Crazy Horse (4 page)

T
HE
U.S.
GOVERNMENT
, meanwhile, during the most intense years of warfare with the Plains Indians, pursued a carrot-and-stick policy that was consistent only in its inconsistency. The army almost always underestimated Indian ability, and then, when they were whipped through some foolish action of their own—as with Grattan—they just as invariably overreacted. Every white military defeat from Grattan to the Custer battle came because some white commander arrogantly supposed that he could whip any number of Indians, on any field at any time. When this stupid assumption was disproven, the army, or in some cases, such irregulars as could be pulled together, reacted by punishing whatever Indians they could catch, whether they had taken part in a particular attack or not.

Thus the fate of the wise and considerate Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, a peace Indian from the start. Black Kettle first had his village riddled by Chivington at Sand Creek, and then had it riddled again by Custer on the
Washita, in 1868, even though up at Fort Laramie Red Cloud had just signed a major peace treaty.

At this juncture the two military systems, white and Sioux, suffered from similar elements of unpredictability, especially where their young warriors were concerned. Though Black Kettle was for peace, his young men could not always be restrained, and neither could young white men such as Custer. No Plains Indian ever completely controlled the young warriors, except briefly, nor did any white leader long control George Armstrong Custer.

About a year after the Grattan massacre near Fort Laramie (1854), the army finally got up a punitive expedition against the Sioux, although the Sioux involved in the massacre—Brulés, mainly—were by then scattered here and there across the prairies. An expedition of about six hundred men under General W. S. Harney (the Sioux were to call him Mad Bear) set out to avenge Grattan. At first they found no Sioux to punish. Six hundred men was a huge force; nothing like Harney's army had yet been seen on the northern plains. Nobody was expecting it—many Sioux bands were unaware that a large body of white men were marching across the prairie, out for their blood. Some did know, because runners had gone out to the tribes, telling them that the U.S. government wanted them south of the Platte River; those who didn't go would be considered hostile. Many Sioux bands
were
south of the Platte, but the Brulés weren't, and neither were the Minniconjous.

General Harney, after considerable frustration, finally located the village of Little Thunder, a Brulé headman then camped on the banks of the Bluewater River. There had been a good hunt; the women of the village were busy working the buffalo hides.

Little Thunder knew the soldiers were coming—it would have been hard not to know it—but he seemed to have disregarded whatever warning he received. When the soldiers arrived, there was some parleying, but only because General Harney wanted to get his troops into position. When he
had
them in position, he proceeded to destroy Little Thunder's village, killing nearly ninety Indians in a few minutes and taking many captives. Spotted Tail fought in this battle and never forgot the carnage he witnessed that day.

It is thought that Crazy Horse was living with Little Thunder that summer, but was out hunting when the terrible attack came. This may be the sort of rumor that makes Crazy Horse a kind of Zelig, turning up wherever the action is. Spotted Tail was so awed by the power of white weaponry that he later came to Fort Laramie and turned himself in; he served two years in jail and was probably the first of the major Sioux leaders to conclude that the Sioux could not hope to win in sustained conflict with the whites.

Most authorities think that Crazy Horse came back to what had been Little Thunder's village, saw the carnage, and rescued a young Cheyenne maiden called Yellow
Woman; he took her back to her people and began what was to be a long and friendly association with the Cheyennes.

With his easy victory on the Bluewater, General Harney, Mad Bear, had essentially won control of the Platte River and the Oregon Trail. The war for the northern plains was just beginning, but this was a significant victory nonetheless. That the whites were willing, almost casually, to destroy a whole village was a new fact that the Sioux would have to come to terms with. In the warfare between tribes such a thing did not happen; there was no such imbalance of weaponry. The scorched-earth policy that General Sherman was to pursue so effectively a few years later—warfare as terror—hadn't come to the west, or anywhere else, at this time. The carnage at the Bluewater was the closest thing to it. Spotted Tail, who saw that carnage close up, from then on believed that the whites could wipe out the Sioux whenever they chose to.

Throughout Crazy Horse's life, he, like all the other Plains Indians, would have to grapple with a too-rapid pace of change. The Sioux and the Cheyennes and the other tribes still hunted buffalo, in the main, with bows and arrows. In their warfare they had bows, lances, clubs, tomahawks, etc. They knew about guns, of course, but only a few had firearms at this time. That the whites could use guns so effectively as to kill ninety Sioux in a few minutes was a new thing. Crazy Horse, whether he saw the destruction at the Bluewater or merely heard
about it, spent the rest of his life either avoiding whites or fighting them.

He would have preferred, I imagine, simply to avoid them and go on living a traditional Sioux life, raiding, hunting, dreaming; but the option of avoidance was not available to him for very long. The whites were too many, and they weren't satisfied with the Holy Road. They weren't satisfied with any one place or one road; they wanted everything. So he fought: on the Bozeman, on the Powder River, on the Yellowstone, in the Black Hills, on the Tongue and the Rosebud, at the Little Bighorn. He was a participant and possibly a catalyst at three of the Indians' greatest victories: Fetterman, the Rosebud, the Little Bighorn. He didn't win the war. What is hard to judge is how long he really expected to, if he ever expected to. Despite much urging, and unlike Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull, he never went east, never saw the whites in their seats of power; had he done so, he might have drawn the same conclusion they drew. But he went his own way, traveled his own road, until it dead-ended at Fort Robinson in September of 1877. Looked back on from the perspective of one hundred and twenty years, his doom seems Sophoclean, inevitable; but perhaps all dooms do, once the roads taken and not taken deliver the character to his fate.

B
Y MOST ACCOUNTS
, Crazy Horse spent the winter of 1856–57 with Yellow Woman's people, in Kansas. Young Man Afraid, son of the much-respected Old Man Afraid, was with him; the son would one day be much respected too. It may have been about this time that a Cheyenne medicine man convinced the young warriors that he had a medicine so strong that it would turn away bullets, a belief that has surfaced frequently among native peoples. The Comanche prophet Isatai convinced Quanah Parker and others that bullets would not harm them, whereupon they attacked some buffalo hunters who were securely forted up in the old trading post called Adobe Walls. Alas, the bullets proved easily able to penetrate both the medicine and the Comanches, perhaps because a warrior spoiled it by riding a mule rather than a horse. The dervishes believed themselves to be bulletproof when they lined up to be slaughtered at Omdurman; and the belief has cropped up again in Africa within recent decades.

But the young Sioux and Cheyennes in Kansas in the
summer of 1857 never got to put this strong magic to a test. They ran into a party of soldiers and prepared to attack, but the soldiers, indifferent to whether the Sioux were bulletproof or not, charged them with drawn sabers. The Sioux may have thought themselves bulletproof, but they knew they weren't saberproof, so they fled—an embarrassing rout.

Later that summer several thousand Indians gathered at Bear Butte to parley—ineffectively, as it proved—about the whites. Crazy Horse was probably there, with his friend Hump; it may have been at this gathering that he met Touch-the-Clouds, the seven-foot Minniconjou warrior who attended him in his last hour.

Also, it may have been at this large conclave that Crazy Horse met the woman who was to be the love of his life: Black Buffalo Woman, one of Red Cloud's nieces. It was because of his great, irrepressible passion for Black Buffalo Woman that he was later to fail in his grave responsibility to the tribe, once he had been given the high honor of being made a Shirt-wearer, a story we will get to in good time.

This parley at Bear Butte in the end changed nothing. There was general agreement that the tribes needed to take a sterner line with the whites, before their hunting grounds were completely destroyed; but how exactly they were to do that, with each band moving along with the game and looking essentially to their own needs, was hard to say. The whites had a great advantage: they were
one nation (though soon to be split, temporarily); the native peoples of the plains were many nations.

The bitter lesson all the Plains Indians had to begin to absorb in the late 1850s was how very quickly nature's abundance—that is, game—could become scarcity. The hunting along the Platte was already much diminished; the great masses of buffalo upon which all the tribes were dependent had by then been split into a northern and a southern herd. The hard fighting between Brulé Sioux and Pawnee, which so occupied Spotted Tail, was intensified by the fact that the two peoples were competing for a dwindling supply of game.

For the Oglalas, the same need to stay where the game was abundant forced them west and north and brought increased conflict with the tribes already there, namely, the Arapahos, the Shoshones, and the Crows.

It was on a raid against the Arapahos, probably in the summer of 1858, that Crazy Horse—he would have then been about sixteen—finally earned his name. He charged straight at a party of enemy warriors, untouched by either arrows or bullets; his bravery was so exceptional that the Sioux began to sing in his honor. When two Arapaho warriors rode out to challenge him, he killed both of them and took their scalps, forgetting in the heat of battle that his dream had told him never to keep anything for himself. While he was taking the scalps, he was hit in the leg by an arrow. He threw the scalps away and his friend Hump removed the arrow and treated the wound. When
the Oglalas returned to their camp, old Crazy Horse, the father, made a fine ceremony and transferred the name to his son. Thereafter the old man was called Worm and Crazy Horse took the name by which history knows him.

These were not his first kills. Sometime earlier, in a skirmish with some Omahas, he shot at what he thought was a warrior, crouched in some bushes, and discovered that he had killed a woman. He did not take this scalp.

In the main the Oglala effort to edge into the game-rich Powder River country was successful.

The years of Crazy Horse's early manhood were years of relative prosperity for the Sioux; one reason for this was that the whites were soon fighting a terrible civil war, a war so destructive that, by contrast, their conflicts with the Plains Indians seemed almost like frolics. From 1861 to 1865 the army had all it could handle elsewhere; the best officers, naturally, wanted to fight in that fight, leaving the western forts ill manned, usually by officers who resented the fact that they weren't fighting the Rebs. Some very ugly incidents—for one, the great Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862—took place during the Civil War; but farther west, where Crazy Horse was, the fighting during these years was mainly Indian against Indian. It was in these years that Crazy Horse earned the high reputation among his fellow Indians that he would carry all the way to the Little Bighorn.

I
T IS PERHAPS
appropriate to pause during this nominal lull in the plains warfare—nominal because there was never a total cessation of hostilities—to say a word about the plains themselves: this great American steppe was Crazy Horse's home during his whole life. His attachment to these plains never weakened; he was born to those great skies and those long horizons, and he kept to them as long as he could. When Nelson A. Miles attacked him and his people in their winter camp on the Tongue River in January of 1877, Crazy Horse knew that the terms of the conflict had changed. For the Sioux, warfare was mainly a summer sport. In the hard northern winters they had enough to do just to keep their old and their young warm and well fed. It is true that they wiped out Fetterman on a cold day in December, accomplishing that task just before a blizzard struck, but, in the main, winter warfare was not something they enjoyed. Fighting was a great deal more pleasant in warm weather.

Bearcoat Miles came anyway, and kept coming,
forcing Crazy Horse to make an awkward and painful retreat. Then the winter stopped even General Miles; and Crazy Horse, in the breather it allowed him, had the opportunity to do what Chief Joseph had hoped to do and what Sitting Bull
did
do: escape into Canada. Neither Miles nor Crook could have followed him there; the Canadian government would not have tolerated it, although, almost a decade later, Crook found the Mexican government far more pliant when he went in after Geronimo.

Crazy Horse refused to go to Canada. It was even colder in Canada, and the game was uncertain; but it may be that he didn't go because he refused to be chased from his home country. The range that he traveled in his life was spacious, but it wasn't infinite. He went south a few times into Kansas, west as far as the Bighorn Mountains, north and east to the Missouri country; but the land where he roamed and fought mainly was plains country: Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, eastern Montana. Rarely if ever was he east of the 100th meridian, that important line on the map that told the whites where the Great American Desert began.

It wasn't desert, of course—Geronimo lived in a desert. Crazy Horse lived near the center of the great grassland steppe that stretched from Texas well into Canada. Then and now, the central plains were the least populated part of the United States. To those not attuned to their subtleties the plains are merely monotonous emptiness. But to those who love them, the plains are
endlessly fascinating, a place where the constant interplay of land and sky is always dramatic; gloomy sometimes, but more often uplifting. Despite their unpopularity with the general public, many writers have penned rhapsodies to the plains, and the eyes of many artists—from Catlin and Bodmer on—have been challenged by them.

The American plains, like all the world's great steppes, are the natural home for grazing animals and nomadic peoples, and are particularly ideal for certain large ruminants such as the buffalo. The plains have never welcomed either the plow or the fence. The balance of the grasses, the wildlife, and the climate is delicate, easily disturbed. Not merely Crazy Horse but all the Plains Indians recognized with dismay that the whites were indifferent to this balance and likely to destroy it.

Nomads, of course, can be wanton too; like most humans they are inclined to the binge. But, in the main, they held a sacramental attitude toward the earth and its creatures, whereas the white attitude from the first was essentially commercial.

Nomadic lifestyles are often vulnerable to the technologies of settled people; and yet the appeal of what appears to be freedom—the freedom of the nomad, whether Sioux Indian or lone cowboy—remains very potent. It may be that one reason writers from the American west have had such a hard time getting their words taken seriously is that they have been competing from the first with one of the most powerful visual images of all: the image of horses
running. The Indian and the horse have been together in movies for as long as there have been movies: I now own a tape of a fragmentary silent film called
Old Texas
, made in 1913, in which the great cattleman Charles Goodnight appears briefly at a picnic before the film—possibly it is supposed to represent his reminiscences—dissolves into grainy images of Indians on horses.

Crazy Horse was not unaware of mountains. He knew the Bighorns and the Black Hills, was born near and died not far from Bear Butte. But for most of his life he was a man of the Great Plains. His rivers were the Platte, the Niobrara, the Powder, the Yellowstone, the Tongue, the Little Missouri. He lived under one of the most generous skies in the world. Again, many commentators have recognized that such skies, hovering over the rolling land, with the horizons a mystery, with mirages frequent, make the plains a place that calls forth imaginings. Those long vistas, those splendid clouds tempt the imagination as the plains of Castile tempted Don Quixote. When Plains people die, white or Indian, they speak of a going up, for where would the spirit go except into that sky? It is easy on the plains to imagine things not seen, worlds not known. Crazy Horse, in his wanderings over the summer plains, would have seen many mirages, which perhaps encouraged him in his belief that this world, with its buffalo and horses, is only the shadow of the real world. He was in a way a prairie Platonist, seeing an ideal of which the day's events were only a
shadow. His belief in the two worlds seems to have made him exceptionally cautious where the camera is concerned. He didn't want any white man to snatch his shadow, coax it into a little box. He wouldn't even allow his friend Dr. McGillycuddy, the doctor who so faithfully treated his wife Black Shawl for tuberculosis, to take his picture. He believed it would shorten his life; and his life did indeed end not long after he came to the place where cameras—the little boxes that snatched shadows—were common.

This strange man of the Oglalas was always a man of the central plains. He would not be driven from them, rejecting, in a crucial decision, even the plains of Canada. He was determined to hold to the country that was his own, and in the end, that is what he did.