In the same years that northern Oglala warriors were preoccupied with the war to dispossess the Crows, Lakota relations with the United States came under new and unprecedented pressures. An intractable knot of problems centered on the twin issues of land and treaty rights. These were first highlighted early in 1858 when, just as Lakota speakers at Bear Butte had feared, their Yankton relatives ceded their lands east of the Missouri, retaining only a small reservation. Northern Lakotas reacted angrily to the sale, threatening a renewed boycott of treaty relations with the United States. Chiefs like Bear Ribs, returning with treaty goods to the hunting grounds, had their horses killed by disillusioned warriors. The Strong Hearts ideology of separatism, increasingly identified with Sitting Bull, took deeper root. On August 22, 1860, Hunkpapas served notice of the switch in tribal policy by unleashing an all-out attack on Fort Union, the main trading post on the upper Missouri. In the weeks that followed, Hunkpapa raiders, augmented by Sihasapas and Sans Arcs, swung south along Powder River, striking the stretch of the Overland Trail west of the Upper Platte Agency. In a pointed affront to Oglala tribal authority, they stole horses from the trading community and killed stragglers.2
In the Platte zone, the Oglalas continued to enjoy a reputation as the most tractable of the Lakota divisions, but here too loss of Indian lands was a rising issue. Also in 1858, gold was discovered high up the South Platte River. The following year, massive emigration poured into Colorado Territory: one hundred thousand miners and assorted entrepreneurs—their numbers exceeding all the Indians on the plains—founded Denver and a cluster of other boomtowns along the front range of the Rockies. The influx swamped Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting range between the forks of the Platte, and during spring 1859, large numbers of Arapahos filtered north. They appealed to Lakota leaders for permission to join their hunting operations in the Powder River country.3 The appalling situation of the Arapahos—who had effectively lost their lands to the mining frontier without prospect of compensation—focused many Lakota minds on the issue of adequate treaty payments, but to Crazy Horse and a cohort of warriors who were winning their people rich hunting grounds from old tribal enemies like the Crows, the issue of a few more sacks of moldy flour or the arrival of plows and seed corn was at best irrelevant.4
In these years, Crazy Horse was invited to join the Strong Hearts, surely courted by the inner elite and invited to the private feasts at which the isolationist members sought to forge society consensus on their agenda. Crazy Horse sympathized with their position. All his instincts were to reduce the disturbing level of dependency Lakotas were acquiring. In intertribal relations, such systems helped all participants to weather bad seasons. But the relation with the Americans seemed badly out of balance. As the emergence of bands like the Loafers testified, significant sections of the people were becoming dependent on American largesse. Foodstuffs like flour and bacon were no longer novelties to the Loafers, but a vital part of their diet. Manufactured cloth and garments had become essential handouts to a people without access to buffalo herds. Against such developments, Crazy Horse had a lifelong aversion. But he was never the tool of political cliques, and he felt uncomfortable with the sort of plotting Lakota pressure groups engaged in. Ingrained respect for the elders also played its part in keeping Crazy Horse out of politics.
In 1861, however, new strains were placed on Crazy Horse as conflicting loyalties impinged on the issues of land and treaty rights. Stoking Lakota fears of land loss, an unrepresentative body of southern Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders, dismayed at the failure of game and tempted by the promise of increased subsistence spending, had signed an agreement ceding all tribal lands except a small Colorado reserve. The agreement remained a bitterly divisive issue in Cheyenne society. As a reminder of the Cheyennes’ loss, thousands of American cattle, the herds of freight companies and private ranchers serving military posts and Colorado boomtowns, now grazed the plains between the North and South Platte rivers. Buffalo in the region were virtually extinct.5
Treaty issues were just as divisive as those of land. In August, when Man Afraid of His Horse led the Hunkpatila and associated bands toward Deer Creek to receive their annuities, they met a stronger village of Miniconjous who forbade the Hunkpatilas to continue, telling them that accepting annuities would result in open warfare.
Sections of Oglala opinion began to swing behind the Miniconjou position. Reports reaching the agent claimed that these Oglalas were “overawed” and intimidated by the Miniconjous.6 While such factors played a part, the Miniconjou example likely fired the Oglala Strong Hearts to adopt wholesale the ideology of separatism. Strong Hearts pointedly feasted only on traditional Lakota dishes, enthusiastically consuming buffalo broth and rejecting novelties like bacon and coffee. The Strong Hearts set deadlines preventing Oglala movement to the agency. Offenders would have their horses killed.7
As winter deepened, visitors arrived, Hunkpapas, Miniconjous, and even Yanktonais trekking down the west side of the Black Hills. Strong Hearts chapters feasted and intensified pressure to break off all diplomatic relations with the United States. They ordered trade closed and sponsored a war pipe to build an anti-American coalition. The situation starkly highlighted the generational differences between warriors and elders. For most Lakota men born before about 1835, the buffalo robe trade was their fundamental economic activity. They had grown up in a world with few wasicu. The exchange of surplus robes for valued manufactured goods seemed unproblematic and represented a golden age status quo. Chiefs like Man Afraid of His Horse viewed the equation of trade and peaceful relations as fundamental to Lakota well-being. For the rising men of Crazy Horse’s generation, the equation seemed less compelling. After 1862, trade declined, not just from Strong Hearts edicts, but from the meddling of corrupt Indian Office agents and, increasingly, from army-driven bans targeting ammunition sales and tribal wealth. Crazy Horse’s generation grew into responsible adulthood, marrying and establishing households, in a world without the robe trade. And, haltingly, some Lakotas recognized that the trade itself, targeting as it did adult female animals, threatened the long-term stability of buffalo populations. Small wonder that they, unlike their fathers, could easily imagine a world in which the absence of Americans was an unmitigated good.
The bitterness and hostility of northern Lakotas only deepened against the Americans. In Minnesota, years of mounting tension between Santee Dakotas and the growing American population erupted in open warfare. Early Dakota victories were soon reversed, and flight and capitulation spelled the de facto loss of the Santee reservation. By 1863 Minnesota, the ancient homeland of all Lakotas, was exclusively wasicu land.8
In 1862, gold discoveries in western Montana had fueled a wartime bonanza on the northern plains. Steamboat traffic on the Missouri and civilian wagon trains pioneering new routes like John Bozeman’s trail threatened what remained of Lakota goodwill. Late in 1863 the northern Oglalas established winter camp near the forks of Powder River. Upstream the northern Cheyennes and Arapahos located their camps; south of the forks were the Miniconjous; while at the junction of the river with the Yellowstone, a large village of Hunkpapas and other northern Lakotas, hosting a contingent of Santee refugees, pitched their tipis. Such close proximity dictated a season of talks and councils. Through the winter, these talks refocused Oglala minds on the need to address radically the issue of American access to their lands.
In January, Red Dog, a war leader in the Oyuhpe band, arrived in the Oglala Proper village and told a general council that the Lakotas to the north, including Miniconjous and Hunkpapas, had agreed to fight the Americans. They had appointed Red Dog to treat with the Oglalas and secure a final decision. In a large bundle he carried a black-stemmed war pipe with which to cement an offensive alliance. A deputation of Minnesota Santees added their weight to Red Dog’s oratory.
Crazy Horse must have been in these councils, listening attentively to the debate and quietly registering his approval of the call to war. He curiously inspected these
strange Santee relatives. Many wore manufactured clothes, the threadbare relics of their prewar annuities; some, educated at mission schools, spoke English; a few had even been Cut Hairs, ultra “progressives” who had hacked off their braids in deference to American hairstyles. Embittered beyond conciliation, they made persuasive and articulate speakers, arguing that Santees and Lakotas unite to “drive the Whites away from the Platte, & block the Overland & mail route.” With regular troops replaced by skeleton militias, the Santees reasoned that the time was propitious to roll back the frontier.9
Making much of their refugee status and the wartime tension between the United States and Great Britain, some speakers claimed that Canadian officials sympathized with the Lakota cause and in the future might weigh in against the Americans. Safe haven in the British possessions was a theme that would occupy Crazy Horse in years to come. Santee access to Canadian Métis traders with large ammunition stocks was doubly significant, although this probably did not carry much weight now. Most important, the loss of Santee lands convinced many Lakota warriors that a preemptive strike against the Americans was necessary. “The white men have come to take over the entire land,” agreed Oglala war leaders, “so in this manner they press on. . . [until] they will completely annihilate the Lakota people!”10
No speaker himself, Crazy Horse was not involved in the responses. Instead, three Oglala speakers dominated the debate. For the warriors, forty-three-year-old Red Cloud rose to speak in support of Red Dog, his brother-in-law. Red Cloud, the greatest Oglala warrior of his generation, proved a forceful and direct spokesman. From the arc of chiefs, Brave Bear—coincidentally another brother-in-law of Red Cloud’s—urged peace. War, he argued, risked the loss of their homeland. Warriors noisily dissented. Lest tribal solidarity be shattered, the chiefs withdrew their opposition, and Red Dog’s war pipe was unwrapped and smoked. Crazy Horse was among the warriors who passed the pipe around the great circle, smoking a few whiffs in solemn undertaking of war. Heralds announced the decision, declaring open war on the Americans.
In this radical realignment of Lakota-U.S. relations, for the first time Americans were defined as enemies. Crazy Horse wasted little time in putting the new policy into effect. There was little in the way of a concerted strategy. A loose agreement was made to launch a major offensive against settlers and other wasicu along the Overland Trail in July. But as soon as the grass was up, small war parties would harry the trail. Such raids were second nature to Crazy Horse now. Moreover, as an Oglala familiar with conditions along the North Platte, Crazy Horse was vital to the plans of northern Lakota and Santee warriors. He could lead war parties directly to posts, stage stations, and settler stopovers, mapping tactics onto familiar terrain.
Crazy Horse formed a partnership for raiding along the Platte with Little Big Man, named for his distinctive build: scarcely five foot, five inches tall but with a powerful physique and Sun Dance scars on his heavily muscled chest, habitually ringed in red. The two made a strange pairing, but Little Big Man’s blowhard manner may have been a necessary corrective to Crazy Horse’s quietism. Someone had to deliver disciplinary talks to unruly followers—a proactive leadership not congenial to Crazy Horse. The indications are that they worked well as a team, regularly returning from the Platte with stolen stock right through the war years of the 1860s. Billy Garnett remembered their enterprise as “a lively business,” suggesting that the partners often traded on stock northward.11
From April through June, small raiding parties laced across the North Platte, striking at trading posts, ranches, and garrisons, and harrying the early settler traffic. They came from a cluster of villages, chiefly Miniconjou, but including Oglalas, Hunkpapas, and Two Kettles, strung along the Yellowstone near the mouth of Powder River. Most parties were less than ten men strong, concealing themselves near the Overland Trail until an opportunity arose to “run off stock without danger.” The raiders melted into the north, killing a few straggling settlers and looting their wagons.12
The initial military response was to close all trade in ammunition. As raiding continued, Lieutenant Colonel Collins ordered a total closure of trade except for those Lakota bands living permanently near the agency. Crazy Horse continued to visit relatives there occasionally, though now he had a double purpose in assessing prospects for raiding. Visiting in spring 1864, he found the agency relocated to a site twenty-eight miles south of Fort Laramie. Agent Loree had already erected a stone agency building and a log warehouse. As spring opened, employees had dug an irrigation ditch and plowed fifteen acres of bottomland; Lakota women dutifully planted a crop of corn. Crazy Horse probably observed this development with wary skepticism. July hailstorms destroyed one part of the fields, and loutish settlers drove their cattle through another: an August plague of grasshoppers consumed what remained. Crazy Horse found the chiefs and headmen, including Smoke and Swift Bear, nervous about a northern Lakota threat to “kill all the Laramie Sioux that stay among white men.”13
Midsummer brought new traffic along the Bozeman Trail, and Oglala warriors were concerned to close this unnegotiated route through their hunting grounds. One wagon train bound for the Montana diggings was met beyond Richard’s Bridge by a party of fifteen painted Oglala warriors. In sign language, they persuaded the train leaders to switch their route to the uncontested trail pioneered by Jim Bridger, passing west of the Bighorn Mountains. Other settlers were more determined, and several trains pressed up the Bozeman Trail, resulting in some desultory raiding.14
As the settler season passed, northern Oglala chiefs tried to restore the policy of peace, but emigrants and militia garrisons alike were trigger-happy, and at the agency, the goods were few and poor. On Powder River, news of the derisory goods did nothing to help the position of the Northern Oglala chiefs, and diplomacy fizzled out.15
Events on the central plains transformed this uneasy limbo into irretrievable crisis. There, southern Cheyenne and Arapaho councils had rejected the Lakota war pipe circulating in early 1864, but Colorado territorial authorities, determined to extinguish all Indian title east of the Rockies, had pushed the tribes to war.
After a September truce between the territorial officials and the Cheyenne chiefs, one hundred lodges of the friendliest Cheyennes settled for the winter at Sand Creek. The Colorado militia, led by Colonel John M. Chivington, a Methodist lay preacher with a self-proclaimed mission to annihilate the Indians, decided to strike Sand Creek on November 29. In the massacre that followed, some 150 Cheyennes, mostly women, children, and the tribal elders who had earnestly tried to maintain peace, were killed. The jubilant militia in mob frenzy mutilated the dead, hacking off men’s private parts to make tobacco pouches, and dismembering women to adorn saddles and hats with female genitalia. Cheyenne survivors, half-naked on the frozen Colorado plains, fled to join the militant Dog Soldiers.16
Sand Creek was a true turning point. Moderates were alienated, and the most intransigent rhetoric of Strong Hearts and Dog Soldiers seemed vindicated. Southern Oglala and Brule leaders smoked the inevitable Cheyenne war pipe, approving a move from the war zone to the refuge of the country north of the Platte.
Since the fall, Man Afraid of His Horse had worked to restore peaceful relations. Among the northern Cheyennes, chief Gray Hair was trying to keep his people out of the war. Farther down the Powder, Lone Horn had a following of fifty Miniconjou lodges that he too had sought to keep peaceful. The work of these moderate men was undermined by the arrival in March 1865 of the Sand Creek fugitives. Tales of American betrayal and brutality were vividly brought home by maimed survivors. Ragged widows and bewildered orphans were led onto the Oglala campground, where chiefs had their wives hurry forward with steaming kettles and stacks of robes, blankets, and clothing. Wailing Cheyenne mourners, their hair hacked short and legs gashed and bloody, placed their hands on the heads of chiefs and warrior society leaders, begging piteously for vengeance.17
Crazy Horse was a man of keen sympathies. Listening to the Cheyenne tales, he mu
st have felt all his instincts harden against the Americans. In this reaction, he was no more than typical of his generation. A defining moment had been reached. After 1865 the Oglalas would never again enjoy the reputation among Americans as being the most compliant and reliable of the Lakota divisions.
For the chiefs who had fought so long for peace, it was a grim period. Turning away the Cheyenne fugitives would have been unthinkable. “The first start of the War of 1864 [was] with the Cheyennes & [Santee] Sioux,” the Oglala chiefs would later state, “The Cheyennes staid south—the Sante[e] Sioux were on the Missouri & we in the middle—& they kept crowding us until we had to fight.” For two months, the chiefs resisted urgings to accept the Cheyenne war pipe. In early May on the headwaters of Tongue River, a united Oglala village met to choose the Deciders and akicita to coordinate summer activities. The Cheyennes had already nominated the Crazy Dog Society as police, and it is likely that the Oglalas named their counterpart society, the militant Strong Hearts, to control their village.18
One year earlier, the chiefs and elders had withdrawn their opposition to the calls for war, and in 1865, they took the situation a stage further. Lest society be irretrievably polarized, the chiefs assisted in actively coordinating a second season of attacks along the Overland Trail.
The war the chiefs were prepared to sanction was clearly a limited one. Once Cheyenne vengeance was satisfied, it was hoped that renewed diplomacy could restore peace—a peace dependent on the securing of land rights. The Oglalas decided to cut their losses. Relinquishing all claims to the central plains, they asserted the line of the south fork of Cheyenne River as a deadline dividing American from Indian domains. North of the Cheyenne, in the Powder River country hunting grounds wrested from the Crows, the land was still “filled with buffalo.” The Americans had no treaty rights to travel there, and Lakotas would sanction no more joint-use rights-of-way. Crazy Horse, who would respect this boundary for the rest of his life, surely voiced his acclaim.19
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