Crazy Horse: A Life

by Larry McMurtry

  Crazy Horse could not, after this, be a Shirt-wearer. He had failed in the Shirt-wearer’s first duty, which was to put the interest of the tribe first. When Elinor Hinman asked He Dog all those years later who had been made a Shirt-wearer in Crazy Horse’s place, He Dog replied that nobody had. The institution itself fell into disuse after this foolishness, which left such a bad taste in people’s mouths that the whole thing lapsed.

  Black Buffalo Woman’s fourth child, a daughter, was notably light-skinned; perhaps the child of Crazy Horse, she lived into the 1940s.

  Not long after this the tribe saw to it that Crazy Horse took a wife, an agreeable woman named Black Shawl, whom he accepted and, it would seem, came to love. Rather like Yeats, who after his failure with Maud Gonne came to be happy with his kind wife George, Crazy Horse seems to have achieved domestic content with Black Shawl, who, unfortunately, was afflicted with tuberculosis. One of the reasons Crazy Horse developed a friendship with Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy was that the doctor was so steadfast in his efforts to cure Black Shawl.

  Later, Crazy Horse took a second wife, a half-Cheyenne, half-French girl named Nellie Larrabee (sometimes spelled Laverie); there is a picture of her in Ian Frazier’s Great Plains. Very probably he never quite got over Black Buffalo Woman, about whose later life nothing is known.

  Thus the great passion of Crazy Horse’s life failed and brought serious disorder to his people. It was not long after this that he also suffered the loss of his reckless brother Little Hawk, who was killed when he foolishly attacked some well-armed miners.

  Meanwhile, though the Sioux had their treaty, the railroads were coming and with them the whites. There was no serious attempt made to police the area that was then, by law, off-limits to the whites. Who was supposed to have policed an area that vast, anyway? By 1872 the railroads had come so far that Custer, Sheridan, Buffalo Bill Cody, and other dignitaries could take Grand Duke Alexis of Russia on a buffalo hunt, with the grand duke traveling well into Kansas in the comfort of his railroad car.

  To the north, things were still quiet. The Northern Pacific was only just edging into North Dakota. It would be a while before it threatened the Sioux sanctuary.

  But no quiet, no peace, really lasted long; the endgame was now about to begin. In late summer of 1872 a force of several hundred soldiers pushed up the Yellowstone River into eastern Montana, precipitating the first major conflict between the wild, mainly undisturbed northern Sioux, including Sitting Bull’s people, the Hunkpapas.

  Crazy Horse had perhaps drifted north by then; he may have been dissatisfied with the more and more passive conditions to the south, where both Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were now firmly (and permanently) committed to peace. Both had been given agencies of their own; they made no more war on the whites. Spotted Tail was criticized in some quarters for being, in a manner of speaking, a kind of Vichy Indian—but this is quite unfair. Spotted Tail was never a toady, and never sycophantic in his dealings with the whites. Given a choice, probably he would have been happy just to get out of the way; but the Brulés, whom he led, really couldn’t get out of the way. So Spotted Tail negotiated, for the most part effectively. He survived his two-year imprisonment with his dignity intact, and it was to remain intact until the end, when, like Sitting Bull, he was killed by one of his own people, a rival named Crow Dog.

  But agency life, with its endless compromising and its constant haggling with the white agents, would never have appealed to Crazy Horse, any more than it appealed to Sitting Bull.

  The engagement that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse fought in August of 1872 came near to being a disaster for the Indians. The force against them, some four hundred soldiers, was well armed and could not be tempted into any rashness. Crazy Horse had learned at the Wagon Box Fight how ineffective bows and arrows were against soldiers who were both well armed and competently led. In this fight in the north the Sioux were very daring, but simply could not get close enough to the soldiers to inflict any damage without paying a huge price in lives. As it was, several of the unrestrainable young Sioux were killed early on. It was in this fight that Sitting Bull astonished everyone, Sioux and soldier alike: he sat down in a meadow, in range of the riflemen, casually filled a pipe, lit it, and smoked it, while bullets cut the grass all around him. Crazy Horse, perhaps jealous of Sitting Bull’s sangfroid, reportedly made a reckless dash right across the soldiers’ front, and had his horse shot out from under him for his trouble, after which the Sioux called off the battle.

  Throughout the later stages of these conflicts on the plains, up to and including the Custer battle, the Sioux were at a disadvantage because they were so poorly armed. Only a small percentage had guns, and they were usually poor guns at that; even the Sioux who had reliable firearms seldom had much ammunition. They could never afford to match the white men gun for gun and bullet for bullet. From the first the white authorities had been farsighted enough to deny the Indians guns. Even the bravest warrior, armed with a bow and arrow, could only do so much when up against a well-prepared soldier with a gun.

  Though the financial panic of 1873 slowed the progress of the Northern Pacific somewhat, its surveyors were nonetheless pushing relentlessly west, well protected by a force that in the popular mind was commanded by George Armstrong Custer. In fact the commander was a modest officer named Stanley. It was while this large force proceeded along the Yellowstone, obviously now in what was supposed to be Sioux country, that Crazy Horse encountered Custer for the first time. The Sioux and the Cheyennes caught Custer and his small detachment napping—literally, in the case of Custer himself—but the Sioux initially intended no big fight. They tried to run off the army’s horse herd, and when that plan was thwarted, tried a decoy maneuver similar to the one that had worked with Fetterman. Custer didn’t go for it; but then the Cheyennes noticed Custer’s hair, which was still long, and remembered the massacre on the Washita—perhaps a few of the warriors who had survived that fight were now back visiting their northern cousins. The Cheyennes attacked, but Custer drove them off. Custer then turned back, and the Indians disengaged. There was little loss of life. Custer thought Sitting Bull was the leader in this skirmish; what he knew of Crazy Horse, if anything, is unclear. Crazy Horse had never been to a meeting with the whites. He had a big reputation with his own people but had as yet received no mention in the popular press. Back east the severe financial panic had for a time driven mere Indian fights off the front pages anyway: the gilding was suddenly beginning to flake off the Gilded Age; all was confusion, dismay, frustration. There no longer seemed to be enough money; specifically, not enough gold. The conservatives were happy to have the country on a gold standard, as long as there was enough gold for the economy to expand; but in the summer of 1873, there wasn’t enough. Paper money had not yet fully caught on.

  Fortunately for the nation, unfortunately for the Sioux, the Black Hills awaited; there had long been rumors of large gold deposits in the Sioux’s holy hills. Awkwardly, though, for the leaders of the whites, there was the binding and much-publicized treaty of 1868, unequivocally giving those very hills to the Sioux forever, with unusually clear provisions that they, the whites, were to be kept out. The U.S. government had broken many treaties with the Indians; some would say they had broken all of them—the writer Alex Shoumatoff recently reckoned the total at 378—but few of these breakages involved so much squirming and soul searching and public posturing as the treaty of 1868. General Sheridan began to mutter unconvincingly about treaty violations on the part of the Sioux, but in fact the Sioux were behaving nicely at the time, as the same general had admitted in another context. There were no grounds for breaching the treaty of 1868 except the grounds the whites finally always used: The United States wanted the Black Hills and all the gold that might be there. A big first step toward the taking of them was the expedition that brought General Custer back to the west and produced the famous photograph of a seemingly endless line of wagons proceeding through a valley in the Black Hills. This
expedition soon fulfilled its main, though unstated, purpose, which was to find gold in sufficient quantities to quench the thirst of the starving markets.

  In Custer’s excited imagination the gold his geologists located at French Creek was so abundant and so easy to get that he could kick it up with the toe of his boot. In reality it was not quite that easy to get, but the gold was there, and, as time has proven, there in quantity. The trail Custer blazed into the Black Hills on that occasion became known to the Indians by a name he despised: the Sioux called it the Thieves’ Road.

  Many of Custer’s scouts refused to go into the hills with him, fearing the Sioux, but he went anyway; as soon as traces of gold were detected, he sent the famous white scout Lonesome Charley Reynolds through dangerous country to Fort Laramie to announce this great find to the world. Lonesome Charley made it through and sent the telegram. In August, Custer emerged and described the beauties of the Black Hills in mouthwatering terms. In another life he would have made a wonderful real-estate developer. In this case he sold one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate in the west to a broke, depressed public who couldn’t wait to get into those hills and start scratching up gold.

  The Sioux did not oppose this expedition; Custer saw few Indians on his trip. Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapas were to the north and west; and Crazy Horse, about this time, was grieving for his little daughter They-Are-Afraid-of-Her, who had died, probably of cholera. When he returned to his camp and found that she had died, he located her burial scaffold and stayed with her several days. He did not get to raise the light-skinned daughter of Black Buffalo Woman, and his parentage of that child is conjectural anyway. But They-Are-Afraid-of-Her was his child, and he loved her deeply. Her loss took some of the fight out of him, for a while.

  Again, though, I would enter the caveat that for much of his life only Crazy Horse’s immediate companions knew where he was or what he did. In the early 1870s personal losses began to pile up: Hump, Lone Bear, Little Hawk, They-Are-Afraid-of-Her. Many commentators, Erik Erikson among them, have spoken of the Sioux’s profound devotion to their children—the loss of this child would have been a terribly severe blow.

  The historians who have concerned themselves most closely with Crazy Horse perhaps naturally slip into a Crazy Horse–centric view of Plains Indian life; they put too much weight on the memories of a few old Sioux and begin to believe that if there was a battle that Crazy Horse might have been in, he was in it. In a curious way the historians’ approaches to Red Cloud and Crazy Horse are opposite: they tend to take Red Cloud out of battles he may well have been in and put Crazy Horse in battles he may well have missed. Of course it is true that Crazy Horse got noticed in most of the battles he fought in because of his extreme daring. He would usually have been the Indian the soldiers shot at first. How much of a tactical sense he developed from all this fighting is not easy to know. Since fighting was a big part of his life, we may safely assume that he observed and learned; how much of what he learned was merely common sense we don’t know. He Dog says Crazy Horse was the only Indian he knew who always dismounted to shoot, which certainly shows good sense; and he did not want to fight the Shoshones the day Hump was killed for the excellent commonsense reasons that the ground was slippery and the Shoshones had better horses.

  The fight with Crook on the Rosebud, which we will come to later, was on a different scale. Perhaps this was a strategically thought-out attack on the part of the Sioux Indians; or it may have been only an unusually persistent attack, because, for various reasons, the Sioux were particularly confident that day and had caught Three Stars Crook on disadvantageous terrain. For once they may simply have felt they had the numbers to do the job. But to pretend that we can follow Crazy Horse’s thinking at the Rosebud is hubris, in the main. In a great many shadowy cases where Crazy Horse fought, or may have fought, the data is simply not firm; in making him a master strategist—as opposed to merely a very daring warrior—the historian walks on very thin ice indeed.

  11

  BY THE SUMMER of 1875 the crisis over the Black Hills could no longer be postponed. Custer’s grand announcement caught the nation’s attention: after that the miners could not be held back. The government was obviously going to find a way to take back the Black Hills; but just as obviously, they were not going to be able to do so without difficulty and without criticism. The whites in the peace party were vocal; they and others of various parties thought the government ought to at least try to honor its agreements, particularly those made as solemnly and as publicly as this one. So there ensued a period of wiggling and squirming, on both the part of the government and the part of the Sioux, many of whom had become agency Indians by this time. The free life of the hunting Sioux was still just possible, but only in certain areas: the Powder River, parts of Montana, and the Dakotas, where the buffalo still existed in some numbers.

  By this time most of the major Indian leaders had made a realistic assessment of the situation and drawn the obvious conclusion, which was that their old way of life was rapidly coming to an end. One way or another they were going to have to walk the white man’s road—or else fight until they were all killed. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were among the most determined of the hostiles; Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, rivals at this point, both had settled constituencies. They were administrators essentially, struggling to get more food and better goods out of their respective agents. As more and more Indians came in and enrollment lists swelled, this became a full-time job, and a vexing and frustrating one at that.

  There were of course many Indians who tried to walk a middle road, unwilling to completely give up the old ways but recognizing that the presence of whites in what had once been their country was now a fact of life. Young Man Afraid, son of the revered Old Man Afraid, was one of the middle-of-the-roaders.

  The whites at first tried pomp and circumstance, bringing the usual suspects yet again to Washington, hoping to tempt them—Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, anyone—to sell the Black Hills. They would have liked to have Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse at this grand parley, or even a moderate such as Young Man Afraid, but none of these men nor any of the principal hostiles wanted anything to do with this mini-summit. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail had no authority to sell the Black Hills, or to do anything about them at all, a fact the white authorities should have realized by this time. There were still thousands of Sioux on the northern plains who had not given their consent to anything. The mini-summit fizzled.

  Red Cloud and Spotted Tail had probably long since concluded that the whites were going to take the Black Hills: When had they not taken land they wanted? The two leaders, for a time, probably hoped to get the best obtainable price rather than see their land taken for nothing, which is what eventually happened. But most Sioux had not achieved this level of realism, or cynicism, yet. They thought the Black Hills were theirs forever.

  Parade diplomacy having failed in Washington, the government decided to take its roadshow west. In the early fall of 1875 they staged a big conclave at a place carefully chosen to be midway between Red Cloud’s agency and Spotted Tail’s—they knew they couldn’t afford to further inflame that rivalry. Historians who argue that either the Fort Laramie council of 1851 or the massing at the Little Bighorn was the greatest gathering of Plains Indians ever tend to forget the Black Hills council of 1875, which was at least a challenger. I don’t think anyone can present an accurate count of how many Indians came, or at least hovered in the vicinity, but all agree there were a lot. The Blackfeet came, and the Cheyennes, and at least seven or eight of the major bands of the Sioux. Sitting Bull held aloof, as did Crazy Horse, meaning that both the Hunkpapas and the Oglalas were without their most resolute resisters. Just as Red Cloud was getting ready to deliver one of his lengthy orations, a very great many warriors, by one reckoning seven thousand (here again I can’t imagine who was counting), rode out of the hills and circled the council tent. Then Little Big Man made his dramatic charge right up to the feet of the peace commissioners
, threatening to shoot anyone who wanted to sell the Black Hills. Whether Little Big Man was really speaking for Crazy Horse is hard to say, but all witnesses agree that his entrance made for a touchy situation. The warriors were very stirred up; there was danger, for a time, of serious violence.

  Fortunately, Young Man Afraid—he was by this time an Indian policeman—stepped forward and managed to quiet the situation. Thanks both to his valor and to his irreproachable character, he enjoyed an authority almost equal to his father’s; the warriors, much to the peace commissioner’s relief, would not go against him. The hostiles soon mostly left and the seasoned bargainers got down to business. Various sums were bruited about, but in the end nobody agreed to anything, though soon afterward, miners poured into the Black Hills so rapidly that the land that was to have been the Sioux’s forever had more whites on it than Indians; the same thing happened in Oklahoma, where the citizens of the Five Civilized Tribes were soon outnumbered three to one on their own land.

  The best the government could do at this time was to establish, by fiat, a reservation system and to criminalize the Indians who didn’t feel like parking themselves within the boundaries of whichever reservation they were assigned to. In the fall of 1871, Grant ordered them to hurry on in and get themselves enrolled by January, ignoring the fact that few Indians cared to move their camps in the wintertime.

  No officer in the field—and this now included the redoubtable George Crook, Three Stars to the Indians—supposed that the nonagency Sioux would simply hurry in and sign up. Crazy Horse, who was then riding with Black Twin (No Water’s brother), sent back word that it was a particularly inconvenient time to move; perhaps he would look more favorably on the proposal in the spring. The hostile Sioux didn’t take Grant’s order seriously, and neither did the military men who marched off, confidently for the most part, to whip them into submission. The Indians stayed wherever they happened to be, and the army got on the move, though in fact it didn’t fight much that winter of 1875–76. It proved no more convenient for General Crook to march on Crazy Horse than it would have for Crazy Horse to come in.