In mid-May, war parties started south, and for two weeks, raiders laced through the Overland Trail from Fort Laramie west to the Sweetwater, tearing up the telegraph line, driving off stock, and generally outfighting the tiny detachments sent in pursuit. As quickly as the raids began, however, they ended, war parties melting back into the north during the first week of June.
During these spring weeks of preparation, Crazy Horse paid what would be his last friendly visit to the Fort Laramie district. He found agency relatives more fearful than ever. The Fort Laramie authorities had ordered the friendly Lakotas to concentrate along the five-mile stretch of the North Platte between the trading houses of Bordeaux and G. P. Beauvais. Collins oversaw the rationing of the community on condemned provisions, and the distribution of army-surplus clothing. An akicita force headed by Loafer headman Big Mouth was appointed to keep order and pass on intelligence.
By April the one hundred–lodge village was augmented by the surrender of some 185 lodges of Brules and other Lakotas, but army high command ordered that the friendly village be forcibly relocated to Fort Kearney—in the midst of Pawnee enemies—and compelled to plant corn. Collins’s successor as commander, Colonel Thomas Moonlight, lacked sensitivity in dealing with Indians. On April 23 he ordered hanged a Cheyenne headman implicated in the capture of an American woman the previous summer. In May a small Oglala camp opened talks with the agency camp, but when Moonlight learned that they held another captive, he ordered the camp brought in under guard. The men were imprisoned, and on May 26 Moonlight had headmen Two Face and Blackfoot hanged also. Still manacled in artillery trace chains, the three bodies were left to rot on the gallows, a stark image of the breakdown in interethnic relations.20
The executions were not the only Lakota casualties. Nervous settlers were quick to respond with lead. In one incident, a troop patrol reconnoitering opposite the agency camp stumbled on a sleeping Miniconjou youth. The soldiers shot and scalped the lad. When the patrol clattered into Bordeaux’s, Lakota women were horrified to see the boy’s scalp hanging from a sergeant’s bridle. Across the river, the youth’s lamenting comrades bundled the body in robes and lashed it to the boughs of a cottonwood, making “a great landmark for many years.”21
Such incidents were commonplace. And in one like it, the indiscriminate horror of the war was vividly brought home to Crazy Horse. Details are unclear, but during his stay near the post in early 1865, a “brother” of Crazy Horse was murdered at Fort Laramie. The identity of the brother is unknown: it was not Young Little Hawk but may have been one of the sons of his father’s brothers or of his mother’s female relatives. Conceivably, it could even have been that Miniconjou youth so cowardly shot as he slept. Whatever the exact situation, the killing ended Crazy Horse’s stay in the friendly village. One spring day he rode across the sandy braided channel of the North Platte and struck into the north. It was a final departure. He would not visit an agency again until surrender was forced on him twelve years later. Nor would he return to Fort Laramie except as a raider. Crazy Horse’s anger at American encroachments had gained a vividly personal dimension. Hitherto, he had raided along the North Platte for recreation and profit. Now vengeance too must be satisfied.22
Three
SHIRT WEARER
9
FIGHTING FOR THE ROAD
For Crazy Horse and for the Lakota people, the war against the Americans would change in character after the spring of 1865. A new motive—profit—underwrote the stock raiding he and Little Big Man had led for the past twelve months. Now, outrage at the Sand Creek atrocity, and solidarity with vengeful Cheyennes, had been matched by the personal loss of a kinsman. Warfare assumed the character of blood revenge, fired by a purposeful anger against Americans that would characterize Crazy Horse’s attitudes and actions for the next twelve years, determining his political sympathies, allegiances, and agendas until the last months of his life.
This deepening anger animated many men of his generation, too old to have participated in the heyday of the buffalo robe trade and its ideology of interethnic cooperation. But the spirit of resistance took root across generational divides. “The band I was in,” recalled one Oyuhpe youth of the day, “got together and said they were not going to let the white men run over them.” Some elders also, like Worm, had come to question the whole concept of interethnic relations. Youths who formed boyhood chapters of recognized warrior societies echoed the rhetoric of resistance: “At the age of ten or eleven,” remembered Holy Blacktail Deer, “I had a six-shooter and a quiver full of arrows to defend my nation.”1
Although many capable war chiefs emerged in these years, none outshone Crazy Horse as a tactical leader of warriors. Always mindful of the coming generation, he was a popular mentor of those youths determined to “defend their nation.” Crazy Horse’s courage and an indefinable panache in action inspired confidence, loyalty, and a wry affection for the gauche young man. By the end of the Bozeman Trail War, none was more acclaimed than Crazy Horse. In the apt phrase of historian Robert M. Utley, by 1868 Crazy Horse was already “the greatest Lakota warrior.”2
The years of warfare provide only sporadic glimpses of the man, and then only in action, fighting with inspirational courage. It is as if the insecurities of youth and the visionary period of young manhood had been put behind him. In action, fighting the enemies of his people, he successfully projected a self-image purely as a fighting man. “Crazy Horse was good for nothing but to be a warrior,” observed Billy Garnett, who got to know him late in the Bozeman Trail War: “[He] considered himself cut out for warfare [alone],” and resisted the attempts of civil leaders to engage him in “affairs political.” Such was his fame, however, that he would become a silent shaper of the political agendas that would secure victory in the Bozeman Trail War.3
Moon of Making Fat, early June 1865: Oglala and Cheyenne villages gathered along the Clear Fork of Powder River. Warriors and scouts like Crazy Horse returned from the raids along the Overland Trail. Chiefs and warrior societies debated the target for the major assault of the season. Opinion came to favor a blow against the garrison overseeing the Platte Bridge crossing, formerly the location of Richard’s trading post. Platte Bridge Station, 130 miles upstream of Fort Laramie, was a key link in the Overland chain: a cluster of log and adobe buildings manned by one hundred officers and men of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry. A decisive blow here could open a wedge on the Overland Trail like that made by Cheyenne raiders along the South Platte the previous year—arresting traffic for weeks and forcing settlers and miners from the Lakota domain. Success there, and the warriors would overwhelm other small outposts along the Overland before pressing south to cut off once more the Colorado capital from the road to the States.
Band chiefs like Man Afraid of His Horse and his Cheyenne counterpart Dull Knife sat on the blotahunka, beside warrior society headmen such as Red Cloud. The participation of the chiefs underscored the fact that this was a tribal undertaking, a formal revenge expedition for Sand Creek. As plans advanced in mid-June, the news from Fort Laramie about the order to remove friendly Lakotas to Fort Kearney raised the stakes. Almost three hundred lodges of people, led off by the wagons and carts of the inmarried trading community, started down the Overland, escorted by 135 soldiers of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry. Big Mouth’s akicita force patrolled the line, but in night meetings, they plotted a breakout with Spotted Tail and other war leaders. At Horse Creek on the morning of June 14, the leaders implemented the plan, repulsing the pursuit and supervising the safe crossing of the North Platte. Fleeing north, the fugitives met a late war party led by He Dog, Crazy Horse’s close comrade, and on June 17, the warriors dashed down on Colonel Moonlight’s breakfasting pursuit column and drove off seventy-four head of his carelessly guarded horses. Then, still reluctant to be drawn into the war, most swung up the east side of the Black Hills.4
On July 21 the massive war party departed the villages at the mouth of Crazy Woman Creek. At the head of the column rode a lin
e of chiefs and headmen, each cradling a black-stemmed pipe in the crook of his left arm. Behind them a rank of Strong Hearts and Crazy Dog warriors fronted the tightly disciplined body of at least one thousand warriors. Eager to be avenged for the death of his brother, Crazy Horse rode with the column, probably fanned out ahead with the scouts. Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and their Lakota counterparts, the Miwatani Society, patrolled the rear of the column. The war party reached the hills overlooking Platte Bridge on the twenty-fourth, and after dispatching scouts made an early camp. The following morning Man Afraid of His Horse and the other pipe owners deputed ten or twenty men to act as decoys in drawing out the soldiers. Although his actions in the battle are not known, it is possible that Crazy Horse was one of the decoys—certainly the top-class operation he led eighteen months later had its dry run somewhere in the fighting of 1865. Strong Hearts and other akicita took up positions on each side of the compact mass of warriors and, at a signal from the pipe owners, began pressing them forward toward the river bluffs. There the chiefs and war leaders scrambled forward to view the valley. They passed a set of field glasses along the line to survey the decoys and their pursuers, a company of cavalry followed by an artillery unit. At the sound of gunshots from the valley, warriors surged forward to crest the blufftops. Whip-wielding akicita pressed the warriors out of sight lest the element of surprise be lost. The first day’s action proved abortive in any case, but that night decoys were sent out once more.
At daybreak on the twenty-sixth, they began riding back and forth along the valley floor opposite the post. Up in the hills, the pipe owners implemented a more flexible strategy, detailing three distinct bodies of warriors to cover the valley. While one group infiltrated the brush and timber immediately below the bridge, another took position behind the bluffs fronting the crossing. The largest body moved behind the higher bluffs a half-mile above the bridge. About 9:00 A.M. a detail of twenty-four troopers turned smartly out of the post and clattered across the bridge. Led by Lieutenant Caspar Collins, this detachment was actually riding to escort an eastbound supply train, but exultant warriors cocked muskets and nocked arrows to bowstrings.
As the troopers angled left up the North Platte valley, warriors on the bluffs signaled upstream and down. A party of warriors moved down to the telegraph line. Shinning up the poles, they began cutting the wires but at sight of Collins feigned alarm, dropped onto their ponies, and galloped toward the bluffs. As Collins pressed forward, half the body of warriors in the valley bottom filtered out of the brush to fan out toward the bridge. The shrill blasts of war whistles alerted Collins to the danger in his rear. Faced with a charge to cut him off from the bridge, he ordered a retreat. A second charge from the bluffs threatened to intercept him, and Collins ordered a headlong charge for the bridge. From the post, infantry poured out over the bridge, opening a covering fire for their comrades. A fieldpiece also opened fire, but the gunners failed to find the range. As Collins’s men streaked for the bridge, a heavy charge was driven into their left flank. Inside an impenetrable dust cloud, warriors and troopers clashed in a collision of horseflesh shrill with whoops, shouted orders, and gunfire. Such was the chaos that warriors rained bullets and arrows into one another, and war leaders shouted to use only hatchets and clubs.
Five soldiers, including the gallant Collins, were cut down before the troopers smashed through the reeling warriors. Infantry fanned forward to cover their comrades’ retreat over the bridge. The howitzer finally found its range, and the warriors fell back. About 11:30 scouts sighted the unsuspecting supply train winding down the valley. Hundreds of warriors galloped upstream. Sergeant Amos Custard circled his five wagons and deployed his small escort well, but after four hours of stealthy attrition tactics, the warriors overwhelmed the train, killing all and burning the wagons.5
On the morning of July 27, the great war party filed along the valley in sight of Platte Bridge Station, then swung back into the hills. The bid to crush Platte Bridge had failed, though some twenty-eight soldiers lay dead. Military estimates indicated that up to sixty warriors had fallen; even if inflated, a significant toll had been exacted. As far as the chiefs were concerned, vengeance had been satisfied, and diplomacy should be reinstated. The villages dispersed, scheduling a Sun Dance reunion near Powder River forks for late August.
Unknown to the Indians, the army had moved speedily to implement a major campaign against them. Coordinating strategy was General Patrick E. Connor, commanding the newly established Department of the Plains from headquarters at Fort Laramie. The end of the Civil War freed huge numbers of troops to serve on the frontier, and Connor worked speedily to coordinate a campaign that would clear the northern plains of hostile Indians. While General Sully was expected to tackle the Hunkpapas and their allies in the upper Missouri arena, Connor readied columns to attack Indians in three regional blocs. Most elusive would prove the Fort Laramie fugitives, believed to be in the Bear Butte district east of the Black Hills. In the valley of the middle Yellowstone, Miniconjous had gathered. The bloc of Oglalas and Cheyennes was known to be in the valley of Powder River.6
Connor’s orders were bluntly genocidal: the troops were to accept no overtures of peace but were to locate, attack, and kill every male Indian over the age of twelve. He first ordered the column of Colonel Nelson Cole to strike the Bear Butte concentration from the east. Departing Omaha on July 1, Cole’s fourteen hundred men were to trek around the north edge of the Black Hills, then angle west to unite with the other columns on Rosebud Creek by September 1. From Fort Laramie on August 5 Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Walker’s six hundred men marched due north. Connor commanded the third column, over five hundred troops augmented by 179 Pawnee and Winnebago Indian scouts and a complement of civilian guides. Connor marched from Fort Laramie on July 30 and struck north along the trail pioneered by John Bozeman. On August 11 he reached the upper crossing of Powder River where, three days later, his men began hauling wood to erect a hasty quadrangle of log buildings dubbed Camp Connor.
Barely fifty miles north, the Oglalas and Cheyennes were unaware of Connor’s march. Hunkpatila warriors had scattered widely, joining Miniconjou and Cheyenne raiders, targeting Americans and Indian foes. On August 16 one party of twenty-seven warriors was annihilated by Connor’s Pawnees. Clashing with a civilian wagon train bound for the Montana goldfields, Hunkpatila warriors parleyed with train master James A. Sawyers and learned of Connor’s march.7
As the Oglalas gathered at Powder River forks, a tribal emergency was declared. Scouts like Crazy Horse investigated the reports of Connor’s march, monitoring the construction of Camp Connor and the August 22 departure of the main command to rendezvous with Cole and Walker. They located the remains of the party cut off by Connor’s Pawnees. Messengers, including nineteen-year-old Young Little Hawk, were sent to warn the Miniconjous. Responding immediately to his kola’s call, High Backbone led out a war party against Camp Connor, Young Little Hawk striking second coup on one of the Winnebago scouts. Crazy Horse led another war party against the garrison, harrying stragglers and stealing stock: eleven-year-old Red Hawk, son of the intransigent warrior who had deserted the Hunkpatilas in 1853, served as water-boy apprentice and proudly recalled his first war party under Crazy Horse’s leadership.
For the next three years, Crazy Horse’s band repeatedly targeted Camp Connor (renamed Fort Reno in 1866). Even when other Oglala bands restricted their attacks to troops stationed north along the Bozeman Trail, Crazy Horse and his kinsmen refused to abandon the offensive against the post at the head of Powder River. Clearly, a family member was killed (probably by the Winnebago contingent) in the first skirmishes around the post, opening a raiding cycle that persisted until the army abandoned the Powder River country in 1868.8
Both Oglalas and Cheyennes began their separate Sun Dance celebrations about September 2, but late on the fourth—immediately prior to the climactic final day of self-torture—Miniconjou messengers from downstream raced into the villages. High Backbone reciproc
ated the warning sent by the Oglalas, announcing that some two thousand American soldiers—Cole and Walker’s united columns—were barely a day’s journey downstream and marching toward the Sun Dance camps. United with Hunkpapa, Sihasapa, and Sans Arc warriors from the Little Missouri, the Miniconjous had repeatedly clashed with Cole and Walker over the past four days. Connor’s search-and-destroy commands were proving woefully inept, hampered by morale problems and issues of command seniority, but the plains weather did the direst work. Weeks of baking drought ended on the night of September 2, when temperatures plummeted during a storm of driving sleet. Over the next twenty-four hours, 225 exhausted horses and mules died, struck down by the sudden reversals of heat and cold. Nevertheless, the bedraggled troops were moving toward the Oglalas and Cheyennes.9
The warriors first came upon Walker’s smaller command, but when Walker halted his progress and moved part of his column downstream to support Cole, the warriors were content to mount a holding operation from the blufftops. Most rode on toward the sound of gunfire and cannonades. Fifteen miles south of Walker, in a flat bend of the valley, Cole had formed his command into a hollow square to guard the corral of wagons. A single company fronted the riverbank, but stronger units sketched the other three sides, and Cole had his artillery drawn up on the flank opposite the river. Along the west side of the valley, Indians were visible massing atop hills or filtering downstream to surround Cole’s position. One hill in particular hosted a gathering of war leaders. There, Crazy Horse, High Backbone, the Cheyenne Roman Nose, and other leaders conferred.
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