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

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Is that why Crazy Horse and the rest of them won’t speak now?” Clark turned away from the interpreter, having become even more agitated as the Lakota delegates refused to speak, refused to answer his question.

  His heart must be beating like a drum, Billy thought, looking at the officer’s crimson face when the lieutenant grew exasperated with impatience and asked the chief again.

  “You’re not going to speak to me now that the truth will be made of your words?”

  Then Crazy Horse surprised Billy when he began to speak, slowly moving his eyes to the lieutenant. “Now I believe that you will hear the white words that speak the truth of what I tell you.”

  Clark repeated, “Will you go north with Three Stars and track down the Nez Perce?”

  Nodding slightly, Crazy Horse looked at Billy and said, “Tell him yes. Yes, we will go north with Three Stars. We will take our women along and have a little hunt. Tell him we need the women along to help with the buffalo.”

  But when Garnett translated that, Clark’s face grew red again and in frustration he swiped his open hand down the length of his face before he said, “No! You can’t go hunting up there until we chase the Nez Perce away! It’s foolish for you to think of scouting and making war with your women along! Women don’t belong when men go to do fighting!”

  Billy watched how that made some of the elders and headmen put their hands up to their mouths, not in amazement, but to hide their amusement at the rash foolishness of the White Hat’s words. These warriors knew better than the short-tempered army officer.

  In the hush of that room, Crazy Horse eventually spoke again, softly: “Remind the White Hat that the Oglala have done some good fighting with our women along. We ride fast enough to get away too when we are done fighting … but always we have done good fighting with our families along.”

  As Garnett translated the chief’s words, Clark’s eyes narrowed. Billy figured he understood that Crazy Horse was making him the butt of an Oglala joke on the army and its inability to win a decisive victory over the Lakota.

  The lieutenant’s breathing got louder for a few moments, until he finally bellowed, “No! I don’t give a damn what they say about taking their women along. If they go north, they are going to scout and fight—not for some goddamned buffalo hunt!”

  Billy realized the tone of Clark’s voice was already expressing everything to the Oglala. They didn’t need Garnett to turn the White Hat’s words into Lakota to understand the bad talk coming from this little chief. These warriors did not deserve to be talked to so rudely. This was not right, Billy thought as he continued to translate for the angry Clark and some of the Hunkpatila headmen began to murmur among themselves. He was glad Grouard was the army’s translator and not him, because he did not like the way the army treated his mother’s people—

  “Where the hell are they going?” Clark demanded as Crazy Horse and those right around him got to their feet and began to push back through their own delegation, starting for the door.

  “Come, my friends,” Crazy Horse said to those Hunkpatila around him, adjusting the red blanket over his left arm. “I can see these are people who don’t know very much about fighting.”

  “Won’t you stay and talk until everything is decided?” Garnett asked in desperation.

  Crazy Horse stopped. He turned slowly, his eyes sad yet filled with a toughened resolve. “No,” he said in that hushed room as Clark fumed behind Garnett. “The White Hat and Three Stars are trying too hard to put blood on our hands again and blacken our faces in war when we have untied our horses’ tails and promised peace.”

  Billy pleaded, “It’s better to stay and talk—”

  “No,” Crazy Horse said, wagging his head sadly. “Tell the White Hat I am leaving this place now. Tell him that there has been too much talking here already.”

  * * *

  “What the hell were you trying to do?” Donegan demanded, grabbing a double-handful of Frank Grouard’s shirtfront.

  The half-breed interpreter immediately shoved both of his wrists upward, freeing the Irishman’s grip on him, and lunged backward a step. Menacingly, he said, “Don’t ever you touch me like that again.”

  “You owe me an answer.”

  “I owe you nothing!” he growled, turning away.

  “Damn you son of a bitch,” Seamus snapped, seizing Grouard’s arm and whirling the interpreter around.

  Grouard immediately froze in a half-crouch, his hand almost touching the butt of the revolver sticking from his belt like the huge hoof of a goat.

  “You gonna shoot me? That it, Frank?”

  “You put your hand on me again, I might just cut it off.”

  He stared at Grouard’s eyes, could see that the man meant it. In those same eyes he had read everything from fear to stoic courage over all the miles they had crossed and the battles they had fought together. But now, there seemed to be something new there too. An enemy glaring back at Donegan. The interpreter slowly straightened and dropped his gun hand, turning his back on the Irishman, then starting away again.

  “At the very least you owe me an answer, Frank,” Seamus pleaded. “All we been through together, you owe me that.”

  His words seemed to hit Grouard squarely between the shoulder blades, stopping the man in his tracks. For a long moment he didn’t turn around.

  But when he finally did, Frank said, “It don’t make no difference now. Soldiers like Crook and Clark, they’re gonna believe what they wanna believe. And the Lakota won’t ever change what they believe either.”

  “I don’t give a damn about them,” Seamus said, taking a step closer to the man who was once his trusted brother-in-arms. But Grouard tensed up, took a step back, so Donegan stopped where he stood. “Awright, I ain’t coming any closer. Just tell me why, ’cause I gotta know for my own self.”

  “Don’t make a hill of shit to any of ’em,” Frank said.

  “Tell me why you told Clark that Crazy Horse said something he didn’t say,” Seamus pleaded, “especially when the army already thinks Crazy Horse and his people are gonna break out and go killing white folks between here and the Powder River country.”

  With a shrug, Grouard said, “It’s what the bastard was thinkin’.”

  “What he was thinking? What in blazes does that mean?”

  Frank glared at him, saying, “I only told Clark what Crazy Horse was thinking of doing, what the red bastard wants to do if he sees a chance. So I said it for him! Right out, I said what he’s been thinking he would do anyway!”

  “How do you know?”

  His mouth curled up, his eyes half-closed in a feral warning. “Oh, I know, Seamus. I know damn well what those bastards like Crazy Horse and He Dog are thinking. I lived with ’em long enough.”

  “They could’ve killed you, any day they wanted,” Donegan said, wagging his head in disbelief. “But they took you in after you run away from Sitting Bull’s camp. Kept you safe, made you one of theirs. Even let you marry one of their women—”

  “That’s all in the past now!” Grouard snapped. “You’re a stupid bastard yourself if you think I owe Crazy Horse or any of ’em a damned thing!”

  “Don’t you owe ’em your hide?”

  Grouard bleated with some humorless laughter. “I owe the Hunkpatila nothing—nothing but all the grief I can give ’em for the grief they give me at the end of my stay with them red bastards!”

  Shaking his head, Seamus said, “They made you one of their own. Let you marry one of their sisters, one of their daughters. And this is the way you repay these men who put their trust in you?”

  Now it was Grouard’s turn to take a long step toward the Irishman. He was shaking with fury as he said, “Who the hell do you think we were fighting when we took Crook north to jump that village on the Powder River a year and a half ago? What bastards was we fighting all day at the Big Bend of the Rosebud? Huh? Those same red sonsabitches! So what do I owe them, Seamus? You tell me that.”

  “Fighting
an enemy, making him less than a man and nothing more than an enemy—that’s what we all do when we’re at war, Frank,” Seamus explained. “You done it, and I done it, lots of times. Nothing wrong with fighting and killing when you’re at war. Back when we first run onto each other working for Crook, it wasn’t no problem for me to understand why you become a scout to track down the Injuns. You was back to being white again, Frank. But this I don’t understand—”

  “Spit it out, Irishman.”

  Seamus took a long sigh, then said, “I could see you fighting them Sioux—Crazy Horse, He Dog, and the rest. Stand-up and eye-to-eye … like a man does in war. But this, Frank … this was underhanded. This lying to Clark to make it out like some words come out of Crazy Horse’s mouth that didn’t—”

  “He won’t ever be a agency Injun like Red Cloud or Spotted Tail.”

  “Maybe he won’t,” Donegan admitted. “But he appears to be a man brave enough to stand up without a weapon, right in front of his old enemies—like you and Crook and all the army—and speak what’s in his heart, no matter the consequences!”

  Grouard’s hands were tensing into balled fists. “You saying I ain’t a man now?”

  He saw the man ready to lunge at him, or pull that pistol out of his belt, and realized he hadn’t buckled on his pistols since bringing his family to what he thought was the serenity of sleepy Camp Robinson. A man like Grouard who was ready to fight an old friend, or even to pull a gun on an old comrade, he damn sure wasn’t worth all this trouble.

  “I s’pose I got my answer,” Seamus said with great melancholy.

  “I asked you if you figgered I wasn’t a man no more!” Grouard growled menacingly. “That’s what it sounded like you said.”

  “You was a man I admired for a long time, Frank,” he admitted with deep regret. “The way you found that village on the Powder in the middle of the night and a blizzard to boot. The way you never give up and stuck your neck out to do your job, no matter how Reshaw worked to convince Crook you was gonna betray him and his soldiers. But now, I find out you got enough hatred chewing away at your insides that you could out-and-out lie about an old friend like Crazy Horse—”

  “He ain’t my friend no more!”

  “You could lie about him, because it don’t make you ashamed to do that to a man who was once your honored enemy.”

  “Ain’t nothing to honor in that red bastard,” Grouard said, flexing his fingers.

  “That’s why I guess we don’t see eye-to-eye no more, Frank,” he said quietly. “That’s why we won’t be friends no more.”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Sad is what it is, Frank. Sad because you was my friend all them times we was saving our hair and our hide. Sadder still because of what you done to play this cruel trick on that Injin, a man who I figure will tell the truth … even when it won’t get him nowhere.”

  Grouard shook his head. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  “I know, Frank. I don’t think you ever will.”

  “Go to hell, Donegan!” he growled as he whirled on his heel and started away. “Go straight to hell right here.”

  For some moments he watched the interpreter’s back as Grouard disappeared among the post’s buildings.

  “I sure hope that ain’t where I’m going,” Seamus admitted with a shiver. “Place’ll damn well be crowded with lying bastards I once thought was my friends.”

  Omaha, Aug. 31, 1877.

  Gen. Crook.

  Comdg. Department,

  On West-bound train, Fremont, Neb.

  Dispatch from Colonel Bradley just received. Crazy Horse and Touch-the-Clouds tell Lieut. Clark this morning that they are going out with their bands; this means all of the hostiles of last year. Probably more troops must be brought here, if this movement is to be stopped. I think General Crook’s presence might have a good effect?

  R. Williams

  Adjt. General

  Grand Island, Neb.,

  September 1, 1877.

  General Bradley,

  Camp Robinson, Neb.

  Your dispatch received. I cannot come to Robinson. If Spotted Tail can, with his own people and the help of the troops now at Camp Sheridan, round up Touch the Clouds, you have sufficient force to do the same with Crazy Horse … If there is any danger of the Indians becoming alarmed by the arrival of troops from Laramie, you should so arrange matters that they shall arrive during the night and make the round up early the next morning. Use the greatest precaution in this matter. It would be better not to say anything to the Indians about it until the night previous when you can consult the head chiefs and let them select their own men for the work. Delay is very dangerous in this business.

  George Crook,

  Brigadier General.

  Chicago, September 1, 1877.

  General Crook,

  on West-bound train,

  Sidney, Neb.

  I think your presence more necessary at Red Cloud Agency than at Camp Brown and wish you to get off at Sidney and go there. Colonel Bradley thinks Crazy Horse and others will make trouble if the Sioux scouts leave. I will ask Bradley to detain them until you reach Red Cloud …

  P. H. Sheridan,

  Lieut. General.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Wasutun Wi

  MOON WHEN ALL THINGS RIPEN, 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  The War in Europe—Resumption of Hostilities.

  President Hayes to Adopt a New Indian Policy.

  THE INDIANS.

  General Sitting Bull Gives Rise to a New Indian Policy.

  OTTAWA, August 15.—A commission has been appointed by the United States government to make a treaty with Sitting Bull for a return to the reservation with his tribe. While in Washington lately, Hon. Mr. Mills fully explained to President Hayes the Canadian system of dealing with Indians. The president expressed his intentions of adopting a similar line of policy and give the management of the outposts to experienced army officers, and do away altogether with agents. The Canadian Indians of the northwest are fiercely jealous of the advent of hostile Sioux, and it is feared they may at any time make war upon them. It is expected that the new policy towards the Indians, about to be adopted by President Hayes, will bring about the withdrawal of American Indians from Canadian territory.

  Ta’sunke Witko!

  He did not open his eyes to know that it was still dark. Just the smell, the very feel of the air told him that it was the coolest time of the night outside this lodge, in these moments just before dawn would break beyond Crow Butte. All was quiet around him, so quiet because so few of the lodges remained around his. Only Red Feather and Little Hawk had their lodges raised nearby in a family group.

  “I thought perhaps you had gone,” he said to his spirit helper.

  Because I have not spoken to you for so long? You thought I had deserted you?

  “No, that would have been foolish of me. So, why come speak to me now?”

  You haven’t needed me for some time.

  “That’s where you have been wrong, Spirit Guardian. I have needed you every day.”

  Not the way your heart has been, Ta’sunke Witko. You have let others rule you, whether it was the way you allowed your anger for, and distrust of, Red Cloud to decide things for you … or you allowed your lust for the trader’s daughter to make you believe things were strong inside your heart when your heart was not strong at all.

  For a moment he listened to the breathing of the two women in his lodge. From across the fire came the sleeping sounds of the young woman who had such passion in her mouth and body and those dark, flashing eyes. Then he moved his hand and felt Black Shawl beside him. First wife who was struggling to fight off the white man’s coughing sickness, even while he failed to fight off the seduction of the young woman who wanted only to take Black Shawl’s place as first in his heart.

  “Yes, I’ve been a fool about a few things,” Crazy Horse whispered.

  What have you decided about going north with T
hree Stars on his search for the Nez Perce?

  “I gave the White Hat my answer yesterday,” he said. “But then nothing the wasicus want from me ever turns out the way they promise.”

  You won’t talk to the little chief anymore?

  “It serves no purpose. Here in the final days of the Moon When All Things Ripen … all things terrible have indeed come to bear their bitter fruit.”

  Crazy Horse felt Black Shawl stir a bit beside him. Patting her arm beneath the blanket, he listened while the woman’s breathing became regular and deep once more.

  You are thinking more and more of that north country.

  “Yes, how I would like to be there now. Away from this place where men’s hearts grow small. Up there in my country, the land is big, and men’s hearts grow bigger for it. Down here…” and his whisper faded.

  How can you take your people with you, thinking you won’t have to watch them suffer when the soldiers come after the villages of women, children, and the old ones?

  “Just like they did during the winter when we had so little to eat, when the snows were so deep, and the babes cried out in their dying. No,” he whispered, his eyes stinging, “I cannot do that to the mothers and the children ever again.”

  Do what, Ta’sunke Witko?

  “Ask them to sacrifice themselves, as a warrior willingly sacrifices himself—even unto sacrificing those most precious to him.”

  Just the way you believe you sacrificed They Are Afraid of Her to the white man’s disease she contracted because you had a little contact with the wasicus and loafers at the forts?

  “My daughter was sacrificed because of me—”

  She died because of the white man, not because of anything you did. And Black Shawl did not grow sick because of you either. Still … your heart tells you all things will be better when you are far, far from this place, doesn’t it?

  “Yes,” he answered fervently. “To be where the white man would not molest my people … but I can’t take them along, won’t take them because I don’t want to chance so many of them dying to the cold and the hunger, to the constant running and the soldier bullets when the wasicus eventually find and attack our village.”