This parley at Bear Butte in the end changed nothing. There was general agreement that the tribes needed to take a sterner line with the whites, before their hunting grounds were completely destroyed; but how exactly they were to do that, with each band moving along with the game and looking essentially to their own needs, was hard to say. The whites had a great advantage: they were one nation (though soon to be split, temporarily); the native peoples of the plains were many nations.
The bitter lesson all the Plains Indians had to begin to absorb in the late 1850s was how very quickly nature’s abundance—that is, game—could become scarcity. The hunting along the Platte was already much diminished; the great masses of buffalo upon which all the tribes were dependent had by then been split into a northern and a southern herd. The hard fighting between Brulé Sioux and Pawnee, which so occupied Spotted Tail, was intensified by the fact that the two peoples were competing for a dwindling supply of game.
For the Oglalas, the same need to stay where the game was abundant forced them west and north and brought increased conflict with the tribes already there, namely, the Arapahos, the Shoshones, and the Crows.
It was on a raid against the Arapahos, probably in the summer of 1858, that Crazy Horse—he would have then been about sixteen—finally earned his name. He charged straight at a party of enemy warriors, untouched by either arrows or bullets; his bravery was so exceptional that the Sioux began to sing in his honor. When two Arapaho warriors rode out to challenge him, he killed both of them and took their scalps, forgetting in the heat of battle that his dream had told him never to keep anything for himself. While he was taking the scalps, he was hit in the leg by an arrow. He threw the scalps away and his friend Hump removed the arrow and treated the wound. When the Oglalas returned to their camp, old Crazy Horse, the father, made a fine ceremony and transferred the name to his son. Thereafter the old man was called Worm and Crazy Horse took the name by which history knows him.
These were not his first kills. Sometime earlier, in a skirmish with some Omahas, he shot at what he thought was a warrior, crouched in some bushes, and discovered that he had killed a woman. He did not take this scalp.
In the main the Oglala effort to edge into the game-rich Powder River country was successful.
The years of Crazy Horse’s early manhood were years of relative prosperity for the Sioux; one reason for this was that the whites were soon fighting a terrible civil war, a war so destructive that, by contrast, their conflicts with the Plains Indians seemed almost like frolics. From 1861 to 1865 the army had all it could handle elsewhere; the best officers, naturally, wanted to fight in that fight, leaving the western forts ill manned, usually by officers who resented the fact that they weren’t fighting the Rebs. Some very ugly incidents—for one, the great Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862—took place during the Civil War; but farther west, where Crazy Horse was, the fighting during these years was mainly Indian against Indian. It was in these years that Crazy Horse earned the high reputation among his fellow Indians that he would carry all the way to the Little Bighorn.
7
IT IS PERHAPS appropriate to pause during this nominal lull in the plains warfare—nominal because there was never a total cessation of hostilities—to say a word about the plains themselves: this great American steppe was Crazy Horse’s home during his whole life. His attachment to these plains never weakened; he was born to those great skies and those long horizons, and he kept to them as long as he could. When Nelson A. Miles attacked him and his people in their winter camp on the Tongue River in January of 1877, Crazy Horse knew that the terms of the conflict had changed. For the Sioux, warfare was mainly a summer sport. In the hard northern winters they had enough to do just to keep their old and their young warm and well fed. It is true that they wiped out Fetterman on a cold day in December, accomplishing that task just before a blizzard struck, but, in the main, winter warfare was not something they enjoyed. Fighting was a great deal more pleasant in warm weather.
Bearcoat Miles came anyway, and kept coming, forcing Crazy Horse to make an awkward and painful retreat. Then the winter stopped even General Miles; and Crazy Horse, in the breather it allowed him, had the opportunity to do what Chief Joseph had hoped to do and what Sitting Bull did do: escape into Canada. Neither Miles nor Crook could have followed him there; the Canadian government would not have tolerated it, although, almost a decade later, Crook found the Mexican government far more pliant when he went in after Geronimo.
Crazy Horse refused to go to Canada. It was even colder in Canada, and the game was uncertain; but it may be that he didn’t go because he refused to be chased from his home country. The range that he traveled in his life was spacious, but it wasn’t infinite. He went south a few times into Kansas, west as far as the Bighorn Mountains, north and east to the Missouri country; but the land where he roamed and fought mainly was plains country: Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, eastern Montana. Rarely if ever was he east of the 100th meridian, that important line on the map that told the whites where the Great American Desert began.
It wasn’t desert, of course—Geronimo lived in a desert. Crazy Horse lived near the center of the great grassland steppe that stretched from Texas well into Canada. Then and now, the central plains were the least populated part of the United States. To those not attuned to their subtleties the plains are merely monotonous emptiness. But to those who love them, the plains are endlessly fascinating, a place where the constant interplay of land and sky is always dramatic; gloomy sometimes, but more often uplifting. Despite their unpopularity with the general public, many writers have penned rhapsodies to the plains, and the eyes of many artists—from Catlin and Bodmer on—have been challenged by them.
The American plains, like all the world’s great steppes, are the natural home for grazing animals and nomadic peoples, and are particularly ideal for certain large ruminants such as the buffalo. The plains have never welcomed either the plow or the fence. The balance of the grasses, the wildlife, and the climate is delicate, easily disturbed. Not merely Crazy Horse but all the Plains Indians recognized with dismay that the whites were indifferent to this balance and likely to destroy it.
Nomads, of course, can be wanton too; like most humans they are inclined to the binge. But, in the main, they held a sacramental attitude toward the earth and its creatures, whereas the white attitude from the first was essentially commercial.
Nomadic lifestyles are often vulnerable to the technologies of settled people; and yet the appeal of what appears to be freedom—the freedom of the nomad, whether Sioux Indian or lone cowboy—remains very potent. It may be that one reason writers from the American west have had such a hard time getting their words taken seriously is that they have been competing from the first with one of the most powerful visual images of all: the image of horses running. The Indian and the horse have been together in movies for as long as there have been movies: I now own a tape of a fragmentary silent film called Old Texas, made in 1913, in which the great cattleman Charles Goodnight appears briefly at a picnic before the film—possibly it is supposed to represent his reminiscences—dissolves into grainy images of Indians on horses.
Crazy Horse was not unaware of mountains. He knew the Bighorns and the Black Hills, was born near and died not far from Bear Butte. But for most of his life he was a man of the Great Plains. His rivers were the Platte, the Niobrara, the Powder, the Yellowstone, the Tongue, the Little Missouri. He lived under one of the most generous skies in the world. Again, many commentators have recognized that such skies, hovering over the rolling land, with the horizons a mystery, with mirages frequent, make the plains a place that calls forth imaginings. Those long vistas, those splendid clouds tempt the imagination as the plains of Castile tempted Don Quixote. When Plains people die, white or Indian, they speak of a going up, for where would the spirit go except into that sky? It is easy on the plains to imagine things not seen, worlds not known. Crazy Horse, in his wanderings over the summer plains, would have seen
many mirages, which perhaps encouraged him in his belief that this world, with its buffalo and horses, is only the shadow of the real world. He was in a way a prairie Platonist, seeing an ideal of which the day’s events were only a shadow. His belief in the two worlds seems to have made him exceptionally cautious where the camera is concerned. He didn’t want any white man to snatch his shadow, coax it into a little box. He wouldn’t even allow his friend Dr. McGillycuddy, the doctor who so faithfully treated his wife Black Shawl for tuberculosis, to take his picture. He believed it would shorten his life; and his life did indeed end not long after he came to the place where cameras—the little boxes that snatched shadows—were common.
This strange man of the Oglalas was always a man of the central plains. He would not be driven from them, rejecting, in a crucial decision, even the plains of Canada. He was determined to hold to the country that was his own, and in the end, that is what he did.
8
WHILE THE WHITES were busy in the east, fighting one another, Crazy Horse was active in the old way, harassing his enemies, stealing horses, hunting, sharing what he killed with the poor and helpless, and, it seems, yearning for a woman he couldn’t have.
This was the same fetching young woman he had probably spotted at the big council in 1857: Black Buffalo Woman. She was young and comely—his was hardly the only eye to fall on her, but for a time Crazy Horse seemed to feel that he was at least in the running for her affections. One day he left on a raid with several warriors, one of whom, No Water, soon developed such a terrible toothache that he dropped out of the raiding party and went back to camp. When the raid ended, Crazy Horse discovered to his extreme dismay that in his absence Black Buffalo Woman had married No Water. (Some believe the match was engineered by Red Cloud, the girl’s uncle.)
Crazy Horse took this news hard, as any young man in love would be apt to. He was perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two at the time and had been hanging out almost exclusively in the camp of the Bad Faces (the girl’s people, and also Red Cloud’s). Crazy Horse left the camp at once and was gone for some time.
Black Buffalo Woman had made her choice, and that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Crazy Horse was an unusually single-minded young man; Black Buffalo Woman happened to be the only woman he had serious feelings for. These feelings didn’t go away, although Black Buffalo Woman was a respectable wife and, soon, a mother. Other young warriors took wives: Crazy Horse didn’t. Instead he hung around No Water’s lodge as much as possible. No Water, as it turned out, was a jealous husband. He was not pleased when Crazy Horse continued to pay his wife little attentions, but he tolerated the situation. For some years, while Black Buffalo Woman bore No Water three children, a reasonable decorum was observed.
Around 1865, just as the long Civil War between the whites was ending, the Oglala Sioux revived the old custom of the Shirt-wearers. The Oglala society of elders, sometimes called the Big Bellies and sometimes called other names, sat down and chose four young men of proven courage and good moral character and honored them by making them Shirt-wearers. Their duty, from then on, was to put selfish interests aside and think always of the welfare of the tribe. Those duties were as much moral as practical; they were, in our terms, to be role models, to set examples of how Sioux men should behave. The Big Bellies themselves had not been formally elected; they were just there to advise and counsel, to plan hunts, to decide when to move their camp, and so on.
Crazy Horse, as has been noted, was not from one of the great families of the Sioux. His father was a poor man, a healer, a reader of dreams.
Young Man Afraid was of such a great family. His father, Old Man Afraid, was, in a way, the tribe’s senior diplomat. When the Shirt-wearer ceremony was revived, Young Man Afraid was chosen first, and then American Horse, Sword, and Crazy Horse. This was a very great honor, one that put Crazy Horse in a position of grave responsibility. He was chosen both for his courage and for his charity, his concern for the weak ones. He was expected to keep little for himself, which was no problem; since the time of his dream he had never kept much for himself. The problem was that he was a single man: he hadn’t married.
Though the Civil War had drawn off much of the force of the white military, there was no agreed-upon peace on the prairies. The Santee Sioux rose up in Minnesota, and the Sioux along the Missouri River harried the soldiers when there were any to harry. The Shoshones still made things difficult for immigrants along the Holy Road. In Texas the Comanches and the Kiowas rebounded somewhat and kept pressure on the settlers’ frontier; in Kansas the Cheyennes fought white soldiers when they met them, and so on. It was mainly the Teton Sioux who could, during this period, enjoy good hunting in relative peace. This was largely because of where they were, west of Fort Laramie and south of the Yellowstone River, an area full of game and almost empty of whites. This period of relative ease they owed in part to the wisdom of Old Man Afraid, who believed, with Sitting Bull, that it was best to stay away from the whites as long as it was possible to do so. Still, even then, the rush of immigrants along the Holy Road was constant, and the game, in consequence, harder to find and kill. This irritant was powerful enough that the northern and southern Sioux and some Cheyennes made plans to act in concert; the big offensive they planned to mount would start in the north, with Sitting Bull attacking Fort Rice.
To the extent that this was ever a fully planned offensive, it fizzled for the usual reasons. The older men, the tacticians, could never get the young warriors to wait. The force Crazy Horse may have been with, perhaps as many as one thousand warriors, chose to hit the spot where the Oregon Trail crosses the North Platte River, at what is called the Platte River Bridge. The huge party of Sioux should have been able to surprise and overwhelm the troopers guarding the bridge at the time, but they couldn’t and went home disappointed, having killed only a few whites. This battle (July 25, 1864) had one especially sad death. A young lieutenant named Caspar Collins, who was very friendly with the Sioux and had camped with them on several occasions, was killed late in the fight, possibly because his horse bolted and carried him straight into a group of Cheyennes, who immediately did him in. Had Caspar Collins lived, he might have been able to tell us something of Crazy Horse—it is believed the two knew one another. But either because of an uncontrollable horse, or because he allowed himself to be lured into a trap by the Cheyenne decoys, the young lieutenant lost his life.
In 1865 the U.S. government’s Indian policy was at its most schizophrenic. The nation as a whole was war-weary, weighted with grief, and, after President Lincoln’s assassination, a little addled. The nascent peace party wanted to buy off the hostile Indians, give them money and good land—though never much good land—if they would behave; at the same time the military wanted to send a big bunch of soldiers to punish them for their temerity in not immediately accepting the white man’s way. Unable to decide between peace and war, the government tried both at once. They sent out a bunch of soldiers to punish any hostiles they could find, while at the same time hastily convening a peace conference whose aim was to secure something like squatter’s rights to the Platte River country. The large troop of soldiers found no Indians in any numbers and hunted so poorly that they sometimes had to eat their horses, whereas the peace conference attracted only ration Indians who exercised no control over the Platte River country, or, indeed, any country.
Back east, though, at least one indubitably good thing had happened: the Civil War ended. Having failed to sign up any hostiles at the little peace conference in 1865, the government tried another in 1866. Gold had been discovered in Montana, and soon a flood of miners were seeking the quickest way to it, which happened to be by a route that became known as the Bozeman Trail.
Again the government, whether it fully realized it or not, set about pursuing peace and war at once. General Sherman, aggressive as ever, wanted to immediately start building forts along the Bozeman Trail. So far the Sioux had been quiet, even letting most of the miners go through: perhaps Sh
erman thought he could get away with two or three forts. He sent Colonel Henry Carrington and a sizable force into the Powder River country to get the fort building started. At the same time the Indian Office called a peace conference at Fort Laramie, and this time Red Cloud and some of the other headmen came in to hear what the white men had to offer. Perhaps the peace commissioners hoped that they would have a deal concluded before the Sioux happened to notice Carrington and his troops on the plain by the Powder River, but they were not to be so lucky. A Brulé named Standing Elk ran into Carrington and was casually informed of the plan to build the forts. Standing Elk loped over to Fort Laramie to pass on this news, arriving just in time to provoke one of Red Cloud’s most dramatic exits. Neither he nor the other Sioux leaders were pleased with the news that the whites were already preparing to apply the stick when they themselves had just made a long trip to talk about carrots. No signatures were obtained—at least not the right ones—and for the next couple of years the Bozeman Trail was one of the most hotly contested routes in the west. The gold was in Montana, the money to mine it was in the east, and in between were some very angry Indians who by this time had had enough of being pushed around by the whites.
As a consequence of Sherman’s initiative in fort building, one of the most famous and immediately pertinent comeuppances in Plains Indian warfare was visited on Captain William Fetterman and his unfortunate troop on the twenty-first of December, 1866. Fetterman, by all accounts, was a frustrated young officer who had the misfortune to be stationed at Fort Phil Kearney under the unconcerned, even lackadaisical, command of Colonel Carrington. Fetterman considered Carrington to be what we would now call a wimp or a wuss. Though three forts were to be stuck in the very heart of Sioux country, Carrington showed no inclination to make war on the Indians. No treaties had been signed, no presents exchanged, and there existed no hope of peace along the Bozeman; but it was left to Captain Fetterman to reap the whirlwind that his superiors had called up.