Crazy Horse (10 page)

T
HE 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.

O
UR 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.

The high, keening tension held only until it began to be realized that Crazy Horse had been dealt a fatal blow.

Then the tension broke. No shot was fired, and Crazy Horse—a man who had lost his brother, his daughter, the woman he loved, several friends, his way of life, and even, for a time, his people—began his leaving as a man and his arrival as a myth, a man around whom stories that are like little gospels accumulate. A variorum death of Crazy Horse would consist of at least a score of versions, all contributed or recollected by people, white and red, who were in the fort that night.

These recollections, of course, diverge on many points of detail, overlap, contradict one another; probably most of them are partly true, probably none of them can be said to be completely, definitively true. Violence produces shock, and shock distorts memory: a patrolman trying to sort out varying versions of a rush-hour car wreck has the
same problem as the biographer of Crazy Horse. Many saw what happened, but no two witnesses remembered it exactly the same.

Not long before Crazy Horse left for the Spotted Tail agency he had a much-reported conversation with his old friend He Dog. Crook wanted all the Sioux at Red Cloud to move across the creek, nearer to White Butte, so he would have them handy for a big council. Crazy Horse didn't want to move across the creek, but He Dog thought it might be best to do as he was told. He was nervous, though, about what this move might mean for their friendship, so he asked Crazy Horse if such a move on his part would mean that they were enemies now. Crazy Horse laughed, perhaps for the last time; then he reminded He Dog that he was not speaking to a white man. Whites were the only ones, he said, who made rules for other people. Camp where you please.

So it is with the death of Crazy Horse: the reader is invited to camp where he or she pleases amid the many recollections and recountings.

Crazy Horse, right after receiving the fatal wound, cried out, “Let me go, my friend—you have hurt me plenty bad!” or words to that effect. Then he sank down. Once the high tension between the two groups died, two or three people claim to have stepped forward and covered Crazy Horse with a blanket. He Dog says he tore Crazy Horse's own blanket in two and covered him
with half of it, which seems odd. Why not cover him with all of it? Then Dr. McGillycuddy came, looked at the wounds, saw how it was. Some say that Little Big Man howled when Crazy Horse whirled and cut him; others say Crazy Horse merely cut him on the thumb. Lieutenant Clark was sound asleep, perhaps drunk—his men had to sling him around roughly to get him awake. The dying man on the parade ground was still under arrest; the orders were to put him in the guardhouse. General Bradley would not, at first, relax the order. But when the soldiers started to move the wounded Crazy Horse to the guardhouse, Touch-the-Clouds intervened. Touch-the-Clouds said that Crazy Horse was a chief. He could not be put in the guardhouse.

The Indians, now, were quiet—perhaps chastened, perhaps numbed. Many among them, some of them his old allies, realized that for reasons of politics they had killed a man who had no politics, just the conviction that he wanted to live his life in accordance with the precepts of his own people, as he had been taught to live it.

There were a lot of Indians on the parade ground, and they were mainly, now, on the side of Touch-the-Clouds. Dr. McGillycuddy had to go twice to General Bradley to persuade him not to attempt to move this dying Indian to the guardhouse. The general was irritated by all this; perhaps he thought Crazy Horse was shamming. Not until Dr. McGillycuddy convinced him there
would be a very big fight if such a move was attempted did the general relent and allow Crazy Horse to be taken into the adjutant's office instead.

This move the Sioux allowed, although they would rather have moved him outside the fort and let him die with the rites of Sioux tradition, as Conquering Bear had died so long before. Once in the office Crazy Horse refused a cot and was put on the floor. Exactly who was with him in his last hours is unclear. Mari Sandoz says both his parents were allowed in; others mention only his father, Worm. Touch-the-Clouds, after surrendering his weapons, was allowed to go in. Ian Frazier thinks that the fact that Crazy Horse refused the cot and died on the floor meant that he was his own man to the end.

In Peter Nabokov's
Native American Testimony
there is a Crazy Horse deathbed statement—Evan Connell Jr. thinks this statement was taken down by Baptiste Pourier, the fort's interpreter. But neither Mari Sandoz nor He Dog nor most other accounts of his death mention Baptiste Pourier. Here, for what it is worth, is the statement, supposedly spoken to Agent Jesse Lee:

My friend, I do not blame you for this. Had I listened to you this trouble would not have happened to me. I was not hostile to the white man. Sometimes my young men would attack the Indians who were their enemies and took their ponies. They did it in return.

We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing,
and our tipis. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservations, where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt.

We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government then. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages. Then “Long Hair” came in the same way. They say we massacred him but he would have done the same to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses, but we were so hemmed in we had to fight.

After that I went up on Tongue River with a few of my people and lived in peace. But the government would not let me alone. Finally, I came back to the Red Cloud agency . . . I came here with the agent to talk to the Big White Chief, but was not given a chance. They tried to confine me, I tried to escape, and a soldier ran his bayonet into me.

I have spoken.

In contrast to this lengthy speech, Black Elk maintained that Crazy Horse said only three words after he was stabbed: “Hey, hey, hey!” an expression of regret. Though Crazy Horse may indeed have wanted to assure Agent Lee that he didn't blame him for what had happened, such a long apologia seems peculiar for a man who had never liked to talk and who, moreover, would have had little interest in neatly tidying up the record.

Others say that his father, Worm, spoke to him at some point, saying, “Son, I am here.” Crazy Horse then roused himself long enough to say, “Father, it is no good for the people to depend on me any longer—I am bad hurt.” In its tragic simplicity this exchange between father and son puts us back with the Greeks.

Some say that soldiers came and went—others say that only Dr. McGillycuddy came and went.

If the last exchange between father and son—assuming we have it more or less correct—is like the Greeks, Touch-the-Clouds' final tribute is quietly Shakespearean. When he saw that Crazy Horse was dead, he pulled the blanket over him and said: “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” He may also have said: “This is good. He sought death and now he has found it.”

If it is true that the destination the government had in mind for him was a cell dug into the coral on the Dry Tortugas, then Touch-the-Clouds was right. A man who had lived his whole life under the great western skies would not have lasted long in any prison. Sitting Bull, Spotted Tail, and Geronimo all survived the white man's prison, but the Kiowa chief Satanta did not. He found confinement so irksome that he jumped head first from a high window. Crazy Horse, daring and brave as a warrior, was in other ways not as tough a nut as Sitting Bull or Geronimo. It is hard to imagine him signing photographs for tourists at the big St. Louis Exposition, as Geronimo did—always insisting on his price, one dollar.

But that is speculation. The fact is that Crazy Horse died later that night, September 6, 1877, on the floor of the adjutant's office in Fort Robinson, Nebraska.

When Touch-the-Clouds went out to bring the news of his death to the waiting Sioux, a wail and a howling went up from the parade ground and from the many, many tents, near and distant: a wailing and a howling of grief, of fear, of torment, frustration, despair. No Sioux had exceeded him in charity. The women remembered the charity—it was the women who wailed and howled in the night.

Someone mentioned that taps was played, which seems extremely unlikely. The wailing of the women of the Brulé and Oglala Sioux was the taps for Crazy Horse.

Many of the white people in the fort that night expected to be killed. The fact that the Sioux themselves had meant to kill Crazy Horse—and had helped—meant nothing now. Agent Jesse Lee was sure he faced certain death for having led Crazy Horse back to Fort Robinson; he even instructed his wife in how to kill herself, should they be overwhelmed.

The Sioux, however, did not revolt. They had plenty of leaders, but the one who had never learned to walk the white man's road was dead on the floor.

Mrs. Jesse Lee, the agent's wife, said it made her blood boil to think of all the promises made to the Indians and then broken. Angie Johnson, the captain's wife, seconded that sentiment. Whatever their views on Indians generally,
these women didn't like broken promises. Both wrote in outrage to their families.

The same two women, and several men as well, testified to the terrible, pitiable, Lear-like grief of Crazy Horse's parents: they wandered the fort for three days, sobbing, wailing, rending their garments, refusing all succor. When they were finally allowed to have their son's body, they put it on a burial scaffold outside the fort. Later, when the miserable, predictable exodus to the Missouri River began, they took his body on a travois and then slipped off and buried him. Nobody knows exactly where he is buried, but legend has it that his burial spot is close to the creek called Wounded Knee. It is of course near this same creek that the Ghost Dance Massacre occurred, on the last day of 1890.

General Miles, perhaps vexed that he had failed to get his surrender, called Crazy Horse “the embodiment of ferocity.”

General Crook, though, seems always to have regretted that he had let Woman's Dress turn him away from that last council. He had, no doubt, by then figured out that Woman's Dress was a shit-stirrer, a “two-edged sword to his own people,” as one Sioux described him.

An old Sioux who wouldn't give his name to Mari Sandoz or Elinor Hinman said: “I'm not telling anyone—white or Indian—what I know about the killing of Crazy Horse. That affair was a disgrace and a dirty shame. We killed our own man.”

Before Crazy Horse was even in the ground, Little Big Man and a delegation of the Sioux leaders were in Washington to discuss the relocation issue. There exists a curious artifact, a medal presumably given Little Big Man for his bravery in subduing Crazy Horse. Who made this medal, and who issued it, are not clear. President Hayes may have had a few medals struck off, but none are known to exist for the other members of the delegation. This medal is on loan to the Nebraska State Historical Association.

It may be true, as Black Elk says, that Crazy Horse during his life never owned a very good horse; but he has a powerful horse now: a horse as strong as a mountain. If the Ziolkowski family can only keep it up, he will finally—in a few more years, and in spirit at least—have risen forever over the Black Hills. He will have managed to take back the road General Custer opened: the road the Sioux call the Thieves' Road.