Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (55 page)

Despite the United States Government’s ban on trade with the hostiles, some traders—mainly half-breeds—did manage to sneak a few wagon loads of goods into the hostile camps, where they exchanged white man’s products for beautifully decorated buffalo robes. One of these traders brought in some newspapers and translated them for the Oglalas, reading aloud a report that called the Oglalas “bloodthirsty savages” and “murdering hounds of hell.” The word “hell” confused Crazy Horse. What was hell? The trader tried to explain but only confused Crazy Horse more—how could a great power do a bad thing like sending souls to hell? Another newspaper
had a picture in it, a pen-and-ink sketch of naked, painted, howling Indians with bloody scalps, dancing around three little white girls tied to the door of a burning house. Crazy Horse was so angry at the misrepresentation that he tore the paper into shreds. Later he learned that the paper had belonged to Billy Garnett, a friendly trader, so Crazy Horse gave Billy a good pinto to make up for destroying his paper.
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In 1870 Crazy Horse and Hump led an expedition against the Shoshonis. Years later, He Dog told the story to Eleanor Hinman. It was late autumn, so late that a drizzly rain started turning into snow. Crazy Horse, He Dog recalled, muttered, “I wonder if we can make it back to Cone Creek. I doubt if our horses can stand a fight in this slush. They sink in over their ankles.”

He Dog took this word to Hump, who snorted and declared, “This is the second fight he has called off in this same place! This time there is going to be a fight.” Hump rode over to Crazy Horse and said, “The last time you called off a fight here, when we got back to camp they laughed at us. You and I have our good names to think about. If you don’t care about it, you can go back. But I’m going to stay here and fight.”

Crazy Horse’s reply, as He Dog remembered it, was, “All right, we fight, if you feel that way about it. But I think we’re going to get a good licking. You have a good gun and I have a good gun, but look at our men! None of them have good guns and most of them have only bows and arrows. It’s a bad place for a fight and a bad day for it, and the enemy are twelve to our one.”

They fought all the same, but the Shoshonis had the best of it. Soon the Oglalas were on the run, with only Hump, Crazy Horse, and Good Weasel acting as a rear guard. He Dog remembered that it was a running fight, “with more running than fighting.” In order to check the pursuit and to give the others more time, Crazy Horse charged the Shoshonis from one side, Hump and Good Weasel from the other. When they rejoined, Hump’s horse was stumbling.

“We’re up against it now,” Hump declared. “My horse has a wound in the leg.”

“I know it,” Crazy Horse replied. “We were up against it from the start.”

Despite Hump’s crippled horse, the three-man rear guard charged again when the Shoshonis pressed too close. This time Hump’s horse went down. The Shoshonis surged over him. That was the last seen of Hump. On the slippery ground, with all those enemies around, Crazy Horse could not even recover the body.
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Hump dead! Crazy Horse’s oldest friend, with whom he had fought side-by-side in nearly every battle of his life. Hump had been with him at the Platte River Bridge, had rallied the Oglalas against the Crows and Shoshonis on innumerable occasions, had served as a decoy at Fort Phil Kearny. Now he was gone, the boy with whom he had learned to hunt and to make war. Crazy Horse returned to camp with a blackness in his heart.

Red Feather, who was in that fight, told Eleanor Hinman the aftermath: “Four days later Crazy Horse and I went back to find Hump and bury him. We didn’t find anything but the skull and a few bones. Hump had been eaten by coyotes already. There weren’t any Shoshonis around. When the Shoshonis found out whom they had killed, they beat it.”
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The next summer, Crazy Horse and He Dog worked up a big war party against the Crows. It was an old-time hunting and war expedition, with some of the women coming along to cook and set up lodges. Crazy Horse and He Dog were the lance bearers of the Crow Owners
akicita
and they carried the two lances of the Oglalas, lances that had been with the people longer than anyone could remember. Worm, Crazy Horse’s father, was sure they dated back to the days the Oglalas lived east of the Missouri River. No one could remember, either, how they had acquired their powerful medicine, but it was certain that so long as they were carried by brave warriors and remained in the hands of the Oglalas, there would be fat times for the people. Crazy Horse and He Dog rode at the head of the column, holding the lances high, full of pride in themselves and in the Oglalas.

They found a big Crow camp between the Little Bighorn and the Bighorn rivers. The Oglala women settled themselves on a hillside to watch the fight and to taunt the Crows, making sign-language talk to the enemy, daring them to come on across the valley and take some Oglala women, who were so much better in bed than the Crow women. Crazy Horse and He Dog led an assault, carrying the lances all through the fighting, always making sure that they were first and closest to the enemy, always last to retreat from Crow counterattacks. When they started back home with some captured ponies, the Crows gave chase, getting a few of the ponies back before giving up.

When the Crows broke off the engagement, most of the Oglalas wanted to continue toward home, but Crazy Horse and He Dog decided to follow the Crows awhile. Little Hawk, Crazy Horse’s brother, joined the lance bearers, and the other Oglalas then went
along—they could not allow the sacred lances to remain unprotected in enemy country. The Oglalas chased the Crows right up to their agency on the Little Bighorn, where the Crows camped under the protection of the soldiers’ guns. The Oglalas made camp a little way off and stayed for a week, taunting the Crows, raiding, and hunting. When they finally went back to the Powder River everyone was feeling fine and there was a big victory dance.
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“When They Chased the Crows Back to Camp,” the Oglalas called the fight in their winter-count pictographic history, painted on a buffalo hide.

Custer was becoming bored. He had spent the time from the summer of 1869 to the winter of 1870-71 at Fort Hays, hunting, drilling troops, writing magazine articles and his memoirs, but despite a stream of eastern and European visitors who came for the buffalo hunting there was not enough activity to suit him. Hostilities in Kansas were over, Red Cloud was on a reservation, and the remaining Indians on the Powder River were attacking Crows and Shoshonis, not whites. In late 1869 Custer made a trip to Chicago, where he had an enjoyable visit with General Sheridan, went to the theater, shopped, and lost so badly at cards that he took a vow never to gamble again. Explaining his decision in a letter to Libbie, he wrote with typical exaggeration, “This is a resolution, not the result of impulse, but taken after weeks of deliberation. And in considering, and finally adopting it, I experience a new-found joy. I breathe free’er, and I am not loath to say I respect my manhood more.” The vow lasted for nearly a year.
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Custer returned to Kansas in high spirits—Sheridan had promised to do all he could to get Custer a promotion—but the dullness of life on a frontier post without Indians to fight soon had him bored again. He considered resigning from the Army but decided to ask for a leave instead; he would go East to see what his prospects in civilian life might be before resigning his commission. He would take along some western mining stock to sell.

After settling Libbie in Monroe, Michigan, Custer went to New York in 1871, where to his delight he found that he had not been forgotten. As far as he could tell, everyone of any importance in the city fawned upon him. August Belmont offered him a position. The Astors thought he was marvelous. He attended dinner parties that began at half past seven and lasted until 2
A.M.
and included countless courses of the rarest delicacies. At one banquet he sat between Horace Greeley, editor of the New York
Tribune,
and Bayard Taylor, the writer; Whitelaw Reid, on the staff of the
Tribune,
and Charles A. Dana, owner of the New York
Sun,
were also at the table, along with the Wall Street banker-poet E. C. Stedman, who told Custer he was the beau ideal of the Chevalier Bayard. Custer sold his mining stock for a fat profit and went to Saratoga for the racing season. New York Democrats again held out the promise of a glittering political career. Everyone congratulated him on his great victory on the Washita. Custer, modest as always, said it was nothing.

As usual, Custer wrote page after page to Libbie, describing his triumphs in high society. During the Civil War, when he was in the field and she was in Washington, she had delighted in writing him about her flirtations. Now it was his turn. The women of New York, it seemed, could not leave him alone. He went around the city at night with his actor friend Lawrence Barrett (Custer even considered an acting career for himself but reluctantly decided against it), and between the two of them they knew every woman worth knowing in New York, or so they felt. Custer told Libbie about the hours he spent with the famous singer Clara Louise Kellogg, who gave him the use of her box at the Academy of Music. Custer assured Libbie that “Miss Kellogg is very dainty in regard to gentlemen.” “To show you how careful Miss Kellogg is in her conduct with gentlemen,” he added, “she told me she has never ridden with a gentleman alone but twice in New York, and on one of these occasions her coachman was along.”
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How Libbie put up with all this drivel is a wonder, especially since Custer also told her the story of a constant companion who had been, like him, a temporary bachelor. The companion regretted that his wife was coming home in a few days and bemoaned his fate. “Well, boys, school begins on Wednesday,” the gentleman sighed (and Custer wrote it all down for Libbie). “No more vacation pour moi. … I’ve had one good winter. I expect I shall never get the old lady to leave me alone for another.”
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A week later, Custer wrote Libbie about his own activities: “There is a beautiful girl, eighteen or nineteen, blonde, who has walked past the hotel several times trying to attract my attention. Twice for sport I followed her. She lives about opposite Mr. Belmont’s. She turns and looks me square in the face, to give me a chance to speak to her. I have not done so yet. At her house she enters, then appears at a window, raising this for any attention I may offer.”
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He went on and on like that. “One of the young ladies has evidently taken a strong fancy to your Bo,” Custer informed his wife. “She makes no effort at concealment. She said, ‘Oh why are you
married?’ … This fancy of hers was not induced by any advances of mine. She is not fast, is refined and educated. I really think she is a good girl but cannot control herself. She can cause my little one no uneasiness, no regret.”
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Custer assured Libbie that it did not matter that women could not stay away from him: “Girls needn’t try to get her dear Bo away from her, because he loves only her, and her always.”
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Libbie seemed to understand her man, even when he wrote her love letters in the third person, filling them with accounts of his flirtations, for she did not complain.

All the glitter and luxury of New York were not enough to turn Custer away from his beloved cavalry. After spending the spring and summer of 1871 in the city he decided to turn down the various offers he had received and remain in the Army. In September 1871 he and the 7th Cavalry were ordered from Fort Hays to the South. The regiment was broken into company and squadron units and assigned to occupation duty in seven southern states. Custer’s headquarters were in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he killed time by betting his mining stock profits on horse races. The duty was boring, infinitely so, and he longed to return to the Plains, which by now he realized had captured his heart. As much as Crazy Horse, he wanted to be on those vast spaces, where a man could ride all day without seeing a fence or another human being, where the wind blew free, where the air was always crisp and clean, the hunting always good, where a man could test himself against the elements and against the savages. Like Sherman, he knew that sooner or later the United States Government would have to take control of the Oglalas and he wanted to be there when the time came. That was, probably, the major reason he stayed in the Army even though Sheridan was unable to get him a promotion.

Crazy Horse meanwhile was in the biggest trouble of his life. As had been the case with Custer, Crazy Horse’s problems came because of his desire to be with the woman he loved; again like Custer, that desire cost him the equivalent of a court-martial and temporary disgrace.

At some point following the death of Hump (it is impossible to establish an exact date), Crazy Horse decided that he had been holding back with regard to Black Buffalo Woman long enough. Perhaps he figured that with the white soldiers gone from the Powder River forts he no longer had to take his vows as a shirt-wearer so seriously. Or perhaps Hump’s death caused him to reflect on his philosophy of life and decide that it was too short an existence to
pass up the joys of love. Possibly his desire for Black Buffalo Woman grew too strong for him to think about anything else. Whatever his motives and reasoning, Crazy Horse decided to make Black Buffalo Woman his wife.

By this time, Crazy Horse’s people had drifted northward and they were now camping near the Yellowstone River in Montana. There they associated with the wild Sioux of the north country, the Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, and Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas. These tribes had not yet been in extensive contact with the whites and they lived in the old ways without the white man’s goods. During the winters Crazy Horse’s people had only fifty or so lodges, but in the summers they were joined by large groups from Red Cloud Agency, swelling their camp to two hundred lodges or more. These were the Indians who later, in 1872, joined Crazy Horse and He Dog for the fight called “When They Chased the Crows Back to Camp.” In the summer of 1871 many Red Cloud Agency Indians had come north once again, No Water and Black Buffalo Woman among them.