In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse

by Joseph Marshall

  Grandpa Nyles shaded his eyes and continued to look around. “Well, there were a lot of warriors wounded. Nobody knows exactly how many. Some say around forty warriors were killed. One of those was Crazy Horse’s best friend.”

  Jimmy looked up at his grandfather. “Who was that?”

  “His name was Lone Bear. They’d been friends since boyhood. They were separated in the fighting. After it was over, Crazy Horse was looking around for him.” He pointed down the eastern slope of the battle ridge. “He found him, down there somewhere. Lone Bear had been shot through the chest. But it was so cold, the blood froze around the wound and stopped the bleeding.”

  “For reals?”

  “Yeah. He was still alive when Crazy Horse found him. He held his friend in his arms until he died. Everyone who saw that said Crazy Horse cried like a baby.”

  Jimmy noticed that his grandfather had brushed something out of his eyes.

  “I would be sad, too,” Jimmy said. “It’s kind of sad just to think about it.”

  “Yeah, it is. Come on, let’s start back for the truck.”

  Near the tall stone monument were some large rocks. They stopped, and from his trouser pocket Grandpa Nyles pulled out a bundle of gray sage wrapped in red cloth. He placed it gently on the largest rock.

  “This is for the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors,” he said quietly. “We should never forget them and what happened here. But we have to remember the soldiers kindly, too. They fought hard. Their people shouldn’t have been here, like they promised. If they had kept that promise, those eighty men probably wouldn’t have died here.”

  From the rocks they walked to the truck in silence. Jimmy could still hear the gunshots, the shouting, and the screams in his imagination. Grandpa Nyles was very good at telling stories. When they arrived at the truck, Jimmy looked back toward the battle ridge.

  “What happened to Crazy Horse after this?” he wondered aloud.

  “Well, this was the battle that established him as a leader of warriors. Word spread quickly among the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho. He became a hero. But he was a reluctant hero. He didn’t want to be a leader. He just wanted to be a good man and a good warrior.”

  “He was a good warrior, wasn’t he?”

  Grandpa Nyles unlocked the truck. “One of the best. But he was a good man, too. He was quiet and humble. He didn’t brag. He didn’t even speak loudly. That’s what I like about him. There were a lot of good and brave warriors in those days. But not all of them were really good men. Not all of them were humble, like him.”

  5

  The Tongue River Valley

  JIMMY SAID VERY LITTLE AS THEY RETURNED TO INTERSTATE 25 and headed north. He was still thinking about the story of the Battle of the Hundred in the Hands.

  “Why did they call it ‘Hundred in the Hands’ ? ” he asked suddenly.

  His grandfather smiled. “Before the battle happened, a Cheyenne holy man predicted a victory in a battle against one hundred men. He said the warriors were holding ‘one hundred in the hands.’ That meant a victory. The interesting part is that there were eighty soldiers who came out of the fort that morning. The holy man’s prediction was close.”

  Jimmy sat quietly until they reached the town of Sheridan. There Grandpa Nyles took an exit and then turned onto a narrow highway that went north out of the town.

  “We’re going to take a look at the Tongue River Valley,” he explained. “Most of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people who were here had villages in that valley.”

  In less than fifteen minutes they came near to the river. On either side of it were broken hills. The grass was sparse but green, and there was sagebrush everywhere. Its gray leaves brightened the hillsides and meadows along the river. “This looks nice,” Jimmy commented.

  “Beautiful country,” his grandfather agreed. “Crazy Horse liked it here—a lot. This was the western end of Lakota territory, which started at the Missouri River in the east. He wanted to live here for the rest of his life. His Oglala people were here when he was born, so he grew up around here.”

  “Maybe I’ll live here someday,” Jimmy declared.

  After they had driven awhile, Jimmy spoke again. “Crazy Horse sure was in a lot of places. Way in Nebraska, Fort Laramie, and now here.”

  “For sure. But this is where he spent most of his childhood, in what is now central and north central Wyoming. It wasn’t Wyoming then, of course.”

  “So what happened here?”

  “A lot,” answered Grandpa Nyles. “He lost his birth mother. He learned how to ride horses, use and make weapons, be a hunter and a warrior. Had his first girlfriend.”

  “Cool—well, except for the girlfriend part.”

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” his grandfather said, grinning and glancing at him. “It’ll happen to you one day. But there was one thing he did that I thought was really ‘cool.’ ”

  “He learned to shoot bows and arrows?”

  “Yes, but what I’m talking about is hunting. Starting as a young teenager, he was a really good hunter.” He pulled the truck over to the shoulder of the road and stopped. “Lots of elk and deer around here. So it was fun to be a hunter. But the best thing he did was supply meat for the old people and the widows.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he sure did, and nobody told him to do that. He decided on his own to do it because his parents, and family, told him it was good to take care of the helpless ones. So he would kill an elk or a deer and bring it back for a family that didn’t have a hunter—you know, the old people or a woman who had lost her husband and still had children to care for. He would just leave the meat at the lodge door of someone who needed it.”

  Jimmy was intrigued. He thought for a moment and then said, “I can do that.”

  “You can, and you will one day,” Grandpa Nyles predicted. “Long as you understand that Crazy Horse didn’t do it because he wanted people to notice. He didn’t even want people to thank him. He just didn’t want anyone to go hungry.”

  “Because he cared, right?”

  Grandpa Nyles smiled. “Yeah, you got that right. Later in his life, after he got married, he and his wife would give away their food. He would give away his horses so that people could ride and haul their belongings.”

  “Wow!”

  “Yeah, giving away a horse in those days was like giving away a car today. I don’t know anyone who would give away a car. Do you?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “No. I guess Crazy Horse was a generous person.”

  Grandpa Nyles smiled broadly. “I’m glad you know that word, and, yes, he was very generous. That’s one of the things all Lakota people were taught to be—generous.”

  He put the truck in gear and drove back to the road. After a mile or so he turned onto a gravel road that mostly followed the river. There were many broad meadows on either side, good places that could hold a lot of lodges. They drove to an area with a sign that read PUBLIC FISHING. Getting out, they walked toward the river. A warm breeze swayed the grasses and the shrubs near the banks. Overhead, hawks soared on the air currents. Somewhere nearby a meadowlark and a redwing blackbird sang their bright, cheery songs.

  Jimmy could understand why Crazy Horse loved this place. In his mind’s eye he could see lodges in the meadow on the other side.

  “Grandpa, did Crazy Horse marry his girlfriend?”

  “No,” his grandfather replied a bit sadly. “She was given away to someone else. That broke his heart. Her name was Black Buffalo Woman. Later, though, Crazy Horse married a woman named Black Shawl.”

  “ ‘Given away’? What do you mean?”

  “In those days, a girl’s parents had a lot of control over who she married. Black Buffalo Woman’s father listened to someone who didn’t like Crazy Horse, so he gave her to another young man. But Black Shawl was a good woman. She and Crazy Horse were devoted to each other. They had a daughter.”

  Jimmy nodded quietly.

  Grandpa Nyl
es said sadly, “But they lost that little girl. She got sick with a disease called cholera. She died from it, and she was only four years old.”

  “Sad things happened to him a lot, didn’t they?”

  “For sure,” Grandpa Nyles said, sighing. “His birth mother died. One of his second mothers died later, and he lost his best friend, and then his daughter. Like you said, lots of sad things.”

  “Did he cry?”

  “He sure did, especially when his little girl died. He stayed at her burial scaffold for days. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink water. He just cried and cried.”

  “I saw my dad cry once,” Jimmy remembered. “When my uncle died.”

  “It’s hard to lose anyone we love. Your dad lost his brother. They were very close. He cried because he was grieving. Just like Crazy Horse did.”

  Jimmy looked across the river. There were birds flying and landing in low willow shrubs. Nearby, insects were buzzing. “I guess even tough guys cry, huh, Grandpa?”

  Grandpa Nyles nodded, glancing down at his grandson. “Yeah. When things like that happen, like to your dad and Crazy Horse, it’s okay for tough guys to cry. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  Jimmy nodded. “I won’t, Grandpa.”

  “Good.” His grandfather waved his arm. “So you can see why Crazy Horse liked this area,” he said. “In 1877, when the United States government told him he had to live on a reservation, he said he wanted that reservation to be here.”

  “Was it, Grandpa?”

  “No. I think the government promised him his own reservation just to talk him into surrendering.”

  Jimmy frowned. “That . . . that wasn’t very nice.”

  “No, it wasn’t. But I brought you here because this is where Crazy Horse spent the last year of his life.”

  “Oh, wow,” Jimmy replied as a feeling of sadness went through him.

  “Of course, he didn’t know it would be the last year of his life,” Grandpa Nyles quickly pointed out. “He was more concerned with the hard winter that year, and for the future.”

  “The future?”

  “The Lakota and Northern Cheyenne had won a great battle against the Long Knives in June of 1876, at the Little Bighorn. Because of that, the United States government was angry and wanted badly to put Crazy Horse and his people on a reservation. Sitting Bull and his people, too. That winter of 1876 and ’77 was very hard, in a lot of different ways.”

  Jimmy knew about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Grandpa Nyles talked about it a lot. But he hadn’t talked much about what happened after the battle.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “How was it hard?”

  “Well, it was a cold winter, without much food,” Grandpa Nyles explained. “The buffalo were all but gone. White hunters had come for many years and killed them. Killed them for their tongues and hides. For sport. Eventually they killed most of the buffalo, so it was hard to find enough food to feed everyone. Ammunition for the guns was scarce and hard to get. Long Knives attacked them and burned what little food they did have. On top of all that, most of the Lakota had already surrendered. Men like Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were telling Crazy Horse and his people they should surrender to the whites, too. If they didn’t surrender, the Long Knives would kill or capture them all.”

  “Geez, Grandpa. That was bad.”

  “Crazy Horse did a lot of thinking, spent a lot of time alone,” Grandpa Nyles went on. “He didn’t want to surrender—no one did. But the scary thing was, if they didn’t starve to death, the soldiers would eventually come. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, with plenty of guns and bullets. Crazy Horse had only a hundred and twenty-eight warriors.”

  “He did surrender, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he had to. He was worried most about the helpless ones—you know, the widows, the old people, the children.” Grandpa Nyles put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “He and his warriors could die fighting the whites, but who would take care of the helpless ones after that? Who would protect them?

  “Crazy Horse and his council of old men decided it was better to live under the control of the whites, and stick together, and get through it somehow.” He gazed out across the land. “They decided to surrender, to leave this place.”

  “But—but they won that last battle. You said so,” Jimmy protested.

  “They did, they won the last two battles,” Grandpa Nyles said, a serious look on his face. He pointed south. “Over those hills was a battle that happened before the Little Bighorn. Over there is Rosebud Creek. Crazy Horse led about five hundred men more than fifty miles, in the dark of night, no moon. That next dawn they faced General George Crook’s army, which had three times more men and a heck of lot more guns and bullets.”

  “For reals?”

  “Yeah. The Rosebud Battle, the whites called it. We know it as the Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.”

  Jimmy was intrigued. “Why?”

  “Because a young Cheyenne woman rode with the men. When her brother’s horse was shot down, she raced in to rescue him. Soldiers were shooting at her from two sides, but she still managed to save him.”

  Jimmy’s eyes were wide. “Wow! Awesome!”

  6

  Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument

  JIMMY AND HIS GRANDFATHER CROSSED INTO THEIR third state in four days. First it was Nebraska, then Wyoming. Now Jimmy watched as they drove by the WELCOME TO MONTANA sign on Interstate 90 going north.

  Less than an hour later they turned right at the exit to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Past a convenience store on the left and then a log trading post and restaurant farther up the hill, they turned right again.

  A two-lane road led up to a tiny stone building just in front of the entrance and exit gates. Grandpa Nyles paid the fee and took a brochure from the young park ranger.

  Jimmy looked around at the hilly landscape. He had the same strange feeling he’d had at the Hundred in the Hands battlefield. He felt like he should be quiet or talk only in a whisper. There was one thing that he could not figure out. The whites had lost the battle, and yet they wanted to remember it.

  Past the gate they followed the road toward the parking lot. Off to the right were houses. At the western edge of the parking lot was a two-story stone building. The parking area went farther to the south, bending slightly to the east. South of the stone building was a cemetery with rows and rows of white headstones.

  At the southern end of the parking lot were two more buildings. The first housed bathrooms, and the other, larger building was the visitor center.

  Grandpa Nyles drove slowly through the parking lot, a slight frown on his face. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s do the battlefield first, then finish at the visitor center.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  The parking lot was nearly full of sedans, SUVs, pickup trucks, and even a few motorcycles. Along the side of the road were large motor homes, some with cars in tow. Making a slight right turn, they drove up the hill. They got out of the truck and walked to the monuments. On the left was a new one dedicated to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. It was a wide circular pit with two openings, one on the east and the other on the west. On the hilltop to the right was an older monument. It was large and four-sided, and it sat atop a mass grave. In the grave were the white soldiers who had died 138 years before.

  Below the monument were white headstones inside a black iron fence. There were no graves, only markers, each indicating where a soldier had fallen. One of them bore the name of George A. Custer, the commanding officer of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. The Seventh was the regiment defeated by the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho on June 25, 1876.

  The hill that the monument was on was known as Last Stand Hill.

  Grandpa Nyles cleared his throat. “Many still believe that Custer and his soldiers fought to the last man, until all of them were killed. It’s true that all were killed, but there was no last stand.”

  “There wasn’t?” asked Jim
my. “What happened?”

  “Less than thirty soldiers reached this far. One of them was Captain Tom Custer. He was the younger brother of George Custer. The other two hundred had fallen along the way. They were all down along a mile-long ridge. You’ll see the markers when we go that way.”

  The paved road passed between the monuments and turned south. Grandpa Nyles decided they would drive to the far end of the battle site. It was a place called Reno-Benteen Hill, four miles from Last Stand Hill.

  The way it was—June 25–26, 1876

  The encampment filled the river bottom for two miles along the meandering river. To the Lakota, the stream was the Greasy Grass. It wound north to south and had many bends. The encampment was on the west side, among some very large and tall cottonwood trees.

  This enormous village of one thousand lodges had moved to the Greasy Grass River only two days before. But the people had been together for two months by then. The first gathering was far to the east, and smaller. At first there were only a few hundred people, but, as the days went by, more and more people came. The village slowly grew to a few thousand. They were responding to Sitting Bull’s message to gather and talk about the encroachment of the white people. A month ago Sitting Bull had conducted a Sun Dance, the most holy and powerful of Lakota ceremonies.

  People from all seven Lakota bands were there. So was a small group of Nakota. The Cheyenne numbered several hundred; the Arapaho were fewer than that. Some people had even slipped away from the reservations to join the gathering. By the time they moved to the Greasy Grass, there were nearly ten thousand. Almost one thousand two hundred of them were warriors.

  Never before had there been so many horses in one place. Large grassy flats west of the village were filled with nearly fifteen thousand horses. Such a herd was very colorful on the green prairie. Most of the horses were bays (brown) or blacks, but there were buckskins (tan) and sorrels (reddish) as well; only a very few were white or gray. A herd that size could eat all the grass on a large prairie very quickly. That was one reason the encampment moved several times. The people moved to new areas where there was grass for the horses to eat.