Crazy Horse (9 page)

W
HAT DID THE
S
IOUX
and Cheyenne leaders think at this point? What did they feel? Several commentators have suggested that once the jubilation of victory subsided, a mood of foreboding returned. Perhaps the tribes recognized that they were likely never to be so unified again—and they were not. Probably the leaders knew that they were likely never to have such a one-sided military victory again, either—a victory that was thrown them because of the vaingloriousness of one white officer.

Or perhaps they didn't think in these terms at all—not yet. With the great rally over, the great battle won, they broke up and got on with their hunting. Perhaps a few did reckon that something was over now, but it is doubtful that many experienced the sense of climax and decline as poetically as Old Lodge Skins in Thomas Berger's
Little Big Man
: “Yes, my son,” he says,

it is finished now, because what more can you do to an enemy than beat him? Were we fighting red man against
red man—they way we used to, because that is a man's profession, and besides it is enjoyable—it would now be the turn of the other side to whip us. We would fight as hard as ever and perhaps would win again, but they would definitely start with an advantage, because that is the
right
way. There is no permanent winning or losing when things move, as they should, in a circle. . . .

But the white men, who live in straight lines and squares, do not believe as I do . . . With them it is everything or nothing, Washita or Greasy Grass . . . Winning is all they care about, and if they can do that by scratching a pen across a paper or saying something into the wind, they are much happier. . . .

Old Lodge Skins was right about the army wanting to win. Crook's defeat at the Rosebud had embarrassed the army, and the debacle at the Little Bighorn shamed it. The nation, of course, was outraged. By August of 1876 Crook and Terry were lumbering around with a reassuring force of some four thousand soldiers. Naturally they found few Indians. Crazy Horse was somewhere near Bear Butte, harrying the miners in the Black Hills pretty much as the mood struck him. There was a minor engagement or two, of little note. The Indians were not suicidal—they left the massive force alone. Crook and Terry were such respecters now that they were bogged down by their own might.

In the fall of that year the whites, having failed to buy the Black Hills, simply took them. There was a travesty of
a treaty council at which the theme of farming was again accented. Young Man Afraid, after hearing a great deal about farming, sarcastically ventured the view that it might take him one hundred years to learn how to do such work—he wanted to make sure that the government meant to take care of his people well during this learning period. With this disgraceful treaty the Indians lost not only the Black Hills but the Powder River, the Yellowstone, the Bighorns. There was even talk of moving the settled Sioux at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies to a reservation on the Missouri River, a move they all bitterly resisted. Crook, at this point, wanted to depose Red Cloud, insisting that he had not been forceful enough when it came to bringing in the hostiles. He wanted to promote Spotted Tail, not because he was better about the hostiles but because he was somewhat easier to deal with than the argumentative Bad Face.

From this point in 1876 on, the bitter factionalism of agency politics—in the Sioux's case, the factionalism of the defeated—has a place in the story. Everyone was getting more than a little tired of Red Cloud, but he was both tenacious and smart. He was to be one of the very few Plains Indian leaders of this period who survived everything, dying of old age in 1909.

By the late fall of 1876 General Crook had been in the field for almost a year, with no significant victories and one embarrassing defeat, the Rosebud. In November he finally had a victory, hitting the Cheyennes under Dull
Knife and Little Wolf in their winter camp in the Bighorns. The Cheyennes who got away struggled north in weather so terrible that eleven babies froze in one night; when the survivors finally reached Crazy Horse, he took them in and provided for them as best he could.

By the end of what was in some ways a year of glory, 1876, Crazy Horse had to face the fact that his people had come to a desperate pass. It was a terrible winter, with subzero temperatures day after day. The Indians were ragged and hungry; the soldiers who opposed them were warmly clothed and well equipped. The victories of the previous summer were, to the Sioux and the Cheyennes, now just memories. They had little ammunition and were hard pressed to find game enough to feed themselves.

Colonel Nelson A. Miles, then camped on the Tongue River, badly wanted Crazy Horse's surrender. (Though he couldn't have known it at the time, if he could have persuaded Crazy Horse to come in to his camp he would have ended up claiming three great surrenders, the other two being Chief Joseph and Geronimo.) To entice Crazy Horse, Miles sent many runners promising fair treatment for himself and his people.

Near the end of the year Crazy Horse apparently decided he had better consider this offer. He approached, but stopped well short of Miles's camp and sent a number of emissaries ahead to discuss the matter. Unfortunately, some of Miles's Crow scouts saw the Oglalas coming and
attacked them, killing several. Miles was furious when he heard of this and tried to make amends, but the damage was done. Crazy Horse turned back.

When the New Year came, Miles attacked and kept attacking until the weather finally stopped him. Crazy Horse moved north and hung on. It was during this time that he is said to have shot the horses of Sioux who wanted to give up and go to the agencies, a charge that is still debated.

During this hard period, with the soldiers just waiting for spring to begin another series of attacks, Sitting Bull decided to take himself and his people to Canada. Crazy Horse perhaps considered this option, but rejected it. It may have been because in Canada it was even colder—or it may have been because he just didn't want to leave home.

T
HE WINTER
of 1876–77 was very hard. The fact that the soldiers had been willing to fight until the middle of January was evidence of a new determination on the part of the military to finish the job and subdue the Plains Indians once and for all. Only a few of the Indian leaders still holding out were much to be feared, Crazy Horse being one of these. In general, that long, bitter winter was a time of wearing down.

Very probably, during these months, Crazy Horse finally realized that he would not be able to live out his life as a free man—a resister. During these months he wandered off alone so often that He Dog reproached him for it, reminding him that there were people who depended on him. Crazy Horse was not a chief in the sense that Old Man Afraid had been a chief, but he did have followers, several hundred cold, ill-clad people who looked to him for guidance and provision. When he tried a second time to come in, in early May of 1877, he had
nine hundred people with him, and more than two thousand horses.

It was a surrender, of a sort, but only of a sort. Crook claimed it, though Crazy Horse actually first sat down with Lieutenant Philo Clark. Even so, it was not a full or normal surrender, and neither the agency Indians (whether Red Cloud's or Spotted Tail's) nor the generals nor, probably, Crazy Horse himself ever quite believed that a true surrender had taken place. They may all have intuited an essential truth, which was that Crazy Horse was not tamable, not a man of politics. He could only assist his people as warrior and hunter—a bureaucrat he was not. Had there not been those nine hundred people looking to him for help, he might have elected to do what Geronimo did for so long: take a few warriors and a few women and stay out. He might have gone deep into the hills with a few men and fought as a guerrilla until someone betrayed him or at least outshot him. But it was true that these nine hundred people depended on him, so he brought them in and sat down, for the first time, in council with the white men.

He came into Red Cloud's agency, at Fort Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. I think it is fair to say that neither Red Cloud nor Spotted Tail nor any of the leading agency Indians were happy to see him. Perhaps Crook, who soon arrived, was the one happy person. With Sitting Bull in Canada and Crazy Horse settled near an
agency, Three Stars could wipe his brow in relief. Also, Crook, not Miles, got credit for the surrender, which made up a little for the embarrassment on the Rosebud.

This august event, the surrender of “Chief” Crazy Horse, was reported in
The New York Times
, May 8, 1877.

F
ROM THE TIME
that Crazy Horse handed over his rifle and his horses to the white officers at Fort Robinson until his death just four months later, he was a confused, stressed, off-balance, and, finally, desperate man. For almost the first time in his life he had done something he really didn't believe in, something that went directly against his nature. Even though he knew he had done it for the right reason—the welfare of the people—it did not feel right. The adjustments required of him if he was to live as an agency Indian were not adjustments he was able to make. From his personal point of view probably the best thing that came out of this move was that Dr. (later Agent) Valentine McGillycuddy offered to treat Black Shawl, his wife, for her tuberculosis, and did treat her with some success.

Before Crazy Horse surrendered, Crook made two promises that he was later unwilling or unable to keep. He wanted this surrender, and to get it he offered Crazy Horse an agency of his own, in country of his choosing;
and he also promised the Sioux generally that they would be allowed to leave the agencies and go on a forty-day buffalo hunt. These promises may have been made rashly, but they were not necessarily made insincerely. A good many commanders in the field made well-reasoned promises to the Indians, only to have them rejected by someone higher up the ladder of command. Nelson A. Miles later made promises both to Chief Joseph and to Geronimo that he himself considered practical—in the case of Chief Joseph, at least, Miles was somewhat dismayed by the brusqueness with which his plans for the Nez Percé were rejected by the higher-ups. This tendency of the War Department to ignore whatever had been promised by a man in the field was particularly hard on lower-level officers and agents. They would only work effectively with the agency Indians if they held the Indians' trust, but it was impossible to hold any Indian's trust when they were continually having to explain that no, they couldn't do what they had just said they
would
do.

Crook at first probably thought it made sense to allow a buffalo hunt. It would have reduced Indian dependence on government goods somewhat, and given an active people something to do other than sit around waiting for handouts. It would also have allowed them to retain at least a few of the rhythms of their old life, which would have been a big boost to Sioux morale. But Crook soon began to have second thoughts about
boosting Sioux morale all that much. It meant rearming people he had just disarmed, risking—with Crazy Horse particularly—the possibility that they would then try to reclaim another part of their old life: the part that involved fighting whites.

There was, too, another factor in the rescinding of these promises. The first thing the whites liked to do with a great hostile was to dress him up and whisk him off to Washington to meet the president and other high potentates, thus, it was hoped, impressing him with the immensity of white power. It usually worked, too. Even Sitting Bull, once he saw the east, was impressed by white power, but was correspondingly depressed by the homeless beggars he encountered on the streets of the white men's cities. Such a lack of charity would never have been allowed among the Sioux, he pointed out.

A second reason for taking major hostiles east was to neutralize them. A bit of lionizing, a little ceremony, it was felt, would make them that much less likely to take again the path of war. Instead of fighting, the hostile would soon settle down and become part of the process of democratic life.

Where Crazy Horse was concerned, this policy was an utter failure. He never became part of the process, which is surely one big reason he is such a hero today. He did, however, entertain the notion of going to Washington. The problem was that he insisted that at least one of General Crook's promises be kept
before he went
:
if he could have his agency, or if there could be a hunt,
then
he would go to meet the president. If the whites had immediately given him the agency he wanted—on Beaver Creek, in the Powder River country—then he might have gone to Washington and might, just conceivably, have adjusted. But he was determined to get
something
before he made the trip; also, he was probably just nervous.

One reason he was adamant about having his own agency was that he didn't like it where he was. At Red Cloud's agency the attitude of the settled Sioux toward him was at best ambivalent and at worst malign. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, still bitterly jealous of one another, were even more jealous of Crazy Horse, in part because he still had the aura of the warrior about him. He had, after all, been in a shooting war with Miles as recently as January. Though he had been forced to move, he had not been decisively beaten, and he had done the right thing by taking in the Cheyennes who had been dispossessed by Crook.

From the day that Crazy Horse came in he was the focus of rumor, envy, jealousy, and hatred, and it was among his own people that the hatred became a dripping, ultimately fatal poison—a paradoxical thing since, except for this short terrible period, no Indian was more respected by the Indian people than he was. Captain John Gregory Bourke, who served with Crook, said that he had never heard an Indian speak of Crazy Horse with
anything but respect. And yet, during this one period, the mere fact that the white officers respected him for fighting them so hard in battle made the agency Indians jealous. What they were jealous of, finally, was his moral authority. Among a broken people an unbroken man can only rarely be tolerated—he becomes a too-painful reminder of what the people as a whole had once been.

As I read the records, Crazy Horse at this point was far from being broken, but he was certainly very stressed.

Even though he camped twice as far from Fort Robinson as he was supposed to, he was still in much closer proximity to white people than he had been since his youth on the Platte. He was worried about his people, worried about his wife, and confused by what the whites seemed to want of him. Though there were among the whites men who respected him and some who just liked him, he must often have wished that he had continued to hold out. For a time he fidgeted and worried, waiting for the whites to either give him his agency or allow his people to go on the hunt that had been promised.

The whites did neither. Crook pestered Crazy Horse to go to Washington, but Crazy Horse kept backing out. The summer was usually a time of pleasure for the Sioux, but this summer—1877—was for Crazy Horse a time of confusion and anxiety.

Meanwhile, the poisons of idleness and jealousy were working on the Sioux. An Indian named Grabber began to spread the rumor that the whites liked Crazy Horse so
much that they were going to make him chief of all the Sioux, though at this time he wasn't really chief of any of the Sioux. Jealousy intensified as rumors of his ascendancy multiplied. The whites were as uncertain about him as the Sioux, although one or two experienced officers recognized that he was just off-balance, overwhelmed by his new situation. Too many whites had talked to him too much—and this was an Indian who had never parleyed with white men before. He didn't know how to assess the conflicting statements he heard them make.

A few wise officers advised that he be left alone until he calmed down a little and had time to adjust to agency life, but this advice was ignored. Crazy Horse was the star of the hour—everyone wanted to talk to him. Probably he would have weakened and eventually gone to Washington—after all, he had little to do—but Red Cloud didn't like it that this upstart was suddenly such a big star. Neither he nor Spotted Tail wanted Crazy Horse to be taken east and lionized: they began to talk against him.

One legitimate apprehension the Indian leaders may have had about Crazy Horse was the fear that if he misbehaved, the government might react by immediately dragging them off to the Missouri River reservation. By this time most of the Sioux leaders feared that the Missouri would be their eventual fate (and it was).

Though many of the whites who met Crazy Horse
liked him, the agency Indians continued to talk against him. Crook was annoyed by Crazy Horse's reluctance to go to Washington. Some time around midsummer of 1877 the higher thinking came to be that perhaps the best thing to do with this Indian was to send him to prison in Florida, before he broke out and became a rallying point for the discontented young warriors, most of whom, having no chance to either fight or hunt, were bored silly.

Then, to everyone's surprise, in far-off Idaho, the Nez Percé broke out first and began their dramatic thirteen-hundred-mile march through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, whipping up on everybody they encountered along the way. At first no one supposed Looking Glass and Chief Joseph would get very far, or cause as much alarm as they caused; but the next thing anybody knew they had whipped yet more militia and were speeding along a clear track to Canada. One-armed General Howard was chasing them, but he wasn't catching them—Crook eventually became responsible for trying to head them off. Lieutenant Philo Clark, the officer who did most of the dealing with Crazy Horse, seems to have gotten it into his head that the idle Oglalas could be useful in this effort. Crook seems to have briefly entertained this notion—his options at the time were not good. The meeting that was held to discuss this matter can only have added to Crazy Horse's confusion. He had come in, given up his gun, and promised to fight no more, but now the whites wanted to
give him his gun again and have him fight the Nez Percé. Where was the sense in all of it? Indeed, there
was
no sense. The army had a superabundance of Sioux at its disposal, not to mention plenty of Crows and Shoshones. Why arm the one Sioux leader who was most likely to stay out once he got out? The Oglalas didn't seem the most logical choices anyway—their range was well east of the Nez Percé's looping line of flight.

Crazy Horse was again reluctant; he may have supposed that this was some complicated plot on Crook's part to get him to help fight Sitting Bull. Or he may simply have had no idea what was going on with these whites. Though the whites and the Indians lived in close proximity at the agencies, neither group had any clear notion of what the other group was thinking or saying or planning.

Also, Crazy Horse may simply have been irritated by this white effort to get him to fight the Nez Percé. His attitude may have been: Why me? Parleys annoyed him, tried his patience, disturbed him. Crook wasn't at this one, anyway. Crazy Horse finally told the whites that he had promised to be a man of peace, but if the whites insisted that he go fight the Nez Percé he would fight them until every last Nez Percé was killed—the kind of claim that probably just reflected his exasperation.

At this point a famous mistranslation occurred, made by Crazy Horse's old friend Frank Grouard, the scout. Grouard reportedly told the whites that Crazy Horse
meant to fight until every last
white man
was killed. The half-breed scout Billy Garnett, who had known Crazy Horse most of his life, was aghast and—along with others who understood Sioux—immediately tried to correct Grouard, but whether they convinced anyone is now hard to say. Mari Sandoz makes much of this mistranslation; George Hyde makes little. My own feeling is that the incident speaks mainly to the intense climate of suspicion that surrounded everything Crazy Horse did in the last few days of his life. Frank Grouard was a mixed-blood who had interpreted at many councils; Crazy Horse liked him. That Grouard lied in such a way as to get Crazy Horse in more trouble than he was in already is explainable mainly by jealousy, if it is explainable at all. Or it may be that Grouard himself wanted to twit the whites, even shock them; it could even be that he was drunk and misunderstood, or that Crazy Horse was so bored with the whole proceeding that he made an outrageous remark merely to end the meeting.

All we know now is that this incident did nothing to lessen or allay white paranoia where Crazy Horse was concerned. He was clearly unhappy at the agency, clearly missed the freedom of the plains. Of all the Indians at Red Cloud's agency he
was
the one most likely to fight again; only an exceptionally obtuse officer could have missed that fact.

On the other hand, immense grief always flowed from the army's tendency to see war where there was
no war. They had a hard time understanding that the Indians they had subdued would really stay subdued. The slightest sign of Indian independence invariably produced an overreaction on the part of the white authorities, the best example of which is white response to the Ghost Dance.

It is hard now to understand, except as paranoia, the overreaction to the Ghost Dance, or other, earlier expressions of Indian messianic or millennial religion. The Paiute holy man Wovoka, who lived in Nevada and began to preach the Ghost Dance in the summer of 1887, had been anticipated nearly a decade earlier by the Apache preacher Noch-ay-del-kline, who lived on Cibecue Creek in Arizona. The army was so alarmed by Noch-ay-del-kline's preaching and the response it evoked in the local Apaches that they went to arrest him, although he was at the time living peaceably at home. Eighteen men were killed in this arrest. Geronimo, who had been trying to live as the whites wanted him to, read this lesson well and soon went out again, into the mountains of Mexico.

The white authorities hugely overreacted to both these native preachers, who offered to raise the good spirits of the dead while burying the bad people under a new soil. What they preached, that is—allowing for all differences—was not so very different from what low-Protestant, millennial, evangelical, Holy Roller charismatics preach now to dirt-poor congregations throughout
rural America. To broken, despairing, poverty-stricken people the Apocalypse has always sounded good. Sitting Bull was killed because he wouldn't try to suppress the Ghost Dance on his reservation. It is unlikely that he himself believed Wovoka, or that Geronimo believed Noch-ay-del-kline—both men were too hardheaded—but they both recognized that the preachers brought a beaten and depressed people a little involvement and a little hope. The whites saw this merely as a sign that the Indians might act up again, so eighteen died at Cibecue Creek and as many as two hundred at Wounded Knee.