Crazy Horse (5 page)

W
HILE THE WHITES
were busy in the east, fighting one another, Crazy Horse was active in the old way, harassing his enemies, stealing horses, hunting, sharing what he killed with the poor and helpless, and, it seems, yearning for a woman he couldn't have.

This was the same fetching young woman he had probably spotted at the big council in 1857: Black Buffalo Woman. She was young and comely—his was hardly the only eye to fall on her, but for a time Crazy Horse seemed to feel that he was at least in the running for her affections. One day he left on a raid with several warriors, one of whom, No Water, soon developed such a terrible toothache that he dropped out of the raiding party and went back to camp. When the raid ended, Crazy Horse discovered to his extreme dismay that in his absence Black Buffalo Woman had married No Water. (Some believe the match was engineered by Red Cloud, the girl's uncle.)

Crazy Horse took this news hard, as any young man
in love would be apt to. He was perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two at the time and had been hanging out almost exclusively in the camp of the Bad Faces (the girl's people, and also Red Cloud's). Crazy Horse left the camp at once and was gone for some time.

Black Buffalo Woman had made her choice, and that should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. Crazy Horse was an unusually single-minded young man; Black Buffalo Woman happened to be the only woman he had serious feelings for. These feelings didn't go away, although Black Buffalo Woman was a respectable wife and, soon, a mother. Other young warriors took wives: Crazy Horse didn't. Instead he hung around No Water's lodge as much as possible. No Water, as it turned out, was a jealous husband. He was not pleased when Crazy Horse continued to pay his wife little attentions, but he tolerated the situation. For some years, while Black Buffalo Woman bore No Water three children, a reasonable decorum was observed.

Around 1865, just as the long Civil War between the whites was ending, the Oglala Sioux revived the old custom of the Shirt-wearers. The Oglala society of elders, sometimes called the Big Bellies and sometimes called other names, sat down and chose four young men of proven courage and good moral character and honored them by making them Shirt-wearers. Their duty, from then on, was to put selfish interests aside and think always of the welfare of the tribe. Those duties were as
much moral as practical; they were, in our terms, to be role models, to set examples of how Sioux men should behave. The Big Bellies themselves had not been formally elected; they were just there to advise and counsel, to plan hunts, to decide when to move their camp, and so on.

Crazy Horse, as has been noted, was not from one of the great families of the Sioux. His father was a poor man, a healer, a reader of dreams.

Young Man Afraid
was
of such a great family. His father, Old Man Afraid, was, in a way, the tribe's senior diplomat. When the Shirt-wearer ceremony was revived, Young Man Afraid was chosen first, and then American Horse, Sword, and Crazy Horse. This was a very great honor, one that put Crazy Horse in a position of grave responsibility. He was chosen both for his courage and for his charity, his concern for the weak ones. He was expected to keep little for himself, which was no problem; since the time of his dream he had never kept much for himself. The problem was that he was a single man: he hadn't married.

Though the Civil War had drawn off much of the force of the white military, there was no agreed-upon peace on the prairies. The Santee Sioux rose up in Minnesota, and the Sioux along the Missouri River harried the soldiers when there were any to harry. The Shoshones still made things difficult for immigrants along the Holy Road. In Texas the Comanches and the Kiowas rebounded
somewhat and kept pressure on the settlers' frontier; in Kansas the Cheyennes fought white soldiers when they met them, and so on. It was mainly the Teton Sioux who could, during this period, enjoy good hunting in relative peace. This was largely because of where they were, west of Fort Laramie and south of the Yellowstone River, an area full of game and almost empty of whites. This period of relative ease they owed in part to the wisdom of Old Man Afraid, who believed, with Sitting Bull, that it was best to stay away from the whites as long as it was possible to do so. Still, even then, the rush of immigrants along the Holy Road was constant, and the game, in consequence, harder to find and kill. This irritant was powerful enough that the northern and southern Sioux and some Cheyennes made plans to act in concert; the big offensive they planned to mount would start in the north, with Sitting Bull attacking Fort Rice.

To the extent that this was ever a fully planned offensive, it fizzled for the usual reasons. The older men, the tacticians, could never get the young warriors to wait. The force Crazy Horse may have been with, perhaps as many as one thousand warriors, chose to hit the spot where the Oregon Trail crosses the North Platte River, at what is called the Platte River Bridge. The huge party of Sioux should have been able to surprise and overwhelm the troopers guarding the bridge at the time, but they couldn't and went home disappointed, having killed only a few whites. This battle (July 25, 1864) had one
especially sad death. A young lieutenant named Caspar Collins, who was very friendly with the Sioux and had camped with them on several occasions, was killed late in the fight, possibly because his horse bolted and carried him straight into a group of Cheyennes, who immediately did him in. Had Caspar Collins lived, he might have been able to tell us something of Crazy Horse—it is believed the two knew one another. But either because of an uncontrollable horse, or because he allowed himself to be lured into a trap by the Cheyenne decoys, the young lieutenant lost his life.

In 1865 the U.S. government's Indian policy was at its most schizophrenic. The nation as a whole was war-weary, weighted with grief, and, after President Lincoln's assassination, a little addled. The nascent peace party wanted to buy off the hostile Indians, give them money and good land—though never
much
good land—if they would behave; at the same time the military wanted to send a big bunch of soldiers to punish them for their temerity in not immediately accepting the white man's way. Unable to decide between peace and war, the government tried both at once. They sent out a bunch of soldiers to punish any hostiles they could find, while at the same time hastily convening a peace conference whose aim was to secure something like squatter's rights to the Platte River country. The large troop of soldiers found no Indians in any numbers and hunted so poorly that they sometimes had to eat their horses, whereas the peace
conference attracted only ration Indians who exercised no control over the Platte River country, or, indeed, any country.

Back east, though, at least one indubitably good thing had happened: the Civil War ended. Having failed to sign up any hostiles at the little peace conference in 1865, the government tried another in 1866. Gold had been discovered in Montana, and soon a flood of miners were seeking the quickest way to it, which happened to be by a route that became known as the Bozeman Trail.

Again the government, whether it fully realized it or not, set about pursuing peace and war at once. General Sherman, aggressive as ever, wanted to immediately start building forts along the Bozeman Trail. So far the Sioux had been quiet, even letting most of the miners go through: perhaps Sherman thought he could get away with two or three forts. He sent Colonel Henry Carrington and a sizable force into the Powder River country to get the fort building started. At the same time the Indian Office called a peace conference at Fort Laramie, and this time Red Cloud and some of the other headmen came in to hear what the white men had to offer. Perhaps the peace commissioners hoped that they would have a deal concluded before the Sioux happened to notice Carrington and his troops on the plain by the Powder River, but they were not to be so lucky. A Brulé named Standing Elk ran into Carrington and was casually informed of the plan to build the forts. Standing Elk loped over to
Fort Laramie to pass on this news, arriving just in time to provoke one of Red Cloud's most dramatic exits. Neither he nor the other Sioux leaders were pleased with the news that the whites were already preparing to apply the stick when they themselves had just made a long trip to talk about carrots. No signatures were obtained—at least not the right ones—and for the next couple of years the Bozeman Trail was one of the most hotly contested routes in the west. The gold was in Montana, the money to mine it was in the east, and in between were some very angry Indians who by this time had had enough of being pushed around by the whites.

As a consequence of Sherman's initiative in fort building, one of the most famous and immediately pertinent comeuppances in Plains Indian warfare was visited on Captain William Fetterman and his unfortunate troop on the twenty-first of December, 1866. Fetterman, by all accounts, was a frustrated young officer who had the misfortune to be stationed at Fort Phil Kearney under the unconcerned, even lackadaisical, command of Colonel Carrington. Fetterman considered Carrington to be what we would now call a wimp or a wuss. Though three forts were to be stuck in the very heart of Sioux country, Carrington showed no inclination to make war on the Indians. No treaties had been signed, no presents exchanged, and there existed no hope of peace along the Bozeman; but it was left to Captain Fetterman to reap the whirlwind that his superiors had called up.

Fetterman was an arrogant young man who had no regard for Indians; he had publicly said that with eighty men he could march through the whole Sioux nation. On that cold December day he got his chance. He demanded that Carrington let him lead a troop of men in the defense of some woodcutters who were being harassed by a few Indians. Carrington consented, but with reluctance. He would have preferred to send a more reliable officer, but finally yielded to Fetterman's demands—though he made it clear that on no account was Fetterman to follow the Indians over Lodge Trail Ridge.

Captain Fetterman, having bullied his way into the assignment, rode out of the fort with eighty men, the very number he had said he could ride through the whole Sioux nation with. The Sioux and the Cheyennes, in large numbers, had been waiting with uncharacteristic patience, hoping a sizable group of soldiers would expose themselves. For once, the young warriors refrained from spoiling the ambush. Crazy Horse led a party of decoys whose job it was to tempt the soldiers to go where they had been told
not
to go: over Lodge Trail Ridge, a move that would take them out of sight of the fort.

The soldiers, of course, were no strangers to the decoy tactics; they were not easily tempted. The legend is that it was Crazy Horse who skillfully and successfully played the wounded bird, leading the soldiers farther and farther from safety. He dismounted several times, pretending that his horse was lame; at one point he
even built a small fire. Captain Fetterman had not insisted on taking this command merely to protect a few woodcutters. Eventually, ignoring his strict orders, he took the bait, led his soldiers over Lodge Trail Ridge, and went down the other side. The Indians, in this instance perfectly disciplined, sprang the trap: in half an hour or less Captain Fetterman and his eighty men were dead. By some accounts Captain Fetterman saved his last bullet for himself; American Horse, however, claimed that he clubbed him down and cut his throat. Red Cloud, who probably wasn't there himself, later said that he couldn't remember American Horse being there. There were so many arrows in the air at the same time that some of the Indians may have been wounded by what we now call friendly fire.

Whether Red Cloud was present at this battle remains a matter for debate. Stanley Vestal thinks he wasn't, but George Hyde believes he was somewhere around, being a general of sorts. Crazy Horse had his reputation enhanced, but the victory was somewhat spoiled for him by the death of his friend Lone Bear. The soldiers in Fort Phil Kearney expected to be attacked that night, but the Indians faded into a winter blizzard.

General Sherman, like everyone else, underestimated the fighting spirit of the Plains Indians and misjudged their determination to resist the utter destruction of the hunting grounds upon which they depended. Sherman had the peace party to contend with, and an underabundance of
funds besides. The railroads which would eventually bracket the Sioux were on their way but not yet far enough west to be decisive.

The Sioux and the Cheyennes hacked up the bodies of Fetterman and his men in a terrible but customary fashion. Some of the Cheyennes probably remembered that Chivington's men had done exactly the same thing to Black Kettle's people at Sand Creek. The Indians vented their fury on corpses; this is likely to occur in every war—think of Bosnia—but when these mutilations were reported in the eastern newspapers, they had the usual inflammatory effect on the nonmilitary public. It was, however, a divided public. The likelihood is that the government
could
have bought off most of the hostile Indians if they had offered adequate monies and decently spacious reservations. But the government was invariably penny-pinching in its allocations, and much of what it did allot was immediately siphoned off by corrupt Indian agents. Sherman, in charge of a large and unwieldy district, was for a time helpless. He could not put enough men in the field to scorch the vast earth of the west, while the money that could then be offered for peace did not impress hardheaded negotiators such as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. If they were going to sell their patrimony for goods, they wanted fine goods, not tacky goods.

The strategic flaws in the military approach were demonstrated conclusively in 1867 when General Hancock led a large and well-publicized expedition into the
central plains, accomplishing almost nothing. This lumbering force annoyed the southern Cheyennes, who had not been causing much trouble at the time. George Armstrong Custer had some fun shooting buffalo along the Smoky Hill River, but very few Indians were fought or even seen. This campaign was such an embarrassing failure that the army, for a time, gave up on a military solution to the problem of the Plains Indians. It was once again demonstrated that large forces of soldiers, dragging mostly useless equipment, could rarely catch up with the hostile Indians; the army was far more likely to blunder into peaceful villages of Indians who were merely minding their own business.