Dances with Wolves

In 1863, buffalo surge across the Plains in the tens of millions, as they always have, a “great, living blanket of buffalo” (164), grazing on the abundant prairie grasses and moving from one rich field of forage to the next. Out of these herds the Comanche make culls, and the animals’ meat, hides, and even bones and sinews provide the nomads with most of their resources, the only major exceptions being horses and rifles. Comanche life thus centers on the buffalo, which shape the life and culture of the people who hunt them. 

The Comanche summer hunting camp, somewhere out on the Great Plains north of Texas, is the rallying point for nearly 200 Native Americans whose principal resource is the buffalo. Week in and week out, they hunt buffalo, process the carcasses, and build up their food stores for the coming winter. The camp is filled with conical tents called lodges in which the villagers live. The people often hold evening dances and other celebrations around central campfires. They must also guard the camp against invaders, and they can move quickly, as needed, to follow the great herds of buffalo that roam where they will. 

Dunbar is very respectful of the American Flag—he has fought to defend it and flies it carefully above Fort Sedgewick—and brings one with him on his first visit to the Comanche village. On finding Stands With A Fist bleeding out on the prairie, he tears strips from the flag to wrap her wounds. This helps to save her life, but the flag is ruined in the process. This act symbolizes a transition for Dunbar, from one dully loyal to his old nation to someone who cares more for people than for symbols. 

This ill-equipped outpost—little more than a couple of mud structures and a corral perched on a rise above a river—is abandoned by the US Army for most of a year. By a series of coincidences, its only occupant, Dunbar, is forgotten by the bureaucracy, which gives him leave to explore the nearby prairie and get to know, and eventually bond with, the land’s occupants. Not long forgotten, however, the fort soon experiences a rebirth at the hands of a company of soldiers, and once again it becomes a forbidding threat to the Comanche. 

With softly rolling, grass-covered hills that extend in all directions as far as the eye can see, the prairie is the foundation of the world in which Dunbar finds himself: “The prairie was glorious, ablaze with wildflowers and overrun with game” (45). Bird-filled trees grow along the rivers, and gigantic herds of buffalo provide resources for the Comanche. In following the buffalo, the people move across the prairie beneath a hot summer sun and sudden thunderstorms. The prairie delights Dunbar and draws him into its ways, until he learns to live within its enchanting regime as a member of the Comanche. 

Like a gun on the wall in a Chekhov play that finally gets used in the third act, the rifles at Fort Sedgewick, buried early on by Dunbar as a precaution against Native American raids, get dredged up later to help protect those same Native Americans against attack by an enemy tribe. This transformation in the weapons’ purpose parallels the change in Dunbar from Army interloper to Comanche defender; their burial and retrieval act as bookends to that process of transformation.