Crazy Horse (11 page)

Ambrose, Stephen E.
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors.
New York: Doubleday, 1975.

A good book, though not free of abundant speculation. The author is riding a hobbyhorse and keeps it in a high trot throughout.

Berger, Thomas.
Little Big Man.
New York: Dial, 1964.

Easily the best novel about the Plains Indian wars. The author finesses the question of Crazy Horse thusly:

I seen that great warrior once before we split off by ourselves: he had a face full of sharpened edges, wore no ornamentation whatever, no paint, no feathers; he was like a living weapon. He surrendered to the military a year later and was stabbed to death in a scuffle at the agency while his arms were being held by another Indian called Little Big Man—Not me. He was a Sioux and therefore it was a different name, though Englishing the same. . . .

Bourke, John Gregory.
On the Border with Crook.
New York: Scribner's, 1881.

A famous memoir, much reprinted, and still readable. The author went on to write a famous work of anthropology,
Scatological Rites of All Nations
(1891).

Brininstool, E. A.
Crazy Horse, the Invincible Oglala Sioux Chief.
Los Angeles, 1949.

Brown, Dee.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.
New York: Holt, 1971.

Not an Indian History history but a valuable overall account nonetheless.

Clark, Robert A.
The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse.
Glendale: Arthur H. Clark, 1976.

Contains the scout Billy Garnett's account, which differs in some respects from all the others.

Connell, Evan S. Jr.
Son of the Morning Star.
San Francisco: North Point, 1984.

Its topic may be Custer and the Little Bighorn, but its theme is the American character, as revealed in the struggle for the Great Plains.

DeMaillie, Raymond (ed.).
The Sixth Grandfather.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1984.

In 1932 the writer John G. Neihardt published
Black Elk Speaks
, his attempt to preserve the teachings of the Sioux holy man Black Elk, whose father had been a contemporary of Crazy Horse. There has long been debate about how much of the book is Black Elk and how much is Neihardt.
The Sixth Grandfather
contains a kind of digest of the memories and teachings of Black Elk, as given in the interviews recorded by Neihardt's daughters, Hilda and
Enid. These are the rough interviews, stripped of the literary art with which Neihardt later rendered them.

Frazier, Ian.
Great Plains.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

Chapter 6, pp. 93–119, is a fine meditation on Crazy Horse.

Heyen, William.
Crazy Horse in Stillness.
Brockport, N.Y.: Boa Editions, 1996.

A powerful book of poetry, showing that the imagining and reimagining still goes on.

Hyde, George E.
Red Cloud's Folk
. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1937; and
Spotted Tail's Folk.
Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1961.

George E. Hyde deserves a short biography himself. Rendered completely deaf and nearly blind while in his early twenties, he had to do his scholarly work entirely through correspondence, and with the resources of the Omaha Public Library, or what it could obtain for him. Despite these handicaps, his histories respectively of the Oglala and the Brulé Sioux have not been bettered. They are very lively reads. He didn't think Sioux memory was any worse than white memory, but he didn't think it was any better, either. He was cranky and impatient, but a very good analyst of the often inconsistent and contradictory sources.

Kadlecek, Edward, and Mabell Kadlecek.
To Kill an Eagle: Indian Views on the Death of Crazy Horse.
Boulder: Johnson Books, 1981.

Gathers some interesting accounts; the more one reads
about this death, the more one is likely to sink into confusion.

Manning, Richard.
Grassland.
New York: Viking, 1995.

An essential book for students of the plains.

Nabokov, Peter.
Native American Testimony.
New York: Viking, 1991.

Contains the speech Crazy Horse is said to have made on his deathbed; no source is given for it.

Sandoz, Mari.
Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas.
New York, 1942.

Mari Sandoz's book is still the only full-length life of Crazy Horse. Its inception was a series of interviews she and the journalist Elinor Hinman conducted with Sioux elders in 1930–31. Hinman had intended to write the biography herself but withdrew and gave her research to Mari Sandoz, who made the decision—unfortunate, I think—to tell the story from a Sioux point of view. This makes for so many narrative awkwardnesses that the book reads like an historical novel with a biographical basis. Sandoz is not nearly so critical as George Hyde was when it came to evaluating sources, whether white or Sioux. (She once “authenticated” a so-called scalp-shirt said to have belonged to Crazy Horse. This shirt, in the collection of the Nebraska State Historical Association, contains something like 491 locks of hair, but turned out to have been machine-sewn and is no longer thought to have any connection with Crazy Horse.) Nonetheless, Mari Sandoz's book has its value; it is a considered and sympathetic study of Crazy Horse the man, and of the Sioux way of life as well.

Utley, Robert.
The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1984; and
The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull.
New York: Holt, 1993.

Both are useful books.

Vestal, Stanley.
New Sources of Indian History, 1850–1891.
Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1934.

Stanley Vestal (Walter Stanley Campbell) is almost as cranky as George Hyde, with whom he frequently disagreed. This book reprints a lot of Ghost Dance material but also contains documents of wider relevance to Sioux history.

 

The Nebraska State Historical Association kindly made available to me a copy of the Hinman-Sandoz interviews with He Dog and others. A pamphlet reprint of these interviews is currently out of print. One can hope that someday Judge Eli Ricker's interviews, done in 1906–07, can also be reprinted—or, rather, printed. They can only be read now on microfilm.

 

 

Beyond the sources, there are stories—always the stories.

One that I like comes to us from Red Feather, the younger brother of Black Shawl, Crazy Horse's first wife.

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.