YEE NAALDLOOSHII

Between 1820 and 1840 more than 35 million American Bison were taken from the West. For the Native Americans, this was a disaster. Starvation became a possibility. In the fall of 1858, a battle between the Shoshone and Crow Tribes was fought for control of the rich hunting grounds of the Yellowstone ecosystem and the Wind River valley rich in animal resources that the Lakota and Cheyenne also coveted. After a staggering loss of lives, both tribes realized that continuing the war would mean that neither tribe would have enough young and fit warriors left to hunt. If the losses continued both Shoshone and Crow would not survive the rapidly approaching winter. It was agreed to let a duel between Chief Washakie and Chief Big Robber decide the matter. One tribe would take control of the treasured valley and make it through until spring. The other would lose a significant portion of their population through starvation. It was a duel that still has consequences today.

Returning home for a funeral John Hoon-nah Hetaw Becker is confronted with an evil that stalks the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

Introduction 

 In the fall of 1858 a long battle between the Shoshone and Crow Tribes was ultimately decided by a duel between the two Chiefs. The outcome resulted in consequences still felt today. 

  Cover Photograph Chief Washakie Circa 1880-1890                  Library of Congress

PREFACE 

    In the mid 1800's millions of buffalo, the American Bison, had been slain for meat, hides, and control of the plains Tribes by the US government. The result was competition for the game rich valley south of Yellowstone. 

    Desperate for control of the area between mountain ranges the Shoshone and Crow Tribes fought a battle that lasted for several days. Neither side could survive the loss of more young men. 

    A duel between the two Chiefs to decide the matter was agreed on. 

    One man, bitter about the outcome, went in search of power that would give him eternal vengeance.

SAMPLE:

                                             Cecilia Johnson nee Hoehne, despite her Anglo-sounding name, was pure Eastern Shoshone. Born and raised on Wyoming's Wind River reservation. She is currently living in Dubois with her husband of six years. They had recently closed on a two-bedroom house on the edge of town. Just a short distance northwest of her birthplace. It had been after nine pm when she had left her parent’s house in Fort Washakie where she had been born almost 32 years ago.

Driving north on 287, she soon merged onto even lonelier Highway 26. A quarter moon in the clear early October western Wyoming sky along with the uncountable stars undimmed by any artificial illumination, save her headlights gave enough light that she could see the 13,804-foot Gannett peak to her left. She was on the lightly traveled road that ran between the Wind River Range and the Owl Creek mountains. In a few more miles she was able to make out the silhouette of Crowheart Butte. A place named for a terrible battle between the Shoshone and Crow tribes fought in the late fall of 1858.

After a staggering loss of life on both sides it was agreed that Big Robber, chief of the Crows, would fight Chief Washakie in a duel to decide ownership of the game-rich hunting grounds. Washakie, the victor, cut out Big Robber’s heart. Impaling it on his lance he claimed the Wind River valley for the Shoshoni.

Both famous members of the tribe, Chief Washakie and Sacajawea, were buried on the reservation less than a mile from her girlhood home. Cecilia had lived and worked her whole life in and around the 2.3 million acres set aside by the federal government for the Shoshone tribe nearly a decade after Chief Washakie’s victorious duel. Chief Washakie is famed for not only his prowess in battle but also in his shrewdness of negotiating treaties with the US government in keeping the enormous wildlife rich valley for the Shoshone in 1868.

Ten years later in 1878, two years after Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn, pushed in from the east by the US army, the Arapaho tribe arrived. The Arapaho along with the Sioux and Cheyenne, united in an alliance more than 160 years ago. Known by the United States Cavalry as the Platte River Indians. Native Americans that warred with the Shoshone. Former Bitter enemies speaking a different language forced by hubris-filled bureaucrats far away in Washington to share the same land once promised to Chief Washakie’s people. An arrangement both tribes reluctantly agreed to when promised that the Arapaho would soon be given their own land. The joke among both tribes was that soon was more than 145 years.

Initially, the Shoshone settled in the North, and Northwest while the Arapaho made their home in the South, and Southeast of the reservation. As she came abeam Crowheart there was an oppressive darkness that seemed to descend around her. Cecilia always felt her mood darken when passing here or other battlefields and places of calamitous accidents where so many had died. Locations where pain, sorrow, fear, horror, grief, and regret gouged an eternal lesion in these tragic spaces that time could never fully heal. 

 Tonight was different and worse, depressing dark dread that she had never experienced before. A feeling more ominous and heavier enveloped her. She shivered and turned up the heater fan on her twenty-two-year-old pickup. The hairs on the back of her neck were erect now, a shiver went down her spine. She sensed next to her, just outside the rolled-up truck window by her left shoulder great evil. Somehow a material entity moving along with her at sixty miles an hour. Cecilia couldn’t bring herself to turn her head to look. She floored the gas pedal. The worn old Ford F150 accelerated. Whatever was next to her did also.

The Shoshone believed the spirits of departed enemies roamed the night. As a child, she had been warned against NununBi, malevolent dwarfs that lived in the dark. Residents of the Wind River mountains who were just waiting for children that ventured too far from home. She had stopped believing in them long ago. She had no dead enemies to worry about. Stick people, Shapeshifters, Wendigo, and wicked shamans who had sold their souls for superhuman powers were not so easy to dismiss. A subject most Native Americans seldom even dared whisper about. But more than a few quietly acknowledged the existence of.

She knew with sad certainty what was beside her. Cecilia forced herself to slowly rotate her head to the left. For two long seconds, she locked eyes with an enormous upright wolf running on human legs. Yellow eyes met hers. Saliva dripped from canine jaws studded with jagged teeth made for tearing great chunks of flesh from prey. Suddenly it was gone. She realized the truck had drifted into the left lane. Moving her eyes to the front, she quickly steered back into her lane. Within seconds a fifteen-foot-high line of flames stretched across the road in front of her. The fire extended for several yards on both sides of the road. Braking hard she came to a stop as a giant wolf walked out of the fire.

Cecilia flung her door open exiting the cab while at the same time pulling her rifle from the scabbard behind the seats. ‘’I’m sending you straight to hell you evil son of a bitch!’ she shouted as she levered a fat .358 caliber 200 grain 35 Remington cartridge, the same round from the same rifle, she had dropped a dozen mule deer, antelope, and three elk with one shot, into her Marlin model 336. She shouldered the rifle as the wolf sprung forward, covering half the twenty-five yards that separated them in seconds. Cecilia squeezed the trigger. Flesh and fur flew from the animal’s left flank and slowed its charge for half a second. Without hesitation, she levered another round into the chamber sending another bullet at twenty-four hundred and seventy-five feet per second into the creature. Once again it staggered and slowed for a moment while she quickly shot it again. Four rounds were in the under-barrel tubular magazine. Cecilia triggered off the last round at point-blank range into its midsection. Then the beast was on her.