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

by Terry C. Johnston

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  1. This turned out to be the same wagon that had been readied to whisk prisoner Crazy Horse away from Camp Robinson after midnight that 6 September 1877. Orders were given and plans had been laid for Second Lieutenant H. R. Lemley and his E Troop of the Third U.S. Cavalry to escort their famous captive south to Sidney Barracks, located on the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad, near present-day Sidney, Nebraska, manned that autumn of 1877 by a unit of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry. From there a shackled Crazy Horse was to be hurried east to Omaha, on to Chicago to meet General Sheridan himself, and eventually to the Dry Tortugas, off the coast of Florida.

  Epilogue

  1. Reap the Whirlwind, vol. 9, the Plainsmen Series.

  Afterword

  1. Wanagi Tacunku, or “Spirit’s Trail,” otherwise known as the Star Road, or our Milky Way.

  2. The “loafers,” or “coffee-coolers,” who hung around the white man’s army posts.

  AFTERWORD

  We did not ask you white men to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home. You had yours. We did not interfere with you. The Great Spirit gave us plenty of land to live on and buffalo, deer, antelope, and other game; but you have come here; you are taking my land from me; you are killing off our game, so it is hard for us to live. Now you tell us to work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to live by hunting. You white men can work if you want to. We do not interfere with you, and again you say, why do you not become civilized? We do not want your civilization! We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them.

  As early as the summer of 1877, Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy first credited this speech to Crazy Horse. But many historians have lined up to express their skepticism that Crazy Horse ever said these things to the army’s contract surgeon at Camp Robinson. The truth is, these historians claim, Crazy Horse never did say anywhere near this much at any one time.

  However—I, for one, believe Crazy Horse did utter these heartfelt sentiments to McGillycuddy during the final months of his life, sometime after the wasicu healer had earned the Oglala leader’s trust by managing to ease Black Shawl’s suffering. Far from being the words of a defeated man, they were instead the unerring defiance of a man who would never be corralled, tamed, or “civilized.”

  You will remember how Crazy Horse dared to go against the ways of his own people, finally turning his back on the ineffectual shamans by inviting McGillycuddy to help his wife, Black Shawl. In fact, Helen Laravie was the first interpreter the physician brought along to the Oglala camp. If not through his subsequent translator, William “Billy” Garnett, then perhaps through the young half-breed woman who eventually became Crazy Horse’s “third” wife, this famous war chief expressed his renunciation of all that the white culture offered.

  He might have brought his suffering people in to Red Cloud’s agency, but Crazy Horse never once acted as if he had surrendered to his enemy. Never acted as if he had been subjugated by the wasicu. The army had yet to defeat him in battle.

  Why, I ask those skeptical historians, wouldn’t Crazy Horse speak to the white healer he reluctantly had come to trust? Never before was there any occasion, much less a need, to speak to a white soldier, or a civil official, in such an informal manner. Beginning with the time his youthful friend, Lieutenant Caspar Collins, was killed in the Platte Bridge Fight of 1865, until a dozen years later, when his relationship with McGillycuddy was kindled, Crazy Horse always spoke to the white man through others: men like his uncle, Little Hawk, or fellow Shirt Wearer He Dog, or even good friend Little Big Man, back in those days when white commissioners were first attempting to “buy back” the sacred Pa Sapa.

  If Crazy Horse trusted the physician enough to medicate his wife, and saw with his own eyes the improvement in her health, why wouldn’t Crazy Horse feel enough at ease to believe he could express his unmitigated bitterness with his new “condition” to this white healer? Is it impossible to believe that Crazy Horse thought: if McGillycuddy had proved himself powerful enough to heal Black Shawl, perhaps his medicine would be strong enough to improve conditions for the Hunkpatila?

  He was exactly what Red Cloud and Lieutenant William P. Clark feared he was. Crazy Horse was, and always would be, an “unreconstructed” warrior.

  Another matter that has become abundantly clear to me over the years is how most historians, along with the great majority of Crazy Horse’s white admirers, have failed to plumb the depths of his spirituality, a mysticism that guided him throughout the years he was known to the white man … but most especially a spirituality that guided his every step during these last days of his short life.

  In To Kill An Eagle, authors Edward and Mabel Kadlecek succinctly explain the bedrock of a Lakota warrior’s belief: “When an Indian dies, he is believed to travel to the Milky Way.”1

  The Lakota believe that the Great Mystery—or Wakan Tanka— gives to each baby a ghost, or niva, which originates or comes from the stars. Therefore, each person is possessed of a spirit, or nagi, what author Raymond J. DeMallie calls an “immaterial reflection of the body.” After death, DeMallie goes on to explain, this sicun, or spirit guardian, was believed to escort the spirit of the departed human back to the spirit world just beyond the Milky Way. Then the person’s body, now empty of all spirit, rots and becomes nothing.

  Through dream, a man was able to leave this day-to-day secular world and briefly return to the sacred world that knew no earthly bonds. Every Lakota grew up learning how dangerous it was to attempt to stay in that sacred world for very long. So it was that I imagined a Crazy Horse, chafing more every day with the weight of his unseen shackles and chains, making more and more attempts to leave behind this temporal world of strife and worry—this cramped existence on Red Cloud’s agency, where the chief’s jealous and conspiratorial wagluke2 mocked him—daring to take more and more of those perilous journeys into the sacred land of dream where Crazy Horse saw his life as it ought to have been.

  Leaping more and more into the realm of sacred dream, could it be that Crazy Horse had come to believe he could experience an exalted resurrection?

  In those last seasons of bloody warfare that preceded his death, Crazy Horse had oft instructed his friends and relations on what he himself had been told in dream by the sacred ones, instructions regarding how the others must care for his body should he be killed. His fellow warriors were to paint his body red, then plunge it into fresh water, at which moment Crazy Horse would be revived and returned to life. But if his friends forgot this sacred ritual, Crazy Horse prophesied his bones would turn into rock and his joints into flint.

  While his spirit undoubtedly rides across the night sky far above us, the body of Crazy Horse has returned to dust, somewhere. Trouble is, there’s more controversy and speculation as to his final resting place than there ever was over how he was killed, or who dealt him the fatal deathwound.

  What we do know is that Worm took his son’s body into one of the nearby camps, where he and others transferred it from the army wagon to a travois. Then the grieving father and at least one of his two wives started east with it, because the old man did not consider Red Cloud Agency to be hallowed ground. At Spotted Tail’s agency, a temporary sepulcher was constructed for the body, which the women bathed and sewed inside a ceremonial blanket. Ironic that the white man’s cattle wandering the agency grounds were drawn to that sepulcher, beside which Worm and the two women remained, fasting and mourning for more than three days and nights. Near the end of the fourth day Worm begged the agent, Lieutenant Jesse M. Lee, to protect his son’s body from the cattle that apparently enjoyed rubbing their itchy hides against the rough timbers of that crude sepulcher. By himself, Lee rounded up the wood and constructed a fence around the three-foot-tall bier where the body would remain, at least until the Lakota were forced to migrate east to new homes on the Missouri River.

  Eighteen days after Crazy Horse’s death, on September 23, 1877, in an article more
suited to the white man’s stereotype than having anything to do with Lakota practice, the New York Sun reported that

  [Crazy Horse’s] favorite war pony was led to his grave and there slaughtered. In his coffin were placed costly robes and blankets to protect him from the colds, a pipe and some tobacco, a bow and quiver of arrows, a carbine and a pistol, with an ample supply of ammunition, sugar, coffee, and hard bread, and an assortment of beads and trinkets to captivate the nut-brown maids of paradise.

  The following year, when the Oglala were finally allowed to escape that desolate patch of ground beside the Missouri and return west to a new reservation that would one day be known as the Pine Ridge, Worm brought the body of his son with him. This is where things get really murky and shrouded not only in legend, but in controversy too. In later years some Oglala testified that the body of Crazy Horse was secreted away to the north when many of the Northern bands were able to slip away from that forced march to the Missouri River, unnoticed by the army escort as the column strung itself out more and more across the rolling prairie. One school of thought believes his bones made it all the way across the Medicine Line when a few of the Northern People reached the camp of Sitting Bull. Others believe Crazy Horse was eventually buried somewhere along the Powder by those who escaped the migration. And, in reading the Kadleceks’ book, as well as that of Robert A. Clark (see selected bibliography, which follows), you will learn of the case made for Crazy Horse’s bones being buried in the valley of his beloved Beaver Creek, on the old Spotted Tail Agency.

  As for me, it simply doesn’t matter where the bones of this mystical and enigmatic leader were finally laid to rest. Crazy Horse does not lie here, or there, or even over there. He is a thousand winds that will forever blow across these Northern Plains.

  For those of you who do want to learn even more about the controversy of those final days and the killing of Crazy Horse, or you want to read more on the conflicting theories about just where the remains of Crazy Horse were laid to rest, you can ask your local bookstore or librarian to locate the following titles:

  Autobiography of Red Cloud, War Leader of the Oglalas, edited by R. Eli Paul

  “Big Bat” Pourier: Guide and Interpreter, Fort Laramie, 1870–1880, by Hila Gilbert

  Blood on the Moon—Valentine McGillycuddy and the Sioux, by Julia B. McGillycuddy

  “The Bordeaux Story,” by Virginia Cole Trenholm, Annals of Wyoming (July 1954)

  Buffalo Soldiers, Braves, and Brass, by Frank N. Schubert

  “Campaigning Against Crazy Horse,” by David T. Mears, Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 15 (1907)

  “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” by Jesse M. Lee, Journal of the Military Service Institute of the United States (May–June, 1914)

  Caspar Collins: The Life and Exploits of an Indian Fighter of the Sixties, by Agnes Wright Spring

  “Chief Crazy Horse, His Career and Death,” by E. A. Brininstool, Nebraska History Magazine (1929)

  “Crazy Horse,” by Guy V. Henry, Army and Navy Journal (15 September 1877)

  Crazy Horse and Custer—The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Crazy Horse: The Invincible Oglala Sioux Chief: The “Inside Stories,” by Actual Observers, Of a Most Treacherous Deed Against a Great Indian Chief, by E. A. Brininstool

  Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Lakota, by Mari Sandoz

  The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger, edited by Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul

  Custer’s Conqueror, by William J. Bordeaux

  “The Death of Crazy Horse—A Contemporary Examination of the Homicidal Events of 5 September 1877,” by James N. Gilbert, Journal of the West (January, 1993)

  The Eleanor H. Hinman Interviews on the Life and Death of Crazy Horse, edited by John M. Carroll

  Fifty Years on the Old Frontier, by James H. Cook

  Firewater and Forked Tongues, by M. I. McCreight

  Fort Robinson, Illustrated (published by NEBRASKAland Magazine)

  General George Crook: His Autobiography, by Martin F. Schmitt

  A Good Year to Die—The Story of the Great Sioux War, by Charles M. Robinson, III

  Great Plains, by Ian Frazier

  Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, by Charles A. Eastman

  The Indian Sign Language, by W. P. Clark

  The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse, by Robert A. Clark

  Lakota Belief and Ritual, by James R. Walker

  Lakota Society, by James R. Walker

  The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, by Robert M. Utley

  Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, by Joe DeBarthe

  The Life and Death of Crazy Horse, by Russell Freedman, drawings by Amos Bad Heart Bull

  Man of the West: Reminiscences of George Washington Oaks, 1840–1917, by Ben Jaastad

  “The Man Who Captured Crazy Horse,” by Bailey Millard, Human Life (September, 1910)

  My People the Sioux, by Luther Standing Bear

  The Oglala Lakota Crazy Horse: A Preliminary Genealogical Study and An Annotated Listing of Primary Sources, by Richard G. Hardorff

  “Oglala Sources on the Life of Crazy Horse,” by Eleanor H. Hinman, Nebraska History (Spring 1976)

  On the Border With Crook, by John G. Bourke

  Paper Medicine Man—John Gregory Bourke and His American West, by Joseph C. Porter

  “The Passing of Crazy Horse,” by H. R. Lemley, Journal of the Military Service Institute of the United States (May–June, 1914)

  Phil Sheridan and His Army, by Paul Andrew Hutton

  A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, by Helen H. Blish (drawings by Amos Bad Heart Bull)

  Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, by James C. Olson

  Red Cloud—Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux, by Robert W. Larson

  Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians, by George E. Hyde

  Rekindling Camp Fires: The Exploits of Ben Arnold, by Lewis F. Crawford

  Sacred Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota, by William K. Powers

  The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society, by Royal B. Hassrick

  The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, by Raymond J. DeMallie

  Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux, by George E. Hyde

  The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse: A Source Book About a Tragic Episode in Lakota History, by Richard G. Hardorff

  To Kill An Eagle: Indian Views on the Last Days of Crazy Horse, by Edward and Mabel Kadlecek

  Unpublished personal journal by Lieutenant John G. Bourke, photocopy contained in “Crazy Horse File,” at Fort Robinson, Nebraska (1878)

  “War or Peace: The Anxious Wait for Crazy Horse,” by Oliver Knight, Nebraska History, 54 (1973)

  Warpath and Council Fire: The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, 1851–1891, by Stanley Vestal

  West From Fort Pierre: The Wild World of James (Scotty) Philip, by James M. Robinson

  He is a thousand winds that still blow.

  Like Mari Sandoz, I see Crazy Horse—who she called the “Strange Man of the Oglala”—as a mystic. But even more, I see him as the central, lead figure in a tragic passion play.

  A Shakespearean tragedy is this, a tale fraught with New Testament overtones. Consider, if you will, the striking similarities when you compare this story you have just read with that final week in the life of Jesus, the poor carpenter from Nazareth. Neither Christ nor Crazy Horse ever set out to become wealthy or powerful in the secular world of mankind. Both were exalted by others, summoned to their fate by others: while Jesus was called to his ministry by God, Crazy Horse was anointed by the Big Bellies, the old ones who selected the Oglala band’s Shirt Wearers.

  Consider, too, Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the joyous cries of the crowds, the happy wailing of the women, along with the gall-tinged jealousy Jewish officials must have felt for this rebe
llious and ragged upstart who had been performing miracles among the poor out in the countryside. How dare this carpenter’s son call himself a rabbi! Why, the high priests must have exclaimed, was this Jesus of Nazareth proclaiming himself to be the Son of God? How dare he anoint himself as our long-awaited Messiah!

  Then remember the scene of Crazy Horse’s grand entry into Red Cloud’s agency—how the men, women, and children lined the road for the last two miles, just as they had for Jesus, waving scarves and feathers and medicine bundles instead of palm fronds, crying out in unrestrained joy to their hero: this fighting chief who for ten winters had given his all to be their savior. Think now how that spontaneous and heartfelt celebration at his arrival had to raise the gorge in Red Cloud’s throat, angering the chief’s jealous minions—even Crazy Horse’s own uncle, Spotted Tail—as these reservation Lakota were forced to watch the adulation heaped upon this ragged upstart who had refused for so long to come in and give himself up to the white man.

  Why, Crazy Horse did not even carry a title of his own! He wasn’t even a chief!

  It took less than a week for the sinister whispers spoken behind the back of Jesus to grow into an angry cry. Whispers of the most powerful religious officials eventually growing in volume to become the cry of the crowds. Even though it was the priests themselves who convinced Judas that it was for the best to betray his leader, look back and see how it all was played out under the majesty and the might and the fluttering banners of the Roman Empire. It was on behalf of those high priests, who were frightened, and jealous, and ultimately very envious of the upstart who had begun to shake the temple to its very foundation, that Roman soldiers arrested the rebel leader. In front of thousands of the prisoner’s own people, soldiers hauled their captive off for his final sentencing. On behalf of the wary priests, the Empire’s soldiers carried out the death warrant: pounding nails through the rebel’s flesh and hanging him from the timbers of a thief’s cross.