Joseph M. Marshall III (39 page)

Crazy Horse did reach that point in his life—a culmination of the forces and influences of destiny and the circumstances of the times he lived in, rather than the infirmities of old age.

After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the United States government stepped up its military campaign against the Lakota. Sitting Bull was forced to flee into Canada in 1877 and the U.S. Army attacked Crazy Horse’s own encampment during the winter. Other influential leaders such as Spotted Tail of the Sicangu Lakota and Red Cloud of the Oglala were already settled at their own agencies. Indeed, most of the Lakota bands were on agencies or reservations by early 1877, already living under the control of the United States government. It was inevitable, they said, and they sent messages to Crazy Horse’s band that it was time to consider that living on reservations was preferable to being hunted down and killed by the whites.

With Sitting Bull in Canada, Crazy Horse was the most influential leader among those Lakota who refused to surrender. In fact, the Crazy Horse band of nearly a thousand people were for all intents and purposes the final holdouts. When Sitting Bull finally returned south of the Forty-eighth Parallel in 1881, it was in capitulation rather than to continue the fight.

Crazy Horse and his advisors realized that it was a numbers issue. He had less than two hundred able-bodied fighting men. The whites could send ten times that many men against him at any time. Furthermore, the whites had more guns and more bullets. The deciding factor, however, was the lack of resources to sustain his people in the field. The buffalo were gone, but there was probably enough elk and deer to provide them with the fresh meat they needed. However, when men had to devote most of their time to fighting to defend their families, there wasn’t much time left to hunt.

A number of the younger men proposed hiding their non-combatants in some secret location and taking to the field as a highly mobile force against the whites. The idea had strong appeal, especially with those who thoroughly detested the thought of life on a reservation and those who knew that man for man the Lakota could outfight the whites. The idea was appealing to Crazy Horse the warrior, but to Crazy Horse the family man, to the leader responsible for the welfare of all the people, he knew that leaving the women and children unprotected would not be wise. Sooner or later the whites would find them, and he didn’t want a ghastly reoccurrence of the Little Thunder or Sand Creek massacres. Therefore, the cold hard reality was simply and inescapably picking the lesser of two evils. Continue to resist until the soldiers killed them all, or surrender.

Almost a year earlier Crazy Horse had mounted his horse and ridden around the encampment on Ash Creek, and with each circuit more and more warriors fell in behind him. In May 1877, the circumstances were nearly the opposite. If he had decided to fight, every able-bodied male, from the very young to the very old, would have followed him anywhere. Most certainly more than a few women would have taken up arms also. But now he had to put the warrior aside—push him into the shadows, so to speak. It would have been completely understandable for the warriors to fight and die, because the very survival of a nation and a way of life was certainly worth dying for, but that would mean leaving the helpless ones to face the whites alone. So the choice was made to surrender.

Crazy Horse realized that a new kind of war was being fought to save the very essence of being Lakota. To fight in this war meant that the right kind of leadership was even more critical because the enemy was not only the whites but those Lakota who had essentially “gone over” to the other side. Crazy Horse knew that surrendering militarily didn’t mean surrendering identity, and he detested anyone who pandered to the whites. To survive physically was necessary to prevent further bloodshed, but it was just as critical to survive culturally. That would mean hanging on tenaciously to language, values, and beliefs no matter what the whites might do. To fight that fight he knew that, as he had done on the battlefield, he had to take the lead and set the right example. The prospect of living in close proximity with white people
and
under their control was distasteful and detestable. Nevertheless it was a call to duty and service to the - people he couldn’t ignore. He had to do it so that the people - could live. If he suspected that it would cost him his life, he spoke of it to no one, but he must have wondered about that part of his vision in which his own people pulled the rider down from his horse.

Afterword:

Honoring Song for a Thunder Dreamer

Crazy Horse still lives in the shadows of my mind, as he always will. The boy in me sees him as a glorious warrior. The man I’ve become sees him as someone who reluctantly answered the call to serve and who became a leader in the most trying of times.

There were struggles within me from time to time, between the temptation to make Crazy Horse into a shimmering legend and the need to see him as a real person. He is certainly both, but it is immeasurably reassuring and inspiring to know him as a real man. Legends
are
like fog. Sooner or later the heat of the sun does burn them off. The scrutiny of unvarnished truth is like the sun. Bit by bit it dissipates the misty aura of legend. We do need our legends, it would seem. We hold them up as sort of a standard that we can try to attain, knowing we never can. But if we dare to look at them as people, it is frequently possible to understand them, their motives, their attitudes, and how and why they did what they did, or didn’t do. If we accept them as people, we can find a connection to them, a connection woven by reality and humanity—for, after all, they fulfilled their journey just as we are fulfilling ours, on the same Earth.

Crazy Horse should be a hero, but not one of conjecture. Many have misjudged him or made him into something he is not, and as a result, Crazy Horse pretenders cross our path with annoying consistency. They seem to be everywhere. Some are living grand adventures in the wide-eyed imaginations of “Indian lore” enthusiasts, or are stubbornly fighting a losing war in the pages of pulp western history magazines as another dark icon opposing the inevitability of manifest destiny. These Crazy Horses are almost never without a weapon in hand, frequently wearing a feather “war” bonnet and riding at the head of a mass charge. They are from the “an Indian is an Indian is an Indian” view of indigenous cultures, which will swear that Crazy Horse and Geronimo spoke the same language and that “war” bonnets are standard issue for all Indian males over the age of twelve. This type of Crazy Horse is the darling of those who find lost causes somehow appealing. They know nothing of the reasons Indians fought so hard to protect their lands and their lives, but only that they were “noble savages” because they fought knowing they would lose.

Then there is the “conqueror of Custer” version, the purveyor of violence ready to fight at the drop of a “war” bonnet, his hate for white people dripping like venom—meaning, of course, that Crazy Horse has no validity without Custer. Kill a famous white man and insure your place in history. That’s almost as popular as the glory-seeking egotist suffering from violent mood swings—a quiet camp dweller one day and a screaming savage on the warpath the next. Close behind is the overrated leader who owes his place in history to the fascination of white people, a first cousin to the one who owes his celebrity to offing Custer. Popping up in the crowd is “Chief” Crazy Horse because there are those among us who seem to think that we can’t make history unless we have a title in front of our names; like general, duke, emperor, governor, mayor, judge, president, or chief. And then we have the Crazy Horse that could be one of the richest men in the world if he were paid endorsement fees for the use of his name on anything from tobacco products to malt liquor, designer clothes, salons, saloons, jewelry stores, and Paris burlesque houses.

The Hollywood Crazy Horses are an eclectic bunch. In a 1955 feature film his vociferousness was as out of place as his “war” bonnet. In a 1990 made-for-television miniseries (about Custer), he was a moody, reticent pedestrian (literally). A feature film the same year in which he shared equal billing with Custer attempted the “untold story” approach, but it went awry soon after the opening credits. Between 1955 and 1996 he has appeared as a background or minor character in several westerns, and once as an insect-eating captive in a western television series about Custer that lasted only slightly longer than the Battle of the Little Bighorn. A 1996 television movie came the closest. But overall, screenwriters should know that it takes more than an occasional smile on an Indian face and lovemaking on the prairie to portray the human side of Indians and give us a realistic insight into Indian culture. It is progress, I suppose, for non-Indian writers to realize that we smile and make love. Fortunately there hasn’t been a preponderance of movies because they probably would have done nothing more than burden us with Crazy Horses of conjecture.

Photographs of Crazy Horse also pop up now and again. I’m inclined to react to those who purport to have or know of an “authentic” photograph of him much the same way I would to anyone who wants to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, or argues that Custer really won the Battle of the Little Bighorn. There is, of course, no way to state unequivocally that no photographs of Crazy Horse exist. But we should consider two factors when discussing this topic: first, he was very suspicious of white people in general and, second, he probably would not have sat or stood still (literally) for the minimum five or ten minutes required to pose for a photograph. A few people have suggested that a photograph could have been taken of him without his knowledge, but, again, given the photographic technology of the time it would have been impossible to take a “snapshot” of him. Furthermore, until he took his people to Camp Robinson, he was rarely in the presence of whites and only once anywhere in the vicinity of a photographer. From that encounter came the anecdote of his refusal to pose and the words, “Why would you want to take from me my shadow?”

Western writer Louis L’Amour gave him gray eyes and someone else suggested he was part white because of his brown, slightly wavy hair. (I think it was the same writer who postulated that the Lakota won the Battle of the Little Bighorn because Sitting Bull was secretly trained by Jesuits at a military school in Europe.) The “part white” theory explains, to some folks, why Crazy Horse was such an outstanding warrior and tactician. The white blood made all the difference.

Historian Stephen Ambrose called him a man of violence, and the subtitle of his book
Crazy Horse and Custer
labels him an “American warrior.” If Crazy Horse is an American, then Joe McCarthy is a friend to Communism, Ralph Nader loves Chevrolet Corvairs, and Kenneth Lay is the champion of the working class.

Larry McMurtry seemed mostly mystified with his slant on Crazy Horse and almost hesitant to write about him, but he did venture a point that I do agree with. Neither historians nor writers have an accurate insight into the deeds of Crazy Horse, much less his soul.

There will always be pretenders because Crazy Horse is many things to many people. Even among us Lakota there are tendencies to deify him. It’s difficult to say if the real Crazy Horse will ever outmaneuver the ethnocentric opinions, the paternalistic pronouncements of those who think they have the final word on history, or the plain, unmitigated hero worship. But strangely enough, each time a pretender steps into the limelight of someone’s ignorance, it is an opportunity to unveil the real Crazy Horse. For it was as a real person he left tracks both on the Earth and in the hearts of men and women who truly know him.

I have walked the ridge north of Buffalo, Wyoming, where he led several hundred Lakota and Sahiyela fighting men to victory over the infantry soldiers from Fort Phil Kearny in the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, or
Opawinge Napogna Wicayuhapi—
also known as the Fetterman Battle or Fetterman Massacre. I went there alone on a cold December day and transported myself back to a like day in the Winter Moon of 1866. The wind stung my face and numbed my fingers as I walked the snow-covered ridge along the old Bozeman Trail. I could hear the deep boom of fifty-caliber rifles, the sizzling hiss of flying arrows, and the voices of men exhorting one another in Lakota, Sahiyela, and English as they fought or screamed in pain as they were mortally wounded. In the eerie aftermath of combat I could see Crazy Horse riding the slippery eastern slope of the ridge to discover his boyhood friend Lone Bear disabled by a grievous wound and face down in the snow. I could see Crazy Horse turn his friend over gently and brush snow and ice from his face and hair, and then his own features distort with anguish and grief as the young man died in his arms.

On more than one hot summer day I have stood and looked over the ridges and rolling hills along the Little Bighorn River north of where Ash (Reno) Creek flows into it and where, 128 years ago, another battle was fought.