Good Stories

Did you ever meet one of those people who just know a million stories? You feel lucky when you meet them and talk to them, because you know there's just no way you're going to get those stories from anybody else. I'm pretty lucky, because my dad is one of those people. He rode his Harley from Socorro, NM, to see us here in Wildwood, MO, and we had a nice dinner with him this evening.

I told him that I was reading a great book called about the Battle of the Little Big Horn called A Terrible Glory, by James Donovan, which I thought he would find interesting. My dad's an anesthesiologist, and we lived on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota when he was in the Public Health Service. The Pine Ridge Reservation is an Ogalala Sioux reservation, and it was against the Lakota Sioux and some of the Northern Cheyenne that Custer fought in that Battle. This got my dad telling a couple of stories from the time we lived on the Rez.

The first story he told was about Ben Black Elk, who was Black Elk's son, and who translated Black Elk Speaks to John Neihardt (who was an interesting guy in his own right; my dad used to see him walking around campus at Mizzou in Columbia). Ben Black Elk came in to see my dad as a patient a few times. He told my dad that Black Elk was 13 at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and that he and a friend of his were walking through the dead and wounded soldiers after a fight, scalping them with their dull kid knives. It was standard procedure for dead and wounded enemies to be mutilated by the women and children; one's enemies are not to go comfortably into the afterlife. Ben Black Elk said that his father scalped one soldier who was still alive, the soldier started grinding his teeth. How's that for stoicism?

Another story was about a Sioux named Ben Irving. Ben showed up at my dad's office with all the classic symptoms of diabetes. My dad prescribed some medication for him, and Ben came back after a while feeling a lot better (which, according to my dad, is what they always do). Ben was effusive in his thanks, telling my dad how much better he felt and everything, and he reached out his hand to give something to my dad. Dad was thinking that Ben had some interesting Native American craft or something, and that he was going to have to say something about not being able to accept a gift like that. What Ben put in my dad's hand was all of his urine test strips showing his good blood sugar results. Ben must've been awfully proud of those things.

One thing about Ben Irving was that he was kissed by the Queen of England. How that happened was that it turns out that Ben was the Littlest Indian in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. One performance was attended by Her Majesty, and at one point a couple of her guards went out and lifted the Littlest Indian from his pony and brought him to be kissed by the Queen. That is definitely something to tell the grandkids about.

My dad didn't tell this story this evening, but it's one that I've always liked because I think it changed my history. One time my dad was helping some Indians on the reservation break a horse. He said that at one point when the horse was really kicking, he saw one of the horse's back hooves come right up toward his forehead. Luckily, it didn't hit him (I can tell you from experience that those animals can really kick hard). But later that evening when he was home, he happened to look in the mirror and he noticed a red horseshoe-shaped mark right in the middle of his forehead.

Mitakuye oyasin.