Despite the euphoria over his first successful warpath, there remained unfinished business for Curly Hair. Although our culture today is open to the mysticism inherent in the vision quest, it is easy to overlook the central fact that the Lakota vision seeker wished less for enlightenment than for spiritual potency, the transformative power called sicun. To cry for a vision was not to seek the state of disinterested spiritual awareness of Buddhism. All visions demanded for their understanding insight, wisdom, and the exertion of meditative willpower. Older men, and women past the age of childbearing, might acquire profound spiritual awareness and perfect their capacity to live with “all my relatives.” Nevertheless, the typical dreamer sought sicun to grant him a spiritual edge, the potential to overcome enemies, misfortune, and illness for his own sake or that of relatives.
To the Lakota, no sicun was more awesome than that granted by the Thunder Beings. In a culture that valued reciprocity, so potent a gift naturally demanded sacrifice. The abject humiliation of the heyoka, for some a lifelong commitment, represented the absolute nature of that undertaking. Heyoka were living lightning conductors, preserving their people from the destructive powers of the Thunder Beings. Instead, they channelled through themselves those staggering energies to strike enemies with the terrible random ferocity of lightning.
The heyoka’s total commitment to the warrior ideal outside the tribe was counterbalanced by their domestic role as hapless clowns. Lakota society imposed on all its males a drastic dichotomy: to be a responsible conciliator within the tribe and a cruel implacable enemy beyond it. The heyoka represented the extreme manifestation of the dichotomy, as if society, forced to confront the pathological implications of the warrior ethic, had to resort to mockery—not of the ideals, but of the individuals who most fully lived up to them.
Like figures of carnival licensed to excess, they lived at the far edge of public respect. Small wonder that many a Thunder dreamer “became morose or melancholy and [spent] much of his time alone.”23 This description aptly characterized the adult Curly Hair, whose natural reflectiveness was easily tipped into melancholia. The tragedies of childhood had played a significant part in the formulation of his adult psychology, but the behaviors imposed on him as an active heyoka also shaped and heightened the gloomy reserve that characterized one aspect of his peacetime behavior. Heyoka both gave Curly Hair an accepted public guise for his melancholy and more deeply etched it into his inner being.
If the reconstruction of the heyoka pledges that he warily, reluctantly undertook are accurate, Curly Hair had been ordered by the holy man who interpreted his vision to kill, under pain of Thunder’s punishment, a woman. Perhaps this explained his first coup in the attack on the Pawnee village. His dramatic charge, a sixteen-year-old youth outstripping tried Brule warriors, was clearly an extraordinary act of will. There is little room for sentimentality when assessing Plains Indian warfare. Although many fights yielded few casualties as men sought to strike coups—simple blows with the hand or a weapon—steal horses, or engage in daring one-to-one clashes, some were characterized by wholesale killings of noncombatants. Lakota warriors, like their Crow or Pawnee adversaries, sought to terrorize enemy morale by the death or capture of the enemy’s women and children.
Undoubtedly, not all men felt easy with such practices. By accident or inner compulsion, Curly Hair spared his victim, striking only a blow for first coup. If act of mercy this was, it did not fulfill the demands of the Thunder Beings. Sometime after the war party returned home, Curly Hair committed his most terrible act. Known only through a terse statement by his friend He Dog seventy-four years later, during the Brule sojourn, Curly Hair “killed a Winnebago woman.”24
The details of the tragedy are unknown. He Dog was disinclined to expand on the subject to his interviewers, Eleanor Hinman and Mari Sandoz. Perhaps sensing his reluctance, they did not press the matter, but He Dog’s own measured statement yields vital clues to understanding the killing. It was certainly no war honor, as Sandoz contended, for Curly Hair made no public statement claiming this as a coup. Instead, recalled He Dog, “I made inquiries about why he had left the Rosebud [Brule] band. I was told he had to come back because he had killed a Winnebago woman.”25 The matter was already an enigma, something hidden, only to be solved by “making inquiries” within months of the killing.
The woman involved, significantly, was not a Lakota, but an alien, of marginal status. In circumstances now unknowable, Curly Hair killed her. Curly Hair’s relatives succeeded in quickly “covering” the death with whoever called the Winnebago woman a relative. Nevertheless, the act carried enough stigma for Curly Hair to realize that his stay among the Brules was at an end: “[H]e had to come back.” Perhaps uniformed Brule akicita implemented Agent Twiss’s orders and drove Curly Hair from the village.
It had been an uncomfortable visit, contrasting with Curly Hair’s restorative trips to the Miniconjous. Just how much the Brule stay rankled is revealed by the youth’s next move. When a number of other young Oglalas proposed a hunting trip into the Cheyenne country, Curly Hair joined them. Curly Hair’s flouting of the anti-Cheyenne position taken by Spotted Tail was a considered rejection of the new policy to conciliate Americans, the final act of a strained year.
As Curly Hair left the Brule country for the south, he did not leave behind the moral trauma of killing the Winnebago woman. The historian is free to assign blame, to convict and exonerate or to pronounce a qualified acquittal on the mitigating grounds of psychological disturbance or cultural relativism. The evidence suggests that Curly Hair felt no such comforting cliché. Immediately compensated for by the gift of a few horses, then covered up by enigma, silence, and misdirection, the murder lived on in his mind as an enduring blot.
6
CRAZY HORSE
In July, the Moon of Red Cherries, Curly Hair and his Oglala companions crossed the South Platte River and angled their ponies southeast into the Cheyenne country. Game was scarce. Another hot summer signaled climatic shifts on the plains that incrementally ate at buffalo range, threatening seasonal hardship and the long-term stability of the Plains Indian way of life. Buffalo herds in the region moved east across the shortgrass plains toward the reliable pasture of the lower prairies. As a string of deserted village sites showed, the Cheyennes continued to track the herds downcountry.1
Among the group of friends rode the eldest son of Man Afraid of His Horse. Now twenty-one years old and already a leader of war parties, Young Man Afraid of His Horse was good company for Curly Hair. The son of the Hunkpatila chief was himself a Thunder dreamer, thoughtful but with a genial good nature and a spontaneous smile that may have done something to alleviate Curly Hair’s mood. As the party rode, they found disturbing signs of new army movements—following the success of the Harney operations, a punitive force had been ordered to chastise the Cheyennes.
Colonel Edwin V. Sumner rode at the head of a command comprising eight companies of the First Cavalry and the Second Dragoons. On July 13 Sumner left his base camp on the South Platte, probing east. Curly Hair’s party fanned out scouts to monitor his approach until, after a two-hundred-mile journey, the youths located the Cheyenne village on the Saline River. Curly Hair’s party was welcomed to the large white council tipi at the center of the campground, where travelers and visitors were every day debriefed about news of troop movements.2
Elders proposed that the village move out of the troops’ way, but younger war leaders were determined to fight. Two young holy men, Ice and Dark, believed that their sacred power would render the soldiers’ guns harmless. The Cheyennes owned few firearms, mostly smoothbore trade muskets, but Ice and Dark offered to load these weapons with a white powder that would guarantee a hit with every shot. The assurances of spiritual power convinced most warriors that a battle with Sumner could be won. Unlike the Lakotas at the Blue Water, they were actively preparing to choose the place of battle. They agreed that, when the soldiers neared, the warriors should meet them on the south fork
of the Solomon.3
On the evening of July 28, scouts arrived with word that Sumner’s column had gone into camp barely thirty miles north. Into the night, warrior societies paraded around the campground. Inside the lodges men prepared paints, incensing weapons, shields, and battle charms in sacred smoke of sage, sweetgrass, and cedar. Others sharpened arrowheads or heated lead in bullet molds. As Curly Hair watched the preparations, he could only have been impressed by the piety and confidence of the Cheyennes. Before dawn the village was astir. Some mothers, proud and anxious, untethered war ponies and offered sons counsel. Horses were rubbed down with sage, dusted with sacred earth medicines, streaked with paint designs or circles that denoted battle wounds; scalps were tied at bridles and tails bobbed with twists of red cloth. Warriors donned hair-fringed war shirts and feather headdresses. As the sun appeared down the Saline valley, a party of over three hundred men formed behind Ice and Dark and, to the tremolos of the women, headed north toward the Solomon.4
Curly Hair and his Oglala friends, after four years of frustration with the Americans, were happy to ride beside their Cheyenne friends. Shortly, the column paused at a small prairie lake, where Ice and Dark ordered the warriors to dip their hands in the water. Now they needed only to hold up their hands toward the soldiers to make the enemy guns useless; then the Cheyennes would charge in and fight the troops at close quarters. The column re-formed and strung out over the plain. About midmorning they crossed the Solomon and dismounted in the thin belt of cottonwoods. Horses were watered and turned out to graze. Curly Hair, still a novice at warfare, would be tense and expectant, but many warriors negligently sat around chatting or gambling, lunching on jerky and pemmican. Midday passed; the day dragged into afternoon.
Suddenly, scouts appeared over a bluff upstream, circling their ponies in wide arcs, the signal that many enemies approached. The warriors formed a well-spaced line, four or five loose rows deep, extending north across the valley floor for almost half a mile. Around the bend two miles upstream, a column of some three hundred mounted soldiers appeared and wheeled into a broad front of three squadrons, four men deep. Before the front rank of blue-coated troops, guidons snapped smartly in the Kansas breeze. The line of blue-coated troops started forward at a trot. War leaders ordered the Cheyennes forward at a lope. War songs started up. On both flanks, warriors were detailed to fan out, crossing the river or scaling the bluffs, and outflank the soldiers. Curly Hair expectantly watched the soldier line, the distance swiftly narrowing to one mile. The soldier chief detached companies to combat the flanking movement. The soldiers on the left quickly ascended the bluffs, forcing the Cheyenne flankers to fall back downhill.
Rifle range neared. Warriors beside Curly Hair shouted battle cries and challenges. A lone figure galloped out from the soldier line and hauled in his pony. Although he wore the soldier’s blue jacket, leggings and a bright cloth turban identified him as a Delaware, an army scout from one of the displaced eastern Indian tribes. The Delaware snapped off a shot at the Cheyenne line and wheeled his pony back toward the soldiers. Yelling warriors responded with ragged musketry fire. Through the mounting dust, Curly Hair saw the war leaders wave their lances toward the oncoming troops, turning in their light saddles to urge the warriors onward. Curly Hair and his fellows expected the soldiers to fire a volley from their readied carbines at any moment. Unproven youths flexed hands ready to hold up and stop the bullets.
Suddenly, each soldier simultaneously slung his carbine and drew his saber, the long knives that cavalry carried but rarely used. At sight of the sabers, the Cheyennes hauled in their ponies to a jarring halt. Curly Hair sat in the mill of dust and shouts. Comprehension of the situation was limited for a youth who could not understand the panicked clamor of voices. Up ahead a warrior in a trailer headdress sped along the demoralized line, shouting. Beyond him the relentless front of troops galloped forward, yelling wildly through the dust. The din of hooves and the clink and slap of horse gear added to the confusion of sound. The gap had narrowed to little more than one hundred yards. The Cheyennes seemed stunned by the saber maneuver, milling aimlessly. As the pause lengthened, they responded to insistent shouts by loosing a volley of arrows straight into the juggernaut of troops, then wheeled their ponies away from the field at a dead run. Bewildered and frightened, Curly Hair and his Oglala friends whipped after them, crossing the Solomon and galloping south. Behind them, bugle calls signaled the pursuit.
Here and there across the plain, troopers and Cheyennes clashed in small-scale struggles, in which several warriors and two soldiers were killed. At 3:00 P.M. Sumner ordered recall. While the troops regrouped, the Cheyennes sped south. At news of their defeat, the village began to fall. Some people abandoned lodges, packs and all, in their haste to get away. Most raced south, but the northern Cheyenne bands turned northwest. In hurried conference with Curly Hair and his Oglala friends, they decided to race for the Lodgepole Creek crossing of the South Platte, two hundred miles away. The Oglala friends joined the flight north, valuable intermediaries should the Cheyennes need to seek Lakota aid beyond the Platte.
Riding at horse-killing speed, the vanguard of the fleeing Cheyennes reached the South Platte the next afternoon. A base camp was established to provide food and intelligence for the people following. Through August 5, people continued to filter across the river and over the plains northward. Beyond the North Platte, the flight slowed and scattered. By August 11 one camp of Cheyennes was reported to have reached the south edge of the Black Hills.5
Once in the North Platte valley, Curly Hair and his comrades peeled away from the flight. Oglalas and Brules were gathering at Rawhide Butte, and the youths were anxious to be home. Riding along the Overland Trail, they saw the country scarred by many trails. Settler traffic had again been heavy, and thousands of troops bound for a new campaign against the Mormons were moving west. Around Fort Laramie Curly Hair’s party found a city of army tents, vivid proof of the American nation’s expanding might. A few Brule tipis were pitched around James Bordeaux’s trading store. Before riding on to join their own bands, the friends were invited to eat at the lodge of Swift Bear, Bordeaux’s brother-in-law, and tell their news. Young Man Afraid of His Horse probably took the lead in speaking, relating the news of their visit with the Cheyennes, while Curly Hair reflected on the events of a momentous summer.6
He would remember the central plains as an easy avenue for American travel, traversed by the great thoroughfares of the Overland and Santa Fe trails. Already army topographers were mapping new routes along the tributaries of the Kansas River, bisecting the hunting grounds of the Cheyennes and their allies. The ease with which troops could penetrate the Cheyenne country had been vividly demonstrated by Sumner’s march. The Platte country was also tainted by recollections of Curly Hair’s uncomfortable visit among the Brules and its abrupt termination. Mistrustful of the new Brule policy of accommodation, Curly Hair would never again travel south of the Platte except as a raider. His future would lie in the north.
The Cheyenne debacle also confirmed other conclusions. Fighting the long-knife soldiers in pitched battle had proved as disastrous as Brule overconfidence at the Blue Water. If warfare continued, a small-scale war of attrition, using Indian tactics of ambush and stock stealing, seemed to offer the best solution. The individualist’s distrust of communal panaceas was sharpened in Curly Hair by the farcical failure of the Cheyennes’ bulletproof medicine. Although he would continue to seek the personal protective edge offered by wotawe charms, all Curly Hair’s instincts revolted against the mass manipulation of such power. After 1857 Curly Hair’s worldview began to harden: the malleable edges of youth were roughened by what, for such an unworldly man, was probably the healthy abrasion of cynicism.
The sight of the great Oglala camps strung around Rawhide Butte heartened a homesick youth. A herald, using Curly Hair’s formal name, circled the campground to announce that His Horse Stands in Sight had returned. Friends called to exchange news and greetings, He
Dog among the first. Curly Hair’s Bad Face friend told him that he had this same day returned with a war party from the Crows. In another recent incident, Curly Hair’s kinsman Iron Whiteman had captured a Crow man. The news revealed that the sporadic Crow truces that had followed the Horse Creek Treaty were finished, which promised a rising warrior renewed scope for war honors in the north.7
In August 1857 the great Lakota council proposed in the aftermath of the Harney treaty gathered along the Belle Fourche River, near the landmark of Bear Butte. Probably all northern Teton tribal divisions were present, with significant numbers of Oglalas and Brules. Logistics of pasturage for the horse herds, of water, fuel, and game, meant that such a massive gathering could have stayed together for only a matter of days. As cosponsors of the gathering, the Hunkpapa and Miniconjou villages raised a huge council tipi and shade. Warrior societies pitched their own meeting lodges on the campgrounds, where colorful society dances, gambling tournaments, and coup-counting contests were held. At the council shade, chiefs and elders held preliminary meetings, but much of the real political action would take place inside private lodges, at feasts hosted by cliques of leaders and society headmen.8
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