A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  The renegade Wahpekutes then moved west, along the way killing two of the captives. The remaining pair, including the Gardner girl, were rescued when two friendly Wahpeton hunters (members of another Dakota subtribe) purchased their freedom. Army units failed to capture Inkpaduta, though they killed one of his sons, Roaring Cloud, in June. The government threatened the other Dakota bands with the loss of their annuities if they refused to help bring in Inkpaduta. So pressured, Little Crow, chief of the Mdewakanton (Dakota) tribe, led a hundred annuity Indians after him. They killed Roaring Cloud’s twin brother, Fire Cloud, but Inkpaduta’s band slipped away, moving farther west and joining a large Yanktonai (Nakota) camp in Dakota Territory. The government raised one more punitive expedition against the elusive renegade but failed to locate him.

  Over the next several years, any Indian attack within hundreds of miles was attributed to Inkpaduta, the “savage monster in human shape, fitted for the dark corner of Hades,” as Abbie Gardner described him. Indian portraits of Inkpaduta, and even some white remembrances, are far less severe: a half sister remembered him as a humble man who avoided trouble until repeatedly provoked, and another Indian said that he was gentle and kind to his family. A white settler said that he sometimes entrusted his own family to Inkpaduta and had learned Sioux from him. He considered the Indian chief a “good neighbor and true friend.”7 Whites throughout that part of the plains lived in fear that Inkpaduta — and his second set of vengeful and ferocious twin sons, Sounds the Ground as He Walks and Tracking White Earth — would return to lead an Indian uprising against them. His ability to elude white soldiers became legendary, and the former pariah gained stature among Indians for his fierce resistance. Though the degree of his involvement is unclear, it seems likely that Inkpaduta put aside intertribal differences and joined Little Crow’s movement. When the reluctant Little Crow led the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, which resulted in more than seven hundred white deaths, it was generally acknowledged by white observers that the government’s inability to punish Inkpaduta for the earlier massacre was directly responsible for the distrust between the Indians and the whites that led to the later one.8

  During the next year, Inkpaduta helped direct a series of running battles with the two-pronged army expedition led by Generals Alfred Sully and Henry Sibley that was sent out against Little Crow. The Indians lost each standoff as they retreated up the Minnesota River valley and then west into Dakota Territory, thousands of them surrendering along the way. Some followed Little Crow north into Canada. But Inkpaduta and hundreds of others escaped across the Missouri and onto the Great Plains, there to spread the message of armed resistance to their western cousins, the Yankton and Yanktonai (Nakota) Sioux, and the Lakotas farther west.

  Through the next decade, Inkpaduta roamed the northwestern frontier from the Canadian Rockies to the Mississippi River, hunting the buffalo and raiding whites in Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakota, Nebraska, and even eastern Montana territories. He became a legend on the frontier — to whites, a phantom who was everywhere and nowhere, unable to be killed or cornered; to the Sioux, a brave patriot admired for his refusal to give in to the wasichus. His small band of refugee Wahpekutes and Yanktonais spent much time near the Canadian border, crossing over when army columns were sent into the field in pursuit. Sometimes they traveled alone, sometimes with a larger group of Sioux.

  At the end of July 1864, an army column met a large force of Sioux from many tribes. Inkpaduta and his band were there, having joined the Hunkpapas earlier that summer (a daughter and a cousin had married Hunkpapa men). Near Killdeer Mountain in northwest Dakota Territory, 1,400 lodges and several thousand warriors gathered to fight the enemy. Though Inkpaduta’s eyesight was deteriorating, the Sioux relied on his strategic advice. But the white soldiers and their superior weapons — the Indians had few guns, most of them carrying bows and arrows — overwhelmed them.9

  Inkpaduta and his small band retreated to the northwest, and over the next twelve years, they wandered the upper Missouri country, hunting the buffalo and retreating into Canada when necessary. Sometimes they journeyed south and joined with the Hunkpapas to raid and fight against the whites invading their country. Inkpaduta had a crucial ally among the Hunkpapas, a warrior infuriated by the many white men who journeyed up the Missouri River to the goldfields at the river’s headwaters. The two had met the year after the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862. They had fought together east of the river against the soldiers sent after the Lakotas. Years had passed since then, but Inkpaduta’s friend was always glad to lend support to the old patriot. Sitting Bull respected a man who hated the whites as much as he did.

  IN LATER YEARS, many whites believed that Sitting Bull was a medicine man. But he was more than that. He was a dreamer, a holy man, and a spiritual leader more concerned with the welfare of his entire tribe than with practicing the healer’s art.

  Sitting Bull was born about 1831 into a distinguished Hunkpapa family living on the upper Missouri River in what is now South Dakota.10 The Hunkpapas, along with the Sans Arcs and Blackfeet (not to be confused with the Blackfoot tribe farther to the northwest), were the northernmost of the seven Lakota Sioux tribes. They were not large tribes and often traveled together over the northern Great Plains in pursuit of the vast buffalo herds. South of them lived the Minneconjous and Two Kettles, and even farther south roamed the Oglalas and Brulés. All seven were united by a common culture, language, and heritage.

  Sitting Bull’s father, a mystic, named him Jumping Badger, but he soon became known by the nickname Slow for his deliberate manner. Slow grew up like all Lakota boys, yearning to become a warrior, for the main preoccupation of the Lakotas was war. All of the tribes fought, and they fought frequently and for many reasons: plunder, horses, revenge, land. Intertribal war, however, did not consist of the full-scale pitched battles Europeans were accustomed to. Rather, elaborately planned raids on enemy villages were the norm. The primary reason they fought was for glory. With few exceptions, displaying bravery in battle was the only way a young man could gain prestige and honors, and only through war could a man rise to the level of chief. Before the whites invaded their lands, the Lakotas had battled enemy tribes. The presence of the whites did not change that.

  As he grew older, Slow became proficient in the skills of a Lakota warrior. He was a fast runner and an accurate bowman. At the age of ten, he killed his first buffalo. When he was fourteen, he participated in his first battle, against his people’s traditional enemy, the Crows. A Lakota male often did not receive his permanent name until he had done something as an adult to earn it. But after this battle, Slow’s proud father gave him his own name, Sitting Bull. Over the next several years, he forged a reputation as a brave warrior in battle after battle against the Crows and other Indian tribes, as well as against the whites encroaching on Lakota lands.

  When he reached full physical maturity, he stood five feet ten inches tall and had a heavy, muscular frame. He dressed and bore himself humbly. His gaze was intense — his eyes dark and piercing — and his features were sharply defined. He took full advantage of his deep bass voice11 and became a commanding presence. “He had some very indefinable power which could not be resisted by his own people or even others who came into contact with him,” said a missionary who knew him well in his later years.12 Legendary for his kindness to children and older people, he was also uncommonly gentle with women, and they responded: he married nine times.

  By the age of twenty-five, Sitting Bull was a leader of one of the tribe’s elite military societies, the Strong Hearts. Two other boys he had grown up with, Crow King and the orphan Gall, had also become noted warriors and belonged to the Strong Hearts. Every Plains tribe could boast of several of these akicitas, and in a culture that revolved around war, they played an important part in fostering a strong esprit de corps. Each society was a military fraternity of good fellowship, competing for battle honors. But the akicitas were also charged with maintaining civil order and took turns, usually f
or a single season, serving as camp police — guarding the village and supervising marches and communal buffalo hunts. Only young men who had demonstrated the right qualifications — a good war record, an outstanding “vision quest” that revealed some sort of supernatural power, or sometimes just membership in an important family — were asked to join an akicita.13 Members of an akicita often became as close as brothers, and Sitting Bull’s fellows in the Strong Hearts would follow him for decades.

  As Sitting Bull continued to distinguish himself in battle and in the hunt, other Hunkpapas began to realize that he was more than just a military leader. He was that rare warrior who possessed each of the four cardinal virtues so valued by the Lakotas: bravery, generosity, fortitude (in regard to both dignity and the ability to endure physical hardship), and wisdom. The first three could be cultivated, in some individuals better than others. But the fourth was more difficult to acquire, springing in part from a combination of the first three but also from additional attributes — experience, intelligence, spirituality, and superior judgment in all matters — that could be fully developed only in a few rare souls. In Sitting Bull, each of the four virtues was developed to an extraordinary degree, and his kinsmen appreciated that fact. As a result, when he was in his late twenties, Sitting Bull was made a war chief of the tribe.

  As Sitting Bull matured, he developed a remarkable kinship with the natural world — which, to the Sioux, was also the spiritual world. The two went hand in hand. Sioux pantheism celebrated an existence in which virtually every object, every occurrence, every force of nature contained a spirit, or deity, that could be good or bad. The young Hunkpapa understood these forces better than most, and with that knowledge came the ability to control, or predict to a certain extent, some of these forces. Even more important, others believed this to be true. Some of his tribesmen thought that he could interpret birdsong, for he became known for his singing and composing.14 And his dreams sometimes proved prophetic. Based on this skill or gift, and others related to the Lakota religion which he was taught or simply intuited, he earned a reputation as a Wichasha Wakan, or holy man, before he was thirty.

  By the late 1850s, the Lakotas understood that whites were a growing threat to their way of life. In the summer of 1857, six of the seven Lakota tribes — the Hunkpapas, Minneconjous, Two Kettles, Blackfeet, Sans Arcs, and Oglalas — gathered at Bear Butte, on the banks of the Belle Fourche River north of the Black Hills, for a special council convened to discuss the growing threat. (The Brulés under Spotted Tail were busy in the south, making war against the Pawnees on the Platte.)15 For half a century, they had tolerated the infrequent forays by the wasichus into their lands, and even traded with them and treated with them. Sitting Bull himself had often associated with white traders at Fort Pierre, on the upper Missouri River, since his early youth. He had even worked for a French trader, buying furs, for a while.

  At least 5,000 Lakotas pledged to resist white encroachment on their lands. A few days later, a band of them came upon an army survey party on the edge of the Black Hills. A chief allowed the wasichus to depart safely in return for one thing: the Lieutenant in charge would send a message to the white people and their President “that they could not be allowed to come into our country. . . . All they asked of the white people was to be left to themselves and let alone.”16

  In the 1860s, the discovery of gold in the Rockies turned the trickle of whites invading Lakota territory into a steady flow. When the Dakotas fleeing Minnesota after the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 reached their Lakota brethren and spread the word of rebellion, army columns trailed after them. Dakotas and Lakotas united to fight the whites, gradually perfecting the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics that would prove so successful over the next decade.

  Any ambivalent feelings on Sitting Bull’s part disappeared by the end of 1864, after the bloody fighting at Killdeer Mountain in northern Dakota Territory, against the army column led by General Sully, and the running battles in the Badlands that followed. Over the next several years, he and the militant Hunkpapas kept up an ongoing guerrilla war against whites in the upper Missouri area. Their favorite target was Fort Buford, built in 1866 in the northernmost part of Dakota Territory, though other forts on the river also were targeted. Aside from occasional brushes with white traders who carried items the Lakotas needed, Sitting Bull and his followers avoided the wasichus — unless it was to actively resist their invasion. When Sitting Bull was approached to sign the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and come in to the reservation, he refused, saying, “We do not want to eat from the hand of the Grandfather (the President). . . . We can feed ourselves.”17

  Soon after the treaty, certain high-ranking Lakotas realized the rapid changes occurring in their world and proposed an unprecedented solution: a supreme chief of all the Sioux. Up to that point, the proud and independent Lakotas had recognized few authority figures and maintained a most rudimentary and nonbinding political organization. Each tribe boasted its own old-man council of advisers, which recommended tribal actions rather than governed, and war chiefs who led by example. For many generations, the autonomous bands, or tiospayes, of each tribe had wandered separately, coming together only at the annual Sun Dance or on other special occasions. But the white threat to their existence, which necessitated interaction between the nontreaty Lakota tribes, required a high office that could make important, binding decisions.

  At a special gathering in the Powder River country, backed by both older chiefs who recognized his superior leadership qualities and his adherence to the four cardinal virtues, and younger warriors respectful of his war record and his adamant opposition to whites, Sitting Bull was ceremoniously named supreme war chief of the entire Sioux nation.18 Over the next several years, virtually all nontreaty Lakotas on the northern plains — the “hostiles,” as the U.S. government branded them — gathered around him, at least in spirit. Most of the time, the tribes still roamed apart, but Sitting Bull’s influence was felt, and his wishes were usually followed. While the majority of the Lakota became entrenched on reservations, Sitting Bull led the free roamers against the government, refusing all parleys and treaty invitations. He did not sign a treaty or even discuss one, nor did he enter a reservation to receive any annuity goods. He did not waver from that position for seventeen years, and when he finally buckled, it was only because his people were starving.

  AFTER THE FETTERMAN Massacre had induced the United States to give in to Red Cloud’s demands, Crazy Horse and several hundred Oglalas continued to roam the Powder River country, hunting and raiding against their traditional enemies as they had for generations. They had no interest in living on a reservation, eating food provided for them by the whites and trying to become farmers. They would live as Lakotas always had, free, following the buffalo through the country east of the Bighorn Mountains.

  Crazy Horse’s stature had steadily increased, and somewhere around 1865 he was awarded a rare privilege. He and three other young warriors who had proved themselves superior Oglalas were named Shirt-Wearers, the highest honor a Lakota could receive.19 Besides certain governing and diplomatic responsibilities, a Shirt-Wearer’s duty was to put the interests of the tribe before his own and serve as an example of proper Sioux comportment. Crazy Horse assumed his new role readily, though his behavior — he was already well known for his generosity and kindness — changed little.

  In the summer of 1870, Crazy Horse ran off with a married woman whom he had long cared for, disregarding all Lakota proprieties concerning such matters. Her enraged husband galloped after them and a day later burst into their tent. Before Crazy Horse could grab his knife, the warrior shot him in the face just below his left nostril. The attacker left, assuming he had killed Crazy Horse, and his wife ran away, though she was soon persuaded to reunite with her husband. Crazy Horse survived, sustaining only a broken jaw. But for his inability to rise above personal interest, Crazy Horse lost his Shirt-Wearer position. (He also gained a scar on his left cheek, which only made his face
even more striking.) The incident did serious damage to tribal peace, and the office of Shirt-Wearer was never the same.

  More misfortune followed. While Crazy Horse was still recovering from his jaw wound, his only brother, an impulsive young warrior named Little Hawk, was shot and killed during an attack on some miners. Then, on a badly planned raid against the Sho-shones that fall, his close friend and mentor Hump was killed. Crazy Horse had wanted to abort the raid — rain had turned to snow, and the horses were having a hard time — but Hump had insisted, saying they would be laughed at if they turned back. Crazy Horse had reluctantly agreed, and the raid quickly turned into a fiasco. When Hump fell from his wounded horse, the Shoshones finished him.20

  Sometime during the next year, 1871, Crazy Horse married a woman named Black Shawl. He may have been talked into it by friends — a war chief of his stature and age was badly in need of a wife, and his personal losses made it even more imperative. Like her husband, Black Shawl had waited longer than usual to marry. She bore him one child, a daughter named They Are Afraid Of Her, who looked like her father. The girl, Crazy Horse’s sole offspring, lived only to the age of three, dying while her father was off on a raid against the Crows. The camp moved some seventy miles during his absence, and when Crazy Horse returned a few days later and heard the news, he rode two days through Crow country to find her death scaffold. (Plains Indians did not usually bury their dead, but left them on a platform high enough that wild animals could not reach them.) He mourned there with no food or water for three days and nights. That loss may have been the cruelest.

  It was about the time of his daughter’s birth that Crazy Horse met Sitting Bull. After 1870 the Hunkpapas had ceased raiding the upper Missouri forts and moved south and west into the Powder River country, content to battle their traditional enemies, the Crows, and wage a defensive war against white incursions into their country. Bitter winters and meager hunting forced Sitting Bull and his people to accept rations occasionally over the next couple of years. To the south, during the spring and summer of 1872, the Oglalas occupied themselves with hunting, making small raids on settlements and stations on the roads along the Platte River, and clashing with the Crows. In midsummer they moved north to the Powder River country. Crazy Horse’s fierce opposition to the encroaching whites had by this time won him a large following of Oglalas, Brulés, and Minneconjous, his mother’s people.