Crazy Horse (6 page)

Not much has been written about Indians who scouted for the army—and such scouts existed virtually from the time the first white man met the first Indian—but the fact is that if the army had not been able to employ Indian scouts, they would never have found
any
Indians. The Indian scouts were essential, not merely to help the army find Indians but to help the army find its own way as well. A few such scouts, because of their great knowledge of the country, acquired a certain fame. Black Beaver, a Delaware who scouted for Captain Randolph Marcy in Texas, was said to know every creek between the Columbia River gorge and the Rio Grande. In any pursuit situation the army would have been helpless without their Indian—or, often, half-breed—scouts. General Crook would never have found Geronimo in
Mexico without Apache scouts to lead him, and the same is true of much Plains Indian warfare. Even
with
the scouts the army was rarely able to move fast enough to catch up with the hostiles they sought. When the whites did surprise a village, as Custer surprised Black Kettle on the Washita, it was usually because the Indians felt too secure in the knowledge that they were living peaceably to post adequate guards. If they weren't bothering the whites, they did not expect the whites to bother them. The lesson learned on the Bluewater in 1855 had to be learned over and over again: when white soldiers were in the mood to punish Indians, they would punish whatever group of Indians they came across, whether that particular group had committed hostilities or not.

Stephen Ambrose believes that it was Sherman who decided, after the miserable failure of the Hancock expedition, that he might as well give the peace policy a chance. Ambrose's contention is that Sherman, taking the long view, thought he saw a better way to eliminate the Indians than to keep sending out armies that couldn't find them. The better way would be to wait for the railroads. In a decade or less the hostiles of the northern plains would be caught between the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific. Then the buffalo hunters—and, for that matter, the soldiers too—could ride at their ease right into the heart of Indian country and destroy the buffalo, the Indians' subsistence animal. This amounts to a leisurely—but sure—version of scorched earth, with
E. H. Harriman and the other railroad magnates bearing much of the expense. The railroads would soon hurt the Indians far worse than the army had yet managed to. If this was indeed Sherman's thinking, then he was right. The buffalo lasted barely ten years after the railroads came.

T
HE VICTORY
over Fetterman may have been sweet for the Indians, but the fort itself was still there, as were two others: Fort Reno and Fort C. F. Smith, all three in the heart of country that the Sioux felt was their own. Throughout the winter of 1866–67 the Indians kept a certain pressure on these forts, but, after Fetterman, the soldiers were cautious; about all the Sioux could do was make it difficult for them to gather firewood. To Red Cloud and the other Indian leaders the very presence of these forts was intolerable. In July of 1867, with Crazy Horse and a large force of warriors, Red Cloud attacked a kind of mini-fort that had been set up on the edge of the Bighorns, where wood could be cut in abundance. This little encampment, under the command of a Captain Powell, had only about forty men, but the wagons had been pulled into a tight circle and fortified with boxes stacked in and under them. The battle that ensued was thus called the Wagon Box Fight. The Indians picked off a few woodcutters, but the charge against the mini-fort
failed. The soldiers were good marksmen, with plenty of ammunition. Had the Indians tried hitting the little troop from two sides at once, they might have overwhelmed them, but they didn't try that, and Captain Powell could not be induced to come out and play, as Fetterman had been. The Indians lost several warriors and the army regained a certain amount of face.

In the fall of 1867 General Sherman made a whirlwind tour of the prairies. He went up the Missouri and talked with Sitting Bull's people, parleyed with Spotted Tail in Nebraska, hurried south to Kansas, where he talked with the southern Cheyennes, the Arapahos, the Comanches, and the Kiowas, and then came back to Fort Laramie to talk, he hoped, with the Oglalas. Hurrying up and down the plains in pursuit of a general peace, Sherman preached farming, telling the Indians that it was finally time to give up the chase. The Indians were neither impressed nor persuaded. They hemmed and they hawed.

The peace commissioners, in approaching the Oglalas, caused a bit of awkwardness by asking for Red Cloud by name; in their eyes the struggle for the Powder River had become his war. To the Sioux and the Cheyennes, it was not that simple. The “war” had consisted of a number of skirmishes and a few battles, some of which Red Cloud fought in and some of which he didn't. He was neither the first Indian nor the last to discover that popularity—or at least prominence—with the whites was apt to complicate relations back home.

To the Sioux and the Cheyennes the struggle for the Powder River was
their
war, not Red Cloud's, who at this point, though a respected war leader, was not a Big Belly or a man with any special moral authority. Their most respected man was still Old Man Afraid, and it was he who finally journeyed to Fort Laramie to talk with Sherman and the peace commissioners. Old Man Afraid agreed to nothing, but he did let the dignitaries know that peace was not likely until the forts along the Powder River were removed, a step the government was not willing to take—not yet. General Sherman, who had talked to Indians all the way from the Missouri to the Arkansas, went home well aware that he had made few converts to the farming life—nor would he while the buffalo still roamed.

In March of the next year, though, General Grant ordered the abandonment of Fort C. F. Smith, Fort Reno, and Fort Phil Kearney. The battle for the Bozeman had become a stalemate. General Sherman was as convinced as ever that all the Indians would become, in time, what Chief Justice John Marshall had called them long before: domestic dependent nations. But Sherman also recognized that he could not immediately subdue these Indians by military means. The army's resources, whether of men or money, were not unlimited; the three little forts were soaking up money while producing nothing but aggravation.

The result of this decision was the famous treaty of
1868. It closed the forts and gave the Sioux and the Cheyennes forever the lands they had fought for so hard: the Dakotas west of the Missouri, the Black Hills, the land between the Platte and the Bighorn Mountains. No whites would be allowed to enter this territory, on penalty of arrest, a stern provision that was violated before the ink was dry on the paper. The Indians agreed to become, in white terms, “civilized” once the buffalo were gone. It is doubtful that many of the Sioux understood some of the more extreme clauses in regard to civilization, such as the provision for compulsory education.

Many dignitaries came to Fort Laramie in August of 1868 for the signing of this treaty, and some Indians came, but Red Cloud didn't arrive. The whites who sat there, twiddling their thumbs—they included Sherman—got a good taste of Red Cloud's hauteur. In the end they left the papers and went home. Red Cloud, who had pursued some buffalo he ran into, finally showed up at the fort in November. The hated forts were by then gone, and the Sioux in full possession of their hunting grounds. The whites, for once, had backed down.

Meanwhile, to the south, in the same month that Red Cloud touched the pen, General Custer, in the famous dawn attack that was to provide a visual metaphor for so many movie westerns, wiped out Black Kettle on the Washita.

C
RAZY
H
ORSE
had not gone to the peace conference at Fort Laramie in 1868. As usual, he avoided all conferences and continued to raid and hunt; now, free of the whites, he could again turn his attention to his traditional tribal enemies. He was a highly respected warrior, revered in the band for his willingness to share what he killed with the old and helpless; but he was not a chief, nor did he lead anyone other than his immediate companions, one of whom, his old friend Hump, was killed in a foolish raid on some Shoshones, a raid Crazy Horse had tried to discourage, mainly because it was rainy and slippery and the Shoshones were better mounted. (Black Elk said Crazy Horse never owned a good mount; no horse would carry him far, one theory being that the little stone pendant the medicine man Chips made for him was so heavy with magic that it broke the horses down.)

About three years after Red Cloud touched the pen at Fort Laramie, Crazy Horse, still unmarried, experienced a
crisis that was marital rather than martial in nature. Though he was a Shirt-wearer, one who was supposed to provide an example of stable family behavior, his passion for Black Buffalo Woman had not abated. Ignoring the tribe's concern, he still hung around No Water's lodge, paying Black Buffalo Woman an unseemly amount of attention, even after she bore No Water a third child. No Water was not pleased with the state of things, but, like many husbands, he bore it.

Black Buffalo Woman, by Sioux custom, was not necessarily locked in for life with No Water. Any Sioux woman could divorce a husband who was no longer agreeable to her; all she had to do was place her husband's effects outside the lodge and she was divorced. But Black Buffalo Woman never quite worked up to this drastic step. She neither divorced No Water nor discouraged Crazy Horse, who might, within the terms of Sioux custom, have made No Water a formal offer for her. He could have offered his best horse, or several horses. Very likely No Water would have rejected this offer—from what we can tell at this distance he loved and valued his wife and had no intention of giving her up. But if Crazy Horse had made some sort of offer, at least the norms of civility that were expected of a Shirt-wearer would have been observed.

Crazy Horse, though, was indifferent to these formalities, or any formality. He always had been. What he did
was wait until No Water had gone on a hunt, then he eloped with Black Buffalo Woman. The grand passion of his life could be denied no longer.

No Water was hardly the sort of husband to take this sort of behavior sitting down. When he returned from his hunt, he immediately borrowed a pistol from a warrior named Bad Heart Bull and went in pursuit of the lovers. This too was a violation of Sioux custom—Black Buffalo Woman had a right to go if she wanted to. But No Water went after her anyway.

The lovers enjoyed, at best, a very short idyll, perhaps only one night. They had not had time to go far before No Water found them, burst into the lodge where they were staying, and shot Crazy Horse just below his left nostril. Horrified, Black Buffalo Woman crawled out of the tent and skedaddled.

Versions of this violent incident differ. Some say Crazy Horse might have been able to grapple with No Water had not Little Big Man grabbed his arm just as he was rising to meet the challenge. No Water said, “Friend, I have come!” or words to that effect; then he shot. If Little Big Man did grab Crazy Horse's arm, it of course foreshadows what he did in the fatal struggle at Fort Robinson six years later; it also fulfills Crazy Horse's dream, in which it was prophesied that he would only be injured if one of his own people held his arms to prevent him from fighting.

That is the poetic version, but there are other
versions, none of which mention Little Big Man at all. He Dog, who was much exercised by this grave misbehavior, doesn't mention him. Since He Dog had to do much of the peacemaking, it would be odd that he doesn't mention Little Big Man if the latter had indeed been an actor in this old drama. He Dog says the lovers had been in the lodge of Little Shield when No Water caught up with them.

In any case, quite a mess had been made. No Water was brother to the prominent Sioux twins Black Twin and White Twin, of the Bad Faces, Red Cloud's village. No Water went to his brother Black Twin, who made a sweat lodge, purified No Water of what he supposed was a murder, and prepared to fight Crazy Horse's people, if necessary.

Fortunately for all concerned, Crazy Horse wasn't dead. The bullet broke his jaw, but after a day or two it was clear that he would live. Still, feelings ran high in both camps. The peacemakers had to work skillfully and quickly to prevent what could have become a bloody feud. Black Buffalo Woman, like many a wife taken in adultery, fled, but was eventually persuaded to return to her husband. Crazy Horse made it a condition that she not be punished, and she wasn't. No Water gave Crazy Horse his best horse as a peace offering, but the two never really made it up. No Water and Black Buffalo Woman went to live with Red Cloud's band. Once Crazy Horse encountered No Water while on a hunt and chased
him all the way across the Yellowstone River before allowing him to escape.

He Dog, remembering this sorry sequence of events sixty years later, was still indignant at the thought of the damage it had done to tribal harmony. No Water blamed the medicine man Chips, saying Chips had made Black Buffalo Woman a potion that had caused her to lose her reason; but among the elders of the band, Crazy Horse was judged to be the most at fault. He had taken another man's wife and had done it with complete disregard for custom and propriety, thus seriously threatening tribal unity. Much diplomacy had to be practiced to prevent war between one band and the other. No Water, in particular, never forgot. He was an eager member of the party that went to the Spotted Tail agency to arrest Crazy Horse at the end.

Crazy Horse could not, after this, be a Shirt-wearer. He had failed in the Shirt-wearer's first duty, which was to put the interest of the tribe first. When Elinor Hinman asked He Dog all those years later who had been made a Shirt-wearer in Crazy Horse's place, He Dog replied that nobody had. The institution itself fell into disuse after this foolishness, which left such a bad taste in people's mouths that the whole thing lapsed.

Black Buffalo Woman's fourth child, a daughter, was notably light-skinned; perhaps the child of Crazy Horse, she lived into the 1940s.

Not long after this the tribe saw to it that Crazy Horse
took a wife, an agreeable woman named Black Shawl, whom he accepted and, it would seem, came to love. Rather like Yeats, who after his failure with Maud Gonne came to be happy with his kind wife George, Crazy Horse seems to have achieved domestic content with Black Shawl, who, unfortunately, was afflicted with tuberculosis. One of the reasons Crazy Horse developed a friendship with Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy was that the doctor was so steadfast in his efforts to cure Black Shawl.

Later, Crazy Horse took a second wife, a half-Cheyenne, half-French girl named Nellie Larrabee (sometimes spelled Laverie); there is a picture of her in Ian Frazier's
Great Plains.
Very probably he never quite got over Black Buffalo Woman, about whose later life nothing is known.

Thus the great passion of Crazy Horse's life failed and brought serious disorder to his people. It was not long after this that he also suffered the loss of his reckless brother Little Hawk, who was killed when he foolishly attacked some well-armed miners.

Meanwhile, though the Sioux had their treaty, the railroads were coming and with them the whites. There was no serious attempt made to police the area that was then, by law, off-limits to the whites. Who was supposed to have policed an area that vast, anyway? By 1872 the railroads had come so far that Custer, Sheridan, Buffalo Bill Cody, and other dignitaries could take Grand Duke Alexis of Russia on a buffalo hunt, with the grand duke traveling well into Kansas in the comfort of his railroad car.

To the north, things were still quiet. The Northern Pacific was only just edging into North Dakota. It would be a while before it threatened the Sioux sanctuary.

But no quiet, no peace, really lasted long; the endgame was now about to begin. In late summer of 1872 a force of several hundred soldiers pushed up the Yellowstone River into eastern Montana, precipitating the first major conflict between the wild, mainly undisturbed northern Sioux, including Sitting Bull's people, the Hunkpapas.

Crazy Horse had perhaps drifted north by then; he may have been dissatisfied with the more and more passive conditions to the south, where both Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were now firmly (and permanently) committed to peace. Both had been given agencies of their own; they made no more war on the whites. Spotted Tail was criticized in some quarters for being, in a manner of speaking, a kind of Vichy Indian—but this is quite unfair. Spotted Tail was never a toady, and never sycophantic in his dealings with the whites. Given a choice, probably he would have been happy just to get out of the way; but the Brulés, whom he led, really couldn't get out of the way. So Spotted Tail negotiated, for the most part effectively. He survived his two-year imprisonment with his dignity intact, and it was to remain intact until the end, when, like Sitting Bull, he was killed by one of his own people, a rival named Crow Dog.

But agency life, with its endless compromising and its
constant haggling with the white agents, would never have appealed to Crazy Horse, any more than it appealed to Sitting Bull.

The engagement that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse fought in August of 1872 came near to being a disaster for the Indians. The force against them, some four hundred soldiers, was well armed and could not be tempted into any rashness. Crazy Horse had learned at the Wagon Box Fight how ineffective bows and arrows were against soldiers who were both well armed and competently led. In this fight in the north the Sioux were very daring, but simply could not get close enough to the soldiers to inflict any damage without paying a huge price in lives. As it was, several of the unrestrainable young Sioux were killed early on. It was in this fight that Sitting Bull astonished everyone, Sioux and soldier alike: he sat down in a meadow, in range of the riflemen, casually filled a pipe, lit it, and smoked it, while bullets cut the grass all around him. Crazy Horse, perhaps jealous of Sitting Bull's sangfroid, reportedly made a reckless dash right across the soldiers' front, and had his horse shot out from under him for his trouble, after which the Sioux called off the battle.

Throughout the later stages of these conflicts on the plains, up to and including the Custer battle, the Sioux were at a disadvantage because they were so poorly armed. Only a small percentage had guns, and they were usually poor guns at that; even the Sioux who had
reliable firearms seldom had much ammunition. They could never afford to match the white men gun for gun and bullet for bullet. From the first the white authorities had been farsighted enough to deny the Indians guns. Even the bravest warrior, armed with a bow and arrow, could only do so much when up against a well-prepared soldier with a gun.

Though the financial panic of 1873 slowed the progress of the Northern Pacific somewhat, its surveyors were nonetheless pushing relentlessly west, well protected by a force that in the popular mind was commanded by George Armstrong Custer. In fact the commander was a modest officer named Stanley. It was while this large force proceeded along the Yellowstone, obviously now in what was supposed to be Sioux country, that Crazy Horse encountered Custer for the first time. The Sioux and the Cheyennes caught Custer and his small detachment napping—literally, in the case of Custer himself—but the Sioux initially intended no big fight. They tried to run off the army's horse herd, and when that plan was thwarted, tried a decoy maneuver similar to the one that had worked with Fetterman. Custer didn't go for it; but then the Cheyennes noticed Custer's hair, which was still long, and remembered the massacre on the Washita—perhaps a few of the warriors who had survived that fight were now back visiting their northern cousins. The Cheyennes attacked, but Custer drove them off. Custer then turned back, and the Indians disengaged. There was
little loss of life. Custer thought Sitting Bull was the leader in this skirmish; what he knew of Crazy Horse, if anything, is unclear. Crazy Horse had never been to a meeting with the whites. He had a big reputation with his own people but had as yet received no mention in the popular press. Back east the severe financial panic had for a time driven mere Indian fights off the front pages anyway: the gilding was suddenly beginning to flake off the Gilded Age; all was confusion, dismay, frustration. There no longer seemed to be enough money; specifically, not enough gold. The conservatives were happy to have the country on a gold standard, as long as there was enough gold for the economy to expand; but in the summer of 1873, there wasn't enough. Paper money had not yet fully caught on.

Fortunately for the nation, unfortunately for the Sioux, the Black Hills awaited; there had long been rumors of large gold deposits in the Sioux's holy hills. Awkwardly, though, for the leaders of the whites, there was the binding and much-publicized treaty of 1868, unequivocally giving those very hills to the Sioux forever, with unusually clear provisions that they, the whites, were to be kept out. The U.S. government had broken many treaties with the Indians; some would say they had broken
all
of them—the writer Alex Shoumatoff recently reckoned the total at 378—but few of these breakages involved so much squirming and soul searching and public posturing as the treaty of 1868. General Sheridan
began to mutter unconvincingly about treaty violations on the part of the Sioux, but in fact the Sioux were behaving nicely at the time, as the same general had admitted in another context. There were no grounds for breaching the treaty of 1868 except the grounds the whites finally always used: The United States
wanted
the Black Hills and all the gold that might be there. A big first step toward the taking of them was the expedition that brought General Custer back to the west and produced the famous photograph of a seemingly endless line of wagons proceeding through a valley in the Black Hills. This expedition soon fulfilled its main, though unstated, purpose, which was to find gold in sufficient quantities to quench the thirst of the starving markets.