He found himself in a huge house with many rooms. He learned to sit on chairs rather than on the floor.
He met his white brother.
His brother was named David, like their father. He spent only part of his time in the United States, in the fine house Lord Douglas built near the Black Hills, because he was being groomed to become the next Lord Douglas, and he was being sent to school in England.
But no matter how hard Hawk tried to dislike his older brother, he could not do so. The younger David was too much like the older David, interested in everything and everyone around him, intrigued by different cultures rather than repulsed by them. He listened avidly to Hawk’s boastful stories about counting coup and the Sioux ways of courage. He was eager to ride with Hawk when he went to visit his Sioux relations. He had a smile that could draw anger from the soul, melting it away.
As they grew older, they grew closer. When Kathryn died soon after Hawk’s seventeenth birthday, his brother mourned with him, kneeling by her coffin throughout the night. For once,Hawk was glad to be part white, glad to have a reason to allow the tears to slide down his face.
His brother shed silent tears along with him.
In the years to come, they argued about the American Revolution and the War of 1812. They discussed American politics and British. David went to Oxford.
And ironically, Hawk was sent to West Point. Appointments were not easily acquired. But as a younger son of a British peer, David Douglas had spent a great deal of time in the employ of the United States Army. Hawk was half British and half American Indian, a most unusual candidate for the military academy, but one of David’s very good friends, an aide-de-camp to none other than General Winfield Scott, saw to the appointment. David was greatly pleased by the honor for his son. Hawk, who had yet to realize that he loved his father, was anxious to please him. Also, for the benefit of his Sioux chief, he was determined to learn everything he could about the workings of the American army. Another factor influenced him. By this time, admittedly, he had gradually become just as white as he was Indian.
Neither he nor his father realized at the time why the appointment had come so easily.
The United States government had nothing against Indians battling Indians, Army patrols often used Crow scouts against the Sioux. “Civilized” Cherokee and Creek had been used against the Seminole in the Florida wars.
Such tactics could work both ways.
Hawk found himself at West Point. He was a natural student, and the world was opened to him in many ways.
At first, he was taunted for being Indian. Because of that, he went about scoring some of the best grades in his class and excelling in marksmanship, swordsmanship, and strategy. He made a number of very good friends. Just as he had learned to be a Sioux youth, he discovered the pranks that could be playedby young white men. He went to dances, attended balls and luncheons. He engaged in his first affairs, all conducted with the proper chivalry of a future officer. He studied white women even as he studied the great military leaders of the past. In the end, he knew every campaign Napoleon had ever undertaken and how and why he’d met with his greatest defeat at Waterloo, the movements of Alexander the Great, and how Jackson had gone about winning the Battle of New Orleans. He also knew that white women could be very different from their Indian counterparts. Many were eager for possessions—they were not at all familiar with sharing. They were often determined at all costs to appear prim and innocent and beyond reproach, yet beneath such appearances, they could be complete mistresses of sensuality. Those young ladies who were most fervently—if secretively!—warned about his red blood were often the most eager to know him. Very early on he began to respond to such curiosity with a cool and courteous contempt. He was both careful and discreet himself, not averse to the charms of an entertaining widow, but always aware of his father’s pride in him and determined he would disgrace neither his father nor his Indian heritage by bringing disgrace down upon himself.
He graduated with honors and couldn’t wait to see David to taunt him with the fact.
He took his first trip to his father’s estates in Scotland not a month after his graduation. He hadn’t known until he arrived there just how dearly he had missed his brother or even the strength of the bond between them. For the first time in his life, he had really understood his father’s family and his brother’s place in a totally different society. He had been steeped in ancient traditions, ridden the vast boundaries of the Douglas lands, discovered that he belonged in a proud and ancient castle as well as in a tipi. “Learn to love it well, baby brother,”David had told him gravely one day. “This is yours,” Hawk had returned. “Your world.”
“One day, you may be called upon to protect this world in the name of our family.”
Hawk had told him, “I will be chief. You will be lord.”
“Always, we will be brothers.”
In America, the land was breaking apart. Lincoln had been elected president. South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Shots had been fired.
The war was begun over states’ rights, but one of the rights the South sought was the right to keep slaves. Hawk had spent enough time among the great Northern political homes to learn American politics, and despite his concern for his own people and the never-ending battles on the plains, he felt that he had to fight a different war. In his heart, he knew that slavery was wrong.
There were Union troops in the West—fighting Indians. He didn’t want to fight Indians. The Crow were his natural enemies, but only when he was fighting them as a Sioux. He didn’t want to fight Indians as a white.
But he belonged in the war. He and his brother returned to America. David accepted an invitation from the Federal troops to train men, in order to remain close to his brother.
Hawk was one of the best horsemen to ever graduate from West Point. Numerous wealthy acquaintances asked him to take on command of militia companies with a higher rank than he might receive from the regular army. As a West Point graduate, he had earned a commission as a second lieutenant, but despite his youth, he was offered command of a cavalry company as a full lieutenant in the regular army. He accepted the commission, and he fought through all the long and arduous stages of the war along the eastern front. After four years of war, he had gained the rank of colonel and been brevetted as a brigadier general.With the war over, many of the volunteer officers were desperate for regular army commissions. Hawk no longer wanted his.
He would be sent west, he knew. To fight the Indians.
He resigned his commission. Worn and weary from the years of bloodshed, he went first with his brother to his father’s ancestral home. But he was restless. David decided one day it was time to return to the raw Dakota territory, and they traveled together back to America. Hawk realized later that it had been his brother’s way of sending him back, because David couldn’t stay long. The Douglas lands in Scotland were a small empire. For Hawk, the mountains and wilderness were home. David belonged in the ancestral castle.
Hawk was glad to return to his father’s Dakota house, where he could ride the open plains, the sacred Black Hills. He was glad to sit with his grandfather again and listen to his wisdom. He was glad to remember that he was Sioux. Many things had happened in the years of his absence. While he had been engaged in the eastern theater of war, Minnesota Sioux had gone on the warpath, killing settlers, destroying everything in their wake. The army had come after them, and the Minnesota Sioux had traveled west for help from their cousins. The army now said that the Indians must live on the reservations the whites had set aside for them.
Still, they refused to do so. As of yet, in the north, the army hadn’t a strong enough presence to force its edicts upon the Indian populace. A brief time still remained with them.
But every day, more stakes were driven into the ground for the railroad to cross the country. More emigrants teemed west. The war in the East was over. The army was now free to fight the Indians.
Aside from his joy at being among his mother’s people again, Hawk was happy to get to know his father. Proud to be his son. His father had created a cattle empire. Together they worked avast estate. In turn, Hawk was able to see to his family, his band, and his tribe. When hunting was poor, Lord Douglas brought the family cattle. When the wars began to break out and escalate, Hawk found himself a mediator.
Then came word that his brother had been killed in a fire.
