Small Wonders: A love story

What happened that day, moment by moment, will never be resurrected exactly. We shape our stories to our ends, even when they bless our hopes and dreams, as does this one, a young Brule Sioux girl who dies before her time.

Even her name is a mystery. Some claim it's Brings Water; others, Fallen Leaf or Fleet Foot, White Flower, even Princess. But this we know: she was the first daughter of Sinte Gleska, or Spotted Tail, the great headman of the Brule, whose sorrow is at the heart of this tender story.

Think broad shoulders. Handsome.  Think fierce, and when tested, combative. Think warrior. Think leader. In 1855, Spotted Tail and several warriors in battle fatigues and war paint rode into Fort Laramie singing their death songs, assuming they were on a path to the next world.

They were wrong about that. Instead, they were taken back east to Fort Leavenworth to be imprisoned. Spotted Tail had deliberately taken the fall for others, lent out his life as a sacrifice for the people he led and served. 

Some historians claim Brings Water and other family members came with Spotted Tail, that his incarceration was not so dreadful as you might imagine. Some claim white men and women in and around Leavenworth sought Spotted Tail's lively company. By all accounts his social skills were warm and inviting. He was a delightful conversationalist, made friends of his captors.

As did Brings Water, his oldest daughter. 

That experience and those acquaintances prompted Spotted Tail to ride into Ft. Laramie once again, years later, in deep grief and sorrow, to make what seemed a most unlikely request. Once, Spotted Tail had come into the fort dressed for war. A few winters later, he'd come in tears. He loved his daughter. 

When Spotted Tail explained himself and his presence, he’d spoken to the commanding officers in a fashion none of them had ever witnessed before. He cried—his eyes filled with tears. They were speechless because none of them had ever seen a great warrior’s tears—an Indian in the throes of deep grief.

Brings Water had suffered during a winter that wouldn’t end, died from deprivation. But before she passed away, she’d asked her father to bury her near the fort, close to those she'd come to know and maybe even love (some claim there was a handsome young soldier in this love story, but it can’t be proved). 

Brings Water's death created a very touching moment and a lovely story just outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming, a funeral ceremony like none other in the 19th century American West. 

It happened this way.

Spotted Tail determined to live up to his promise to his daughter. Thoughtfully, the fort's commander determined he and his troops would offer him their grief and thereby respect his. To that end, behind the fort’s band, 600 troops marched slowly and mournfully out to a spot a few hundred yards north, where Spotted Tail's people, 200 mourners more, awaited them. 

The burial itself was perfectly blessed mix of cultures. Brings Water’s body, wrapped in buffalo hides, was enclosed in a coffin created by the fort’s carpenters but raised on a traditional Lakota scaffold. Two horses were killed for her use in the spirit world, their heads and tails severed out and placed out front and behind the scaffold.

In a gesture as beautiful as any during the Great Sioux Wars, the fort’s commander participated by placing a pair of of his long, leather gloves in the casket beside the body to keep Brings Water’s hands warm on her journey. Other officers followed with other gifts. When the Brule women walked by, they stopped to whisper some things and leave a string of beads or some embroidered things, even a looking glass beside the body, all for her passage to the spirit world.

The chaplain placed a book beside her, a little red book he’d just then received from Spotted Tail himself, an Episcopal prayer book.

When all the salutations were finished, a number of men raised that coffin up atop the scaffold.

All of that happened in March of 1866, ten years before Little Big Horn, 24 before Wounded Knee. The death and burial of Spotted Tail’s daughter didn’t end hostilities. Hundreds more would die. Violence had only just begun.

Still, there’s a grave out there north of Fort Laramie yet today, a stone and a story told so often its grown some variations and even a few blessed sidetracks because Brings Water's story of peace remains very much a love story.