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

by Terry C. Johnston

  More than eighteen centuries later, out on those plains of northwestern Nebraska Territory, it took much longer than a week for the jealous and suspicious chiefs to undo Crazy Horse. They needed a few months not only to convince the white officials and army officers that this last of the holdouts could not be trusted … they needed ample time to work the other side of the equation too: After laboring so hard throughout that spring to convince Crazy Horse he had no choice but to trust the army and agent to whom he would give himself and his people, they now set about convincing Crazy Horse that he never would be able to trust the dishonest wasicus.

  With agonizing slowness, this tragedy of great passion was played out under the majesty and might of the stars and stripes, the banner of the United States of America. Day by day, week by week, the chiefs who had so much to lose to Crazy Horse hammered away at the rebel’s own people, finally convincing them that their leader could no longer be trusted to do what was good for them. Just as the high priests had whispered doubts and charges of blasphemy into the ear of Judas, so too did Red Cloud and his grasping allies concoct their betrayal of those Hunkpatila closest to Crazy Horse, luring them away from their leader. Eventually, most of the Crazy Horse people came to believe that Crazy Horse was about to ruin everything for them if he were not stopped.

  (It is here I pause to be sure you understand that I do not in any way, shape, or form agree with Red Cloud’s biographers when they howl in protest to this dark, evil view of Red Cloud, claiming that the Oglala chief was, at the very best, an innocent who was used by Lieutenant Clark and General Crook, an otherwise noble figure who was much maligned by Mari Sandoz, or, at the very worst, Red Cloud was not the insecure and evil chieftain who manipulated people and events to bring about the fall, if not the death, of Crazy Horse. Make no mistake, dear reader: I firmly believe that Red Cloud’s hand—not to mention those of Woman’s Dress, American Horse, and many others—are forever stained crimson with Ta’sunke Witko’s blood.)

  After months of delicate, and some not-so-delicate, machinations comes September 5, 1877. On behalf of this conniving chief Red Cloud and his faithful courtiers—who were frightened, jealous, and extremely envious of this upstart who was getting so much more attention from the white man than a ragged non-chief ever should enjoy—the U.S. Army cajoled Crazy Horse, convincing him of his personal safety even while they were in the process of arresting him. In front of thousands of his own people who packed the grounds surrounding the adjutant’s office, Camp Robinson soldiers took their prisoner into custody and marched him off to the guardhouse, prepared to lock him away until the middle of the night, when plans were for Lieutenant H. R. Lemley’s troop of cavalry to whisk the trouble-maker far away from those few Oglala he might still influence.

  Yes, things had been quite comfortable at Red Cloud’s agency ever since Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and the Fourth U.S. Cavalry disarmed and unhorsed the Oglala in the autumn of 1876. The obstinate chief was made malleable: he could be brought around to the agent’s, and Lieutenant Clark’s, way of thinking. Red Cloud’s Oglala had adjusted to their new way of life. No one wanted Crazy Horse to shake this peaceful existence to its very foundation. Not the army. Least of all the Oglala leaders, who had the most to lose.

  In a Shakespearean climax of catastrophic proportions—even though chief American Horse and other angry headmen were fully prepared and willing to kill Crazy Horse by their own hands—it was a lone soldier who carried out Red Cloud’s and American Horse’s most fervent wish.

  The most potent rebel voice was silenced. Trouble snuffed out by a fateful conjunction of the fears of a trouble-maker’s own people with the fears of their powerful captors.

  Colonel Luther Bradley ordered every man on the alert that night of September 5, the soldiers fearing reprisal by the Lakota. But despite what wailing and mourning took place in the surrounding camps, everything remained surprisingly calm. Crazy Horse’s supporters were fleeing toward Spotted Tail’s agency. Very few of the Northern People remained nearby.

  Do you remember how Red Cloud and his headmen met with General George Crook and offered to kill Crazy Horse a few days before the arrest? That night, as Crazy Horse lay dying, and in the days to follow, those chiefs came to Lieutenant Clark to assure him that, indeed, they were glad that the trouble-maker was no more. They believed they had done their part to see that the source of all discord at the two agencies had been removed. The chiefs promised the White Hat there would be no outbreak of violence … and there wasn’t. These coffee-coolers did all that was necessary to stamp out the first flames of the white man’s fear of a wholesale uprising.

  That suicidal uprising would not come for another thirteen winters.

  So with Crazy Horse out of the way, the immediate item on the chiefs’ agenda was their crucial journey to Washington City. Twenty-two scant days after Crazy Horse passed on to the ages, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and the rest of the delegation were in the nation’s capital, having their first audience with President Rutherford B. Hayes. Within the walls of the White House that twenty-seventh day of September, Hayes promised the chiefs he would do everything in his power to fight the opposition in Congress, a powerful lobby that had lined up enough votes to overrule the president and banish the Lakota south into Indian Territory, the present-day state of Oklahoma. But Carl Schurz, Hayes’s brilliant and courageous Secretary of the Interior, would eventually succeed … and the Lakota would be allowed to come back to new homes in Dakota Territory.

  But that autumn of 1877, even before the chiefs and headmen had returned from Washington City, the army and agents went about packing up the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail people for their march east to the Missouri River, where they could be more easily supplied by steamboat than by long-haul freight-wagon outfits. As the weather turned cold with the foreboding of an early winter, those long, sad processions started east for a new home promised on the banks of the Missouri. As the days wore on, the columns strung out and some stragglers found it hard to keep up. With nowhere near enough soldiers to keep an eye on everyone on that gently rolling landscape, the Northern People began to slip away, a few lodges at a time. Some disappeared into the badlands, on their way back to their beloved hunting grounds in the Powder River country. Others pointed their noses farther north for the Land of the Grandmother and kept right on going until they crossed the Medicine Line, rejoining the Sitting Bull people.

  But as I’ve already mentioned, the bones of Crazy Horse stayed with his father that terribly cold winter of 1877–1878 when starvation howled wolfishly at every lodge door. In the spring, the tribes were informed that they could return to new agencies near the reservations they had been forced to abandon in the autumn of 1877. Tradition holds that Worm brought the remains of his son back to Beaver Creek. It was somewhere high along the borders of this valley—where Crazy Horse fasted, prayed, and meditated many times in his brief life—that tradition holds Worm buried the bones in a secret place. A place few Lakota would ever know. A place no white man would ever see.

  Back to the here and now, I have concluded my years of research and feel ready to make a final pilgrimage to Fort Robinson, once more seeking out Tom Buecker, the savvy historian and museum curator who doesn’t mind kicking around the “what ifs” with me. But even more, I have returned here so that I could walk this ground once more—to stand right here outside this reconstructed guardhouse and wonder how things might have been different had Crazy Horse not attempted to bolt from that narrow doorway. How long would the government have kept him at the Dry Tortugas? Would they have held him until he died, unable to break his spirit, unable to tame so wild a rebel? And if he had ever been allowed to return to the Oglala—like his uncle, Spotted Tail, returned to his Brulé—would the man who came back ever have been the same Crazy Horse, the Ta’sunke Witko who loved and lived, fought and died on the high plains of the far west?

  Or, in my wildest imaginings, how would things have played themselves out if he had escaped the reservation in
time—putting into motion his hopes of slipping away a lodge or two at a time, eventually to reunite with his few faithful friends and followers before the first snows fell somewhere in their beloved hunting grounds, there in the shadow of the Bighorns? It is easy to believe that Sherman, Sheridan, and Crook would not have rested until the escapee was hunted down, until Crazy Horse was captured or killed. Brought in dead or alive. Just as easy as it is for me to realize that once Crazy Horse had been forced to taste the bitter gall of reservation life as accepted by Red Cloud, American Horse, and Spotted Tail … Crazy Horse would never again let himself be taken alive.

  How different things would have turned out for history had Ta’sunke Witko gone down fighting in his beloved homeland.

  Instead of crumpling to his knees, all fighting strength seeping from him, collapsing on this dusty patch of summer sun-baked ground where I now stand. Tears in my eyes, I clearly see a dripping red bayonet yanked out of his back, his fellow Oglala suddenly leaping away in dismay and shock. In utter fear that this unkillable warrior was about to die.

  It was here, on this patch of grassy dirt at old Camp Robinson—where I find myself sitting in the shade because I feel my own knees buckling with overwhelming emotion—that the great hoop of the Lakota Nation was irretrievably broken.

  Not when Sitting Bull managed to escape north to Canada. Not when the other fighting chiefs decided to give up and come in to the reservations.

  On this hallowed ground the greatest Lakota warrior fell … never to rise. His people never were as mighty again.

  No one would ever mend the hoop, no matter the efforts of Sitting Bull and Gall when they returned south of the Medicine Line and gave themselves over to the wasicus some four years later. It would take thirteen more years after Crazy Horse’s death for that broken hoop to be shattered beyond all repair—when the white man ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull, and the old chief was killed at the hand of his own people. Such a terrible thing could happen only because the power and might of the fighting bands had been broken for all time in that spring of 1877 … only because the spirit that had once made them mighty was now crushed.

  With Crazy Horse out of the way, no Oglala ever took up the mantle and carried on the struggle.

  But in the midst of the emotions that threaten to engulf me, I suddenly remember that Crazy Horse is not here, nor does his spirit infuse this ground with tragic sadness.

  A thousand winds that will forever blow across this stark and beautiful country.

  While a mighty life has been snuffed out, all one need do is to walk out onto the prairie, away from the contaminating wattage of modern man … and gaze up into the greatness of the heavens. Let your eyes and your heart guide you to that Star Road, a thick dusting of countless points of light. Resting there among the best of the Lakota … shines the spirit of Crazy Horse.

  He who would have considered his image being carved out of a mountain in the sacred Pa Sapa as the ultimate profanity, because Crazy Horse had spent his whole life steadfastly refusing to have his image taken from him! It is this Crazy Horse you must remember. The sacred and mystical war leader of the Oglala. Not some artificial and obscene rock face that’s been blasted out of the side of a mountain.

  I sit here in the shade of this log building, taking great solace in the words of Black Elk, who wrote many years afterward of “The Killing of Crazy Horse”:

  It does not matter where his body lies, for it is grass; but where his spirit is, it will be good to be.

  So tonight when it grows quiet and your find yourself needing to close your eyes in sleep—I want you to walk outside and look up at the dark canopy overhead. There … you’ll find it in the untamed fires of the night sky: the true fighting spirit of Ta’sunke Witko rides across the heavens forever.

  Terry C. Johnston

  Camp Robinson, Nebraska

  September 5, 1999

  THE PLAINSMEN SERIES BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON

  Book I: Sioux Dawn

  Book II: Red Cloud’s Revenge

  Book III: The Stalkers

  Book IV: Black Sun

  Book V: Devil’s Backbone

  Book VI: Shadow Riders

  Book VII: Dying Thunder

  Book VIII: Blood Song

  Book IX: Reap the Whirlwind

  Book X: Trumpet on the Land

  Book XI: A Cold Day in Hell

  Book XII: Wolf Mountain Moon

  Book XIII: Ashes of Heaven

  Book XIV: Cries from the Earth

  Book XV: Lay the Mountains Low

  Book XVI: Turn the Stars Upside Down

  HIGH PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF TERRY JOHNSTON

  “You are there, you are really there, in Johnston’s largest, most complex work.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Lay the Mountains Low

  “Johnston is a skilled storyteller whose words ring with desperation, confusion, and utter horror of a fight to the death between mortal enemies.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Lay the Mountains Low

  “The author’s attention to detail and authenticity, coupled with his ability to spin a darned good yarn, makes it easy to see why Johnston is today’s best-selling frontier novelist. He’s one of a handful that truly knows the territory.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Rich in historical lore and dramatic description, this is a first-rate addition to a solid series, a rousing tale of one man’s search for independence in the unspoiled beauty of the Old West.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Buffalo Palace

  “A first-class novel by a talented author.”

  —Tulsa World on Dream Catcher

  “With meticulous research, vivid dialogue, memorable characters, and a voice uniquely his own, Johnston has once again written the finest of historical fiction, seamlessly blending together both time and place to bring to life a world as real as our own.”

  —Roundup Magazine on Dance on the Wind

  “Compelling … Johnston offers memorable characters, a great deal of history and lore about the Indians and pioneers of the period, and a deep insight into human nature, Indian and white.”

  —Booklist

  “Terry C. Johnston pierces the heart and soul of the 19th century men and women he writes about so well, capturing in unforgettable and gracious stories the joys and agonies of the great westward expansion of a young America … he will make your heart sing.”

  —RICHARD S. WHEELER, Spur Award–winning author of Sierra

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR*

  Terry C. Johnston was born on the first day of 1947 on the plains of Kansas and lived all his life in the American West. His first novel, Carry the Wind, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books appeared on bestseller lists throughout the country. After writing more than thirty novels of the American frontier, he passed away in March of 2001 in Billings, Montana.

  Terry’s work combined the grace and beauty of a natural storyteller with a complete dedication to historical accuracy and authenticity. He continues to bring history to life in the pages of his historical novels so that readers can live the grand adventure of the American West. While recognized as a master of the American historical novel, Terry remained, and will be remembered to family and friends, as a dear loving father and husband as well as a kind, generous, and caring friend. He has gone on before us to a better place where he will wait to welcome us in days to come.

  If you would like to help carry on the legacy of Terry C. Johnston, then you are invited to contribute to the Terry C. Johnston Memorial Scholarship Fund:

  Terry C. Johnston Memorial Fund

  c/o Montana State University–Billings Foundation

  1500 N. 30th St.

  1-888-430-6782

  For more information on other Terry C. Johnston novels visit the Web site at: http://cu.imt.net/∼tjohnston

  Send email to:

  tjohnston@imt.net

  or write to:

  Terry C. Johnston’s
West

  PO Box 50594

  Billings, Montana 59105

  TURN THE STARS UPSIDE DOWN

  Copyright © 2001 by Terry C. Johnston.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001019264

  ISBN: 0-312-98209-7

  EAN: 80312-98209-6

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / August 2001

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / June 2002

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  eISBN 9781466843240

  First eBook edition: March 2013

  *Please note that some of the contact information referenced in this section may no longer be accurate.