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

by Terry C. Johnston

  All of them behind him, yelling in horror—and he could still hear the mighty voice of Touch-the-Clouds yelling for him to stop. The strident voices of the wasicu agent and his interpreter—two languages tumbling against each other as everyone tried to yell at once … but those voices were fading, falling from his ears as he burst through the trees and onto the long, open slope that led to the top of the bluff.

  Taste the air, Ta’sunke Witko!

  Yes! It tasted sweet. Not the same air he had been tasting moments ago. Different now because he was no longer surrounded, hemmed in, made a prisoner by all their bodies moving closer, closer—like those rigid iron bars his friends had told him were what kept a man from escaping the iron lodge at the Soldiers Town. He drank deep of the air that shot into his lungs with a valiant song while the horse beneath him found its gait and stretched out for this run across the flat, making the gradual climb up the long slope, on toward the skyline where late-summer clouds were gathering that afternoon.

  Such a fine, strong animal, he thought, his thighs tight around its ribs, riding forward, close to its withers, hearing its eager, heavy breathing coming rhythmically. It could go and go; he was sure of it … go as far as he needed it to—if not all the way to the North Country. He looked over his shoulder and saw that his pursuers were back down the slope and so far behind, spread out and struggling just to keep up with the strong horse his uncle had given him.

  Aren’t you cursing Spotted Tail now!

  His uncle’s agency scouts and that white agent would be cursing too—angry that Spotted Tail had given his nephew such a powerful animal. They would never catch him now.

  But as he shot over the top of the hill, Crazy Horse saw the next long slope rising to the top of the next hill. And beyond it another. Farther still, one more. On and on it would go. How could he keep on?

  She will cry more because you have abandoned her, more than if you … you had fallen in battle.

  And he knew his sicun was right.

  Yes. You can run, but you have never run from a fight, Ta’sunke Witko. Always you have turned your horse into the battle, unafraid of what lesser men could ever do to try stopping you. Unafraid of throwing your body away.

  “I have never turned away from a fight,” he answered the spirit guardian, whose words reverberated not just in his head, but hummed within his breast now, echoed down through his belly, and shuddered out through every limb with the same anticipation he always experienced as he rode into battle. Ready to throw his body away rather than turning from the fight.

  At the bottom of the hill, in a narrow wrinkle within those rising and falling folds of land, ran the course of a tiny stream3 marked by its emerald border of grass and brush. This powerful horse could vault that stream without making so much as a stretch, he knew. And then he would be on the other side, with only the White Earth River between him and all that country beckoning him to come north once more. Tonight he could finally lie again beneath the sky again, looking up at the black so dark it reminded him of the trader’s silk handkerchiefs some of the agency scouts wore around their necks, a black so encompassing it swallowed everything but the tiny points of light dusting the star road above where all the warriors of ages past galloped across the sky for all time to come. To lie there in that North Country again and look up, knowing there were no boundaries to those heavens, that those stars could ride forever … the same way he too could forever ride the country of his birth.

  But when the moment came for the man to kick ever more speed out of the animal below him … Crazy Horse slowly drew himself back from the horse’s withers, pulled back on the buffalo-hair reins, and brought Spotted Tail’s pony to a halt beside the creek gurgling over its stony bed.

  He leaped down, patting the horse on its neck, and watched it step into the stream before he turned around to look at those coming after him. Yelling, shaking their firearms, shouting such anger from frustration and embarrassment that he had broken away, that he could have gotten away so easily. The pride of these agency men was so easy to bruise because they had so little to feel pride for … no longer warriors. Instead, they played at being fighting men now, full of bluster and bravado as they circled around him, yelling at the top of their voices with fear as all the more thundered down the long slope toward the first who had him surrounded once more—around and around him, threatening with their carbines, shaking their fists and shouting the bad words at him, even yelling some of the wasicu words that he did not know, but understood their meaning just the same because they came from so many angry tongues who had learned such talk from the soldiers and miners.

  “Do not touch me!” he cried back at them suddenly, catching those closest to him by surprise.

  In shock, it jolted most of them. They snapped their mouths closed, eyes wide now that he pointed to one after another of his pursuers—turning slowly, pointing at another, then turning again in a tight circle as they paced their panting ponies in a loop around this Hunkpatila who would be free but for knowing there was only one path left a warrior to complete freedom.

  “Yes—you heard me, you little men!” he growled, holding up his empty hands, fingers spread, palms outward to them. Daring them, daring them all. “Do not touch me!”

  More of the chasers raced up, their horses skidding in the grass and throwing up dust over those whom they bumped and jarred, horses whinnying with fright. Still not a one of them had the courage to speak, to challenge him … wide-eyed were they all like their frightened, snorting horses.

  “Don’t you know who I am?” he bellowed at them, now that there were more than five-times-ten come to make him prisoner again. “Hey-ya! I am Crazy Horse … and I have come here to water my horse!”

  Through the pack slowly came one rider. He was a little older than the rest of these agency police. Older than Crazy Horse. Perhaps not as old as his uncle, but a warrior who would have known the old days of glory when the Sicangu of Spotted Tail had struck back after soldier chief Harney murdered the innocents on the Blue Water. This one would have counted many coups … but eventually turned his heart away from fighting to become a loafer like Spotted Tail. How sorry Crazy Horse felt for the man as the old warrior came up and stopped his pony between the lone Hunkpatila and the agency scouts.

  “You came here to water your horse, say you?” he demanded. “Not to run?”

  “This horse my uncle gave me, it is full of vigor,” Crazy Horse replied with the faintest hint of a smile.

  Eventually a small grin came across the man’s wrinkled face. He gazed across the creek for a moment, then back at the Hunkpatila standing on foot. Then the old Sicangu said, “This horse would need a lot of water to carry you for such a long, long ride, Ta’sunke Witko.”

  He smiled back at the old warrior, then nodded once before he turned, picked up the long rein dragging in the shallow creek, and leaped atop the animal’s back.

  “Ride with me back to the trail and the soldier wagon,” the old Sicangu requested gently.

  Crazy Horse looked at him, then turned his head to gaze at all these petty agency men, saying boldly, “My uncle’s horse … yes—it will carry me now where I must go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  September 5, 1877

  Cheyenne, W. T.

  September 5

  General P. H. Sheridan.

  Your dispatch of today received. Crazy Horse was at the bottom of the whole trouble at both agencies & yesterday his band was dismembered by the soldiers & our Indians, mostly by the latter. The members of his band are being distributed among other bands. Crazy Horse is now a prisoner & I have ordered Bradley to send him here. I wish you would send him off where he will be out of harm’s way. You can rest assured that everything at the agencies is perfectly quiet & will remain so.… This is the end of all trouble as far as the Sioux are concerned, outside of Sitting Bull.

  Crook.

  “You ever do anything ’cept stand guard duty?” Seamus Donegan asked the forty-eight-year-old sen
try as he walked up to the corner of the guardhouse.

  William Gentles smiled wryly as he kept on pacing down the length of the log building, where a shingled awning covered the entire width of the guardhouse. “Nothing else but sleep, eat, drink up what pay they give me … and walk this goddamned Sentry Post Number One.”

  “When your relief comes?”

  “Not till tattoo, Seamus,” Gentles groaned. “My dogs gonna be yapping by then!”

  He looked down at the man’s bootees. “Them broghams look to be falling apart on you.”

  “Quartermaster says he’s got more coming up from the rail in Sidney next week or so,” Gentles explained. “Till then, I stuff in some bits of newsprint so the screws workin’ up through the soles don’t chew up the bottoms of my ol’ feet. Still a damn sight better’n the boots we had in the war.”

  “Blessed Mother of Christ!” Donegan exclaimed with the vivid memory. “A wrap of old canvas was better’n those new boots they give us to wear.”

  Gentles laughed easy and hearty as he stepped along, keeping time. “Like the blankets they give us always come apart in the rains that fell and fell, and never stopped!”

  “Boots did too,” Donegan agreed with a laugh of his own. “I was afraid of climbing down from me horse, because it meant I’d have to slog around in the puddles and the mud—sucking the soles off my cavalry boots!”

  “I ’member scrounging over the battlefields for to find a Johnny what had feet big enough to fit my dogs,” Gentles said with a loud blast of laughter. Then his face suddenly went sad. “But most Johnnies didn’t have ’em no good boots anyway. Lots of ’em I saw had no shoes at all.”

  “I remember that as well,” Seamus said, reflecting on those terrible days some fifteen years gone. “We Federals was lucky with what we had.”

  Gentles straightened, ramrod rigid, and shifted his rifle into both hands as he came to a sudden stop. “Aye, so I keep on marchin’ my watch, don’t you know.”

  The old soldier dropped the butt of his Long-Tom Springfield rifle to the ground beside his left boot, clicked his heels together, and saluted the Irishman, snapping his right arm across his breast—fingertips barely touching the muzzle of the rifle where the long regulation bayonet was locked, protruding like a bold exclamation mark at the end of the sentry’s rifle.

  Donegan snapped his heels together too, returning the salute, fingers touching the wide brim of his well-worn hat. “Carry on, sojur!”

  “Aye, Sergeant Donegan, sir!”

  That made the Irishman stop and turn back. “I told you I was a sergeant, did I?”

  “You did,” Gentles said. “And if I’d been the sort could scrub my arse against a saddle for days at a time, I could think of no better man I’d want as non-com over me than your plucky soul, Seamus dear!”

  “That’s about the highest praise I feel a man could give, save for looking in the face of my wee boy and knowin’ I’m his da. You ever was married, Willy?”

  He wagged his head with melancholy. “Soldierin’… that was me mate. Come to it later’n most men does … so we stuck it out together, it appears. Only wish the general’d get around to shippin’ me back to my own unit before I’m bound to muster out here at Camp Robinson.”

  “Not a one of your outfit still here? Just you?”

  Gentles said, “Like I told you in the saloon, ever’ last bloody one of ’em gone ’cept me—shipped back to Camp Douglas in Utah Territory, while my arse was chained up in this here guardhouse,” and he jabbed a thumb back at the low-roofed log building behind him.

  “What does the adjutant say about you getting back to your company?”

  “When it suits ’em, I s’pose,” Gentles replied. “No one seems in the hurry … so as long as there’s whiskey to drink up at Paddock’s store, I’ll walk as many miles as they tell me to walk: back and forth … back and forth.”

  “Ever you have serious trouble with them what get thrown in here?”

  “Them? Naw—they’re just soldiers like me.” Then he looked at Donegan quizzically. “Here and I took you for a man who’d seen the inside of a place just like this. Didn’t you ever spend some time in no guardhouse?”

  “Been over ten year, it has,” he said, awash with the memories of that cold December in Dakota Territory when a brave but reckless officer marched off with eighty men to punch his way right on through the whole Sioux nation. “Fort Phil Kearny. Fetterman got hisself and a lot of good men hacked to pieces one cold day.”

  “Aye, another officer leading his lambs to the slaughter.”

  “I was in on the rescue detail,” Seamus declared as footsteps scraped on the boards of the covered porch behind them. “We got there too late.”

  “If you hadn’t, you’d not be standing here, keeping this old soldier from his work,” Gentles growled with a smile, raising his Springfield to his shoulder once more.

  Seamus turned his head slowly and looked over the small army post. “Things get quieted down some, now that I hear Crazy Horse run off for the other agency?”

  The sentry nodded, then shrugged. “Seems to be settled some. Let them others keep him so all the buggers who don’t like him will have to find something else to worry us with. Naw, there ain’t no bloody excitement to help keep a sleepy man awake when he’s ordered to stand a twelve-hour watch on guard duty!”

  “Buy you a drink tomorrow?”

  “Swear on my grandmother’s grave that’ll be as soon as I drag my bones outta my bunk,” the private replied with a knowing roll of his eyes. “Gonna be a long night of walking sentry here. Thank you for offering, Seamus dear.”

  “More’n happy to have a cup with an old soldier. Tomorrow, Willy?”

  As he set off in a rhythmic pace again, Gentles dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and said, “Aye, tomorrow it is.”

  Chicago, Illinois

  Sept. 5, 1877.

  Captain Gillies, U.S.A.,

  Cheyenne Depot, Wyo.

  Sending the following to General Crook.

  Your dispatch of this date received. I will send to you at Green River Station, the latest news of the Nez-Perces. I wish you to send Crazy Horse under proper guard to these Hd. Qrs.

  P. H. Sheridan,

  Lieut.-General.

  Once Crazy Horse came back in sight, Jesse M. Lee felt like he could breathe again, that huge set of iron pincers that had clamped themselves around his chest suddenly freed. As the Oglala leader rode up among that posse of Spotted Tail’s scouts, Lee stood at the back of the ambulance and wiped his brow with a damp red kerchief. He felt immense relief that he would not be the one to trust, then suffer betrayal at the hands of the one he had trusted.

  “Bordeaux, I want you to tell him he must ride right here,” Lee ordered, pointing emphatically at the rear of the ambulance. “Tell him he must not stray from the tailgate of this wagon or I will have him removed from his horse and placed in here with the rest of us.”

  Crazy Horse listened, turning to glance at the warriors massed on either side of him. Those Brulé were men, Lee realized, who Crazy Horse had just made to look inept, if not like fools. While he was a warrior, a horseman. These agency police would have to struggle to even begin to hold a candle to Crazy Horse.

  Lee wiped his face once more, then ordered his driver to resume their march, pressing on up the White River Road. Taking a seat in the jostling ambulance, the lieutenant now kept a constant eye on the prisoner’s face.

  That’s what he is, Lee thought. A prisoner. Never before in all these months since the Northern bands had surrendered had the lieutenant ever known anyone to think, much less speak, in those terms. He’s a prisoner, for God’s sake! Surely Crazy Horse knows that, if only by looking around to see the way the scouts have him surrounded, the way he was pursued so doggedly. A man of his stature and history must surely be chafing from this prison he finds himself inside already … because these reliables had already moved within a couple of arm lengths of the Oglala. All around him
now, like the bars on a prison cell.

  Lee got his first sight of the magnificent Crow Butte a little less than fifteen miles from Camp Robinson. It was here that he ordered a brief halt while he took out a small tablet and his pencil, writing a short note for Luther Bradley at the post ahead.

  DEAR GENERAL: I have Crazy Horse with me, about 15 mi out. Please send word by return courier. Take him to the post or agency? I respectfully suggest that we use all tact and discretion in securing Crazy Horse so that we do not precipitate serious trouble. Additionally, sir—since I have promised him that he might state his case to you, I request that arrangements be made accordingly for him to see you.

  LEE, agent

  “Bordeaux, call for Horned Antelope,” the lieutenant instructed. “He’s on a good horse, you said?”

  “It’s a strong, leggy one,” the interpreter responded, then hollered for the Brulé to come forward.

  Having positioned himself right behind Crazy Horse’s left heel, the agency scout now had reined aside and around the prisoner, no more than a few steps, to halt at the rear of the army ambulance.

  “White Hat,” Lee said in English. “Bordeaux, tell him to take this note to the White Hat—just as fast as he can ride. And tell him he’s to wait for word from White Hat, wait to bring back a letter from him for me.”

  He watched Horned Antelope turn his horse away, parting the crowd of more than sixty faithful friendlies, then kick the animal into a lope that quickly rolled into a gallop. Lee brought his eyes to Crazy Horse as he sat back down on the wide seat at the side of the ambulance. Once more the Oglala looked as he had when he showed up at the office early that morning. Like a small, trapped, feral animal that finds itself in the company of snarling predators. Not that the man could ever be considered timid in the way a jackrabbit was a timid creature … but the way even the bravest, most courageous and noble of animals would become when it realizes that there is no escape from its enemies, no flight possible from the predators on its heels.

  His heart ached for the man. And he began to feel the first twinges of guilt, looking now at Crazy Horse as the ambulance lurched into motion once more.