Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
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Authors: Stephen Ambrose
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Crazy Horse and Custer
The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
Stephen E. Ambrose
For Moira, who took me to Wounded Knee,
and for Stephenie, Barry, Andrew, Grace,
Hugh, Bib, and Blackness, who came along.
A WORD OF SPECIAL THANKS
To the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee, South Dakota; to the Brulé Sioux at Rosebud, South Dakota; to the Shoshonis and Arapahoes at Wind River, Wyoming; to the Crows at Crow Agency, Montana; and to the northern Cheyennes at Lame Deer, Montana, for allowing me and my family to camp with them on their land;
and to the National Park Service officials at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Fort Laramie and Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming; and Custer Battlefield, Montana, for their many kindnesses;
and to the state officials at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota and at Camp Robinson, Nebraska, for their excellent campgrounds and generous assistance;
and to all the people of the Great Plains, red and white, for their hospitality.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1:
The Setting and the People: The Great Plains
CHAPTER 2:
The Setting and the People: Ohio
CHAPTER 6:
Custer at West Point
CHAPTER 7:
Custer and Crazy Horse on the Eve of Manhood
CHAPTER 8:
War and Love Among the Oglalas
CHAPTER 9:
Guerrilla Warfare, Indian Style
CHAPTER 10:
War and Love Among the Americans
CHAPTER 11:
The Boy General and the Glorious War
CHAPTER 12:
Crazy Horse and Custer as Young Warriors
CHAPTER 13:
Crazy Horse and the Fort Phil Kearny Battle
CHAPTER 14:
Custer Comes to the Plains
CHAPTER 15:
A Summer on the Plains: 1867
CHAPTER 16:
The Treaty of 1868 and the Battle of the Washita
CHAPTER 17:
Truce on the High Plains,
1869–73
CHAPTER 18:
Crazy Horse and Custer on the Yellowstone, 1873
CHAPTER 19:
The Panic of 1873 and the Black Hills Expedition of 1874
CHAPTER 20:
Politics: Red and White
CHAPTER 21:
Crazy Horse Fights on the Rosebud While Custer Closes In
CHAPTER 22:
The Battle of the Little Bighorn
CHAPTER 23:
The Death of Crazy Horse
CHAPTER 24:
What Happened to the Others
LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS
- One of Crazy Horse’s “dress” shirts.
- He Dog, a life-long friend of Crazy Horse.
- Custer in his 1861 West Point graduation photograph.
- A Sioux encampment along the Platte River.
- Custer, the boy general of the Civil War, dressed in a typical fashion.
- Pawnee Killer, the Sioux warrior who led Custer on a wild chase.
- Custer, the leader of the Washita campaign.
- Elizabeth Bacon Custer in the late 1860s.
- Custer in 1874, after the Black Hills expedition.
- Touch-the-Clouds, the seven-foot-tall war chief of the Miniconjous.
- Tom Custer, devoted brother and gallant soldier.
- Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, probably the most intelligent Sioux leader of the period.
- Custer and his Indian scouts during the Yellowstone River expedition of 1873.
- Spotted Tail, Crazy Horse’s uncle, fearless Brulé warrior.
- Crater’s camp in the Black Hills, 1874, near the spot where gold was first discovered in South Dakota.
- Custer and Libbie at Fort Abraham Lincoln, 1875.
- Little Big Man, one of Crazy Horse’s wildest warriors.
- Elizabeth Bacon Custer in 1874.
- Red Cloud, an Oglala leader, a champion of peace, an able and unscrupulous politician.
- The famous Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull.
- Libbie Custer at the turn of the century.
- He Dog in old age.
LIST OF MAPS
The Crazy Horse Country (page 153)
Fort Phil Kearny and Vicinity (page 230)
Custer at the Washita (page 314)
The Little Bighorn and Vicinity (page 429)
INTRODUCTION
This is the story of two men who died as they lived—violently. They were both war lovers, men of aggression with a deeply rooted instinct to charge the enemy, rout him, kill him. Men of supreme courage, they were natural-born leaders in a combat crisis, the type to whom others instinctively looked for guidance and inspiration. They were always the first to charge the enemy, and the last to retreat.
Just as they shared broadly similar instincts, so did they have roughly parallel careers. Born at about the same time, they died within a year of each other. Both had happy childhoods, both had become recognized and honored leaders in their societies at an astonishingly young age (Custer at twenty-three, Crazy Horse at twenty-four), both were humiliated and punished at the height of their careers for violating the fundamental laws of their societies in an attempt to be with the women they loved, both recovered from the blows and re-established their claims to leadership roles, both had younger brothers who were even more daredevil risk takers than they were, and both were in a position when they died that, with a little luck, could have given them the supreme political direction of their people.
There were other parallels. Neither man drank. Both were avid hunters, for whom only the excitement of combat exceeded the joy of the chase. Each man loved horses, and riding at full gallop across the unfenced Great Plains of North America, day after day, was a source of never-ending delight for both of them.
Yet Crazy Horse and Custer, like their societies, were as different as life and death.
Crazy Horse and Custer spent their adult lives on the Great Plains, riding, hunting, fighting. They met only twice, on the battlefield, the first time on the banks of the Yellowstone in 1873, the second time on the banks of the Little Bighorn in 1876. The trail each man followed to the Little Bighorn is the subject of the following story.
Stephen E. Ambrose
Started in June 1971 at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota;
finished in July 1974 at
Camp Robinson, Nebraska.
“I said, ‘Does this mean that you will be my enemy if I move across the creek?’ Crazy Horse laughed in my face. He said, ‘I am no white man! They are the only people that make rules for other people, that say, “If you stay on one side of this line it is peace, but if you go on the other side I will kill you all.” I don’t hold with deadlines. There is plenty of room; camp where you please.’”
He Dog, close friend and associate of Crazy
Horse, in an interview in 1930
“In years long-numbered with the past, when I was verging upon manhood, my every thought was ambitious—not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great. I desired to link my name with acts & men, and in such a manner as to to be a mark of honor—not only to the present, but to future generations.”
George Armstrong Custer
“So much to win and only life to lose.”
John Neihardt,
The Song of the Indian Wars
*
* From
The Song of the Indian Wars
by John Neihardt. Copyright 1925; by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1953 by John G. Neihardt. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
The Setting and the People: The Great Plains
“As far as the eye could reach the country seemed blackened by innumerable herds [of buffalo].”
Captain Benjamin Bonneville, 1832
“Indians are so excessively indolent and lazy, they would rather starve a week than work a day.” James Mackay, 1835
The Great Plains of North America, on a cloudless day, stretch out forever under an infinity of bright blue sky. During the violence of a tornado or a snowstorm, however, the vision is limited to the length of an arm. The Plains can be hot, dusty, brown, flat, and unfit for life; they can be delightfully cool, abundantly watered, a dozen shades of green, marvelously varied in appearance, ranging from near mountains to level valleys, and hospitable to all forms of life.
The Plains can be a source of endless delight, or of misery, as well they might be, considering their extent. They stretch from the Mexican border north to and beyond the Canadian frontier, from the 100° meridian west to the Rocky Mountains. The Plains are relatively flat, semiarid, and essentially treeless.
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In the midnineteenth century they were unfenced, covered by an endless sea of prairie grass, grass that sent its roots down twenty-four inches or more to withstand the droughts and which offered some of the most nutritious plant food in the world. Innumerable small streams cut through the Plains; many of them were dry beds in summer and only a few would be dignified by names or used as reference points in a humid area, but every one carried a name and a legend on the Plains. Trees, mostly cottonwoods, grew along the stream beds, and there men and animals tended to congregate. Among the cottonwoods they found shade, a little water, and perhaps an escape from the sense of limitless space, with its constant reminder of the insignificance of mankind.
Men and animals also congregated in the tree groves to escape
the weather. The weather. On the Plains it cannot be ignored. There is, first of all, the nearly constant need for rain. The average yearly rainfall is less than twenty inches, so every storm is welcome. Or rather nearly every storm, because at times the sky can open, dump five inches of rain in a matter of hours, fill the stream beds to overflowing, and flood the surrounding countryside. Spring and summer storms often touch off tornadoes, too, which level everything in their path, or they become hail storms, beating plants to the ground and destroying them. No one can do anything about the storms—those who live on the Plains must accept them.
They must also accept the wind, which blows harder, and more consistently, on the Plains than anywhere else on the continent, save at the seashore. And the average wind velocity on the Plains is equal to that on the seashore.
“Does the wind blow this way here all the time?” asked the eastern visitor.
“No, mister,” answered the cowboy. “It’ll maybe blow this way for a week or ten days, and then it’ll take a change and blow like hell for a while.”
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