They too dressed Black Shawl in finely decorated clothing, presenting gifts of body paints and dress accessories, tying ribbons and ornaments to her braids. Worm could be heard outside the tipi welcoming his new in-laws. While women and children formed a circle around a group of drummers, and Black Shawl’s mother and aunts joined Worm’s wives in readying the feast, Worm had horses packed with goods led forward. A herald called the names of the poor, announcing that Worm was giving away in honor of his son and daughter-in-law. Singers extemporized songs of praise to Crazy Horse and Black Shawl, and the women of both families served the feast. For the first time, the two principals sat together, at the head of the circle surrounding the kettles. Confirming that Black Shawl was his favored choice for daughter-in-law, Worm may have had a white down plume fastened to her hair, signifying the ultimate honor of making her hunka. The day of celebration closed with the newlyweds being led in procession to their new tipi. To public joy, the bashful smiles of sisters, and the giggling of knowing children, they were at last left alone.
Black Shawl had little time for honeymoon bliss. Her husband remained debilitated by his wound, and his appearance at the wedding—sporting unsightly bandages or displaying a barely healed scar that drew his mouth into a fierce grimace—was at odds with Worm’s conventional pieties. Black Shawl must have wondered about Crazy Horse’s commitment to her. His courtship had been civil but passionless and, as gossips had always claimed, had run parallel to his affair with Black Buffalo Woman.
The first shock to the couple’s new married life came within days, and from an unexpected quarter. A straggle of warriors rode into camp from the southwest, their loosened hair hacked short, leading a riderless pony. Familiar trappings hung from the saddle—to instant howls of grief from Crazy Horse’s female relatives, the warriors quietly stated that Young Little Hawk had been killed. While Black Shawl laid out food for their guests, they confided the details to her husband. After hearing of Crazy Horse’s shooting, the war party had shifted east down the Sweetwater valley, shadowing the course of the Union Pacific across the North Platte and over the Medicine Bow range, probably uniting with the party Crazy Horse had left on the Laramie plains six weeks earlier. Since hearing word that the Big Horn Expedition had been called off, the warriors had not troubled wasicu, but they were spoiling for a fight. They scoured the mountain trails for sign of Shoshone or Ute hunting camps. A skirmish or two followed, and in one fight, Young Little Hawk was killed.13
The exact identity of his killers is uncertain. Worm would recall that Shoshones were responsible, but Crazy Horse’s cousin Flying Hawk identified American “settlers” as the killers. Most of the fragmentary statements bearing on the killing confirm Flying Hawk. It is not impossible that Shoshones and civilians, united against the Lakota threat, aided each other in the skirmish. As the surviving brother, Crazy Horse would have felt it incumbent on him to seek vengeance, but obstacles stood in his way. He still had not fully recovered from his wound, and even more significant, the iwastela policy remained tribal consensus. Shirt Wearers and Deciders had issued edicts forbidding war parties against the wasicu. Undoubtedly, elders and chiefs urged Crazy Horse to forego vengeance.14
Just as certainly, Crazy Horse pondered the Male Crow disaster and remembered the slanders that had torn apart his childhood. Unable to recruit a war party, he at least had to see that his brother’s bones received a proper burial. In an idiosyncratic take on the sort of honeymoon visit that followed a wedding, Black Shawl agreed to join her husband on a solitary 150-mile trip into the mountains. With no public announcement of their destination, the couple headed southwest, Crazy Horse leading his brother’s war pony.15
During the journey, probably acting on runners sent by Crazy Horse, the war party he had recruited over three months earlier started home. Between June 22 and 27, Union Pacific stationmasters wired reports of large war parties seen repeatedly crossing the tracks west of Fort Sanders (modern Laramie, Wyoming), with signal fires visible on the Medicine Bow Mountains. Troops were hurried west to patrol the line, and in a sharp skirmish on the 27th, a Second Cavalry detachment tangled with a reported two hundred warriors, losing one trooper and killing several of the Lakotas. An attack on a wood train near Fort Fetterman two days later may have been a reprisal by the same party, bound homeward.16
The timing of these demonstrations coincided with the return of the Red Cloud party. The attacks served notice that the new Oglala conciliation policy was not without its detractors, but for now, Crazy Horse satisfied himself with locating his brother’s body. He collected the remains and buried them under a cairn of stones, then shot Young Little Hawk’s pony so that it might carry its owner to Wanagi-yata, the Spirit Land. The couple remained in the vicinity for nine days, camping in high country timber. According to Flying Hawk, Crazy Horse scoured the district, killing several straggling wasicu.
It was an eye-opening start to married life for Black Shawl: Crazy Horse, bitter and reflective, was rarely at home. Nevertheless, a pattern was set. Through the seven years of their married life, the couple would make regular solitary trips, and if their relationship was not grounded in the passion that bound Crazy Horse to Black Buffalo Woman or that would bind him to Nellie Larrabee, it clearly grew into a stable companionship founded on mutual respect. Black Shawl was supportive of her husband’s imperatives, the uncompromising opposition to American encroachments, and the vision questing that drew him repeatedly from home. On this first and eeriest journey, she grew to know her man, revealing the vulnerable mystic beneath as she replaced bandages and renewed dressings. In these first weeks of marriage, their physical relationship ignited to secure an early pregnancy. At last, Crazy Horse had had enough of cold vengeance. “He killed enough to satisfy,” recalled Flying Hawk, “and then he came home.” Early in July, Crazy Horse and Black Shawl rode together into the tribal village to find that the Oglala world had again moved on.17
Moon of Red Cherries, July 1870: The northern Oglalas gathered at Rawhide Butte for the Sun Dance, joined by bands of Miniconjous and Sans Arcs to greet the return of the Red Cloud delegation. Red Cloud’s party arrived at Fort Laramie on June 26, and after final talks with General John E. Smith and post commander Colonel Franklin F. Flint, they crossed the North Platte to rejoin their people.18
For ten days, chiefs, headmen, and warriors debated the results of the Washington trip. The delegates were eagerly debriefed, and their anecdotes of the massive eastern cities; the ironclad warships moored in the Potomac; the factories and foundries producing firearms and artillery; the passenger ships in New York harbor landing tens of thousands of new wasicu settlers—these were weighed and assessed at feasts and society meetings. Skeptics might question the veracity of the delegates, but Red Cloud’s party convinced most that the network of railroads spreading across the plains would soon shunt settlers west, filling the prairies with homesteads, ranches, mines, boomtowns, and cities, eroding further the contracting gamelands. The ever-improving arsenal of military weaponry they had seen could be used with devastating effect against those Lakotas that chose military resistance. A true turning point had been reached for Red Cloud: he persuasively urged that iwastela was the only road the Oglalas could take.
Debate now turned on the substance of Oglala meetings with government representatives. How well had the delegates fulfilled their agenda? Here, the record was definitely mixed. The agency location had not been finalized, although the Indian Office agreed to ship Oglala annuities for this year only to Fort Laramie. This concession, and the limited trade approved at the fort, won Red Cloud measured approval. He parlayed a half-promise of a goodwill issue of ammunition into a substantial diplomatic victory.
Far less clear-cut were the full implications of the treaty the Oglalas had signed two years earlier. The delegates had spent an uneasy afternoon in the Indian Office listening to a litany of clauses and subclauses. In 1868 Oglalas signed the treaty to reestablish peace. Verbal agreements with the commissioners had be
en fundamental to Oglala acceptance of the treaty, but these were not represented in the legal instrument acclaimed by the Senate. For every sentence promising the security of the Indian domain, another committed the Lakotas to approving future rights-of-way, railroads, and military expeditions.
The unceded hunting grounds constituted the delegation’s real minefield. Warrior societies had demanded guarantees of the tract’s security. The recognition of the Powder River country as unceded had been one of the diplomatic coups of 1868—” the country. . . given up to the Sioux under ‘Red Cloud’ and ‘Man afraid of his horse,’” as reservation Lakotas understood the concession.19 Now Red Cloud had to admit that the promise seemed far from watertight. The Oglalas had overlooked its always vague northern boundary, but the officials urged a minimalist reading coterminous with the northern line of Wyoming Territory, slicing out the Yellowstone valley from the tract. The rider “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase” carried a real sting. An optimist in 1868 might have interpreted it as a metaphor for an indefinite future. Two years later, with mounting evidence of diminishing buffalo herds, it rang hollow.
In off-the-record talks, Red Cloud tentatively approved a proposal that the hunting grounds retain their unceded status for thirty-five years. For the same term, the delegates reported, annuity goods would be paid to the Lakotas. The term, matching the period left under the 1851 treaty, before its controversial amendment by the Senate, was not accidental. Red Cloud sold it heavily as his reclaiming of diplomatic ground lost by the older generation of chiefs. Indeed, in seizing so dramatically the initiative of the iwastela policy, and by stressing his critical engagement with the officials at the expense of Man Afraid of His Horse’s standoffishness, Red Cloud was able to portray himself to Oglalas and Americans alike as the true guarantor of the new high plains order.20
Warrior societies warily came on board. Crazy Horse’s comrade Little Big Man made a far-reaching commitment on the hunting grounds. Reviewing the diminishment of game, he urged the warriors to approve Red Cloud’s thirty-five-year agreement, “for I thought it would be as long as I should want a country.”21 Consensus crystallized on this crisp formulation, and faced with qualified approval, Red Cloud conceded some ground to the warriors. During the Washington talks, he had tentatively approved location of an agency trading post southwest of the Black Hills, within the hunting grounds. Now, prompted by visiting northern Lakotas, the warriors demanded that not so much as a storeroom be built on Lakota land: the Americans must concede an agency located on the south side of the North Platte, on neither reservation nor unceded land. The old Ward and Guerrier trading post eight miles north of Fort Laramie was their favored site: Red Cloud would demand it when the “good men” from the East brought out the annuities.
Red Cloud had carried the day. Warriors agreed to extend indefinitely the truce that had held since spring. Red Cloud sketched a summer of shuttle diplomacy, scheduling major assemblies on the Powder late in July, and at Bear Butte in August, to secure a national consensus for peace. With Oglala support assured, Red Cloud departed the Sun Dance village in mid-July, leading a deputation to engage Cheyenne and Arapaho cooperation.22
Crazy Horse arrived home in the middle of these debates—an unsettling vengeful presence in the acclaim for peace. He declined to address the council, but gossip had it that during the trip home, he had twice stalked troop details, single-handedly killing as many as four soldiers. “Those are the things,” remembered his eighteen-year-old cousin Eagle Elk, “that aroused the people.” That these feats remained stubbornly apocryphal is proof that Crazy Horse did not advertise them as war honors or use them directly to subvert the consolidation of iwastela. Instead, the fragmentary evidence suggests that another pattern of behavior was establishing itself. After a period of intense physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual activity, Crazy Horse was suffering burnout. The nervous energy of Thunder power, which had carried him through nine months of living on a war footing, concluding a long-standing love affair, and traveling upwards of two thousand miles on the warpath, was exhausted. As the bands scattered, Crazy Horse remained silent. Almost unnoticed, Crazy Horse departed to join his new wife’s people.23
As summer drew on and Black Shawl announced that she was expecting a child, Crazy Horse could have been forgiven for settling into the private stabilities of family life. Newlyweds customarily joined the bride’s tiyospaye for a protracted sojourn before permanently settling down, typically in the husband’s band. Black Shawl’s father was dead, and the family could use an extra provider. Moreover, the Big Road tiyospaye was congenial: like Crazy Horse, it remained skeptical of American entanglements. In his new home, Crazy Horse had to master complex social skills. Etiquette prescribed that a man show respect for his mother-in-law by complete avoidance. He soon established a good working relationship with Black Shawl’s brothers. Iron Horse was probably close to Crazy Horse in age, and the pair maintained a respectful affinity, seasoned by the brash sarcasm of brothers-in-law. As so often happens, Crazy Horse had a special bond with Black Shawl’s younger brother, seventeen-year-old Red Feather. Inducted into the Crow Owners Society that season, Red Feather plainly idolized his new brother-in-law and was overjoyed at every mark of favor. In the vacuum left by Young Little Hawk, some of Crazy Horse’s nurturing protectiveness, his delight in mentoring the younger generation, was transferred onto Red Feather.24
By contrast, Red Cloud’s summer was one of vigorous political activity. Although faced with low-key sniping by isolationists, Red Cloud met everywhere with a wary consensus for peace. Early in September, the Oglalas rendezvoused at Bear Lodge Butte, and chiefs prepared to meet the Washington officials and resolve the agency issue.
Although Red Cloud was empowered to concede that deteriorating resources necessitated a new modus vivendi with the Americans, change was to be expressly on Lakota terms, at Lakota speed. Even minor intrusions on the Lakota domain would be vigorously contested. Plans for educating Lakota children, one of the treaty’s underpinnings, must be deferred: “We want that by and by.”25
It was not lost on the most tractable chiefs that American respect for their people was rooted in Lakota valor. Oglala oral histories establish that somewhere in the north, at an unspecified date after his removal as Shirt Wearer, Crazy Horse was nominated tribal war chief: the most likely context is Bear Lodge, September 1870, at a great council attended by hundreds of chiefs, elders, and warriors. The consolidation of iwastela meant that such a title was honorific, but should the council ever declare a state of war, tribal leadership would inhere in the war chief. Like Sitting Bull among the Hunkpapas, his Oglala counterpart would be invested with decisionmaking power in strategy, tactics, and negotiations.
A caucus of “the older, more responsible men of the tribe” empowered three chiefs—Man Afraid of His Horse, Bad Wound, and Big Road—to make the final decision.26 Crazy Horse remained the people’s greatest warrior. Moreover, since July he had tacitly cooperated with the iwastela policy. The chiefs might have concluded that, unworldly and apolitical as he was, Crazy Horse could always be swayed by their counsels.
At the great council, Crazy Horse was led from his seat among the warriors to sit with the three chiefs at the honor place. As the chiefs held their pipe to his lips, heralds proclaimed Crazy Horse the okicize itancan, war chief of the nation. A three-foot war club, set with three knife blades, was placed in his hands. Marking again the comradeship that had often smoothed over interband tensions, He Dog sat beside Crazy Horse as the war chief’s akicita. Loud acclaim greeted the appointments, and pledges were made to defend the Lakota domain. Then Crazy Horse led a parade of the Oglala warrior societies in a triumphant circuit of the campground. After the unacceptable limitations of his Shirt Wearer status, the new war chief was happy to ride as a Thunder dreamer: hair streaming loose, naked but for breechclout and moccasins, his body painted yellow, for the power of the Rock, and dotted with hailstone spots. Crazy
Horse’s self-image at last coincided with his outward role. From now on he was determined to remain the warrior protector of his people and their land.27
On the same day that the main village started for Fort Laramie, a smaller camp turned north from Bear Lodge. Numbering perhaps fifty lodges, it comprised families from each of the main three northern Oglala bands, Hunkpatila, Bad Face and Oyuhpe, people determined to maintain as long as possible the old hunting life without wasicu interference. Big Road, Black Twin, and He Dog were their peacetime leaders, but war chief Crazy Horse would always remain their principal man, the key to village consensus. Tracking buffalo herds northward, as fall opened, they moved into the valley of the middle Yellowstone in south-central Montana Territory.28
The shift was prophetic, for the contracting buffalo range would increasingly draw them north in the years to come, away from their agency kin and into an ever-tightening association with the northern Lakotas—Sitting Bull’s people. The same forces were drawing the nonagency Hunkpapas steadily west up the Yellowstone valley. The indications are that immediately, in October 1870, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse agreed to a policy that for the present complemented iwastela. Their people would remain on the hunting grounds but would not challenge the Red Cloud strategy of implementing a gradual transition to reservation life. Sitting Bull even declared an end to his own bands’ four-year war against the military posts on the upper Missouri. Provided they were not interfered with, his and Crazy Horse’s people would try to live apart from the Americans—so long as the game held out.29
Rosebud Creek, Moon of the Changing Seasons: Crazy Horse decided on a last war journey before winter. A select party of comrades would strike the Shoshones. Sixteen men made up the party, including High Backbone, Bald-Face Horse, Chasing Crow, and a Bad Face warrior whom Crazy Horse would increasingly rely on as a battlefield subordinate, twenty-five-year-old Good Weasel. Two relations through marriage were along, emphasizing the tight-knit affinity of the party: Little Killer and young Red Feather, recruited as the pipe owner’s servant.30
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