Blake drove furiously across the plains. Through rocky hills and limitless cornfields he drove, grim in the haze of fertilizer and exhaust fumes. He slept in the parking lots of malls and superstores. At night, in the hazy darkness of spring, starless and quiet, occasional towns glowed like embers. Strange fearful specters and security vehicles stalked asphalt lots. He cooked lentils on a gas stove. He slept with a blanket in the back seat of his car.

  Humans first arrived in the Great Plains around 16,000 BC. They hunted bison and mammoth. By 1700 AD, the major nations in that area were the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Navajo, Pawnee, and Ute. They practiced basketweaving and bowhunting. During the winter, people lived in dry caves in the hills and mountains. In the summer, they descended to the plains to hunt. Later, tensions ran high between these nations because many Native people were being pushed west by the expansion of the United States.

  The Cheyenne were ruled by the Council of 44, composed of representatives from each Cheyenne clan. In the mid 1850s, the Cheyenne fought against an alliance of Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache. The chief of the Dog Soldiers, Porcupine Bear, traveled through the Cheyenne lands bearing the War Pipe, gathering soldiers for this war. He killed a man in a drunken brawl and the Council of 44 took the War Pipe away from him. The Dog Soldiers continued to support Porcupine Bear and became a vigilante clan. They patrolled the rivers in the north of the plains and refused to sign treaties with settlers.

  In 1851, the United States signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie with representatives of eight Native nations: the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. This treaty acknowledged Native sovereignty over the land and delineated the specific territory of each nation. In exchange for the right to build roads and settlements through Native land, the United States would pay each nation $50,000 per year. This treaty, however, failed to acknowledge that the eight Native nations were all partially nomadic, accustomed to shifting their territory by the season. Since the Treaty of Fort Laramie made them owners of their land in the European sense, they could also be dispossessed of their land according to European legal tactics.

  In 1858, settlers found gold in the Rocky Mountains and swarmed across the plains. In 1861, six chiefs of the Cheyenne and four of the Arapaho received enormous bribes to sign the Treaty of Fort Wise, which ceded over 90% of the land allocated to their nations by the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The Council of 44 never approved this treaty, nor did the majority of the Arapaho nation. Indeed, many of the chiefs did not even understand what they were signing. Nevertheless, representatives of the United States held it to be a “solemn obligation” and began to settle freely across the plains.

  The Dog Soldiers ignored the Treaty of Fort Wise. Soon, US soldiers began to confront Natives and accuse them of theft. A series of escalating skirmishes erupted. The Civil War began around the same time. Colonel John Chivington, a Grand Master of the Freemasons with a viscous gaze and a bloated face, burned villages and killed civilians, taking fetuses, breasts, and scalps as trophies.

  The Governor of Colorado invited the Cheyenne to come to Denver and parley for peace. The chiefs who accepted were mainly the ones who had signed the Treaty of Fort Wise, who were regarded as traitors by the majority of the Cherokee. They arrived at Fort Lyon, where the governor told them that peace was not possible. He said, “Whatever peace you make must be with the soldiers, not with me.” He said his real intention had been to attract the peaceful Cherokee who abided by the terms of the treaty. Then he told them they would be safe if they camped at a creek nearby. This place was called Sand Creek. Colonel Chivington attacked it with 700 soldiers and killed 600 people, 80% of them civilians.

  The Sand Creek Massacre encouraged many Cheyenne to join the Dog Soldiers and attack settlers in the area, but Native militaries were exhausted by 1865. Soldiers and settlers forced most of the Cheyenne and Arapaho to leave Colorado. Around the same time, the Sioux suffered decisive military losses and retreated. Using tales of “Indian massacres,” reports urged that all Natives should be restricted to their reservations. Battles continued over the following years as US forces attempted to gain control of strategic positions along the Rocky Mountains, including Powder River (an important pass) and Black Hills (a Cheyenne, Sioux, and Lakota holy land which also contained gold). In 1874, after the conclusion of the Civil War, the United States started the Red River War, crisscrossing the plains with small armies and cavalry, rounding up bands of Natives. Native warriors quickly ended up isolated and cut off from supplies.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Colonel Custer famously died in this war. He was a gaunt, vain dandy with clever, suspicious eyes and a heartless stare. He said, “Indian women rape easy,” and he attacked civilians indiscriminately. He captured families to force warriors to surrender. In 1868, he attacked a Cheyenne village at Washita River, captured 50 civilians, forced 150 warriors to surrender, then killed everybody. In 1876, he fought a similar battle. Near the place where the Powder River makes a pass to the Yellowstone Valley, he approached a large village of Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people, who were camping and hunting on the Crow reservation. He took a battalion and climbed a ridge, sneaking towards the village. Meanwhile, the remainder of his forces were surrounded by Native warriors. Custer arrived above the village, but was soon surrounded also. He persisted in his attempts to capture civilian hostages, but his entire battalion was destroyed. His main force was soon destroyed as well. Black Elk later said that Custer died for spreading the news about gold in the Black Hills holy land.

  By 1877, most of the Cheyenne had been ‘escorted’ to a reservation in the barren highlands, where they suffered from disease and starvation and were forced to adopt European practices of agriculture and ranching, or else to rely on government aid. Many of their children were taken to “Indian Schools,” where they heard the doctrine of their own inferiority. In 1887, the Dawes Severalty Act divided many reservations among the individual members of Indigenous nations, selling any “left over” land to settlers. Exempted from this act were the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole. In 1893, however, the Curtis Act extended the same provisions to the Five Civilized Tribes, and also dissolved all tribal courts and governments.

  The Paiute lived in an arid mountain valley, where they hunted and fished. They ate pine nuts and cypress bulbs. Many of their clans had no chiefs or laws. Rather, they followed various spiritual leaders, who rose and fell with the times. Their oral tradition was combined with song and dance.

  Among the Paiute was born a man named Quoitze Ow, but he came to be called Wovoka, or Wood Cutter. He could control the weather. He called down blocks of ice from the skies and shot frost from his hands. He lit his pipe with sunlight. He was also Christian. During a solar eclipse in 1889, he fell into a coma and returned with a vision. He prophesied that the ghosts of the dead would return to share Earth with the living. He prophesied that a series of natural disasters would destroy all empires and spare the innocent people. He urged everyone to practice virtuous life and to participate in the Ghost Dance, which calls the dead to aid the living.

  The Ghost Dance became especially popular among the Arapaho, Cherokee, Sioux, and Lakota, who had all been displaced by settlers at that point. They began to perform the Ghost Dance in their reservations. The dancers move in a circle, chanting together. Each round dance has a particular spiritual function, but they are all associated with trance and ekstasis. The Ghost Dance was apocalyptic, tragic, plaintive, carefree, solemn, heroic, defiant, and gallant.

  As the practice of this dance intensified, settlers became anxious. In 1890, the United States used it as a pretext to occupy the reservations with military force. Incidentally, the United States was also building railroads to the gold mines in the Black Hills. At Standing Rock Reservation, Chief Sitting Bull of the Lakota allowed Kicking Bear and Short Bull to teach the Ghost Dance, which they had learned from Wovoka. The Indian Agent, administrator of the reservation, feared that Sitting Bull intended to leave the reservation and travel with Kicking Bear and Short Bull. 39 policemen arrived to arrest Sitting Bull but killed him instead. His followers fled to the camp of Spotted Elk, who in turn fled to the Pine Ridge Reservation to take shelter under Red Cloud. This band was intercepted by US cavalry, who demanded that they make camp. During the night, they positioned cannons nearby. In the morning, the soldiers ordered Spotted Elk and his followers to disarm themselves. Spotted Elk resisted and the cavalry attacked. 300 Lakota people were killed, mostly women and children. That was Wounded Knee.

  Blake arrive in Denver and checked into a hotel. Marijuana had just been legalized in Colorado, so he went out and bought a few grams of the finest buds he had ever seen, lemony Silver Haze, pale-green and glittering. That night, he walked along the Platte River, looking at park benches in orange lamplight and smooth ripples along the dark water, an ominous and empty scene. Ghosts rode the wind like leylines or flocks of birds. When Mohammed and his brother arrived, they all went to a concert at an amphitheater carved into the mountains.

  They stopped at a hot spring. Mohammed absorbed the heat without complaint, while Blake went gasping for fresh air every five minutes, head spinning. When they emerged smelling sulfurous, Mohammed’s brother patted his belly like a king at a feast. Later, he took the plane back to New Jersey. Blake and Mohammed camped in the woods where they were nearly abducted by aliens. They visited Chaco Canyon, the ancestral homeland of the Hopi and Pueblo people, then they went to the Grand Canyon, where they rode mules down to the Colorado River. Blake rode a mule named Miss Vivian. She carried him with grace and respect, but walked her trail with noble will. It began to seem unfair, when he thought about it.