Counting Coup

by Larry Colton

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In this extraordinary work of journalism, bestselling and award-winning author Larry Colton journeys into the world of Montana's Crow Indians and follows the struggles of a talented, moody, charismatic young woman named Sharon LaForge, a gifted basketball player and a descendant of one of George Armstrong Custer's Indian scouts. In Native American tradition, a warrior gained honor and glory by "counting coup" -- touching his enemy in battle and living to tell the tale. Counting Coup tells the story of a modern hero from within this tradition, but it is far more than just a sports story or a portrait of youth. It is a sobering exposé of a part of our society long since cut out of the American dream. Along the banks of the Little Big Horn, Indians and whites live in age-old conflict and young Indians grow up without role models or dreams. Here Sharon carries the hopes and frustrations of her people on her shoulders as she battles her opponents on and off the court. Colton delves into Sharon's life and shows us the realities of the reservation, the shattered families, the bitter tribal politics, and a people's struggle against a belief that all their children -- even the most intelligent and talented -- are destined for heartbreak. Against this backdrop stands Sharon, a fiery, undaunted competitor with the skill to dominate a high school game and earn a college scholarship. Yet getting to college seems beyond Sharon's vision, obscured by the daily challenge of getting through the season -- physically and psychologically.

Release date: September 21, 2000

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

CHAPTER ONE



Tar paper shacks, abandoned junk heaps in front yards, rutted and littered streets—all the outward signs of people living on
the margin. Down the block from where I park, a pack of mangy dogs mosey across the street, pacing themselves in the heat
of this August day in Crow Agency, Montana.


The only sign of energy in the town is the ubiquity of basketball hoops… on telephone poles, sides of houses, scrawny trees.
These hoops aren’t fancy Air Jordan NBA specials purchased at the Rim Rock Mall in Billings—they have rotting plywood backboards
and flimsy rims drooping toward the hardened dirt. Rare remnants of net, shredded by heavy use and the fierce winds that blow
off the prairie, hang loosely.


At the park in the center of town—a luckless patch of dried grass with a well-used outdoor basketball surface in the middle—Norbert
Hill, Paul Little Light, and Clay Dawes, three seniors on the Hardin High varsity, are playing a lazy game of half-court crunch.
I know their names because I studied their photos in the showcase in the lobby of the high school gym. These are the guys
I’ve traveled to this remote corner of southeastern Montana to write about, the athletic young men who carry the hopes of
the Crow Tribe on their shoulders. In the heat, they move at half speed. I sit down to watch.


A burgundy Mercury Cougar riding out of the dusty Montana summer eases to the curb, and a young woman—I guess her to be seventeen—grabs
a basketball from the back seat and walks onto the vacant end of the court, dribbling the ball between her legs with a casual
ease, her eyes fixed on the guys at the other end. She shyly waves to them, then throws up a halfhearted shot from the free
throw line, the ball sailing perfectly through the netless rim, hitting the support pole and bouncing onto the dead grass.
Slowly, she retrieves it, picking it up with a tricky little flick of the foot, then returns to the court.


Tall and slender, she has a quiet beauty—high cheekbones, dark hair, mahogany eyes—yet she is not a celluloid Pocahontas or
a black velvet rendition of an Indian princess. Her appeal is subtler. It is the way she moves, a grace, languid, fluid, sexy.
All without effort. She seems mysterious, detached.


From the other end of the court, one of the boys beckons her to come play some two-on-two. He is Paul Little Light, a charming,
handsome, crew-cut seventeen-year-old who dreams of Hollywood. He’ll be a movie star with a Beamer, a Benz, and a mansion.


She rolls the ball off the court and walks to the other end, silent, serious. Her teammate will be Norbert, a young man slated
to be captain, star player, and class clown. Twenty years earlier his uncle Darrell Hill had also been a star player at Hardin
High, good enough to win All-State honors. After the season Uncle Darrell and his brother got into a fight outside a bar in
Hardin with two men from another clan with a long-standing feud against the Hill family. When it was all over, the Hill brothers
were dead on the sidewalk of stab wounds and the other two men were arrested, although one eventually walked free and the
other spent only ten years in jail. Whites took the double murder as further proof that the Crows were their own worst enemy.


On the first play, the girl dribbles to her left, then zips a no-look pass to a wide-open Norbert, who scores. Little Light,
her defender, grins, embarrassed. She shows no expression. Instead, she fakes left, then cuts backdoor, leaving Little Light
flatfooted with his Hollywood smile. Norbert’s pass is perfect and she scores an easy layup. She still doesn’t smile, but
she looks at home, as comfortable as the old T-shirt and shorts she wears.


At this moment, a red Chevy 4x4 with a young Indian man behind the wheel cruises by the park. The girl turns and watches it
disappear around the corner, then flips the ball to Little Light and takes off running toward her Cougar, picking up her own
ball on the way.


“Wait,” pleads Little Light. “Let’s finish the game.”

She doesn’t look back or bid them farewell. She just gets in her car and vanishes around the corner.

My journalistic journey to the Crow Indian Reservation, and my own fascination with sport, date back several decades. Back
in the late 1960s, when America was going nuts in the streets, I was a professional baseball player, skilled enough to make
it to the major leagues with the Philadelphia Phillies, but stupid enough to blow it one game after I got there, injured in
a mindless bar brawl, my dream cut short. I played for the Phillies on a Tuesday.


But not a day has gone by since then that I haven’t thought about the pursuit of fickle athletic glory and our national obsession
with sports. It’s hard not to: we’ve got fans in cheese hats, Dennis Rodman on the best-seller list, endorsement fees bigger
than school district budgets. I always read the sports news first.


After I left baseball and took a turn at high school teaching, I wrote a book about pro basketball, as well as basketball
stories for a number of magazines. Somehow along the way I became fascinated, then mystified and alarmed, at the plight of
young Native American athletes. For reasons that were beyond me, these intelligent, very capable young men seemed to have
their lives explode at the time when most young men’s lives are just taking off. On the Crow Reservation, where the passion
for basketball is legendary and star high school players are the heroes of the tribe and often the best players in Montana,
these young athletes invariably finish their high school careers with no hope for a scholarship and no skills for the future.


Before coming to the rez to explore this phenomenon, I knew enough to understand that this is not just some funky little social
trend. This is a whole culture that is backsliding, and has been for a very long time. Why, I wondered, is Native American
society failing, leaving its people so hopeless at such an early age?


The story I’ve come looking for, however, is not at all the story I will write. The story I find is the girl who just dropped
the ball and took off in pursuit of the 4x4.


At the end of my first week in Montana, I head off for another journey to Crow Agency, this time to check out Crow Fair, a
huge tribal powwow. I decide to take the long way from my newly rented duplex in Hardin, a border town on the edge of the
rez. The route will take me south on Montana State Highway 313, across the Big Horn River, then east through the heart of
the rez. On my bicycle. Out of shape.


I’ve never been on a rez before, not even to gamble. I’m not a Native American scholar or New Age wannabe in search of becoming
one with the tribe. I’ve come to Big Horn County only because Indians and sport seem like a good story and an interesting
way to spend a year.


Riding through Hardin, I pass two Indians in front of the Mint Bar, angry, pointing fingers at each other. They interrupt
their discourse to glare at me. I speed up.


Indians, I’ve been led to believe, are very emotional people who tend to score big from fat government handouts, then blow
their windfall money. They are people with rocky family lives and major booze problems. Doesn’t everyone know that?


Odd. That sounds familiar. Though I am, by DNA and upbringing, a WASP, I can identify. As an athlete and a writer, I’ve scored
nice bonuses on occasion, and hey, why not buy a couple of rounds for everybody in the place—only to find myself months later
scrounging cash for rent and a cup of coffee. And perhaps the best thing to be said about my family life is that it’s been
eventful. I’ve been married a couple of times, and although I put in a decade doing the single-dad thing seeing two daughters
through high school and on to college, I’m still baffled by parenting. As for alcohol, I no longer drink, but back when I
did… let’s just put it this way: I’ve seen the inside of a drunk tank.


So, in some ways, I expect to feel right at home here.

As I head south out of town, the land is flat, the air thick with the smell of fresh-mown alfalfa. I take a deep breath. Riding
a bike across the landscape is quickly changing the first impressions I’d gotten a week earlier when I arrived on I-90 from
my home in Portland, Oregon. From the Interstate that first day, eastern Montana appeared intimidating, mile after relentless
mile of empty space—no trees, no houses, no Burger Kings. Why had I left my girlfriend and our cozy tree-lined neighborhood
for these cutbacks and ravines, this dead dirt and buffalo grass, these low-pinched hills and dry creek beds? But now, from
my bicycle seat, I can smell the alfalfa, see the horses, hear the river. A sign reads: “Good Luck Fishermen.” What at first
seemed hostile land now breathes of life and adventure. It feels good… except that after only an hour on the road my butt
hurts and it feels like I’m riding in a kiln.


An empty sugar beet truck barrels past, nearly blowing me into the irrigation ditch next to the road. I keep pumping, past
an abandoned homestead, the landscape crawling by, land rich with beets, wheat, barley, and corn, the crops providing the
area with its economic lifeline, at least to its white farmers. I wave to a farmer on a tractor. He doesn’t wave back.


After crossing the Big Horn River, I turn onto a county road toward Crow Agency ten miles to the east. The rich farmland that
hugs the river now gives way to mile after mile of open range, herds of cattle grazing their way to the slaughterhouse. At
first glance, the terrain seems smooth and flat, but soon I encounter slow winding hills that loom like invisible Himalayas.
The fact that the temperature on this cloudless prairie day just passed the plutonium meltdown point doesn’t help. I pass
an Indian mending a fence. He doesn’t wave either.


The closer I ride to Crow Agency, the more garbage and litter I notice next to the road: discarded pop cans, junk food wrappers,
disposable diapers, Styrofoam cups. It seems contradictory. I’ve just read a poignant account of the Indians’ kinship and
harmony with the earth and nature and how that relationship had been disrupted by the white man and his pollution of the land
and the rivers… and yet the deeper I ride into the reservation, the uglier the trail of trash. I doubt farmers have thrown
it there.


A car filled with Crow teenagers zooms by and an empty pack of Marlboro Lights sails out the window. “Get a car,” the driver
yells. In the distance, I see Last Stand Hill.


Finally, I stop at the top of a rise, and down below is dusty little Crow Agency, the political and cultural center of the
reservation, a town with a population of one thousand, give or take a couple dozen on any day. Off to the left is the Big
Horn Carpet Mill, a government-subsidized tribal business that has been abandoned and boarded shut since going belly-up in
1974. Prior to its failure it was the largest entrepreneurial venture ever tried on the reservation, but now it is just an
ugly hunk of concrete alongside the freeway, an eyesore, a grim testimonial to yet another Crow failure in business.


Entering town, I stop at the Crow Mercantile to get something to drink. Of the ten customers, I’m the only white. “Do you
have any bottled water?” I inquire.


The clerk doesn’t respond.

I ask again.

Still no response. She stares at me as if I’m speaking French. I wonder if they only speak Crow in Crow Agency during Crow
Fair week. Finally, she turns and points to the rear of the store. “Gatorade’s down there,” she advises.


I quench my thirst, then ride south, past the rodeo arena and tribal headquarters, and past the proposed site of Little Big
Horn Casino, a project that, depending on whom you ask, is either going to be the salvation of the tribe—“it’ll bring jobs
and revenue”—or its ruin—“just what they need, another addiction.”


At the Custer Trading Post, I turn onto the road leading up to Custer Battlefield, and fall in line behind the caravan of
campers and urban assault vehicles bringing needed tourist revenue into the area. Struggling to catch my breath, I slowly
make my way up the incline leading to the entrance, swerving onto the shoulder to avoid a Winnebago from Minnesota.


Inside the park, I lock my bike and walk up the hallowed hillside to the monument marking the spot where the Indians had massacred
General Custer and his troops back in 1876. A warm wind ripples through my T-shirt. Looking at the clusters of white headstones
scattered in the undulating meadows of parched mustard and buffalo grass, I wipe away the sweat. I want to know more about
the Battle of Little Big Horn and Custer’s demise, but on this day and in this heat, I’m not in the mood to take the tour.
Maybe on another day when the tourists are thinned out, and the sun is low, and the park rangers aren’t looking like Marine
DIs in their olive green uniforms and reflector shades. So I head back down the hill, stopping at the Custer Trading Post
to buy another drink.


Sitting on a bench out back, I stare down the hill and across a dirt road at a small brown house, probably built by HUD. It
stands alone and weary, and has all the architectural flair of an inflated shoe box. There is something melancholy about it,
like the sacred ground that surrounds me. Next to the drab house a teenage girl nonchalantly shoots hoops at a netless rim
nailed to a telephone pole beside a rusty abandoned trailer. She is too far away to see her face, but it is impossible to
miss the grace and elegance of her movement. When the ball rolls away, she moves to retrieve it, picking it up with a tricky
little flick of the foot. It is that same girl.


From where I sit, I can’t even tell if the ball goes through the hoop or not, yet as I sit and watch, transfixed, I forget
that I am in the middle of one of the most famous places in American history. There is something enchantingly beautiful in
what I’m seeing—the girl’s movements, the setting, the arc of the ball, the cavalry gravestones in the background. It all
seems to momentarily fit together in some sort of American mosaic, old and new, sport and culture, form and purpose, sorrow
and hope.


*     *    *

Crow Fair is the tribe’s five-day powwow held the third week in August, an event the recently fired boys’ basketball coach
at Hardin High describes as “a place where a bunch of Indians run around drunk and nothing starts on time.” Known in Crow
as umbasax-bilus, or “where they make noise,” the fair is the most anticipated happening of the year on the reservation. For five days, Crow
Agency becomes the “Teepee Capital of the World,” with spirited competition for prize money in horseracing, rodeo, and tribal
dancing. I’ve never seen so many pickups.


At the fairgrounds located above the banks of the Little Big Horn River, a river the Indians call the Greasy Grass, I lock
up my bike again and start meandering on foot, soaking up the culture: men in full-length headdresses; fancy dancers in beaded
dresses; the Nighthawk drummers pounding out tribal rhythms; kids in braided hair riding bareback on pintos; hundreds of teepees
with lodge poles extending so high above the covering they resemble giant hourglasses. I feel like a tourist in New York City
trying not to let the natives see me gawking up at the skyscrapers. Judging from the dearth of white faces in the crowd, Crow
Fair is not big on the social calendar of local farmers and ranchers.


I check the Crow Fair program and according to the schedule of events it is almost time for the Grand Entry, a colorful parade
into the arbor, the circular outdoor arena that serves as the centerpiece of the fair. The Grand Entry, I’ve been told, is
something not to miss, a spectacular display of pageantry and culture that serpentines its way down an adjoining roadway before
entering the arbor. I walk to the roadway to get a good view, surprised to find nobody there, no spectators, no participants.
I wait ten minutes, and still nobody appears.


Finally, an elderly woman carrying a folding chair arrives, her face creased with many lines. I imagine her to be full of
wisdom and stories. Slowly, she sets her chair down next to the roadway and takes a seat. Dressed in the clothes of the traditional
Crow woman—long-sleeved T-shaped cotton dress, wide leather belt, high-top moccasins, head scarf, shawl—she is one of a handful
of elderly women on the reservation still clinging to the old tribal customs and trying to maintain the vanishing culture.
Whites call these women “blanket squaws.”


“What time does the parade start?” I ask.

She stares straight ahead toward the east and the direction from which the earliest Crows migrated two centuries earlier.
No words come, no acknowledgment of my presence or my question. Just like earlier at Crow Mercantile. I wonder if she even
speaks English. For many on the reservation, Crow is still the first language, and to a few, it is still the only language.


Just as I’m about to turn and walk away, she raises her head and points down the roadway, away from the arbor. “The parade
will start,” she says, “when you see it coming.”


My patience is no match for hers, so I make my way back to the arbor to wait there for the Grand Entry and the start of the
tribal dancing competition. I join the waves of fairgoers circling the perimeter. It is like a carnival midway—craft booths,
food vendors, teenagers. If there is a litter patrol, I don’t see it.


I purchase a slice of fry bread, a puffy pancake-shaped pastry fried in lakes of grease, then sit down to rest and people-watch.
Pretty soon I see a familiar face—the mystery girl from the outdoor court in Crow Agency. At her side is a white girl, wearing
tight jeans and a dark blue Montana State sweatshirt. She is pretty, if maybe a little trailer park naughty, her reddish brown
hair teased skyward. They are sitting on a bench, deep in conversation, oblivious to everyone around them.


The conversation seems intense. Not angry, just earnest. Intuition, sharpened by raising two daughters and spending tons of
hours around high school kids, advises me that they are up to no good, especially when they high-five each other, then hurry
off, arm in arm, laughing, two girls on a mission, escorted out of sight by the rhythmic pounding of tribal drums.


In time—Crow Time—the Grand Entry parades into the arbor. Accompanied by a cacophony of bells, drums, and chanting, and led
by a color guard of Crow Vietnam vets, hundreds of dancers dressed in native costumes stream into view. Men, women, children.
I have never seen such color, such beadwork, such magnificence. Some of the children are no more than four years old. How
do they know the steps?


I watch the dancers majestically circle the arbor, and I am moved by the beauty and spirit. The parade has indeed started.

It is twelve miles back to Hardin along the frontage road next to I-90, twelve long miles, not uphill, just long. I pedal
hard.


The land around me is at the center of the enmity between the Indians and whites. From a territory once the size of Pennsylvania,
the Crows’ land has been reduced by the U.S. government to a mere 2.2 million acres, smaller than Connecticut. And if that
isn’t bad enough, whites now lease or own 95 percent of the Crows’ allotted reservation land, acquiring it for pennies on
the dollar from tribal members desperate for a buck. Small wonder the Indians are pissed and suing to get it back, a case
that seems destined to idle in the courts forever.


But it isn’t the struggle for the land I’m thinking about as I pedal along. It is that Indian girl. She is in my karass, a
term Kurt Vonnegut used in Cat’s Cradle to explain recurring chance encounters with a stranger. I’ve been in town for a couple of days and already I’ve spotted her
three times. She stands out. Maybe it’s her athleticism, or maybe it’s her good looks. Whatever it is, she’s in my karass.


I will soon learn she is Sharon LaForge, a fifth-generation relative of one of the six Crow scouts that rode with General
Custer on his fateful day. And as I sense, she will turn out to be special, a person who will be the focus of my attention
during my time on the rez, as well as after I leave. I will see her in school and talk to her daily when she finally allows
it. I will yell myself hoarse watching her try to win a scholarship and carry Hardin High to the State Championship. I will
become inexorably involved in her life as she struggles against the seemingly endless forces working against her. I will marvel
at her bravery, recoil at her bad choices.


I can’t foresee any of that, of course, as I continue to pedal, continue to hurt. I’m not exactly sure how far I’ve ridden
this day, maybe forty miles, maybe 750. For a guy fast approaching his AARP card, it feels like the Tour de France over the
Pyrenees. I still have five miles to go. Even worse, a nasty wind has come whipping in off the prairie. It feels as if I’m
losing ground. I have to pedal on the downslopes.


I try to think of anything rather than how badly I hurt or how slowly I’m moving. An eighteen-wheeler rumbles by on the Interstate
and I’m reminded of a sad story I heard about two Crow teenagers who decided to play a modern-day version of counting coup.
On a rainy night these two boys stood on the edge of I-90, leaning out into the right lane to count coup by slapping the sides
of eighteen-wheelers rolling by. These trucks, evidently, were the enemy. But the boys had been drinking and leaned out too
far and got hit. They both died instantly.


With three miles to go and the wind still blowing hot and hard, I spot a beat-to-shit pickup turning onto the frontage road.
It is headed in my direction. As it gets closer I see that it is limping along on a flat tire, the torn tread flopping against
the pavement. An older Indian couple are inside, and as we pass, they check me out, not just a quick glance but a real eagle-eye
stare-down.


They go a few yards farther down the road, then turn around, nearly driving off the shoulder. I can hear them behind me, closing
ground, the sound of their flopping tire getting louder and louder, closer and closer.


Being new to these parts, I’m a bit nervous. I know it’s irrational, but my heart doesn’t. I can’t outrun them, not even with
their wounded tire. I strain into the wind.


In a few seconds they are right alongside me, almost close enough to touch. I glance over, just as the woman in the passenger
seat rolls down her window. We travel side by side for several more yards, then she speaks. “In case you’re interested,” she
says with a toothless smile, “you’re going four miles an hour.”




I awake feeling stiff—my shoulders, back, butt. Especially my butt. I abandon my plan to go for another bike ride, and decide
instead to take a walk through Hardin to the Chat and Chew Cafe for breakfast. Maybe after that I’ll head over to the high
school to catch the first day of the girls’ varsity practice. (In Montana, the girls’ and boys’ basketball seasons are separated,
the girls playing in the fall, the boys in the winter.) The girl from the court in Crow Agency will be there, I hope.


I’ve been in Hardin a few days now, settling into my prosaic little unfurnished two-bedroom duplex behind the empty lot adjacent
to Hardin Bowl. I found the place only through a chance conversation at the Big Horn County Historical Museum with a sweet
grandmotherly woman who said that property owners never list their rentals in the Big Horn County News because they don’t want to rent to Indians. “They make bad tenants,” she explained.


That isn’t the only thing explained to me during my first couple days in town. At Sevons, a junky secondhand shop and Tupperware
graveyard where I’d gone to pick up some home furnishings, I stopped to buy a snow cone from a cherubic ten-year-old in front
of the store. He took the opportunity to inform me that the Indians in Hardin “wouldn’t be so bad except they all think they
own the place.”


At the Hardin Community Center, a nice clean facility where $50 bought me a year’s membership to use the exercise equipment,
Jacuzzi, and Olympic-size indoor pool, the assistant manager looked me square in the eyes and set the record straight. “All
you need to know about these Indians around here is that they were all born with basketballs in their hands.”


Despite the mistrust and misunderstanding between the two cultures, I like the prospect of spending a year in a place that
is an underdog, a gritty town fighting the odds. I’ve always wanted to live in a small town, I guess in the same way I’ve
always wanted to live in New York—not forever, just to do my thing for a while and move on. Hardin is indeed a small town.
It has an abundance of churches and bars, but only one traffic signal and no MTV in its cable package. “Why no MTV?” I ask
the cable guy.


“ ’Cause folks around here said they’d rather have the two Nashville stations,” he answers.

So far, I’ve seen no car phones, gang graffiti, or business suits. At Hardin Ford, the only vehicles on the lot are pickups,
and during the day, the only radio station I can get on my secondhand radio is KTCR “Cat Country.” This is Montana, real wrangler
country. The Chamber of Commerce’s promotional video boldly declares the town “The Heart of the American West,” and those
are real cowboys and real gun racks, and that’s a real Indian pissing over there in the shadows next to the Mint Bar.


To the storekeepers, these drunken Indians are ruining business, driving away customers. Merchants regularly complain to tribal
leaders about the problem, but the leaders say it isn’t their jurisdiction, and besides, the drunks aren’t really bothering
anyone, they are just “a benign presence.” So nothing ever changes, including perceptions. It is these Indians, the visible
ones, the ones peeing in the shadows and sleeping on the sidewalks, whites think of first. They are the ones perpetuating
the stereotype of the drunken Indian staggering down America’s Main Street.


In the town’s early days, saloonkeepers learned in a hurry that money could be made selling booze to the Indians. But there
was an obstacle—it was a federal crime to sell liquor on the reservation, and Hardin was within the reservation boundaries.
So town leaders asked the government to move the boundary. The government obliged, moving the line to the edge of town, taking
Hardin off the reservation. The saloonkeepers were then free to sell liquor to Indians, and in time, everybody else was free
to complain about the “Indian drinking problem.”


But is it really the drunken Indians who are hurting the local economy? Or is it the “disloyal whites” in town, the ones who
take their money and drive fifty miles to shop at the supermarkets and malls in Billings? In the past month, the corner drugstore
closed its doors, and the owner of the jewelry store, who is also the mayor and brother of my landlord, has announced he is
looking for a buyer. So far, he’s had zero offers.


Or is Shell Oil the real culprit? Back in the 1970s, predictions of huge oil and coal discoveries swept across eastern Montana.
Practically overnight Big Horn County was supposed to change from a cattle and crop place into a huge energy empire. Hardin’s
population would swell to twenty thousand. Even Safeway bo