Joseph M. Marshall III

by The Journey of Crazy Horse a Lakota History

  The warriors talked low among themselves as they watched the horses being led away by soldiers and Lakota men wearing blue coats. Other Lakota, including Red Cloud, waited on their horses and watched. This was a new feeling for the Crazy Horse - people. A Lakota warrior without his horse was like sunrise without sunset.

  Next, the lodges were pitched, and as the women worked, several white men walked among the people counting and marking on the papers they carried. White Hat Clark went to Crazy Horse and spoke through two men, Grabber and one called Garnier, both speaks-whites. The weapons were to be taken next, White Hat said. There was a silence as before when the horses were taken. And, as before, Crazy Horse was the first to give his rifle to White Hat. One long, silent, angry moment later, the warriors began to lay down their weapons.

  It was a time, that first afternoon at Camp Robinson, many - people remembered and talked about often. But, of course, it was not a good remembering. Almost in the same breath they wondered how it was up north and if the elk in the Shining Mountains would be fat this year.

  The soldier commander’s house was off to the right, in the direction Fast Thunder had disappeared. Suddenly Crazy Horse was being taken to another place. Perhaps Three Stars and Randall were waiting elsewhere. The surge of the men all around them wouldn’t let him turn.

  He was astonished, though not surprised. Many Sahiyela fighting men had been sent away to places where the whites imprisoned their enemies. Spotted Tail had been held in a place called Leavenworth. From there, he had returned with a new fear of the whites. Perhaps they wanted to send him away so that he would change his way of thinking as well, suggested his young wife. First, they wanted to send him to dance for the “great father.” Now they wanted to send him away to a place at the end of their world—all because they thought he wanted to kill Three Stars. Perhaps it was Grabber’s words put in his mouth by Red Cloud.

  There would be trouble. Soldiers were coming for him, it was reported, with wagon guns. If trouble started in the Cottonwood camp, too many people could get hurt. He had seen what those wagon guns were able to do. His new wife had a place in her father’s lodge, but Black Shawl would have no one if they came for him. So he decided to take her to the Spotted Tail camp. There, he could ask his uncle for help as well.

  So they rode away at a high lope. The watchers from Red Cloud rode away with news of their leaving, and down the trail, a group of riders led by No Water took after them. Crazy Horse took the lead rope of Black Shawl’s horse. With his uncle Little Hawk’s method he had used many times before, he let the horses walk up the hills and then ran them down slope. They outdistanced No Water and his men who pushed their horses without stopping until they killed two or three, it was said.

  At Spotted Tail, Crazy Horse hurried to the camp of Touch the Clouds where all was in uncertain turmoil. The women were striking their lodges and preparing to find safe places to hide, and the men were making ready for a fight. Word of trouble and fighting to come—Lakota against Lakota—had traveled quickly from Camp Robinson. When No Water appeared, a few of the younger Mniconju charged out to stop him and turned him away. He and his exhausted horses could do no more than head for the lodge of Spotted Tail himself.

  Lieutenant Lee, the soldier leader in charge at Spotted Tail’s agency, sent word that Crazy Horse must come to the soldier house. Crazy Horse rode out with Touch the Clouds and White Thunder, followed by Mniconju and Oglala. Spotted Tail and over a hundred of his young men met them on the trail. Lee arrived with Black Crow and Louie Bordeaux and was frightened seeing that he was between the Mniconju and Oglala on one side and Spotted Tail’s Sicangu on the other. There were shouts and threats hurled back and forth and weapons were brandished, until Crazy Horse raised a hand and a silence slowly fell over the gathering. Lee, now very frightened, told Crazy Horse that he must return to Robinson and make it good with the soldier leaders there.

  Spotted Tail waited and then spoke. It was far past the time to learn to live with the whites, he admonished. But there was no room for troublemakers at his agency. The sharp, scolding words were much like those the agents and soldier leaders often threw at the Lakota. Crazy Horse said nothing, then told Lieutenant Lee he would be ready to leave in the morning because he had to see to his sick wife first.

  He and Black Shawl spent the night in the lodge of Touch the Clouds. She sat up at every noise to his quiet assurances that young men were positioned all around outside to prevent trouble. Through the night, he sat against a willow chair, listening. There was movement all around, and voices, too. Young men came to the door—earnest, stalwart young men who were the next generation of warriors.

  “Lead us north, Uncle,” they said. “Take your family and we will travel with you. There is nothing but trouble here, bad trouble.”

  “There are good men here,” he replied, “but not enough to take care of the helpless ones.”

  The young men nodded sadly, and went away.

  So the night passed and the morning came. When the sun arose, he hurried to the soldier house to speak to Lieutenant Lee, to assure him that he had not changed his mind and was ready to speak with Randall to make things good. So, with Touch the Clouds, Swift Bear, and Black Crow along, they started out for Camp Robinson.

  The first group of blue-coated Lakota met them along the trail. They said nothing and formed a wide half-circle around Crazy Horse and the others. Further on, more blue-coated Lakota arrived and now they became a mob of more than sixty. It was then that Crazy Horse knew there was trouble.

  On the shore of the lake the people rose up and grabbed the rider, pulling him down from behind.

  Fast Thunder was lost in the crowd. So, too, were He Dog and Touch the Clouds. All around was the noise of running and scuffling as if men were pushing each other. Crazy Horse was pushed toward a square house made of logs, a strange place for Randall to be. Before he could help himself, he was through the open doorway. There was a bad smell. A man with dark hair and braids rose from a corner. Then he saw the iron bars.

  He spun on a heel and saw a man—Little Big Man—blocking the opening. Crazy Horse shoved the shorter man aside and tried to push past but almost immediately felt Little Big Man grab both his arms from behind. With a great effort, he pulled himself free and reached into the opening of his blanket for the knife. Outside, there were shouts of both soldiers and the Lakota.

  “Let me go!” he said to Little Big Man. “Let me go!”

  The man, the Oglala warrior who had ridden into battle with him, stood fast. Perhaps it was the blue coat of the soldier that had turned his heart. With a sudden swipe, Crazy Horse slashed the arm of the coat and immediately blood flowed, and Little Big Man jumped back. With a step, Crazy Horse was outside and there was movement everywhere. More hands grabbed at him from either side, brown hands holding him fast. The strident voice of a soldier yelled.

  From the middle of the confusion came a soldier, thrusting with the knife at the end of his rifle. Those near him heard Crazy Horse gasp and saw his knees begin to wobble. Brown hands were still holding his arms even as the soldier withdrew the long knife.

  “Let me go,” they heard him say quietly, “you’ve gotten me hurt.”

  Then he fell.

  He was covered with a red blanket on the floor of the post surgeon’s office. Opening his eyes, he tried to focus on the form above him, his father, Worm. Touch the Clouds sat cross-legged on the other side, head down. The room was dim, lit by a single lamp.

  Crazy Horse had protested when the men who carried him in tried to lay him on a cot, and so they lowered him to the floor. The surgeon gave him medicine to sleep and take away the pain. Touch the Clouds had been alone with him for much of the evening until Worm had arrived. Together, they had watched the slight rise and fall of the wounded man’s chest and listened to his shallow breathing. So they had waited, the powerful warrior and the skilled healer, and neither could do anything to fight against death, or to fight for the life of the man on the floor. />
  With great effort, the man under the red blanket lifted a hand, motioning his father to lean close. His voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper.

  “Tell the people they should not depend on me any longer.”

  The hand fell, the slight rising and falling of the chest stopped.

  Touch the Clouds reached over and laid a palm against the scars on the left side of his face, then withdrew his hand to wipe the tears sliding down his own face.

  Worm reached slowly down and laid his hands on the top of his son’s head. Since childhood, his son’s hair had always been soft and fine. Moving a hand down, he gently closed the eyes, and wept.

  So ended the journey.

  Twenty-one

  The old man and his wife drove their wagon through the darkness until they reached the edge of the soldier town and saw the team of horses and another wagon appear as dark shapes. The old woman began to sob softly again when she saw the soldier wagon in the darkness.

  The men waiting with the wagon were afraid; someone had pointed a gun at them, they said. Nervously, they helped to lift the body down and place it on the drag poles behind the travois horse Worm had brought along. One of the men said Lieutenant Lee ordered them to turn over the wagon and team, but Worm refused. His son had lived as a Lakota and his final journey across this Earth would be as a Lakota, across the drag poles pulled by a good horse, not in the bed of a white man’s wagon. The men unhitched the team and led them away, leaving the wagon.

  The old woman pulled aside the blanket covering his face and stroked his hair, then threw herself across his chest and loosed her pain and grief from the very depths of her soul, giving voice to the darkness all around.

  “My son! My son! What have you done? Why have you left us?”

  Worm waited, wiping his own tears. Anger and confusion were waiting in the night. The young men who wanted to follow his son back to the old life, who hoped he would lead them out, were honing their shock and disbelief into the sharp edge of revenge. In the lodges along Cottonwood Creek, the harangues for war mingled with the tears. Inside Camp Robinson, the soldiers and all the whites waited, wondering when anger would swoop in from the darkness. At the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies, they waited, too, wondering how many would carry out the attack.

  The old woman gathered herself together and gently caressed the pale face and lifted the blankets over his head. Worm helped the old woman onto the seat of the wagon and handed her the reins; then he mounted the travois horse. She shook the reins of the two sturdy horses and the wagon creaked. They moved off into the night to begin the saddest journey they would ever make.

  Worm wanted to move quickly. He knew that someone was out there. Whether white or Lakota, it didn’t matter. They were after the reward for the head of their son. Two hundred dollars.

  The sun was rising when they reached Beaver Valley. Already - people in the camp were awake. Many didn’t know what was happening, but when they saw Worm and his wife with the blanket-covered body, they knew.

  The daughter of Bad Heart Bull and two others had been waiting and helped the two old people. They took the travois horse and untied the poles. Worm warned two men who approached that they had been followed through the night and whoever it was may still be looking to cause trouble. The men went back for their weapons.

  The young women wept as they uncovered the body. They removed the shirt and washed away the dust and blood from his face, arms, and the wounds with fresh water from two buckets. They cut away the leggings and slipped off his moccasins and finished washing him. Then they prepared him for burial.

  Down the sides of his arms, they anointed him with red and wept again as they remembered his words, spoken not two months before: If anything should happen to me, paint my body red and put me in water and my life will return. If you do not, my bones will turn to stone and my joints to flint, but my spirit will rise.

  They brushed his hair and painted him as if for war, the yellow lightning mark over the left side of his face and the still visible scar from the pistol wound, then blue hailstones on his chest. To his left ear they tied a reddish brown stone.

  Worm next braided a narrow strip down the back of his head, and then cut it close to the scalp. The lock of hair would go into his spirit bundle. Finally, the dried body of a red-tailed hawk was tied to the top of his head.

  His mother helped wrap him in new deer hides, tenderly touching his cheek before his face was covered for the last time. Over the deer hides was sewn a buffalo hide with the hair side out. After they finished, Worm smudged them all with sage and sweet grass and sang an honoring song. Then the body was reloaded onto the drag poles.

  They led the horse to a meadow above Beaver Creek on the west side. A tree had been chosen by some of the men, a sturdy ash whose main branches were like the fingers of a hand. Across one of its forks, a scaffold had been built and onto it the men placed the body.

  That day and into the night, Worm and his wife sat beneath the tree, their clothes cut like ribbons to show they were mourning. Warriors came, among them the five who had pierced themselves in his honor at the Sun Dance. People brought food and ate together to show they shared the grief. Old men stood in front of the gathering and wept as they told stories of he who had left them—of his deeds, of his strengths and weaknesses, of his good quiet ways. What is to happen to us now? they asked.

  After sunset the following day, the scaffold was taken down and the body loaded once more onto the drag poles by warriors old and young, by those who had followed him and those who wished they could have. And the people watched as Worm and his wife led the travois horse holding the body of their son off into the darkness. It was their wish to do this final task alone.

  The old man and the old woman walked without fear across the land, for they knew it well. Neither did they fear death, for they knew it well, too. The other mother of their young man had left them before he did.

  Across meadows and dry creek beds they moved steadily, now and then stopping to rest briefly, and then finally to the base of a long slope. There, they rested once more, and then found a narrow trail that took them to their final destination.

  Sunrise found them back among the people at Beaver Creek. Worm paused to look across the land and went into the lodge that had been pitched for them. The old woman walked to a far hillside and found a rock to sit on. There, she sat looking across the valley until the sun went down.

  No one asked the old man or the old woman where they had taken him because they knew that knowledge would go with them to their graves. But many could see that Worm carried the spirit bundle, and when he spoke of his son, there was one thing he would always say:

  Life is a circle. The end of one journey is the beginning of the next.

  Reflections:

  So That the People May Live

  I go forward under the banner of the people.

  I do this so that the people may live.

  —Lakota warrior philosophy

  Historians, anthropologists, and other outside observers of indigenous cultures on Turtle Island are still quick to conclude that the native tribes of the northern Plains were “war-like.” Catchy phrases may be exciting titles for papers or dissertations or effective leverage to gain funding for a sociological study, but they obscure reality. For example, one anthropologist stated that the Oglala Lakota would start a fight just to see if their bowstrings were taut enough. Such sensationalist pronouncements are nothing more than attempted validation for ethnocentric bias rather than an honest, objective conclusion as a consequence of unbiased study. And, unfortunately, one of the realities obscured is the Lakota warrior’s strong belief in serving one’s community and nation.

  The Lakota fighting man of old has long suffered from an image of flamboyance, aggressiveness, and mean-spiritedness. Those observers who didn’t or wouldn’t look beyond the feathers and war paint are responsible for foisting that image upon us. Behind the warrior’s accoutrements and habiliments was a man, a thinkin
g, feeling, mortal man with strengths, weaknesses, hopes, dreams, and a family and a strong sense of commitment to cause and country. During the recent initial fighting in Afghanistan, American combat casualties were publicized by the press, giving television viewers a personal insight. Consequently the serviceman became more than one of many wearing the same uniform because we heard his name, saw photos of his childhood, the names of his wife and children and parents, the length of his military service, and his particular job in the Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps. We found much in common. We connected him to ourselves, or a father, brother, or close friend who served and perhaps died in combat. But if we chose, for some reason, not to look beyond the camouflage uniform, he would be just another “serviceman,” an expendable commodity, a faceless extension of us, one of many sent to a strange land. But we - didn’t. We did extend our thoughts and prayers to his loved ones because he died in the service of his country; he died for us.

  If we as a nation have learned anything from the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and of the issues and challenges that have unfolded since, one of the lessons surely is that we are not immune to attack no matter how strong or invincible we think we are. Within the shadows of that lesson is one as equally important: we must be prepared to defend ourselves. The survival of any group, society, or nation is directly connected to its willingness to defend itself, and the willingness and ability to defend itself is dependent on the depth of the devotion of its people. That kind of devotion is not the exclusive domain of any one culture or race of people. It is a basic human characteristic augmented by cultural beliefs and traditions. Such devotion is part of the history of the Lakota people.