Cypres by Gregg Norman

CYPRES

Loathsome wolfers, whiskey traders,

Metis buffalo hunters and freighters,

Farwell, his post flanking

The bank of the Battle River,

The drunken braggart, Hammond,

Little Soldier’s fifty lodges –

This the dramatis personae

And the setting for the final scenes.

The Green River Renegades,

Foul poisoners of prairie wolves,

Detested wherever they went,

Left horseless in wild Montana

By a band of Plains Cree raiding

South across the longest border,

Stealing silently in the dark

Of a soft summer night.

Weary and footsore,

Refused aid at Fort Benton,

The odious crew pressed on,

North into the Grandmother’s land

Fetching up at Farwell’s post

Angry and armed to the teeth,

Howling for whiskey

And Indian blood.

In the morning, sick from

The trader’s hooch,

Hammond led a cadre

Of the aggrieved to Little Soldier’s

Camp with Farwell in tow to negotiate,

Thinking only of his livelihood,

Trying to save his customers.

It was the first of June, 1873.

The Assiniboine warriors, no less the worse

For wear from rotgut drink,

Tried to pacify the whites

With a pair of poor ponies

From their small herd,

But the offer was angrily spurned,

And the air between the factions

Filled with oaths and angry shouts.

Tension bloomed gut-string tight

As women and children fled

And warriors stripped for battle.

Hammond took his rabid troop

To shelter by the riverbank,

Armed with repeating rifles

Against the Indians’ rusty muskets

And weapons of wood and bone.

Volleys rained upon the camp

Killed dozens and injured scores more;

The whites lost but a single man

Before retreating to the post

To drink and commiserate

Over their bloody victory.

The Assiniboine, all but one,

Fled to a Metis encampment in the hills.

At dawn the whites returned

And found Little Soldier hiding.

They killed him quick

And cut off his head,

Impaling it on a cypress lodge pole,

Cypres in the Frenchified Metis tongue.

Teepees were pulled down to the ground

And burned over the bodies of the dead.

The stolen horses were never recovered,

The killers never held to account.

The bones of the Assiniboine

Lay unburied for countless years,

Bleaching white into the ashes

Of the white man’s wrath,

Settling back into the land

Where they had lived forever.

This too familiar staged play

Acted out again and again:

Cypress Hills, Sand Creek,

Bear River, Wounded Knee,

Names relegated to dark places

In our collective soul,

Purged from the pages of history,

Massacres all.