The People
Tribal Report of the Northern Cheyenne Nation (October 2006 Vol. I No. 10)
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A Message From Our Elders: White Bull (Ice) Talks to George Bird Grinnell in 1908 About the Warnings of Sweet Medicine
The Sweet Medicine oral tradition is still alive and spoken only during certain occasions and only after prayers are offered. However, there are numerous written accounts of Sweet Medicine’s warnings. We have found one of the oldest written accounts of the prophet’s warnings as told by Ice. One man who sat in the circle in the lodge spoke to Sweet Medicine, who for a long time had been sitting in silence with his head hanging down, as if discouraged. He said, “Friend, what is your trouble? Why are you sorrowful?” Sweet Medicine answered, “Yes, it is true I am troubled. Listen to me carefully. Listen to me carefully.” He said this four times. “Our great-grandfather spoke thus to me, repeating it four times. He said to me that he had put people on this earth, all kinds of people. He made us, but also made others. There are all kinds of people on earth that you will meet some day, toward the sunrise, by a big river. Some are black, but some day you will meet a people who are white, --good-looking people, with light hair and white skins.” A man spoke up, and said, “Shall we know them when we meet them?” “Yes,” said Sweet Medicine, “you will know them, for they will have long hair on their faces, and will look differently from you. They will wear things different from your things, --different clothing. It will be something like the green scum that grows on waters about springs (the thread of cloth). Those people will wander this way. You will talk with them. They will give you things like isinglass (things that flash or reflect the light, mirrors) and something that looks like sand that will taste very sweet. But do not take the things they give you. They will be looking for a certain stone. They will wear what I have spoken of, but it will be of all colors, pretty. Perhaps they will not listen to what you say to them, but you will listen to what they say to you. They will be people who do not get tired, but who will keep pushing forward, going, going, all the time. They will keep coming, coming. They will try always to give you things, but do not take them. At last I think that you will take the things that they offer you, and this will bring sickness to you. These people do not follow the way of our great-grandfather. They follow another way. They will travel everywhere, looking for this stone which our great-grandfather put on the earth in many places.” “Buffalo and all animals were given you by our great-grandfather; but these people will come in, and will begin to kill off these animals. They will us a different thing to kill animals from what we use, --something that makes a noise and sends a little round stone to kill. Then after a while a different animal will come into the country. It will have a head like a buffalo, but it will have white horns and a long tail. These animals will smell differently from the buffalo, and at last you will come to eating them. When you skin them, the flesh will jerk, and at last you will get the same disease. At last something will be given to you, which, if you drink it, will make you crazy. These people will have something to give to animals to eat which will kill them.” “There will be many of these people, so many that you cannot stand before them. On the rivers you will see things going up and down, and in these things will be these people, and there will be things moving over dry land in which these people will be.” “Another animal will come, but it will not be like the buffalo. It will have long heavy hair on its neck, and a long heavy tail which drags on the ground. It will come from the south.” “When these animals come, you will catch them, and you will get on their backs and they will carry you from place to place. You will become great travelers. If you see a place a long way off, you will want to go to it, so at last you will get on these animals with my arrows. From that time you will act very foolishly. You will never be quite. You will want to go everywhere. You will be very foolish. You will know nothing.” He took some grass in his hand, and held it out before him, and said, “Here is something that the animals live on.” Then he put it down and he took other plants in his hand, and said, “You see that these are different-looking grasses and plants. These are to be used for your medicine”; and as he put each one down on the ground, he explained the uses of each. “These people will not listen to what you say; what they are going to do they will do. You people will change: in the end of your life in those days you will not get up early in the morning; you will never know when day comes; you will lie in bed; you will have disease, and will die suddenly; you will all die off.” “At last those people will ask you for your flesh (he repeated this four times), but you must say ‘No.’ They will try to teach you their way of living. If you give up to them your flesh (your children), those that they take away will never know anything. They will try to change you from your way of living to theirs, and they will keep at what they try to do. They will work with their hands. They will tear up the earth, and at last you will do it with them. When you do, you will become crazy, and forget all that I am teaching you.” George Bird Grinnell, “Some Early Cheyenne Tales. II,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXI, NO. 80 (1908), pages 319-320. Tribal Report of the Northern Cheyenne Nation (October 2006 Vol. I No. 10), page 8.
A Message From Our Elders: John Stands In Timber Speaks about the Sacred Arrows in the Early Reservation Days Tribal historian John Stands In Timber gave the following story of the Sacred Arrows in his book Cheyenne Memories. Stands In Timber is probably the most well-known Northern Cheyenne historian. The Sacred Arrows have been in the South most of the time since 1877. In that year the Northern people surrendered and split into four groups. One group of eighteen families included the Arrow Keeper, Black Hairy Dog, who went down along the foothills to join the Southern Cheyennes on Fat River, the South Platte. After Black Hairy Dog, I think the next Keeper was Rock Forehead, and then White Thunder, and Chief Mower, and Little Man, and Baldwin Twins, and Teddy Red Cherries for a short time, then Baldwin Twins again, and Fred Last Bull. The present Keeper is Jay Black. Those further back than Black Hairy Dog are not remembered today. Those Keepers were important. They claimed fifty years ago that the character and actions of the Hat and Arrow Keepers—how they acted and felt—set the way the whole tribe went. Everything was smooth if the Keeper lived quietly and prayed all the time and the people followed his instructions. If he did wrong, everything went wrong. If a member of the tribe drew the blood of another member, one of the chiefs had to renew the Sacred Arrows—nobody but a chief. It was a four-day ceremony. They changed the feathers, and when they were through they set a stick and tied the Arrows to this—two points up representing good health or anything good; two points down, bringing plenty of fruit and game. Then only men come close to see the Arrows. When things with the Arrows went wrong, they say that is why so many of our young boys committed suicide, four or five of them, or were in wrecks and were killed. The last Keeper in Oklahoma got old and sick and wanted to give them up, but no one else could be found. At last he transferred them without authority to a Northerner, Fred Last Bull, and they were moved to Montana. The Oklahoma leaders were angry with the Northern leaders because the Arrows were moved up here, but they could not return them to the Keeper who had given them away, and Last Bull did not want to give them up. They remembered that he had shot at another Cheyenne years ago and had wounded him. That made things worse—it was almost as bad as a murderer having hold of the Arrows, because he drew blood. Nobody knew what to do. They talked about giving the Arrow Tepee to the Smithsonian for safekeeping, but finally the Southern chiefs found a new Keeper down there, so they came up to get the Arrows and took them back. The Northern people were glad to see them go. There was no telling what might have happened if they had stayed up here. They are still holding the Arrow Renewal each year in Oklahoma before the Sun Dance there. But the ceremony, like others, has changed. A full renewal used to take four whole days. The feathers of the Arrows were removed and new ones put in their place. The shafts were painted and the points fixed. Now they just worship and offer cloth and other gifts. The ceremony is put on by an individual who vows to sponsor it for the sake of health or some personal reason. When the worshiping is finished the offerings out into the hills and leaves them there, weighted down with stones so the cloth will not blow away. There is an old man in Oklahoma, Ben Osage, who had vowed this ceremony three times, and now I understand he is to put it on again, and has vowed to do the whole thing and change the feathers in the old way. But the people down there thing they won’t be able to get anyone who understands the whole thing anymore. All these religious ceremonies are like that; they are either beginning to change or gradually to fade away. There is another worshiping connected with the Arrows in which the Northern Cheyenne still take part. Every few years some of the medicine men return to Bear Butte in the Black Hills, where Sweet Medicine got the Arrows centuries ago, to hold some private ceremonies. There are different kinds. Four Cheyennes fasted there during the First World War, and in June of 1945 four others went to Bear Butte after their leader David Deafy was told several times in dreams to go. While there he had a vision foretelling the end of World War II which shortly came true. In August the same year the Arrows were taken there from Oklahoma by Keeper Baldwin Twins for ceremonies or worship, and they were taken again in 1948. That time the tepee was put up on the old camping grounds south of the Butte, and ceremonies were held inside. The bundle that always protects the Arrows was opened and some white men were allowed to see them. They wanted to know what connection they had with that Butte, or the Holy Mountain as the Cheyennes call it. Other tribes also have religious beliefs about that place, and the Chamber of Commerce people from Sturgis found out about it and wanted to make the mountain into a shrine. It is in private ownership, and they wanted the Government to buy it and set it aside. They had some publicity on it in the papers, and afterwards some white people who had once lived there wrote and said they had found a cave on the side of the mountain too deep to explore. They had just gone in so far, but them came to a big rock blocking the passage. They could throw rocks over it, and when they did there was an echoing sound as if the passage went a long way. That must be the place where Sweet Medicine went in and received shelter and was taught by the gods. The old Indians told me years ago that the Kiowas and Arapahos and Apaches all got important religious power there. The Kiowas got the kidneys of a bear, and the Arapahos got medicine they put on hot coals that made a sweat smoke, and the Apaches got horse medicine. The Sioux also claimed that they got a pipe from that mountain, but I am a little in doubt about that. The Sioux came from across the Missouri River, from Minnesota, and they might have had the pipe long before they reached the Black Hills, or they may have gotten it from the Cheyennes when they met them there. When the Arrows were taken to Bear Butte in 1948, there was no individual fasting. But there was an old custom that, when a man did fast to seek for personal power, the Holy Mountain was a good place for it, so many went there for that purpose and some still do. The Cheyennes never held annual ceremonies there on top, though, the way the Chamber of Commerce had heard. The ones who fasted did not go all the way to the top either. There is one story remembered about a man who did fast there, and even he went too high. We saw his markers about halfway to the top. He had been lying facing the top, on a sagebrush bed, and after he had been there some time, a day or more, he said a bird came from the air someplace and sounded like a whistling bullet. It barely missed him and he could feel a strong wind hit his body. Then it passed even closer. It was one of those swift hawks, quite big and a blue color, with black stripes across the tail feathers. Then he heard a voice telling he must not lie so close to the top. “You are too close to the Tepee,” it said. “Go back down.” Then he knew why the bird was trying to hit him. So he picked up his medicine and carried it down to the bottom and fasted there instead. I remember this old fellow, Brave Wolf, back in 1890. He used to wear a mounted swift hawk tied to the back lock of his hair, and he claimed this bird gave him power. After that the ones who fasted stayed at the bottom. Most of them were healed of any disease they had, and many received power to heal the sick. They have been thinking of going again. Some were planning to go in 1958. The Chamber of Commerce was encouraging them. It offered to pay for their groceries and car expenses, and was going to have people there to take down the story of whatever they did. But the tribal elections were coming up and some men were campaigning, so they never went. Cheyenne Memories. John Stands In Timber and Margot Liberty. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967): pages 86-90 Tribal Report of the Northern Cheyenne Nation (October 2006 Vol. I No. 10), page 8.
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