Crazy Horse: A Life

  As I read the records, Crazy Horse at this point was far from being broken, but he was certainly very stressed.

  Even though he camped twice as far from Fort Robinson as he was supposed to, he was still in much closer proximity to white people than he had been since his youth on the Platte. He was worried about his people, worried about his wife, and confused by what the whites seemed to want of him. Though there were among the whites men who respected him and some who just liked him, he must often have wished that he had continued to hold out. For a time he fidgeted and worried, waiting for the whites to either give him his agency or allow his people to go on the hunt that had been promised.

  The whites did neither. Crook pestered Crazy Horse to go to Washington, but Crazy Horse kept backing out. The summer was usually a time of pleasure for the Sioux, but this summer—1877—was for Crazy Horse a time of confusion and anxiety.

  Meanwhile, the poisons of idleness and jealousy were working on the Sioux. An Indian named Grabber began to spread the rumor that the whites liked Crazy Horse so much that they were going to make him chief of all the Sioux, though at this time he wasn’t really chief of any of the Sioux. Jealousy intensified as rumors of his ascendancy multiplied. The whites were as uncertain about him as the Sioux, although one or two experienced officers recognized that he was just off-balance, overwhelmed by his new situation. Too many whites had talked to him too much—and this was an Indian who had never parleyed with white men before. He didn’t know how to assess the conflicting statements he heard them make.

  A few wise officers advised that he be left alone until he calmed down a little and had time to adjust to agency life, but this advice was ignored. Crazy Horse was the star of the hour—everyone wanted to talk to him. Probably he would have weakened and eventually gone to Washington—after all, he had little to do—but Red Cloud didn’t like it that this upstart was suddenly such a big star. Neither he nor Spotted Tail wanted Crazy Horse to be taken east and lionized: they began to talk against him.

  One legitimate apprehension the Indian leaders may have had about Crazy Horse was the fear that if he misbehaved, the government might react by immediately dragging them off to the Missouri River reservation. By this time most of the Sioux leaders feared that the Missouri would be their eventual fate (and it was).

  Though many of the whites who met Crazy Horse liked him, the agency Indians continued to talk against him. Crook was annoyed by Crazy Horse’s reluctance to go to Washington. Some time around midsummer of 1877 the higher thinking came to be that perhaps the best thing to do with this Indian was to send him to prison in Florida, before he broke out and became a rallying point for the discontented young warriors, most of whom, having no chance to either fight or hunt, were bored silly.

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, in far-off Idaho, the Nez Percé broke out first and began their dramatic thirteen-hundred-mile march through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, whipping up on everybody they encountered along the way. At first no one supposed Looking Glass and Chief Joseph would get very far, or cause as much alarm as they caused; but the next thing anybody knew they had whipped yet more militia and were speeding along a clear track to Canada. One-armed General Howard was chasing them, but he wasn’t catching them—Crook eventually became responsible for trying to head them off. Lieutenant Philo Clark, the officer who did most of the dealing with Crazy Horse, seems to have gotten it into his head that the idle Oglalas could be useful in this effort. Crook seems to have briefly entertained this notion—his options at the time were not good. The meeting that was held to discuss this matter can only have added to Crazy Horse’s confusion. He had come in, given up his gun, and promised to fight no more, but now the whites wanted to give him his gun again and have him fight the Nez Percé. Where was the sense in all of it? Indeed, there was no sense. The army had a superabundance of Sioux at its disposal, not to mention plenty of Crows and Shoshones. Why arm the one Sioux leader who was most likely to stay out once he got out? The Oglalas didn’t seem the most logical choices anyway—their range was well east of the Nez Percé’s looping line of flight.

  Crazy Horse was again reluctant; he may have supposed that this was some complicated plot on Crook’s part to get him to help fight Sitting Bull. Or he may simply have had no idea what was going on with these whites. Though the whites and the Indians lived in close proximity at the agencies, neither group had any clear notion of what the other group was thinking or saying or planning.

  Also, Crazy Horse may simply have been irritated by this white effort to get him to fight the Nez Percé. His attitude may have been: Why me? Parleys annoyed him, tried his patience, disturbed him. Crook wasn’t at this one, anyway. Crazy Horse finally told the whites that he had promised to be a man of peace, but if the whites insisted that he go fight the Nez Percé he would fight them until every last Nez Percé was killed—the kind of claim that probably just reflected his exasperation.

  At this point a famous mistranslation occurred, made by Crazy Horse’s old friend Frank Grouard, the scout. Grouard reportedly told the whites that Crazy Horse meant to fight until every last white man was killed. The half-breed scout Billy Garnett, who had known Crazy Horse most of his life, was aghast and—along with others who understood Sioux—immediately tried to correct Grouard, but whether they convinced anyone is now hard to say. Mari Sandoz makes much of this mistranslation; George Hyde makes little. My own feeling is that the incident speaks mainly to the intense climate of suspicion that surrounded everything Crazy Horse did in the last few days of his life. Frank Grouard was a mixed-blood who had interpreted at many councils; Crazy Horse liked him. That Grouard lied in such a way as to get Crazy Horse in more trouble than he was in already is explainable mainly by jealousy, if it is explainable at all. Or it may be that Grouard himself wanted to twit the whites, even shock them; it could even be that he was drunk and misunderstood, or that Crazy Horse was so bored with the whole proceeding that he made an outrageous remark merely to end the meeting.

  All we know now is that this incident did nothing to lessen or allay white paranoia where Crazy Horse was concerned. He was clearly unhappy at the agency, clearly missed the freedom of the plains. Of all the Indians at Red Cloud’s agency he was the one most likely to fight again; only an exceptionally obtuse officer could have missed that fact.

  On the other hand, immense grief always flowed from the army’s tendency to see war where there was no war. They had a hard time understanding that the Indians they had subdued would really stay subdued. The slightest sign of Indian independence invariably produced an overreaction on the part of the white authorities, the best example of which is white response to the Ghost Dance.

  It is hard now to understand, except as paranoia, the overreaction to the Ghost Dance, or other, earlier expressions of Indian messianic or millennial religion. The Paiute holy man Wovoka, who lived in Nevada and began to preach the Ghost Dance in the summer of 1887, had been anticipated nearly a decade earlier by the Apache preacher Noch-ay-del-kline, who lived on Cibecue Creek in Arizona. The army was so alarmed by Noch-ay-del-kline’s preaching and the response it evoked in the local Apaches that they went to arrest him, although he was at the time living peaceably at home. Eighteen men were killed in this arrest. Geronimo, who had been trying to live as the whites wanted him to, read this lesson well and soon went out again, into the mountains of Mexico.

  The white authorities hugely overreacted to both these native preachers, who offered to raise the good spirits of the dead while burying the bad people under a new soil. What they preached, that is—allowing for all differences—was not so very different from what low-Protestant, millennial, evangelical, Holy Roller charismatics preach now to dirt-poor congregations throughout rural America. To broken, despairing, poverty-stricken people the Apocalypse has always sounded good. Sitting Bull was killed because he wouldn’t try to suppress the Ghost Dance on his reservation. It is unlikely that he himself believed Wovoka, or that Geronimo believed Noch-ay-del-kline—both
men were too hardheaded—but they both recognized that the preachers brought a beaten and depressed people a little involvement and a little hope. The whites saw this merely as a sign that the Indians might act up again, so eighteen died at Cibecue Creek and as many as two hundred at Wounded Knee.

  19

  THE INCIDENT that speaks most decisively to the climate of suspicion surrounding Crazy Horse occurred at the beginning of September 1877, when General Crook was coming to Fort Robinson to a council about the Nez Percé problem. On the way to the council Crook was met by an Indian named Woman’s Dress, who warned him that Crazy Horse meant to shake his hand and then stab him to death. Crook may possibly have known about the famous mistranslation by then, in which Crazy Horse had reportedly said that he would kill all the whites to the last man; but George Crook was not a man who liked to turn aside. Once he started for a place—as he often said—he liked to get there. Crook surely know enough by then to disregard most Indian gossip. Had there not been such a climate of suspicion surrounding Crazy Horse, it is not likely he would have paid Woman’s Dress much mind. For all Crook knew, Crazy Horse didn’t even plan to show up at the council, and very likely Crazy Horse wouldn’t have. But Crook took this wild threat seriously and for once made an excuse and turned aside.

  Shortly after this, Crook ordered Crazy Horse’s arrest, a move he surely knew would be touchy. Crazy Horse, after all, had come in as a great military hero; he had beaten Crook himself, helped destroy Custer, checked Miles. He was a hero to the young men—the first generation of young Sioux men, it should be remembered, who were not allowed to establish their bravery as warriors in the normal way. These young men were looking for a leader, and Crazy Horse was the natural—in fact, the only—choice.

  Crook, though, had no real grounds for arresting Crazy Horse, who had been behaving correctly. But Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were wild to be rid of him, and he made the white military men nervous. Crook had plans to send him to Florida—some say to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, the prison-atoll for incorrigibles. (Even Geronimo, who, for a period, killed every white he ran into, only got sent to Fort Marion, a palace by comparison.)

  Early in September, though, a huge force of soldiers and Indian policemen went to Crazy Horse’s camp to arrest him, only to find that he had just left for the Spotted Tail agency, forty miles away. The pursuers followed him all day but could not catch up; the scout Billy Garnett says this was because Crazy Horse had a method for keeping his horses fresh: he walked them going uphill, loped them when he was going down. No Water, still jealous because Crazy Horse had briefly made off with Black Buffalo Woman, is said to have ruined two horses in this pursuit (and then billed the government for them), but the arresting force never quite caught up.

  When Crazy Horse arrived, his uncle Spotted Tail was anything but happy to see him. He told Crazy Horse unequivocally that he was the boss at his agency: if Crazy Horse expected to stay, he would have to toe the line and obey all orders. Spotted Tail wanted no trouble and Crazy Horse was a magnet for it—a magnet so powerful that as many as a thousand Indians may have joined or at least watched the arresting party.

  Crazy Horse considered that he had been behaving well; he was at a loss to understand why so many of his own people would show up to help arrest him. Agent Jesse Lee, whom he liked and trusted, came to speak to him. Crazy Horse explained, again, that he had offered to fight the Nez Percé, that he hadn’t said anything about killing the whites to the last man, that he had never had the slightest intention of stabbing Crook in a council, etc. So why was there all this fuss?

  Agent Lee, who got on well with Crazy Horse, accepted his explanations. But he said that, nonetheless, it would be necessary for Crazy Horse to come back to Fort Robinson and explain all this to General Bradley, the fort’s commander.

  The next day, September 6, 1877, Crazy Horse went back, followed, if not surrounded, by a huge mass of warriors and soldiers. He was by then desperate—and justly so. Why did so many Indians—among them several of his oldest allies—so obviously hate him and want his blood? He was now not the hunter; he was the hunted. This man who had once had the whole of the Great Plains as his home suddenly had no place to be.

  No one really knows how many Indians rode with him from the Spotted Tail agency that day, or how many were waiting at Fort Robinson when, near dusk, he rode in. There were so many that the mere mass must have stressed him more. He was a man who had always liked to be alone, and now, suddenly, most of the nation he had been born into was massed around him. No doubt he would far rather have been living in a cave or a hole—but for that it was too late.

  As Crazy Horse understood matters, he had made no threat and committed no offense. How could he have understood that he had become an intolerable symbol of resistance, even though he wasn’t resisting? But he was, for white and Indian alike, a symbol of resistance so potent that neither could afford to leave him alive and free.

  On the ride back to Fort Robinson, according to Agent Jesse Lee, Crazy Horse was hopeful one moment and desperately worried the next, a natural alternation of mood under the circumstances. Spotted Tail and Touch-the-Clouds rode back with him, along with many of Spotted Tail’s warriors. Perhaps Crazy Horse knew, as Malcolm X did toward the end, that very soon his own people were going to have his blood.

  Near dusk the great party came into the valley of the White River and rode onto the parade ground of the fort. Many Indians were waiting, but a path opened for Crazy Horse. He had time to say a few words to his old friend He Dog before walking with Agent Lee to what he supposed would be his promised interview with General Bradley.

  As he approached the official quarters his old friend Little Big Man, now an ambitious Indian policeman, stepped close beside him, ready to fulfill, possibly for the second time, the old prophecy Crazy Horse had dreamed as a boy. What Crazy Horse thought about Little Big Man’s metamorphosis into Indian policeman we don’t know, but Little Big Man was hardly the only one of his former allies to take that route to preferment. Young Man Afraid was an Indian policeman, and no one thought the worse of him for it.

  General Bradley had no intention of seeing Crazy Horse and no interest in hearing his side of the story, a painful discovery not only for Crazy Horse but for Agent Lee also. Bradley’s orders were clear: Crazy Horse was to be arrested and shipped immediately to Omaha and thence to Florida. Agent Lee, whether knowingly or unknowingly, had made a major false promise, one that was to haunt him for years. (For some weeks after that night he expected to be killed by Crazy Horse partisans.)

  Crazy Horse surely thought he was going to see the camp commander when Little Big Man and Lieutenant Kenningston (the officer of the day) led him past the adjutant’s office toward the guardhouse. But the moment he saw, or smelled, the filthy cells where the chained Indians were kept, he sensed betrayal and whirled, attempting to run back into the parade ground. He was scarcely clear of the doorway when Little Big Man jumped on his back and tried to hold his arms. Little Big Man was stout—Crazy Horse could not immediately shake him, but they were not struggling alone anymore; they were in full view of the many, many Indians on the parade ground, most but not all of whom were, at this moment, hostile to Crazy Horse. He had managed to conceal a knife under his blanket and he finally got one arm free and cut Little Big Man, causing him to loosen his hold.

  When it looked for a brief few seconds as if Crazy Horse might break free and make a fight of it, even though he had only a knife (some say he had two knives; Billy Garnett thought he even had a pistol), there was a short, bitter spew of epithets from those Sioux who wanted him dead: “Shoot him!” “Stab him!” “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch!” Frank Grouard remembered a moment of silence, and then the sound of hammers being cocked and shells being chambered in many rifles. Billy Garnett thought some of the chained prisoners ran out; he remembered the clanking of chains. Some say that several rifles were raised but that the officer of the day knocked them down. A white private, William Gentles, who was
to die of asthma about six months later, ran forward and bayoneted Crazy Horse twice (some say only once; Little Big Man says not at all) as he struggled to free himself. One of Private Gentles’s thrusts missed—the bayonet stuck in the wood of the doorjamb. There is disagreement about the bayoneting, but what is certain is that one thrust pierced the kidneys, causing Crazy Horse to sink down, a mortally wounded man.

  20

  OUR CENTURY HAS SEEN several public assassinations to which there were many eyewitnesses, as many in some cases as there were in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, that September night. We’ve had JFK, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, to name a few. Invariably the men and women who were there each had their own memories of these killings, and the memories differ greatly in matters of detail.

  So it was with the death of Crazy Horse; many saw him killed and their memories differ. With the exception of Little Big Man, who maintained to the end that Crazy Horse, in his whirling frenzy, accidentally and fatally stabbed himself, all the witnesses agree that Little Big Man tried to hold him, that many were ready to shoot him, that other Indians grabbed him, that Private Gentles stabbed him (and also the doorjamb). There is a pictographic record of the stabbing, done by Amos Bad Heart Bull. Crazy Horse’s arms were held by his own people, just as the dream said they would be. Crazy Horse sank down, his blood seeping into the dust of the parade ground. Those loyal to him and those ready to kill him faced off for a few moments of almost unbearably high tension. All agree that had a single shot been fired there would have been a terrible carnage, with Indians fighting Indians and Indians fighting soldiers, without anyone quite knowing why they were shooting or even whom they were shooting at, there in the gathering dusk on the parade ground of a small fort in the west.