When I wrote this last March,
The Death & Vision of Moxtaveto (Black Kettle)
Custer was pursuing the snow tracks of Dog Soldiers that would eventually lead to Black Kettle’s village on Thanksgiving Day in a cruel irony. The cruelest irony however, was that Black Kettle and his wife would be slain nearly four years to the day that they both escaped Chivington at the Sand Creek Massacre. Black Kettle’s honesty concerning young men in his village he could not control was of no avail. He and his village were going to be “punished” and broken beyond any immediate or distant recovery.
a Cheyenne Man had me when I was at Washita of the bench where he told me was the location of Moxtaveto’s extermination by Custer.
I sat under the tree facing the Washita River and thought hard about it.