Great Plains (12 page)

“I will tell you about one of the war stunts that Crazy Horse pulled off that I thought was great,” a Sioux named Short Buffalo said to an interviewer years later. “It was in a fight with the Shoshones in which the Shoshones outnumbered the Oglalas. Crazy Horse and his younger brother were guarding the rear of their war party. After a lot of fighting, Crazy Horse's pony gave out. Crazy Horse turned it loose and the younger brother, who did not want to leave him, turned his own pony loose. Two of the enemy, mounted, appeared before them for single combat. Crazy Horse said to his brother, ‘Take care of yourself—I'll do the fancy stunt.' Crazy Horse got the best of the first Shoshone; the other one ran away. He got the horses of the two Shoshones and [he and his brother] caught up with their party. They had saved themselves and their party and got the two horses and the scalp of the Shoshone who was killed.”

At the Battle of the Rosebud River, in June of 1876, Crazy Horse led a thousand or so warriors against a force of eleven hundred soldiers commanded by General George Crook, and inflicted on that distinguished Civil War veteran the most galling defeat of his career. Eight days later, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse was at the head of the attack which pinned and later wiped out Custer on the ridge of the famous Last Stand. In the intense military campaigns which followed Custer's defeat, Crazy Horse managed to stay ahead of the Army until January 8, 1877, when General Nelson Miles attacked his camp on the Tongue River. Crazy Horse and most of his band managed to escape. In the spring, relatives and friends who were already living at Indian agencies came to his camp and urged him to stop fighting and return with them. They said there would be presents and rations and no trouble. Crazy Horse was at first so opposed to the idea that he killed the ponies of those who decided to go. But finally he gave in. The Army would certainly come after him again. Staying out would mean leaving his home territory and going to Canada, as Sitting Bull had done. Crazy Horse said he would go into the agency if that was what everybody else wanted to do. On May 6, 1877, he led 899 people, including 217 warriors, with a two-mile-long train of camp equipage, to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where they surrendered their guns and their herd of two thousand ponies to the Army.

*   *   *

Le War Lance and I stood talking about Crazy Horse for a long time. My grocery bag started to fall apart, so I held it under my coat. Le War Lance also told me about himself: that he once took part in a march for Indian rights which began in Alcatraz, California, and ended in Washington, D.C., and he wore out many pairs of boots on the way; that he was born June 14, 1942; that he rode a horse to school for first and second grades; that he and a woman named Joni were the only ones of twenty-two in his grade-school class still alive; that he served time in prison for a theft involving a lard bucket full of coins, which turned out to be a coin collection, which theft he did not commit; that his father's name was Asa Walks Out. He said, “I'm getting hungry. Come and eat with me. I'll make us some beans and ham hocks.” I said I had to get home. We exchanged telephone numbers. He wrote only his first name, in script—a big loop connected to a smaller loop. I told him that I hoped someday to learn how to speak Sioux. He took my right wrist and pressed his thumb tightly against my pulse and then spoke a sentence. The sound of Sioux is soft and rippling, like something you might hear through a bead curtain. I asked him what he had said. “I said, ‘If your pulse speeds up, then I will know that you are lying, and then I will have the right to kill and scalp you.'” Then he smiled a sunny smile which turned his mouth and eyes to crescents. A few minutes later I started to leave, and he stopped me to sing me a song. He closed his eyes and chanted in a high, wavering voice. He finished one song and then started another. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the Sixth Avenue masses hurrying past with shopping bags. “Immigrants!” he shouted. He shook his head, and said, “Pasta!” Did I hear that right? Yes; in tones of exasperation, as if this was really the last straw: “
Pasta!
”

*   *   *

So thoroughly did Crazy Horse avoid contact with white people away from the battlefield that history records the name of the first white man ever to shake his hand. Lieutenant J. Wesley Rosencrans was among the party of soldiers and Indians from Fort Robinson and the Red Cloud Indian Agency who met the Crazy Horse Indians about a day's journey from the fort, with ten wagons full of presents and a hundred head of beef cattle. Apparently, Lieutenant Rosencrans's party wanted to make sure that Crazy Horse came in to Fort Robinson and did not decide to go to the Spotted Tail Agency, which was about forty miles northeast of Fort Robinson. General Crook (late of the Battle of the Rosebud) had promised, through emissaries, that Crazy Horse and his band could go on a buffalo hunt in the fall. This gave some of the Crazy Horse Indians the impression that they would only have to stay at an agency for a short while, and then would be allowed to return to their campgrounds on the northern plains. When they were a few miles from the fort, more soldiers came out to hold council with them, and that was when the Indians realized that they were expected to surrender.
The New-York Times
(it had a hyphen then) reported, “The surrender was made as impressive as possible. As the Indians entered the broad valley of White River, near the point selected for the camp, the warriors formed in five bands, 40 in each band, and filed across the stream, chanting songs suited to the occasion.” Several observers remarked that the band looked more like a victorious army than like one laying down its arms. Crazy Horse himself surrendered three good Winchester rifles. The surrendered ponies were given to Indians from the Red Cloud Agency “as a reward for their cooperation in subduing the hostile bands,” the
Times
said. There was no formal written surrender agreement. Crazy Horse never signed anything. He was never officially enrolled at any agency. In one of his first meetings with the soldiers, Crazy Horse was promised that he would soon be able to choose a place for his own agency. He said he would like his agency to be on Beaver Creek, west of the Black Hills (now eastern Wyoming). For the time being, he was to stay at the Red Cloud Agency. Like every other Indian at that agency, he was now forbidden to travel farther than three miles away and stay overnight without special permission. He moved more than the three miles he was allowed, and pitched camp at the junction of Little Cottonwood Creek and White River.

At that time, Indian agencies had Army posts nearby. The Red Cloud Agency was three-quarters of a mile from Fort Robinson. The Spotted Tail Agency was near Camp Sheridan. Indian agencies were under the supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was (and is) part of the Department of the Interior. The agencies were to distribute goods and promote the Indians' welfare. The Army posts were to keep the Indians in line. The Indian agent in charge of the Red Cloud Agency was James Irwin. The Indian agent at the Spotted Tail Agency was Lieutenant Jesse M. Lee. Red Cloud, the Oglala chief who got credit for driving the Army from the northern plains in a series of engagements (including the Fetterman fight) later known as the Red Cloud War, was the most important chief at the Red Cloud Agency. At the Spotted Tail Agency, his counterpart was Spotted Tail, a Brulé Sioux chief famous as an orator and diplomat. Spotted Tail was the most persuasive of the emissaries sent by General Crook to get the Crazy Horse band to surrender. Both Spotted Tail and Red Cloud had signed peace treaties and moved to their agencies some years before, and neither took part in the Custer fight or the other last battles between the Sioux and the Army.

Because thousands of agency Indians did take part, Congress had recently given the Army final authority in running the agencies. The officer at Fort Robinson who superintended the Crazy Horse Indians' surrender was Lieutenant William Philo Clark; the Indians called him White Hat. Keeping an eye on Crazy Horse was Clark's special responsibility, and he often visited the Crazy Horse camp. The commanding officer at Fort Robinson was General Luther P. Bradley. His immediate superior was General George C. Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, with headquarters in Omaha. Crook's superior was General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Department of the Missouri, with headquarters in Chicago. Sheridan's superior was General William T. Sherman, General-in-Chief of the Army. Soon after Crazy Horse surrendered, Sherman wrote to Sheridan, “If some of the worst Indians could be executed I doubt not the result would be good—but that is impossible after surrender under conditions … Rather remove all to a safe place and then reduce them to a helpless condition.”

The first thing Crazy Horse did after arriving at Red Cloud was to request that a doctor from Fort Robinson treat his wife, Black Shawl. Assistant Surgeon Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy went to the Crazy Horse camp on horseback and discovered that Black Shawl had tuberculosis. Dr. McGillycuddy returned often to bring her medicines and note her progress. Eventually, he got to know Crazy Horse perhaps better than any other white man did. He thought Crazy Horse was “the greatest leader of his people in modern times.” He asked several times to take his photograph, but Crazy Horse always refused. Crazy Horse told him, “My friend, why should you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?” D. F. Barry, a well-known photographer of Indian life, said he often tried to bribe Crazy Horse to sit for a photograph, without success. Crazy Horse's name was magic all over the plains and beyond. The
Times
referred to him simply as Crazy Horse; no further identification was needed. Red Feather, the brother of Black Shawl, told an interviewer in 1930, “All the white people came to see Crazy Horse and gave him presents and money. The other Indians at the agency got very jealous.” Not long after Crazy Horse came to Red Cloud, he took a second wife. Her name was Nellie Larrabee, and she was the eighteen-year-old part-Indian daughter of an Army scout at Fort Robinson. She may have been a present herself, engineered for Crazy Horse by Lieutenant Clark.

In June of 1877, at the solstice, the Indians from the Red Cloud Agency and the Spotted Tail Agency held the biggest Sun Dance in history at Sun Dance Creek, about halfway in between the two. Twenty thousand Indians were there. On July 1, Agent Irwin at Red Cloud informed his superiors that he did not have enough flour to make the week's issue, even at half rations. At the time, most of the annuities and supplies owed the Sioux by treaty were being sent not to Red Cloud Agency but to a new agency on the Missouri River, where Congress and the Army had long wanted them to move. None of the western Sioux had lived on the Missouri for generations, and they had no desire to now. They protested the planned move in councils with Indian agents and the Army. For many hundreds of Indians confined at Red Cloud, this was the first time they could remember being hungry in the summer. In August, the Indians met with General Crook and Agent Irwin, who renewed the promise that everyone who wanted could leave the agency for forty nights to hunt buffalo. After the council, followers of Red Cloud told Irwin that if the Crazy Horse band went to hunt buffalo they would never come back, and would use the guns and ammunition to kill whites.

That same summer, the Nez Percé, a Rocky Mountain tribe who had never before killed a white man, resisted being sent from their hunting grounds to a small reservation in Idaho, killed some settlers, lost thirty-four people in one battle with the Army and about eighty-nine in another, killed two vacationers in the newly created Yellowstone National Park, and by the end of August escaped onto the northern plains. Perhaps because this put them in the vicinity of the Sioux buffalo grounds, perhaps because of Red Cloud's warning, Agents Irwin and Lee withdrew permission for the hunt. The Sioux were disappointed. But right away Lieutenant Clark got the idea of taking Crazy Horse and sixty other Sioux north to fight the Nez Percé. Some of the Sioux, who were still getting used to the idea of never going to war again, found Clark's offer confusing. Touch the Clouds, a seven-foot Miniconjou Sioux from Spotted Tail Agency and a friend to Crazy Horse, told Clark that he felt like a horse with a bit in its mouth being turned first one direction and then another. Crazy Horse said that he had come in to the agency for peace, that he had promised not to go out on the warpath anymore, but that if the Great Father wanted him to fight the Nez Percé, he would go north and fight until not a Nez Percé was left.

Clark's interpreter at this council was a man named Frank Grouard, one of the strange characters of the plains. No one knew for sure whether he really was a Sandwich Islander brought to America by Mormons, as he often claimed. His half sister said that he was the son of an American Fur Company employee named John Brazeau. (John Brazo, you may remember, was the man hired by Kenneth McKenzie, bourgeois at Fort Union, to shoot a Frenchman who had threatened his life.) Grouard had lived with the Sioux. Apparently, Sitting Bull had once saved his life. To his biographer, Grouard made many bizarre claims; he said that he once owned a piece of buckskin which he got from Crazy Horse's father which detailed the history of the Sioux nation for the past eight hundred years, and that he also once owned a huge “scalp cape” made from the scalps of the white victims of Sitting Bull, but that both these objects had been destroyed in a fire. He also said that he and Crazy Horse were closer than brothers. (“I never had any use for Gruard,” Dr. McGillycuddy said.) For some reason, Grouard mistranslated the end of Crazy Horse's speech to Clark, to the effect that Crazy Horse would go north and fight until not a
white man
was left. At this, Clark became angry, the interpreters began arguing, Grouard walked out, Crazy Horse got fed up, and the council finally fell apart. Crazy Horse did not try to learn what the trouble had been about; even before he came to the agency, he was not much for councils. The rumor that Crazy Horse was going on the warpath caused great excitement at both agencies, and Agent Lee, who managed to get the story straight after talking to Touch the Clouds and others, rode from the Spotted Tail Agency to Fort Robinson to explain to Clark. As Lee later wrote, Clark “seemed
POSITIVE
that there was no mistake.”