The Powder River Read Online Free

back in the moon when the buffalo bulls are rutting with funny clothes and funny ways.
    One of Smith’s grandfathers (the white people would have said grand- uncles ), a man who once had a strong vision, asked Smith closely about his dreams. Did Smith dream of enchanted buffalo or messenger magpies? Did the wind words of the grandfathers of the four directions sound in his dreams? Did he ever see painted horses or painted faces? Did he hear power in the sound of running water? Or did he dream of watches and telescopes and books, and the things he spoke of when he came back from St. Louis, railroads and steamboats and houses and especially his favorite subject, this science?
    Smith answered honestly, and told the old man his dreams, which were a coat of all these colors, and more—castles with knights in armor he read of in books, stories of the men who investigated the stars and discovered that the earth circled the sun, and tales of coyote, the trickster of many shapes, and of Sweet Medicine and Buffalo Calf Woman, sometimes all in the same dream. In his recurring dream, he said, he felt himself swimming in the river among all the water creatures, not like a man holding his breath, but comfortable, a native there, quick and graceful in movement. He said he loved flowing water, and heard it constantly in his dreams.
    The old man shook his head in puzzlement and put the pipe away. He didn’t know water medicine, he said. Perhaps if the boy could find someone who did …
    When Smith went to his buffalo robes in his own lodge, he felt uncertain what he was, veho or Cheyenne.
    The next summer Smith and his brother and their Cheyenne comrades joined Red Cloud and Crazy Horse and the other Lakotas and made the white man pay for their blood lust at Sand Creek. And then he knew. When you fight with your people, the dust acrid in your eyes and mouth, the smell of gunpowder and dung and blood rank in your nostrils—when you shed your blood with theirs, and sometimes hold them while they die, and make the enemy die for hurting them—then you are one with them. When Smith went to Dartmouth, he knew he was a Cheyenne.
    He reminded himself all through the thirteen long years of his schooling. He wanted to be a white-man doctor, so he put in his learning time at Dartmouth, and then at Boston Medical College, and rubbed shoulders with white people, and learned the ways of their drawing rooms, and sometimes dallied with their women. Occasionally white men spoke to remind him that in blood he was three-quarters white, and although his skin was dark, his reddish hair marked him a veho . But he always wore two objects to remind them, and himself, that he was a Cheyenne. Underneath his shirt he kept tied to the inside of his right biceps a gift from his mother Lisette, the shell of a mussel, traded to the Powder River country from the western ocean, cobalt outside, silver inside, and to Smith reeking of magic. And he wore a small deerskin pouch, its strings braided into his long, reddish hair, its contents small seeds given to him by his other mother, Annemarie. To wear this pouch he had to stay away from white-man barbers—he left his hair long, and free.
    By these gestures he helped keep his home country as the place of his heart during his years of exile. Like any exile, he dreamed of the time he would be able to go home. Go home to his mothers and the family trading post on Powder River, where the Little Powder flowed into it. Go home and help his people. That was the reason his father, who loved the Cheyennes, sent him east—to get some of the white man’s knowledge to put to use on behalf of the Cheyennes, and all Indian people. Smith’s gift to them would be the white man’s power of healing.
    He saw no contradiction in bringing a white-man gift to the Cheyennes. He believed what his father had believed: The Cheyennes would take from white culture what was best in it—principally the beauty of science—and leave what was