Joseph M. Marshall III

by The Journey of Crazy Horse a Lakota History

  As a child, Light Hair saw men ride into the encampment with deer, elk, and antelope either hanging across the back of a packhorse or on drag poles behind the horse. It was a mystery to him how exactly the hunters were able to find such game. Buffalo hunting was not so much a mystery. He’d watched a few chases from hilltops, horses and riders on the edges of an undulating black river, dust billowing, a low rumble coming across the prairie. It was the most exciting thing he had ever seen. He knew it was dangerous, but he couldn’t wait to chase buffalo. Now, under the tutelage of men like his uncle Little Hawk, he began to understand the practical aspects of hunting.

  Much of it was repetition and practice, which was not exciting at all. Sitting along a game trail waiting for a mountain black tail was almost as boring as shooting arrows through a rolling willow hoop. He would have preferred to watch the clouds billowing above the horizon, or the eagles circling overhead. But if he didn’t have the patience to wait for the deer to come, or the patience to wait for it to come into range of his bow, and if he missed when he had the right shot, his family would go hungry.

  “The family of a good hunter looks well fed,” he was told. “They wear fine clothes because he takes deer and elk so the women can tan the hides and sew them into shirts and dresses and make moccasins. The family of a poor hunter is thin, with worn clothes because there are no new hides to sew. What do you want everyone to say about how you provide for your family?”

  So Light Hair took his lessons seriously.

  Some lessons had nothing to do with improving his physical endurance or distinguishing between elk and deer hoofprints. They were nonetheless just as important.

  One afternoon Light Hair spotted a hare resting beneath a clump of sagebrush well within range of his bow. The teacher took the bow away. “Run,” he said, “chase it and catch it with your hands.”

  Light Hair put down his weapon and did as he was told, or tried. The hare was off and running in a heartbeat and out of sight before the boy had run ten strides. He returned complaining that he couldn’t catch the animal.

  “But it’s only a hare,” replied the teacher, “and you are a human being. You are the hunter.”

  Like all boys caught in such a predicament, Light Hair humbly reasoned that he couldn’t bring down the hare without his bow and arrows.

  “True,” said the teacher. “Remember that we all have weaknesses and strengths. Sometimes the hare will win, sometimes you. Even the wolf fails more often than he wins, but he doesn’t stop. He has great fangs, he can smell a trail two days old, and he can hear you over the next hill. But his real strength is endurance. He never quits.”

  As he was learning the skills necessary to hunt, Light Hair was also learning that the hunter had much in common with the hunted. We all live to sustain the life of others, he was told. The grass feeds off the earth; the rabbits, buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope feed off the grass, and wolves, foxes, and men feed on them. In the end, the hunters feed the earth when the life of even the mightiest hunter comes to an end. To acknowledge this practical and spiritual connection, Lakota hunters performed a simple ceremony. Light Hair was taught to offer a bundle of prairie sage to acknowledge the gift of life the animal had given, whether it was a squirrel or an elk.

  As the days passed he unknowingly attracted the interest and curiosity of a man called High Back Bone. He was a Mniconju with an Oglala wife, and he liked what he saw in the shy Light Hair. Perhaps it was the boy’s quiet determination or his innate humility.

  High Back Bone himself was a quiet man, not given to pursuing the path of glory, but he was deeply committed to achieving the status of wica, the complete man. The complete man embodied the best qualities of the hunter and the fighting man. Though all men necessarily filled roles of both provider and protector—the hunter/warrior—not everyone could achieve the highest ideals for both callings. High Back Bone was one of the few.

  High Back Bone was a leader of fighting men, muscular and broad shouldered, exuding the confidence of a man who not only had physical strength but also a lifetime of experience and accomplishment. He knew that Little Hawk and the Light Hair’s other teachers had taught him a variety of physical skills, but had also laid the foundation for an important quality that would stand him in good stead throughout his life: self-confidence. Most important, he also saw in the boy the proverbial stillness of deep water. The day he visited the lodge of Crazy Horse and asked to take the light-haired boy under his wing was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. From the first time High Back Bone rode out of the camp with Light Hair at his side, the future of the Oglala Lakota rode with them.

  The Oglala had been slowly pushing westward from the Black Hills before Light Hair was born. By the time he was seven, there was a consistent Lakota presence as far west as Elk Mountain at the northern tip of the Medicine Bow Mountains, and north into the Powder River country east of the Shining Mountains. Buffalo and pronghorn antelope were plentiful on the prairies, as were the elk and deer in the mountains. All were essential to survival and comfort. The Snakes, also known as the - Eastern Shoshoni, had prior claim to the lands near Elk Mountain. Likewise, the Crow, who called themselves Absaroka, long roamed the Powder River region. Those ancient Lakota enemies grudgingly gave way but only because they were outnumbered. Numerical advantage was the basis for strength. A willingness to fight added to it, and when the Lakota did fight and win, their victories stayed in the minds of those they defeated. They were not better than their enemies, simply stronger. And Light Hair would learn where that strength came from.

  High Back Bone reminded the boy that he was born in the Year a Hundred Horses Were Taken. In a daring raid on a Snake encampment, a handful of Lakota warriors swooped in and drove off a hundred horses without losing a single man or horse. Perhaps it was a sign that he was born in a year designated by warrior accomplishments. Every man was a hunter and every man was a warrior. A few warriors set themselves apart with their exploits on the battlefield. Such men seemed to be born to the calling, more than others. High Back Bone sensed that in his slender, light-haired charge. The stillness of deep water.

  High Back Bone’s choice did not go unnoticed. A man with his reputation might have been expected to pick the son of an influential family, the kind of association that would enhance High Back Bone’s standing in the community and in the warrior societies. More than a few men were puzzled over his selection of the light-haired son of a humble medicine man. On the other hand, Crazy Horse’s wives were the sisters of Spotted Tail, an important man among the Sicangu. Perhaps, some said, High Back Bone selected the nephew of Spotted Tail, rather than the son of Crazy Horse. But the Mniconju paid no heed to such opinions. If anyone would have asked him, he would have told them, but no one did.

  A broad-shouldered man with serious, chiseled features and a shy slender boy with wavy brown hair were an unlikely pair, but they became a familiar sight in the Hunkpatila camp. Light Hair emulated his teacher from the way he rode his horse to how he wore a quiver of arrows across the small of his back. The boy was a willing student and never failed to attempt to do anything High Back Bone asked him to do. He was slowly being shaped into a warrior in much the same way the fire-cured bow is made.

  The preferred process for curing a wood stave for a bow was to cut it in winter when the sap was down, hang it high in the lodge beneath the smoke hole, and simply allow it to cure for five years. But the Lakota had made their living and protected themselves with the bow for countless generations and had learned effective shortcuts out of necessity. Using fire, it was possible to cure a green stave in a matter of days.

  The summer of his eighth year, when the Hunkpatila were encamped near the southern fork of the Powder River, Light Hair and High Back Bone found a stand of young ash trees guarding a spring in a gully. A straight tree a little taller than the boy was selected. Before he instructed the boy to chop it down, High Back Bone smudged it with sage and offered tobacco bundles to the tree to acknowledge its life and th
e sacrifice it was about to make. With a hand axe the boy cut the tree down, marking the bottom. They hauled it to their camp where a fire with a deep bed of coals was already burning.

  The slender stave, no wider than a man’s wrist, was stripped of its bark and hung over the fire. At appropriate intervals it was turned so that it dried uniformly.

  “The fire is like life when it strengthens a man through hard times,” a bow maker would point out.

  Over a bed of hot coals the fresh stave, mostly white in color, slowly turned a deep yellow as it became harder and harder. After the fire-cure came the tools: a hand axe, several knives, a flat piece of sandstone, and elk antler tines. An outline was carefully drawn on the stave to mark the bottom end, and to show the excess wood to be removed with the axe. That done, a knife was used for the next phase of shaving off excess wood.

  The bow maker watched his pupil closely, with a patient word here and there, making sure the bow was taking shape as it should. Then he took the bow and refined it, explaining his methods as he worked. Finally, the bow had the desired shape and design. In the exact middle it was two fingers wide from side to side and tapered away to each end, which was about the size of a man’s little finger. From the top to bottom profile it gradually tapered away to each end.

  On the top near the tip a single notch was carved in one side for the bowstring. On the bottom two notches were carved, one on each side. Just as it is important to mark the bottom of the tree so that as a finished bow it remains in line with the flow of life, upward from the Earth, when the bow is kept in its natural direction, it is less likely to break. Strength comes from balance, as all bow makers know. The bow stands on its feet, bow makers are quick to point out, like humans do.

  With the antler tine the bow maker rubbed the wood, giving it a smooth sheen as well as closing the grains to give it more strength. With the addition of a sinew string the weapon became a force to be reckoned with. Shaping a stave into a bow was the story of any boy’s journey on the path to becoming a warrior.

  High Back Bone watched the slender boy and wondered what fires of adversity lay ahead on his journey. Of one thing he was certain: the boy would become strong as a result, in the same way the ash stave became harder as it dried over the coals. The fires of adversity, as High Back Bone knew, were already smoldering along a wide, flat river far to the south known as the Shell.

  The Shell River flowed north out of the Medicine Bow Mountains, turned east on the sagebrush plains, then southeasterly as it entered the short grass prairies until it emptied itself into the Great Muddy River after a slight turn to the northeast. People traveled west along this river, though they were calling it the Platte and then the North Platte. The corridor along the river was called the Oregon Trail. The travelers were a trickle the two summers past, but now the trickle grew to a thin but steady stream. These were a people strange to the Lakota, though not unknown. Their kind had been encroaching on Lakota lands for several generations, perhaps for nearly a hundred years, though only a little at a time.

  These travelers along the Shell were from the nation of whites to the east beyond the Great Muddy River. They had already established outposts mostly on the fringes of Lakota lands, and traveled up and down the Great Muddy in large smoke-belching houseboats. A trading settlement northeast of the Medicine Bow Mountains along the Shell became an outpost called Fort Laramie. Soldiers in blue coats came to the fort, carrying knives as long as a man’s arm. Thus they became known as the Long Knives. And they and the travelers heading west along the Oregon Trail were the first wisps of smoke from the smoldering embers that would grow into flames of adversity for all the Lakota, and for Light Hair.

  In the summer of his ninth year Light Hair’s Hunkpatila encampment moved southeast to the area northwest of Fort Laramie. They were curious about the stories coming from the southern encampments that seemed difficult to believe—stories of lines of wagons pulled by teams of cattle, mules, and horses moving west along the Shell, not unlike the migration of large buffalo herds. Men, women, and children rode in the covered wagons and many walked as well.

  The corridor on either side of the Shell River had been a trail for elk and buffalo for thousands of years. Human beings used it as well. The first whites in the area were trappers and mountain men, who learned of the trail from the Ponca people to the east and the Kiowa and Blue Clouds, called the Arapaho by many, to the south as well. When one ant sets off on a trail, others follow.

  Light Hair accompanied High Back Bone to the Shell. There they joined over a hundred other curious men and boys sitting on the hills and ridges north of the river to watch a line of wagons plodding westward. The stories were true.

  Amusement was the predominant state of mind. Men and boys stood, sat, or reclined in the grass and among the rocks on the hills. There were many questions and much speculation. Where were these people going? And why did they obviously leave behind their homes? Some of the older men told alarming stories connected with whites. The whites, they said, likely carried illnesses that were very dangerous. The Kiowa far south of the Shell had lost half of their people in less than two months to disease brought among them by whites, it was said. Perhaps as many as four thousand Kiowa had died, it was said, and this only the past summer.

  The Lakota themselves had suffered. The Sicangu living near the Great Muddy had lost over a thousand to the running-face sickness, called smallpox, just over ten years earlier. One of the large houseboats came up the Great Muddy, stopping at various landings to trade or take on wood. People and goods from the boat had come among the few Sicangu who met the boat to trade. Very soon after the boat departed upriver smallpox swept through several encampments. People became ill, their faces and chests marked with pustules. Death came in a matter of days. Though medicine men worked day and night, they were powerless against the illness that moved like a wind-driven fire. The only possible cause of the sudden and terrifying outbreak was contact with the people and goods from the houseboat. In the autumn, word came down from the upper reaches of the Great Muddy that the People of the Earth Lodges, the Mandan, had been all but wiped out by the same running-face sickness. They had also traded with the houseboat.

  The men and boys who heard the stories for the first time stared somberly from the hills and ridges at the line of wagons and people. For some, curiosity turned into a sense of foreboding. Perhaps something should be done, a few suggested. Perhaps they should be prevented from coming into Lakota lands. In spite of their concerns, the Lakota men did nothing more than watch. Most, if not all, of them had never seen a white man up close.

  Light Hair watched as well, but he didn’t know what to think. The distant wagons and people yielded no specific features. Though some of the Lakota described white men as having beards, it meant nothing to those on the hill because the people in the wide valley below were small, shadowy outlines. On either side of Light Hair were men and boys with brown skin, long hair flowing in the breeze or worn in tight braids, most of them dressed in leggings, breechclouts, and moccasins due to the warm weather. Dozens of pairs of curious or intense dark eyes fixed on the spectacle below. He knew them, who they were and what they were. The people below, although he was aware there were men, women, and children, were nothing more than distant shapes moving slowly to some unknown destination for unknown reasons.

  Light Hair had never seen a wagon. Canpagmiyanpi—“Wood that is rolled,” they were called. No doubt difficult to move since four horned cattle in line two by two were needed to pull them. He returned to the Hunkpatila encampment with High Back Bone, saying little and nothing at all about the wagons and the shadowy travelers.

  Four

  One fact of life for the Lakota was movement. Clouds, wind, the buffalo—all were in constant motion. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn also lived a never-ending cycle. Life itself moved from infancy, to childhood, to adulthood, and to old age, and all the various layers of life also had a beginning, and an ending.

  Like most Lakota
boys approaching the age of twelve, Light Hair was a proficient hunter. The game trails and seasonal migration habits of white tail and black tail deer and elk in every region in which the Hunkpatila people pitched their lodges—from the Black Hills to the Powder River country—were common knowledge. Like all hunters, Light Hair learned to sit motionless in a driftwood blind along a creek for the better part of an afternoon waiting for a white tail to move within the effective killing range of his bow, which was as far as he could throw a stone with all his might. He knew to cut the jugular in the animal’s neck and the femoral arteries on either side of the back legs so that the warm carcass would bleed out profusely and so that the fresh meat wouldn’t spoil.

  His skill with the bow was approaching the expert level. More than a few grasshoppers on the fly fell to the deadly flick of his arrows. Though he was not much larger than he was at the age of ten, there was the confidence of a man in the way he handled a weapon and in the manner in which his eyes appraised everything around him. More and more there was the stillness of a deep pool. If the taunts of other boys about his light hair touched a nerve, he didn’t give them the satisfaction of a reaction. Perhaps it was this characteristic that drew a thin, gangly boy to him, a boy with dark, inquisitive eyes.

  Lone Bear and Light Hair became close friends and shared the usual activities of boyhood. They ranged far beyond the encampment in pursuit of adventures small and large as they yearned for the excitement they knew was waiting for them as young men. On their horses they patrolled the perimeters of the camp or hid among rocks on a hilltop to watch for enemies, wishing, almost hoping, that one would appear so they could be the first to spread the alarm, or charge forward to meet the threat.