56 pages • 1 hour read
Michael BlakeDances with Wolves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 27-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary
News of the great victory against the Pawnee elates the returning warriors; it makes up for their disappointment in failing to find their own Pawnee to fight. Kicking Bird is deeply impressed with Dances With Wolves’ progress, a man who, only months earlier, hadn’t even seen a Native American. He’s also stunned to learn from his wife about the budding romance between Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist. She assures him that it is a good thing, but it rankles him.
Kicking Bird enters Dances With Wolves’ lodge and brusquely demands to know what is going on between him and Stands With A Fist. Startled, Dances With Wolves replies that he loves her and wants to marry her. Kicking Bird leaves, consults with Wind In His Hair and Stone Calf, then returns to his own lodge, where he tells Stands With A Fist, “You are no longer a widow” (275). Then, still flustered by these strange developments, he takes his favorite horse for a long ride.
Wind In His Hair and Stone Calf visit Dances With Wolves and explain that he must make a large gift to Kicking Bird, the bride’s adoptive father, but Dances With Wolves has little to offer. The two visitors walk through the village soliciting donations for a dowry; the villagers, even the poor ones, want to contribute to Dances With Wolves. By day’s end, twenty ponies are tied up in front of his lodge. He brings them, along with his precious Navy revolver, to Kicking Bird’s lodge. If the medicine man accepts the gifts, the marriage will be assured. At dawn, the horses and gun are gone.
Kicking Bird officiates in front of Dances With Wolves’ tent. The groom and bride are dressed in their best finery; Kicking Bird gives an interminable speech, then puts the lovers’ hands together and directs them to enter Dances With Wolves’ tent. On entering, the marriage is official. The newlyweds pull the tent flap shut and stay inside for the rest of the day.
Chapter 28 Summary
Late rains renew the prairie grasses, and the tribe decides to wait two more weeks so the ponies can finish fattening up for the long winter ahead. Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist are grateful, as this allows them to linger in the newness of their marriage. They spend much time alone in their lodge, and the men tease Dances With Wolves about it. He takes the kidding in stride; he’s too happy to care. He and Kicking Bird continue their conversations, exchanging knowledge about the white and Comanche peoples. Dances With Wolves shows special interest in the spiritual side of the tribe. Kicking Bird is very happy with his student.
He takes Dances With Wolves on a day-long ride south to a sacred forest along the river. This is where the Comanche believe all the world’s creatures were first hatched and where they return to renew themselves. The forest, an Eden of sorts, is strangely silent; death is in the air. In a clearing, they find a killing field of deer and smaller animals, partially butchered, heads severed. Farther on, they find two dilapidated huts surrounded by trash and the discarded carcasses of animals. Dances With Wolves wants to wait for the owners and kill them, but Kicking Bird believes they’ll be gone awhile. They turn and ride back toward camp.
On the way, Dances With Wolves tells Kicking Bird of the strange dream of death he had in the canyon north of the camp. Kicking Bird wants him to tell the dream to Ten Bears. They quicken their pace. At Ten Bears’ lodge, they tell of the forest carnage, and Dances With Wolves relates his dream. He adds that the whites are limitless in number and their massive weapons can overpower the Comanche.
Ten Bears brings out a sack and pulls from it a rusted helmet from a conquistador. He says his grandfather’s grandfather fought and defeated these outsiders and the Mexicans who followed, and that he has fought Texans in their turn. All the treaties have been broken, and the Comanche have moved west to avoid problems, but the whites continue to invade. He doesn’t know what to do except to continue to fight to defend his people’s land.
Chapter 29 Summary
The air grows chilly, and the village begins preparations to return to the winter camp. Dances With Wolves looks forward to the distance from the oncoming whites as well as the anonymity this will provide. Then it hits him: He’s not anonymous because he left his journal back at the fort. Kicking Bird doesn’t like the idea of Dances With Wolves heading there just as the village is leaving in the other direction, but he relents.
Dances With Wolves races on Cisco to the fort. When he gets there, he pulls up sharply: Twenty tents, a corral full of horses, and two cannon greet him. Soldiers are everywhere. A nearby squad, seeing Dances With Wolves and Cisco, raise their rifles and fire. Cisco rears, throwing Dances With Wolves; a bullet catches the horse in the heart, and he falls. Dances With Wolves rushes to him, but Cisco already is dead. The butt of a rifle slams into Dances With Wolves’ face, knocking him out.
He comes to on a dirt floor, his broken cheek aching painfully. The fort commander, Major Hatch, and a lieutenant arrive and question him. Dances With Wolves tells them he’s First Lieutenant John Dunbar: “This is my post” (295). They ask for proof; he tells them about the paper with his written orders under his bed. They find it, but it’s smeared, and the orders are for a “Rumbar.” Dances With Wolves tells them to read his journal, but it can’t be found. None of them know that an illiterate private took it, thinking it useful as toilet paper, and now he dares not admit to it.
Dances With Wolves asks why the Army is out there in force; they reply that they’re searching for whites taken hostage. Dances With Wolves denies that any such thing has occurred. His interrogators offer to reevaluate his “treasonable conduct” if he leads them to the Comanche and acts as interpreter. Dunbar insists there is nothing for the Army to do out here. They place him under arrest and tell him to think about it.
At the Comanche camp late in the afternoon, Kicking Bird can stall no longer, and Ten Bear’s village moves out. The medicine man sends three men to scout the fort. Stands With A Fist wants to stay and becomes combative when forced to leave; Kicking Bird’s wives restrain her roughly until she calms down.
At the fort, Dances With Wolves gets permission to go relieve himself. As his escorts walk him back, a wagon arrives, and two soldiers toss from it the body of Two Socks. The soldiers pick up the wolf’s body and lug it around, teasing and chasing a soldier known to have an intense fear of wolves. Dances With Wolves leaps up, knocks out one soldier and begins to strangle the other until again he’s struck by a rifle butt and loses consciousness.
Dances With Wolves awakens in chains. The officers return to question him; he answers only in Comanche, and they give up and leave. At midnight, the Comanche scouts return from the fort and report 60 soldiers, who hold Dances With Wolves in chains. The village immediately splits up and heads in different directions, planning to meet days later at the winter camp. Wind In His Hair, Stone Calf, and 18 other warriors insist on riding to the fort, where they’ll lay low until an opportunity arises to rescue Dances With Wolves.
At the fort, Major Hatch decides to have Dunbar shipped to Fort Hays. This will likely enhance the Major’s career as well as get the unnerving traitor out of his hair. Six men are detailed to escort the prisoner on the wagon ride east. As the group sets out, Dances With Wolves considers his options, concludes he can’t overpower the six soldiers, and decides it would be better to die trying than rot in a prison. He rues his separation from Stands With A Fist but expects, and believes it proper, that Ten Bears won’t risk his entire village to save one man. Still, he hopes Comanche scouts at least know of his situation: They might find some way to save him.
After some hours, the group comes to a river crossing lined with bushes. Dances With Wolves senses the hidden presence of Comanche warriors and braces himself. At the first crack of a rifle, Dances With Wolves strangles his wagon guard with his hand chains. The sergeant in command, struck by an arrow, falls from his horse; the wagon driver jumps into the river, followed by Dances With Wolves, who whips him to death with the chain. Wind In His Hair chases down the remaining lead rider and clubs him in the head, killing him. Dances With Wolves turns to find the rear riders lying in the water. Stone Calf finishes them off.
Someone grabs his shoulder: It’s Kicking Bear, elated at the ease of the ambush and no injuries among the Comanche. They find the keys to unlock Dances With Wolves’ chains. The group rides southwest, well away from Fort Sedgewick, toward a reunion with their band.
Chapter 30 Summary
Early snow hides the tracks of Ten Bear’s people as they escape to the winter camp. They meet in the traditional canyon, miles long with cliffs half a mile high, that they call “The Great Spirit Steps Here” (304). Secluded from the worst storms, and with plenty of water and forage, the canyon serves as home for other bands as well. The last of Ten Bears’ people to arrive is the rescue party. Stands With A Fist, on seeing them approach, runs toward them, calling out Dances With Wolves’ name over and over until she reaches him.
A blizzard keeps the villagers in their lodges for a few days. Kicking Bird applies healing herbs to Dances With Wolves’ face, but the broken cheekbone must heal on its own. Dances With Wolves isn’t worried about the injury, but he’s troubled by something else. Finally, he tells Stands With A Fist about it, and she understands. He also asks for a council.
At the council, Dances With Wolves declares that the white soldiers will not rest until they have found him, for they consider him a traitor who should be hung, and they will hurt or kill any who harbor him. Dances With Wolves must leave the band to protect it from that fate. Stands With A Fist will go with him. The council is upset at first but soon sees the wisdom of his words.
Something about this decision troubles Ten Bears, but he can’t discern what it is. For two days, he sits in his lodge and smokes, hardly eating, as he struggles with an insight that eludes him. He fears his hard-earned wisdom has failed him with age, and that perhaps it is a sign that his time is over and he should end his life.
He hears a voice that says, “Go to the lodge of Dances With Wolves” (309). He struggles through snow drifts and visits Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist. As he enters the tent, Ten Bears realizes what is wrong with the decision. He tells Dances With Wolves that, when the white soldiers come, they will not find Dunbar because that man is gone already. All they will find is a Comanche warrior.
Chapter 31 Summary
The winter is exceptionally snowy, and the villagers stay close to their lodges; by spring, they’re anxious to move north. The band treks to a spot far from Fort Sedgewick, with water, forage, and great herds of buffalo. Late in the summer, many babies are born in the village. It is a good year for them, the last good year they will have. The white settlers will soon be upon them.
Chapters 27-31 Analysis
The final chapters tie off the story’s loose ends. Dances With Wolves marries Stands With A Fist; he makes a final, violent break with the US Army; the band returns to its winter camp; and the Comanche’s cycle of hunting begins again the following year.
Three of the book’s scenes depict white settlers or soldiers behaving thoughtlessly or ruthlessly toward the resources of the Plains. These include the original Fort Sedgewick, whose soldiers ill-treat their locale, waste food, and begin to starve; the white hunters who slaughter dozens of buffalo merely for their hides and tongues; and, in the final chapters, the wholesale killing of deer and other animals in a primeval forest, the wasted bodies lying among the trash of uncaring pioneers. Part of Dunbar’s transformation into Dances With Wolves derives these offenses, which alienate him from his cultural past.
Lieutenant Dunbar’s arrest and rough treatment at the hands of the Army point up the vast gulf that has grown between the hero’s old way of life and the new. To Dunbar, as Dances With Wolves, the soldiers now seem alien. That they kill both of his treasured animal friends, Cisco and Two Socks, puts the final nail in the coffin, and Dances With Wolves thereafter has no hesitation about killing American soldiers.
Dunbar’s transformation into Dances With Wolves has taken less than a year, from mid-spring through autumn 1863. So quickly has he become a treasured member of the band that, when he’s arrested, his friends Wind In His Hair, Kicking Bird, and Stone Calf join other ranking warriors who risk themselves to rescue him. When Dances With Wolves offers to leave his adopted Comanche people so they won’t be implicated in his escape from Army custody, Chief Ten Bears tells him instead that Dances With Wolves will simply blend into the village, and the Army will never find him. This testifies to the authentic completeness of Dunbar’s transformation into the Comanche warrior Dances With Wolves.
The book’s final paragraphs foretell the troubles that will visit the Comanche with the coming flood of white settlers. After the Civil War, it was US policy in the West to limit Native American food sources, especially by mass-killing the buffalo. The purpose was to force Plains Native Americans to relocate to reservations, where they could more easily be controlled and kept out of the way of white settlers. The policy of killing buffalo proved so successful that the creatures were decimated to near extinction. A century later, the rules changed to permit buffalo to make something of a comeback. At 150,000, though, their current number pales in comparison with the tens of millions that roamed the Plains until the late 1860s.
Of the many groups who lived in the Plains region—Pawnee, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Sioux, among others—the Comanche stand at the center of the book’s tale. For practical filmmaking reasons, the film version of Dances with Wolves switched from Comanche to Lakota Sioux, who also had a buffalo-hunting culture, and their South Dakota homeland boasted a large buffalo herd and numerous actors who spoke the native tongue. Author Michael Blake wrote a sequel called The Holy Road that continues Dances With Wolves’ adventures with the Comanche as they struggle to survive the onslaught of settlers pouring in from the East.
