by Dee Brown
of dust and blade of grass within their territory.
On September 20, 1875, the commission assembled under the
shade of a large tarpaulin which had been strung beside a lone
cottonwood on the rolling plain. The commissioners seated themselves on chairs facing the thousands of Indians who were moving restlessly about in the distance. A troop of 120
cavalrymen
on white horses filed in from Fort Robinson and drew up in a line behind the canvas shelter. Spotted Tail arrived in a wagon
from his agency, but Red Cloud had announced that he would
not be there. A few other chiefs drifted in, and then suddenly
a cloud of dust boiled up from the crest of a distant rise. A band
of Indians eame galloping down upon the council shelter.
The
warriors were dressed for battle, and as they came nearer they
swerved to encirele the commissioners, fired their rifles skyward,
and gave out a few whoops before trotting off to form a line immediately in the rear of the cavalrymen. By this time a second band of Indians was approaching, and thus tribe by tribe
the Sioux warriors came in, making their demonstrations of power, until a great circle of several thousand Indians enelosed
the council. Now the chiefs came forward, well satisfied that
they had given the commissioners something strong to think
about. They sat in a semicircle facing the nervous white men,
eager to hear what they would have to say about the Black Hills.
During the few days that the commissioners had been at Fort
Robinson observing the mood of the Indians, they recognized
the futility of trying to buy the hills and had decided instead
to negotiate for the mineral rights. "We have now to ask you PHOTO PAGE 281
Bury My Heart atWounded Knee
if you are willing to give our people the right to mine in the Black Hills," Senator Allison began, "as long as gold or other valuable minerals are found, for a fair and just sum. If you are
so willing, we will make a bargain with you for this right.
When
the gold or other valuable mineralg are taken away, the country will again be yours to dispose of in any manner you may
wish."
Spotted Tail took this proposal as a ludicrous joke. Was the commissioner asking the Indians to lend the Black Hills to the
white men for a while? His rejoinder was to ask Senator Allison
if he would lend him a team of mules on such terms.
"It will be hard for our goverr-)ment to keep the whites out of the hills," Allison continued. "To try to do so will give you and our government great trouble, because the whites that may
wish to go there are very numerous." The seuator's ignorance
of the Plains Indians' feeling for the Powder River country was
displayed in his next proposal: "There is another country lying
far toward the setting sun, over which you roam and hunt, and
which territory is yet unceded, extending to the summit of the
Bighorn Mountains. . . . It does not seem to be of very great value or use to you, and our people think they would like to have the portion of it I have described." a While Senator Allison's incredible demands were being trans-Iated, Red Dog rode up or) a polly aud announced that he had
a message from Red Cloud. The absent Oglala chief, probably
anticipating the greed of the commissioners, requested a week's
recess to give the tribes time to hold councils of their own in
which to consider all proposals concerning their lands. The commissioners considered the matter and agreed to give the Indians
three days for holding tribal councils. On September 23
they
would expect definite replies from the chiefs.
The idea of giving up their last great hunting ground was so preposterous that none of the chiefs even discussed it during
their councils. They did debate very earnestly the question of
the Black Hills. Some reasoned that if the United States government had no intention of enforcing the treaty and keeping
the white miners out, then perhaps the Indians should demand
payment-a great deal of money-for the yellow metal taken from the hills. Others were determined not to sell at any price.
'Ihe Black Hills belonged to the Indians, they argued; if the Bluecoat soldiers would not drive out the miners, then the warriors must.
On September 23 the commissioners, riding in Army ambulances from Fort Robinson and escorted by a somewhat enlarged
cavalry troop, again arrived at the council shelter. Red Cloud
was there early, and he protested vigorously about the large number of soldiers. Just as he was preparing to give his preliminary speech to the commissioners, a sudden commotion
broke out among the warriors far in the distance" About three
hundred Oglalas who had come in from the Powder River eoun-try trotted their ponies down a slope, occasionally firing ofi rifles. Some were chanting a song in Sioux: The Black Hills is rny land and I love it
And whoever interferes
Will hear this gun.5
An Indian mounted on a gray horse forced his way through the ranks of warriors gathered around the canvas shelter.
He
was Crazy Horse's envoy, Little Big Man, stripped for battle and wearing two revolvers belted to his waist. "I will kill the first chief who speaks for selling the Black Hills!" he shouted.
He danced his horse across the open space between the commissioners and the chiefs.6
Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses and a group of unofficial Sioux policemen immediately swarmed around Little Big Man
and moved him away. The chiefs and the commissioners, however, must have guessed that Little Big Man voiced the feelings
of most of the warriors present. General Terry suggested to his
fellow commissioners that they board the Army ambulances
and return to the safety of Fort Robinson.
After giving the Indians a few days to calm down, the commissioners quietly arranged a meeting with twenty chiefs in the
headquarters building of the Red Cloud agency. During three
days of speech making, the chiefs made it quite clear to the Great Father's representatives that the Black Hiils could not be bought cheaply, if at any price. Spotted TaiI finally grew impatient with the commissioners and asked them to submit
a definite proposal in writing.
The offer was four hundred thousand dollars a year for the mineral rights; or if the Sioux wished to sell the hills outright
the.price would be six million dollars payable in fifteen annual
installments. (This was a markdown price indeed, considering
that one Black Hills mine alone yielded more than five hundred
million dollars in gold.)
Red Cloud did not even appear for the final meeting, letting Spotted Tail speak for all the Sioux. Spotted TaiI rejected both
offers, firmly. The Black Hills were not for lease or for sale.
The commissioners packed up, returned to Washington, reported their failure to persuade the Sioux to relinquish the Black Hills, and recommended that Congress disregard the wishes of the Indians and appropriate a sum fixed "as a fair equivalent of the value of the hills." This forced purchase of the Black Hills should be "presented to the Indians as a finality,"
they said.?
Thus was set in motion a chain of actions which would bring
the greatest defeat ever suffered by the United States Army in
its wars with the Indians, and ultimately would destroy forever
the freedom of the northern Plains Indians: Nouember 9, 1875: E. C. Watkins, special inspector for the Indian Bureau. reported to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs
that Plains Indians living outside r
eservations were fed and well
armed, were lofty and independent in their attitudes, and were
therefore a threat to the reservation system. Inspector Watkins
recommended that troops be sent against these uncivilized Indians "in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into
subjection." 8
Nouember 22,18?5: Secretary of War W. W. Belknap warned of trouble in the Black Hills "unless something is done to obtain possession of that section for the white miners who have
been strongly attracted there by reports of rich deposits of the
precious metal." e
December S, 1875: Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward P. Smith ordered Sioux and Cheyenne agents to notify all Indians off reservations to come in and report to their agencies by
the cold went away. "It was very cold," a young Oglala remembered afterward, "and many of our people and ponies would
have died in the snow. Also, we were in our own country and
were doing no harm." "
The January 31 ultimatum was little short of a declaration of war against the independent Indians, and many of them accepted it as that. But they did not expect the Bluecoats to strike
so soon. In the Moon of the Snowblind, Three Stars Crook came
marching north from Fort tr'etterman along the old Bozeman
Road, where ten years before Red Cloud had begun his stubborn flght to keep the Powder River country inviolate'
About this same time, a mixed band of Northern Cheyennes
and Oglala Sioux left Red Cloud agency to go to the Powder River country, where they hoped to find a few bufialo and antelope. About the middle of March they joined some non&gency
Indians camped a few miles from where the Little Powder runs
into the Powder. Two Moon, Little WoIf, O1d Bear, Maple Tree,
and White Bull were the Cheyenne leaders. Low Dog was the
Oglala chief, and some of the warriors with him were from Crazy
Horse's village farther north.
Without warning, at dawn on March 17, Crook's advance column under Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds attacked this peaceful camp. tr'earing nothing in their own country, the Indians
were asleep when Captain James Egan's white-horse troop, formed in a company front, dashed into the tepee village, firing
pistols and carbines. At the same time, a second troop of cavalry
came in on the left flank, and a third swept away the Indians'
horse herd.
The first reaction from the warriors was to get as many womell
and children as possible out of the way of the soldiers, who were
firing recklessly in all directions' "Old people tottered and hobbled away to get out of reach of the bullets singing among
the lodges," Wooden Leg said afterward. "Braves seized whatever weapons they had and tried to meet the attack." As soon
as the noncombatants were started up a rugged mountain slope,
the warriors took positions on ledges or behind huge rocks'
From these places they held the soldiers at bay until the women
and children could escape across the Powder.
"From a distance we saw the destruction of our village,"
Wooden Leg said. "Our tepees were burned with everything in
them. . . I had nothing left but the clothing I had on." The Bluecoats destroyed all the pemmican and saddles in the camp,
and drove away almost every pony the Indians owned, "between twelve and fifteen hundred head." 13 As soon as darkness
fell, the warriors went baek to where the Bluecoats were camped,
determined to recover their stolen horses. Two Moon suecinctly
desoibed what happened: "That night thd soldiers slept, leaving
the horses to one side; so we crept up and stole them back again,
and then we went away." ra
Three Stars Crook was so angry at Colonel Reynolds for allowing the Indians to escape from their village and recover their horses that he ordered him court-martialed. The.Army reported this foray as "the attack on Crazy Horse's village,,, but Crazy Horse was camped miles away to the northeast. That was
where Two Moon and the other chiefs led their homeless people
in hopes of finding food and shelter. They were more than three
days making the journey; the temperature was below zero at
night; only a few had buffalo robes; and there was very little food.
Crazy Horse received the fugitives hospitably, gave them food
and robes, and found room for them in the Oglala tepees.
,,I,m
glad you are come," he said to Two Moon after listening to accounts of the Blueeoats plundering the village. ,'We are going
to fight the white man again."
"All right," Two Moon replied. "f am ready to fight. I have fought already. My people have been killed, my horses stolen;
I am satisfied to fight." 15
In the Geese Laying Moon, when the grass was tall and the horses strong, Crazy Horse broke camp and led the Oglalas and
Cheyennes north to the mouth of Tongue River, where Sitting
Bull and the Hunkpapas had been living through the winter.
Not long after that, Lame Deer arrived with a band of Minneconjous and asked permission to camp nearby. They had heard
about all the Bluecoats marching through the Sioux hunting
grounds and wanted to be near Sitting Bull's powerful band of
Hunkpapas should there be any trouble.
As the weather warmed, the tribes began moving northward
in search of wild game and fresh grass. Along the way they were
joined by bands of Brul6s, Saus Arcs, Blackfoot Sioux, and additional Cheyennes. Most of these Indians had left their reservations in accordance with their treaty rights as hunters, and those who had heard of the January 31 ultimatum either considered it as only another idle threat of the Great Father's agents or did not believe it applied to peaceful Indians.
"Many young mell were auxious to go for fighting the soldiers,"
said the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg. "But the chiefs and old men all urged us to keep away from the white men." 16
While these several thousand Indians were camped on the Rosebud, many young warriors joined them from the reservations. They brought rumors of great forces of Bluecoats marching from three directions. Three Stars Crook was coming from
the south. The One Who Limps (Colonel John Gibbon) was coming from the west. One Star Terry and Long Hair Custer were coming from the east.
Early in the Moon of Makiug Fat, the Hunkpapas had their annual sun dance. For three days Sitting Bull danced, bled himself, and stared at the sun until he feli into a trance. When he
rose again, he spoke to his people. In his vision he had heard
a voice crying: "I give you these because they have no ears."
When he looked into the sky he saw soldiers falling like grasshoppers, with their heads down and their hats falling off.
They
were falling right into the Indian camp. Because the white men
had no ears and would not listen, Wakantanka the Great Spirit
was giving these soldiers to the fndians to be killed.17
A few days later a hunting party of Cheyennes sighted a column of Bluecoats camped for the night in the valley of the Rosebud. The hunters rode back to camp, sounding the wolf
howl of danger. Three Stars was coming, and he had employed
mercenary Crows and Shoshones to scout ahead of his troops.
The different chiefs sent criers through their villages and then
held hasty councils. It was decided to leave about half the warriors to protect the villages while the others would travel through
the night and attack Three Stars's soldiers the next morning'
About a thousand Sioux and Cheyennes formed the party.
A
few women went a
long to help with the spare horses.
Sitting
Bull, Crazy Horse, and Two Moon were among the leaders.
Just
before daylight they unsaddled and rested for a while; then they turned away from the river and rode across the hills.
Three Stars's Crow scouts had told him of a great Sioux village down the Rosebud, and the general started these mercenaries out early that morning. As the Crows rode over the crest of a hill and started down, they ran into the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. At first the Sioux and Cheyennes chased the
Crows in all directions, but Bluecoats began coming up fast, and the warriors pulled back.
For a long time Crazy Horse had been waiting for a chance to test himself in battle with the Bluecoats. In all the years since the Fetterman fight at Fort Phil Kearny, he had studied
the soldiers and their ways of fighting. Each time he went into
the Black Hills to seek visions, he had asked Wakantanka to give him secret powers so that he would know how to lead the
Oglalas to victory if the white men ever came again to make war upon his people. Since the time of his youth, Crazy Horse
had known that the world men lived in was only a shadow of
the real world. To get into the real world, he had to dream, and
when he was in the real world everything seemed to float or dance. In this real world his horse danced as if it were wild or
ctazy, and this was why he called himself Crazy Horse. He had
learned that if he dreamed himself into the real world before
going into a fight, he could endure anything.
On this day, June 17, 1876, Crazy Horse dreamed himself into
the real world, and he showed the Sioux how to do many things
they had never done before while fighting the white man's soldiers. When Crook sent his pony soldiers in mounted charges,
instead of rushing forward into the fire of their carbines, the Sioux faded off to their flanks and struck weak places in their
lines. Crazy Horse kept his warriors mounted and always moving
from one place to another. By the time the sun was in the top
