Turn the Stars Upside Down: The Last Days and Tragic Death of Crazy Horse

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Turn the Stars Upside Down: The Last Days and Tragic Death of Crazy Horse Page 6

by Terry C. Johnston


  “You remind Crazy Horse,” the lieutenant snapped again in that clipped, even cadence of someone attempting to keep a lid on his anger, “he did not surrender to General Crook. He surrendered to me. That means Crazy Horse and He Dog and some of their headmen will go to Washington City, as I say, and then perhaps we’ll talk about where to put his agency. For the time being, his people—every man, woman, and child—will stay right here at Red Cloud’s agency for the Oglala.”

  After waiting until Billy had translated that to the stone-faced warriors, Clark continued, “His surrender means that Crazy Horse will take his orders from me and from Red Cloud. If I say he goes to Washington City, he goes. If Red Cloud tells Crazy Horse to camp in a certain place, then that’s where Crazy Horse will camp. Do he and his chiefs understand they have surrendered to me?”

  The officer and Billy waited until after he had translated in Lakota. Crazy Horse sat motionless for several moments of reflection. When he finally did whisper to He Dog, Garnett translated.

  “Crazy Horse gives you his word as a warrior that he won’t take up the gun against the soldiers, not no more,” Billy declared. “He will listen to what Red Cloud has to say. To what Three Stars and White Hat say too. But … he says … each Lakota man must make up his own mind for himself.”

  “What?” Clark whined. “Every man makes up his mind for himself?”

  With a nod, Billy said, “That’s their way. Each man—”

  “You tell Crazy Horse that he better do a damn good job to help his people make up their minds,” Clark interrupted, his teeth gritted together as he rose and dusted off his rump once he was standing. “It’s for their own good, you know, Garnett. This surrender is all for their own good.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pehingnunipi Wi

  MOON OF SHEDDING PONIES, 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  CHEYENNE.

  Indian and Deadwood News.

  CHEYENNE, May 19.—General Crook with Major Randall and Lieutenant Schuyler leave here in the morning for the agencies, where the final grand council will be held, which must be simply a formality, as the disarmament of the Indians renders their consent to any proposition easily obtained. A small band of Cheyennes arrived at Red Cloud Wednesday, bringing in some two hundred horses. The Indians are convinced that the government is acting in good faith, and are evincing a like fidelity to the terms of the surrender.

  He was a prisoner now.

  Even though he did not wear the iron cuffs and shackles bound by heavy chain, Crazy Horse knew he was nonetheless a prisoner. With no weapons, nor a horse to hunt the buffalo or track down an enemy … what good was he to his people now?

  How many days had it been since he brought the Northern People into Red Cloud’s agency, this cluster of log buildings that had been raised in the bottomground near the foot of the bluffs, crouched beside the narrow and meandering White Earth River. This was where the wasicus and their soldiers kept the food and blankets behind tall stockade walls. Stringy, greasy meat for those hungry bellies he could no longer fill with fat buffalo. Thin blankets for these spring nights so cold with the wind and rain.

  No more buffalo. Now his people had only beef and pork to eat, a little flour to make their fry bread. It was not food to make a man strong … but—why did a man have to be strong anymore?

  His old friend Red Cloud, and his uncle, Spotted Tail, too, they had grown fat eating the wasicus’ food … while his own people came here lean and starving because they had been herded and harried by the army throughout the winter and down into the spring. How could some people grow fat by doing bad, and others go hungry for doing what was right? As often as he looked at the plump faces of the agency Oglala, and the famine-etched faces of his own Northern People, Crazy Horse refused to make himself over into a wasicu the way Red Cloud and Spotted Tail had done.

  In their eyes, on their faces, it wasn’t a hard thing to see—these subtle differences in Red Cloud, in his uncle too. Eight summers after Red Cloud gave up the fight … and it had been just as long since the white man made Spotted Tail a prisoner. The fight was gone out of them. The wasicu had broken them. It was clear these two old chiefs realized that Crazy Horse alone could see they were no longer the strong leaders they had once been. And Crazy Horse knew they resented him for it.

  White Hat and his soldiers had taken their guns to the Soldier Town erected nearby, just west of the agency. And most of the Oglala horses had been driven south. Some said to be taken away on the white man’s iron horse, perhaps sold to wasicu ranchers and farmers. Even the horses of the Northern People would now become something so foreign to their old way of life. Weapons gone; ponies pulling the white man’s plows and wagons; and the Crazy Horse people with nothing in their bellies but the sort of food that made a man’s body weak.

  Had he done right?

  To the east, just beyond the gently rolling ground richly greened with spring’s moist kiss, the majestic Crow Butte raised its impressive head. It was here among its heights that Crazy Horse came often in those early days of surrender, came to think mightily on what he had done. Up here he could look down upon the agency lodges, upon the Soldier Town, upon the village of his people. Theirs was a prison, with nowhere to go.

  Had he ever had a choice?

  Perhaps he was as helpless as the Shahiyela1 had been. Only days after he brought his people to this agency, Crazy Horse had watched the army lead away the people of Morning Star2 and Little Wolf, starting their long, terrible journey south to the Place of Heat and Sickness.3 By reputation only, the Shahiyela had been forced to migrate to a country where the ground was as hard as iron, the water warm, and all the creeks and rivers trickled through the bottom of coulees that were nothing more than poor shadows of the streams that refreshed his beloved North Country.

  The wind tormented some of his unbound hair. He pushed it out of his eyes and stared at the chalk-colored ridge rising out of the green of the earth just north of the soldier lodges. Patches of green, stunted pine dotted the slopes. But here on Crow Butte, Crazy Horse could sit among the thick stands of timber, shaded from the warm afternoon sun, and dream of what had been.

  Should he have followed Sitting Bull into an uncertain future far north of their hunting grounds?

  Gazing down at his lap, Crazy Horse took his canupa, the small pipe, from its unbeaded bag, crumpled a palmful of tobacco from the dried twist of brown leaf, and stuffed it into the hand-carved redstone bowl he had rubbed and cradled within his palms for summers beyond count.

  To have followed Sitting Bull north would have condemned his people to a life far, far from the land of their birth, separated from the bones of their parents. But what had he achieved for his people by bringing them to this agency? How would the little ones be brought up now that they were no longer free? Would the children become loafers, just as Red Cloud’s people had become coffee-coolers over the winters of their indolence? Would the children grow thirsty for the wasicu whiskey—grow crazy in drunkenness? Would the poor and helpless ones grow weaker still, now that they had no buffalo in their bellies, no free air to fill their lungs?

  And where were the smiles? That more than anything had steadily eaten away at his resolve. No more did his friends have reason to smile. Not He Dog, Big Road, Little Hawk, even the perennially happy Little Big Man. Crazy Horse had little reason to smile himself. So he came here alone to this place to sit among the rocks at the edge of Crow Butte—just as he had walked away from the camps so many times last winter—to be with himself and the questions weighing heavy on his heart. No friend’s voice, no friend’s laughter reached him here. Only the soughing of the breeze through the pines that stood sentinel around his place of solitude.

  Late last night two young Oglala, who had elected to stay in the north rather than ride south to surrender with the rest of Crazy Horse’s people, slipped into camp, undetected by the soldiers and the White Hat’s agency scouts. They carried sad news from the old country: firsthand reports of the figh
ting between the army and the last of the hold-outs who had rallied around the banner of Mnicowaju4 chief Lame Deer. All fight had gone out of the warriors the moment Lame Deer had been slaughtered. But no, he hadn’t died in honorable combat. Instead, chief Lame Deer was discussing with the Bear Coat terms of surrender for the women and children when he and his son were cut down5 under a white flag of truce.

  Embittered, and feeling as hollow as a rotted log, Crazy Horse gazed to the east for some time, watching the way the summer’s wind bent the new grass far out on the prairie, and thought on those of his people who had chosen to live with Spotted Tail. His most trusted cousin, the Mnicowaju chief Touch-the-Clouds, and even his father, Worm, both had decided to live with the Sicangu,6 camped so far away beyond that distant line where the earth scraped up against the summer sky. Crazy Horse felt alone, and every bit as cold as the unlit pipe he cradled in his upturned hands.

  This was a good land for some. But his country lay far to the north, where he turned his eyes now. Closing them, he let his heart feel, let his heart see that good land far away on the Powder, where he prayed his people would be given the agency he had been promised.

  It felt as if his life was thrown away now. For what did he go on living? A long time since he had been made a Shirt Wearer—one of the four who had vowed in the Wicasa Yatanpi ceremony to protect their people with their very lives. No longer did it matter that he had given back his shirt to the Big Bellies, because Crazy Horse continued to do what he knew he must for the sake of his people. Whether that was waging war or making this peace with the soldiers and the white man’s loafers who had stayed back at the agencies while the fighters defended their homeland in the north. Sad men like his uncle, Spotted Tail, and his old friend and war comrade, Red Cloud.

  How the face and those dark, brooding eyes of Red Cloud had registered such deep satisfaction as he watched the Crazy Horse people turn in their weapons, watched them hand over their horses. That terrible day seemed so distant now. Red Cloud had seen how Crazy Horse noticed his satisfaction. The old chief of the Bad Faces must have been sensing some great turning of fate, because he had suffered the same taking of weapons and horses by Three Fingers Kinzie last autumn, just before that soldier chief pushed his men north to eventually discover the Shahiyela in a hidden valley of the Red Fork. Yes, Red Cloud knew the painful sting of that same insult. As he stood there with his closest friends, No Water and Woman’s Dress, right behind the White Hat, Red Cloud’s eyes had loudly proclaimed, Now you are not so great before my Oglala, are you, Crazy Horse? Now you have no rifle, no pistol. Now you have no horses. Now your people belong to me!

  Even Three Stars had heaped scorn and insult on Red Cloud last winter, throwing him away as a chief, and making Spotted Tail the leader over both the Mnicowaju and the Oglala. How that must have made the old man’s pride bleed and bleed … and bleed.

  But whispers were that Three Stars would soon lift Red Cloud again, and make him chief of the Oglala once more … simply because he had been the one to bring in Crazy Horse. This was of great importance now, for a chief would be over all the others, he would command his scouts, and he would be the one given all the rations—through his hands would come the food and blankets. Now it seemed the wasicus were smiling on Red Cloud once again.

  Hau! So Crazy Horse had come in and given himself to the White Hat, not to Spotted Tail. It was done the way the White Hat wanted, so Red Cloud would be raised, exalted, once more.

  Oh, how he spent more and more hours away from camp, slipping off to be alone among the rocks, here beneath the sky, trying harder and harder to dream himself back into the Real World, seeking desperately to flee the despair of this Shadow World where everything and everyone sank deeper and deeper into the swallowing gloom. A clinging mire of hopelessness.

  He drank in a deep breath and opened his eyes again, thinking how in these first days there had been much helping and sharing of this new burden for his people. The Red Cloud, and even some of the Spotted Tail people too, had offered what they had to those relations who had just come in from the north. That first day had arrived in the Crazy Horse camp with what little they could offer to fill the kettle or the skillet. But the very next morning following the surrender, the thin-faced agent had come with his wagons to distribute the first of their giving-up presents: poor soldier blankets that would never give them any warmth through a harsh winter, pants and shirts for the men and boys, long rolls of bright cloth for the women and girls to make their dresses now that the men could not hunt the deer or antelope for skins … and some small things, shiny and smooth and made by the wasicus, things the Northern People had never seen before … because they had never, ever, come to a reservation.

  Never before had they come to eat and sleep, to live out the rest of their lives under the muzzles of the soldier guns. But now … their new life had begun on the reservation.

  This prison to his heart.

  As surely as if there were iron bars driven into the ground around this agency and the nearby Soldier Town, this was a prison. Although he was free to come here to this high, private place on the butte to think and look far away to the north, Crazy Horse felt as if he were held by the wide iron bands that the soldiers locked around the limbs of their captives. Many were the nights he awakened, damp with sweat, and rubbed at his ankles, massaged a wrist with his hand—just to assure himself that he did not indeed wear the wide iron bands. But he knew he was a prisoner just the same.

  This was something he had done for his people. Most seemed to understand why he had brought them here. But he himself was not sure of much of anything, not anymore.

  Especially when it came time that the half-breed interpreter explained that the men must register their families, give up their names, so that these things could be written down on the white man’s flimsy parfleche. Then each of the Northern men were to touch the wasicu’s pen to signify that the names were indeed those of his own relations. Clan by clan, family by family. To give them up to the white man by giving away their names. Writing them down would rob them of their wild souls as surely as the white man’s picture box could rob a man of his spirit. Like Crazy Horse, not one of the Northern men dared touch the pen. Even though they reluctantly spoke the names of their loved ones—because the interpreters explained that this was the only way they could acquire rations for their families—not one of these old men and young warriors touched the agent’s pen.

  Every time he walked somewhere—usually without speaking, without even noticing those around him, those he passed by—the agency Indians whispered behind their hands as he passed by, wrapped in his blanket. Trusted associates told him what Red Cloud’s people gossiped about: claimed they had heard from a friend of Crazy Horse that he had not really surrendered to the soldiers, that he had come to Red Cloud’s agency only to feed his people, to trade for bullets, before he would flee away to the north again.

  That made him want to bray like a mule! What good was the white man’s pig meat and his moldy flour in their bellies when only buffalo made a wild people strong? And what good did a handful of bullets do a man when he didn’t have a weapon to use those bullets in? Yes, Red Cloud’s people were full of silly talk. For years now, they had had nothing better to do than talk.

  But … the reason he had come here to his private place was to decide what was best for Black Shawl. For a long time his wife had suffered with the coughing sickness that gave her great pain and made her skin hot to the touch. Women brought what roots they could find to boil for drinks, or leaves to chew on that might soothe her throat—but nothing had eased the torment. Then two days ago the half-Lakota interpreter had told him of the wasicu healer at the Soldier Town, the very same healer who had been among the soldiers in the fight at Slim Buttes, when American Horse7 was shot through the belly and a coil of his gut pushed its way out of the ragged bullet hole, bringing a night of agony before he died.

  “This healer is a good man,” the half-blood called Billy Garnett expla
ined in a whisper, his eyes alert that no other should hear what he told Crazy Horse. “He has the sleeping water that took away the pain from American Horse after the fighting at Slim Buttes, so the old chief could die in peace and dignity.”

  But he had protested, “Black Shawl does not need this sleeping water that will help her die.”

  “No—but I am sure if I asked him for you,” Garnett whispered, “the healer has some other medicine that will make your wife better, and take away the pain of her cough.”

  “I will think on this,” he had promised.

  So it was here at the edge of the rocks that were the very flesh of the earth, the rocks that were so much a part of his strength and power, where he came to think on this thing. Looking down at the cold pipestone in his hand, Crazy Horse decided this reservation was a new world where the old ways no longer worked. A new place, with new people and new ways. Perhaps it was best that if he could not accept and adapt himself, at least he do what he could to help those he loved most.

  He hadn’t been there when his young daughter, They Are Afraid of Her, was taken sick with the white man’s illness and died. She was gone before he returned from a revenge raid into Psatoka8 territory, her last breath taken and her death journey already begun.

  Crazy Horse owed more to Black Shawl than to watch her die from the coughing sickness here in this prison. Squeezing the unlit pipebowl with fervent hope, he decided. If this wasicu healer possessed some powerful medicine that could ease his wife’s pain and make her better, then he would ask help from a white man for the first time in his life.

  A war leader, a one-time Shirt Wearer of the Oglala nation … the man who had turned back Three Stars in a day-long battle, then annihilated the Long Hair on the Greasy Grass, he would go to this healer and ask for whatever it would take so his wife would be spared. Although she would always remain second in his heart, Crazy Horse nonetheless owed Black Shawl more than he could ever repay her.

 

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