The party camped below the Painted Cliffs, a tall bluff marked with ancient petroglyphs believed to be the work of wakan beings. Lakotas believed that the designs changed to foretell coming events. Crazy Horse and several followers solemnly smoked and made offerings to the power that etched the rock drawings. The following morning they returned to take a reading and were disturbed to make out markings that suggested they would get the worst of any encounter.
Crazy Horse suggested that the party turn back, but High Backbone curtly dismissed his kola’s caution. After a pause, Crazy Horse reluctantly indicated his assent. “Yes, we’re looking for death, let’s go.”31 A formulaic response, yet the words resonated with significance, echoing the fatal remarks of Male Crow exactly twenty-six years earlier. The party pressed ahead down the spine of the Bighorn Mountains. By mid-October Shoshone camps would be tracking buffalo herds north from Wind River, through the very district where Male Crow had died, adding to Crazy Horse’s sense of foreboding. His party struck southwest, descending from the mountains by the tortuous trails called the Sioux Pass. Persistent rain lashed the party, forming muddy pools that frosted overnight into slush. Along Bad Water Creek, an eastern tributary of the Wind, they made a miserable war camp. The temperature dropped, and darkening clouds threatened an early snow. Thoroughly discouraged, Crazy Horse again urged abandoning the expedition. As usual, the reversal in his confidence was extreme, and he was unable to secure agreement over the opposition of High Backbone. When scouts reported a large Shoshone village on Wind River, the warriors quickly acclaimed High Backbone’s suggestion of a dawn attack.
Before dawn, they were in place, making their final adjustments to weapons, applying wotawe paint designs to face and body. As light grayed behind them, they rode forward under cover. Through a thin drizzle, the outline of at least 150 tipis became visible in the gathering light, the whickering of a sizeable pony herd audible on the near side of camp. The warriors clapped heels to their mounts and raced toward the lodges, whooping and firing their guns in a bid to startle the herd. Indiscriminate shots rattled through lodgeskins, felling several Shoshones. Crazy Horse had picked his men well, and the herd was soon on the move. Behind them two hundred startled Shoshone warriors mounted tethered war ponies for the pursuit.
As the chase strung out over the plain, the drizzle turned to light snow. This further echo of the Male Crow disaster was not lost on an increasingly despondent Crazy Horse. Slushy pools dotted the plain, slowing the retreat. The sixteen men were scattered and exhausted, struggling to keep the captured stock on the move: only the lead they maintained on the pursuit was saving their lives. High Backbone proposed a stand and sent riders forward after Crazy Horse, who urged a retreat into the mountains. “I wonder if we can make it back to Cone Creek,” he told the messengers, “I doubt if our horses can stand a fight in this slush. They sink in over their ankles.”
The riders strung back to High Backbone, who once more dismissed his friend’s misgivings. “This is the second fight he has called off in this same place! This time there is going to be a fight.” He urged his pony to catch up with Crazy Horse. “The last time you called off a fight here,” he chided,” when we got back to camp they laughed at us. You and I have our good name to think about. If you don’t care about it you can go back. But I’m going to stay here and fight.”
“All right,” replied Crazy Horse, “we fight, if you feel that way about it. But I think we’re going to get a good licking. You have a good gun and I have a good gun, but look at our men! None of them have good guns, and most of them have only bows and arrows. It’s a bad place for a fight and a bad day for it, and the enemy are twelve to our one.”32
The two men rethought tactics. High Backbone was persuaded that a retreat into the mountains offered the best chances of survival, but Crazy Horse agreed that straight flight was ill advised. A holding maneuver should be made to deter the pursuit. Warriors turned exhausted ponies toward the enemy, but the sight of Shoshone outriders on their flank, cutting off the direct trail to the high country, signaled a deteriorating situation. Along the Bad Water, the pursuit repeatedly tangled with the Oglala rearguard—” but the Shoshones had the best of it,” and a desperate fight ensued. Several warriors, including Chasing Crow and Bald-Face Horse, were wounded. Soon the Oglala warriors were scattered in precipitate flight. By late afternoon only Crazy Horse, High Backbone, and Good Weasel remained to hold back the pursuit. “It was a running fight, with more running than fighting,” recalled He Dog, and “only these three were fighting at all.”33
Crazy Horse took the left of the enemy line, drawing fire and cutting zigzag dashes across the gap between his men and the Shoshones. High Backbone and Good Weasel took the center and right. A hail of Shoshone lead ripped through the closing gap, and when Crazy Horse met his comrade at the middle of the line, High Backbone’s pony was stumbling. “We’re up against it now,” he told Crazy Horse; “my horse has a wound in the leg.”
“I know it,” replied Crazy Horse. “We were up against it from the start.”34
The men urged weary horseflesh to another charge. In the broken terrain, Crazy Horse’s comrades were soon lost to view. Zigzagging back to the center, he made out only Good Weasel riding toward him. Breathlessly, Good Weasel told what he had seen. A sudden Shoshone rush had threatened to cut off the rearguard, but he had managed to escape. High Backbone had not been so fortunate. An unlucky shot toppled the Miniconjou’s wounded pony. Good Weasel saw High Backbone leap from the saddle, then face the enemy charge to fight hand to hand. A press of Shoshones surged over the massive Lakota, clubs swinging. Another horrified glance backward showed nothing of his comrade—only dismounted Shoshone warriors hacking at something on the ground. There was nothing to be done, he assured Crazy Horse: “None of us could go against such odds.” Reluctantly, Crazy Horse agreed, and the pair loped after their comrades.35
The killing of High Backbone satisfied Shoshone vengeance. Aware they had killed a great man, the pursuit dissolved. Good Weasel pressed on, but Crazy Horse separated, as if to ride back to his kola’s body. Meanwhile the scattered Oglalas climbed the Bighorn foothills, searching for a suitable place to camp. At sundown, the main party found a spring, dismounted, and tended to their wounded. As night fell, Bald-Face Horse died. The exhausted company nervously scanned the darkness. In the distance a wolf howled, then again, nearer. Good Weasel answered the call several times until Crazy Horse rode alone out of the night.
Unable to locate High Backbone, Crazy Horse had his warriors bury Bald-Face Horse. The other wounded were soon remounted or placed on makeshift travois as the war party started up the mountain trails. On the fourth day, safely across the Bighorns, Crazy Horse and Red Feather turned back to bury High Backbone’s remains. Quartering the bleak battlefield, the pair at last came upon a skull and a few other bones. Coyotes had devoured everything else. Much as his sister had done only four months earlier, Red Feather warily watched Crazy Horse as the full significance of his loss sank in. He was, according to another contemporary, so “beside himself with grief and rage... [that from] that very hour. . . Crazy Horse sought death.”36
14
IRON ROAD
No year in Crazy Horse’s life was more momentous than 1870. It saw the death of his brother and the spectacular failure of a love affair, hastily followed by an arranged marriage and political upheavals, ending with the death of his closest comrade and first mentor in war. The loss of Young Little Hawk and High Backbone cut away two of his props. The pair had formed a constellation in Crazy Horse’s life. In their reckless courage, they resembled each other more than they resembled Crazy Horse, whose bravery was always tactically calculated. With High Backbone, Crazy Horse had enjoyed a relationship of friendly, if occasionally pointed, rivalry, seasoned by the banter of warriors. Competitiveness was missing in his relationship with Young Little Hawk, to whom Crazy Horse had always shown the elder brother’s balance of nurture and provocation, pushing the younger man to pr
ove himself without consideration of Crazy Horse’s exploits.
In these complementary relationships, Crazy Horse showed a maturing warrior’s awareness of accepting and setting examples, of the dual imperatives of battlefield bravado and protectiveness. With the loss of Young Little Hawk and High Backbone, something of that holistic spirit hardened and contracted. In his brother-in-law Red Feather, Crazy Horse found a junior to bring on, but no one would replace High Backbone. He no longer had an example to measure himself against, or a revered partner to deflate his own propensity to brood.
As winter drew on, what optimism Crazy Horse could muster pointed to the deeper future, to the intimacies of domesticity rather than the public spheres of war and diplomacy. It lay in Black Shawl’s swollen belly and in the incremental affection that was building between husband and wife. As Worm had hoped, the marriage matured into a stable companionship, sealed early in 1871 with the birth of a baby girl. Crazy Horse entered a brief period of personal happiness, security, and confidence. The baby was born along the Yellowstone as winter turned to spring. As Black Shawl’s family affectionately acknowledged, the girl resembled her father—evidence for the transmission of nagila, spiritual essence, across the generations. Kokipapi, Crazy Horse called her, They Are Afraid of Her: pointedly, the name of one of his mother’s sisters. Accounts, though fragmentary and unsatisfactory, indicate that Crazy Horse found in his daughter an outlet for suppressed spontaneous affection.
Although Crazy Horse and Black Buffalo Woman never renewed their affair, the bad blood between Crazy Horse and No Water remained. The disfiguring wound on Crazy Horse’s face stood for the rest of his life as a reminder of the feud. For many weeks, only soups could have passed his lips. Even after the wound healed, it left a visible scar, smudged by the powder burn, that drew Crazy Horse’s mouth down, rendering his reflective features morose. Although we have no medical records, the wound must have left him with recurring problems in his teeth and plagued him painfully in cold weather.
During the winter 1870–71, the trouble with No Water flared up again. Several months after the elopement, Black Buffalo Woman had given birth to a daughter with light hair. No proof was ever adduced that the child was Crazy Horse’s, but gossips’ tongues were set wagging again, doubtless reflecting on the relative potency of the scandalous woman’s lovers. After a buffalo surround near the mouth of the Bighorn, across the Yellowstone, Crazy Horse and his hunting partner Iron Horse, Black Shawl’s brother, were starting homeward when they came upon Moccasin Top, still dressing his meat, with his buckskin racer tethered beside him. Approaching from the opposite direction, a fourth man came into view—No Water. At that distance, Crazy Horse did not recognize his rival, but as the two groups neared each other, No Water untethered Moccasin Top’s pony, sprang into the saddle, and galloped south.
“Are you here?” asked the nonplussed Crazy Horse, “Then who was the man who just rode off on your buckskin horse?” “That was No Water,” replied Moccasin Top.
“I wish I had known it! I would certainly have given him a bullet in return for that one which he gave me.” With that, Crazy Horse uncinched his pack, leapt astride his own mount, and galloped toward the Yellowstone. Crazy Horse gained, but No Water plunged the racer over a cutbank, straight into the river, and toward the southern shore. After that, No Water permanently quit the northern Oglala camp. He traveled south to join Red Cloud’s people, remaining at the agency until the last months of the war of 1876.1
No Water’s departure highlighted the increasingly bitter issue of the agency location. After leaving Crazy Horse’s camp the previous September, the main Oglala village had traveled to Fort Laramie to counsel with the “good men” from Washington. Talks deadlocked over the agency location issue and the promised guns and ammunition withheld from the annuity distribution. Skeptical warriors demanded the guns before they would approve a location, but opposition eroded, and in June 1871, accommodationist chapters of warrior societies approved the siting of the first Red Cloud Agency, on the North Platte thirty-two miles downstream from Fort Laramie.2
Cynical observers concurred with Sitting Bull, who declared that Red Cloud had seen “too much” in Washington. The wasicu, he contended, had “put bad Medicine over Red Cloud’s eyes to make him see everything and anything that they please.” Key supporters of the iwastela compromise, like the Shirt Wearer Sword Owner, were dismayed by what they claimed to be American bad faith.3 Many shifted back to the minimalist reading of treaty obligations that Crazy Horse had helped formulate in 1868, and from which he had never wavered. As the Sun Dance circle gathered in 1871, Crazy Horse was heartened to mark the return of many who had succumbed to the appeal of government rations.
Some forty lodges of Hunkpatilas were among the arrivals. At Fort Laramie they had nominated Yellow Eagle III, Crazy Horse’s old war comrade, as their chief. Yellow Eagle crystallized opposition to Man Afraid of His Horse’s conciliatory leadership, rejecting the agency solution. Worm’s kindred, and that of Little Hawk, backed Yellow Eagle. They were joined by tipis following the seventy-two-year-old Human Finger—Oyuhpes and Miniconjous drawn to the Hunkpatila camp during the Bozeman Trail War years.4
For Crazy Horse, this was a period of consolidation. Following the annus horribilis of 1870, the war chief put down roots, relieved for politics to take a back seat. He served among the blotahunka, coordinating an expedition to avenge High Backbone, but apart from the usual Crow raiding, he stayed at home, enjoying the bedrock pleasures of family life.
No amount of politically correct revisionism will make a Lakota father fit modern ideals of “hands-on” parenthood. Care of They Are Afraid of Her devolved entirely on Black Shawl and other female relatives. But Lakota fathers were traditionally indulgent of daughters, and Crazy Horse seems to have doted on the growing girl. Frank Grouard stated that “in his savage way, [Crazy Horse] idolized” the child. They Are Afraid of Her began to assert her independence of mother and cradleboard, attempting halting steps with the help of a favorite doll and a fond father’s hands, rummaging curiously among the parfleche cases at the back of the tipi, racing on all fours in pursuit of some hapless puppy. Then, in precious moments that delighted both parents, she began to experiment with words, threading strings of gobbledygook with the bright lucidities of ina (mommy) and ate (daddy).5
Wasicu activity in the Yellowstone valley late in 1871 alerted nonagency Lakotas to a new threat to their homeland. In the two years since the Union Pacific railroad west from Omaha had met the Central Pacific line at Promontory Summit, Utah, the era of the transcontinental railroad had dawned. Completion of the Union Pacific severed the two regional buffalo herds, what Lakotas called Pte Waziyata and Pte Itokagata, the Buffalo North and the Buffalo South. Already new tracks across Kansas brought settlers by the thousands, eager to secure free land under the Homestead Act; shipped millions of buffalo hides east; and created an infrastructure of American society that marginalized Indian occupation. Crazy Horse and his compatriots were determined to avoid such a future on the unceded hunting grounds in the Powder River country.
Plans had long been maturing, however, for a northern railroad linking the Great Lakes to the Pacific Northwest. Military surveys had singled out the Yellowstone as the best route to the Rockies, and in fall 1871, surveyors probed the lower valley ahead of a large-scale reconnaissance planned for the following year. General Sherman dubbed the Northern Pacific a “national enterprise,” recognizing its potential to transform the unceded territory into productive cattle range, industrious homesteads, and lucrative mines.6
Lakota councils earnestly assessed this prospect through the winter. The issue raised the recurring question of the unceded territory’s vague northern boundary. Did it coincide with the northern line of Wyoming Territory, or extend west from the northern boundary of the reservation proper? Such niggling issues had been raised in Washington, but to the northern bands, they were academic. To them, Lakota hunting ranges extended west to the Bighorn and north
to the upper Missouri valley. Northern Lakotas viewed the Yellowstone valley as the heart of their hunting grounds. Elk River teemed with winter game. As the edges of the northern buffalo herd in Alberta and Wyoming contracted year by year, the Yellowstone range became ever more fundamental to Lakota self-support. Lakotas quickly concluded that the railroad would frighten the buffalo away—. “that their only source of subsistence and wealth, would be dried up, and that they would die before they would permit it.”7
Crazy Horse’s views neatly dovetailed with those of Spotted Eagle, the Sans Arc war chief, who asserted at his people’s agency that no Lakota “properly authorized to speak for his people” would ever permit the Northern Pacific to build along the Yellowstone. Spotted Eagle would personally “fight the rail road people as long as he lived, would tear up the road, and kill its builders.” Colonel David S. Stanley, selected to lead a military escort for the Northern Pacific surveyors, warned him that resistance would spell the ruin of his people. Spotted Eagle replied that “the driving off of the Buffalo was death to his race,” and he would rather “fight knowing he would be beaten in the end” than capitulate.8
Spotted Eagle’s visit demonstrated that even to hardline Lakotas, the agency represented a vital channel of communication to the wasicu world. Almost alone, Crazy Horse still declined even to visit and trade at the agencies. In mid-February 1872 some 430 lodges of Oglalas and Miniconjous, with a straggle of Sans Arcs and Hunkpapas, rendezvoused southwest of the Black Hills. Cold weather privations, and the urgency of dialogue with government officials, at last bore out Red Cloud’s arguments to visit the agency named after him. Lone Horn, Black Twin, Elk Head— an impressive list of leaders chose to go in and sample Red Cloud’s generosity.9
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