Chapter 15

The next morning, one of the Crow women approached me hesitantly and touched my hand. That was the signal my wives had worked out to let me know she had agreed to be with me. She was the leader of the women from the first village we had raided, and she was nervous.

“Relax, I’m not going to hurt you. I want you to enjoy this,” I told her comfortingly. Afterwards, I hoped none of the other widows were in the cave or they would have thought I was torturing the woman. She was a screamer.

“Your wives are very lucky,” she sighed afterwards.

“Any time you want me again,” she whispered when she stood up to dress again. I died when I heard her talking with several other women just down the hall in the cave’s kitchen area. Moments later, they were giggling so I guess everything was okay. Each of the women grinned and looked at me speculatively when I finally got up the courage to leave our bedroom and face them.

Word must have traveled quickly because it seemed as if all the women were watching me by afternoon, even the Cheyenne widows. The woman who approached me in the afternoon didn’t seem nervous at all. She wasn’t a screamer, but she wasn’t quiet, either. More giggles greeted her when she left me in the bedroom. I was surprised when one of the cooks wandered into the bedroom and touched my hand.

“Star Blanket says you still need relief,” she said hopefully, her hand moving to the front of the pants I had just put on. She was much quieter than the first two women had been but still managed a couple of squeals of pleasure.

My wives smirked at me while we ate dinner. “There are three very happy women out there tonight,” Tara said, nodding towards the outside after we finished dinner.

“What about the seven of you?” I asked, apparently needlessly they assured me.

Four weeks later Neha and I were walking behind one of the covers the women use over their worktables. I was enjoying the light mist that was falling. Three sides of the cover were down, and we could hear women talking inside as they worked. Neha slapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing aloud and her shoulders shook for almost a minute as she laughed silently.

“What’s so funny?” I finally asked.

“One of the women said you should be named Strong Spear,” she chuckled as she whispered. “A second one disagreed and said you should be named Long Spear. You should go in there and give them your Long Spear,” she chuckled.

“In front of everyone else?” I gasped.

“They will pretend to protest, but they will be pleased,” she assured me.

Slipping between two of the draped buffalo skins, I stepped inside the covered area. I’d heard the comments but didn’t understand what they meant because my command of the Crow language was still sorely inadequate. Having heard the comments, I knew where the two women were standing and stepped behind the first one.

“Strong Spear?” I asked in Cheyenne since most of them understood Cheyenne. She gasped and paled, afraid that she was in trouble. When I kissed the side of her neck, she sighed and relaxed into me, gasping when I started slowly raising her dress up her legs.

“Not here, not in front of everyone” she protested, although even I could tell that her protest was merely pro forma.

The other women were pretending to ignore us and continuing with their work, but each of them was watching us surreptitiously.

“You ladies should probably put the sharp tools down so you don’t cut yourselves while you watch us,” I suggested, making them blush. I bent her over the worktable, silently complimenting the men who built it.

“Long Spear?” I asked the woman to her right once I finished with the first woman. She got the hint and blushed when I pressed her forward over the table.

“Not in front of my daughter, please,” she protested, although I still didn’t detect any real distress. Her daughter watched what I was doing with her mother, rapt.

“Your daughter should see what awaits her when she’s old enough,” I replied. The daughter was at that transitory age where she may or may not be old enough and I had no intention of forcing one of the girls.

“She’s old enough,” the woman groaned as I made sure she was ready for me. The other women had already moved the branches they were weaving into baskets out of the way. The girl almost bent over to watch us. I couldn’t believe she just had an orgasm from watching her mother and me.

“You like that idea?” I asked when she was again coherent. She blushed nearly crimson, but nodded. “I like the idea, too,” I told her.

Her mother had moved enough to watch, but was still bent over the table top. “Are you trying to tempt me again?” I asked her, playfully swatting her butt.

She didn’t say anything, but her eyes told me she was hoping to tempt me again. The other women laughed. “As tempting as you are, it’s time for your daughter to become a woman. I think you should be with her unless you feel she should be alone,” I said.

“What do you want?” she asked her daughter as the mother stood and slipped her buckskin dress back down er body. Shyly, the girl held her hand out for her mother’s hand and we headed for the cave and my bedroom. The mother whispered to her daughter the entire time. I had no idea what she told her, but her daughter seemed less nervous when we got to the bedroom than she’d been in the covered area.

When we finished, she whispered something shakily to her mother who smiled. “She says that she felt as if she died and flew away with the spirits,” her mother explained.

The girl beamed up at me. She was beaming even more when she exited the bedroom a while later, walking proudly, albeit slightly awkwardly, towards the women in the kitchen cooking dinner. Her mother watched her leave and gave me an emotional kiss. “Mika is a very happy woman, now,” she sighed happily.

“Is her mother as happy?” I asked.

“Happier,” she sighed, and with a final kiss, she left.

“Somebody looked quite proud of herself when she left a few minutes ago,” Emma teased me as my wives entered our bedroom.

“Neha told us what happened,” Tara said, and then cracked up.

“The women who watched decided your name should be Long Strong Spear,” Neha laughed, as did the rest of my wives. After that, I had the virgins watch me with their mother right before their turn. It seemed to make them less nervous.

To make matters worse, Neha asked if the Cheyenne widows who lived near the fort could come here to live if they wanted. She explained how difficult their lives were with no man to hunt for them. They existed on what they could trap with snares, fish they caught, and on plants they could find. I agreed, telling her that I would rather have all widows and orphans living here than starving in their own village. Since then, aside from the widows living near the fort, more than fifty widows from various Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapaho villages have decided to stay. Several of them have since found another mate and our village has grown even larger.

It took nearly four months for me to have my way with each of the single Crow women, although several of them got two or more turns before they all had their first. Once word got out about what I did in the covered work area, several of the women I recognized would greet me by calling me Long Spear or Strong Spear. By the time I had the buffalo skin sides down so we had a little privacy from everyone except those women working inside, she was usually naked and bent over the table ready for me.

Once I made my way through each of them, I acceded to my wives wishes, not that I was upset about it by then. Mika became wife number eight, making her unofficially the highest ranking among the Crow women. Listening to the advice offered her by Nawaji and Neha, she affirmed the system that was already in place, leaving the woman chosen by each Crow village in charge of the other women in that village. The only difference was that those women went to Mika instead of coming to me with problems. Mika would bring them to me if necessary, or to Tara, Nawaji, Neha, or someone else if appropriate.

By the time we got our first snow, thirty-three of the Crow women and nineteen other widows had mates from the villages that had visited us to trade or that had stopped here when hunting the nearby buffalo herds. Sometimes, they did both at the same time.

While the Cheyenne elders were here, I had finally asked about mining copper. I assured them that we wouldn’t mention where we found it. I even showed them the gold we’d collected to date and told them that we’d been panning gold from the stream for over a year. That they just learned about the gold showed them that I also intended to keep the copper secret, and they agreed.

All we did this summer at the copper mine was build a barracks where twenty men could live during the winter. We also installed a windmill in a shallow well we dug and lined with stone and mortar. The windmill pumped water into a cistern we built in the back of the large barracks to keep the water from freezing in the winter. The pipes carrying water to the cistern were buried four feet deep to keep them from freezing.

The barracks has a kitchen and large pantry, one we stuffed with food. Ten feet away from the barracks is a stone and mortar building like a smithy. Inside the building, they break up the rock they mine and smelt it in ceramic crucibles. The “smithy” has a deep bed of coal like a blacksmith uses, complete with two bellows to use for smelting the ore.

A covered walkway from the barracks leads to the actual mine. The way it’s built, it looks like a building, rather than a walkway and a mine entrance. The entire building is built to keep cold winter winds out, although we do let in enough air to replace what goes up the chimney pipes of the cooking stove and the pot-bellied stoves we use to keep the inside of the buildings warm.

Back at the valley, in anticipation of building cabins, once the leaves fall, we plan to dig up the trees we had planted along the ridges just outside the cave opening. We decided to move them to other ridges where we didn’t plan to build anything. We’d already planted the chestnuts, hickory nuts, and black walnuts. We planted over two hundred of each tree and had nuts left over to eat. Even the fruit trees we brought back this spring had been planted in a timely fashion.

Sunday September 29, 1844

Holy smokes!! The first twenty days of September were normal, meaning hot and dry. The buffalo stayed nearby all month, so we had three to five different Indian villages staying with us since mid-August. On September 21, we noticed a thick plume of smoke far to the west of us. We immediately had people using every sickle and scythe available, extending the two-hundred-yard buffer of cut prairie grass that we had already made. We filled wagons with the cut grass and took it into our valley where we lay it out to dry or fed it to the animals. For three days, the smoke grew closer. Late in the morning of the third day, our sentries sent riders out warning everyone working outside of the original valley to get back inside our valley.

Barely an hour after everyone was safe, a huge herd of stampeding buffalo arrived. Our fence turned away most of the herd, but many collided with the fence. The fence gave way in several places, allowing buffalo into the outer valley. Fortunately, the buffalo that entered were stunned and moving slowly so the original fence blocking the main valley kept them out.

Once we had herded the wayward buffalo back outside of our fence, we dealt with nineteen injured buffalo, filling several outdoor smokehouses. Some looked like they’d been trampled while others were impaled on pieces of the fence rails. Still others had injured or broken legs. By late evening, the smoke from the approaching fire had grown very thick and we herded everyone and all our livestock into the cave. With the visiting villages, the cave was crowded.

We checked the progress of the flames each hour and when they arrived the next morning, a lot of us went out to keep the flames out of the valley. With our mouths and noses covered by wet bandanas, we fought the flames with grain shovels and buckets of water. Several people stood ready in the valley, waiting to fight any fires started in our grain fields by flying embers. In anticipation of the fire reaching us, we had spent the last three days running an above ground pipe from the nearest cistern through the narrow valley where the northwest stream entered the main valley.

Rather than having to run back and forth to the stream for water, we had several valves we could open to fill buckets. Many of the posts that survived the stampede were slightly scorched, but looked as if they’d be okay. After we eliminated the flames headed for us, we actually watched for a couple minutes. Columns of flames rising up to a hundred feet into the air as they swirled around were terrifying to watch. Satisfied that the flames had been turned away, we headed back inside. The ridges north of us directed the fire farther to our north before it turned east again. It never reached our northeast valley, although smaller herds of buffalo made their way up to the fence protecting that valley. Two days later, the first rainstorm of September extinguished the fire.

Monday December 30, 1844

As you can see, I haven’t written much lately. This “being a chief” isn’t as easy as it sounds. I seem to run around all day checking on different groups of people assigned to various jobs, end up helping with one of the jobs, or go out with a group hunting, gathering, or getting salt or coal. By the end of the day, I’m as exhausted as I was our first spring and summer here.

Mr. Choteau just left today after asking if we could be ready to travel to St. Louis in two weeks. I assured him that we could.

Looking back at this last year, I’m amazed at how much we’ve accomplished. Despite feeding the many people and animals we have in the valley now, as well as the large number of Indian villages that traded with us or stayed while they hunted, we still have four stone silos in the cave filled with corn and two with dried beans. We have squash piled in every nook and cranny we can find to store them while keeping the animals away from them.

This winter, we plan to build bins for the squash similar to our coal bins, and to build more silos.

We built three glass-roofed houses to start tobacco seedlings in, as well as some of the vegetable plants for this coming spring’s garden. We hope to be able to pick some of the vegetables a week or two sooner that way. We built the glass-roofed houses on the lower part of the upper slope of the south-facing ridges where the soil is too shallow to grow crops or trees. We also built a fourth glass-roofed house, but it’s more of an indoor garden for when it’s too cold to grow vegetables outside. The house is ten feet by thirty feet with four, four-and-a-half-foot high walls of rock and mortar sectioning the growing bed into five sections. Thick cedar planks rest on top of those walls for us to walk on and kneel on when we work. The planks sit about six inches above the four feet of mixed soil and compost we used to fill the bottom part. In addition to the glass roof, all of the east, west, and south walls except the bottom are glass panes.

We’re trying to grow cabbages, carrots, radishes, beets, and green beans in there all winter. We burn coal in a small stone fireplace to provide enough heat to keep the plants from freezing. We started the first plants growing in September, and have planted another row every two weeks. The ones we planted in September were ready to eat much sooner than the ones we planted in October. Still, we have a few fresh vegetables to eat so we aren’t always eating dried, bottled, or pickled vegetables. This coming spring we’ll decide if the extra effort was worth it. If so, we’ll buy more glass panes and build more of the glass-sided indoor garden buildings.

The other three glass-roofed houses have stair-stepped shelves and benches covered with the wooden trays we will use to start tobacco plants in a couple of months. The trays are already filled with baked compost. All we have to do is wet the compost and sprinkle seeds on top of it. Despite our successful harvest this year, we intend to grow three times as much tobacco. Many villages want to trade for extra tobacco so they can trade with other villages that don’t come here, including the Jicarilla and the Comanche far to the south.

Our five lambs have grown. Having reports that the ram mated with each of the ewes, I guess we’ll have lambs in the spring. Fortunately, one of the eight trappers who asked if they could retire from trapping and work for us has raised sheep before. After we sold our furs last spring, the prices dropped enough that several trappers have decided that it’s not worth freezing all winter to obtain them. Aside from the eight who asked to work for us, we know of more who headed back east permanently this summer. The men who stayed here prefer this area to what they, and I, feel is the crowded conditions in cities east of the Mississippi. Yeah, we sometimes have more than seven hundred people in our valley, but once outside the valley, “civilization” disappears.

Four of the former trappers work with us as carpenters when we need them, especially helping to repair wagons for the wagon trains that stop at the trading post. This winter, they’re building furniture and window frames for the cabins we plan to build next year, as well as repairing our wagons, and a myriad of other jobs. The trappers who make furniture have numerous assistants and apprentices helping them all winter. They’re making tables, chairs, bed frames, wardrobes, shelving, and cabinets for storing our food supplies. Two former trappers help make barrels for us. We use the barrels to store the flour we sell, as well as corn meal, pickles, and numerous other things. We also sell a few empty barrels to the wagon trains as replacement barrels for water or as additional water barrels.