Crazy Horse: A Life

by Larry McMurtry

  Red Feather says that an eagle came down and walked on Crazy Horse’s coffin, once he was on a scaffold outside Fort Robinson. Red Feather mentions that he had never seen an eagle do such a thing before.

  A possibility that Red Feather doesn’t consider is that the eagle may have stopped in hopes of making a meal and, like Mr. Hardy’s little dog, was unaware that the man he was hoping to eat was Ta-Shunka-Witco, or Crazy Horse, a man of charity and a living weapon, who, in his way and in his day, had been a kind of eagle too.