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Elder Stories
Remembering My Mother, Eleanor Starving Bear Bigfoot
by Susie Cain, as told to Renee Sansom Flood
Eleanor Starving Bear Bigfoot Poor in money, but rich in love. |
Note: Susie and her husband Wally Cain lived at the Heritage Living Center for a year before Wally passed away after a lengthy illness. A popular resident in our community, Susie has remained to live and work here. The following is Susie’s tribute to her mother, Eleanor (Starving Bear) Bigfoot, who made the transition from early reservation poverty in 1898 to life in the modern world.
I was born in a wall tent at Lame Deer, Montana in 1940. My mother, Eleanor Starving Bear and my dad, John Tall Whiteman, a policeman in Ashland, helped raise 8 of us kids, plus relatives and orphans. But dad died young and left mother alone to care for her big family.
The first memory I have of mother – she was sitting on the ground scraping and tanning deer hides. I can still see her wide leather belt with her knife sheath, long dress and a bandana around her head. She had white flour all over her dress and arms. She used flour to whiten the deerskins and then she made and beaded moccasins. She didn’t use store bought thread. Mother could roll sinew as thin as a needle.
Every Saturday morning mother heated water to wash all of our clothes on her washboard. That meant a lot of jeans and heavy work clothes. During the winter, my niece and I took turns running outside to put the clothes out to dry. They were frozen stiff by the time we got them on the line. In the evening we ran back out to take them down and bring them inside. If they weren’t dry, we’d hang them up on ropes across the tent ceiling. By Sunday morning they were ready to iron. Each morning, no matter how cold it was outside, the boys hauled water from the creek.
Mother had very little money to take care of 14 of us, including the adults. My sister had a stroke and mother took her and the children in. The only way she could feed her older kids and at the same time make sure we were safe and educated was to send us to the boarding school at St. Labre Mission. On Sunday mornings mother opened up 8 suitcases and put them on the mattresses. She ironed and creased pants, shirts and dresses and folded them neatly in each suitcase. Afterwards, we took baths and washed our hair with brown, lye soap to get ready for school.
Sunday afternoon we went to school and we stayed until Friday afternoon. Then we came home for the weekends. Everybody had their chores but I was the youngest girl so I got to stay with mother most of the time. The days were long gone when Indian women had to haul wood and water, but my mother and sisters still carried the little ones in shawls on their backs.
Sometimes dad’s father, grandpa Tall Whiteman, told old battle stories to wall-to-wall kids and adults who slept on mattresses on the ground. He was 5-years-old when the US 7th Cavalry attacked his camp on the Little Bighorn in 1876. He remembered watching horses gallop back and forth in front of where he was hiding in the bushes. Shots rang out and screaming women cried out for their children. His main fear was getting run over by the horses.
At night, the kids loved to hear mother joke about when she was young. “When I got married, I was traded for a horse,” she’d say. When she was 16-years-old, my dad rode up to her tipi leading 2 horses. Her parents told her that she was going to marry, so she got on the second horse and followed her new husband home. Her parents received the 3rd horse. Many of those traditional Indian marriages worked out pretty good.
All the tipis were gone by the time I was born. Most of the people lived in tents and log cabins. In the middle of our tent sat a red woodstove. After dad died, mother married Dave Bigfoot, a man with 4 children. My step-dad found a “little red wagon,” took off the wheels and turned it upside down over a hole in the ground. He cut out a place for a stovepipe and another round hole for wood. Mother cooked our food on top of that wagon without electricity or running water.
In those days we didn’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day or Easter. We went barefoot in the summer and wore moccasins in the winter and we took turns getting old shoes and clothing from rummage sales at the Mission. My step-dad worked on area ranches while mother made and sold moccasins for $35 a pair. She saved up ration stamps during World War II and for a special treat she bought each of us an apple or an orange. Another treat was plum pudding and fry bread before bed. That was so much fun. We never had butter or milk and I never saw a banana until I was grown.
In September, mother helped our white neighbor ladies, Mrs. Schmaus, Mrs. Eagan and Mrs. Bailey to put up canned food. Every week Helen Schmaus brought us a bucket of fresh eggs. Once in a while, she had her boys come over to give us candy or cookies. She didn’t know they stood across the road and threw the candy to us. “Here, you want this?” one of them would yell. The candy always landed in the dirt. Like puppies, we’d run over and grab the candy off the ground and eat it. Their mother finally found out and those boys really got a lickin.’ It never happened again.
We had wieners once a month at home but that was all the meat we had until somebody brought in a deer, prairie dog or rabbit. Our family dug Indian turnips in June and gathered tree mushrooms after every rain storm. We ate brown oven bread with flour gravy day after day. That got tiring but it was all we had. In late August we each took a lard bucket with our name on it and went to the creek to gather plums, chokecherries, June berries and buffalo berries. Nobody could stay home. Mother made pemmican and dried the fruit for winter use. Nothing was wasted. When we had a deer, she dried meat on a pole hung from the tent ceiling. She also dried beef lungs. The only time we got horse meat was at the rodeos in white towns bordering the reservation. During a rodeo the Indians waited in back for an injured horse. They’d give us the meat to butcher and eat.
During the old days mother made our underwear and slips out of “Rex Flour” sacks. One time I was swinging and my dress caught on the swing seat. When I jumped off, the dress went way up over my head. My friends saw my panties! From then on my girlfriends, and especially the boys, called out, “Hey Rex! Where are you going?” They called me “Rex” until 8th grade.
Mother never complained or said that she was tired and I never saw her cry except at night when she thought we were asleep. I could hear her from my bed. She prayed to “Maheo” (God). “Please watch over my kids and grandchildren. Bless our home. Give us more food. Have pity on us!”
She didn’t have to raise her voice or hit us because we obeyed her. She gave us “the look” when we were bad. It stopped us in our tracks. She was a quiet woman but she loved to laugh. At night in the dark we all laughed at her jokes. I felt warm, safe and loved as I watched her bead in the dim light of the kerosene lamp. She was always there to hug and care for us, especially if one of us got sick. We didn’t have a doctor on the reservation in the old days so she doctored us with Indian medicine made from plant roots, seeds, leaves and bark. Back in those days Indians died from malnutrition and tuberculosis.
When I was 16-years-old, mom had a birthday party for me. My present was a glass plate. My very own glass plate! That was really something special for me. All my life we’d used old enamel plates and cups. Mother invited a blind man, Willis Red Eagle, to pray at the dinner. As he came into our tent, he stepped right on my plate and broke it! I cried and he felt so bad he gave me a coin. My very first birthday present and I didn’t have it one hour!
My older brother Clarence went to war in Korea but before he left, he told mother, “I want you to take care of my kids. I won’t come back from the war.” He wasn’t over there very long before we got a telegram from President Truman saying that Clarence had died fighting in October, 1951. We were all proud that he fought bravely and died a warrior, but mother stayed in bed for days with a terrible headache. She cried alone at night but she never openly grieved in front of us.
In the 1950s our white neighbors had it really good, but it was still tough for Indians. It wasn’t until the ‘60s that living conditions improved on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Our mother admired the modern ways of living. It didn’t take her long before she sold all her land and bought a 49’ Chevy Coupe. She made my brother drive it. Then she moved into one of the HUD houses built for the elderly. She was thrilled to have linoleum floors, electricity, running water and a bathtub! The house was heated by electricity and at first, she didn’t know how to turn on a stove or to turn up the heat in the house. The next thing she did was to buy a television set, but it came with strict rules. Every evening at 9 p.m. we’d hear: “Turn off the TV. You’ll run up my electricity bill.” Electricity cost her $3.50 a month.
I miss playing cards with my mother and listening to her laugh. She had all her teeth worn down to the gums, but she could still pop her Wrigley’s Spearmint! I was the only one of her children to graduate from High School and she was proud of me. Since I was the youngest, I stayed at home when all the others were grown. Then it was my turn to do the housework and laundry. I didn’t mind because mother had been so good to all of us. She said she wanted me to have nice things like a radio, and a phonograph with records. The beading finally left her blind the last ten years of her life. She was 81-years-old when she died in 1979. We obeyed her to the end. She’d worked for so long, she deserved to have her way.
When I think back about my mother’s hard work; all the bedding, diapers and heavy work clothes she washed, the meals she cooked, and the endless ironing and beadwork, I don’t know how we went without or how she ever put up with all the kids. I guess it was her faith and her will to survive. When she was a girl she attended school at the Mission where the nuns taught her how to cook, clean and take care of a family. She soon used what she had learned. Nobody fought or used harsh words in our home. We were poor in money but rich in love. I still have my mother’s washboard to remind me of her. Mother would have loved the Heritage Living Center.
