by Win Blevins
In the middle of the Moon of Frost in the Lodge, young men came in from Red Cloud Agency. They had had a hard time coming in the middle of winter. The White Earth River lay far to the south and east. Though not much snow fell, the weather was bitter, cold and windy. Their skin got frostbitten, and they needed nearly a full moon to get here. Now they had things to say in the council lodge.
Their relatives took them to warm lodges, fed them stew, and got them warmed up and rested. Then the messengers and headmen and people gathered in the council lodge. The message from the white agent turned out to be simple enough: All Lakota who did not come in to the agencies by the end of this moon would be considered hostile. The army would come out and drive them in.
Big Road, Black Twin, and Crazy Horse looked at each other. Though the Strange Man was still smoking his short canupa, about a hundred lodges of these people regarded him as their leader. The chiefs looked at each other….
Crazy Horse supposed the others were having the same mad thoughts he was. He was amused at the presumption of the whites and outraged, too. Amused further at their stupidity: a journey that had taken young men a full moon was now supposed to be done by a village with children and old people in half a moon. Or maybe it wasn’t stupidity—maybe the whites wanted to make an impossible demand to get an excuse to fight.
Sad. The young, the old, and the weak would suffer when war came. Sad, for this turn was likely a sign of the end of their free life.
He was also glad, because this meant an end to the talking and maneuvering, bribing and blackmailing. The issues would be settled now by honorable clash of arms.
The chiefs all drew in smoke and sent it, the breath of the earth, up to Father Sky. They had talked plenty about this possibility in private. They knew what was coming. So did the people. Not many words were needed, and none from Crazy Horse.
Elation was swelling his chest. He wanted to fight. He recognized that fighting might not be best for all the people. So he promised himself that he would seek a vision and ask Spirit what to do. He promised himself further that he would pray constantly with his Inyan, in hope that they would speak.
He could hear, in his mind’s ear, Hawk yawping her war cry. It would be a fight.
Big Road was the one who finally spoke up. “Tell the agent the snow is deep, there is no grass, and the ponies are already weak.”
After a pause, Black Twin added quietly, “Tell him also that we are not willing to be told where we must live in our own country.”
Crazy Horse looked at his fellow headmen and smiled with his eyes alone. No, no words were needed from him.
A CALL TO ARMS
People disagreed, though, about whether they should go in. When the grass greened, some said, the soldiers would be chasing everyone—it would be hard. Others said the soldiers wouldn’t wait for the grass: “Remember eight winters ago,” they said, “Long Hair attacked the Sahiyela on the Washita River in the middle of the snow time. And killed many women and children.” Still others said that they could keep the soldiers out of the country, or at least stay clear of them, as long as their ammunition held out and there were enough buffalo.
Throughout the rest of the Moon of Frost in the Lodge and all through the Moon of Popping Trees, they met in the council lodge and talked about it. Word came by runner from Red Cloud: “Come in, we’re waiting for you.” But was that what the old war leader truly wanted? Or did the whites make him say it? Or was there a hidden message?
Crazy Horse said privately that each man must decide for himself. He told those who wanted to go in that he understood. A man can’t fight when he can’t feed his women and children. Each family must do what’s good for them.
Publicly, Little Big Man spoke for him. For himself and his family Crazy Horse chose the old way, the ways of the grandfathers, the ways shown them by White Buffalo Cow Woman and Grandfather. To Crazy Horse all ways but these were death. Regardless of the ammunition, regardless of the buffalo, he would stay in this north country.
So the people were divided against each other. During a warm wind in the Moon of Popping Trees, Crazy Horse’s cousin Black Elk started for Red Cloud Agency with a few lodges. Early in the Snow-Blind Moon, the last moon of winter, even He Dog left. He took eight lodges toward the Sahiyela camp led by Two Moons on Little Shifting Sands River. From there, when the ponies were stronger, he would go to the agency.
A-i-i-i, a shirtman and one of his oldest friends.
Sometimes it seemed to Crazy Horse that he had to lose everyone who mattered to him: his mother, his daughter, his brother, Little Hawk, his hunka Hump, Grandmother Plum. Now his cousin Black Elk and two old friends, Young Man-Whose-Enemies and He Dog, both leaders, both wearers of the shirt, were agency Indians.
Crazy Horse took the only course he could see clearly. He paid attention to his spirit animal, Hawk. He purified himself in the sweat lodge. He cried for a vision. He listened for word from the Inyan.
The Inyan seemed silent, except for the sound of the beat of the earth. But maybe they weren’t silent. Maybe the beat was speaking and he wasn’t listening.
The thaw was on. Snow dripped down the trees and bushes. The ground was patchy, white here and marshy there. They were sitting on a log by the river. Horn Chips had suggested it because, he said, he liked to hear the thick river ice make its big cracking noises. To Crazy Horse the cracking sounded too much like soldiers’ rifles in camp. The Strange Man had asked his teacher for a talk about the Inyan.
“Sometimes I do think I hear something,” said Crazy Horse. “Sort of.”
“Tell me about it.”
Crazy Horse made a little flinch with his shoulders. He had never been really comfortable with his Inyan, not the shell stone he wore behind his ear, not the moss stone under his arm. To him the Inyan were a little bizarre.
Maybe that was because Chips was a little bizarre. Crazy Horse had long since accepted that the two of them would never have an easy relationship. There would always be an undercurrent of tension, a feeling that Chips was impatient with Crazy Horse’s spiritual slowness. He thought Chips liked him but didn’t entirely approve of him.
“Tell me,” Horn Chips repeated. Their canupa sat on their laps.
“I expected words,” said Crazy Horse. “Or pictures. Lots of times when I pray and listen I hear nothing at all, see nothing. Feels like trying to walk through a boulder. Sometimes I … Maybe I get a sense. Not words, not pictures, not anything … A sense.”
“Describe it to me.”
“It’s like hearing a drum but not quite hearing it.”
“Does it make you nervous?”
“No, it makes me … peaceful.”
Horn Chips thought for a while. “Inyan are different for different people. Sometimes they say something exact. I can ask my Inyan where someone is, and maybe I will see. Sometimes Inyan just… People listen and without being able to say how, they know what’s right to do. Sometimes they’re more subtle, much more, they … It’s like a song with no words, just the music.”
He left it for a little. Crazy Horse began to wonder if his teacher was finished. The river ice made a loud snap.
“Just listen,” Chips said. “Just listen.” He paused again, as though considering whether to speak. “You have a hard path. You are called to be a holy warrior and one who sees deeply. Normally they don’t go together. I’ve told you before that to hear truly, you may have to stop fighting. And stop seeking glory in the eyes of the people.”
Chips gave him a knowing smile. Crazy Horse knew what he meant. It made him mad. Give up leadership, give the people up.
“Inyan are the oldest of all living things,” Chips said. “Inyan can tell us everything about life. Listen. Just listen. No one can tell what you will hear. Something small or something big, that will be your beginning point.”
Crazy Horse supposed so. But was a teacher supposed to be like a sand sticker on a moccasin?
They heard someone coming from the direction of the villa
ge. A young man approached and stood respectfully silent four or five steps away. The Strange Man turned to him and raised an eyebrow.
“A messenger has come from Fort Fetterman,” he said. “He tells us the entire village of Crazy Horse has been destroyed by the soldiers.”
Crazy Horse looked sharply at Horn Chips, half-tickled and half-scared. The village of Crazy Horse?
The stone wicasa wakan nodded and smiled.
Crazy Horse got up and walked toward the council lodge.
Before they could get the council well started, one of the young men came in with a signal from the wolves. People were coming up the creek, weary, with almost no horses or belongings.
They sent food and robes out for everyone and pony drags to bring in the wounded. Crazy Horse and the other principal men rode out ahead.
It was He Dog and the Sahiyela he had joined, led by the headman Two Moons and the seer Ice.
After everyone was warmed and fed, they heard the story. Like He Dog, Two Moons had wanted to go in to the agency. The Sahiyela were not like the Oglala, hostile to the whites. But they decided to wait until the grass was better. The scouts saw soldiers, some out of Fort Fetterman led by Three Stars, the one the whites called Crook. After Three Stars marched on by, the chiefs moved the village into a small, obscure canyon the soldiers couldn’t find. They were sure they were safe, though—the Sahiyela were known to be peaceful.
Three Stars’ soldiers were almost into the village at dawn before the scouts spotted them. Grabber was with the soldiers. He knew the canyon and had led them there.
“Hai!” people exclaimed.
Grabber was the son of a Mormon missionary and a woman of the islands of the western sea. Years ago, the Hunkpapa had found him and taken him in and made him one of them. Now he led the soldiers against his own. The runners said Grabber thought the village was Crazy Horse’s because he recognized the horses of He Dog.
Several men in the council gave each other looks that meant, “Let’s kill this traitor.”
In the dawn attack the women and children ran. The warriors, naked and afoot, tried to hold the soldiers back. Though the whites stampeded the pony herd, the boys found some old horses that hadn’t run far and got the people going. From afar they saw the black, oily smoke of lodges burning, and knew that everything not on their backs or in their arms was destroyed.
Through the snow they made their way here.
Crazy Horse was glad to see that one matter was settled. He Dog had no agency in his heart, not now.
Still, Three Stars was loose in the country. The Lakota had not met the ridiculous deadline, so soldiers could now hunt them like animals. No village was safe.
Everyone decided to move the camp to Chalk Buttes, where Sitting Bull’s people were. There would be safety in numbers.
At Chalk Buttes the headmen counciled. Sitting Bull would not go in to any agency, not ever, he said. His position was unchanged: The people must have nothing to do with the whites in any way. Not talk, not make treaties, nothing. Not even go in to the forts to trade.
As for the coming fight, he welcomed it. The people had a little ammunition from the Gros Ventres. They could trade for more from the Slota. It would be expensive, but worth it. He wanted to turn the tables on the agency Indians. “Let’s send our runners back to the agencies,” he suggested. “Come fight. Bring shells. It’s going to be a grand summer against the whites.” He looked at the man next to him, powerful in medicine and in war, and added, “Tell them His Crazy Horse will be leading the war.”
The Strange Man kept his silence, as always in council, but he was satisfied. Hawk was exhilarated.
Once more Crazy Horse prepared in the sweat lodge. He went onto the mountain to seek a vision. For four days and nights he cried to the grandfathers and all the powers for assistance. He saw. He dreamed. He dreamed pictures of war and of dying. He saw only an eternal fighting, a martial dance. He did not see Lakota women cutting their hair off or scarifying their arms and legs in grief. Nor did he see them dancing in celebration, with brown and yellow and red scalps dangling from the pole.
After sweating again, he prayed for a long time with the Inyan. He heard nothing from them. The dreams of war rampaged through his mind, a war that seemed never to end, blood that pulsed out forever, like a fresh and abundant spring flowing from a wound in the earth.
Throughout that spring of the Winter Red Cloud’s Horses Were Taken Away, which the whites called 1876, Crazy Horse left Black Shawl, the wife he had come to love, to go back to the mountain over and over. His dream was always the same.
He was satisfied. It would have been good to see many soldiers upside down, therefore dead. It would have been good to see Lakota men dancing their coups, Lakota women sending up the piercing tremolo. But for a warrior like him, he knew, it was the rise to martial spirit that counted, not the victory.
Throughout that spring, agency Lakota swelled the wild camps. Black Elk’s people came back from Red Cloud, disgusted because the peace chiefs intended to sell Paha Sapa. Many young men were also angry and would come to fight the soldiers, said Black Elk, even Red Cloud’s son Jack.
The young men did begin to come in, eager to go to war behind Crazy Horse. Northern bands joined the camps: Those Who Plant by the River, Those Without Bows, Sihasapa, Two Kettles, some Santee and Yanktonai, and many Sahiyela.
The soldiers would come too, said all the agency men. At the agencies the whites were even trying to recruit agency Lakota to scout and fight against their own. Three Stars would come out, they’d heard, and other soldiers from the forts on the Big Muddy River. These soldiers were not coming with excuses, not to build a road to the goldfields, to survey for a railroad, to look for gold in Paha Sapa. They were simply coming to kill Indians.
A-i-i-i, it would be a summer for a young man to show what he was made of.
It was also a good summer to stick together, the headmen agreed. They would not go out looking for the soldiers but would stick together in one big camp and wait until the whites were near. They would employ all the strength of their numbers. The numbers were grand—by early in the Moon When the Chokecherries Are Ripe, 450 lodges, 3,200 people, about 800 fighting men.
The young men were not so sure they just wanted to wait. Maybe they would go find the soldiers.
On Rosebud Creek the camp grew so big it had to be moved every few days, for the sake of firewood and grass. For once the scouts found plenty of buffalo, and the hunters filled the camp with meat. Many young men and women got married. The old ways felt strong. And in this strength Sitting Bull was able to see beyond.
He dreamed of a huge billowing of dust leading soldiers from the east against a cloud that looked like the village. When the dust whipped against the village, a great storm raged. When it cleared, the dust fell to the earth, and the village stood strong.
When Sitting Bull told the other headmen his dream, they rejoiced. They also posted extra lookouts to watch for soldiers coming from the east.
A few days later Sitting Bull pledged to give a sun dance, not the annual dance of all the Lakota, but a special dance of his own band only, where he would make a particular sacrifice.
In the first quarter of the Moon When the Chokecherries Are Ripe, the Hunkpapa gave the dance with the other bands watching. Sitting Bull sacrificed fifty small pieces of flesh from each arm, cut away with an awl. Bleeding profusely, he then danced most of the day gazing into the sun. Suddenly he stopped and stared at the sun for a long time. And when he returned from his journey, he told the people what he had seen.
Soldiers came thick as grasshoppers to an Indian village. All of them were upside down with their hats falling off, and their horses were upside down. Some of the Indians were also upside down. “The soldiers do not have ears,” Sitting Bull said, “but you are not supposed to take their spoils, or cut their bodies.”
The people were thrilled. Lots of soldiers would attack their village. Though some Indians would die, all the soldiers woul
d be killed. But the people must leave their bodies untouched.
The lodge circles simmered with anticipation of a great victory. Soldiers falling into camp, they called their leader’s vision.
During this time Crazy Horse also sought to see beyond. Again he saw only blood, killing without end.
The scouts said Three Stars and his soldiers were marching toward Rosebud Creek.
Only yesterday the big camp had left the Rosebud, headed over the divide to the west toward the Greasy Grass River. Now Three Stars was close behind them.
The council was divided. The older men said to leave the soldiers alone until they attacked the village. This was what Sitting Bull had seen in his vision. There was no reason to look for trouble with the whites. But the younger men said the people should not risk the lives of the women and children and the elderly by letting the soldiers hit the camp. They wanted to drive the soldiers away now.
“But you’ll leave the village unprotected,” some protested. “What if the soldiers seen by Sitting Bull come from the east?”
So they divided the warriors, the young men led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to attack Three Stars, the older men to stay behind and guard the village.
That night Crazy Horse talked to the young warriors and the akicita leaders. He told them this was a new kind of war. It was not honorable fighting, where a man demonstrated his physical and spiritual power, but simply killing. The white soldiers didn’t have women to protect or children or homes, they were merely killers. If the Lakota wanted to live peaceably on their own land, they must not think of the heroic touch with a hand, but the bullet to the brain. They must all act together, they must charge not as individuals but in bunches, they must fling themselves at the soldiers like hail. And they must kill every soldier they could.
Even Crazy Horse thought it was ugly advice. But it was necessary. The world had changed, and he would walk the new way, despising it.
Gen. George Crook did not believe the world had changed. He believed, without thinking about it, that he was the instrument of the inevitable. So he was comfortable with himself while waiting for his aide-de-camp to set up the table in front of the tent and deal the cards. He was a white man, a soldier, a man of honor.