ‘army.’ They’ll fight together, but Tall Bull won’t operate with a strategy or a plan of battle. No Indian really ever does. One might start a fight and the others’ll join in. Indians never want to defend something so fat or stupid as a fort.”
    “What about a village?” I said.
    “Sometimes, if the hunting is good, they’ll stake a place and defend it. But you’ll see. They don’t often bother to protect themselves even in the camps. They frequently don’t even post a guard. And if they don’t think it’s a good day to fight, or if they ain’t dressed for it, they won’t bother, even if they got you outnumbered by hundreds.”
    “They don’t need a guard with all them dogs,” I said.
    “Hell, a dog’ll bark at anything.”
    “But we ain’t fighting, are we?”
    “We’ll watch,” he said.
    We was riding close behind Major Carr’s regiment. There was maybe three hundred of them in two columns in front of us. Sioux scouts—real Sioux, not just Mitch and Tom—fanned out to the left and right. There was twenty or twenty-five of them.
    We left on a searing-hot Sunday afternoon while singing at Sunday service still rung out in the fort. The sky was white and empty. The sun felt like it was only a few feet above us.
    We rode along in silence for what seemed like a hour or so, maybe more. We circled around the Indian camp, a long way around. I never seen even a wisp of smoke. But then we come to the village. It was at a place called Summit Springs. Up to that time I never seen so many lodges in one place. It seemed like hundreds of them spread out along the banks of the creek in a great, sprawling half circle. We come at it from the west, over a small rise of land that allowed us to survey the whole village. Indians always form their lodges in a big horseshoe with the opening facing east. The entrance of each lodge always faces east. So we was coming at them from behind. Major Carr raised his hand and we stopped. The air was absolutely still. We was only about fifty yards from the first lodge. I didn’t hear a dog bark. The inhabitants was all inside the lodges, out of the heat; most of them was taking a afternoon nap. Carr raised his white gloved hand, then give the signal to charge. The whole troop raced down the slope and charged into the sleeping village. They threw