A visit to the "Fetterman Massacre" site

Just about due South, and maybe 2 miles from my house, is a low spot in the long ridge which extends east from the Bighorn Mountains and separates the Piney Creek drainage from the smaller Prairie Dog Creek. This was a natural crossing point for prospectors and settlers heading up the eastern side of the Bighorns into Montana on the Bozeman Trail. The Bozeman Trail was yet one more broken promise from the "Grandfather in Washington" to the Northern Cheyenne, Crow and Lakota who lived, hunted and fished in the foothills of these mountains.

From my back porch, I can just barely make out the stone monument erected by Western history "buffs" to the battle. More visible is a lone cottonwood close to the dying place of Big Nose, a Cheyenne warrior who was part of the decoy party that led the Ft. Kearney patrol into an ambush.

There's actually a pretty good set of markers describing the battle from Indian and soldier viewpoints, and I can imagine the long progression of that cold December day as soldiers and Indians fought each other until Captain Fetterman's entire detachment was killed. The decoy party led the soldiers out along a north-trending ridge with a series of dips and high points, and with steep drops to either side into brushy draws. Up out of these draws came the war party of Cheyenne and Lakota, attacking the soldiers from several directions at once.

According to the interpretive sign post, Big Nose was shot when his tired horse faltered; he asked those that came to his aid that they lay him with "his head uphill so that he could breathe the fresh air as he died".

I tried to imagine what it was like to lie on the hard ground of winter, breathing what you know to be your last breaths, while men continued fighting all around you.

It's a far cry from the death that most Americans - and Indians - fear now, in this time. Death from illness: long, drawn-out dying from diabetes, cancer; from chemical byproducts of our ways of life: polluted water, food, air. Our deaths now are complicated by other kinds of battles than the one fought here: now we fight death itself with heroic medical procedures, more chemicals, and decaying atomic particles. No honest confronting that we're dying and simple request to fill our lungs a few more times with some good air, but denial borne, I'm coming to think, of a sense of entitlement to a long and comfortable life.

It seems to me that Big Nose -whatever physical pain he felt- knew what a weakened deer knows when it's caught in the deep drifts of a spring snowstorm or brought down by by a pack of coyotes. Simply "My time is up." It's actually quite impersonal, and not even particularly consequential.

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I've been working on the design of a hospice facility in Gillette, where the Cheyenne and Lakota once hunted Buffalo, and where the white man hunts coal and coalbed methane these days. The facility will have 6 patient rooms, and there will be 5 rooms for out-of-town family members to stay. Something around 10 or 11 thousand square feet, at roughly $300 per square foot, not to mention the cost of the palliative care itself, for 6 people at a time to die. The tangled net of local, state and federal regulations for constructing and running such a facility (which is another industry in itself) requires such things as 4 foot wide doorways, wheel-in showers, clearance everywhere for wheelchairs and even the beds themselves. Private porches or patios are required amenities, as are multiple spaces for family members to meet, or relax, or fix a meal. The cost of outfitting one room with a state-of-the-art bed from Germany, a nightstand and a fold-out chair for an overnight visitor, patient lift track in the ceiling, headboard with oxygen and suction ports, and other equipment is around $12,000. (All of this for a facility that is supposed to "feel like home".)

We say all of this is for the comfort and "dignity" of those whose lives are coming to an end, but is it really?

Our culture has made dying into an event of major proportions. While we're not creating the drama of cavalry vs. Indian, we're creating a different drama of high technology, complex medical protocols, interacting cocktails of drugs, and elaborate buildings. Why? I think it's because we are so uncomfortable around others' suffering, and with the thought of our own death. Much of what we are doing is meant to relieve our own discomfort around friends and family members who are sick and dying. By "doing everything we can for them" as they now lie dying, somehow we're relieved of our greater responsibilities for taking care of ourselves, each other and the planet: for the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink.

I think Big Nose died an honorable and dignified death. He accepted what was, gave his companions the gift of fulfilling a request, and let himself go.

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I'd put a small amount of tobacco in my pocket when I left the car, and as I knelt where Big Nose took in those last breaths of fresh air, I put the tobacco under a small piece of sandstone and prayed that the Great Grandfather of the Red Man breathe strength of heart and mind back into his people today, so that they can share with all of us the wisdom of living as a human animal on Earth once again. When we are connected with Life, dying doesn't need to be a battle.