CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  Across all societies, a culture of secrecy frequently surrounds a family suicide. Relatives seek to hide motivations from prurient outsiders and from the most vulnerable victims of loss, children. Unfortunately, children kept from the truth are unable to come to terms with the event: what might be understood and “placed” becomes instead an unhealing wound of enigma, fixation, and doubt.

  Fragmentary as they are, all sources suggest that the family tragedy had a traumatic effect on Curly Hair, shaping much of his adult life. Although a classic expression of a Lakota warrior’s fatalistic defiance, Male Crow’s final words — “I am a man to look for death” —would echo through Curly Hair’s life. Passed down in family tradition, they shaped his reaction to the deaths of friends and loved ones. It is easy to picture the growing boy hearing the story of Male Crow’s end, brooding over the terse poetry of his words and their prompt, bloody fulfillment.22

  After losing his mother, Curly Hair became isolated. Winter games like sledding and snow snake occupied most boys, and each spring, girls and boys played together at “moving camp,” packing toys and dolls on dog travois. Curly Hair dropped out of these activities and instead often followed grandfather Makes the Song to the council tipi, where he silently observed debate and watched the elders play interminable rounds of the hand game. A child was typically taught to ride in his fifth year. Curly Hair learned quickly, but contemporaries recalled that he often rode into the hills to sit and think alone. A pattern had established itself. Curly Hair clearly remembered this period as a decisive break. Recounting his most famous vision to a young relative, he summarized his own childhood: “When I was born I could know and see and understand for a time, but afterwards went back to it as a baby” ; he acknowledged the psychological regression. He did not resume “growing up naturally” for three years.23

  Within months, Crazy Horse married one of Rattle Blanket Woman’s kinswomen. Two full sisters survived the dead woman, Good Looking Woman and Looks at Her. One family tradition is that Good Looking Woman left her own husband to offer herself to Crazy Horse and to help raise Curly Hair. But that may have been a scandal too far. Instead, Crazy Horse married Kills Enemy, daughter of the Miniconjou chief Corn. Crazy Horse’s relations with his new in-laws were good. As time passed, he took Corn’s younger daughter, Iron between Horns, as a second wife. The new marriage consolidated Crazy Horse’s Miniconjou links, but through his new wives’ maternal connections, he also established important ties with the Brule Lakotas. Through the marriages, a rising Brule warrior named Spotted Tail became another of Curly Hair’s uncles.24

  The family grew. Kills Enemy bore two daughters, and about 1846, Iron between Horns bore a son. Eventually Curly Hair, his father, and his two stepmothers would come to enjoy a relationship of deep and spontaneous affection. For now, though, as his stepmothers doted over the new additions and his father was preoccupied with the fostering of new family ties, Curly Hair suffered a period of transition in his life. Two incidents illustrate these tensions. During the severe winter following Rattle Blanket Woman’s death, buffalo could not be found. Crazy Horse, a skillful and diligent hunter, one day brought home two pronghorn antelopes slung across his packsaddle. While his stepmother prepared a family meal, Curly Hair slipped quietly out of the lodge. He rode the length of the snow-drifted camp, calling the old people to come to his tipi for meat.

  When they looked out the door flap to find their son, a surprised father and stepmother saw instead a line of old men and women, gratefully holding up dishes. Each of the old folk was served a portion of the antelope, and they left singing praise of Curly Hair’s generosity. The next day Curly Hair asked for food, and his stepmother replied that there was none left. “Remember, my son,” she advised, “they went home singing praises in your name, not my name or your father’s. You must be brave. You must live up to your reputation.”25

  The story smacks a little of a boy trying to prove a point, and perhaps contrasting an idealized mother’s uncalculated largesse with the stinting formalism of his stepmother. In another unsettling incident, his father tested Curly Hair’s courage. Father and son caught a snapping turtle. As Crazy Horse flipped the struggling reptile over on its shell, he ordered Curly Hair to cut open the animal and eat raw its beating heart. The image, the sensations of fear and revulsion, are said to have remained with the boy the rest of his life.26

  Moreover, the family tragedy may have caused a withdrawal in Curly Hair’s father. In his midthirties, Crazy Horse was at a sensitive stage in life, as warriors sought to make the transition to responsible elder. Typically, an injury or disaster at this stage triggered an introverted man to consider a future as wicasa wakan, a holy man. That Crazy Horse, the son of a revered priest, should seek to follow in his father’s steps was not unexpected. Already he had secured visions of the Bear and the Thunder, Lakota patrons of warfare. Beginning in these crucial years following the deaths of his brother and wife, he began a long visionary apprenticeship. His new vocation necessarily deprived his family of his presence for lengthy vision quests and ritual training that demanded isolation and sexual abstinence. Preoccupied as he was, something of the spontaneous affection that had animated Crazy Horse’s first years with his son must have been withdrawn. Again, a symbolic shift in parent-child behavior may have crystallized Curly Hair’s isolation: as he turned six, a son typically relinquished the seat he shared with his father at the honor place of the tipi, underscoring the independence a growing boy must acquire. The birth of his half-brother can only have emphasized the shift in his father’s attitude.27

  It would be misleading to suggest that everything in Curly Hair’s life deteriorated in the years after his mother’s death. Lakota life was geared to mitigating the impact of unforeseen tragedy on children. Grandparents were typically indulgent and played a full part in child rearing. Children were welcome visitors at the tipis of cousins and other relatives. Friendships made within the band would often last for life. Curly Hair’s relative Iron Whiteman was one older playmate who would remain close: at the time of the surrenders in 1877, Iron Whiteman’s tipi still stood next to that of his boyhood friend. The son of Man Afraid of His Horse would also remain a respectful friend, even after the polarization of the Oglala tribe over relations with the Americans divided the two men. Little Hawk, a half-brother of Crazy Horse, was only four years older than Curly Hair, but Curly Hair addressed Little Hawk as atku, father, and the two would grow up to share similar attitudes toward the Americans, indicative of the close family bond.28

  An exact contemporary of Curly Hair’s was He Dog, nephew of chief Smoke of the Bad Face band, with which the Hunkpatilas often traveled. But most of Curly Hair’s closest friendships were with older boys, suggesting something of the precocious maturity the family tragedy forced on him. By the time Curly Hair was about five or six, he had acquired two special friends, who, for the brief weeks of the summer Sun Dance camp or at intertribal gatherings, were famously inseparable. One was Lone Bear, a Bad Face lad with a penchant for getting into scrapes. In the rough games boys engaged in to prepare themselves for adult life as warriors, Lone Bear suffered a relentless flow of accidents. Balls of mud—sometimes with live coals embedded in them—lobbed from springy sticks rarely failed to miss him; and the swing-kicking game usually left him nursing a bloody face. Always Lone Bear got up to do it all over again—an infectiously positive lesson for the brooding, reflective Curly Hair.29

  Even closer to Curly Hair was High Backbone, a Miniconjou kinsman. Five or so years older than Curly Hair, High Backbone was already husky and broad chested, hulking over the slim figure of his Oglala playmate: adults smiled and gave them a joint name, The Bear and His Cub. In the boisterous wrestling and play fights that boys engaged in, the Miniconjou must have been an invaluable ally. Already ten years old, High Backbone would have begun participating in buffalo hunts, but by all accounts, he was patient and protective of his Oglala friend. As much as Curly Hair’s father or uncles, High Backbone was a key
tutor in the crucial skills of archery, riding, and combat.30

  During Rattle Blanket Woman’s lifetime, Crazy Horse had begun the habit of a lengthy visit to his Miniconjou in-laws. As Oglala winter camps broke up, the family traveled around the south flank of the Black Hills to join the Miniconjous encamped near the forks of Cheyenne River. Most Miniconjous went east to the Missouri, visiting the great trading center of Fort Pierre during May, when the season’s first steamboats brought up American officials to distribute goodwill presents to the Lakotas. Even after his wife’s death, Crazy Horse kept up the visits, suggesting that he was at pains to maintain close links with Miniconjou allies. Certainly to his son, the weeks spent with the Miniconjous were a significant part of the year, a valued time when Curly Hair felt the relief of a holiday spent among indulgent grandparents and protective uncles, aunts, and cousins.31

  Grandfather Corn’s sons—Bull Head, Has Horns, Bear Comes Out, and the rest—were already apprentice warriors, mentors in warrior skills who advised Curly Hair how to protect himself in battle. Touch the Clouds, two or three years older than Curly Hair and a son of Rattle Blanket Woman’s kinsman Lone Horn, became another close friend. The friendship with High Backbone deepened. Mutual gifts of horses marked each other as comrades, kola, who pledged to aid each other in all of life’s trials.32

  The year 1848 was to prove a turning point. Through the spring, the family lingered near Fort Pierre, long enough for seven-year-old Curly Hair to listen intently to a strange visitor to the Miniconjou camps—Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet.33 The alien precepts, filtered through halting interpreters, were unlikely spiritual healers, but it was a season of renewal for the boy. To a cousin, Curly Hair remembered it as the end of three years of regression: then “I grew up naturally again—at the age of seven I began to learn.”34

  As his receptivity to Father De Smet’s message indicated, questions of the spirit world occupied Curly Hair’s mind. From his father and grandfather, Curly Hair absorbed much of the Lakota belief system. He had learned that everything in the natural world was animated by a mysterious force that Lakotas called wakan. The totality of all these powers was Wakan Tanka. Human beings were born with the potentiality of wakan power, but to acquire more was essential to personal growth and social advancement. Power might be gained by making oneself pitiable before the wakan beings, through the ritual supplication of the vision quest and the self-torture of the Sun Dance. To interpret the wakan powers’ requirements, Lakotas sought the aid of holy men like Curly Hair’s father and grandfather, men who had through fasting, vision, and prayer been granted insight into the workings of the universe.35

  As he approached adolescence, Curly Hair learned how to call on the wakan powers to aid him in his endeavors. Spiritually attuned youths might be expected to show a predisposition for a particular being or constellation of powers. As his teen years neared, Curly Hair had repeated intimations in dreams that Thunder, the most awesome manifestation of Wakan Tanka, had singled him out for especial favor. Dreamers of Thunder, he knew, were granted unmatched powers in warfare. To turn such powers to his people’s service entailed drastic lifelong obligations. For now, his father advised him only to be receptive and attentive to his dreams, but by age ten, Curly Hair seemed already an unusually brooding introspective youth.36

  A lifelong pattern had formed, alternating cycles of brooding inaction with bursts of focused energy. Family tragedy had forced on Curly Hair an outward maturity beyond his years. Most of all, his brief years with his mother—barely long enough for a set of sequential memories—left him with a massive contradiction in expectation: a large capacity for trust, a literal belief in promises that remained childlike throughout his life, was undercut by a matching doubt that could plunge instantly into mistrust and alarm.

  At ten years old, Curly Hair cut a strange figure among his playmates. But he was still a Lakota boy. If not built for the rough sports that prepared boys for combat, he had a deceptively wiry strength and friends who clearly felt for him the sort of devotion an unusual child can evoke. One incident indicates something of the affection he evoked. In the evening following a buffalo hunt, Curly Hair and a gang of pals chased a bunch of bawling calves. Dared to ride one of the animals, Curly Hair leapt astride a well-grown bull, managing to keep his seat as it ran over the hills, pursued by his cheering chums. He did not dismount until the calf stopped from exhaustion.37

  From an early age Curly Hair had loved the thrill of the buffalo hunt. With his playmates, the boy ran after the hunters as they butchered the great beasts, perhaps to be favored by an indulgent uncle with a bite of raw liver, the hunter’s morsel. Horsemanship and shooting, under the tutelage of his father, uncles, and friends, became second nature by the time he was ten. To shooting with the bow and, later, the gun, he devoted care and forethought, even leaping from his pony to be sure he hit his mark, the awkward token of lessons hard won from an exacting father.

  About the age of ten or eleven, Curly Hair’s training paid off as he became a full-fledged provider. His father permitted the boy to accompany him on a buffalo hunt—not just to hold the family packhorses and observe the hunters, but to ride with him in the carefully organized surround. For the Lakota, the buffalo was the staff of life. Women’s gathering activities garnered fruits and vegetables crucial to the Lakota diet, but Pte Oyate, the Buffalo Nation, stood in a unique relationship to human beings.

  In return for the buffalo’s sacrifice of flesh, the Lakotas used every part. In addition to the meat and marrow used in roasts and stews, tongues were eaten in sacred feasts, intestines made into tasty sausages, blood boiled down for pudding. Meat was preserved in wafer-thin sheets of jerky, while fat was mixed with dried fruit to make pemmican and stored for winter surplus. Rawhide was used to make saddles, ropes, riding tack, containers, shields, and hard moccasin soles. Skins were tanned to make tipi covers, robes and clothing, dolls, soft bags, and pouches. Haired winter robes were traded to Americans for manufactured goods. Horns and bones were used to make a variety of tools and implements, hair to provide padding, ropes, and ornaments. Brains furnished a lanolin-like tanning material. Sinew provided threads and bindings; bladders, paunches, and stomach linings served for every type of vessel from cups to kettles. The hooves were made into rattles or boiled down to make glue. A handy switch or hair ornament might be made from the tail, while even the buffalo’s dried dung was used for fuel on the timberless plains.

  The economic centrality of the buffalo was reflected in ritualized procedures and the supreme value society placed on the communal hunt. Curly Hair observed the return of scouts, understood their signaling by waved robes or maneuvers of their ponies, and watched their reception at the council tipi. There the Deciders—four chiefs nominated each season to oversee the hunt—would offer a pipe to the scouts and, using archaic language and formal gestures, elicit their report. If buffalo were near, the herald rode the circuit of the campground, announcing a hunt and instructing all to repair gear, secure saddles, and sharpen knives and arrows.38

  Curly Hair’s first surround can be reconstructed from typical Lakota practice. The hunters rode out, overseen by akicita—police appointed by the Deciders—so that no premature attack dispersed the buffalo. Once the hunters had taken up positions around the herd, akicita signaled the hunters to charge. With precise coordination, they enveloped both flanks of the herd, circling it into a milling throng. Behind his father, Curly Hair kneed his pony bravely in pursuit of the racing animals. True to his training, he cut out one of the calves, rode up on its righthand side and—after the usual nervously spoiled shots—placed a well-aimed arrow in its flank, angling forward at the heart. The rider’s superbly trained pony immediately veered away from the enraged buffalo, but as the wounded animal slowed and then fell, Curly Hair reined in and leapt down to stand breathlessly beside his kill.

  After the surround, Crazy Horse and his son roughly butchered the buffalo. Women and elders arrived, leading pack dogs and ponies. Handed
the raw liver squirted with gall, Curly Hair swallowed the successful hunter’s tidbit before the packhorses were loaded with the quartered joints and hides. As they neared the village, Crazy Horse casually turned over a horse to an elder, who harangued around the campground, announcing Curly Hair’s first buffalo kill and calling old folk and unsuccessful hunters to feast at the family tipi. The old man announced a new name to mark the rite of passage: His Horse Stands in Sight. The boy stood uneasily, but for the moment triumphantly, on the edge of the adult Lakota world.39

  2

  YEAR OF THE BIG GIVEAWAY

  In the same season as Curly Hair’s first buffalo kill, messengers brought long-awaited invitations to Man Afraid of His Horse: Thomas Fitzpatrick, the U.S. agent to the Indians of the Upper Platte and Arkansas, had finally won government approval to hold a grand treaty council that summer of 1851. Across the region, from the upper Arkansas to the upper Missouri, camps and delegations trended toward Fort Laramie on the promise of a big talk and a grand giveaway.1

  The Plains Indians were rightly proud of their independence and the skill of their hunters and craftswomen in winning a living from an abundant but harsh environment. What made American promises of a new treaty so attractive that upwards of ten thousand people descended on Fort Laramie? What motivated the Hunkpatila band’s chief and council to facilitate the treaty?

  Understanding the answers to these questions requires putting aside romantic notions, beloved of Hollywood and the latest brand of New Age pulp fiction, that the Lakotas and their neighbors were innocents newly exposed to a rapacious Euro-American culture. In Curly Hair’s youth, Lakotas and Europeans had already enjoyed two centuries of direct if sporadic contact. French, English, and Spanish traders brought with them a technology that Indians valued. Firearms and horses transformed native warfare patterns, set communal buffalo hunting on a new, prosperous footing, and became an index of wealth for the nomadic hunting tribes of the plains. Early in the nineteenth century, the Lakotas had won a commanding role in the realignment of plains geopolitics, just as the United States claimed sovereignty of the continental interior.