White Buffalo Quotes

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Now we move out again, the horses slipping down off the knoll, following the People, who follow the buffalo, who follow the grass, which springs from the earth.

They're all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I'm the last, the very last, and I'm sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot. I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash water across my bare skin. And dance. I'll dance a Ghost Dance. I'll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it's my grandfather and grandmother singing. Can you hear them? I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls. I'm growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor. We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.

I might be killed any day, by whites or hostile Indians, I might be run down by a grizzly or a pack of buffalo wolves, but I rarely did anything I didn't feel like doing, and maybe this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it.

They don't believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested." "They don't want communism." "They want enough rice," I said. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." "If Indochina goes--" "I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans.

(On Baron von Blixen:) Six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker at the fanfare of safari or to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky.

Black and white buffalo pass in and out of red barns, offering free rides to itinerant atoms.

When I was around four years old I asked my father, “Aba, what color are you?” He replied, “I don’t know, a bit white, a bit black.” “It’s like when one mixes milk with tea,” I said. He laughed a lot, but as a boy he had been so self-conscious about being dark-skinned that he went to the fields to get buffalo milk to spread on his face, thinking it would make him lighter. It was only when he met my mother that he became comfortable in his own skin. Being loved by such a beautiful girl gave him confidence.

It’s all nonsense of course. You can find God in a thunderstorm, or in the smile of a child, or in the wilderness (I believe that Jesus himself tried that at one stage), or in a rain forest, or a puppy, or in a legend, or by just lying under the stars, or in a daydream, or in your lover’s eyes, or in music, or by believing in magic, or in a conversation with a bag lady, or by loving a Gypsy girl, or by stumbling upon a white buffalo, or by dancing around your bones on the edge of extinction.

We can create some information about Buffalo, milk and its nutritional values. We can exchange that information with each other for money, appreciation etc. A monk living alone in jungle doesn't know words such as Buffalo, milk or nutrition. He just wonders, "Green grass enters into this big black thing and a white liquid comes out of it. How!" He can't exchange this wonder with anyone but it transports him to eternity.

can’t live the way the Wild Boar and the Buffalo and the Raven lived, and probably still live, back in Laxmangarh. I am in the Light now.

It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets. It weeps for the black people who think like white people. It weeps for the Indians who think like settlers. It weeps for the children who think like adults. It weeps for the free who think like prisoners. Most of all, it weeps for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

I walked her to her door and said good night, while Romeo waited. "I'll see you in the morning," I said, 'when the barking dogs arouse the sleeping tepee village and the smell of roasting coyote is in the air." "My sisters will prepare me," she said. "I shall come to your wickiup in my white doeskin dress and lose my innocence on your buffalo robe." "I will give you little ornaments to put in your hair, black as the crow's wing. I will give you red flannel and a looking-glass so that you may groom yourself." "I'd also like to have a little spending money and a charge account at Wormser's," she said. "Good night, Maiden Who Walks Like a Duck." "Good night, Warrior Who Chickens Out at the Least Sign of Trouble.

Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works—worked—like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait.

I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the black river.

Back in the buffalo days, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had seen a vision of men with hair on their faces who would come bringing a white sand that was poison to Indians. The prophecy had come true, the white sand was sugar, and Adeline blamed the white man for poisoning her right up to two hundred pounds.

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women.

A mounted buffalo chase was one of the most exciting things a man could do. There was always the risk of injury and death, but having once hunted buffalo from the back of a horse, no man could resist trying it over and over again. It was one thing to wait in ambush along a trail for black-tailed or white-tailed deer or at a waterhole for the white-bellied pronghorn, but chasing buffalo was the pursuit of life itself, testing one’s nerves and skills to the limit as fast as a horse could run.

I did not see the appeal of a wife. We had never had one before. She would not be half as interesting as our buffalo.

Last night I dreamed of the "happy hunting ground." I passed through a place of bones that looked human, but weren't--the skulls were wrong. Then I came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, all as if it were a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes--all white--snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream. I dreamed I was at Fleety's, and she told me the bones were poor people killed by bandits, and she took me back to the place, and under a huge rock where no light should have shown, a cave almost, was a dogwood tree. It glowed the kind of red those trees get at sundown, the buds were purple in that weird light, and a madman came out with an axe and chopped at the skulls, trying to make them human-looking. Then I went back to the other side of both dreams. --from a letter to his mother, Helen Pancake, where he describes a dream that seems to encapsulate the play between violence and gentleness in his life.

Ingredients 1 package (8 oz.) cream cheese, softened 1 can (12 oz.) chunk white chicken, drained (you can also use chopped-up leftover roast chicken—about 1–2 cups) 1/2 cup Buffalo wing sauce (my friends prefer it spicy!) 1/2 cup ranch dressing 2 cups shredded cheese (you can go for something like a spicy Havarti, Colby, even cheddar—whatever you like most) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread cream cheese on the bottom of an ungreased baking dish. We used one of my mom’s that’s rectangular and shallow and holds about a quart. On top of the cream cheese, layer your chicken. Then place wing sauce on top, and salad dressing on top of that. Finally, sprinkle cheese on top and bake until you see all the cheese melted and bubbly. It should take about 20 minutes; any longer and it might burn, so keep an eye on it. Go ahead and dip your chips in it; it’s pretty delicious on anything—even bread or a pretzel.

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Indians were made for film. Indians were exotic and erotic. All those feathers, all that face paint, the breast plates, the bone chokers, the skimpy loincloths, not to mention the bows and arrows and spears, the war cries, the galloping horses, the stern stares, and the threatening grunts. We hunted buffalo, fought the cavalry, circled wagon trains, fought the cavalry, captured White women, fought the cavalry, scalped homesteaders, fought the cavalry. And don't forget the drums and the wild dances where we got all sweaty and lathered up, before we rode off to fight the cavalry.

After her mother died and Adrienne and her father took up with wanderlust, Adrienne became exposed to new foods. For two years they lived in Maine, where in the summertime they ate lobster and white corn and small wild blueberries. They moved to Iowa for Adrienne's senior year of high school and they ate pork tenderloin fixed seventeen different ways. Adrienne did her first two years of college at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she lived above a Mexican cantina, which inspired a love of tamales and anything doused with habanero sauce. Then she transferred to Vanderbilt in Nashville, where she ate the best fried chicken she'd ever had in her life. And so on, and so on. Pad thai in Bangkok, stone crabs in Palm Beach, buffalo meat in Aspen. As she sat listening to Thatcher, she realized that though she knew nothing about restaurants, at least she knew something about food.

Arapahos had followed the buffalo, pitched villages in the lee of the mountains, ridden out like itinerant shop-keepers to trade buffalo robes and blankets with other Indian tribes. Intelligent, logical, peaceful, that was the Arapahos. “The businessmen of the plains,” the first white traders had called them.

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey— why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?

Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo.… Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above. So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them. There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back. Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track. The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.

One day, The road came. The road brought with it beer and cigarettes. The road brought Coca-Cola and disposable razors. The road brought all the wonderful things that we westerners know and hold close. But where did the road go? A few of the younger men decided to find out. They rode a buffalo cart along the road until they came to a town and then a train station. They hid in a bunch of rice sacks and took the train to the city, to the lights, to the jobs. There was this thing called money, with it you could buy stuff. You could gamble, drink, and be merry. After a period of two years, one of the young men returned to the village driving a new car. He showed the villagers all the beautiful things that he had bought. He said that there was work for everyone in the cities. He took another young man and two young women with him. They were pretty in a rural way and very hungry for money. Money was good. They liked it. It was a great adventure.

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a "teleplastic" mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. ("The Vane Sisters")

A t magic hour, when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke. When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years, that have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow-aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works – worked – like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture-bait. As cattle turned into better dairy machines, as the city ate more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolatechip, as it drank more mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead. Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much else to look forward to.

But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

In concluding, I want to express the hope that the dealings of this Government of ours with the Indians will always be just and fair. They were the inheritors of the land that we live in. They were not capable of developing it, or of really appreciating its possibilities, but they owned it when the White Man came, and the White Man took it away from them. It was natural that they should resist. It was natural that they employed the only means of warfare known to them against those whom they regarded as usurpers. It was our business, as scouts, to be continually on the warpath against them when they committed depredations. But no scout ever hated the Indians in general.

This reality strikes many as tragic, as if oppressed former slaves and Indigenous peoples being subjected to genocidal warfare should magically be unified against their common enemy, “the white man.” In fact, this is precisely how colonialism in general and colonial warfare in particular work. It is not unique to the United States, but rather a part of the tradition of European colonialism since the Roman legions. The British organized whole armies of ethnic troops in South and Southwestern Asia, the most famous being the Gurkhas from Nepal, who fought as recently as Margaret Thatcher’s war against Argentina in 1983.28 The buffalo soldiers were such a specially organized colonial military unit.

And now the solider toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. 'As far as the eye could reach,' wrote Carter, 'not an object of any kind or living thing was in sight. It stretched out before us- one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.' The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. 'This is a terrible country,' railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, 'the stillness, wildness, and desolation of which is awful... Not a tree to be seen... and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.

«It's not easy to believe.» «I» she told him, «I can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.» «Really?» «I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in "War of the Worlds". I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kind of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.»

We warily sipped ‘fresh’ buffalo milk in a Krishna temple. We travelled into the Himalayas until, at a height of two kilometres above sea level where we found ourselves surrounded by men as hard and tough as the mountains that bred them. We negotiated a price of 100 rupees for one of these men to carry our two heaviest bags the 15-minute walk to the hotel with nothing more than rope and a forehead strap. I paid him 300 rupees and his face lit up! We watched the morning mist clear to reveal views of the green Doon Valley and the distant white-capped Himalayan peaks. We rode an elephant up to the Amber Fort of Jaipur, and the next day we painted, washed and fed unpeeled bananas to another elephant, marvelling at her gentle nature as we placed the bananas on her huge bubble-gum coloured tongue.

Achild acquires stuffed animals throughout their life, but the core team is usually in place by the time they’re five. Louise got Red Rabbit, a hard, heavy bunny made of maroon burlap, for her first Easter as a gift from Aunt Honey. Buffalo Jones, an enormous white bison with a collar of soft wispy fur, came back with her dad from a monetary policy conference in Oklahoma. Dumbo, a pale blue hard rubber piggy bank with a detachable head shaped like the star of the Disney movie, had been spotted at Goodwill and Louise claimed him as “mine” when she was three. Hedgie Hoggie, a plush hedgehog Christmas ornament, had been a special present from the checkout girl after Louise fell in love with him in the supermarket checkout line and would strike up a conversation with him every time they visited. But Pupkin was their leader.

As they did so, Andrews looked back upon the valley which in a few moments would be gone from his sight. At this distance, the new growth of grass was like a faint green mist that clung to the surface of the earth and glistened in the early morning sun. Andrews could not believe that this same valley had been the one he had seen pounding and furious with the threshings of a thousand dying buffalo; he could not believe that the grass had once been stained and matted with blood; he could not believe that this was the same stretch of land that had been torn by the fury of winter blizzards; he could not believe that a few weeks ago it had been stark and featureless under a blinding cover of white. He looked up and down its length, as far as he could see. Even from this distance, if he strained his eyes, he could see the expanse dotted with the dark carcasses of the buffalo.

Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it in Lonesome Dove they had decided that the reports must be exaggerated — thinned out, maybe, but not wiped out. Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching out over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants – of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.

know that the first mineral product of the Ohio Valley was salt?” Ned asked. When Nancy shook her head, he went on, “As you know, salt has been an essential food for man and animal since the beginning of time. In prehistoric days salt attracted not only human inhabitants to this area, but also animals like the giant sloth, the mammoth elk, deer, and buffalo.” “That’s fascinating,” said Nancy. “Don’t stop.” “Professor will relate one more story and that’s the end of his knowledge.” Nancy giggled and Ned went on, “The Indians here were fearful that the white men would take away all their territory, so they raided and burned settlements. It was not until the American Army took over that the raids were stopped, around 1794.” By this time Ned was nearing Pine Hill. Nancy happened to look up the high embankment at the woods which ran to the Rorick garden. Suddenly she caught a flash of sunlight on glass. “Ned,” she said, “somebody is watching us with binoculars! See him up there among the trees?” Ned turned to look, resting his paddle. “You think that’s your phantom?” he asked.

But the hawk knew the landscape; there were vast areas of it he avoided due to a scarcity of prey. Land that was overhunted—that land was the Great Sioux Reservation, bordered by the rugged Black Hills on the west, the Missouri River on the east. There, even scrawny squirrels and half-dead rabbits were precious. The smudges there were tepees, made out of fading buffalo hide, clustered together in groups, the groups too close to those from other tribes, but forced, due to the government, to live together. Misery hung over this landscape like a cloud, even on the sunniest day. So he kept to the south, swooping closer to the ground, and finally the peaceful-seeming landscape gave up some secrets. A fence post here, a clump of bushes there, an upturned wagon, haystacks. As his eyes adjusted, however, other secrets were discovered. What seemed like a line of small haystacks were, upon closer inspection as the hawk zeroed in, cows. Unmoving cows, statues; some on their sides, others standing, all frozen where they were. The hawk turned, uninterested, to investigate more dark shapes emerging from the blinding white; horses, their legs collapsed under them, eyes closed forever.

What is this strange touch?" With a start, Jesse realized that Rides the Wind had awakened. He lay watching her closely.Feeling shy she pulled the buffalo robe up under her chin, answering softly, "My people say 'kiss.'" "And who gives this 'kiss'?" "Parents to children, husband to wife." "Show me." As he said it he leaned toward her. Jesse obediently placed a kiss upon the wind-hardened cheek. He kept his face near hers and the dark eyes searched hers.Then a knowing smile curled up the edges of his mouth. "When Marcus Whitman met with Running Bear and the traders,Rides the Wind was there.I saw many things.I saw this touch you call 'kiss' between man and woman.It was not here," he tapped his cheek, "but here." His finger indicated his mouth. Jesse felt her face flush and wondered if the early morning light revealed her embarrassment. She assented, "Yes,for some it is so." "Did Jesse King and Homer King touch in this ay?" Jesse looked hard into the searching eyes.They returned her stare with honest interest. "My people do not speak of these things." Rides the Wind was quiet for a moment, pondering her response. "If the white man speaks not of what is here," he laid a hand flat upon the tawny chest, "he must be very sad.

Hi, Georgie,” it said. George blinked and looked again. He could barely credit what he saw; it was like something from a made-up story, or a movie where you know the animals will talk and dance. If he had been ten years older, he would not have believed what he was seeing, but he was not sixteen. He was six. There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing. It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?—George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings—Buffalo Bob was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell. The clown held a bunch of balloons, all colors, like gorgeous ripe fruit in one hand. In the other he held George’s newspaper boat. “Want your boat, Georgie?” The clown smiled.

July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event. It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840’s. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked. This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July. When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch. The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have ‘taken’ what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have ‘taken’ what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book? This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life. * * *

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. Oh my god, said the sergeant.

I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe." "Really?" "I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in this universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath. Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud.

She looked at him defiantly, "I know I am not beautiful.I laughed at myself for thinking such impossible things." Rides the Wind was quiet for so long that she wondered if her rush of words had overreached his abilities in English. But just when she started to question him,he turned his own face to the horizon so that she could view only his profile. "When Rides the Wind was young, he danced about the fire like no other brave.It was then that Dancing Waters came to be his woman.She would watch, and her eyes danced with the flames. But one day Rides the Wind went to hunt.His pony fell and crushed his leg. Marcus Whitman fixed the leg, but it would not grow straight.Rides the Wind could dance no more. The fire died in the eyes of Dancing Waters." He encircled her with his arms before continuing. "Walks the Fire sees Rides the Wind when he walks like the wounded buffalo.She sees, but the fire does not die in her eyes.Beautiful is in here," he placed his hand over her heart. "So do not laugh when you think you are beautiful.Rides the Wind sees the fire in your eyes.And to him,you are beautiful." Jesse reached for his hand,and, holding it palm up,she kissed it. He growled, "...and so you give me more of the white man's ways." In a moment of uncharacteristic abandon, Jesse stood on tip-toe and placed a less-than-chaste kiss upon the mouth of her husband.She smiled in spite of the resulting blush on her cheek, reaching up to tug childishly on his flowing hair. Then,to his delight and amazement she spoke the Lakota words: "Mihigna-my husband-Walks the Fire is an obedient wife.If he wishes her to stop this strange touch,he must tell her.Walks the Fire will obey." Rides the Wind took her hand, and they started back to the tepee.As they climbed the hill together he replied, "Many of the white man's ways must be forgotten to live among my people...but not all.

The buffalo will return," Kicking Wolf said. "They have only gone to the north for a while. The buffalo have always returned." "You are a fool," Buffalo Hump said. "The buffalo won't return, because they are dead. The whites have killed them. When you go north you will only find their bones." "The whites have killed many, but not all," Kicking Wolf insisted. "They have only gone to the Missouri River to live. When beaten the whites back we have they will return." But, as he was speaking, Kicking Wolf suddenly lost heart. He realized that Buffalo Hump was right, and that the words he had just spoken were the words of a fool. The Comanches were not beating the whites, and they were not going to beat them. Only their own band and three or four others were still free Comanches. The bands that were free were the bands that could survive on the least, those who would eat small animals and dig roots from the earth. Already the bluecoat soldiers had come back to Texas and begun to fill up the old forts, places they had abandoned while they fought one another. Even if all the free tribes banded together there would not be enough warriors to defeat the bluecoat soldiers. With the buffalo gone so far north, the white soldiers had only to drive them farther and farther into the llano, until they starved or gave up. "The whites are not foolish," Buffalo Hump said. "They know that it is easier to kill a buffalo than it is to kill one of us. They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve – then they won't have to fight us. Those who don't want to starve will have to go where the whites want to put them." The two men sat in silence for a while. Some young men were racing their horses a little farther down the canyon. Kicking Wolf usually took a keen interest in such contests. He wanted to know which horses were fastest. But today he didn't care. He felt too sad. "The medicine men are deceiving the young warriors when they tell them the buffalo will return," Buffalo Hump said. "If any buffalo come back they will only be ghost buffalo. Their ghosts might return because they remember these lands. But that will not help us. We cannot eat their ghosts.

I have been all over the world cooking and eating and training under extraordinary chefs. And the two food guys I would most like to go on a road trip with are Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlmann, both of whom I have met, and who are genuinely awesome guys, hysterically funny and easy to be with. But as much as I want to be the Batgirl in that trio, I fear that I would be woefully unprepared. Because an essential part of the food experience that those two enjoy the most is stuff that, quite frankly, would make me ralph. I don't feel overly bad about the offal thing. After all, variety meats seem to be the one area that people can get a pass on. With the possible exception of foie gras, which I wish like heckfire I liked, but I simply cannot get behind it, and nothing is worse than the look on a fellow foodie's face when you pass on the pate. I do love tongue, and off cuts like oxtails and cheeks, but please, no innards. Blue or overly stinky cheeses, cannot do it. Not a fan of raw tomatoes or tomato juice- again I can eat them, but choose not to if I can help it. Ditto, raw onions of every variety (pickled is fine, and I cannot get enough of them cooked), but I bonded with Scott Conant at the James Beard Awards dinner, when we both went on a rant about the evils of raw onion. I know he is often sort of douchey on television, but he was nice to me, very funny, and the man makes the best freaking spaghetti in tomato sauce on the planet. I have issues with bell peppers. Green, red, yellow, white, purple, orange. Roasted or raw. Idk. If I eat them raw I burp them up for days, and cooked they smell to me like old armpit. I have an appreciation for many of the other pepper varieties, and cook with them, but the bell pepper? Not my friend. Spicy isn't so much a preference as a physical necessity. In addition to my chronic and severe gastric reflux, I also have no gallbladder. When my gallbladder and I divorced several years ago, it got custody of anything spicier than my own fairly mild chili, Emily's sesame noodles, and that plastic Velveeta-Ro-Tel dip that I probably shouldn't admit to liking. I'm allowed very occasional visitation rights, but only at my own risk. I like a gentle back-of-the-throat heat to things, but I'm never going to meet you for all-you-can-eat buffalo wings. Mayonnaise squicks me out, except as an ingredient in other things. Avocado's bland oiliness, okra's slickery slime, and don't even get me started on runny eggs. I know. It's mortifying.

You are my friend, Prairie Flower. If I tell you what is in my heart, will you promise never to tell?" Prairie Flower laid a hand on Jesse's shoulder, pulling it away quickly when her friend flinched in pain. "I will not betray my friend." Taking a deep breath, Jesse lifted her head. "When Rides the Wing comes near to me, my heart sings.But I do not believe that he cares for me.I am clumsy in all of the things a Lakota woman must know.I cannot speak his language without many childish mistakes. And..." Jesse reached up to lay her hand on her short hair, "I am nothing to look at.I am not..." Prairie Flower grew angry. "I have told you he cares for you.Can you not see it?" Jesse shook her head. Prairie Flower spoke the unspeakable. "Then,if you cannot see that he cares for you in what he does,you must see it in what he has not done. You have been in his tepee. Dancing Waters has been gone many moons." "Stop!" Jesse demanded. "Stop it! I..just don't say any more!" She leaped up and ran out of the tepee-and into Rides the Wind, who was returning from the river where he had gone to draw water. Jesse knocked the water skins from both of his hands. Water spilled out and she fumbled an apology then bent stiffly to pick up the skins, wincing with the effort. "I will do it, Walks the Fire." His voice was tender as he bent and took the skins from her. Jesse protested, "It is the wife's job." She blushed, realizing that she had used a wrong word-the word for wife, instead of the word for woman. Rides the Wind interrupted before she could correct herself. "Walks the Fire is not the wife of Rides the Wind." Jesse blushed and remained quiet. A hand reached for hers and Rides the Wind said, "Come, sit." He helped her sit down just outside the door of the tepee. The village women took note as he went inside and brought out a buffalo robe. Sitting by Jesse,he placed the robe on the ground and began to talk. "I will tell you how it is with the Lakota. When a man wishes to take a wife..." he described Lakota courtship. As he talked, Jesse realiced that all that Prairie Flower had said seemed to be true.He had,indeed, done nearly everything involved in the courtship ritual. Still, she told herself, there is a perfectly good explanation for everything he has done. Rides the Wind continued describing the wedding feast. Jesse continued to reason with herself as he spoke. Then she realized the voice had stopped and he had repeated a question. "How is it among the whites?How does a man gain a wife?" Embarrassed,Jesse described the sparsest of courtships, the simplest wedding.Rides the Wind listened attentively. When she had finished, he said, "There is one thing the Lakota brave who wishes a wife does that I have not described." Pulling Jesse to her feet, he continued, "One evening, as he walks with his woman..." He reached out to pick up the buffalo robe.He was aware that the village women were watching carefully. "He spreads out his arms..." Rides the Wind spread his arms,opening the buffalo robe to its full length, "and wraps it about his woman," Rides the Wind turned toward Jesse and reached around her, "so that they are both inside the buffalo robe." He looked down at Jesse, trying to read her expression.When he saw nothing in the gray eyes, he abruptly dropped his arms. "But it is hot today and your wounds have not healed.I have said enough.You see how it is with the Lakota." When Jesse still said nothing, he continued, "You spoke of a celebration with a min-is-ter.It is a word I do not know.What is this min-is-ter?" "A man who belives in the Bible and teaches his people about God from the Bible." "What if there is no minister and a man and a woman wish to be married?" Jesse grew more uncomfortable. "I suppose they would wait until a minister came.

{Excerpt from a message from one of the Cherokee chiefs - Onitositaii, commonly known as Old Tassle} ... 'If, therefore, a bare march, or reconnoitering a country is sufficient reason to ground a claim to it, we shall insist upon transposing the demand, and your relinquishing your settlements on the western waters and removing one hundred miles back towards the east, whither some of our warriors advanced against you in the course of last year's campaign. Let us examine the facts of your present eruption into our country, and we shall discover your pretentions on that ground. What did you do? You marched into our territories with a superior force; our vigilance gave us no timely notice of your manouvres [sic]; your numbers far exceeded us, and we fled to the stronghold of our extensive woods, there to secure our women and children. Thus, you marched into our towns; they were left to your mercy; you killed a few scattered and defenseless individuals, spread fire and desolation wherever you pleased, and returned again to your own habitations. If you meant this, indeed, as a conquest you omitted the most essential point; you should have fortified the junction of the Holstein and Tennessee rivers, and have thereby conquered all the waters above you. But, as all are fair advantages during the existence of a state of war, it is now too late for us to suffer for your mishap of generalship! Again, were we to inquire by what law or authority you set up a claim, I answer, none! Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of the law of nature and the law of nations, and they are both against you. Indeed, much has been advanced on the want of what you term civilization among the Indians; and many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners, and your customs. But, we confess that we do not yet see the propriety, or practicability of such a reformation, and should be better pleased with beholding the good effect of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them, or reading your papers to us upon such subjects. You say: Why do not the Indians till the ground and live as we do? May we not, with equal propriety, ask, Why the white people do not hunt and live as we do? You profess to think it no injustice to warn us not to kill our deer and other game for the mere love of waste; but it is very criminal in our young men if they chance to kill a cow or a hog for their sustenance when they happen to be in your lands. We wish, however, to be at peace with you, and to do as we would be done by. We do not quarrel with you for killing an occasional buffalo, bear or deer on our lands when you need one to eat; but you go much farther; your people hunt to gain a livelihood by it; they kill all our game; our young men resent the injury, and it is followed by bloodshed and war. This is not a mere affected injury; it is a grievance which we equitably complain of and it demands a permanent redress. The Great God of Nature has placed us in different situations. It is true that he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people! He has given each their lands, under distinct considerations and circumstances: he has stocked yours with cows, ours with buffaloe; yours with hogs, ours with bear; yours with sheep, ours with deer. He has indeed given you an advantage in this, that your cattle are tame and domestic while ours are wild and demand not only a larger space for range, but art to hunt and kill them; they are, nevertheless, as much our property as other animals are yours, and ought not to be taken away without consent, or for something equivalent.' Those were the words of the Indians. But they were no binding on these whites, who were living beyond words, claims ...

The White Man has taken most of our land. He has paid us nothing for it. He has destroyed or driven away the game that was our meat. In 1868 he arranged to build through the Indians' land a road on which ran iron horses that ate wood and breathed fire and smoke. We agreed. This road was only as wide as a man could stretch his arms. But the White Man had taken from the Indians the land for twenty miles on both sides of it. This land he had sold for money to people in the East. It was taken from the Indians. But the Indians got nothing for it.

To ensure that no men would be kept from the fray because they lacked equipment, the Buffalo merchant Robert Foote threw open all the resources of his store, passing out guns, ammunition, slickers, blankets, and flour to anyone who wanted them. Foote rode up and down the Buffalo main street, “mounted on his celebrated black horse, with his long white beard flowing in the breeze,” and shouted: “Come out, you — —, and take sides. Now is the time to show your colors.

went to the White House and got the President out of bed. Carey and President Harrison were said to be old Senate friends, and no one was present at this session to speak for Johnson County. Quickly convinced of the necessity for immediate action, Harrison ordered a telegram send to General John R. Brooke in Omaha shortly after 11:00 P.M.4 At 11:05 P.M. the president wired Governor Barber that “in compliance with your call for the aid of the United States forces to protect the state of Wyoming against domestic violence,” he had ordered the secretary of war to send troops.5 The president did not have his facts right — the state of Wyoming needed no saving from domestic violence — but Governor Barber made no effort to set the record straight. At 11:37 P.M. General Brooke telegrammed Governor Barber, informing him that the commanding officer at Fort McKinney had been ordered “to prevent violence and preserve peace.”6 This message was received in Buffalo at 12:05 P.M., and within two hours, troops rode out of Fort McKinney under orders from the post’s commanding officer, Colonel J. J. Van Horn.7

Two days later, on August 17, Smith’s Cove was abuzz with activity. The bulldozer was scraping a deep pathway from the beach, past the beach shack, heading up toward the Cave-In Pit, and the pump was pulling water from the bottom of the freshly-dug shaft located partly up the hill. Bobby was working near the beach shack with Andrew Demont, Leonard Kaizer, and Cyril Hiltz--young, local men who were helping Bobby to clear brush and burn it in an empty 50-gallon drum that sat on the shoreline. Both Dunfield and Karl Graeser were also on site. The air was electric with optimism and urgency. My father needed to take the boat over to mainland so he could visit his bank in Chester before closing time--papers had to be signed before Dunfield’s funds could be released. Dad was running late, but before he went up to the cabin to change his clothes for the trip ashore, he decided to take one last look in the new shaft to see how well the pump was getting rid of water. This newest shaft was behind the beach shack at a point where the land had started to rise to go up to the clearing. The shaft was large and deep (10 feet by 30 feet by 27 feet deep) and had three or four feet of water in the bottom. Dad peered down into the shaft, and without a sound, he tumbled in. Bobby saw it happen, dropped the bushes he had in his hands, and raced over to help. Others did, too. Bobby started down the ladder, but suddenly fell into the shaft. Karl Graeser was right behind Bobby, and began to climb down, but he lost consciousness and slid into the shaft, too. Cyril Hiltz followed Karl, and Cyril’s cousin, Andrew Demont, was close behind. Leonard Kaizer was the last man to rush in to help the others. One-by-one, as each man tried to climb down the ladder into the shaft, he lost consciousness and fell in. Ed White, a fireman from Buffalo, was visiting the island that day with a group of friends. He heard the cries for help and rushed to the shaft. His wife pleaded with him not to go down, but White tied a handkerchief around his face and had someone lower him into the shaft. He was able to get a rope around Leonard Kaizer, so that those at the top could pull him out. Then White went after Andrew Demont, who was unconscious with his arms locked around a steel pipe, which supported him above water. Even in his unconscious state, Demont lashed out and punched White. But the fireman prevailed and got the rope harness around him so that he could be pulled from the shaft. Ed White was a hero. He saved Leonard Kaizer and Andy Demont that day. But he could do no more. By then, he, too, was feeling the effects of the invisible gas. On that fateful day, August 17, 1965, Cyril Hiltz, Karl Graeser, Bob Restall, Sr., and Bob Restall, Jr. all lost their lives. The coroner’s ruling was “death by drowning.

Too disparately settled and demoralized to fight back physically, the Native Americans found a kind of inner resistance through the Ghost Dance movement. In 1889, Wovoka, a Paiute shaman, had a vision. It was an essentially peaceful one: The tribes should cooperate with each other and the white man. A ritual was to be followed, which would bring back dead Indians and make the white man head back east of his own accord. The buffalo would return to the plains. Wovoka taught the ritual, a five-day dance, to members of various tribes (including a representative of the Mormons), who interpreted it in light of their own culture and experience. The warlike Lakota added the idea of the Ghost Shirt, a ceremonial garment that made the wearer immune to bullets. Lakota began to perform the dance. The authorities took this as a sign that they were planning an uprising; in 1890, the army was dispatched to arrest tribal leaders, including Sitting Bull.

Ah, me! Roll them back, you ruthless harvester of the years. Give back to me Nat-ah’-ki and my youth. Return to us our lodge and the wide, brown, buffalo plains.

When the headmen walked out of the gate in front, beyond the delicate and civilized little white fence, they were met and surrounded by soldiers and the soldiers reached out to them in a moving confusion of blue woolen arms and boots. The headmen were disarmed and handcuffed. A man named Big Tree fought for a short while but three soldiers flattened him on the ground and cuffed his hands behind him. A revolver fell from beneath the buffalo robe of Eaten Alive and it went off with a startling bang but nobody was hit. A soldier picked it up delicately by the grip between thumb and forefinger. He said that Agent Hammond might want to make out a receipt for this but the sergeant told him to shut up. The men walked away between the soldiers quietly and stepped into the army transport wagon. It was not dignified to struggle. The women and children had scattered to the horses and within moments they were gone. Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (p. 306). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

Washakie said that I was just like the rest of the white men. They would kill buffaloes as long as there were any in sight and leave their carcasses over the prairies for the wolves. He said that was not the way of the Indians. They killed only what they needed and saved all the meat and hides. “The Great Spirit,” he said, “would not like it if we slaughtered the game as the whites do. It would bring bad luck, and the Indians would go hungry if they killed the deer and buffaloes when they were not needed for food and clothing.

Most of the ingredients she cooked with came from the tiny farm immediately behind the restaurant. It was so small that the Pertinis could shout from one end of it to another, but the richness of the soil meant that it supported a wealth of vegetables, including tomatoes, zucchini, black cabbage, eggplant and several species that were unique to the region, including bitter friarielli and fragrant asfodelo. There was also a small black boar called Garibaldi, who despite his diminutive size impregnated his harem of four larger wives with extraordinary diligence; an ancient olive tree through which a couple of vines meandered; a chicken or two; and the Pertinis' pride and joy, Priscilla and Pupetta, the two water buffalo, who grazed on a patch of terraced pasture no bigger than a tennis court. The milk they produced was porcelain white, and after hours of work each day it produced just two or three mozzarelle, each one weighing around two pounds- but what mozzarelle: soft and faintly grassy, like the sweet steamy breath of the bufale themselves. As well as mozzarella, the buffalo milk was crafted into various other specialties. Ciliègine were small cherry-shaped balls for salads, while bocconcini were droplet-shaped, for wrapping in slices of soft prosciutto ham. Trecce, tresses, were woven into plaits, served with Amalfi lemons and tender sprouting broccoli. Mozzarella affumicata was lightly smoked and brown in color, while scamorza was smoked over a smoldering layer of pecan shells until it was as dark and rich as a cup of strong espresso. When there was surplus milk they even made a hard cheese, ricotta salata di bufala, which was salted and slightly fruity, perfect for grating over roasted vegetables. But the cheese the Pertinis were best known for was their burrata, a tiny sack of the finest, freshest mozzarella, filled with thick buffalo cream and wrapped in asphodel leaves.

Originally the Indians made their tepees of buffalo hides, but since the destruction of the buffalo herds by the white man, domestic cow hides have been used, as well as canvas. New buffalo-hide tepee covers were made every spring. The size of the tepee depended somewhat on the number of horses the tribe or family had, because it required several horses to transport a large tepee. The poles were made of lodgepole pine, cedar, spruce, or any other straight tree. Flexible poles were not used. The poles averaged about 25 feet in length and tapered from 4 to 1 inch in diameter. In warm weather the lower part of the tepee was raised up on the poles to allow the breeze to blow through. In cold weather the space around the bottom between the stakes and the ground was packed with sod to hold it down tightly and to keep out the snow and drafts. When the tepee was new it was nearly white. But by spring, the smoke and the weather had darkened it at the top and the skins became quite transparent. At night the campfires made the tepees look like large Japanese lanterns. On the Great Plains the wind is usually from the west and for that reason the tepees were set up with the smoke hole facing the east. The flaps, or smoke hole ears, as they are called, were used to control the drafts and to keep the wind from blowing down the smoke hole. In case of a storm they could be lapped over to close the smoke hole completely.

The buffalo played a large part in the ceremonies and mythology of the Plains Indians. Many myths and folk tales about the buffalo, which delighted both young and old, were told and retold about the campfires. The first buffalo spirit was supposed to have been born in a northern cave and was said to have been pure white. It had great powers in healing, especially wounds. A white buffalo in a herd was supposed to be the reappearance of this buffalo spirit on earth. The hide taken from such an animal was sacred and had special ceremonial purposes. Most of the Plains tribes had buffalo societies. The members of these groups took part in special buffalo ceremonies and dances. These men had personal names suggesting movements, actions, or postures of the animal, such as “Standing Buffalo,” or “Sitting Bull.” The Buffalo Dance of the Plains tribes has many forms. Sometimes a herd of buffalo are represented. In this dance we have only one buffalo wearing a buffalo mask and a buffalo tail. Other dancers, eight or more in number, are hunters carrying feathered lances and shields.

The Indians painted their faces and bodies for several different reasons—sometimes for protection against the sun, wind, and insects. Some of the markings indicated memberships in various political or religious societies; others represented brave deeds done by the wearer. Many times the designs were merely personal decoration without any particular meaning. The dry coloring matter was carried in small buckskin bags and was mixed with bear or buffalo fat before being rubbed on the skin. Clays containing oxide or iron were used for red; kaolin clay was used for white; black was made from wood charcoal; and green from powdered copper ore. Colors did not represent the same things in every tribe, but generally most tribes used black to represent death, red for human life, blue for sadness or trouble, white for peace or purity, and yellow for joy.

The Prophecy From the place where the sun rises, there will come to the People a great warrior who will stand tall above his brothers and see far into the great beyond with eyes like the midnight sky. This Comanche shall carry the sign of the wolf upon his shield, yet none shall call him chief. To his people shall come much sadness, and the rivers will run red with the blood of his nation. Mountains of white bones will mark where the mighty buffalo once grazed. In the sky, black smoke will carry away the death cries of helpless women and children. He will make big talk against the White-Eyes and fierce war, but the battles shall stretch before him with no horizon. When his hatred for the White-Eyes is hot like the summer sun and cold like the winter snow, there will come to him a gentle maiden from tosi tivo land. Though her voice will have been silenced by great sorrow, her eyes shall speak into his of a morning with new beginnings. She will be golden like the new day, with skin as white as the night moon, hair like rippling honey, and eyes like the summer sky. The People will call her the Little Wise One. The Comanche will raise his blade to slay her, but honor will stay his hand. She will divide his Comanche heart, so his hate that burns hot like the sun will make war with his hate that is cold like the winter snow, and the hate shall melt and flow out of him to some faraway place he cannot find. Just as the dawn streaks the night sky, he will chase the shadows form her heart and return her voice to her. When this is done, the warrior and his maiden shall walk together to a high place on the night of the Comanche moon. He will stand on the land of the Comanche, she on the land of the tosi tivo. Between them will be a great canyon that runs high with blood. The warrior will reach across the canyon to his maiden, and she will take his hand. Together they will travel a great distance into the west lands, where they will give birth to a new tomorrow and a new nation where the Comanche and the tosi tivo will live as one forever.

You will be warm with me in my lodge? I have many buffalo robes. And plenty food. Meat, yes? And my strong arm will protect you, forever into the horizon. There is nothing to fear.” He pressed his hand more firmly against her midriff. “My tongue does not make lies. It is the truth I speak, not penende taquoip, the honey talk, but a promise. I have spoken the words, and they are carried away on the wind to whisper to me always. You will trust? When I go away from you on raids and hunting trips, my brother’s strong arm will be yours. No harm will come to you.” Loretta swallowed. His brother? The man who had helped pour water down her, she guessed. The one he called Warrior. “You can seek death another time. Te-bit-ze, sure enough. But first, you will see what lies on the horizon. It is wisdom.” “I want--” Tension and disuse strung her voice so taut, it twanged like a harp cord. “I want to go home.” “That cannot be. You go with me--to a new place. You are my woman, eh? You have said it, I have said it. Suvate, it is finished.” “I’m not your woman,” she cried. “You stole me from my family.” “I traded many fine horses.” “You bought me, then. And that’s just as--” Loretta craned her neck and stared up at his carved features. “I’m a person, not a thing.” “The white men have slaves, and this is okay, yes? Your Gray Coats fight the great fight so you can own black men. Is this not so? This Comanche has a slave, too. It is good.” “No! It’s not good. It’s monstrous.” She passed a hand over her eyes. “I’ll die before I let you touch me. You hear me?” “Ah, but Blue Eyes, I tough you now.” He slid his hand up her ribs and gently cupped her breast. “You see? I touch you, and you do not die. There is nothing to fear.

The long bone beads used in the breastplate were called hair pipes. They were used as a medium of exchange in trading. The finer they were, the more valuable they were. Originally they were made out of buffalo bones and later on, out of cow bones. They were not made by the Indians, however, but by white men who traded them to the Indians.

There’s a native American legend. It says that one day a white buffalo will be born during a summer storm. The crows will nest with the eagles and salmon will spawn in the sea. Then, and only then, will Hank and Sloane find a common vision.

Look what I have here. A gift, yes? For your woman. A gift like no other.” He pulled something sparkly from a parfleche and palmed it, extending his arm toward Hunter. “Moonlight on water, cousin. A comb for your tosi wife.” Drawn by the glisten of bright stones, Hunter lifted the comb and turned it to catch the firelight. For an instant he imagined the look on Loretta’s face if he were to give her something so fine. Then he discarded the thought. “You took it off a woman you killed. She would spit upon it.” “No! I traded with the Comancheros for it.” Excitement coursed up Hunter’s spine. He wanted so badly to give Loretta pretty things, things a white woman would treasure. He knew his world was vastly different from hers. A comb like this might console her. “How much?” “It’s a gift!” “Ah, no. Only a woman’s husband should give her something so beautiful.” “It will cost you a blanket,” Red Buffalo said with a shrug. Hunter snorted. “Two horses, no less.” “One. I will accept no more.” Red Buffalo laughed. “We do this backward, eh, cousin? Some fine traders we are.

The wise ones called council. We cannot remain passive. The whites must be driven out. Now is the right time, while they are at war amongst themselves. Their soldiers are away. They’re defenseless. The People must strike.” Red Buffalo’s sobbing quieted. “But Hunter, that is exactly what you feared might happen. What about survival through peace?” “It’s too late for that.” A heavy ache centered itself in Hunter’s chest. “I am a dreamer, Red Buffalo. The land is like a single bone between a pair of starving dogs. There is enough for only one. Peace will never come, never. You were right all along, and I was too blind to see it.

As Red Buffalo disappeared into the darkness, Hunter’s hand, which was riding Loretta’s thickened waist, tightened. He glanced down, his brows lifting in question. With a wondrous expression on his face, he placed his other palm on her slightly swollen abdomen. “Blue Eyes, what is this?” Loretta looked up at him through tears. “Our child, Hunter.” His warm fingers flexed and curled protectively. A slow smile spread across his mouth. “A child…” The words were a reverent whisper. “Our child.” Loretta placed her hand over his, so filled with love for him that she felt she might die of it. The future was filled with uncertainty. The way ahead might be fraught with danger. And they would be completely alone. Two people, against a world of hostility. None of that really frightened her, though. Theirs was no ordinary love, and she knew the course of their lives would have a far greater purpose than that of simply being together. They would find their way west, just as the prophecy had foretold. She knew they would. The Comanche nation was doomed. There was no stopping the tide of white settlers that washed over their land. An entire race of people would eventually be conquered and all but destroyed. She and Hunter were like a seed floating on the wind. Somehow, somewhere, they would find a fertile place, where they could put down roots and grow strong. Through them, the People would live on. The gods had sent her and Hunter a sign to help them believe, to give them faith, and she no longer had a single doubt that all the words of Hunter’s song would somehow come to pass. Within her grew a child, both tosi tivo and Comanche, the child of the great warrior with indigo eyes and his honey-haired maiden. A child who brought new hope for the People and tomorrow.

When she finally grew still, a taut silence settled over them. From the corner of his eye he could see her worrying her lip, her small white teeth sinking into the soft pink flesh. Remembering how those lips felt beneath his, another surge of longing knotted his guts, making him recall the plans he had made for the evening--plans that were now drifting away on the wind. He wanted her, yes, but not if it meant forcing her. “I suppose that…” Her voice trailed off. She plucked nervously at her skirt, then ran her fingertips up the line of buttons on her bodice. She glanced around nervously, still nibbling her lip. “I, um, haven’t forgotten my promises to you.” “This is good.” Hunter watched her with gentle amusement. “A promise is a promise, even when given under unusual circumstances. You kept up your part, and--” She seemed unable to meet his gaze. “I’m sure you expect me to keep up mine.” A dark flush crept up her neck. “I, um, guess you had Amy taken to your mother’s so we could--so we could…” She looked so distressed that Hunter took pity on her. “Ah, yes, we have a bargain, do we not?” He forced a long and very loud yawn. “My heart is heavy to say these words, Blue Eyes, but I am sure enough weary after traveling so far, eh?” Her expression brightened so visibly that he nearly chuckled. “Oh, but of course!” she exclaimed in a shaky little voice. “You’ve ridden a very long way. You must be exhausted.” He yawned again and patted the fur beside him. “You will lie beside me.” “But what about Amy?” “Your Aye-mee is with my mother, yes? The woman who is mean like a buffalo. She is safe. You will be easy about her until the sun shows its face.” His voice turned husky. “Keemah, come.

* Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? “The first people who come to mind are the real heroes of Task Unit Bruiser: Marc Lee, first SEAL killed in Iraq. Mike Monsoor, second SEAL killed in Iraq, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor after he jumped on a grenade to save three of our other teammates. And finally, Ryan Job, one of my guys [who was] gravely wounded in Iraq, blinded in both eyes, but who made it back to America, was medically retired from the Navy, but who died from complications after the 22nd surgery to repair his wounds. Those guys, those men, those heroes, they lived, and fought, and died like warriors.” * Most-gifted or recommended books? “I think there’s only one book that I’ve ever given and I’ve only given it to a couple people. That’s a book called About Face, by Colonel David H. Hackworth. The other book that I’ve read multiple times is Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy].” * Favorite documentaries? “Restrepo, which I’m sure you’ve seen. [TF: This was co-produced and co-filmed by Sebastian Junger, the next profile.] There is also an hour-long program called ‘A Chance in Hell: The Battle for Ramadi.’” Quick Takes * You walk into a bar. What do you order from the bartender? “Water.” * What does your diet generally look like? “It generally looks like steak.” * What kind of music does Jocko listen to? Two samples: For workouts—Black Flag, My War, side B In general—White Buffalo

Hunter crouched beside the fire, a cup of coffee cradled in his palms, his gaze fixed on the shifting flames. He could see his yellow-hair from the corner of his eye and knew every time she moved, every time she looked at him. Somehow she had managed to stay covered with the fur while she pulled on his shirt and her ruffled breeches. His brother, Warrior, squatted next to him and began tossing chips of bark onto the coals, watching them ignite. “The tosi tivo must be very poor lovers.” Hunter glanced up, more than a little bewildered by his brother’s observation. Warrior was like that, though, the thoughts in his heart darting here and there like autumn leaves caught up in the wind. “You don’t agree?” Warrior pressed. Warrior’s voice and the musical cadence of the Comanche language fell sweetly on Hunter’s ears. Talking tosi tivo talk to the yellow-hair had left a dirty taste on his tongue. “The tosi tivo are very poor at everything.” Warrior glanced toward the yellow-hair, squinting as a trail of smoke got in his face. “She still hides beneath the buffalo robe. Your shirt and her ruffles are not enough.” Hunter searched his brother’s dark eyes. “I think the tosi tivo teach their women such foolishness because they are afraid.” “Hm. And what would they be afraid of?” Warrior grinned. “A woman who isn’t well loved will seek solace elsewhere.” Hunter huffed at that idea. “With as many children as their women bear, how can you think they need solace? The trouble with the tosi tivo is that they have no honor. They will call a man friend, then borrow his woman when his back is turned. The many clothes make the wife borrowing a little more tricky, eh?” A thoughtful frown settled on Warrior’s forehead. He dumped the remainder of the wood chips he had collected onto the fire. The flames hissed hungrily and flared brighter. “This is the truth? And what of the females? Don’t they spurn the men who try to shame them?” “The females have no honor, either.” Brushing his hands clean on his leggings, Warrior shot a worried look at the white woman. “You must teach her, eh? If you go down in battle and I have to take her into my lodge circle, I want to know her children are yours.” “She will learn. I will teach her honor if I kill her doing it.

The girl is half my size. I think I can handle her without calling council.” “You disappoint me, Hunter. Where is the patience you show with the wild horses you train? Has it gone the way of the wind?” “A horse is worth the trouble. A yellow-hair is not.” “I know men who greatly treasure golden women. Perhaps she will grow on you.” “I prefer a horse. A black one.” “Women, horses, there is little difference, eh? Well trained, they both give men smooth rides and much pleasure. What happens when you first rope a mustang?” Hunter knew where this conversation was going and refused the bait. Warrior replied for him. “Every time he runs against the rope, he flips end over end.” “And what does he learn? Not to challenge your rope, eh? After that first lesson, he knows you are his master and allows you to gentle him with kindness. The white woman is the same. She is afraid and lunging against the rope. As soon as you break her of that, the battle is won, eh?” Hunter wished it could be that simple. When a horse accepted the touch of his hand, joy filled him. After swirling the dregs of his coffee, Hunter emptied his cup onto the fire. Rising to his feet, he said, “You are both very wise, and I am glad of your advice. I will handle the woman my way, though. She is my woman, eh?” “Take care,” Old Man warned. “The tosi tivo are unpredictable. Especially the females. Wisest-One had himself a yellow-hair once. After one night in his buffalo robes, she jumped into the Talking Water River and drowned herself. Not even Wisest-One could be that bad a lover.

An hour later he lay awake beside Loretta, staring at the firelight that played upon the walls of his lodge. Red Buffalo’s words haunted him. If Loretta had to choose, would she forsake him for her people? He knew she was awake by the sound of her breathing, but her voice still startled him when she spoke. “Hunter, what’s wrong? Surely you’re not still stewing over the scalp. It upset me, but I’m over it now.” He turned to regard her. There were shadows in her eyes, and she was as pale as bleached bones. “You lie, Blue Eyes. Many of your people are dead, by my cousin’s hand, and their spirits wail and call out to you.” “It wasn’t you who killed them. That’s all that counts.” Hunter’s chest tightened. One day he would ride into battle again--to slay White Eyes. It was inevitable. How would she feel about that? “You are Comanche now, yes?” he said hopefully. “One with us.” Indefinable emotions played across her face. “I’m married to a Comanche. I love him. But I’ll never be a Comanche.” Hunter studied her features, once so repulsive to him, now so cherished. He ran a finger up the fragile bridge of her nose, then traced the line of her brow, acutely conscious of the small bones that shaped her face. Protectiveness welled within him. “You are one with me, one with my people. You cannot stand with one foot on Comanche land and the other on tosi tivo land.” “Both my feet are here, Hunter, but part of my heart is at my wooden walls. No matter how much I love you, that will never change. You are one with me, too. Does that make you one with the tosi tivo?” An unnameable fear grew within him. He felt very much as he had several summers ago when he had been caught in a flash flood, swept along by the raging water. The Comanche struggle for survival was like that, surging forward, catching up everyone in its path. Men like Red Buffalo fed its fury.

Loretta awoke shortly after dawn, alone in a cocoon of fur. She had only the haziest memory of Hunter carrying her to bed after making love to her last night. She sat up, clutching the buffalo robe to her naked breasts. Her clothing lay neatly folded on the foot of the bed, the rawhide wrappings for her braids resting on top. Her blond hair fascinated Hunter, and he had never yet made love to her without first unfastening her braids. A sad smile touched her mouth. Hunter, the typical slovenly Indian, picking up after his tosi wife. She had been so wrong about so many things. She hugged her knees and rested her chin on them, gazing sightlessly into the shadows, listening to the village sounds. A woman was calling her dog. Somewhere a child was crying. The smell of roasting meat drifted on the breeze. Familiar sounds, familiar smells, the voices of friends. When had the village begun to seem like home? Loretta closed her eyes, searching desperately within herself for her own identity and memories, but white society was no longer a reality to her. Hunter had become the axis of her world, Hunter and his people. Amy lay sleeping on her pallet a short distance away. Loretta listened to her even breathing. Amy, Aunt Rachel, home. Could she return there now and pick up the threads of her old life? The answer wasn’t long in coming. Life without Hunter would be no life at all.

The history of the land is a history of blood. In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming. It’s all in the telling. The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow. Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness. Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.) The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead. The land remembers everything, though. It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting. The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood. Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded. The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb. All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us. We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing. One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis. Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever! Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun.

The arrival of the food snapped me out of my reverie. Like many chefs in Roma, the Farnese chef had taken much inspiration from Bartolomeo over the years. The first course included slices of Parmesan; olives from Tivoli; cherries in little gilded cups; a salad of sliced citron with sugar and rosewater; veal rolls dredged in coriander, spit-roasted, then topped with raisins soaked in wine; peas in the pod served with pepper and vinegar; salted buffalo tongue, cooked, then sliced and served cold with lemon; a delicate soup of cheese and egg yolks poured over roasted pigeon; blancmange white as snow and sprinkled with sugar; roasted artichokes and pine nut tourtes.

BY 1876, THE YEAR THE Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought, the United States had become a nation of some forty million people, the vast majority of whom had never seen a fighting Indian—not, that is, unless they happened to glimpse one or another of the powerful Indian leaders whom the government periodically paraded through Washington or New York, usually Red Cloud, the powerful Sioux diplomat, who made a long-winded speech at Cooper Union in 1870. Or, it might be Spotted Tail, of the Brulé Sioux; or American Horse, or even, if they were lucky, Sitting Bull, who hated whites, the main exceptions being Annie Oakley, his “Little Sure Shot,” or Buffalo Bill Cody, who once described Sitting Bull as “peevish,” surely the understatement of the century. Sitting Bull often tried to marry Annie Oakley, who was married; he did not succeed.

Niobe earned the ire of the gods by bragging about her seven lovely daughters and seven “handsome sons—whom the easily offended Olympians soon slaughtered for her impertinence. Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. Still, while elusiveness and loss tortured Tantalus and Niobe, it is actually a surfeit of their namesake elements that has decimated central Africa. There’s a good chance you have tantalum or niobium in your pocket right now. Like their periodic table neighbors, both are dense, heat-resistant, noncorrosive metals that hold a charge well—qualities that make them vital for compact cell phones. In the mid-1990s cell phone designers started demanding both metals, especially tantalum, from the world’s largest supplier, the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire. Congo sits next to Rwanda in central Africa, and most of us probably remember the Rwandan butchery of the 1990s. But none of us likely remembers the day in 1996 when the ousted Rwandan government of ethnic Hutus spilled into Congo seeking “refuge. At the time it seemed just to extend the Rwandan conflict a few miles west, but in retrospect it was a brush fire blown right into a decade of accumulated racial kindling. Eventually, nine countries and two hundred ethnic tribes, each with its own ancient alliances and unsettled grudges, were warring in the dense jungles. Nonetheless, if only major armies had been involved, the Congo conflict likely would have petered out. Larger than Alaska and dense as Brazil, Congo is even less accessible than either by roads, meaning it’s not ideal for waging a protracted war. Plus, poor villagers can’t afford to go off and fight unless there’s money at stake. Enter tantalum, niobium, and cellular technology. Now, I don’t mean to impute direct blame. Clearly, cell phones didn’t cause the war—hatred and grudges did. But just as clearly, the infusion of cash perpetuated the brawl. Congo has 60 percent of the world’s supply of the two metals, which blend together in the ground in a mineral called coltan. Once cell phones caught on—sales rose from virtually zero in 1991 to more than a billion by 2001—the West’s hunger proved as strong as Tantalus’s, and coltan’s price grew tenfold. People purchasing ore for cell phone makers didn’t ask and didn’t care where the coltan came from, and Congolese miners had no idea what the mineral was used for, knowing only that white people paid for it and that they could use the profits to support their favorite militias. Oddly, tantalum and niobium proved so noxious because coltan was so democratic. Unlike the days when crooked Belgians ran Congo’s diamond and gold mines, no conglomerates controlled coltan, and no backhoes and dump trucks were necessary to mine it. Any commoner with a shovel and a good back could dig up whole pounds of the stuff in creek beds (it looks like thick mud). In just hours, a farmer could earn twenty times what his neighbor did all year, and as profits swelled, men abandoned their farms for prospecting. This upset Congo’s already shaky food supply, and people began hunting gorillas for meat, virtually wiping them out, as if they were so many buffalo. But gorilla deaths were nothing compared to the human atrocities. It’s not a good thing when money pours into a country with no government.

the white tents. 17. Two views of The Wild West in Paris, igo5. Colonel Cody, a Hawkeye by birth, is personally lionized by the Parisians, and his unique exhibition, so full of historical and dramatic interest, made a wonderful impression upon the susceptible French public. The twenty lessons I took in French, at the Berlitz School of Languages, London, only gave me a faint idea of what the language was like, but as I was required to make my lectures and announcements in French, I had my speeches translated, and was coached in their delivery by Monsieur Corthesy, editeur, le journal de Londres. Well, I got along pretty fair, considering that I did not know the meaning of half the words I was saying. Anyway it amused them, so I was satisfied. I honestly believe that more people came in the side show in Paris to hear and laugh at my "rotten" French than anything else, and when I found that a certain word or expression excited their risibilities, I never changed it. I can look back now and see where some of my own literal translations were very funny. Colonel Cody's exhibition is unique in many ways, and might justly be termed a polyglot school, no less than twelve distinct languages being spoken in the camp, viz.: Japanese, Russian, French, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, German, Italian, Spanish, Holland, Flemish, Chinese, Sioux and English. Being in such close contact every day, we were bound to get some idea of each other's tongue, and all acquire a fair idea of English. Colonel Cody is, therefore, entitled to considerable credit for disseminating English, and thus preserving the entente cordiale between nations. 18. Entrance to the Wild West, Champs de Mars, Paris, Igo5. The first place of public interest that we visited in Paris was the Jardin des Plantes (botanical and zoological garden) and le Musee d'Histoire Naturelle. The zoological collection would suffer in comparison with several in America I might mention, but the Natural History Museum is very complete, and is, to my notion, the most artistically arranged of any museum I have visited. Le Palais du Trocadero, which was in sight of our grounds and facing the

We tried to run," Louise Weasel Bear said, "but they shot us like we were a buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children.

White people don’t want to be seen as having prejudice, so they go out of their way to treat Indians like they’re anyone else. And that’s right about half the time. But there’s a fundamentally different outlook, especially with the older generation. I can help you navigate that. Okay?

To me, this isn’t just about John Running Boy. I want to know who drove those buffalo over the cliffs. I want to know who, and I want to know why, and I want to know about the guy who died there. I want the guilty to pay for their sins. There’s a purity in that kind of pursuit. It’s black and white.” He gave a short laugh. “Unlike the rest of life.” Sean stopped himself there, embarrassed that he’d given voice to the code he lived by, something he’d seldom confessed, even to lovers.

himself hard with unscented soap. Then he turned the temperature down, stood under freezing water until he could tolerate that no longer, stepped out and dried himself. He examined his wounds from last night: two large aubergine-coloured bruises on his leg, some scrapes and the slice on his shoulder from the grenade shrapnel. Nothing serious. He shaved with a heavy, double-bladed safety razor, its handle of light buffalo horn. He used this fine accessory not because it was greener to the environment than the plastic disposables that most men employed but simply because it gave a better shave – and required some skill to wield; James Bond found comfort even in small challenges. By seven fifteen he was dressed: a navy-blue Canali suit, a white sea island shirt and a burgundy Grenadine tie, the latter items from Turnbull & Asser. He donned black shoes, slip-ons; he never wore laces, except for combat footwear or when tradecraft required him to send silent messages to a fellow agent via prearranged loopings. Onto his wrist he slipped his steel Rolex Oyster Perpetual, the 34mm model, the date window its only complication; Bond did not need to know the phases of

His suspicion was that white people simply had no serious interest in truth. What they managed to see was usually enough truth for them, even if it was only half of what was there to see.

As for Sitting Bull, he was so indifferent to everything except his own fame that he rarely even came on deck, preferring to sit in the boat’s saloon and squeeze white women when they asked for autographs. Most of the white women on the boat had already been squeezed several times, and had more Sitting Bull autographs than they could use.

One day a young man stood at the foot of Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia, sugar town, 1882. Folded into his vest, a letter of reference. He had an idea that involved a railroad ticket and the millions of dead buffalo out west. If he could get those bones into railroad cars and ship them to Philadelphia, they could be heated in a sealed vessel at 700 degrees Celsius, which was 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, not easy to imagine. The super-heating would drive off the organic matter in the bones, leaving activated carbon, composed of tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and carbon. Bone charcoal. Bone black. Ivory black. Animal charcoal. Abaiser. Pigment black 9. Bone char. Carbo animalis. Buffalo black. This substance could be used to refine crude raw sugar processed from sugarcane, slave sugar, although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now. Bone char worked better than bull’s blood or egg whites or any other substance to bleach the sugar white. And the bones! The bones were everywhere, he’d heard, littering the ground, so thick that a farmer couldn’t plow without stacking them beside the fields. He went into

One day a young man stood at the foot of Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia, sugar town, 1882. Folded into his vest, a letter of reference. He had an idea that involved a railroad ticket and the millions of dead buffalo out west. If he could get those bones into railroad cars and ship them to Philadelphia, they could be heated in a sealed vessel at 700 degrees Celsius, which was 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, not easy to imagine. The super-heating would drive off the organic matter in the bones, leaving activated carbon, composed of tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and carbon. Bone charcoal. Bone black. Ivory black. Animal charcoal. Abaiser. Pigment black 9. Bone char. Carbo animalis. Buffalo black. This substance could be used to refine crude raw sugar processed from sugarcane, slave sugar, although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now. Bone char worked better than bull’s blood or egg whites or any other substance to bleach the sugar white. And the bones! The bones were everywhere, he’d heard, littering the ground, so thick that a farmer couldn’t plow without stacking them beside the fields. He went into business. The bones were picked up by human

RED JACKET, SAGOYEWATHA (Seneca) “We like our religion, and do not want another” (May 1811) Red Jacket (c. 1751-1830) addressed Reverend Alexander, from New York City, during a Seneca council at Buffalo Creek. Brother!—We listened to the talk you delivered us from the Council of Black-Coats, in New York. We have fully considered your talk, and the offers you have made us. We now return our answer, which we wish you also to understand. In making up our minds, we have looked back to remember what has been done in our days, and what our fathers have told us was done in old times. Brother!—Great numbers of Black-Coats have been among the Indians. With sweet voices and smiling faces, they offered to teach them the religion of the white people. Our brethren in the East listened to them. They turned from the religion of their fathers, and took up the religion of the white people. What good has it done? Are they more friendly one to another than we are? No, Brother! They are a divided people—we are united. They quarrel about religion—we live in love and friendship. Besides, they drink strong waters. And they have learned how to cheat, and how to practice all the other vices of the white people, without imitating their virtues. Brother!—If you wish us well, keep away; do not disturb us. Brother!—We do not worship the Great Spirit as the white people do, but we believe that the forms of worship are indifferent to the Great Spirit. It is the homage of sincere hearts that pleases him, and we worship him in that manner. According to your religion, we must believe in a Father and Son, or we shall not be happy hereafter. We have always believed in a Father, and we worship him as our old men taught us. Your book says that the Son was sent on Earth by the Father. Did all the people who saw the Son believe him? No! they did not. And if you have read the book, the consequence must be known to you. Brother!—You wish us to change our religion for yours. We like our religion, and do not want another. Our friends here [pointing to Mr. Granger, the Indian Agent, and two other whites] do us great good; they counsel us in trouble; they teach us how to be comfortable at all times. Our friends the Quakers do more. They give us ploughs, and teach us how to use them. They tell us we are accountable beings. But they do not tell us we must change our religion.—we are satisfied with what they do, and with what they say. SOURCE: B.B. Thatcher. Indian Life and Battles. Akron: New Werner Company, 1910. 312—314. Brother!—for these reasons we cannot receive your offers. We have other things to do, and beg you to make your mind easy, without troubling us, lest our heads should be too much loaded, and by and by burst.

Josiah White Buffalo tied the dead man’s

Crow?” I leaned against the counter. He took a deep breath. “Yes, but not River or Mountain Band. He is something else.” I pointed toward the moccasins. “The bead pattern is one I’ve never seen; it’s geometric, but not the Crow that I know.” He knelt by the bars and examined the medicine bag and moccasins, though I noticed he touched neither, and nodded. “Kicked-in-the-Belly.” I waited a moment. “You mind telling a heathen devil white man what that is?” He pivoted and sat on the floor with his back to the cell, which Dog took as an invitation and joined him. “Eelalapi’io, a shunned band, one of thirteen exogamous maternal clans; fourth clan, grouped with ackya’pkawi’a, or Bad War Honors. ” I watched as he thought about it, first categorizing the information and then translating it so that it would be relatable to me linguistically and culturally. “Seventeen-twenty-seven, or thereabouts, there was a Crow war party led by Young White Buffalo that raided the Fat River country and came back with a very strange animal. This animal was as large as the elk but with rounded hooves, a long tail, and mane; it had no antlers, and the tribe was very interested in this new thing. A brave got too close to the

for sixty-one days.” I began questioning the makeup of the negotiation team I’d brought with me to convince the chief of the Northern Cheyenne tribe that he should allow my daughter to be married at Crazy Head Springs. “Don’t call the White Buffalo a joint; it’s the nerve center of the reservation.” My undersheriff, Victoria Moretti,

Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind:  It is abomination.’  Leviticus, Chapter 18, Verse 22.” “How do you do that?  Rattling off all those quotes?” Micah stared blankly. “Well,” said Tommy, mulling it over.  Tommy tried not to laugh.  “It’d be kind of hard to, uh, lie with a man the way you lie with a woman.  A man doesn’t have a woman’s…uh.  Parts.” “I do not follow.” “I’m saying if you ‘lie’ with a man, and then you ‘lie’ with a woman, you’re going to be ‘lying’ two very different ways.

STEP 11  –  Spiritual Awareness We pray and think about ourselves, praying only for the strength to do what is right. We have always been a People of prayer. In our old ways, we prayed when the sun came up, we prayed when we picked the herbs that became our medicine, we prayed for a good harvest, and we prayed when the buffalo or deer was taken so our people might live. We are still a People of prayer. Something inside of us becomes alert when an Elder prays before a gathering. At home, there is prayer before a basketball game or a graduation. Step 11 is about re-awakening our gift of prayer and using it for sobriety, recovery and especially on the Wellbriety journey that will last our whole life. Many

for hundreds of stories had been handed down from their fathers and grandfathers of the way in which the white man had killed their people and driven them from the land that had been theirs for centuries.

Midnight Mass was required, and at Saint Aloysius, it lasted ninety minutes. Because the church was crowded with what Mother called “one timers” who attended Mass only on Christmas Eve, we arrived at 11:00 p.m. to get a seat near the front. The church was splendidly decorated. Poinsettias bloomed everywhere, huge wreaths and sprigs of holly tied with red bows hung on every pillar, potent incense enveloped us, and six tall candles burning on the main altar lighted our way out of the long, cold darkness. Carols sung from the choir loft filled the church and evoked the sensuous beauty and mystery of this holy night. While other children chatted with friends and showed off their holiday apparel, My PareNTs, gail aNd i, Mara aNd NiCho- las; ChrisTMas, 1974; CaNToN, ohio I sat quietly, awaiting the chimes that announced the first minutes of Christmas and heralded the solemn service: the priest’s white and gold vestments, his ritualized gestures, the Latin prayers, the incense, the communion service with the transfigured bread and wine, and the priest’s blessings from the high altar that together