4
THE
CHEM AW A
AM ERICAN
He told me I might go and get it, but the Sioux would kill me if I
went toward the river. Then I told him I would go toward the moun
tains where I knew I could find springs. I was naked. I had my rifle.
I met a Sioux, who had a fine horse. He tried to stop me. We fought.
I killed him and I got the the horse. It was all that I got in the fight.
That night it rained and I stood under a tree. I was cold and heart
sick. I had seen the end of the great Custer.
In the morning I started on I had not gone far when I met the
soldiers, hundreds of them, going toward the place of the fight. They
stopped me. I tried to make them understand. The leader was Gen
eral Terry, but I did not know it. I said there had been fighting and
Custer was gone.
They would not believe it. I tried harder and harder to make them
understand. Finally they did. General Terrv asked me where I was
going. I said.
“ 'Back to my people to get a fresh horse and come again to fight the
Sioux.’
’Go,’ he said, ‘and remember you are in the United States Service
till you are ready to come back. Your pay will go on.’
"Then I went back to the agency.”
White Man Runs Him has one unsatisfied ambition. He wants to
have Congress grant him the right to be buried among the soldiers and
the Indian scouts of the “ Great Yellow Haired Chief.” who fell in the
massacre 37 years ago. He expects to remain in Washington until after
the assembling of Congress and then he hopes that a bill will be intro
duced granting his request. The old chief carries with him a packet of
etters of indorsement of himself as a progressive Indian with high am
bition for the betterment of his tribe and also recording the fact that
\V hite Man Runs Him has always been a friend of the white men and
always enlisted on the side of the law and order in the Crow Nation.