Plains Folk: Stone Hands and the 'Holy Cost'

The story of Dull Knife, Little Wolf, and the Northern Cheyenne has gone through some changes in perspective over the years. To begin with, because their story was desperate and bloody, it attracted the attention of all the more lurid writers about Indian-white conflict on the plains. I remember reading Paul Wellman's treatment of it in Death on the Prairie when I was about twelve years old and finding the grisly details impressive.

In western Kansas it was remembered as the "Last Indian Raid" because of killings and atrocities committed by young Cheyenne men along Minnie Sappa Creek. The Last Indian Raid Museum of Oberlin took its name from that ugly episode, and the town even celebrated Minnie Sappa Days as a community festival.

On the other hand, among the Cheyenne the events of 1878 are passed down as the heroic exploits of desperate people racing for survival and freedom, deeds dripping with courage, actions sparkling with tactical brilliance, as the little band of Cheyenne fought and ran their way through a gauntlet of settlements, railroads, and troops.

Now, as for the writer, Boye -- his is an artful and often stirring book. He makes his way -- walking -- from El Reno to Fort Robinson and a little way into South Dakota. The climax comes when he finds the hilltop depression where the last remaining cohort of Dull Knife's comrades (not Dull Knife himself, who had slipped through to Pine Ridge) were rubbed out by soldiers from Fort Robinson. Throughout the journey, on which Boye is joined by Andrew Sootkis and Samuel Spotted Elk, Jr., and sometimes by other Cheyenne, the author shows a good eye for landscapes and, when he uses it, a perceptive sense about people.

The narrative is transporting -- a mix of history, memoir, and sometimes strange digressions that are nevertheless engaging. At the end I'm left wondering why the book disturbs me.

Now I've got it, I think. There is a strong undercurrent in the book. It is the author's desire to make the point that there is racial hatred in the world, the makings of genocide in our society, as in others. This theme breaks onto the surface when Boyes meets a rumpled, hostile, Holocaust-denying deputy sheriff in Kansas–an illiterate guy who insists there never was a "Holy Cost" of the Jews. Sure enough, the writer later entitles his climatic chapter, the one about the killing of the Cheyenne on that hill in northwest Nebraska, "The Holy Cost." OK, you don't have to hit me with a brick, I get the point.

The question is, why come out from Vermont and hike across Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to make the point that there is race hatred in America? The answer has import for all manner of things in life on the plains. Boyes comes to the plains because he sees the plains as open country, where one may write whatever story one wishes, without a lot of people getting in the way. An open landscape invites inscription like a blank page.

Unless we keep the plains filled up with good stories, credible stories that include us all, then the stories of the plains will be written by people who come here with their own stories to tell, scrawl them across the level land, and leave again.