Goodbird the Indian: His Story
9781465668639
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I was born on a sand bar, near the mouth of the Yellowstone, seven years before the battle in which Long Hair was killed. My tribe had camped on the bar and were crossing the river in bull boats. As ice chunks were running on the Missouri current, it was probably the second week in November. The Mandans and my own people, the Hidatsas, were once powerful tribes who dwelt in five villages at the mouth of the Knife River, in what is now North Dakota. Smallpox weakened both peoples; the survivors moved up the Missouri and built a village at Like-a-fish-hook Bend, or Fort Berthold as the whites called it, where they dwelt together as one tribe. They fortified their village with a fence of upright logs against their enemies, the Sioux. With our crops of corn and beans, we had less fear of famine than the wilder tribes; but like them we hunted buffaloes for our meat. After firearms became common, big game grew less plentiful, and for several years before my birth, few buffaloes had been seen near our village. However, scouts brought in word that big herds were to be found farther up the river and on the Yellowstone, and our villagers, Mandans and Hidatsas, made ready for a hunt. A chief, or leader, was always chosen for a tribal hunt, some one who was thought to have power with the gods. Not every one was willing to be leader. The tribe expected of him a prosperous hunt with plenty of meat, and no attacks from enemies. If the hunt proved an unlucky one, the failure was laid to the leader. “His prayers have no power with the gods. He is not fit to be leader!” the people would say. This leader had to be chosen by a military society of men, called the Black Mouths. They made up a collection of rich gifts—gun, blankets, robes, war bonnet, embroidered shirt—and with much ceremony offered the gifts, successively, to men who were known to own sacred bundles; all refused. They prevailed at length upon Ediakata to accept half the gifts. “Choose another to take the rest,” he told the Black Mouths: “I will share the leadership with him!” They chose Short Horn. The two leaders fixed the day of departure. On the evening before, a crier went through the village, calling out, “To-morrow at sunrise we break camp. Get ready, everybody!” The march was up the Missouri, on the narrow prairie between the foothills and the river. Ediakata and Short Horn led, commanding, the one, one day, the other, the next. The camp followed in a long line, some on horseback, more afoot; a few old people rode on travois. Camp was made at night in tepees, or skin-covered tents. My grandfather’s was a large thirteen-skin tepee, pitched with fifteen poles. It sheltered twelve persons; my grandfather, Small Ankle, and his two wives, Red Blossom and Strikes-many-woman; his sons, Bear’s Tail and Wolf Chief, and their wives; my mother, Buffalo Bird Woman, daughter of Small Ankle, and Son-of-a-Star, her husband; Flies Low, a younger son of Small Ankle; and Red Kettle and Full Heart, mere boys, brothers of Flies Low. We Hidatsas looked upon the Sioux as wild men, because they lived by hunting and dwelt in tents. Our own life we thought civilized. Our lodges were houses of logs, with rounded roofs covered with earth; hence their name, earth lodges. Fields of corn, beans, squashes and sunflowers lay on either side of the village, in the bottom lands along the river; these were cultivated in old times with bone hoes.
