Strongheart (2 page)

A half hour passed and now he was so close that he had to squint when he froze, so the shine off his eyeballs would not spook the deer. His bow came up slowly, inch by inch, and while the buck's head was down, he drew the arrow back.

The tail twitched, and he froze. Most men could not have held the powerful bow at full draw for very long without their arms shaking from total exertion, but this man was conditioned and very disciplined. The deer's head went down and the string slipped off his fingers, and he saw the arrow's almost instantaneous impact as it tore through the buck's left flank just behind the lower part of the left shoulder. It passed through the heart and then through the right lung, exiting the far side, as the buck leapt with the shock. He ran less than fifty feet, struggled, as the life drained from him, and lay still.

The warrior prayed to the deer's spirit and wished it well on its spirit journey. Then the young woman, who was closer to the age of a girl, came forward and watched his dexterity with the knife. He first removed the heavy musk glands on the inside of the buck's back knees. Then he carefully cleaned the razor-sharp Bowie knife, knowing the smelly gland could taint the meat. She marveled at the heavily beaded and fringed sheath on his left hip, the giant shiny blade, the elk antler handle. He removed the testes and anus and again cleaned the blade thoroughly. He then cut through the pelvic bone and slit the belly all the way up well into the chest cavity. Next, he slit the throat, reached in and cut the esophagus, and then pulled the entrails out along with the lungs and organs.

Walking to her village, she was amazed at how small the mighty buck looked across this brave's shoulders. Soon, they were at the lodge, and it was hung outside to be skinned and butchered.

Lila Wiya Waste, which meant “Beautiful Woman,” was his cousin. Because her husband had been killed by the great bear, she and her mother had nobody to bring meat to their lodges. When Joshua Strongheart came to her village, he helped her to hunt for the lodge, because he was her closest relative. She accompanied him, so she could learn. Joshua told her not to just marry again but to wait on a warrior who was worthy of her. She wanted to know how to be self-sufficient, for her cousin was not around the village circle very often, just a few times per year.

The tall warrior grabbed his bag and headed to the nearby stream to bathe, clean off his war paint, and change clothes. The Lakota and their allies the Cheyenne and Arapaho were meticulous about bathing and keeping clean, and he was amused how so many racist
wasicun
, or “white men,” used expressions such as “filthy redksins.” The Lakota actually viewed many whites as being very dirty and unkempt.

Thirty minutes later, he returned from the stream to the circle of lodges. Lila Wiya Waste looked with a great longing at him approaching. She wished he was not her first cousin, but wished more he would look at her the way the other braves did. He now was dressed in his normal manner and looked like a totally different person, a white man with Lakota features.

His long, shiny black hair was no longer braided but hung down his back in a single ponytail, and it was covered by a black cowboy hat with a broad, very flat brim and rounded crown. A wide, fancy, colorful beaded hatband went around the base of the crown.

He wore a bonehair pipe choker around his sinewy neck, and a piece of beaded leather thong hung down a little from the front with a large grizzly bear claw attached to it.

His soft antelope-skin shirt did little to hide his bulging muscles, and the small rows of fringe that slanted inaV shape from his broad shoulders to his large pectoral muscles actually served to accentuate his muscular build and the narrow waist that looked like a flesh-covered washboard.

Levi Strauss had recently patented and started manufacturing a brand-new type of trousers made of blue denim, which whites were calling “Levi's.” Joshua had bought a couple from a merchandiser. They fit tight with brass rivets and did little to hide the bulging muscles of his long legs.

Around his hips, Joshua wore his prized possessions, one a gift from his late stepfather and the other a gift from his late father. On the right hip of the engraved brown gun belt was the fancy holster, with his stepfather's Colt .45 Peacemaker in it. The gun had fancy engraving along the barrel and miniature marshal's badges, like his stepfather's own, attached to both of the mother-of-pearl grips. It was a brand-new single-action model made especially for the army in this year, 1873, and this one had been made to special order for his stepfather's friend Chris Colt, who was a nephew of the inventor Colonel Samuel Colt.

On his left hip was the long, beaded porcupine-quilled and fringed leather sheath holding the large Bowie knife with the elk antler handle and brass inlays. It had been left to him by his father.

He wore long cowboy boots with large-roweled Mexican spurs, with two little bell-shaped pieces of steel that hung down from the hubs on the outside of each and clinked on the spur rowels as they spun while he walked.

Because he had always been trained to keep his weapons clean and his knife sharp, Joshua pulled the large knife from its sheath and examined the blade. As usual, it was scalpel-sharp.

Lila Wiya Waste handed him a cup of hot coffee from a large pot he had given her months earlier. He sipped the steaming brew and thought about his childhood quest to learn about his biological father and search for blood relatives.

His biological father, Siostukala, “Claw Marks,” had disappeared when Joshua was young and had been a total mystery to him for many years. His mother would not tell him anything about the man, and Joshua quit asking, because tears would well up in her eyes every time his name was mentioned. Joshua figured he must have caused her very painful memories.

Whenever family friends went off to trade with the Sioux, he traveled with them, seizing every opportunity to locate his father. Finally, at sixteen, he met his half brother, who grew up with Siostukala . His thirteen-year-old half brother, named Cate Waste, meaning “Cheerful,” told him that his father had died a year earlier.

Joshua was very sad that his father had died, but he was also excited to meet a brother and several cousins. His half brother had since grown to manhood and proven himself in battle several times. At eighteen, Cate Waste's name was changed to his manhood name, Akayake Mato, meaning “Rides the Bear.”

Joshua recalled the story of their shared legacy.

Claw Marks was one of the few men in the village along the banks of what was called the Greasy Grass. In three years, many Lakota, and their brothers the Cheyenne and Arapaho, would fight there against Long Hair Custer. They would call the mighty victory the Battle of the Greasy Grass, while the
wasicun
would always refer to it as the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and some would call it Custer's Last Stand.

In the small circle of lodges, Claw Marks had been recovering from a stab wound to the thigh suffered when he vanquished two Crows in a hand-to-hand fight with knives and war clubs on the banks of the Hehaka Wakpa, which meant “Elk River” but was called the Yellowstone River by the
wasicun.
Most of the men had left the tribal circle and gone out on a great hunt when a vast herd of buffalo was spotted a half day south.

A large band of Crows approached the circle of lodges and the warning went up.

Claw Marks, a war chief, had been hobbled and was walking with a makeshift crutch, but this day he tossed the crutch aside. With two older warrior volunteers, he faced the charging band, after sending the young warriors and children, including Cate Waste, down the banks of the Little Bighorn to what the warrior called the Badger Coulee. From there the remnants of the tribe could escape up the coulee, covering their tracks as they went.

He and the two gray-haired warriors knew they would die. Although he was wounded, he was younger and stronger than the other two men, so he knew it fell to him to keep the Crows at bay as long as possible, to cover the retreat of the family circle. They sang their death songs while firing shots and arrows at the charging Crows. He looked up at a pair of red-tailed hawks swirling high overhead in the cloudless, endless Montana sky, and he smiled to the warriors, saying in Lakota, “This is a good day to die.” They nodded and smiled.

Leaving them, he raised his hand to bid them stay back, and ignoring the leg pain, he leapt on his pinto mount and rode toward the reassembling Crows. They had lost several warriors already and were shocked at the ability of these three determined men. They had to admire their perennial enemies.

The Crows were planning a final charge, with the idea to count as many coups as possible, touching the enemy in battle. They were encouraging each other to “Brave up!”

Thirty yards off, Claw Marks dropped off his war pony and tied a long rawhide thong to his leg. He tied the other end of the twenty-foot leather thong to a stake, which he jammed into the ground and pounded down with a nearby rock.

Claw Marks then faced the Crow, a challenging grin on his face, and raising his rifle into the air with one hand and his war club with the other, he yelled,
“Hokahey!”

The Crow knew he was going nowhere, but would fight to the death, taking as many of them as he could with him. They yelled back, more in admiration for his raw courage than to taunt a warrior. They agreed they would ride him down, and each warrior wanted to count coup on this mighty enemy, touching him without killing him, with a coup stick, bow, or rifle. They charged screaming and yelling, and he raised his rifle taking careful aim, and bodies started falling. The group rode down upon him, and he swung his rifle one way and the other and broke the stock over the face of the largest Crow. Then he started swinging his war club, as he felt stab wounds and strikes hitting his body all over. His scalp was a great reward for the hardest fighting of the Crows, who finally struck the fatal blow against him. Near Siostukala's body eight Crow bodies also lay on the grass by the shallow sand- and rock-bottomed Little Bighorn, and several more moaned with wounds.

The two elderly warriors wanted to help the courageous young man, but they knew they must lay back and wait, buying more time for their extended family members. They knew they, too, would make the great walk this day. Inspired by the young warrior's ferocious fighting and tremendous courage, they too held the Crows off, for another hour, giving the tribal remnants plenty of time to hide in Badger Coulee.

After they hid far down the river valley, Joshua's young half brother crept through the tall, waving buffalo grass high on a ridge that would be traveled years later by Custer and his men. He found a vantage point and actually watched the heroic death of his father. With no other warriors or tribal members around, he cried. But then he returned to the others. He was bursting with pride at the incredible courage of his father and vowed then never to tarnish such a family legacy.

Joshua felt like he could easily cry wishing he had known his father. After his stepfather died and his mother gave him the gun and knife, only then did she reveal to him her relationship with Claw Marks. When his name was mentioned, she did not cry out of bad memory, but out of pure love-loss.

2

Forbidden Love

Abigail Harrison was the daughter of a British-born father and French-born mother. They were shopkeepers back east, where she was born in a small Ohio town, New Philadelphia, along the banks of the Tuscarawas River, in the midst of southern Ohio farming and coal-mining country. New Philadelphia, or as locals called it, “New Philly,” was first settled in 1777 by German immigrants, who named it Schoenbrunn, which actually meant “beautiful spring.”

But wanderlust struck the Harrisons, and having heard about the green of Oregon and mining riches in California, they headed west. They were headed to see both and then settle in one. However, the trials of the westward movement took their toll. He died first, when trying to free a mud-encased Conestoga wagon wheel. As it came free and the horses lunged forward, he slipped, and the wheel rolled over his neck, crushing his larynx and fracturing his cervical spine in two places.

He was buried not far from the tamer lower headwaters of the mighty Mississippi.

Ironically, in Montana, Abigail's grief-stricken mother fell getting off the wagon, striking the left front wagon wheel with her forehead and snapping her head back, fracturing her neck as well. She died instantly, and Abby quickly became even more of a survivor, as she was the only child.

After the loss of both parents, she was in a state of total despair and depression. Abby knelt by the hastily dug grave and just stared. She did not care about living or dying. After many attempts to motivate or move her failed, she was left alone with her family wagons by a heartless wagon master. After two days of crying, and taking nothing but little sips of water, she built a fire as her father had taught her and made a nice breakfast. She had come to the realization that she did indeed want to survive, and she would. The beautiful fifteen-year-old made herself a hearty breakfast of bacon, biscuits, eggs, and coffee.

That is when, two miles away, the big silvertip plains grizzly bear stood on his hind legs and slowly popped his teeth, sniffing the wind. On the breeze, he picked up the delicious smells, and he headed that way at almost a dead run. Bears have an incredible sense of smell, and this big bruin was no exception. He had survived thirteen winters already and was cunning, ferocious, large, and very powerful.

He came up out of a draw and again stood on his hind legs, testing the wind, his nose well over eight feet in the air when he lifted it and smelled. He picked up Abigail's scent as well and dropped to all fours, let out a ferocious growl, and made his charge. A grizzly bear can outrun a Thoroughbred racehorse on flat ground, and his flat-out charge was so unnerving that Abby stood transfixed and actually paralyzed in fear and denial. As a last resort, she raised her frying pan.