Joseph M. Marshall III

by The Journey of Crazy Horse a Lakota History

  He was a modest man, a healer. Crazy Horse was his name, the same as his father’s and which was passed down to him. They were a humble family, part of the Hunkpatila band1 of the Oglala Lakota. She was Mniconju Lakota. Their children thus carried the blood of the Oglala and Mniconju Lakota people. The little one, this new life, this new hope for the people, squirmed in his arms and Crazy Horse felt the promise of goodness and strength within the tiny bundle he held.

  So the father sang a welcoming song for his new son.

  Thus the journey began.

  Two

  The father of an infant boy would sometimes say to his wife and to all the women in his family, “He is yours for the first years of his life.” Even if it were not spoken, it was the way things were done. And so for those first important years when a child plants the roots of his being that will support him throughout life, he is left entirely to his mother and grandmothers, not to mention all the mothers and grandmothers in the tiyospaye, the community, who might take a liking to him.

  For most of the first year of his life the son of Crazy Horse and Rattling Blanket Woman stayed quite contentedly within the protective folds of his cradleboard, which, if not strapped to his mother, was propped within easy reach. Sleep was mostly what he did, bound snugly inside the portable cradle. And even after the boy began to venture beyond the cradleboard and his mother’s immediate reach, his older sister hovered closely by watching over him like a hawk. Beyond her were the women and girls of the community, the second line of mothers and grandmothers for all the children. So the boy, like all Lakota children, grew with the reassuring knowledge that someone would always be there to see to his needs, even if it was only to take him by the hand and guide him back to his mother’s lodge. Just as important, because his mother and all the women in his immediate environment nurtured him with gentleness, it was one of the first virtues he learned.

  The boy also learned patience. Most of his whims and impulses were indulged as he explored the limits of his environment more and more, driven by his childish curiosity and inquisitiveness. Except to keep him from harming himself, the others did not dissuade him from any path he chose. Consequently he learned small but important lessons: the prairie cactus grew sharp thorns and therefore must be avoided; it was impossible to climb the side of a tipi; all grandmothers were good for at least one handful of freshly washed chokecherries; and so on.

  The longer and stronger his legs grew, the wider he roamed in the village, and his world broadened. He played among the meat-drying racks and watched the women scraping hides stretched out on the ground, or he helped a grandmother carry firewood to her lodge. Curiosity drew him toward the horse herd often grazing just beyond the outskirts of the village, and he was more than a few times warned away by an older boy posted to watch the herd. Or he played the Keep-the-Hoop game where he joined a noisy gaggle of boys rolling a large willow hoop with long sticks, trying to keep it away from everyone else as long as possible. Fun was the obvious reward, but of course the game also developed quickness and coordination as well as determination. It also taught each participant to depend on himself. Thus the son of Crazy Horse and Rattling Blanket Woman was no different than any Lakota child, except in one way.

  Every Lakota baby was born with thick, shiny black hair that stayed black for most of adulthood. But the hair of the son of Crazy Horse seemed to grow lighter even as he lost his baby fat, which happened to him quicker than in most children. To his mother and the other women in his life it was an endearing characteristic, although they worried that it would prove to be troublesome for him later in life. Outside the reach of his sharp ears he was referred to as Jiji Kin, or “The Light-Haired One.”

  “Jiji Kin wanlaka he?” someone would ask. “Have you seen the Light-Haired One?”

  To his face he was simply called Jiji, or Light Hair.

  “Huyu we, Jiji, wanna inunkin kte,” his mother or sister would say. “Come, Light Hair, you will go to bed now.”

  Brown hair was not unknown among the Lakota, though it was much more common for girls. But when a boy had brown hair and the color of his skin was also lighter than usual, it did mean trouble. By giving him a name that called attention to an obvious physical characteristic, Light Hair’s mother wisely made it less of an issue for him to face as an older child.

  Four winters came and went in those first and formative years—a time as carefree as the adults in Light Hair’s world could make it. In spring the people moved from sheltered winter camps to find good grazing to fatten the horses after a winter of thin, snow-covered grass. Summers brought several villages together. So the Hunkpatila winter camp of twenty families, about a hundred people, grew to nearly a hundred families and about four hundred people in summer. For Light Hair those factors were not important, only that the number of his playmates increased as well as the number of doting mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. More playmates meant more interesting adventures.

  Light Hair was fed when he was hungry, his scrapes and bumps treated and healed, and his disappointments and losses softened by the indulgent attention of the females in his extended family. His father, Crazy Horse, and the other males of the family were always there on the periphery of his world, but they were busy working to provide and protect. As yet Light Hair was not fully aware that their path would be his, only that as he grew older he felt more inclined to seek his father’s approval and was becoming more and more curious about him. It was a subtle change that the women allowed, albeit a little sadly, because the carefree boy was beginning to leave their world. He was taking the first hesitant steps onto the path he would follow for the rest of his life. His mother and all the grandmothers had done their part by teaching him the strength he would need to travel that path. Since before anyone could remember it had been said “a boy will learn the way of the warrior from his fathers and grandfathers after he learns courage from his mothers and grandmothers.”

  So the women, in their way, gave the boy to his father and grandfathers. There was no definable moment in which the next phase of the journey came, as much as a traveler doesn’t know that it is a certain place at which he must go from a walk to a trot—only that it is time to do so. The men in the family simply began to give the boy more and more attention.

  There came a day when someone handed Light Hair a bow and a quiver of arrows suited to his size and strength. It was the first tangible sign of the life that lay ahead, and his mother smiled because she was proud her son would follow the path of the hunter and warrior.

  After the gift of the bow came the gift of knowledge. Light Hair instinctively knew what to do with the bow. Every child, for that matter, understood the bow was a weapon, significant enough that every man, young or old, carried one or always kept one within easy reach in every household. Light Hair was not left solely to his boyish whims to form his relationship with the weapon, however. It was that significant to the life of the Lakota. So, beginning with his father, various adult males taught him the proper way to carry it, care for it, and shoot it effectively. Careful and patient instruction from the knowledge and experience of seasoned hunters and warriors turned the gift of the bow into the gift of change. Light Hair couldn’t look at the process in those real and figurative perspectives, of course. For him the immediate impact was in ownership of the bow and the connection it had with the adult males in his family and in the community. Something important was happening and he felt good, he felt different.

  The words “He is yours for the first few years of his life” must have seemed to his mother to have been spoken only days earlier. Those first few years passed much too quickly for her. Her son, her only son as it would turn out, was no longer exclusively hers. Perhaps she sensed that she would not be there to see him fulfill his life’s path.

  Change came into Light Hair’s life in yet another way. She who gave him life lost her own. In the perception of a child time can often be irrelevant, especially in a culture that was not given to measuring it. He was too young
to understand that death is a part of life. Later he would realize that his mother’s time on Earth had been much too short.

  Perhaps Light Hair could not comprehend what had happened to his mother, but he could certainly perceive that all of the constant realities that were his mother—her voice, her reassuring touch, her busy hands at work, her physical presence—were suddenly no longer part of his daily routine. Perhaps he wondered at the sudden attention directed at him and his sister and their father and about the inordinate amount of weeping among adults. Something had happened that caused unusual behavior. Older women relatives took him and his sister into their homes and acted in an uncharacteristically somber manner, all the while treating them with utmost love and respect.

  Such behavior was not totally unfamiliar to children. Death was part of their environment. Adult men were killed in battle or during a hunt. The elderly died of old age and people died from illness or women in childbirth. Although children were not excluded from the rituals and ceremonies surrounding mourning and burial, they were not directly involved unless, of course, someone from their immediate family or a close relative had died.

  Few children would know exactly what to do or how to behave. Light Hair and his sister could do no more than react to the mood of the adults and grieve in the same way everyone was. One day they were taken to a secluded area and to a long bundle atop a platform on four poles, a bundle of buffalo hide. There they left tiny bundles of prairie sage tied to the poles and an old man sang an honoring song. From the platform hung some small personal possessions they recognized as belonging to their mother. Perhaps it was at that moment they might have realized somehow their mother would never come home from wherever she had gone.

  So she left Light Hair when he was at that turn in his new journey that would take him beyond those first formative years. She gave him life, thus filling what Wakantanka had created her to do, and she gave him a foundation on which to build the balance of his life, thus fulfilling the expectation held for all Lakota mothers. Her work on Earth was wholly fulfilled, it seemed, because she gave her son all that he would need: life and a foundation.

  Losing one’s birth mother was not unknown among the Lakota, but in reality there were no orphans. Other mothers and grandmothers filled in because they had always been there.

  The seasons did not stop, however. Sun rose and traveled its daily journey. Moon graced the night without missing its more than ancient cycle. In the Hunkpatila encampment life went on. There came a day when Crazy Horse and his woman relatives made a feast and invited everyone to eat, and they talked of the woman who had been a shadowy guest in all their grieving hearts and in so doing let her rise from their grief into the light of the next life. And so, finally, she was on her next journey.

  More seasons turned. Leaves colored and fell, the autumn winds grew colder until they became the gusty breath of winter blowing the snow as it fell across the land. Spring came once again with its ancient promise of renewal, then summer with the fulfillment of that promise. And one day Light Hair and his sister were given their new mothers.

  They were sisters, quiet and polite as they walked into the circle of their new life as the wives of Crazy Horse and the mothers of his daughter and son. They were the younger sisters of a man renowned among his own Sicangu people, one whose name was spoken often in reference to courage and leadership: Spotted Tail. Even Light Hair had heard the name, though unaware as yet that his new uncle, a tall, stalwart man, would influence his journey on this Earth.

  A man having more than one wife at a time was not unusual among the Lakota. Such an arrangement had to be worth the added responsibility, however. Now and then a man would take his wife’s widowed sister into the family circle, for example. Crazy Horse, though of modest means, was much in demand as a healer and he had as much of an obligation to the community as he did toward his children. Thus a new wife was a necessity, and two—in his case—would turn out to be a blessing for his children.

  Crazy Horse had told Light Hair and his sister that they would have new mothers. It was a tentative declaration though, not in the sense that it might not happen, but stemming from a feeling of trepidation. There was the real fear that Light Hair and his sister would not accept their father’s new wives as their new mothers. But although there was uncertainty on both sides of the new family, day by day they grew to tolerate one another. Tolerance, in the end, was the mother of acceptance and in time the sisters of Spotted Tail became, in practice and in the heart, mothers to the children of their husband.

  Crazy Horse was relieved, for he did have the welfare of his children in mind when he offered gifts to the family of Spotted Tail. His duties as a medicine man kept him busy and away from the home and he knew that his new wives were thought of as good young women well taught in the art of keeping a home. And like all Lakota women, they knew their eventual calling was to be mothers whether the children they cared for and raised were only born to them in the heart. As for Light Hair and his sister, the emptiness that had been in their lodge began to slowly fill in with soft voices and laughter and the sense of purpose and comforting presence only a mother could provide.

  The lodge of Crazy Horse became whole again, not because the two new wives and mothers replaced her who had been the first mother, but they came with their own presence and their own ways. There was still a sense that someone should be there in the hearts of the children she had left behind. Yet there was the growing sense that beside the empty space was the reality of mother embodied in two. The specific memories of she who had given them life began to fade and take much of the pain with them. They would always have memories of her, but over time they would grow more into feelings than images.

  Three

  Light Hair knew his father was different from other men because he spent many days and nights away from his family. He knew he was curing fevers or treating broken legs or rattlesnake bites, and he also helped families prepare for burials when there was a death.

  The boy didn’t completely understand all about his father. But he did know that Crazy Horse didn’t hunt like the other men or go to war. A father who was a medicine man and didn’t do the things all men did caused the boy to feel all the more different. He wondered most of all why he looked different than other boys. Each summer gathering when several encampments came together, he always looked for other boys with light hair like his. To his dismay, the only other children with light hair were girls. Older boys also noticed and teased him by pulling on his breechclout—their way of suggesting that he should be wearing dresses instead.

  Light Hair was about to begin a journey that, in the end, would make him even more different than the boys who teased him mercilessly. But first, he would become a hunter.

  Hunting was the Lakota lifeblood. Like the wolf, fox, eagle, mountain lion, and hawk, the Lakota were hunters. At age seven, Light Hair realized more and more that hunting was the way to have fresh meat, and deer and elk hides for clothing, and buffalo hides for lodge coverings. He also sensed that he would be part of the process somehow.

  Like all boys, Light Hair was becoming skilled with his bow. He had progressed to a stouter bow, stronger than the first he was given—one made in proportion to his size and strength. His favorite game had changed as well. Shooting arrows through a rolling willow hoop had become too easy and boring, so his uncle Little Hawk and a few other men introduced him to a new game—shooting at grasshoppers. The rules were simple: Walk along the prairie with an arrow on the bowstring, and shoot at a grasshopper when it flew. A rolling hoop was a much easier target. A grasshopper was about the size of his little finger and flew erratically, and fast. The men would suppress smiles when, at first, the boy was unable to get off a shot. Before he could pull back the string the insect was back in the grass. But as he learned to hold his bow ready, he could send an arrow in the general direction of the flitting grasshopper. Shooting at grasshoppers was not boring. It was, he learned, a very humbling experience.

  As t
he summer wore on, his reaction became faster and more and more his arrows only narrowly missed. Grasshoppers, an old man told him, have much to teach. Many Lakota hunters bring down rabbits or deer because grasshoppers taught them how to shoot with unerring marksmanship. If you want to sharpen your shooting eye, they said, or if you ever think you are as good as you’ll ever be, chase grasshoppers.

  But fortunately for Light Hair there was more to his training than humiliation by grasshoppers. Across the prairies, through brushy creek bottoms and up mountain slopes, he followed his mentors, and each kind of terrain offered ample opportunities to learn. Whitetail deer, he noticed, left a nearly perfect, matted circle in the grass where they had been resting the day away. They lay in hiding most of the day and grazed at night. A wolf’s paw print was almost as large as a grown man’s hand. After sundown, warm air flowed up from the floor of a valley; therefore, the best place for a night camp was high on the slope.

  Lying beneath the branches of a pine tree, Light Hair watched a young coyote approach. “Stare at him,” whispered the teacher. “Stare at his eyes.” Light Hair did as he was told. The coyote was about to pass when he stopped and turned to stare back directly at the boy hidden among the branches, and then fled.

  “No matter how far, the eyes have the power to draw the eyes,” said the teacher. “A good thing to know when scouting in Crow lands. Do not stare at the enemy’s eyes too long. He will feel your stare. He will know you are looking. Just as the coyote did.”

  Light Hair’s teachers were not loud, vociferous men. They made no speeches espousing grandiose philosophy. Their approach involved action more than words. They took him away from the comfortable confines of his boyhood environment and into the realm of their knowledge and experience. They introduced him to the various dimensions of his world. Day by day he learned its rhythms, its moods, its colors and textures, and he began to form his own experiences, build his own knowledge, and develop his own intimacy with it. What he thought was merely endless space had its own life, its own spirit. He began to appreciate that the grasshopper had something to teach him. More importantly he began to understand that, like the grasshopper, he had a place in the world around him.