There was a mad uproar within the hall, where my classmates sang and shouted my name at the prime of their lungs; and the disappointed students howled and brayed in fearfully dissonant tin trumpets. In this pleasure, happy students rushed ahead to offer their congratulations. And I couldn’t conceal a smile when they wished to escort me in a procession to the students’ parlor, where all had been going to calm themselves. Thanking them for the sort spirit which prompted them to make such a proposition, I walked alone with the night to my very own little room.
Part of that nice ocean river which renders our faroff islands habitable by impinging on their shores. Snowy ranges, one behind the opposite, prolonged to the distant horizon, folding in their wintry embrace the beauties of Middle Park. Pike’s Peak, a couple of hundred miles off, lifted that vast but shapeless summit which is the landmark of southern Colorado. There have been snow patches, snow slashes, snow abysses, snow forlorn and soiled trying, snow pure and dazzling, snow glistening above the purple gown of pine worn by all the mountains; whereas away to the east, in limitless breadth, stretched the greengrey of the countless Plains.
Elaine Goodale, the first superintendent of education for the Dakota reservations, heard “the distant thunder of massive guns, some eighteen miles away” from where she wrapped Christmas gifts on the Chapel of the Holy Cross at the Pine Ridge Agency. The wounded, few of whom survived the ordeal, have been taken to the church. They were tended by Goodale, Susette La Flesche, and a Santee Sioux physician, Charles Eastman . Dr. Eastman, raised in Canada and educated within proximie aibased medical design… the East, had simply returned to work among his folks. He is losing time; he yearns for the spring, and the daybreak of latest possibilities. But he is a restless, not a resolved man, and with spring come back the birds of promise, the valley rings with their music, the seeds are up within the garden, and the baby is learning to stroll.
Then anxiously we watched the person carry towards the stage the envelope containing the final determination. There have been two prizes given, that evening, and considered one of them was mine! The evil spirit laughed within me when the white flag dropped out of sight, and the arms which furled it hung limp in defeat. Leaving the gang as rapidly as attainable, I was soon in my room. The rest of the night I sat in an armchair and gazed into the crackling fire.
As my life began in my father’s nation it may end in my mother’s. After all I even have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant “connecting link.” And that is all. Mere mortal, but the boys only laughed at the roar and rush of the tempest. Then Cloud noticed that they have been in fact his youngsters, and he took them to his house.
