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

by Terry C. Johnston

  Every morning he awoke with the first calling of the birds in the gray of pre-dawn light, as the world around them softly stirred once more. He would quietly breathe fire back into the embers, set the coffee water to heating, then always—always—kneel over her, planting a gentle kiss on her forehead or eyelids. Without fail Sam would murmur something he never understood; then he would leave her and the boy to sleep in as long as Colin’s tummy allowed them to. No rush, no need to hurry away as it had been for so many, many months with him now, no matter the season. One day put behind them at a time. One more day that stretched before them too. The slowing of his own rhythms come at long last.

  Until … the buildings came into view beneath the powder blue of that early-summer sky, here in this most stunning natural amphitheater, the emerald bowl surrounded by the pale, majestic bluffs dotted by ponderosa. Camp Robinson. Log and slab-wood huts. Corrals and stockade fences. Along with that telltale fragrance of dung, a perfume to every horseman’s nose, and by it he located the stables. Nearby stood the quartermaster’s stores. Off to their right gurgled the narrow confines of Soldier Creek.

  As they approached the verdant brush lining the stream Donegan spotted a lone Indian who urged his pony down the opposite bank, and into the creek. The warrior’s eyes locked onto those of the tall civilian, then moved to appraise his wife, and back again, finally landing on the small boy harnessed against his father’s chest. For the briefest moment, Seamus even wondered if he really was an Indian. If so, the man had to be a half-breed. Lighter-skinned than most of the Sioux he had ever laid eyes on, alive or dead. The man’s hair was wrapped in braids that hung past his waist, a single feather tied into it so that it hung downward. Naked to his waist, the warrior bore no suffering scars from sundance trials on his chest or back as he looked away without emotion crossing his face, reining his pony out of the path of the oncoming white couple and their five extra horses.

  For that flicker of a moment, what with the play of shadow and sunlight streaming through the treebranches, Seamus noticed something different, peculiar, something very distinctive about the man’s face. But was troubled he could not put his finger on just what it was.

  As much as he wanted to call out, to engage the Indian in some sign-talk with their hands, he was all the more anxious to get to Camp Robinson.

  The family crossed with a clatter of hooves and a splash of water as the animals halted all on their own, pausing on the graveled bottom in the narrow confines of Soldier Creek, and drank their fill. He could let them do that now, without fear of the horses getting loggy with a long distance yet to go. Up the far bank and through the trees they moved on, his neck craning this way and that to get a look at the buildings.

  “He’s watching, Seamus,” she announced quietly as Donegan tucked his chin and gazed down at the boy who was strapped to his chest, the child turned to the front so he could peer at his new and changing surroundings. “I really do believe he’s watching.”

  The odors of fresh-sawn lumber reached Donegan’s nose as they pressed on past the stables, on past the carpenter’s and paint shops, where his nostrils picked up the odor of soaped and dyed leather from the saddlery. Men in blue, young and old, some fresh-faced and those wrinkled with age, all passed by, giving these three curious travelers more than a cursory glance. Finally he spotted an older man, his lower face well tanned and wrinkled to the consistency of an oft-used saddlebag, the soldier standing at ease against a building front, his infantry Springfield propped against his side.

  “’Scuse me, sojur,” Seamus said, glancing at the absence of any rank on the man’s sleeve, despite the short gray hairs that bristled on his cheeks and chin. “You tell me where I can find the officer of the day?”

  “Right here it is,” he said, jabbing over his shoulder with a thumb. “Adjutant’s office this is. But … there’s no one about right now, Mister.”

  “Where can I find the quartermaster, or even the post commander?”

  The old soldier’s eyes studied Samantha a moment, then came back to look at little Colin strapped to his father’s chest, legs working in eagerness to get out of his harness. The man’s tired eyes climbed to Donegan’s face and he said, “That’s where you’d find ’em, across the parade there. That row of buildings to the north—”

  “By the grace of Jupiter himself!” a loud voice bawled, interrupting the old soldier’s explanation.

  Seamus turned in its direction, a smile instantly on his face as he peered down at the visage of an old friend hurrying across the last of those twenty yards that temporarily separated them.

  The officer shoved his kepi back a bit so he could peer up at the tall horseman. “That … really is you! Gray-eyed Seamus Donegan in the flesh!”

  Ripping off his sweaty right glove, the Irishman held down his hand and pumped the one held up by the officer. He watched how his old friend’s eyes bounced over the child, quickly, and on to that auburn-haired rider sitting most manly astride her horse next to Seamus.

  The soldier quickly ducked around the head of Donegan’s claybank and came to a stop in the shadow beside Sam’s knee. “This … this beautiful creature … why—you must be Samantha!”

  “Yes,” she responded almost shyly as she held down her gloved hand.

  Sweeping off his hat, the officer kissed the back of her hand, then performed a gallant bow before he let her have that hand back. “You know you’re all Seamus ever seemed to talk about on the campaign trails we shared with General Crook—when the late-night stars gleamed over our heads and the embers burned low. His talk was only of his bride Samantha. But now,” the officer gushed with admiration, “oh, now it’s plain to see why this homely, ham-handed Irishman is so damned fond of you—er, excuse my Irish, ma’am.”

  “No offense taken, sir,” she replied. “After all, you will remember who I am married to!”

  All three of them laughed loose and easy.

  “So, Seamus,” the young officer said, turning to the Irishman, “are you going to make me introduce myself in an unseemly and impolite manner to your bride?”

  “Hell no, I ain’t, you flea-bit, sorry excuse for a horse sojur!” he roared, gesturing grandly with one arm. “Samantha Donegan, I’m pleased to introduce to you my good, old friend: Lieutenant Johnny Bourke!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Late June 1877

  “I never knowed Frank Grouard to be scared of much of anything,” Seamus commented to Billy Garnett at his side as their horses carried them right up to the outer fringes of the swelling throng gathered this late afternoon on the final day of the Oglala sundance.

  “This here’s something different than anything he’s ever had to face before,” said the half-breed interpreter as they reined up their horses.

  Donegan rocked forward on the saddle horn, stretching the tense muscles at the small of his back. “What’s so different with this that it’s gonna make Frank afraid?”

  “Being here,” Garnett answered. “Smack in the middle of the Indians who believe you betrayed them. And you’re where they can get their hands on you at long last. You get to know these Northern People, Seamus, you’ll soon see how they look at things—”

  “You’re half-Sioux yourself.”

  Billy nodded. “My mother was full-blood Lakota, yes. But her people made peace with the white man a long time ago. Hung close to the fort—that’s how she caught my father’s eye. Just remember that the bunch Frank Grouard turned his back on is a warrior band, so they’ll carry bad blood against Frank for a long, long time.”

  “Never saw him scared of anything near the way he was scared to come ride along with us today.”

  “This is where the Hunkpatila people—that’s these Crazy Horse people—where they pray and make their vows to the Great Mystery,” Garnett explained. “Grouard is smart enough to know he’s not welcome here in this holy place.”

  “A holy place?” Seamus repeated as he swung out of the saddle.

  “This sun-gazing is serious
business for the Lakota,” Billy sighed as they walked over to a bush that was already crowded with several Indian ponies. They tied off their horses and stepped to the edge of the crowd.

  Seamus spotted young Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy and his wife, Fanny, seated across the sundance arbor, both of them perched in the shade on what appeared to be empty crates. Fanny clutched her proper parasol, watching with intense excitement from under the brim of her very proper hat, its smoke-thin veil just reaching the bottom of her chin. Donegan and the army doctor knew each other on sight, having served together during Crook’s spring and summer campaign against the Sioux. So earlier in the month, not long after arriving at Camp Robinson, they had introduced their wives. Samantha and Fanny took to each other famously, and were already becoming fast friends.

  As Seamus slowly gazed around the wide circle, here and there he noticed other officers he recognized, some soldiers he didn’t, all of them equally intrigued by what they were witnessing.

  “How many of these dances have the Sioux held?” Donegan asked.

  “This is the first this summer,” Garnett replied. “Lakota only hold the sun-gazing dance in the middle moon of the summer.”

  “Middle moon,” he repeated the words. It had a nice ring to it. “So this is going to be it for sundancing?”

  “Likely so,” Billy said. “I figure that’s why so many of the soldiers and white men turned out so they could see the wild Indians who whipped Custer’s men—dancing, singing, hanging themselves from the sacrifice tree.”

  For a long time Seamus stared at the six dancers tugging ever harder against the wooden skewers passed under the muscles in their chest, the ends of which were tied to long rawhide ropes fastened to the top of the tall central pole. He was nothing short of amazed at how elastic human flesh could be each time the dancers leaned back, stretching their skin as they jerked a little, then continued to shuffle around the pole, right to left, following the path of the sun.

  “Riding over, you told me this was their last day,” he whispered as he followed Billy to the right.

  Garnett nodded as they threaded their way through the edge of the crowd. Then they stopped and Billy pointed. “That’s He Dog.”

  He stared at the dark-skinned warrior with the full face. “He’s Crazy Horse’s good friend?”

  “And the one on his right is Big Road,” Garnett said. “Got a band all of his own, but he threw in with the Crazy Horse people once the troubles started last year.”

  “I was there when those troubles broke out of the box.”1

  “On He Dog’s left sits Little Big Man. He’s another longtime friend of Crazy Horse,” Garnett explained. “Word is that Crazy Horse put him up to riding into them talks the agency chiefs were having with the white men who came west to buy the Black Hills a few years back. Little Big Man rode his horse right onto that patch of ground between the loafer chiefs and those government men, shouting, shaking his carbine and his pistol too. Daring the soldiers to shoot him and start a war. All the time he was screaming that he wasn’t only going to kill the white men come to steal the Black Hills, but he was going to shoot any of the agency chiefs who touched the pen to sell the Black Hills to the wasicu.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Wasicu? Means the white man,” Billy said in a whisper. “Little Hawk, Crazy Horse’s uncle, is sitting on the other side of Big Road.”

  Seamus saw some movement in the crowd as the throng began to part and many of the young men and older boys got to their feet and pushed out of the gathering, hurrying toward their ponies tethered nearby. His attention was immediately snagged by an Indian who rose a full head taller than all the rest, standing bare-chested, watching the dancers continue their slow circling of the sacred pole, his arms crossed before him as he surveyed the sun-gazers who kept blowing on their wingbone whistles, making a shrill, high-pitched sound that Donegan felt penetrate the base of his spine. It was a sound he had heard in battle against the Sioux, more times than he cared to count. A shrill call meant to turn a white man’s heart to water, to make the enemy wet himself.

  He looked around nervously while the young men and older boys flung themselves onto their horses and raced off, cleaving in two directions against the long, gentle hillside that rose behind the sundance arbor.

  Seamus asked, “That tall one there—he must be the war chief Crazy Horse?”

  Turning, Garnett easily picked out the big man. “Naw, that’s Touch-the-Clouds.”

  “His name fits, big as he is.”

  “He’s uncle to Crazy Horse, and his good friend too. They’re both fighters. Touch-the-Clouds brought his Mnicowaju people into the reservation, over at Spotted Tail, just before Crazy Horse brought his folks in to surrender—”

  “So where the blazes is Crazy Horse?” Donegan demanded with a little impatience. “When we was getting to know one another this morning, you said you was gonna bring me here to see the great war chief that stopped Crook cold at the Rosebud, and rode right over all of Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn. I admit I never got me a good look at him at Wolf Mountain,2 no matter that we was about as close to his Injins as we are to that Touch-the-Clouds fella over there. Us down in the bottom, slogging through the snow, and Crazy Horse’s warriors up on a low ridge—”

  “I don’t see him anywhere,” Garnett hissed in disappointment. “Thought sure he’d be here to watch his people dance.”

  “But you told me he don’t dance.”

  Garnett nodded his head. “Said he never has.”

  “You know him well?”

  “Just since he brought his people in to surrender,” and Billy shrugged. “Not near as good as Grouard, I s’pose.”

  “Frank got to know Crazy Horse and his kind so well that Frank had to get out by the skin of his tee—”

  “I’ll be damned,” Billy exclaimed, his voice a good deal louder, an edge of excitement in it too.

  “What’s going on?” And Seamus craned his neck to see if he could discover what the half-breed was looking at.

  Garnett grabbed the Irishman’s forearm and said even louder now as the drumming and singing climbed in volume and intensity, “They’re about to end the sun-gazing, Seamus.”

  “Then we’ve missed most everything,” he said with some disappointment. “And I don’t get to see Crazy Horse either.”

  “Most of the dancing,” Garnett agreed, his voice still drenched with excitement. “But that’s gone on four days already. It’s not all that interesting to watch after the first couple hours or so.”

  “A long way we had to ride for just a few minutes of watching this dance,” he said, raising his voice over the growing reverberation of the drums, the climbing crescendo of the singers’ falsetto song.

  “No, Irishman—we got here at just the right time,” Billy declared with conviction. “It’s about time for the battle to break out.”

  “A b-battle?” he echoed with concern, his eyes flicking this way and that.

  “Not to worry, white man,” Billy said with a big smile. “This isn’t a real battle. Something that’s always a part of the biggest sun-gazing dances. Near the end of the fourth day, they sometimes hold a … a make-believe battle.”

  “Against who?”

  “The warriors divide up, take sides. Then they go at it like they did when they were just young boys: striking each other with sticks for clubs, or knocking each other off their ponies with a smack from their bows.”

  “Sounds like a fella could get hurt,” Donegan observed as Billy tugged at his elbow and started him around the sun-dance arbor at the outer fringe of the crowd.

  “They do get their share of bruises and cuts, that’s for sure,” Garnett agreed. “There!” And he pointed at the few hundred horsemen forming themselves into two groups in the distance.

  As Garnett stepped aside to talk in Sioux to a pair of older women who waited nearby, Donegan watched both sides milling around, straightening their clothing, some of the men sprinting their horses so
the animals would be forced to gain their second wind.

  “They’re gonna make the Greasy Grass fight!” Billy squealed in excitement, his voice a notch higher as he clamped his hand on the Irishman’s forearm once again.

  Donegan scratched at his memory, knowing he had heard that name before. Was it Grouard, or had it been Big Bat, Baptiste Pourier, who had explained what river the Sioux called the Greasy Grass? Suddenly he remembered.

  “The Little Bighorn?” he asked, leaning down slightly to gaze right into the younger man’s face. “Custer’s fight?”

  With eyes twinkling, Garnett nodded. “Can you believe what we’re about to watch? No man I ever heard tell of has ever known the story of how Custer and all his soldiers got wiped out on the Greasy Grass.”

  Straightening his back and peering over the milling, murmuring throng, staring at the masses of horsemen gathered on either side of a low swale of the smooth, green hillside, Donegan reflected, “So we’re about to find out the story from the Injins who wiped out Custer’s command, are we? The only ones to ever know for sure how all them sojurs was killed—”

  “There they come now!” Garnett interrupted, gesturing with his arm in excitement. “See how them agency horsemen are lined out.”

  “Column of twos,” Seamus said low. “Them warriors are supposed to be Custer’s sojurs, ain’t they?”

  “That’s Red Cloud’s men playing the soldiers. The old woman over there told me them agency fellas wanted to play the winning side in this make-believe battle,” Garnett explained. “So they chose to be Custer’s men.”

  “Trouble is,” Donegan corrected, wagging his head, “they wasn’t the winners in that fight, Billy.”