Turn the Stars Upside Down: The Last Days and Tragic Death of Crazy Horse

by Terry C. Johnston

  You are afraid?

  His pale eyes smarted with the sting of truth. “You know that I am. First it was Hump, my kola, taken away from me. How his death scared me so. And then Little Hawk. My own brother shot down by the wasicu. In the past few winters, I feel so much has been ripped from me that I cannot be brave anymore. I do not know from where my strength will come.”

  You must show courage, if only for a few more days, a few more miles, until this journey is finished.

  “When that time comes, I do not have to be brave anymore?”

  Then you will have delivered your people to an island of safety, Ta’sunke Witko. Where you will have to find a new courage in your heart.

  “A new courage?” How he wanted to turn and look into the face of the spirit guardian who breathed the words at the back of his ear.

  You must seek the sort of bravery that no Lakota has ever known. The other chiefs already there, they know nothing of this courage, having lived so long under the thumb of the wasicu leaders and their soldiers.

  “I must walk this unmarked road alone?”

  You are Ta’sunke Witko! You are Crazy Horse! Isn’t that what your vision first told you when you were but a boy?

  “So many clawing at me, their hands and arms, reaching and pulling at me,” he said, clenching his eyes and wagging his head a little with the memory of his spirit vision.4 “My own people, they hold me back, pin my arms—”

  Do you want your journey on this road taken from you?

  He brooded on that a moment longer, then answered, “No. I have taken other journeys where no man has gone before.” Crazy Horse drew in a deep breath of cold air as the lip of the sun crept over the distant brow of the earth. “Alone … I can walk this road too.”

  I will be there with you, Ta’sunke Witko. Every step you take, I will walk it with you.

  “It is time for me to go,” he announced, standing uneasily, finding his muscles sore from the strenuous climb up this steep ridge, cold and cramped from the long sitting in the wind. “We do not have far to go now.”

  Do you ever wonder upon what awaits you when you reach that place?

  He stood a moment, wondering if he was shivering with the cold despite his red blanket, or if he was trembling with apprehension for what awaited him out there—a little distance and a few days from now. Finally he whispered, “I am a warrior. You have made me a man different from all other Lakota. But … in the end I am nothing more than a warrior.”

  You must remember that in the hard days to come.

  “I am only what you and my people have made of me.”

  Crazy Horse started slowly down the hill, clutching his worn, dusty blanket around his shoulders, feeling how the gusts of wind toyed with the flaps so that the cold snaked under his breechclout.

  Ta’sunke Witko! You will listen when I speak to you in the coming days?

  Stopping, he nodded slightly, not daring to turn and look upon the guardian. “Yes, I have always listened to you, Sicun.”

  Turn your ears to my voice when I summon you. Together we will remember the days of your life. When you suffered loss … when you turned victory in your hands.

  “Yes,” he whispered, turning his head slightly so that his words slipped back to the spirit guardian at his back. “Together … we will remember.”

  Then he stepped away, down the steep slope into the valley, where his people were preparing for another day’s journey toward the white man’s island on the White Earth River.

  I am a part of you, and you will remain a part of me, Ta’sunke Witko. So I will stay beside you as you walk down this new road all alone. Remember that no one else has ever been called to walk this road but you.

  He vowed, “My feet will not stumble.”

  And I promise that one day you will no longer worry about your feet, or stumbling too. For one day, Ta’sunke Witko, your spirit will take wing, and fly as high as the stars.

  CHAPTER ONE

  3 May 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  INDIANS.

  Red Cloud’s Party Coming In.

  CAMP ROBINSON, NEB., May 4.—A courier brings a letter from the Red Cloud party, which will reach this point early on Sunday morning. Its camp to-night is only twenty miles north of here. Forty-seven lodges have gone into the cantonment on the Yellowstone to surrender to General Miles.

  “Could that really be him?” asked Lieutenant William Rosecrans of the half-breed interpreter who came to a halt at his side.

  This Fourth U.S. Cavalry officer, serving under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie out of Camp Robinson,1 anxiously peered into the mid-distance as he threw up his hand, impatiently waving for the teamsters behind him to hurry up with their ten wagons. Next he signaled to the half-dozen civilian wranglers who were herding along a hundred beeves at the end of the procession that had just come in sight of the Hat Creek stage station.

  Rosecrans had just spotted a far-off village on the move, flowing like a great black cloud across the muddy and barren plain, coming his way out of the north country. That crowd of people scattered across the rolling landscape, that massive herd of horses, those travois … it … it—

  “Can’t be no other, sir,” replied young Billy Garnett, the half-blood translator Rosecrans had brought along from Mackenzie’s post. “We knew we were going to run into ’em sooner or later.”

  Rosecrans let out a long sigh as he rocked forward in the stirrups of his uncomfortable McClellan saddle. Who would have believed it? he asked himself. Then he trembled slightly with the sheer anticipation. Somewhere out there, in that small group riding in front of this village on the march, will be Crazy Horse—destroyer of Custer and his legions at the Little Bighorn, the warrior chief who fought Crook to an uneven draw at the Rosebud. The Sioux chief who time and again has confounded and befuddled Miles himself in winter battles along the Tongue River.

  “Crazy Horse,” he finally allowed himself to whisper, then turned exuberantly on Garnett. “You’ve seen himself before, have you?”

  “Not since ’sixty-five, Lieutenant,” Garnett said. “I was ten years old at the time. Taken to a camp by my Lakota mother for a special ceremony. Northwest of Fort Laramie it was—where Crazy Horse himself was made a Shirt Wearer.”

  “You wouldn’t recognize him?”

  The half-breed shook his head. “I doubt it. That’s twelve years of change.”

  Turning back again to the north, Rosecrans squinted into the mid-distance. “By damn—I don’t believe I’ll soon see Crazy Horse with my own eyes.”

  Twisting about at the sound of hooves, the young lieutenant watched the leader of some fifty Sioux scouts stop and make those hand gestures he had begun to learn from the capable Lieutenant William Philo Clark, who was serving as military agent at the Red Cloud Agency.

  “H-hold on,” Rosecrans said with some frustration, giving an impatient wag of his head. “I’m not as good as Clark is at this. Garnett, find out what this one wants to tell me.”

  After a moment of Sioux spoken between the leader of Clark’s agency scouts and the half-breed interpreter, Garnett explained what American Horse was proposing.

  “Yes! Yes!” the lieutenant replied enthusiastically, nodding his head to the Sioux horseman. “By all means: go welcome Crazy Horse and his headmen. Tell them I’ll wait to talk with his chiefs right here!” Then he waved ahead the handsome leader, followed by his tribesmen from the agency.

  They immediately kicked their little ponies into a burst of color and motion, yipping loudly, shaking their army carbines overhead, and even screaming as they bolted past the wagons in a blur. Their noisy charge came so sudden that it raised the hairs on the back of the lieutenant’s neck as he watched these half-a-hundred horsemen riding hell-bent for election, off to greet their Northern brothers-in-arms. Fellow fighting men of the Sioux. The last hold-outs still south of the Canadian border, coming in to surrender their weapons, their families. These bloodthirsty demons finally brought to heel by the might of the U.S. Army.
My, how that made his chest swell with pride: just to be sitting here on his prancing horse, waiting … waiting for Crazy Horse to come forward to surrender this day.

  “Mr. Higgins!” Rosecrans hollered to the head wrangler as he raised himself in his stirrups. “See that your beeves don’t bolt and stampede now!”

  “That’s easier said’n done!” the old cowman growled, then reined back to his work. “Keep ’em headed up!” he bawled at his hands. “Them redskins see these cows gettin’ loose, they’ll be comin’ to make meat soon enough!”

  “Lieutenant?” one of the teamsters cried out behind Rosecrans. “You want we should circle up the wagons?”

  He watched as American Horse’s galloping band of scouts spread themselves out in a broad front about the time those men in the advance of the oncoming village were crossing the Laramie–Black Hills Road. Coming ever onward.

  Of a sudden the scouts’ wild, blood-chilling cries faded when, some hundred yards short of their Northern brothers, American Horse and his fifty friendlies reined up in a dusty spray and quickly dismounted, immediately sitting down on the prairie to await the vanguard that rode out in front of the approaching village. More than a dozen of those advancing Sioux slowly came up to the center of that wide line of seated scouts. In a moment American Horse and a few of his men were gesturing back toward the small escort of soldiers, teamsters, and wranglers. Rosecrans was surprised when more than a dozen of those men at the head of the village pushed on through the seated scouts, causing American Horse’s men to hurriedly shuffle to either side to get out of their way. Perhaps out of some respect for those leaders. Perhaps out of fear.

  By God he was going to be face-to-face with Crazy Horse in a matter of minutes, in less than half-a-mile, in only a few more heartbeats.

  Over the last handful of days reports had drifted in from the north that assured Colonel Mackenzie that these last intractable Sioux were indeed on their way to Camp Robinson. Talk around the post claimed that more than a dozen years ago Crazy Horse had been friends with a few of the soldiers down at Fort Laramie. But that was back in the days before a decade of hard, bitter fighting. So a lot of the old-timers claimed that there wasn’t a white man alive who had ever laid eyes on Crazy Horse. To be sure, there were some who swore they had seen the war chief at the Battle of Slim Buttes.2 But heard more often were the haunted stories floating out of the Black Hills that told of all those white miners who had gone to their deaths alone. Riding down on them was the last face those men would ever see—

  And here he was, watching the war chief and his attendants halt their ponies no more than twenty yards off.

  “Which’un you think he is?” hissed one of the teamsters.

  A second civilian observed, “Why, they ain’t none of ’em painted—”

  “You make about as much sense as a bung-hole in a empty barr’l,” a third man scolded before he spat out a brown stream of tobacco juice over the off-hand wheel of his small freight wagon. “Course they ain’t gonna be painted up, you idiot! These here Injuns givin’ up the ghost to the army. Ain’t that right, Lieutenant?”

  Rosecrans nodded, flicked a look at his half-breed interpreter, then swallowed unsurely as American Horse signaled him to come forward now that the fifty scouts had joined those village headmen and all were standing among the sage, waiting as the village slowly inched its way toward them. Riders fanned out upon their small, ribby Indian ponies, forming a wide crescent as the young lieutenant started his horse across that last expanse of open ground left between the groups—waving the interpreter, along with his sergeant and corporal, to fall in behind him. This was the moment, by God.

  Back among the masses coming up behind their leaders, some of the weary, gaunt women trilled as they pushed forward to have themselves a close look at American Horse’s scouts, excitedly shouting out the names of those they recognized in their shrill foreign tongue. Hundreds of eyes and cheeks turned shiny with tears of happiness at this first stage of a long-awaited reunion.

  “We’ll stop right here and dismount,” Rosecrans instructed the three men who immediately halted just behind him. “Clark never gave me specific instructions, so I don’t know for sure what the protocol is in a case such as this … but I’m sure we’ll find out. Garnett, you ever done anything like this before?”

  “No, can’t say as I have.”

  “Beggin’ your permission, Lieutenant,” offered the old corporal in a faded blouse and tobacco-stained gray beard, “maybe we ought’n let that Sioux bugger come over to us.”

  “I’m damn well not going to stand on ceremony, men,” Rosecrans growled sternly. “This will likely be the most auspicious introduction in my life.”

  Dismounting, the lieutenant waited for the other three men to drop to the ground. Then he handed his reins to his second in command. “Sergeant. Hold these till I return.”

  The soldier watched Garnett step up and hand his reins to the old corporal; then the sergeant looked the younger lieutenant in the eye and asked, “You wasn’t going over there alone—with just this Indian-talker—was you, sir?”

  Rosecrans scratched a two-day growth on his cheek. “If they wanted our scalps, they could have taken them already.”

  “Yessir,” replied the sergeant. “We’ll have your horses right here, Lieutenant.”

  The young officer tugged at the bottom of his tunic, then brushed his gauntlets down the front of the dark blue wool, knocking trail dust and grime from his uniform, as he started forward. Garnett stepped out beside him, his thick-soled moccasins padding softly on the ground dampened by yesterday’s hard spring thunderstorm. The lieutenant was adjusting the bill of his kepi about the time a handful of Sioux headmen dropped to the ground and started forward on foot. They had taken no more than two steps when the smallest among them turned and made a slight motion with his hand, saying something to the rest. That done, the slim, undecorated one came forward alone, likely to make the first contact with the soldier, to make that first overture.

  Swallowing hard, Rosecrans blinked in consternation, then blinked again as the figure got closer and closer, resolute and decided in his gait. The lieutenant saw how American Horse hung back with the other headmen, expectant and waiting. Maybe he should call the scout leader forward … but Garnett should be able to tell this messenger that the officer would wait right here in the open, on the open ground between the two groups, for Crazy Horse himself to come forward.

  By damn, if this fellow wasn’t a bit more pale than the rest of his earth-skinned fellows at the agency. Too, his braided hair falling well past his waist wasn’t black and straight like that of the other Sioux Rosecrans had seen around the post. No, this one’s hair was almost brown—so he was likely a half-breed like Garnett. That had to be the reason this half-blood was selected as a messenger to come out to meet him, carrying his lever-action carbine in the crook of his left arm, a dusty red blanket tied around his waist in traditional fashion, the stiff spring breeze tormenting that single feather tied at the back of his head.

  Skin so light, a half-breed for sure, the lieutenant thought. An interpreter perhaps, one whose mother had spent time around one of the long-ago fur trade posts, his father likely an old fur man who had gone to the blanket with the wild warrior bands.

  The slim figure stopped ten yards away, unceremoniously set his rifle down in the sage, then immediately crossed his arms. Rosecrans stopped, not sure what to do next.

  “Take off your gun, Lieutenant,” Garnett whispered uncertainly.

  They both dropped their weapons, draping their gunbelts over clumps of gray-backed sage. Then the unarmed messenger motioned him and Garnett to approach.

  What should my next move be? the lieutenant worried, as he and Garnett neared the pale-skinned one. Wasn’t likely this messenger would understand the formality of a soldier’s salute—a sign of mutual respect from one fighting man to another. So maybe he should simply put out his hand and present it to the warrior.

  Rosecrans stop
ped mere feet away from the warrior, tore the leather gauntlet from his right hand, then slowly extended his arm, that trembling hand held out between them now that the two of them stood less than five feet apart.

  For a long moment the Sioux stared down at the offered hand, long enough that the lieutenant began to consider that he should drop his arm. He started to turn to Garnett, wanting his interpreter to make some attempt to apologize for his foolishness. Such a civilized gesture had been a stupid formality wasted on this heathen warrior—

  But the Indian suddenly reached out, grabbing the officer’s left wrist in his right hand, and shifted it sideways so that he could grasp the white man’s left glove in his bare hand. Surprised for a moment, Rosecrans eventually smiled hugely and began to shake left hands enthusiastically with this messenger.

  “Yes! Yes!” the lieutenant roared with great vigor, grinning at Garnett.

  The Indian said something, made a small sign with his right hand—pointing to his heart, then brushing the fingers of that hand down the extent of his left arm—ending up by signaling something to those warriors who had remained behind with their ponies.

  When Rosecrans glanced at his interpreter, he found Billy Garnett frozen, staring in awe at the messenger. “Something wrong with the way I’ve done things?”

  “Wh-what, sir?”

  His enthusiasm undiminished, Rosecrans kept shaking hands with this pale-haired messenger as he instructed his interpreter, “Just tell him I want his chief to come forward now.”

  “Ch-chief?”

  “Yes. Crazy Horse,” the lieutenant replied impatiently, as his eyes raked over the others starting their way with American Horse. “I want to meet Crazy Horse.”

  Garnett’s look of awe instantly turned into one of perplexed fascination, but suddenly brightened. He began to smile as if the white officer had just played a great joke upon him. “You want me to tell … him … to go get … Crazy Horse for you?”