Crazy Horse (3 page)

Having chosen the chief of their choice, the U.S. government agreed to pay the tribes an annuity of $50,000 in
goods, for which they expected to get safe passage for immigrants along the Holy Road—peace in their time, as it were. The commissioners went home well satisfied; the Indians divided their presents and went back to their customary lives. No one, of any tribe, had any intention of obeying Conquering Bear, unless his wish happened to coincide with what they wanted. They may not even have understood that the whites harbored such a foolish expectation. Conquering Bear may have supposed that he was now chief of the Brulés, and possibly, at a stretch, of the Oglalas, but even of the Oglalas he would have been far from sure. As for being chief of all the Sioux, much less of all the Plains Indians—well, that was a ridiculous notion that no one took seriously. There was no chief of all the Sioux—never had been, never would be.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of the Fort Laramie council was the government's misreading of what chieftaincy meant among the Plains Indians. They could not rid themselves of the expectation that a Sioux or a Cheyenne or a Pawnee, once called a chief, would then begin to behave exactly like a white CEO, bossing people around, initiating, restraining. They were unprepared to recognize that Indian societies didn't work that way. The Sioux were highly individualistic people; though they often acted in concert on hunts and raids, at other times each man simply went his own way. Crazy Horse ignored the sundance, spent a lot of time by himself, raided when he wanted to. If he could find a few
warriors willing to go raiding with him, that was fine; but if no one in camp was in a martial mood, he went alone.

The issue of chieftaincy remains ticklish because, through long usage, most of those who read about the Plains Indians, and some of those who write about them, come to assume that the Indians who proved most successful in councils and parleys with the whites were really chiefs back home, when in many cases they were not, Red Cloud being a famous example. The struggle for the Bozeman Trail and the Powder River country is often called Red Cloud's war, and he is commonly thought to have won that war when the government closed three forts in 1868. But many of the Sioux who knew him were merely amused by the notion that Red Cloud was a chief, although they did concede that personally he was valorous enough. But he didn't sit in the council of elders and wise men called the Big Bellies. The Sioux may have noticed problems with Red Cloud's character—vanity, for example—that escaped the whites, for a time, though they certainly didn't escape agent Valentine McGillycuddy, who had a long and bitter struggle with him in the years after Crazy Horse's death. Red Cloud's name is on the plaque at the Fetterman battlefield, though several authorities doubt that he fought in that battle; nor was he at the Little Bighorn, though in extreme old age he seems to have believed that he was.

The whites decided Red Cloud was a big chief because he was able in dealing with
them.
He was prominent
in many parleys and conferences, went to Washington several times, and even made a speech at Cooper Union, in New York City, in 1870. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail both recognized quickly that the whites were too powerful to oppose directly—much too powerful. Whatever might be said in the parleys, and whatever was written on the papers, the whites meant to win; they were going to take what they wanted, which, in the end, was all the country that the native peoples had once inhabited. Red Cloud may not have been a big chief to his own people, but he had, early on, made a true reckoning of white ability and white intent. The bottom line, for Red Cloud, was that the whites were going to take it all. Thus, in the big council of 1874, over the Black Hills, where gold had been discovered by the ubiquitous General Custer, Red Cloud advocated selling, and for a big price. Clearly the whites were going to take the Black Hills anyway—why not get some money and a lot of goods?

This council in 1874 was the one to which Crazy Horse—who attended no councils—may have sent Little Big Man as his representative. Little Big Man (the Sioux warrior, not the character in Thomas Berger's novel) raced into the company almost naked, announcing that he would shoot anyone who wanted to sell the Black Hills. Red Cloud had just been about to launch into one of his stem-winding orations when Little Big Man arrived. Sitting Bull was a reluctant parleyer, but Crazy Horse went him one better: he just didn't parley—not
until 1877, when he finally came in. Before that he stayed away, amid his caves and holes, which is one reason so much of his life is simply a mystery. But this avoidance of parleys may also have meant that he never made the kind of hardheaded assessment of white character and white intentions that Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull arrived at early on.

W
HAT
C
RAZY
H
ORSE
did learn about whites while still quite young was the destructive force of their caprice. This knowledge came to him because of the famous incident of the Mormon cow (or, possibly, the Mormon ox). As usual, we can date the incident—August 17, 1854—only because a lot of white people got killed, thirty-one this time.

Conquering Bear, the Brulé leader whom the whites had hoped to make the czar of all the Sioux, was living, along with some Minniconjous and some Oglalas, near the camp of Old Smoke, the much-respected Sioux leader, when a party of Mormons came through, one of them driving a lame cow. The Sioux camp was not far from Fort Laramie. The lame cow wandered through this camp and a Minniconjou warrior named High Forehead (or Straight Foretop) killed her. Many immigrant trains passed over the Holy Road that summer, and the young Sioux warriors pestered them, nipping a cow here and a
horse there. Some of their prizes were a good deal more to be desired than this lame cow.

Despite the poor quality of the animal, the Mormon owner didn't take his loss lightly. He complained at Fort Laramie, and the young commander of the force there unwisely chose this lame cow as an excuse for attempting to bring the Sioux to heel. The officer, Lieutenant Hugh Fleming, summoned Conquering Bear, and Conquering Bear did his best to mollify both the army and the irate Mormon. He even offered to let the Mormon visit his horse herd and pick out a fine pony to replace his crippled cow. But Lieutenant Fleming, backed up by the equally hotheaded Lieutenant John Grattan, refused this sensible compromise. Fleming demanded that Conquering Bear—in his eyes a supreme leader—surrender High Forehead. Conquering Bear pointed out that High Forehead was a Minniconjou; no Brulé had the authority to order his arrest.

There were only about one hundred soldiers in Fort Laramie at this time, and well over a thousand Sioux in the vicinity, which didn't stop the impatient, Indian-hating Grattan from dragging some artillery off to the Sioux village, with which to back up his demand for High Forehead's arrest.

What occurred then was what usually occurred when a white military unit was wiped out by a native force: casual and contemptuous underestimation, on the part of
the whites, of native skill and will. Lieutenant Grattan came into the Sioux village with thirty-one men and an interpreter named Wyuse, who had not helped matters by putting an insulting spin on Conquering Bear's dignified remarks to Lieutenant Fleming. High Forehead stood in plain sight but was not disposed to be arrested, whereupon Lieutenant Grattan shot off his cannon, missing most of the village but mortally wounding Conquering Bear, the man who had been, throughout, the voice of moderation and good sense. High Forehead shot Lieutenant Grattan and the thirty-one soldiers were immediately massacred, along with Wyuse, who was dealt with with extreme prejudice by the outraged Sioux. The Sioux—who could probably have overrun Fort Laramie had they chosen to—took Conquering Bear onto the Plains, far away from whites, so that he could die and be buried in the traditional Sioux way. They melted into the prairies, buried their good leader, and went on with life.

Various historians have chided the Sioux for not fighting as, say, West Pointers fought, but that was not their way. To them tribal warfare, though starkly violent, was nothing like as generally deadly as the forces whites would soon loose against one another in their own Civil War. In a sense every Sioux was his own general, attacking when he wanted to attack, retreating when the odds seemed too long or the weather too bad. Consider this
description of tribal warfare, as observed by Peter Matthiessen in New Guinea in the early 1960s and recorded in
Under the Mountain Wall
:

At the north end of the Tokolik there is an open meadow. Here the main body of the Kurelu were gathering. Over one hundred had now appeared, and at a signal a group of these now ran down the hill toward the reedy pool. On the far bank a party of Wittaia danced and called. The enemies shouted insults at each other and brandished spears, but no arrows flew and shortly both sides retired to their rear positions.

The sun had climbed over the valley and its light shone on breastplates of white sheels, on white headdresses, on ivory boar's tusks inserted through nostrils, on wands of white egret feathers twirled like batons. The shouting was increasing in ferocity, and several men from each side would dance out and feign attacks, whirling and prancing to display their splendor. They were jeered and admired by both sides and were not shot at, for display and panoply were a part of war, which was less war than ceremonial sport, a wild fierce festival. Territorial conquest was unknown to the akuni; there was land enough for all, and at the end of the day the warriors would go home across the fields to supper. Should rain come to chill them or spoil their feathers, both sides would retire. A day of war was dangerous and splendid, regardless of its outcome; it was a war of individuals and gallantry, quite innocent of tactics and
cold slaughter. A single death on either side would mean victory or defeat.

Toward mid-morning a flurry of arrows was exchanged . . . soon a great shout rose up out of the distance, and the Kurelu answered it exultantly, hoo-ah, hoo-ah-h, hua hua, hua. . . .

Add horses and you get something not very unlike what the Sioux did when they went out on a day's raiding. Once the two sides faced off, there would be lots of shouting, taunting, feints, dashes, with now and then an injury and now and then a death, after which, tribal honor having been defended and acts of individual bravery performed and witnessed, everyone yelled a few more times and went home. (There were some serious battles and even a few massacres, but these were the exceptions, not the norm.)

Crazy Horse fought in many raids of this sort; seldom would more than a man or two be killed in such forays. A desire to steal horses was usually the nominal aim of Plains warfare, but the need for the warriors—young warriors, particularly—to display their bravery was usually the real motive.

Not long after the Grattan massacre, Crazy Horse, who was then living with his mother's people, the Brulés, rode off alone to seek a vision, ignoring the rituals and procedures of purification that would normally precede a vision quest. He felt that he needed a vision and simply
rode off to seek it, across the prairies of what is now western Nebraska. To have done this right he would have had to fast, be purified in a sweat lodge, and perhaps be given a lecture or two by a holy man—his father, for example. But orthodoxy was not his way, would never be his way. When Crazy Horse felt like doing something, he just did it.

Perhaps because he didn't fully prepare himself for this vision quest, he only achieved what to him at the time seemed a rather mediocre vision. Such a vision was supposed to put a young man in touch with the eternal, with the sacred powers; properly interpreted, the vision would help him find what we now call identity, and thus show him what was to be his way in life. His vision, correctly understood, would be determinative, give him direction, show him what he must do and how he must behave.

The vision Crazy Horse (then still called Curly) achieved, after fasting alone for two days, has been variously reported. It seems he dreamed of a horseman, floating above the ground. The horseman was dressed plainly, was not painted, was in no way grand; the horse may have been dancing, or in some way magical. The horseman told Crazy Horse not to adorn himself, not to wear a war bonnet; he was permitted a single feather at most. He was instructed to throw a little dust over his horse before going into battle, and to wear a small stone behind his ear. There may have been a battle in the
vision, a battle in which the horseman had his arms held by one of his own people. But neither bullets nor arrows touched him. The horseman told Crazy Horse
never
to keep anything for himself.

Shortly after the dream ended, his father found him. His friend Hump had also come looking for him. They had been worried about him because both Crows and Pawnees were known to have been in the area. His father, a shaman after all, was outraged that his son had simply gone riding off on a vision quest, without making the proper preparation, endangering himself in the process. He let his son know that he had committed a serious violation of custom. Crazy Horse probably kept quiet about his rather low-rent vision for a while, until his father was over his pique; but eventually Worm did find out about the dream and did interpret it. Dreaming, dream reporting, and dream interpretation were an important part of Sioux life. The Sioux sought guidance from dreams as intently as did the patients of Dr. Freud, though of course through different methods and with different results.

According to most reports, about two years passed before Crazy Horse revealed his dream to his father. This time the two went off together, fasted, built a sweat lodge, did it right. His father listened and confirmed the horseman's instructions: Crazy Horse was to dress simply, put a small stone behind his ear, and, most important, he was not to keep anything for himself. Instead, he was to
be a man of charity, doing his best to feed the poor and helpless members of the tribe.

His duty to the poor was a duty that Crazy Horse took seriously all his life—it may have been because he doubted his ability to feed the many hungry people who were following him that he decided to bring the band into Fort Robinson in 1877.

The other element in the dream that has acquired the force of legend is that Crazy Horse could be injured only if one of his own people held his arms. On one crucial occasion (perhaps two) a member of his own people
did
hold his arms; on another occasion he forgot his instructions and kept something for himself—specifically, two Arapaho scalps—and was promptly injured in the leg.

If we have received this dream accurately across one hundred and forty-five years, it would seem that Crazy Horse followed its precepts as best he could, although, being human, he slipped in a couple of instances, as we shall see. But he always dressed plainly; he threw dust on himself and his horse before going into battle; he wore a single feather and put a small stone behind his ear. When he painted at all, it was only with a zigzag representing lightning and perhaps a few white spots representing hail or snow. Many commentators who saw him in his years of battle mention the simplicity of his dress. When he brought his band into the fort in 1877, He Dog and the other warriors were in full panoply—one soldier said it didn't look like a surrender, it looked like a
triumphal march—but Crazy Horse dressed as simply as ever. Through all the difficulties of his life he seems to have remained true to the conditions laid down in his dream, although he had considered it a poor dream at the time.