Saga of the Sioux

by Dee Brown

  Chief American Horse. [LOC, USZ62-102186]

  Three Stars Crook and his main body arrived and began destroying the village. Meanwhile some of the Sioux who had escaped reached Sitting Bull’s camp and told him what had happened. Sitting Bull and Gall, with about 600 warriors, immediately went to help, but they arrived too late. Although Sitting Bull counterattacked, his warriors had so little ammunition that the Bluecoats held them off with rearguard actions while the main column marched on to the Black Hills.

  When the soldiers were gone, Sitting Bull and his warriors went into American Horse’s devastated village, rescued the few survivors, and buried the dead.

  In an effort to get as far away from the soldiers as possible, Sitting Bull took his people north along the Yellowstone River, where buffalo could be found. In the Moon of Falling Leaves (October), Gall went out with a hunting party and came upon an army wagon train. The soldiers were taking supplies to Fort Keogh, a new fort they were building where the Tongue River flowed into the Yellowstone River.

  Gall’s warriors ambushed the wagon train near Glendive Creek and captured 60 mules. As soon as Sitting Bull heard about the wagon train and the new fort, he sent for Johnny Brughiere, a half-breed who had joined his camp. Brughiere knew how to write, and Sitting Bull told him to put down on a piece of paper some words he had to say to the commander of the soldiers.

  I want to know what you are doing on this road. You scare all the buffalo away. I want to hunt in this place. I want you to turn back from here. If you don’t, I will fight you again. I want you to leave what you have got here, and turn back from here. I am your friend.

  —Sitting Bull

  When Lieutenant Colonel Elwell Otis, who was commanding the wagon train, received the message, he sent a scout with a reply. The soldiers were going to Fort Keogh, Otis said, and many more soldiers were coming to join them. If Sitting Bull wanted a fight, the soldiers would give him one.

  Sitting Bull did not want a fight. He wanted only to be left alone to hunt buffalo. He sent a warrior out with a white flag, asking for a talk with the soldier chief. By this time, a colonel named Nelson A. Miles and more soldiers had joined the train. As Colonel Miles had been searching for Sitting Bull since the end of summer, he immediately agreed to a parley.

  Nelson A. Miles in a photograph taken in late 1864 or 1865 when he was a major general. Miles was a Civil War hero and received the Medal of Honor for his action in the Battle of Chancellorsville. His wife was a niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman. [LOC, DIG-cwpbh-00846]

  They met on October 20 between a line of soldiers and a line of warriors. Miles was escorted by an officer and five men, Sitting Bull by a subchief and five warriors. The day was very cold, and Miles was wearing a long coat trimmed with bear fur. Because of this, he was now Bear Coat to the Indians.

  With Johnny Brughiere interpreting, Bear Coat began the meeting by accusing Sitting Bull of always being against the white man and his ways. Sitting Bull admitted that he was not for the whites, but neither was he an enemy to them as long as they left him alone. Bear Coat wanted to know what Sitting Bull was doing in the Yellowstone country. The question was a foolish one, but the Hunkpapa answered it politely: he was hunting buffalo to feed and clothe his people. Bear Coat then made passing mention of a reservation for the Hunkpapas, but Sitting Bull brushed it aside. He would spend the winter in the Black Hills, he said. The parley ended with nothing resolved. The two men agreed to meet again the next day.

  The second meeting quickly became a succession of disagreements. Sitting Bull began by saying that he had not fought the soldiers until they came to fight him. He promised that there would be no more fighting if the white men would take their soldiers and forts out of the Indians’ country. Bear Coat replied that there could be no peace for the Sioux until they were all on reservations. At this, Sitting Bull became angry. He declared that the Great Spirit had made him an Indian but not an agency Indian, and he did not intend to become one. He ended the conference abruptly and returned to his warriors, ordering them to scatter because he suspected that Bear Coat’s soldiers would try to attack. The soldiers did open fire. This fight, known as the Battle of Cedar Creek, was short—the Hunkpapas fought only long enough to let their women, children, and old people escape.

  By springtime of 1877, Sitting Bull was tired of running. He decided there was no longer room enough for white men and the Sioux to live together in the Great Father’s country. He would take his people to Canada, to the land of the British Grandmother, Queen Victoria.

  Meanwhile, General Crook and his army were looking for Crazy Horse. Instead his troops found the Cheyenne village of Dull Knife. Most of these Cheyenne had not been in the Little Bighorn battle but had slipped away from Red Cloud’s reservation in search of food after the army took possession there and stopped their rations. Against this village of 150 lodges, General Crook sent Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie, a successful Indian fighter in the southern Plains and known to the Indians as Bad Hand or Three Fingers because of wounds suffered while fighting in the Civil War.

  It was the Deer Rutting Moon (November) and very cold, with deep snow in the shaded places and ice-crusted snow in the open places. Mackenzie and his troops struck the Cheyenne at first daylight. The Pawnee mercenaries went in first. They caught the Cheyenne in the lodges, killing many of them as they awakened. Others ran out naked into the biting cold, the warriors trying to fight off the Pawnees and the onrushing soldiers long enough for their women and children to escape.

  Dull Knife and Little Wolf managed to form a rear guard. Soon, their ammunition exhausted, they broke away to join their women and children fleeing toward the Bighorns. Behind them Mackenzie and his troops burned the lodges and shot the captured horses.

  Meanwhile, the survivors struggled to reach Crazy Horse’s camp. During the first night of flight, 12 infants and several old people froze to death. The next night, the men killed some of the ponies, disemboweled them, and thrust small children inside to keep them from freezing. The old people put their hands and feet in beside the children. For three days they tramped across the snow, their bare feet leaving a trail of blood, and finally reached Crazy Horse’s camp.

  Crazy Horse shared food, blankets, and shelter with Dull Knife’s people, but warned them to be ready to run. The Oglalas did not have enough ammunition left to stand and fight. With Bear Coat Miles searching in the north and Three Stars Crook coming from the south, they would have to leave.

  In the Moon of Popping Trees (December), Crazy Horse moved the camp north along the Tongue to a hiding place not far from the new Fort Keogh, where Bear Coat was wintering his soldiers. Cold and hunger became so unbearable for the children and old people that some of the chiefs told Crazy Horse it was time to go and parley with Bear Coat. Their women and children were crying for food, and they needed warm shelters. Crazy Horse knew that Bear Coat wanted to make prisoners of them on a reservation, but he agreed that the chiefs should go. He went with the party, about 30 chiefs and warriors, to a hill not far from the fort. Eight chiefs and warriors volunteered to ride down to the fort, one of them carrying a large white cloth on a lance. As they neared the fort, some mercenary Crows who were working for Bear Coat came charging out. Ignoring the truce flag, the Crows fired point-blank into the Sioux. Only three of the eight escaped alive. Some of the Sioux watching from the hill wanted to ride out and seek revenge, but Crazy Horse insisted that they hurry back to camp. They would have to pack up and run again. Now that Bear Coat knew there were Sioux nearby, he would come searching through the snow for them.

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published this woodcut illustration of the Battle of Wolf Mountain a few months after the event in 1877. [LOC, USZ62-109592]

  Bear Coat caught up with them on the morning of January 8, 1877, at Battle Butte (known to the white men as the Battle of Wolf Mountain). He sent his soldiers charging through foot-deep snow. Crazy Horse had only a little ammunition left, but he had good warriors, includin
g Little Big Man, who knew enough tricks to mislead and punish the soldiers while the main body of Indians escaped through the Wolf Mountains toward the Bighorns. For four hours they kept the soldiers stumbling and falling over ice-covered cliffs. Snow began sifting down during the engagement, and by early afternoon a blizzard was raging. This was enough for Bear Coat. He took his men back to the warmth of Fort Keogh.

  Through the screen of sleety snow, Crazy Horse and his people made their way to the familiar country of the Little Powder River. They were camped there in February, living off what game they could find, when runners brought news that Spotted Tail and a party of Brulés were coming from the south.

  During the cold moons, Three Stars Crook had taken his men out of the snow into Fort Fetterman. While he was waiting for spring, he paid a visit to Spotted Tail and promised him that the reservation Sioux would not have to move to the Missouri River if the Brulé chief could find Crazy Horse and persuade him to surrender.

  Just before Spotted Tail arrived, Crazy Horse told his father that he was going away. He asked his father to shake hands with Spotted Tail and tell him the Oglalas would come in as soon as the weather made it possible for women and children to travel. Then he went off to the Bighorns alone to think.

  When Spotted Tail arrived, he guessed that Crazy Horse was avoiding him. He sent messengers out to find the Oglala leader, but Crazy Horse had vanished in the deep snows. Before Spotted Tail returned to Nebraska, however, he convinced Crazy Horse’s ally, Chief Big Foot, that he should surrender his Minneconjous, and he received promises from Crazy Horse’s cousin Chief Touch-the-Clouds and three other chiefs that they would bring their people to the reservation early in the spring.

  On April 14, Touch-the-Clouds, with a large number of Minneconjous and Sans Arcs from Crazy Horse’s village, arrived at the Spotted Tail agency and surrendered. A few days before this happened, Three Stars Crook had sent Red Cloud out to find Crazy Horse and promise him that if he surrendered, a reservation would be created for him in the Powder River country. On April 27, Red Cloud met Crazy Horse and told him of Three Stars’s promise. Crazy Horse’s 900 Oglalas were starving, the warriors had no ammunition, and their horses were thin and bony. Crazy Horse decided to lead his people to Camp Robinson and surrender.

  The last of the Sioux war chiefs now became a reservation Indian, disarmed, dismounted, with no authority over his people, a prisoner of the army, which had never defeated him in battle. Yet he was still a hero to the young men. This adulation made the older agency chiefs jealous.

  Late in the summer, Crazy Horse heard that Three Stars Crook wanted him to go to Washington for a council with the Great Father. Crazy Horse refused to go. He could see no point in talking about the promised reservation. He had seen what happened to chiefs like Red Cloud and Spotted Tail who went to the Great Father’s house in Washington; they came back fat from the white man’s way of living and with all the hardness gone out of them. Crazy Horse did not want that to happen to him. Because of Crazy Horse’s continued resistance to the white men, even while he was living on the reservation, the other chiefs resented him.

  In August, news came that another Native people, the Nez Percé, were at war with the Bluecoats. At the agencies, soldier chiefs began enlisting warriors to do their scouting for them against the Nez Percé. Crazy Horse told the young men not to go against those other Indians far away, but some would not listen. On August 31, the day these former Sioux warriors put on their Bluecoat uniforms to march away, Crazy Horse was so sick with disgust that he rejected the plan of living on a government reservation created for him. Instead he and his people would return to the Powder River country and live there as free Sioux.

  This 1877 woodcut engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper shows Crazy Horse’s band traveling to surrender to General Crook at the Red Cloud agency. In the lower right-hand corner, note the travois built to carry small children. [LOC, USZCN-37]

  When Three Stars Crook heard of this from his spies, he ordered eight cavalry companies to go after Crazy Horse and arrest him. But before the soldiers arrived, Crazy Horse’s friends warned him. Not knowing what the soldiers’ purpose was, Crazy Horse told his people to scatter. Then he set out alone to the Spotted Tail agency to seek refuge with his old friend Touch-the-Clouds.

  The soldiers found him there, placed him under arrest, and informed him they were taking him back to Camp Robinson to see Three Stars Crook. Upon arrival at the fort, Crazy Horse was told that it was too late to talk with Three Stars that day. He was turned over to a captain named James Kennington and one of the agency policemen. Crazy Horse stared hard at the agency policeman. It was Little Big Man, who not so long ago had defied the commissioners who came to steal Paha Sapa, the same Little Big Man who had threatened to kill the first chief who spoke for selling the Black Hills, the brave Little Big Man who had last fought beside Crazy Horse on the icy slopes of the Wolf Mountains against Bear Coat Miles. Now the white men had bought Little Big Man and made him into an agency policeman.

  Guided by his escort, Crazy Horse walked toward a building. Its windows were barred with iron, and Crazy Horse could see men behind the bars with chains on their legs. It was a trap for an animal, and Crazy Horse lunged away with Little Big Man holding on to his arm. The scuffling went on for only a few seconds. Someone shouted a command, and then Private William Gentles, a soldier guard following behind them, thrust his bayonet deep into Crazy Horse’s abdomen.

  In the mid-1970s Crazy Horse was commemorated on a first-class postage stamp. Unlike other chiefs, Crazy Horse refused to let himself be photographed because he believed the camera would steal or imprison his soul. This portrait, created after his death, is based on a description given by Crazy Horse’s sister.

  Crazy Horse died that night, September 5, 1877, at the age of 35. At dawn the next day, the soldiers presented the dead chief to his father and mother. They put the body of Crazy Horse into a wooden box, fastened it to a pony-drawn travois, and carried it to the Spotted Tail agency, where they mounted it on a scaffold. All through the Drying Grass Moon (September), mourners watched beside the burial place. And then in the Moon of Falling Leaves (October) came the heartbreaking news: the reservation Sioux must leave Nebraska and go to a new reservation on the Missouri River.

  Through the crisp, dry autumn of 1877, long lines of exiled Indians driven by soldiers marched northeast toward the barren land. Along the way, several bands slipped away from the column and turned northwest, determined to escape to Canada and join Sitting Bull. With them went the father and mother of Crazy Horse, carrying the heart and bones of their son. At a place known only to them, they buried Crazy Horse somewhere near Chankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek called Wounded Knee.

  ELEVEN

  Sitting Bull Returns Home

  I feel that my country has gotten a bad name, and I want it to have a good name; it used to have a good name; and I sit sometimes and wonder who it is that has given it a bad name.

  —SITTING BULL OF THE HUNKPAPA SIOUX

  BY 1878, THE SIOUX were living on land between the Missouri River and Black Hills believed to be worthless by the surveyors who had marked off the new east-west boundaries. But even that “worthless” land was about to come under threat.

  A great wave of emigration from northern Europe poured into the eastern part of the Dakota Territory, up to the Missouri River boundary of the Great Sioux Reservation. At Bismarck, on the Missouri, a westward-pushing railroad was blocked by the reservation. Settlers bound for Montana and the Northwest clamored for roads to be built across it. Promoters eager for cheap land to be sold to immigrants at high profits hatched schemes to break up the Great Sioux Reservation.

  In the old days the Sioux would have fought to keep them out. But now they were disarmed, dismounted, unable even to feed and clothe themselves. Their greatest surviving war leader, Sitting Bull, was an exile in Canada.

  Free in Canada, Sitting Bull was a dangerous symbol of subversion to the United State
s government. The army became frantic in its attempts to force the Hunkpapa leader and his followers to return. In September 1877, the War Department arranged with the Canadian government for General Alfred Terry and a special commission to cross the border under the escort of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and meet with Sitting Bull at Fort Walsh. One Star Terry planned to promise Sitting Bull a complete pardon, provided he surrendered all firearms and horses and brought his people back to the Hunkpapa agency at Standing Rock.

  Sitting Bull was reluctant to meet with Terry. “There is no use in talking to these Americans,” he told Commissioner James MacLeod of the mounted police. “They are all liars; you cannot believe anything they say.” But Commissioner MacLeod wanted Sitting Bull out of Canada. He finally persuaded the Hunkpapa to come to Fort Walsh on October 17 for a council.

  One Star Terry made a short opening speech. “We have come many hundred miles to bring you this message from the Great Father, who, as we have told you before, desires to live in peace with all his people. Too much white and Indian blood has already been shed. It is time that bloodshed should cease.”

  “What have we done that you should want us to stop?” Sitting Bull retorted. “We have done nothing. It is all the people on your side that have started us to do all these [attacks]. We could not go anywhere else, and so we took refuge in this country.” Sitting Bull then talked about the lies and abuse his people had suffered. Then he said, “Go back home where you came from…. ​The part of the country you gave me you ran me out of. I have now come here to stay with these people, and I intend to stay here.”