The War of the Mormon Cow. Richard Jr. Jepperson

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      Jack Hemingway

      Sun Valley, Idaho

      I thought again of the string of beads in my vision. There were bright beads and dull beads and plump beads and shriveled beads. There were beads that glowed with life and dark beads that ate the light.

      - Crazy Horse -

      PREFACE

      Curly’s best friends’ were Little Mouse, a bossy, shiny eyed girl a few years younger and Lone Bear, a loud mouthed big brother type who could beat up anyone near his age and often did. The three were always together. They called him Curly to make fun of his light, wavy hair. Curly seldom got angry or pouted or blamed someone else. In spite of the bossy girl and bullying buddy he usually got his way. Not because he was tougher, or had a smarter mouth, but because he was always one step ahead. He had that complex quality, found in born leaders, we call charisma.

      Curly wasn’t a carefree boy for very long. On the 19th day of August of 1854, at twelve years of age, he was caught up in The War of The Mormon Cow and rode through acrid smoke, whirring bullets and thrumming cannon balls to rescue Little Mouse.

      This story is written in the meter and structure of the Sioux language, as Crazy Horse would have told it. It is mostly true but when history and legend conflict I choose legend, where the spirit of the Sioux still lives.

      - Richard Jepperson

      The War of the Mormon Cow is the story of Black Robe Woman and Crazy Horse, in their youth.

      She called him Curly and he called her Little Mouse

      THE DAY OF THE RED DAWN

      The day dawned with a sky as red as the coals of a fire. A very bad sign. The smoke from the lodge fires rose straight up then flattened into a haze over the camp of a thousand lodges. It was late summer and we were camped since spring to receive the annuities promised by the Peace Paper. By the time the day wind whispered to the night wind and left, only one lodge remained.

      Everyone knew there would be great trouble. Lodges were pulled down and laced for travel. There was a great milling of people, women, children, old ones, horses, travois and dogs. Little Thunder rode back and forth across the Shell River marking a path through the quicksand with standing poles of willows. Only the lodge of the wounded and dying Conquering Bear stood, guarded by the men of his Akacita. The night wind whispered fitfully and jerked at the lodge flap.

      The flickering fire cast shadows of caregivers onto the lodge skin. Man Afraid, Big Partisan and Ice, the strange and powerful medicine man, stayed with Conquering Bear, who was the Peace Chief that had placed his mark on the Peace Paper at the Big Council and talked long for others to do so. Now he lay with a great wound in his stomach, a leg torn off and his side leaking yellow blood.

      Ahead, in the dark, the whole of the Lakotas traversed north. It had been a day to remember. The happenings raced back and forth in my mind…