CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  In May a large interband war party formed and swung west across the Bighorn Basin, tracking Crow camps moving toward the upper Yellowstone. Some Miniconjou relatives of Crazy Horse joined the party, as did the untried Oyuhpe youth Fast Thunder, who called Crazy Horse cousin. Another Oyuhpe boy, eleven-year-old Struck by Crow, tagged along. Already a coterie of youths formed around Crazy Horse, eager to emulate this strangely silent hero, encouraging him to consider a future not simply as a warrior but as a leader in war.5

  The Crow trail swung north from the Sweetwater. It was a wet spring, and miry travel bogged down in a series of swollen river crossings. The war party repeatedly clashed with other enemies, killing two Nez Perce warriors caught on the prairie, then sweeping through a camp of strange tipis made from grass and brush, a hunting camp of northern Shoshones and Bannocks

  Crazy Horse, his hawk wotawe fastened atop his head, joined a knot of riders charging one enemy, but as he struck third coup, a chance shot struck his left calf. Comrades hurried to his side and helped him to the ground as he slumped from the saddle. He passed out, and for a startled instant, the warriors glanced at each other as his body sank in their arms with the dead weight of Rock.6

  Revived and undaunted by the flesh wound, Crazy Horse remounted and galloped on at the leading edge of the Lakota line. Suddenly, another shot brought down his mount—the first of a long line of luckless war ponies he would lose over the next nineteen years. Crazy Horse toppled forward into the dust and rose unsteadily on his wounded leg to find himself cut off. The Grass House warriors had begun to hold their position, screening their people’s retreat and pinning down the Lakota line. Unlike Crazy Horse’s daredevil rescue of High Backbone, no one raced forward to rescue the young Oglala. Crazy Horse began a hobbling run back to his comrades, but a mounted enemy galloped forward to head him off. Instead of retreating, Crazy Horse lurched forward, unhorsed the warrior, killed him, and dragged himself astride the enemy pony. With a whoop of defiance, he clapped his right heel to the animal’s flanks and galloped to the safety of the Lakota line.7

  When the Lakotas disengaged, they could count a significant victory. A number of the enemy had been killed, including visiting Crows: one contemporary account indicates that Big Robber, architect of the Crow-Lakota truces of 1851–57, may have been among the dead. The fight with the Grass House People signaled an end to the western truces the Lakotas had agreed to in the wake of the 1851 treaty, ushering in a new period of concerted aggression against the Crows, Shoshones, and other western tribes.

  Many who saw the skirmishing declared that Crazy Horse’s personal combat was the bravest of all his deeds. It marked the culmination of a defining year, in which the latent promise of adolescence bore fruit in imperishable achievement. As if aware of these patterns, Crazy Horse chose to mark the transition into manhood as he had done that from boyhood almost seven years earlier: he accepted an invitation by High Backbone to make a protracted visit among his mother’s people. Together the comrades trekked north to the Miniconjou hoop. There, Crazy Horse’s kinsman, the head chief Lone Horn, was concluding his yearlong Ghost Owning with the White Buffalo ceremony—a massive giveaway in which Lone Horn validated his new status through heroic generosity, binding to him in the complex calculus of obligation a network of rivals and allies. This lesson was not lost on the young Oglala, who (Miniconjou elders recalled over half a century later) assumed his peacetime reserve throughout the stay. Contrasting with the troubled Brule visit, he was attentive and respectful among his elders. With peers, Crazy Horse had nothing of the brash young warrior about him, adopting instead an air of unassuming modesty amid the praise songs celebrating his deeds.8

  True friends alert us to our weaknesses and consolidate our strengths: so High Backbone intuited his comrade’s tendency to isolation. The nervy heyoka energies of Thunder power had to be grounded with the generative maturity that Lakotas identified with the buffalo bull. Himself a famous scout, High Backbone inducted Crazy Horse through a master class in the craft. Less glorified than the warrior, scouts performed services that benefited the whole tribe—locating game, alerting to the presence of enemies, guiding tribal migrations. Crazy Horse refined his knowledge of animal behavior, sharpened his observations of natural phenomena, and honed his powers of endurance as High Backbone led him across the trackless plains. He was taught to run at night, feeling the earth to locate game trails, detecting water by the minute changes in air currents. At the council tipi, he knelt before the Deciders who coordinated hunts and reported facts of game location, prospects for the tribe’s meat supply. As High Backbone predicted, Crazy Horse found scouting congenial, turning his self-sufficiency to the people’s good: to leap ahead in the story, one indicator of his commitment to the 1877 peace with the Americans was his kneeling before General Crook (see chapter 21)—the stylized gesture of a returning scout.9

  The following year Crazy Horse had the opportunity to exercise his new skills. In early spring 1859, two sons of Miniconjou chief Black Shield were killed by Crow raiders. Crow negotiations had continued fitfully, but these deaths sealed the end of the Horse Creek truces. Black Shield sponsored a war pipe that brought together Lakota bands in a great gathering north of the Black Hills.10

  Crazy Horse made a glad reunion with Oglala comrades like He Dog. Early in June Black Shield’s party, leaving a trail of eighty campfires, sliced toward the Bighorn valley in search of Crows. Black Shield, an experienced war leader, fostered a spirit of camaraderie among his diverse followers. His careful assignments perhaps numbered High Backbone and Crazy Horse among the scouts. They reported Crow bands gravitating around Fort Sarpy, the Crow trade center on the Yellowstone River, but keen eyes spotted a small party moving down the Little Bighorn. On June 12, with Thunder-like ferocity, the Lakotas struck, killing eleven young men and a woman, forcing the Crows north and west of the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers.11

  When Black Shield’s coalition broke up, Crazy Horse turned homeward with the Oglala contingent. The cycle of adolescence, begun in another Miniconjou sojourn, was ended as Worm and his stepmothers welcomed him in the family tipi. Worm too had completed a circle. In the endgame of his tragic first marriage, he had bitterly accused Rattle Blanket Woman of adultery with a wasicu, a slur that the light-haired son surely registered intimately. Since the tragedy, Worm had patiently followed the holy man’s path. As a captive of the sacred powers, bound head and foot in a darkened tipi, he had acquired the gift of prophecy—a gift that convinced him of his son’s unique ability to defeat the enemies of the Lakota.12 If this smacks of overcompensation, it nevertheless sealed the renewed bond between father and son. Crazy Horse took over as the family’s main provider—a role in which, Worm acknowledged, he never failed.

  The following winter, Crazy Horse joined the Oglala hunters on a famously successful buffalo hunt. As scouts signaled the herd, Deciders ordered forward men with good horses to hunt for the poor and infirm. Crazy Horse acted as if born to such duty. Darting in and out of the milling buffalo as bravely as he charged the enemy, Crazy Horse was able to fell ten cows.

  Even before the return to camp, Crazy Horse called over unsuccessful hunters as he tracked through bloodied grass and snow after his kills. Worm was still an able hunter, well able to provide for the family tipi, so Crazy Horse gave away all the meat, reserving only the ten tongues. It was an echo of the boy who had blithely promised the family’s food to the hungry elders. As the line of hunters and laden ponies approached home, they struck up a song of thanks to the slender youth whose uncommon skills seemed matched by his generosity. That evening, as the elders gathered in the council tipi, Crazy Horse had the tongues sent over for their feast, causing the old men to rise and chant their thanks. Besides proving his generosity, the event confirmed that Crazy Horse excelled as a hunter as well as a warrior and a scout.13

  It also signaled the onset of a decade in which Crazy Horse and the tribal leadership of civil chiefs and elders were most at ease, as a revived spi
rit of national well-being swept the Lakota world. The revival was rooted in the abundant gamelands they had won. Until the intertribal agreements of 1851, much of the Powder River valley had formed a war zone between the Crows and their enemies. For decades its game reserves had been underexploited. After Black Shield’s victory, the Lakotas made the broad swathe of territory between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains their last great hunting ground. Years of insecure hunts, of military stalemate in the Crow war, and shame in their capitulation to Harney were quickly forgotten in an upswelling of tribal pride.

  The Powder River country was a rich and varied habitat for game and people. The high shortgrass plains were watered by major rivers rising in the pine-clad flanks of the Bighorns. Abundant buffalo were matched by antelope herds and high-country game such as elk and bighorn sheep. Crazy Horse felt deep affection for these lands wrested from the enemy. The Powder River country would remain his true home. In 1877, as Lakotas faced capitulation to the Americans, Crazy Horse resisted the alternative of flight to Canada: more than anywhere else, the Powder River country elicited from him the fierce sentiment of belonging.

  Crazy Horse continued to seek spiritual power. Most men endured the physical sacrifice of the Sun Dance in their early twenties, hanging from the center pole by stakes cut through their chests. Crazy Horse is not known to have undergone the ceremony: perhaps the flashy exhibitionism of many peers, their Sun Dance scars circled in vermilion, violated his sense of private spirituality. Nevertheless, some men offered their sacrifices alone, suffering the weight of buffalo skulls hung from their backs, or hanging from stout saplings in a remote spot. In visions of the Shadow, the Badger, and the Day, he successfully accumulated sicun power. But most of his visions remained within the ambit of his first revelation from Thunder. The prancing horse that appeared in one vision and confirmed his name was a servant of Thunder. Under the tutelage of Horn Chips, Worm, and the older holy men, Crazy Horse would be able to interpret his visions as gifts from the world of the Thunder Beings.14

  During the inactivity of winter, conversations with his father widened into profound philosophical debates. Constantly Worm advised Crazy Horse to apply clarity of thought and attentiveness of mind to the revelations of his guardian spirits. Visions were not only for the moment but should be afforded lifelong contemplation. Much as we today may ponder a favorite text or work of art, establishing an interactive relationship that will continue to develop through life, recurrent contemplation established the vision as a locus of evolving regenerative thought.

  One theme Crazy Horse may have traced was movement. Thunder’s envoys shared an unpredictability of motion that a contemplative warrior might well devote “effort and study” to comprehend. The jagged line of lightning; the sudden fall and climb of a dragonfly; the tipped swoop of a flock of swallows ahead of thunder; the squeaking night flight of bats; a horse’s sudden run or the awesome drop to the kill of Crazy Horse’s own guardian, the red-tailed hawk—all were characterized by suddenness, unpredictability. Kicamnayan, Lakotas called this erratic motion, recognizing it as a property of the Thunder Beings and their messengers.15

  Such motion was of inestimable value to a warrior. Crazy Horse worked hard to assimilate Thunder’s message, fronting charges to act as the leading edge of an unpredictable lightninglike strike. Against the Crows, and later in such large-scale clashes with the Americans as the Battle of the Rosebud, he led long oblique lines of charging horsemen that rippled across the terrain like lightning. He placed himself always thirty or forty yards ahead of the line, ordering his men not “to close up on him.”16

  Pondering the erratic motion of his guardian spirits had deeper lessons too. His adult behavior, veering between passivity and fierce action, was clearly grounded in the emotional traumas of childhood. A lesser man, without the compelling assurance of Crazy Horse’s visions, might have stultified in impotent mood swings. Beyond their promises of protection in battle, the Thunder Beings gave Crazy Horse a way of turning trauma to advantage, locating an energy that permitted him to shift with bewildering speed from inactivity to defiance, diffidence to assertive-ness. That energy could trip up political opponents as well as battle adversaries: in assessing the power plays with Lieutenant William P. Clark or agent James S. Irwin during the final weeks of Crazy Horse’s life, one may detect the unpredictable contours of kicamnayan.

  As was customary, the enigmatic Crazy Horse revealed little of his own dreams and guardian spirits. Warriors speculated with affectionate irony about their leader’s power, joking about the unfortunate record of his war ponies, and concluding that he had dreamed of Rock so “that he was as heavy as a rock. That’s why no horse could pack him.”17

  The most famous vision of all, misrepresented by earlier biographers, probably took place about 1860–61, because Crazy Horse gave the locale as near Rosebud Creek, in the heart of the old Crow domain. According to the account Crazy Horse told his cousin Flying Hawk, he had endured the vigil of starvation long enough to begin hallucinating. A stalk of slough grass blew against his head: “I took it to look at,” recalled Crazy Horse. In the abrupt juxtapositions of dream, the stem appeared to overlay a trail down the hillside. Tottering, Crazy Horse followed it down to the shore of a small lake, staggering into the shallows where the trail abruptly ended: “I sat down in the water; I was nearly out of breath; [then] I started to rise out of the water.”18 As he waded toward shore,

  A man on horseback came out of the lake and talked with him. He told Crazy Horse not to wear a War Bonnet; not to tie up his horse’s tail. (The Indians invariably tie up their horses’ tails in a knot [when going to war].) This man from the lake told him that a horse needed his tail for use; when he jumped a stream he used his tail and at other times, and as Crazy Horse remarked in telling this, he needs his tail in summer time to brush flies. So Crazy Horse never tied his horse’s tail, never wore a warbonnet. It is said he did not paint his face like other Indians.

  The man from the lake told him he would never be killed by a bullet, but his death would come by being held and stabbed.

  The rider from the lake showed Crazy Horse how to take “dirt thrown up by the pocket gophers” and sprinkle it over himself and his pony before going into battle. He also told him to take “two or three straws of grass 2 or 3 inches long” and wear them in his hair.19

  To his kinsman Flying Hawk, Crazy Horse disclosed that he waded to shore, feeling a sense of renewal too intense to be described in clichés of rebirth. “[W]hen I came out,” he said, “I was born by my mother.” The essence of his past, including the jagged hiatus following his mother’s death, was relived and finally “placed,” liberating the warrior to a life of full adulthood. Two generations of historians have misrepresented this crucial vision. It is time to unravel the true significance of the rider and his message.

  Billy Garnett, who personally heard Crazy Horse’s account of the vision, repeatedly identifies the mysterious rider as the “man from the lake.” In her influential rendering, Mari Sandoz jettisoned the crucial context of water. Knowing that Crazy Horse derived many of his powers from the Thunder Beings, and dramatically compressing his long visionary career, she sought to press Garnett’s bare account into the context of a Thunder dream. Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law Iron Horse established that the grass Crazy Horse was told to wear was a water grass that grows in prairie sloughs, underlining the water connection. Moreover, the pocket gopher burrows beneath the earth and was believed to cause scrofulous sores: only a wakan person would dare to handle the dangerous dust thrown up by its digging. Instead of a Thunder Being, the rider from beneath the lake was a Water Spirit representing the Unktehi, the Underground Powers that live beneath the earth and waters. Throughout North American mythology, the Underground Powers range in eternal enmity against the Thunder Powers of the Upper World. Lakotas believed that firearms were empowered by the Thunder. In promising him invulnerability to bullets, the man from the lake was neutralizing Thunder’s potential to
harm Crazy Horse.20

  The true significance of the vision was that it completed the cosmic empowerment of Crazy Horse. Through prayer he could call on the powers of Upper and Lower Worlds to aid him: in sacral contexts he embodied the totality of their strength. When he rode into battle, Crazy Horse was not simply a naked warrior with a curious paint design: his being crackled with the awesome destructive powers of the total cosmos. At twenty, an established warrior with an unlimited future, that power must have seemed supremely liberating. Since boyhood he had dreamed of “get[ting] his name up to the highest.”21 For now, he could be forgiven for slighting the costs of such power, unaware that a day might come when the universe would war within him, and tear his being apart.

  As the onset of cold weather curtailed raiding in fall 1862, Crazy Horse confided in Horn Chips about another new vision. This time he had dreamed of the Rock. Perceived as the primal element of the universe, the oldest of the four manifestations of Wakan Tanka, Rock was unique—the only thing in nature that is not round, a manifestation not of the generative assurance of the circle, but jagged, irruptive, of fearsome strength and eternal endurance. Crazy Horse guardedly revealed something of his anxieties to Horn Chips. Although unwounded since the fight with the Grass House People, Crazy Horse had brooded over the words of the man from the lake: that, although invulnerable to bullets, he would be killed by being stabbed. Horn Chips sought the advice of his own visionary guardians.