Garnett’s eyes narrowed on the mid-distance. “The Northern People are going to show what they did to Custer a year ago this very month.”
That struck him like a shot of January ice-water pouring down his spine, landing with a jolt. By damn if this wasn’t the last week of June! A year ago, almost to the day, Crazy Horse had engineered the defeat of that flower of the frontier army, George Armstrong Custer. Civil War hero … the man who stripped Sergeant Seamus Donegan, Army of the Shenandoah, of his stripes because he wouldn’t have any part of hanging Mosby’s raiders like common criminals. A soldier was given rights and dignity, even if he was a prisoner. But Custer had ordered the nooses prepared and the captives executed like common riffraff—
“Look how some of Custer’s men are peeling away from the rest,” Garnett pointed out.
They watched as a portion of the agency horsemen disappeared over the low saddle, gone from sight. Within minutes, another group of what was left of the agency scouts peeled aside too, taking a different course. That left the majority of the agency men continuing on their way across the side of the hill while some of the Northern horsemen suddenly swept down to attack that smaller, second unit that had split off on their own minutes before. While the mass of the agency Indians continued to sweep around behind the Northern attackers who had flung themselves against the small bunch of Red Cloud’s scouts, swinging switches and lashing out with their bows in an eager attempt to unhorse their blue-coated opponents, most of the Crazy Horse people disappeared behind the low hill.
For the moment, it appeared the small band of Northern horsemen were about to be swallowed up between the two pincers of the agency fighters. But just as the large flank of Red Cloud’s warriors went sweeping down on their outnumbered foes, their screams and war cries growing louder still, the mass of Northern fighters suddenly reappeared from behind the crowd, thundering out of brush along the creek bank, dashing past the sundance arbor, shouting and shaking their unstrung bows on high. The agency scouts were caught by utter surprise, wheeling and milling in confusion, with no time to prepare for the assault before the Northern men slammed into them.
Horses whinnied in fear and pain as animals collided against one another. Men shouted out in anger, bewilderment, or heart-pumping battle-fever. Dust that had been rising in small puffs from pony hooves now billowed in yellow waves, cloaking the actors in this all-too-real sham battle. Caught between two enemy forces, the agency horsemen attempted a futile retreat, just as Custer’s men must have fled up that barren hillside, seeking the high ground. Before the Irishman’s eyes, the Northern warriors, men who had enacted this very same maneuver to white soldiers a scant year before, herded the agency horsemen up the slope like bawling cattle, striking Red Cloud’s men on the back and the head, the arm or the leg with their unstrung bows—
Suddenly a gunshot rang out. Then a second. The crowd gasped and held its collective breath as Garnett and Donegan shoved their way closer and closer to the scene among the Sioux leaders and headmen—
Then a half-dozen shots, exploding close together. Answered by another handful.
But as quickly someone was shouting above the cries of fury. A lone man walking into the open, onto that dangerous battleground, moving without hesitation on foot, both arms upraised, crying out to his fellow Sioux.
“What’s he saying?” Seamus asked.
Billy was already shouting to any of the Indians who would listen, his Sioux drowned out by the angry muttering buffeting them as spectators darted one way or another, women scampering away with their tiny children in tow, men dashing off for whatever weapons they still owned.
“The agency men didn’t like getting hit so hard!” Garnett explained.
“Who the hell has guns up there?” Seamus demanded, watching the slope. “Everyone back at the post told me them Crazy Horse warriors gave up all their guns.”
“Not for a minute will I believe that Lieutenant Clark got all the guns they had—”
“Where’s Bradley’s soldiers now?” Donegan asked as he wheeled to look over his shoulder, his anxiety growing by the heartbeat.
“It was Red Cloud’s men shooting. They’re scouts, Donegan,” Garnett declared. “So they’ve got their own pistols. More guns than the Crazy Horse people could ever keep hidden. When those agency Indians got angry for getting whipped, they started shooting at the Northern people.”
Of a sudden the two of them were close enough to the scene that Seamus could make out the lone warrior’s face, could hear what he was shouting in Sioux to both sides. Donegan asked again, “You make out what he’s saying to them?”
Billy concentrated for a few moments, then began to offer a smattering of words in a running translation.
“‘Brothers you must stop! You are shooting at your own people! Put down your weapons.… We do not fight one another.… swallow down your anger.… Stop the fighting before someone is hurt bad. Can’t you see you are shooting at your own people!’”
The more he studied that lone warrior’s face, the more Donegan knew he had seen the man before. It was the horseman he had spotted as they crossed Soldier Creek, the day he brought his family to Camp Robinson. Those two long braids that fell past the man’s waist, braids swaying this way and that as he addressed one group of horsemen, then the other. And that single feather tied sideways at the crown of his head. Shirtless, he wore a breechclout and buckskin leggings in this summer heat. But he carried no weapon. Not even the sign of a knife strapped at his waist. From the looks of him, the figure appeared younger than most of the headmen and chiefs, perhaps only because he wasn’t a tall man by any reckoning, nor was he stocky or muscular. Despite his size, this slight, unimposing figure had interposed himself between two groups of armed men who were ready to spill one another’s blood out of pride and honor, no matter that they were—as Garnett had explained—all Oglala.
“I’ve seen him before,” Donegan confided as the groups of horsemen began to break apart and drift away in a multitude of directions.
“Where did you see him before? In battle?” Billy asked eagerly.
“No,” and he shook his head. “Several days back, when we first reached the post. He was by himself.”
Garnett nodded, looking at the lone man. “He usually is.”
Seamus looked at Garnett strangely. “So you know that Injin firsthand?”
“That one standing alone out there?”
Yes, Donegan thought. The solitary man who just stopped what could have been a lot of bloodshed with nothing more than the power of his will and the strength of his leadership. That man.
“Who the hell is he?”
“Seamus,” Garnett said, “you’re looking at Crazy Horse.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wicokannanji
THE MIDDLE MOON, 1877
No white men came to their second sundance. They weren’t invited.
The first had been held so the soldiers and their wasicu women could gape and mutter at the suffering the men endured. It took place about halfway between Red Cloud’s and Spotted Tail’s agencies, beside a creek the Oglala would thereafter call Sundance Creek. But this second, and much smaller, sun-gazing held at the foot of Beaver Mountain was for the Lakota alone.
Crazy Horse’s uncle, Spotted Tail, had agreed to call for this private and more spiritual ceremony near his people’s land, upstream from his agency, near the headwaters of Beaver Creek. The old chief had to realize how much this Beaver Mountain meant to the soul of his nephew. At the foot of the mountain’s rugged slopes the Oglala and the Sicangu peoples made a clearing for the sundance arbor, carried in the sacred pole behind the long procession led by a virtuous woman, then began the first of their four days of fasting, singing, drumming, dancing … and praying.
Since Crazy Horse had never before taken part in those sacrifices required by the sun-gazing dance—never hung himself by rawhide tethers from the central pole, nor suffered buffalo skulls hooked to the muscles of his back by wooden skewers and
long tethers—five of his young followers volunteered to offer their flesh and their blood, honoring the Oglala war chief who had brought their women and children through so many seasons of war against the army. Three brothers—Kicking Bear, Black Fox, and Flying Eagle—were the first volunteering to dance in the stead of their war chief. Two of Crazy Horse’s cousins—Eagle Thunder and Walking Eagle—quickly came forward, asking that they too be allowed to honor their chief by giving their bodies over to the sacrifice to the sun through the next four days.
Never was heard such a ululation from the women’s throats as echoed off the slopes of Beaver Mountain that hot mid-summer morning. Now the Northern People would offer their prayers to the Great Mystery in earnest, without the eyes of the wasicu come to defile this narrow, sheltered valley. As the five joined the many others who presented themselves for piercing by the shamans, blood oozing down their chests, bellies, and onto the fine dust beneath their feet, the huge drums began their heartbeat rhythm. A cadence that would not cease until the sun fell from the sky that summer night, a pulse-throbbing that would be taken up the moment the great source of life once again made its appearance at dawn.
Taking only sips of water, the dancers rested out the brief cool hours of darkness here at the height of summer, rarely speaking, conserving their strength for the next day’s long ordeal as they tugged and pulled on tethers and skewers captive of their flesh and muscle … praying.
So too did Crazy Horse pray from the circle, thinking of all the faces of friends and relatives who hadn’t lived to reach this crucial point in Oglala history: this coming to the white man’s prison on the White River. Offering his prayers, he asked the Great Mystery what he should do, which way was he to turn, where was he to go, and whom was he to trust. But for now, the only answer given him in the shimmering waves of heat mirage that arose around the naked brown dancers who plodded through the dust, inching around the prayer pole with tiny, weary steps, was that Crazy Horse must once more climb the heights to find what he was looking for. The same heights, to the same mountaintop, among those familiar rocks: where he had gone many times before in his search for peace.
“Build me a small sweat lodge,” he asked of Little Hawk and Little Big Man at sunrise the fourth day while the dancers took their places at the bottom of the pole.
The wrinkled, bloodied hands of the old shamans once more connected the tiny loops of braided rawhide tethers to the red-crusted ends of the sharpened, peeled willow skewers that had been shoved beneath tender, raw, and inflamed chest muscles three days before. Dust and sweat and wide tracks of blood coated the bellies and legs of all those dancers still able to stand, those few still able to hobble around the pole, blowing on their wingbone whistles and making their prayers to the infinite power above.
“How many will you ask inside?” Little Big Man asked.
The drums began their earnest thunder, and quickly the high, falsetto voices of the old men began to climb in prayer.
“Only one,” Crazy Horse instructed. “Me.”
“Where?” asked Little Hawk in a whisper.
His eyes touched his uncle. “Right against the foot of the mountain. There.”
He watched the two of them move away without another question. They knew what to do. Cutting down the long eight-foot-tall willow, trimming off the limbs, tying the long branches together at their tops to form the low, inverted bowl, then laying over this framework the buffalo robes and blankets after they had dug a small pit in the center of the interior. Work continued throughout that afternoon, scraping out a large firepit for the rocks they selected one by one from the banks of Beaver Creek, bringing them back to the sacred mound outside the lodge, constructed with that dirt removed from the firehole. Starting from this altar, where a bleached buffalo skull faced the east with its hollow, black eyesockets, to the entrance into the sweat lodge, they brushed the loose dirt away to form a narrow path for his bare feet.
As the sun went down that evening of the fourth day of their sun-gazing, Crazy Horse stripped down to his breech-clout. The crowd of hundreds fell to a hush. He stood motionless beside the altar and that empty-eyed skull while the shamans brushed him with white sage they repeatedly dipped in cool water brought from the creek, ritually preparing him for this journey from the light into darkness. When it was time, the old men stepped back and the Horse took the first step of his journey alone.
Across the warm, bare breast of the earth he walked, his naked feet following the path that quickly took him to the low, narrow entrance exposed as Big Road pulled back the flap of blanket. Dropping to his knees, Crazy Horse crawled into the semi-darkness, the only light a slim, dusky glow allowed in through that small entrance kept open while a pair of the shamans’ helpers scooped the first of the heated rocks out of the nearby firepit and carried it to the doorway of the sweat lodge. There it was dropped and shoved forward with sticks until it rolled into the shallow pit. One by one, three more rocks were brought from the crimson embers of that fire, each one shoved into the heated darkness while shadows lengthened in that world outside. When the helpers had pulled back the forked limbs they used to carry those rocks and stepped away from the entrance, Big Road immediately pulled the blanket down, throwing the sweat lodge into an instant and inky black.
Crazy Horse knew there was no use in waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. There wasn’t a single slender thread of light allowed in by all the overlapping blankets and buffalohides, not even at the bottom, where the shamans had been sure to turn the covers in to prevent any of the day’s dimming twilight from intruding upon his journey into the dark world.
Hunched over, he searched with his hands to the right but remembered that was the way he had crawled into the lodge, circling the pit to the sunward. So instead, Crazy Horse reached out with his left hand, and touched the large brass kettle. Feeling their way around its rolled lip, his fingers found the handle of the dipper. He swallowed, already wanting a drink of the cool water from Beaver Creek, but instead he raised the dipper, held out his left hand to feel for the heat of those four rocks, then slowly turned the dipper on its side. That first loud hiss of water hit those rocks, each drop bursting into steam, the heavy heat of it immediately rising to penetrate his nostrils—making it hard to breathe for some moments … until his tongue, the back of his throat, and eventually his lungs grew used to the hot, stifling, sticky air.
A second, third, and finally fourth dipper he poured on the four rocks as his head began to swoon from the unremitting heat. Plunging the dipper back into the kettle, Crazy Horse took a drink, letting half of it dribble off his chin, spilling onto his sweating, heaving chest. So shockingly cold to his super-heated, tingling flesh.
Ta’sunke Witko!
“You’ve been here with me all along, haven’t you?” he whispered.
Since you heard the great Wakan explain that you must climb the mountain tomorrow at dawn.
“Will you be with me?”
I am with you always, Crazy Horse. I have been with you from the beginning, in those dim ill-remembered days of your infancy, from the moment you took your first breath, long before you would ever come to know me. And … I will be with you at the end, when you go to join the stars.
“You know why I came here alone, without any others?”
You are always alone. No matter when you walk in a crowd of your people who sing your praises and trill of your exploits in battle. No matter how many gather around you … you are always alone.
“Wh-why?” he gasped, sensing how the heat and the rising steam pressed in upon his chest like huge hands making it hard for him to breathe.
There are only a few who can stand anywhere near such men of greatness, Ta’sunke Witko. A handful perhaps, but most will never know you as a friend.
“But I have had friends, ever since I was a child. I have friends now.”
Yes, you have strong friends. But … you have even stronger enemies. Ta’sunke Witko, the truth to your life will be in learning
which are the enemies to be trusted, and which friends are to be feared.
“I have never feared any man!” he hissed, feeling nauseous from the heat.
But with his empty belly he could only gag. Nothing came up.
Fear can be a good teacher. Keep your eyes on those who stand closest to the heat of your power, wanting to warm their own hands in it. A vision was given you when you were still a mere boy believing you were ready to become a man. Remember that vision and take strength from it.
“The rider coming out of the lake? I remember that.”
And how Ta’sunke Witko would be killed?
He wagged his head, wondering where the memory of it was. “I-I…”
Your own people will cling to you, Ta’sunke Witko. They always have, because you are their strength. They will cling to you in hopes that you can save them … but in the end their clinging will cost you your life. You can revisit your vision on the mountaintop.
“See again … them holding my arms?” he asked, wiping a wet hand down his wet face, flinging the sweat onto the rocks so that they hissed. Then his fingertips brushed the long scar, as he recalled how Little Big Man grabbed his wrist when No Water shot him.
Pull away from them, break free while you still can … and drink in a breath of freedom on your own.
Slowly, painfully, he dragged another breath into his lungs, slowly feeling a bit stronger. Then leaned left, felt for the ladle, and splashed four more dippers onto the rocks. This time the water did not hiss near as loudly, nor did the steam fill the tiny sweat lodge near as it had. Nowhere near as oppressive now. Crazy Horse opened his eyes again, but it did no good—because there was nothing to see, not even in the clouds of steam that must be hovering right before him. He had descended deep into the belly of darkness … where a man had to venture before he could begin his journey back toward the light, a suffering completed in preparation for the sacrifice he would make over the next four days of his vision quest.
Turn the Stars Upside Down: The Last Days and Tragic Death of Crazy Horse Page 11