by Win Blevins
A loud voice interrupted them.
Crazy Horse saw two men, one with a shadow-catching box, walking across the grass. They were shading their eyes against the midday sun, and one was hollering rudely in a language no one here understood. You had to learn patience with white men.
Spotted Tail called softly to his daughter in the lodge and asked her to get Bordeaux from the next lodge to translate. James Bordeaux was one of the traders’ sons. Then Spotted Tail motioned the shadow catcher to come closer. The one fellow came dragging his big box.
“Chief, chief!” cried the one without a shadow box. Bordeaux was coming up. “Sir, can we get a picture? Sirs?” This one was running ahead, the other one struggling. The shadow-catcher box was heavy. “The Great White Father would like to see your picture, Mr. Crazy Horse. Are you Mr. Crazy Horse? You too, Mr. Spotted Tail.”
Crazy Horse looked at the man without understanding a word. He also didn’t understand the look on the man’s face, a kind of avidity, a little like a hunter’s excitement, combined with self-consciousness and self-importance.
Bordeaux said in the Lakota language, “He says The One the Whites Use for Father asks for your face on one of the shadow plates, which is a lie. This fellow wouldn’t know The One They Use for Father from one of their pay women. But someone told him your name, and they’ll give him pay money for your shadow. He loves the pay money, and even more he loves the thought of himself as The One Who Captured Crazy Horse’s Shadow. He will not count the coup honestly but will make it sound like he rode bullet-proof through the fire of a hundred warriors to catch the shadow. That will make him so happy he’ll go get a disease from one of the pay women and for half a moon will walk funny.”
Spotted Tail was laughing out loud. Crazy Horse smiled. Bordeaux was fun.
“General Crazy Horse? Chief Crazy Horse? May we take your picture?”
Said Bordeaux, “He’s using fancy titles. He wants to make you feel so flattered and so important that you’ll give him what he wants. Children they are, the whites. He doesn’t care a bit if you’re willing to have your shadow captured, but he has to get you to stand still while he does it. And he’s heard that you cut off the noses and penises of white men you don’t like and feed them to devils after night-middle-made. So he’s trying to be courteous. Which is against his nature.”
The other one had the shadow box close now and was setting it up.
Spotted Tail contained his laughter.
“No,” said Crazy Horse quietly to Bordeaux. He was uncertain of his connection with Hawk as it was. He didn’t intend to let any white men look at his nagi, spirit. He felt glad he was talking to Lakota, not the whites, and a simple “no” would be enough, without questions.
“They’ve got no manners,” said Bordeaux.
“Go into my lodge,” said Spotted Tail. “They won’t bother you there.”
Crazy Horse walked quickly without appearing to hurry.
“Mr. Crazy Horse! Sir! General!”
He slipped inside.
Spotted Tail spoke in Lakota, and Bordeaux made the words in English. “Would you like a picture of me with my family? My wife and my daughter?”
“Of course, Mr. Spotted Tail, but… General Crazy Horse?”
Bordeaux nodded at Spotted Tail. The chief raised his big frame off the ground and put his head under the door flap of the lodge.
“Come outside,” he said to the two women. “We’ll have our picture taken. Since they think we’re children, they’ll probably give us a few beads, or maybe some of that good lemon candy. Bring blankets,” he added. “They like to see us in blankets, even on the hottest day of the Moon When the Chokecherries Ripen.”
The women stirred themselves without a word. In the lodge Crazy Horse sat down and took out his short pipe for a little smoke.
“Nephew,” said Spotted Tail to him, “I am your relative. I will help you any way I can. Unless it harms the people. Any way I can. Come to me.”
Crazy Horse nodded his gratitude. But Spotted Tail thought his eyes looked far, far away.
Young Man-Whose-Enemies welcomed General Crook formally to the agency and the council and then said he was ashamed. Crook had promised him and his fellow peace chiefs, he said, agencies in their own country. On his word they had urged Crazy Horse to bring in the last hostiles. Now the army was talking about sending everyone to Indian Territory, a bad country far to the south, or to the Missouri, which they knew and disliked. “We are shamed before our kinsmen,” he concluded. “We remind you of your promise.”
Strong talk. Crook acknowledged it with a nod and turned to Crazy Horse.
His uncle Little Hawk stood and spoke in a splendid voice. He was proud to be called a hostile, he said. That meant one who lived in the old way, given to his people many generations ago, in his own country. The soldiers came there without any right and shot at the people, he declared. What could they do? The whites kept pushing in everywhere.
“In the Moon of Sore Eyes,” he said, “our relatives came and said to stop fighting. If we would come in, they said, you would give us an agency in our country.” He looked around dramatically. “Here we are. Now what do you say? You want us to go far away!”
He stared at Crook. The general told the interpreter, Billy Garnett, to hurry him up.
“Yes,” said Little Hawk. “I have only one more thing to say. Are you Three Stars? The one our relatives told us speaks with a straight tongue?”
Murmurs ran through the Indians. Would Crook permit this kind of strong talk?
Crook stood up to speak. He looked them in the eyes, letting them know he meant exactly what he said. He didn’t like not being able to do everything he said he’d do, but by God, he had nothing to be ashamed of. He started by saying that he personally had never wanted to fight the Lakota. He just followed the orders of the Great White Father and had no choice in that. Besides, the Indians shot at him when he came.
Half-voiced protests spewed out, but the Lakota themselves shushed them. Let the soldier speak.
“There is a new Great White Father,” he said, “not the one some of you met in Washington City.” Rutherford B. Hayes, a politician. Good Lord, could anyone understand a politician? A Janus? On Crook’s way here the clack of the rails had drilled a line of doggerel into his head about Hayes. If he’d been a versifier, he’d have written a caustic lyric about his commander in chief. As it was, he had only the last line, which repeated mockingly—“Rutherford, Rutherford, Rutherford B.”
Now his job was to make some plausible excuse for this Great White Father, and what he said would go into the record. “He is very busy. In the autumn we will go there together, and I will ask him to help you.” And maybe for once good sense would prevail and the government would leave these people where they’d always been and wanted to be. But maybe not. He didn’t let his thoughts show.
Rutherford, Rutherford, Rutherford B.
“In the meantime, in the late summer you may go on a buffalo hunt to the north country. Come back with no trouble, and I will go to see the Great White Father with you.”
He wondered if Crazy Horse would come back. Wouldn’t that be a coup for Rutherford, Rutherford, Rutherford B.? Wouldn’t the newspapers love it?
There was nothing more to say now. He looked the principal chiefs directly in the eyes, man to man, Crazy Horse, Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, and some others. They wouldn’t meet his gaze. He sat down.
As they got up to go to the feast, Crazy Horse said to Little Hawk, “The promise is changed.” No guarantee of an agency in their country now, just a request for such an agency to The One They Use for Father.
Little Hawk said, “Yes, the whites get hard and get soft, get hard and get soft, like mud.” He laughed and pushed on with his mockery. “Regardless, they’re all dirt.”
Crazy Horse talked with Worm and Touch-the-Sky after the feast. They had moved their camps up to Spotted Tail’s agency, Touch-the-Sky with most of his Mniconjou lodges. “We aren’t known t
o all the newspapermen,” said Touch-the-Sky, “so we can go where we want.”
Crazy Horse noted the irony. The officers and the men who wrote things down for the newspapers and the men with the shadow-catching boxes made a fuss over Lakota who were “famous.” Since the whites had made a big man of him, he would be watched carefully, his every movement reported, and he could not slip away to hunt. The whites could take away your freedom without putting you in the little room with chains and barred windows.
He asked his father and his mothers’ brother about that agency and got the impression that things were better there. Spotted Tail got along well with the agent and the commanding officer at the fort. Things were settled. Lakota weren’t scheming against each other all the time.
That night Crazy Horse told Little Hawk, He Dog, and Big Road he thought his band perhaps should move upriver to live with Spotted Tail’s people until the Oglala got their own agency.
He Dog nodded. “It would be good to be with your relatives there,” he said. His implication was that He Dog and Big Road, being related to Red Cloud’s people, might want to do otherwise.
Crazy Horse nodded, understanding. “We would have to get permission,” he went on. “Maybe White Hat would help us. Will you go to White Hat and ask him?” said Crazy Horse to his uncle.
Little Hawk said yes. He Dog watched this older man look into the eyes of his nephew, one of the nephews he called son, for a while. They all knew what was happening. More and more Crazy Horse was trying to back away from leadership, to turn it over to his father’s brother. Sometimes this made He Dog impatient with his old friend. A man was supposed to understand that as he grew older, he accepted more responsibility and lived less for himself alone.
“Will you go with me to talk to Clark?” asked Little Hawk.
He Dog and Big Road said yes.
On the other hand, thought He Dog, maybe it would be good for Crazy Horse to set down leadership. Many of the people admired him excessively, and many of the leaders were jealous of him. If Crazy Horse were not a chief, life would be simplified.
Leadership didn’t suit him. Never had. His eyes and ears were always on something else, something no one else saw. He Dog was Lakota and knew deeply that every man’s red road was different. As he took his leave, he was thinking affectionately, My friend, you are truly Our Strange Man.
SUN DANCE
Crazy Horse found it sad. Lakota people came from all the other camps to pitch their lodges in his circle. Even with the tipis crowded together, walking around the circle would take nearly a quarter-day. He knew why. He raised his eyes to the sacred sun pole in the center, defining the dancing place, and the pole shelter built around it. These agency Lakota had not done a sun dance in the truly old way for many winters. They wanted to dance with the hostiles, the Lakota who still knew the old ways.
Though Crazy Horse did not participate in dances himself, he believed in them. They led most Lakota along the red road. Days of listening to the pulse of the drum, whether you let your body move to it or not—that was a true way to set your feet on the red road. The lack of a true sun dance at Red Cloud Agency, well, that was a powerful sign of why agency life would be a black road. It was part of why his soul felt desolate.
He saw White Hat walking toward his lodge. Crazy Horse would share his short pipe with the man. The whites were here, too, big numbers of them, soldiers and their wives, traders and their families, half-blood traders who had been among the people for a long time—everyone wanted to see the sun dance done in the old way, White Hat included.
“Hau, kola!” said White Hat. The officer was without a translator. He didn’t understand Lakota too badly, and would talk with halting words and signs.
Crazy Horse motioned for him to sit and lit the pipe. He wondered what the man would say. Clark had heard that Crazy Horse was thinking of moving his people to Spotted Tail Agency, and he wouldn’t like that.
After the pipe went back and forth, White Hat opened with, “The people are glad to have this dance.”
“Hecitu welo,” said Crazy Horse in agreement.
“I will be glad to see it,” said White Hat.
Crazy Horse nodded. I will be glad to see it. They were funny, these whites. They called the old ways barbarous, or some word that meant more like the ways of four-legged than two-legged people, yet they wanted to see the dances.
Crazy Horse played it out in his mind.
White man: May we write everything down?
Crazy Horse: Yes.
White man: May we make shadow pictures and show the dance in the newspapers?
Crazy Horse: No.
White man: Why not?
Crazy Horse: Just no. It isn’t right.
White man: Well, your ways are wrong, and you need to learn about the One Big Spirit, the one the blackrobes tell about, and you should change to our ways.
Crazy Horse: Yes, we need to become like you, and you need to become like the bird that smiles at shit, and magpies need to become blackrobes.
He smiled to himself. He had never imagined a people so avid to make everyone like them.
For himself, he wouldn’t mind having ways like the four-legged and crawling and winged people. Blood pumped to the pulse of the earth in them as it did in him. They too were born and made young and hunted for food and got cold and hungry and died. Mitakuye oyasin.
In fact, some of their ways were better than the human beings’. They didn’t have wars and kill their own kind. Nor did they scheme to control each other. Strange that the worst two-legged creatures he had known, the whites, had the most weapons and were the most desperate to make others like them. As much as they liked killing, whiskey, and taking other people’s women, they liked controlling most of all.
Crazy Horse decided to give White Hat an opening to talk about the move to Spotted Tail Agency. “Maybe I will go live with my uncle.”
White Hat shrugged and smiled. That was one of the things white men did when they didn’t like something: pretend. Who already told you? Crazy Horse wondered. The man had ears everywhere. One day Crazy Horse and Little Hawk had discussed it with the heads of a few families, and the next day White Hat was talking to his friends among the Indian police about how to stop this move.
“It is good to live among relatives,” Crazy Horse tried again.
“You have relatives everywhere here,” said White Hat.
“Yes, but Spotted Tail is my uncle, and my father and his wives pitch their lodge there.” He waited, but White Hat stared out into space.
Well, Crazy Horse would be amused to see how this white man would try to outsmart him and get him to do what the white man wanted.
After a while they broke up the talk. Crazy Horse shook his head. The silliest thing wasicu did was maneuver and maneuver and maneuver.
Clark ran like hell toward the sun dance. He didn’t pay any attention to the damned heat or the prairie-dog holes or the prickly pear or his hat, which flew off, or his dignity or any damn thing. He ran like a rabbit in a lightning storm.
Because that was live gunfire—a soldier’s ears knew—and a lot of it.
Whites were running away from the sundance circle. Indians were running away, men, women, children, old folks, even dogs. Dust was up, and someone was getting shot.
Lieutenant Clark ran toward the sound of firing. Oh, Christ.
He tripped over something, sprawled straight forward, hit on one shoulder, slid in the dust, jumped up, and ran like hell.
Oh, Christ. Crook would have his ass.
Suddenly, everything went quiet.
He slowed to a trot. He could hear a voice, barely. It repeated the same words, something about friends.
Hell, yes, Crazy Horse’s voice.
He pushed roughly to the front of the circle.
Crazy Horse stood alone in the center of the dance ground, near the sun pole with its prayer flags. Near the outer edge, where the prayer sticks stood like fingers, men were picking themselves up and hauling th
emselves off. Ponies were struggling to their feet, and their riders were leading them away.
Clark got next to Billy Garnett and asked in a whisper. He wanted to be sure of what Crazy Horse was saying. The Strange Man repeated it. “ ‘Friends!’ ” Garnett murmured. “ ‘You are shooting at your own people!’ ” In a tone of finality.
Not a single body lay on the ground. Crazy Horse had come in time.
Clark looked at the Indian. Light-haired, slightly built, poorly dressed, unprepossessing. But he commanded the space in the middle of this dance ground, a master. He commanded the crowd, a master. Christ, he must know a hundred Indians at this place would shoot him in an instant. Evidently, they had just been shooting at each other. But the man rose up and dared them, and from the force of his spirit and the fear of retribution, they dared not. Remarkable, and just like him.
As commander of the scouts Clark was supposed to be the leader of most of these men. He felt envious of their real commander, Crazy Horse.
Clark stepped into the arbor, under the shade. He would write to Crook again tonight. This man could compel the Indians. He alone. The government must have him on its side or be rid of him. They must win his heart. Or take him to Washington City and overawe him. Or put him away very permanently. The Dry Tortugas had been mentioned, some godawful reef off the coast of Florida, a federal prison on a barren rock surrounded by ocean and sharks. Yes, that would do. Miles of shark-infested sea. A one-way ticket in irons.
Jesus, but he was a man.
Crazy Horse started walking away. Suddenly he seemed to sag, and to become ordinary.
Clark and Garnett intercepted the Strange Man. “What happened?”
Crazy Horse shrugged lightly and gave a half-smile. “The Greasy Grass fight,” he said. Garnett’s voice softly changed Lakota into English. “Our Oglala played themselves, riding up the hill.” The slight man gestured to the dance circle. “The agency Indians and the traders’ sons played Long Hair and his Yellow Legs. They got overexcited.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” added Garnett. “The Oglala started hitting the friendlies too hard with their bows. A couple of friendlies pulled their pistols and fired. The Oglala ran off, but they were back in a hair’s breadth with guns.” Clark and Garnett looked at each other. No matter how many times you disarmed Indians, they always came up with guns.