CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  Naked, his hair unbound in supplication and his voice raised in a wailing chant for help and guidance, Curly Hair stood alone, humble and pitiful. For the four days of his hanble-ceya, he must not eat or drink. Much would come, the holy man had warned, to test his courage. Comrades had advised that many considered the extreme solitude of the vision quest to be a sterner test than even the Sun Dance, but he must hold on to his pipe and not be afraid. As hunger and thirst deepened, he must listen to everything around him: passing birds or animals might carry messages that he should not neglect. Circling eagles, a passing coyote, the hover of a distant hawk—all were to be saluted in prayer, their movement and behavior scrutinized for significance. All day the vision seeker followed the slow progress of the sun, turning at noon to face south, standing at each pole and begging the powers to grant him the clarifying vision. As the sun sank, Curly Hair faced the west, his pipestem tracking below the horizon line until he stood in darkness. Famished and exhausted, he at last crawled beneath the brush to wrap himself in his robe and lie on the sage bed of the pit, his head toward the west. Before sleep took him, he sought to focus through the brush on the wheeling progress of the stars in the massive sky. At dawn Curly Hair rose to address a prayer to the morning star, before he took his place once more to face the rising sun.

  So the days passed. His stumbling prayers made the circuit of directions and their powers. At length, as the holy man advised if other prayers failed, he begged power directly from Wakan Tanka, aid to “save his tribe.” As exhaustion deepened, he spent more time sitting against the poles, thinking deeply. At night, sounds he had considered familiar took on unsettling clarity: owl hoots, the rushing swoop of night hawks, and the scamper of small animals, all sounded uncannily loud, as if loaded with a significance that lay just beyond the line of consciousness. As the days succeeded, hunger, exhaustion, and dehydration rendered sound itself a tactile presence. Daytime noises like the scurry of ants or the scratching of a grasshopper’s legs boomed like thunder; observed movement seemed to slow to a glacial crawl or to accelerate impossibly. Small wonder that a distant roll of thunder roared with revelatory power for Curly Hair; or that flashing forks of lightning seared clarity and the assurance of power into the youth’s consciousness. Outside, his nighttime dreams had caused him to fear the destructive power of Thunder, but here, in this sacred space, he stood as if within the Thunder: its power his.

  Somewhere late in the four days and nights the vision came, either in sleep or as Curly Hair staggered between the offering poles. We do not know its details: vision seekers spoke openly about their dreams only to the holy men or their most trusted friends, and Curly Hair was more secretive than most. But dreams of Thunder were typically prefaced by a noise in the west and the charge of mounted men, servants of the Thunder Beings. Thunder itself, a huge bird with lightning at its joints, might appear in awesome revelation or speak through one of its envoys, the hawks and bats, horses, dogs, and dragonflies that acted as its akicita. A red-tailed hawk was the messenger of this first vision: this fierce bird of prey would always be Curly Hair’s closest guardian spirit. An intense visionary experience followed, and the closing admonition to “Remember what you have seen.” Then, finally, the dreamer slept.4

  As day broke on the fifth day, the holy man led his little party back up the bluff. They took down the string of tobacco offerings and entered the vision pit. The holy man closed Curly Hair’s trembling hands over his pipe and led him gently from the pit. His breechclout was put on, and his robe placed over his shoulders before he was helped onto his pony and led down the hill. The offering cloths were left to blow atop the butte, another plea to Wakan Tanka for the liberty of the Blue Water captives. On the plain below, a sweat lodge had been built. The holy man permitted Curly Hair to take a little water, then led him into the lodge where the party underwent the inipi again. In slow disconnected phrases, the dreamer sought to recount his vision to his comrades. The holy man unsealed Curly Hair’s pipe, and it was smoked in communion to indicate the successful conclusion of his vision quest. At the close, the holy man gave Curly Hair a little dried meat to chew, then ordered the helpers to leave. He arranged Curly Hair for sleep and left him alone within the reassuring womblike shelter of the sweat lodge.

  For much of the day and night, the dreamer slept on. On the following day, as Curly Hair’s strength returned with food, water, and rest, the inipi was held again as many as three times. Each time the holy man probed at the details of the vision. He and the helpers, fellow Thunder dreamers, offered their interpretations of its significance, sensitive to the nuance of detail. They were satisfied that Curly Hair had indeed “received the Holy Message,”5 and assured him that the Thunder Beings would assist him as a warrior in the service of the Lakota people. The holy man then reminded Curly Hair that such visions came at a lifelong price. Lest he incur their disfavor and die by lightning, the dreamer must repeatedly convince the Thunder Beings of his humility and fitness for their blessing. Thunder’s protection was one of the greatest gifts the wakan could bestow: Curly Hair must give thanks that would take spiritual humility to the extreme edge of public humiliation. Next spring, after the Thunders ushered in the season of renewal, Curly Hair must pledge to hold the heyoka ceremony in their honor.

  While these events unfolded, the eleven-man party deputed to locate the Blue Water fugitives located Little Thunder’s camp. When Harney’s demands were announced, agreement was soon reached. Iron Shell, whose own mother, son, and three wives were among the captured, addressed Spotted Tail, saying that for the good of the people he should surrender. His own wife and baby daughter in captivity, Spotted Tail replied that he would do as Iron Shell requested.6

  On October 26, Red Leaf, Long Chin, and Spotted Tail rode into the agency, dressed in their finest war clothes and singing their death songs. Lakotas from the peace party village hosted a feast for the warriors who were ready to throw away their lives for the people. Curly Hair, returned from his vision quest, and his family were likely present. The youth, potent with the Thunder power of his vision, must have watched his uncle closely, eyeing the two bullet wounds and the severe gashes of two dragoon sabers scarring Spotted Tail’s body. After two nights spent at the agency, Twiss accompanied the three men to Fort Laramie on the twenty-eighth, where they were turned over to the commanding officer and secured in the guardhouse.7

  On November 5 a slow procession turned out of the Fort Laramie parade ground and down the Oregon Trail. An army ambulance followed by a mounted escort lumbered ahead; a freight wagon loaded with tipis and camping equipment brought up the rear. They were bound for Fort Leavenworth, on the Missouri frontier. In the open ambulance sat Spotted Tail and his comrades, shackled in irons, with their wives and youngest children. As the ambulance passed the Lakotas lining the trail, the three warriors started to chant a song of the Strong Hearts Society. Women sounded the tremolo of praise as for warriors going into battle. Perhaps Curly Hair tracked the progress of his uncle for a while, joining in the high fierce chant for courage. Spotted Tail had shown courage indeed, his nephew knew, but at what price for himself and the people?8

  Through the winter the nominal state of war continued. General Harney scheduled a grand treaty council at Fort Pierre in March 1856. Convinced that the Lakotas could be controlled by an adequately supported chieftainship, he instructed each tribal division to nominate a head chief and nine subordinate chiefs to represent them at the treaty. To impress their people with their status, these chiefs and a force of akicita leaders would receive regular government subsistence in food and uniform clothing.9

  The treaty called for the return of all stolen property and the surrender of all warriors guilty of offenses. Once these conditions were satisfied, Harney would free the Blue Water captives. Established trails must be kept open for troops and settlers. To end horse stealing, which threatened settler security, the Lakotas were to extend the 1851 truces to include the Pawnees and, even less realistically, to stop the intern
al trade in horses entirely. They would consider settling at points near military posts and taking up farming. In return, the Lakotas would have their annuities restored and be protected from abuses by ill-disposed Americans. At Fort Pierre in May, Harney officially announced the end of hostilities, ordering the captives freed and recognizing Bear Ribs, the new Hunkpapa head chief, as Scattering Bear’s successor to the nominal chieftainship of all Lakotas.10

  A new mood favoring consensus and an end to the polarization of the past three years was emerging across the Lakota domain. Hunkpapas and Sihasapas marked the new order by accepting their treaty goods for the first time. During spring 1856 the northern Oglala bands followed Harney’s advice to clear the Overland Trail and moved northwest into the Powder River country. At Platte Bridge the local Cheyennes had gotten embroiled with the troops in another petty argument over stock. Fearful of a rerun of the events of 1854, many people were convinced of the need to secure safer hunting grounds, and the Oglala chiefs had organized a season of diplomacy with the Crows.11

  For Curly Hair, much of the politics surrounding the Harney negotiations probably seemed irrelevant or worse. As spring approached, early thunders reminded him of his pledge to perform the heyoka ceremony. To the Lakotas, the heyoka were sacred clowns. Dreamers of the Thunder, they were expected to ritually display humility reduced to absurdity. Failure to perform these duties would result in certain death by lightning. Some were committed to a lifetime of contrary behavior—dressing in rags, sleeping naked in the snow, willfully performing the opposite of any instruction.12

  His hair shaved off on one side of the head, carrying a dewclaw rattle and speaking “backwards,” Curly Hair had spent the winter being shunned as a bearer of ill luck. As the day of the ceremony approached, Curly Hair’s instructors in the vision quest set up a dilapidated tipi, its smoke-blackened skins hung on broken poles. Here the holy man, helpers like Horn Chips, and Curly Hair met in a burlesque of solemn council, dressed in conical caps, shirts trimmed with crow feathers, and winter robes belted at the waist. While the helpers were strangling dogs for the feast, invitations were sent to all the heyoka in the village. Women set to boiling the dogs. Heyoka, dressed in outlandish masks, or sporting phallic false noses, proceeded to impede and obstruct the cooking, neglecting to singe off the dog’s hair, hamfisting the butchering. Some adopted obscene postures around the women, reducing the crowd to helpless laughter as they pantomimed ejaculation over the oldest crone, urinated on their own clothing, or began happily hurling excrement across the campground.

  Curly Hair had to play a leading part in this performance, scrutinized closely by his instructors. At length, as the heyoka capered madly around the boiling kettles, each singing his own thunder song in glorious discord, Curly Hair’s instructors called him aside. They showed him how to rub his hands and cheeks with an ointment made from the chewed leaves of the red false mallow. With this protection, Curly Hair thrust his hands into the bubbling pot and drew out chunks of dog meat, running out to the crowd to serve the laughing press of people by throwing the boiling cuts into their laps. Other heyoka scooped up handfuls of boiling water, hurling it into Curly Hair’s face or across each other’s backs, to shrieks that the water was too cold. The ceremony ended with full bellies and laughing faces.

  The heyoka is commonly viewed simply as a clown to lift the people’s spirits, but there were darker aspects to the experience of the Thunder dreamer. After the performance of the ceremony, the fortunate were advised that they had endured enough: the Thunder Beings were satisfied. But a few were told that Thunder demanded of them one more sacrifice: they must kill—like the lightning, with implacable random speed—a man, woman, or child, “in which case he must obey and until he does he is upbraided by the people for not doing what he was advised to do.”13 Although we know little of the details of Curly Hair’s heyoka experience, events of the next year suggest that his advisers told him that he must kill a woman.

  As summer deepened, messengers from the Platte reported the return of Agent Twiss from the East, the arrival of annuities at Fort Laramie, and the imminent release of Spotted Tail and his comrades from detention in Fort Leavenworth. After petitions from both Twiss and General Harney, the president had issued a pardon for the mail coach raiders.14

  The Oglalas made their way to rendezvous with the Upper Brules at Rawhide Butte, twenty-five miles north of Fort Laramie, where Twiss had arranged to deliver their treaty goods. According to He Dog’s recollection, Curly Hair left the Oglalas and lived for a year with the Brules when they were youths of about seventeen or eighteen. The chronology best fits the year 1856–57, the context of Spotted Tail’s return from imprisonment. Perhaps Curly Hair’s two stepmothers, keen to see their brother again, and the whole family joined the Brules when, early in October, Spotted Tail and his comrades were released at Fort Laramie.15

  The men who returned from detention had changed in significant ways. One year before, Red Leaf had been their spokesman, but Spotted Tail returned as the leader. Contrary to all expectations, he explained, the prisoners had been treated well. Many of the officers had proved approachable and friendly: to one, who had carried Spotted Tail’s baby from the Blue Water battlefield, he had sworn lifelong friendship. More important than this, Spotted Tail continued, was the sheer number of Americans. Although the prisoners had visited no city, Spotted Tail was an astute observer. Surveying the massive garrison of Fort Leavenworth, observing growing American settlements and the steamboat traffic along the lower Missouri, passing eastern Indian communities marked by farm plots and churches, Spotted Tail accurately saw the shape of the future. Most significant, he understood that Fort Leavenworth, huge compared to the tiny garrisons policing the plains, was only an outlying post in a massive military infrastructure. In public council, warriors’ feasts, and family meetings, Spotted Tail reiterated that Lakotas must never contemplate going to war again with the Americans. War could only bring disaster on the people.16

  Agent Twiss moved to exploit the mood. Although Congress had not yet voted funds to implement the Harney treaty, the agent had been able to secure uniform clothing in the 1856 annuities and used these to outfit a fledgling akicita force, which would keep order at the annuity issue, prevent depredations against Americans, and even seek to regulate intertribal warfare. Members may have been drawn from the Kit Fox warrior society. Unlike the militant Strong Hearts, the Kit Fox leadership was inclined to cooperation with the United States. Among the Brules, the society was the one most commonly called on to act as tribal police, and with a chapter in every Oglala band, the Kit Fox was the strongest of the warrior societies, a potential catalyst for peace.17

  Sixteen-year-old Curly Hair probably listened with misgivings to these developments, and especially to his uncle’s change of heart. Moreover, he heard disturbing reports that the prisoners had served in army reprisals against Cheyenne raiders. In the most serious clash, cavalry attacked without warning a war party sitting out heavy rains on Grand Island, killing six Cheyennes after the warriors threw down their bows in submission.18

  The Brule Wazhazha band moved to wintering grounds in the Sandhills, trading at Ash Hollow near the Blue Water battlefield. Curly Hair decided to stay on with his stepmothers’ people. During the winter, Cheyenne envoys targeted them and other Lakota bands, seeking to win aid for a new war against the Americans. The Wazhazha council repeatedly rejected the Cheyenne tobacco, but Curly Hair was moved by the Cheyenne appeals and began to chafe at the new policy of accommodating Americans. Moreover, he was keen to go to war and test the powers granted him by Thunder. Since his warrior apprenticeship had begun at twelve, the truce with the Crows had narrowed the scope of intertribal warfare: the Brule cooperation with the Americans threatened to foreclose all opportunities for warriors keen to win the battle honors needed in Lakota society.19

  In May 1857, however, a war party was organized to strike the Pawnee villages in eastern Nebraska. Curly Hair joined the party, leading a mount he had
spent patient months training as a war pony. Once the party approached the Pawnee villages, grouped along the south side of the lower Platte River, scouts surveyed the prospect from the hills. Under discipline not to alert the enemy, the war party was ordered forward, and for the first time Curly Hair viewed an enemy village. Below him ran the wide braided channels of the Platte, marked by willowed sandbars snagged with driftwood. Keen eyes could have pointed out the houses of the American settlement of Fremont, Nebraska, across the river—the homes not of fur traders or soldiers but of settlers, proof that this was no longer a world of Indians only20

  On the terrace above the river floodplain stood the village of the Skidi Pawnees, earthlodges and tipis strung along the high bank. Below the village clustered the Skidi garden plots, and scouts pointed out the movement within the brush hedges as women, children, and old people worked the fields. Using buffalo shoulderblade hoes, women bent to grub weeds from around the first shoots of corn. Children scampered to shoo off alighting birds; elders intoned age-old prayers for their crops, the inheritance of almost one thousand years of horticulture on the Nebraska prairies.

  Their target selected, the Lakota warriors massed for a charge into the fields. Hardly had the war whistles shrilled the signal to attack when a lone rider burst far ahead of the Lakota line, brandishing a light staff. His pony responded instantly to each ounce of pressure he applied through his knees and heels, turning, veering, and clearing obstacles at terrific speed. He was, recalled his cousin Eagle Elk, “making a dash to coup an enemy.” The sudden clamor of war whoops alerted the Pawnees to their danger. People began to run down the rows of corn toward the river, women screaming for their children.21

  Far ahead of the other Lakotas, Curly Hair was already among the Pawnees. A Skidi woman appeared near him. Perhaps mindful of his heyoka pledge, Curly Hair veered toward her. Armed with club, knife, and bow, he could have speedily killed his victim. Instead, he struck her with his staff and the woman fell, momentarily stunned, as Curly Hair counted first coup, most prized of war honors. Without pausing, the youth sped forward, the heady rush of action intoxicating him for the first time. Exultantly, he struck light blows to right and left, counting coup over and over, so that the warriors fanning through the field after him marveled at his precocious courage and skill. By the time the war party disengaged and melted back into the hills, Curly Hair, breathless and triumphant, had decisively stamped his future. “From that time on,” remembered Eagle Elk, “he was talked about.”22 With Thunder’s power he would strike all Lakota enemies as he had the Pawnees.