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

by Terry C. Johnston

  Even to swallowing his pride as a fighting man, as a wild and free Northern man who found himself penned up inside a small cage. Crazy Horse would do all that he could to save her life, as he would to save the lives of his people.

  No matter that it might well mean he would one day have to offer up his own life in return.

  BY TELEGRAPH

  WASHINGTON.

  Overhauling the Indian Department Generally.

  WASHINGTON, June 7.—Secretary Schurz, to-day, by order, created a board … to examine into the methods now in force in the finance and accounting division of the Indian bureau, especially as to an analysis of the money and property accounts of Indian agents, and whether the accounts of agents are rendered in accordance with the law and regulations; whether any expenditures are made without proper authority and whether the present system is such as to show at all times the condition of the money and property affairs at each agency … particular examination will be made as to the number and compensation of employees at each agency, and whether they are given or allowed to purchase subsistence or clothing in violation of the law …

  “Eee-god, woman!” Seamus brayed with a grin so broad it nearly split his newly shaved face in half. “How long can your woman’s good-byes take?”

  Samantha reluctantly pulled herself a few inches away from one of the half-dozen or so women who clustered round her at the edge of the parade ground there beside the mud-caked wall of sutler John Collins’s store. She turned her head briefly, blinked her pooling eyes at him, then went back to sobbing with the lot of them—all babbling and clucking like a brood of hens who paid no earthly mind to him.

  “Will you look at your mother, boy,” he whispered to his eight-month-old son, the child cradled in the crook of his left arm, while he re-tucked the edge of the wool blanket around the youngster, protecting the boy from those errant gusts of early-morning breeze here in these last moments before the sun would emerge red and raw and brand-spanking-new upon the eastern prairie far, far away from these grounds of Fort Laramie.

  “A man asks his wife a civil question and all she does is smile at him with those wet eyes and wet cheeks of hers, then goes right on back to what she was already about in the first place,” he cooed down at the round, pink face. “Let that be a lesson to you now, Colin Teig. A little man like you might do well not getting all tangle-footed and tongue-tied with a woman … that is, when it comes the time you first start dogging after a woman’s company.”

  His heart beat all the faster as he just stared down at the boy—seeing what he and Sam had created together. That is, the holy God above and them too. What a boost it gave his heart to just hold the boy in his big, callused, hard-knuckled hands. Just to think of what he and Samantha had made together in this here cold and inhospitable wilderness once unfit for the likes of womenfolk and children too.

  And now his eyes rose to stare at the back of her head, all that spill of auburn curls she had tied back in a bit of pale lavender ribbon earlier this morning when they arose in the dark and he had shuffled off to make ready the horses—those two they would ride, and the five others, one of which would carry the small leather valises holding Samantha’s and the boy’s things, and the others would do to follow along if one of the riding animals went lame, or grew weary from this long journey north they were about to set out upon. Auburn hair turning red with the coming of this new day’s light. Ah, how it set her hair on fire, such light as this.

  Best time of the day, he thought as he heard the shuffle of bootsoles on the gravel behind him and turned. Six of them coming. Pulling at their belts the way a man will when he has just been rousted out of his blanket. And a half-step in the lead of the other five friends strode Major Andrew W. Evans. Old comrades of the battlefield, all of these officers of the Third U.S. Cavalry.

  “Donegan!” Evans cried as he approached. “Bloody good I didn’t miss you.”

  The others were just finishing pulling their uniforms together as Evans came to a halt before the taller Irishman.

  “I’d come woke you me own self, Colonel,” Seamus said, using Evans’s brevet rank, his gray eyes smiling down at this veteran cavalry officer who was once again serving as commander of Fort Laramie, where detachments of both the Third U.S. Cavalry and the Ninth U.S. Infantry were currently stationed.

  “I bet you would at that, you old reprobate,” Evans said with a grin. “You remember these fellows, don’t you?”

  His eyes bounced over the five of them as they smiled, nodded, and presented their hands to the civilian who had earned the untarnished respect and undying affection of all those officers and enlisted he had served with during the last fifteen months’ campaign to finally put an end to the Great Sioux War on these northern plains.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Mason!” he addressed the major who had stepped up to Evans’s shoulder.

  “Seamus,” said Julius W. Mason, the first to hold out his hand. “We’ve had us a go at things together, haven’t we?”

  He swallowed the major’s hand in his hard-boned horse-handler’s paw, “I should say. From those days after Rosebud it was, as I recollect.”

  “While we followed the scattering bands going this way and that,”9 Mason agreed.

  “Funny, ain’t it? How just last night I was laying in the dark, thinking on this ride I was about to make … and I got to remembering how we was lucky to get Guy Henry out off the Rosebud alive, all the way back to the forks of the Tongue, without him dying on us,” Seamus recalled.

  With that jolt of memory, they all looked at the ground or stared at their boot-toes in remembrance of that brave officer who had been shot from the back of his horse as he sat tall and bold during a disastrous and disorderly retreat in the face of shrieking Sioux horsemen, most of them reflecting on how Seamus and an unknown Shoshone tracker had stood back to back over the critically wounded Henry, finding themselves out of bullets and forced to use their rifles like scythes and clubs against the daring enemy horsemen darting in to lay claim to the fallen man’s body.

  “There’s nothing we can do for you?” asked Captain William S. Andrews, dragging a hand beneath his nose, and blinking his eyes.

  Donegan felt the sting of tears himself as some of the other officers looked up, a mist in their eyes. Men who had once been strangers, oft-times hostile to civilian scouts. Soldiers who had eventually become the best of comrades under fire, men tested and not found wanting on the field of battle against the finest warriors on the face of the earth. No finer a friend could a man have than those who together had withstood the trials of warfare, the agony of quarter-rations, and the bitter cold or incessant rain of the northern plains.

  Blinking his own eyes, Seamus glanced down at Colin, then looked up at Andrews to say, “No. We’ve got all we need for our journey.”

  Thomas B. Dewees, another officer in the Third U.S. Cavalry, said, “Your toughest feat will be to drag your Samantha away from that bunch.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at his wife. “Aye, Cap’n. They’ve been the best of friends too, don’t you see? Them ladies helped my dearest bride through all them days and nights while we’ve been out about our business of soldiering.” He sighed and turned back to look at the six faces. “The women has been good soldiers too, waiting.”

  “And your plans still the same?” asked Andrews.

  “North by east from here to Camp Robinson,” Donegan explained.

  “Why not up to Fetterman?” inquired Dewees. “You change your plans to get to the Montana goldfields?”

  “Closer to the Black Hills,” Seamus admitted.

  Mason asked, “Then you’re going to make your fortune near Deadwood or Custer City rather than risk it all on a ride into Montana Territory?”

  Shifting the boy in the crook of his left arm, Donegan said, “No. Plans are still to look up an old friend of mine up Montana way. But the truth is, there’s more folks about the Black Hills. Towns and mining camps too. Better for mother and son I’ve got riding wit
h me now to have a place here and there to lay by for a day or two as we make our way into Montana Territory.”

  “Going to be a long, tough journey for them, Seamus,” Evans declared.

  “Not near as long as the ride Sam and me made coming north from the Staked Plain in the autumn of ‘seventy-five,”10 he said.

  “But you’ve got this little one now,” Dewees advised.

  “Time he got his first taste of riding this big land, don’t you think?” Donegan asked, turning to glance once again at the gaggle of women huddled around Samantha.

  She flicked her eyes at him quickly, and he could tell that it was time to go.

  “Believe our time has come. Colonel Evans?” he said quietly, sentiment clogging his throat as he held out his hand to the officer.

  “Sergeant Donegan, late of the Army of the Potomac,” Evans replied, shook quickly, then took a step back to allow Mason, Andrews, and the rest to move forward, where they could shake the tall Irishman’s hand themselves in this parting.

  Without another word spoken between him and those comrades of battlefield and starvation march, Seamus turned and went over to Samantha. Taking the wide-eyed child from her husband, Sam nestled the boy down into the canvas duck sack she had strapped against the front of her wool coat. To the sack she had sewn a pair of wide canvas straps, cut from infantry haversacks. Then she had fashioned a short crosspiece that held the straps together with a buckle taken from a web cartridge belt. That way the straps would not have a tendency to slide off her narrow shoulders, for she had constructed the contraption large enough to fit comfortably upon Seamus’s too. Either front or back, they could carry young Colin against their chests or behind their shoulders on this journey north.

  “Ready, Sam?” he asked in a whisper, his throat cracking.

  She only nodded, her eyes pooling as she took the reins to her horse from him.

  Donegan cupped his hands before him. She laid her scuffed boot in their cradle and pushed herself and Colin onto the man’s saddle, adjusting herself to the unaccustomed feel of men’s canvas breeches and the long wool coat, the tails of which she flung out behind her so they draped across the horse’s flanks.

  “Good-bye,” she barely croaked the word to her friends, each of whom had taken to bawling, hands over their mouths, dabbing at their eyes with damp handkerchiefs. She tightened up the reins and brought her horse around as Donegan turned away.

  Reaching the side of his horse, he swung into the saddle, shifted, and nestled down for this long journey into the rest of their lives, now that the northern plains had been put to some semblance of peace. From around the horn he took up the lead rope to that gentle mare that carried their battered valises, four weathered pieces of leather luggage that had come west with Samantha to the Staked Plain of Texas years before, then been carried north as soon as she had become his missus.

  Seamus reined around in a tight circle, and brought the anxious horse under control. Halting, he snapped up his right arm, hand rigid against his brow. Tears tumbling down his ruddy cheeks.

  Soldier to soldier, saluting fellow fighting men this one last time.

  Seamus Donegan jabbed heels into his horse’s ribs and it shot away. Those officers left behind not uttering a word. Heavy silence descending around them.

  He knew he couldn’t speak right now if he had to. So instead, he urged his horse over close beside hers, reached out, and brushed one callused finger down the tiny boy’s red cheek. Then slipped his hand in her glove and squeezed tight.

  Dawn suddenly broke, the reddish orb emerging over the far green lip of the earth, instantly splashing its rose light over this unsettled land as the little family rode into this first day of their new life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pehingnunipi Wi

  MOON OF SHEDDING PONIES, 1877

  “Do you think she is pretty?” Black Shawl asked her husband in that raspy whisper she used.

  Crazy Horse realized he was staring at the young half-blood woman and turned back to gaze at his wife as Black Shawl emerged from the open door of their lodge. He studied her eyes, and realized he could not lie to his wife about this.

  “Yes … she is pretty.” He tried his best to put a noncommittal sound to it. He looked down at the two hands Black Shawl had clutching the blanket around her shoulders, the fingers of one hand laced around the neck of a green glass bottle. The wasicu was ducking his head, emerging from the lodge behind Black Shawl now. He wanted desperately to change the subject. “What did the healer give you?”

  But this youngest daughter of the trader called Laravie made it impossible for him to put her out of his attention. She turned away to say something to the white man, then quickly explained in a soft voice, “It is a medicine water that will make her cough sleep.”

  Remembering Billy Garnett’s explanation how the healer had helped American Horse die without pain, Crazy Horse grew frightened, and turned to the healer, then back to the young woman. “Will she … die?”

  The trader’s daughter translated. The healer spoke. The young woman explained, “She will not die, not of the coughing sickness.1 This medicine he has instructed her to drink four times a day—at sunrise, at midday, at sundown, and again when she is ready for bed—it will help her rest, because it will put her cough to sleep.”

  For a moment, he was filled with relief, not knowing what to say exactly to this wasicu healer. Eventually Crazy Horse held out his left hand to the white man. The healer looked down, glanced at the trader’s daughter, then shook the offered hand with his left. The young woman said something in the white man’s tongue and the healer smiled, pumping his arm all the more enthusiastically.

  “Tell the healer I believe him to be a good man,” Crazy Horse declared as they released each other’s hands. “Explain to him that I took a very great chance of misunderstanding and bad hearts among my own people by asking him to come here, by seeking his help for my wife. But…” and he paused as his eyes came to rest on Black Shawl, “she is most precious to me. More precious than anything.” Then he suddenly turned his attention back on the Laravie woman. “Ask the healer what I can do to repay him for his help?”

  “You owe him nothing, he says,” the half-blood woman replied. “He wants only to be your friend.”

  “That is not so much,” the Horse said, looking into the healer’s eyes with interest.

  “Your friendship will mean a lot to him,” the Laravie woman explained. “Says he will always be ready to help, when you or Black Shawl need him.”

  “Kola,” he said the word again. “Tell him that is the word in Lakota, so that he will know how to say it, trader’s daughter.”

  After the woman translated, the healer grinned warmly. Then the white man said the word in Lakota. “Kola.”

  “Yes,” Crazy Horse said, turning away to lead Black Shawl from the shade of the lodge into the warm sunlight of this early-summer day. “Ta’shunke Witko kola.”

  Behind them, the half-blood woman was talking with the healer in the white man’s tongue. He wanted to know what she was saying … if the trader’s daughter was saying anything about him.

  It was some time before Black Shawl spoke again, and not until he had helped her settle onto a buffalo robe, where she could lean back against the trunk of a cottonwood tree, the warm sun pouring down upon her.

  Of a sudden, his wife declared, “She told me her white name.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Who?” Then he saw how she looked at him with the deep, knowing eyes, with a look that said she knew full well that he understood exactly whom she was referring to.

  “The trader’s daughter,” she finally said softly. “The one who looks at you with those wanting eyes.” Black Shawl groaned, hanging her head a moment. Then she looked up again. “She had me repeat it until I learned to say it good.”

  “So she has a Lakota name?”

  “No,” she said. “A wasicu name. Nel-lie. Nellie Laravie.”

  Crazy Horse repeated the yo
ung woman’s first name, very self-consciously, and each time he did, Black Shawl corrected him until he could say the white man’s words the way they sounded coming from his wife’s tongue.

  “That one,” she said as he watched the healer and the half-blood woman starting their way, leading their horses, “she is Long Joe’s youngest.”

  In protest he snorted, “She is no more than a child.”

  “A very pretty child,” Black Shawl argued. “One who looks at you with the eyes of a woman-child who wants you to notice how she looks at you … looks at you with her whole body.”

  Her words stunned him into silence. Finally, he turned back to his wife and admitted, “Yes, I see how she looks at me. But it is only because she knows I am leader of the Northern People. I am … only an oddity to her.”

  “You are a famous man,” she said as they started away slowly.

  She turned from looking at her husband, staring at the young woman who approached with the white healer. Then she looked at Crazy Horse again to see if he was looking at Laravie’s daughter too. Crazy Horse was not. Instead, he was stoically staring off into the distance, his chin jutted proudly.

  Black Shawl concluded, “Yes, you are a very famous … but also a very human man.”

  He felt his brow wrinkle with concern when he finally looked down upon his wife as she wheezed with great effort. “There will be many in this camp, especially those in Red Cloud’s village, who will say I did a great wrong bringing this white healer here to help you.”

  She reached up and touched the back of his hand. “Thank you, husband.” And a moment later, she quietly said, “Even if you lied to me about looking at the pretty trader’s daughter … I love you for lying to me.”

  “Be quiet now, woman,” he shushed her sternly as their guests drew close. “Save your throat from all these wasted, worthless words. You must rest your tongue so that the white man’s medicine has time to heal you.”

  He could feel his wife staring up at him as they gave their good-byes to the wasicu healer and his beautiful translator. Embarrassed to realize how his eyes looked at the trader’s daughter. But next to Black Buffalo Woman—the one he had lost to No Water—Nellie Laravie had to be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.