CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  Recalling his conclusions from the Bozeman Trail War, Crazy Horse strove to keep the battle mobile and isolate the troop units. Remembering High Backbone’s victory against Fetterman, he maintained an unusual level of tactical control. After the initial repulse, lesser leaders would have withdrawn their warriors, contenting themselves with some long-range sniping. Instead he pressed forward, varying infiltration tactics with dashing charges. Always, a strong spine of warriors moved to enclose, to press and overwhelm the foe. “For three hours the fight was kept up,” remarked an officer of the Seventh, “the Indians maintaining a perfect skirmish line throughout, and evincing for them a very extraordinary control and discipline.”28 True again to the instincts honed in engagements like the Wagon Box Fight, Crazy Horse only slackened the assault when Custer formed a strong defensive position. He had the warriors to overrun the timber, but the inevitable losses would have been unacceptably high. Already a handful of warriors had been lost. At sight of troop reinforcements, he ordered disengagement.

  The warriors’ firepower impressed itself on the men of the Seventh. In contrast to the weaponry used against Baker just one year earlier, the proportion of Henry and Winchester repeaters seemed high, making for a rapid and persistent fire that surprised the troops. Beginning in 1873, the northern Lakotas had traded intensively for improved firearms with agency traders, Métis from the Canadian plains, and unlicensed itinerants increasingly entering the Lakota country, finding a ready market for repeating carbines in exchange for that prized frontier commodity, a good mule. By 1876 repeaters composed about one-fifth of the Indian armament, and one-half of the warriors owned some kind of firearm. While hardly armed to the teeth with cutting-edge technology, as claimed by military apologists after the Little Bighorn, this represented a quantum advance on 1866, when barely one in ten warriors owned some patched-up percussion relic or fur trade fusil. Custer’s troops were the first to confront this more formidable foe, well armed, well led, and filled with a supreme conviction to defend their country.

  Crazy Horse’s party withdrew up the Yellowstone. Near the junction with the Rosebud stood Sitting Bull’s village, some four hundred lodges strong. Warned of Custer’s approach, Sitting Bull ordered lodges struck. Crazy Horse’s warriors hurried across the Yellowstone to warn their own villages on the Bighorn. The four circles moved downstream to join their Hunkpapa allies and by August 9 were encamped only four miles south of the junction of the two rivers. Aware that Custer’s entire command was tracking Sitting Bull’s retreat, Crazy Horse and the other war chiefs led their formidable warrior force down to the Yellowstone. They reached the valley to meet the Hunkpapas fording the strongly running river, six hundred yards wide. Women skillfully propelled round bullboats stacked precariously with household goods and meat stores, while men and youths rousted horses into the deep treacherous current. Custer’s force was only hours behind. To ensure the safety of the women and children, the village was hurried across the benchlands to join Crazy Horse’s people. Just before dark, scouts observed Custer and his 450 men arrive at the crossing and go into camp. Through the following day, warriors rode down to reconnoiter the enemy movements.29

  A scan of the far bank revealed that their families were in no immediate danger. Custer’s force was unable to emulate the Indian feat and had to give up repeated attempts to ford the river. The war leaders obviously debated a response. Undoubtedly, the issue that had divided the northern Lakotas the previous summer was again in play: Should the soldiers be attacked before they made any hostile demonstration? All Crazy Horse’s instincts—and his actions throughout the war years to come—confirm that he was at one with Sitting Bull in this matter: intruding soldiers should be repelled by force. Now their counsels convinced the moderates to mount a concerted first-strike response.

  During the early hours of August 11, as many as one thousand warriors approached the south bank of the Yellowstone. While some well-armed men took up positions in the timber facing Custer’s bivouac, Crazy Horse and hundreds more spread out to ford the river. Behind the men, a screen of women and old folk formed around Sitting Bull to witness the action from the bluffs. Just at daylight, a single shot from across the river alerted the troops that an attack was imminent. When Custer ordered forward some of his own sharpshooters, a ragged but accurate fire opened. His Arikara scouts exchanged noisy taunts with Lakotas across the river. To add to the clamor and strike a surreal note, the regimental band played “Garry Owen,” Custer’s favorite march tune.

  Increasingly, the Indian marksmen found the range, their shots striking along Custer’s picket lines. After thirty minutes of this sniping, Custer ordered his force to move toward the foot of the bluffs. Dust upstream warned of fresh warrior movements, and as the cavalry formed in line, troopers noted still more Indians fording the river upstream and down. To combat these threats, Custer implemented a characteristic strategy, spreading his command along a broad front. Two companies were hurried west and two more east, while Custer held the center. Barely was Custer’s line dressed when scouts reconnoitering the blufftops scrambled down the slope, shouting “Heap Indian come!”

  Crazy Horse’s attack came hard and probed everywhere along the line. Downstream, Captain Thomas H. French came under increasing pressure. Upstream, waves of warriors flung themselves against Captain Verling K. Hart’s two companies. Hart ordered a platoon to secure a ridge on the extreme left of the line, but barely had the men crested the slope when one hundred warriors almost overran it. Lieutenant Charles Braden ordered a volley, but even as the Springfields roared, a second wave charged the ridge. Meanwhile, at the center of the line, warriors charged right up against Custer’s position. A well-placed shot barely missed the commander, dropping his mount in the dust. Concerted volleys along the line eventually discouraged the attackers, and keen ears made out, above the renewed clamor of the band, the ominous thunder of artillery: Colonel Stanley’s infantry column was approaching. Already, the war leaders observed, well-placed shells were being lobbed across the river and exploding along the bluffs. The warriors began to disengage, their line unraveling upstream.

  After twenty minutes of intense action, Custer ordered the whole command to mount and charge. Having topped the northern bluffs, the companies veered and twisted to check the warriors scattering to reach the river and their families. Action spread across the bottomlands. Although the Indians were in retreat, this was no panic, and they fought in tight formations, frequently turning to check the pursuit, probing to cut off isolated men and units. At length, having discouraged too close a pursuit, they recrossed the river, guarding the retreat of their women from Stanley’s cannonade. The Battle of the Yellowstone was over.

  Although a tactical victory for Custer, the Northern Nation had achieved its strategic goal of dissuading further operations against their families, for minimal losses. Reunited with the main expedition, Custer’s cavalry attempted no further pursuit. Instead, the survey party pressed west, out of the Lakota country, to complete the work started the previous summer. For five days, warriors monitored its progress as far as Pompey’s Pillar, where the expedition turned north out of the Yellowstone valley. Contenting themselves by firing a harmless fusillade into a gang of swimming troopers, the warriors withdrew.

  Distant events would soon postpone the march of the Northern Pacific. That fall the Panic of 1873 sent shock waves through the industrial economies of North America and Europe, ruining businesses and closing banks. The financiers who had underwritten the railroad’s capital outlay withdrew their support, and the Northern Pacific was declared bankrupt. Track laying ended abruptly at the Missouri. There, a new frontier boomtown, Bismarck, briefly bloomed, and along the track east of the river, settlers funneled in by the thousands to checkerboard the prairie with homesteads. Army chiefs might fret the failure of Manifest Destiny, but on the high plains, the threat to the Lakota way of life was briefly lifted.30

  That fall, a party of Oglala and Sans Arc scouts, riding along the Yellow
stone in search of buffalo, came upon a line of wooden stakes driven into the earth—surveyors’ markers for the route of the iron road. Leaning from their ponies, they pulled up all they could find and threw them aside. Scarcely eighteen months since Spotted Eagle issued his warning to Colonel Stanley, Crazy Horse and his allies had indeed “torn up the road.”31

  When the Oglala warriors rode home the afternoon of the Battle of the Yellowstone, Little Hawk noticed a stranger on the campground. Dressed as a Lakota but clearly of wasicu origin, twenty-two-year-old Frank Grouard, the son of a Mormon missionary and a Hawaiian mother, already had a colorful frontier past. A mail rider along the upper Missouri while still in his teens, he had been captured by the Hunkpapas about four years previously, becoming a trusted aide and intermediary for Sitting Bull. More recently, however, the pair had quarrelled, and Frank was on the lookout for a new refuge. If a single theme ran through Grouard’s life, it was the ability to be all things to all men. As Frank searched the camp for his strayed mule, Little Hawk was struck by the youth’s vulnerability and invited him to eat at his tipi. After hearing Grouard’s tale of woe, Little Hawk advised him to stay with the Oglalas when the villages separated. He Dog, recently married and feeling expansive, invited Frank to move into his tipi. For the next eighteen months or so, Grouard would live with the northern Oglalas.32

  Grouard had already met Crazy Horse, surrounded by a coterie of warriors on the campground. The war chief made a strong impression on Frank, who recalled his unusual features, light hair and skin, and the “few powder marks on one side of his face.” Amid his boisterous comrades, Crazy Horse “didn’t talk much.” Grouard was the first observer to note that, at nearly thirty-three, Crazy Horse “appeared much younger than his age.” Sitting in village councils, Grouard observed Crazy Horse’s diffidence. Even when sitting with the Deciders, Crazy Horse was at pains to demonstrate that he “did not consider himself the chief.” Indeed, remarked the perceptive new arrival, Black Twin and his brother White Twin continued to be “the most prominent among the older men in the village.”33

  Crazy Horse and Grouard became friends, hunting and associating together, and the unlikely bond was soon strengthened by tragedy. As a regular visitor to Crazy Horse’s tipi, Grouard observed the depth of the father’s affection for They Are Afraid of Her, now a feisty two-and-a-half-year-old. Likely within a month or so of the Battle of the Yellowstone, before the village would begin traveling east to the Little Missouri, Crazy Horse led out his usual late-season war party against the Crows. In his absence, They Are Afraid of Her was suddenly taken sick by an unidentified illness. With appalling swiftness, her condition deteriorated, and despite all that Worm and the other healers did, the girl died. Black Shawl assumed the garb of a mourner. Dressed in ragged clothing, she hacked off her fine hair, slashing open her thighs and shins with a butcher knife, perhaps slicing off the first joint of her little finger. Howling her loss as kinsmen erected a scaffold grave, she wept inconsolably when the tiny body, wrapped in robes and blankets, was lashed to the bier. Bereft and alone, she joined the procession as the village wound sadly east.34

  Several days later Crazy Horse’s war party returned home. Grouard was present, and observed that, when the unsuspecting war chief heard the news, “his grief. . . was pathetic.” Like Black Shawl he hacked off his hair. Perhaps he hosted a wacekiyapi, a public mourning, enduring the insertion of pegs through his arms and legs. Certainly, he took the agony in to himself, neither accepting comfort nor giving it. Just as with Young Little Hawk’s loss, he told no one of his plans. If Grouard’s account is to be trusted, however, he privately asked Frank to accompany him on a pilgrimage to the grave. Seventy miles lay before them, but Crazy Horse was determined to make the trip. Without announcement, the pair rode out and, after two days’ travel, approached the rocky outcrops overlooking the Little Bighorn.

  The pair reined in near the scaffold, and Crazy Horse asked Frank to go and prepare a campsite while he visited the grave. Leading his friend’s pony, Frank paused long enough to watch Crazy Horse clamber up onto the platform. He carried no food or drink, but lay down beside the pathetic bundle as if in a final embrace. For three days and nights beside his campfire, Grouard heard the sustained keening of the bereft man. Crow war parties were known to be crisscrossing the district, and Frank regularly checked on the safety of his friend. Each time he saw Crazy Horse atop the scaffold, loudly “mourning for the departed one.”35

  At sunrise of the fourth day, Grouard was stirred awake. Crazy Horse knelt above him and declared that he was ready to leave. For the first time since arriving, he ate sparingly and drank from the waterskin while Frank readied the horses. The vigil had gaunted him again, and as the pair rode homeward, his fierce gaze belied the stolid mask, already pulled over the intransigent knot of griefs within. He cannot but have looked back over the catalog of loss—Rattle Blanket Woman, Lone Bear, Young Little Hawk, High Backbone, and now the hardest one to bear, this child who briefly had afforded him an outlet for spontaneous affection and unconditional love. During the journey home he resumed his silence, so we have no access to his deepest thoughts, but it is safe to say that, after They Are Afraid of Her, no death, least of all his own, would ever mean so much again.

  15

  THIEVES’ ROAD

  The home Crazy Horse returned to in the fall of 1873 was, in Frank Grouard’s phrase, “desolate.”1 With the tiny voice of their daughter stilled, Crazy Horse and Black Shawl were thrown on each other’s comfort. Warm affinities reached across the generations and through the extensive network of relations, but their grief was still harrowingly personal. Grouard reveals that Crazy Horse once more closed down, withholding his plans, hiding his heartbreak behind the warrior’s mask of stoical acceptance. Black Shawl seems to have shared something of her husband’s solitary self-dependence—unusually for a Lakota widow, she would not remarry after his death.

  Like any marriage, the relationship was complex. Their daughter had been born at an awkward time of year, in the privation weeks as winter turns to spring; hardship and illness might have made that birth difficult, which could explain the couple’s failure to have more children. In any case, as pious Lakotas, Crazy Horse and Black Shawl would have taken seriously the injunction to refrain from sexual relations while their child was nursing. At only two and a half, They Are Afraid of Her was by Lakota standards young to yield the breast: it is therefore quite possible that mother and father were still celibate. Moreover, Black Shawl remained intermittently sickly, debilitated by the illnesses that had stalled their courtship. She was keenly aware that her recurrent condition compromised their sexual life and left her husband comfortless at times of deepest crisis.

  Although never directly remarked on to outsiders, Oglala gossip knew of strains on the marriage—strains that all too clearly echo the relationship of Worm and Rattle Blanket Woman. Over sixty years later, when David H. Miller conducted research with Pine Ridge old-timers, he heard that “numerous other affairs followed” the intrigue with Black Buffalo Woman. The gossip may be just that, but one alleged affair has some support. According to modern Lakota informants, Crazy Horse had an adulterous affair with Shell Blanket Woman, wife of the Sans Arc warrior Stands Straddle. Legal testimony from the 1920s establishes that Stands Straddle divorced his wife about 1873, possibly following the affair with Crazy Horse.2

  Divorce was simple in Lakota society. If he had been terminally unhappy in his marriage to Black Shawl, Crazy Horse could have announced a public separation by simply beating a drum and throwing the stick onto the campground at a warrior society meeting. Instead, Crazy Horse obviously valued and sought to consolidate his place among his wife’s relatives. The measure of his success is in the affection and respect evinced by Black Shawl’s brothers in their accounts of their brother-in-law.

  What, then, are we to make of Crazy Horse’s marriage to Black Shawl? It was the longest lasting of his three significant relationships with women. Black Elk’s observat
ion that Crazy Horse was “[s]ociable in the tipi” indicates a measure of contentment in the intimacies of family life.3 Two further anecdotes are suggestive of a deep if unspoken companionship. Sometime in the first years of marriage, Crazy Horse led a horse-stealing expedition to Fort Laramie, making off with two blooded mares belonging to interpreter Baptiste Pourier. Gangly “Big Bat” had recently married an Oyuhpe woman, Fast Thunder’s sister, whom Crazy Horse called cousin. Big Bat rode to Crazy Horse’s camp and asked the war chief to return his horses. Always admiring of courage, Crazy Horse asked Black Shawl to bring the animals, but his wife demurred—she “did not want to give them up,” remembered Pourier. Crazy Horse insisted, saying the horses rightly “belonged to Bat,” and at length Black Shawl led them in. This snapshot of life in the war chief’s tipi hints at the support Black Shawl afforded her husband in his war exploits, with the amusing twist that the woman of the household was the one prepared to take this particular situation to the limit. Perhaps Crazy Horse and Pourier smilingly shook their heads at female intransigence.4

  Black Shawl supported more than just his war expeditions. One oral tradition expands on Crazy Horse’s enigmatic self-reliance. “He never tried to dress well like other chiefs. He was always by himself. He made his own power. When someone wanted him, they could always get his wife, Black Shawl, to go after him.”5

  Although late and nonspecific, the statement fits with other evidence. It may be significant that the Shell Blanket Woman affair predated the death of They Are Afraid of Her. As their marriage deepened, Crazy Horse grew to trust Black Shawl, disclosing his plans, his whereabouts, and something of the spiritual imperatives that led him increasingly from home. That deepening may have begun in the bleak weeks of despair that followed their daughter’s death.