Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

The Indian Village
Aboriginal peoples had hunted on the Western plains of America for more than ten thousand years.
They had seen the glaciers recede and the land become warm; they had witnessed (and perhaps
accelerated) the disappearance of the great mastodons, the hippo, and the feared saber-toothed tiger.
They had hunted when the land was heavily forested, and they hunted now that it was a sea of grass.
Through all the thousands of years, through all the changes of game and climate, Indians had continued
to live as nomadic hunters on the vast spaces of the land.
The Plains Indians of the nineteenth century were colorful, dramatic, mystical, warlike people.
They captured the imagination of all who saw them, and in many ways they stood, in the popular
mind, for all American Indians. The antiquity of their rituals, the intricate organization of their way of
life, was much admired by liberal thinkers.
But the truth was that the Plains Indian society that Westerners saw was hardly older than the white
American nation that now threatened its existence. The Plains Indians were a nomadic hunting society
organized around the horse, as were the Mongols of Asia. Yet there had been no horses in America
until the Spaniards introduced them three hundred years earlier, changing Plains Indian society
beyond recognition.
And even the traditional tribal structures, and tribal rivalries, were less ancient than often
imagined. Most authorities believed the Crow Indians were once part of the Sioux nation, living in
what is now Iowa; they had migrated west toward Montana, evolved a separate identity, and become
the implacable antagonists of their former kin. As one expert wrote, “The Sioux and the Crow are
virtually the same in dress, manner, habits, language, customs, values, bearing. This similarity might
be thought to form the basis of friendship, yet it only heightens their antagonism.”
It was these Crow Indians that they now rode down to visit.
First impressions of an Indian village were often contradictory. Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh
explorer and journalist who in 1871 famously found Dr. David Livingstone in Africa, entered Black
Kettle’s village with Custer and found it filthy: “so foul, indeed, as to defy description.” Robes on the
teepee floors were crawling with vermin; excremental odors assailed him.
Other first-time observers were unnerved to see Indians roasting a dog over a fire, or chewing
bloody buffalo steaks. But Johnson’s first impressions, riding that evening into the Crow village,
seem more revealing about him than about the Crow:
“Anyone who imagines,” he wrote,