Deep into the winter, Crazy Horse remained in wasigla, the withdrawn asceticism of mourning. He and Black Shawl would have given away all they owned. His face blackened, hair loose and hacked off at the shoulder, the war chief reflected on fundamental concepts. As the 1870s progressed, Crazy Horse turned increasingly to the holy men and healers who had shaped the visionary path of his youth. His hunka Horn Chips had left the hunting grounds after the trouble with No Water, but Worm was on hand, as was another man to whom Crazy Horse frequently turned. Long Turd, like Horn Chips, was a Rock dreamer, a practitioner of the cult practice yuwipi, in which the dreamer was bound hand and foot inside a darkened tipi. Long Turd was a superlative practitioner. To awestruck audiences the tipi shook, flutes sounded from the smokehole, blue sparks played around the lodge, and mysterious stones—round black pebbles and glassy crystals—struck the floor space. At the end of the performance, Long Turd, Houdini-like, stood at the door, the robe, lariat, and bowstring that had bound him neatly folded between a sturdy pair of digging sticks. Then Long Turd prophesied, predicting war exploits or locating missing objects.
“When you’ve suffered the loss of anything,” Long Turd proclaimed, “they say then there should be a yuwipi feast.” Small wonder that Crazy Horse was drawn to Long Turd’s sings. Yuwipi was an intimate ritual, without the showy pageantry that the war chief distrusted. It dwelt on themes that became ever more important to him—of things lost and restored, imprisoned and liberated, hidden and revealed. Although Crazy Horse was not yet of an age to abandon the warpath and take up a calling as a holy man, Long Turd and other adepts must have seen in his mysticism the outline of his older years.6
To purify body and spirit, the mourner took sweat baths. Within the blistering hiss of steam, Crazy Horse was constantly adjured to be not frantic in grief but rather iwastela cansicin, reflectively sad. “There is but one road,” the holy men repeated, urging the war chief not to spend too much time alone but to draw on the sympathy of relatives at this most difficult of times.7
For three or four months, Crazy Horse withdrew from the concerns of political life. As the Moon of Frost in the Tipi—January 1874—opened, however, news from Red Cloud Agency demanded his attention. Early in August, the agency had been successfully relocated to the controversial interior site on upper White River. During the fall, thousands of Lakotas had left the hunting grounds to spend the cold months testing the government’s bounty. Upwards of four hundred lodges descended on Red Cloud and on Spotted Tail’s agency, located forty miles downstream.8
The visitors placed the wasicu and the new agency on trial. Every ten days, rations were issued. Beef cattle were delivered on the hoof, and warriors staged chases that sadly echoed the buffalo run. Eked out with issues of flour, beans, bacon, coffee, and sugar, the rations often fell short, though the people vastly exaggerated their own numbers to maximize entitlements
A short ration day was a flashpoint for trouble, but even more contentious was the annuity issue. That spring the Oglalas and their northern guests had approved the relocation on the understanding that the 1873 annuities would be shared. Gifts of guns and ammunition were specifically demanded to validate the territorial concession.9
To the displeasure of the northern guests, the goodwill firearms were not part of the October issue. Animated by grievances large and small, real and imagined, the northern warriors rioted, shot up the agency, and made their own beef issue. Agency akicita responded impotently to the gathering crisis. In any case, agency warriors were easily swayed by their guests, agog at their stories of fighting the soldiers on the Yellowstone. Increasingly the northern akicita, marginalizing their own civil chiefs, demanded influence over agency affairs.
The census at Red Cloud proved the defining quarrel. An Indian Office directive ordered agent John J. Saville to make an accurate count, but the northern visitors declared that the census was unacceptable unless the arms and ammunition were released. Through January, tensions continued to rise, and as news of the crisis filtered north, Crazy Horse was forced to emerge from the hibernation of mourning.10
Typically, an end to public grief was announced by the visit of a respected chief. Near the northern Oglala winter camp, at the junction of Clear Fork and Powder River, was the one-hundred-lodge village of Miniconjous that had resisted the lure of the agencies. Lame Deer and Black Shield were the principal Deciders. Either of these men might have been involved in the rehabilitation of Crazy Horse and Black Shawl. At a warrior society feast, they were coaxed to put aside their grief. Their unkempt hair was combed, and black face paint was replaced with sacred red, the color of the life-giving sun. While well-wishers presented robes, household goods, and horses, food was served, and the chief lectured, “Though you have come up against troubles, weep over [her] only so much, have compassion for your. . . [other] relatives. . . good men and friends have you eat.”11
Whatever their role, Lame Deer and Black Shield were instrumental in engaging Crazy Horse’s return to political life. The two Deciders had fielded reports from the agencies through the winter, and after consulting their warriors, had reached a decision. When word arrived that Agent Saville had requested a reinforcement of troops, Lame Deer and Black Shield sent messengers to order Miniconjou guests at Red Cloud to decamp.
Threatening that they would return to destroy the agency in spring, the visitors urged Red Cloud’s people to join them and depart for the hunting grounds. Haltingly, the agency leaders began to form a united front against their kin. Infuriated Miniconjous launched a scatter of small war parties. In the small hours of February 9, Kicking Bear, Crazy Horse’s cousin wintering in Lone Horn’s camp, shot down the agency clerk Frank Appleton. As Kicking Bear fled north, a mounting wave of violence seemed about to break.12
On Powder River, Lame Deer called an emergency council. A large coalition of Miniconjous and Hunkpapas threatened to advance on the isolated White River agencies, but the northern Oglalas were divided over the crisis. Black Twin urged moderation, arguing for a spring visit to Red Cloud, to parley and trade—in effect, the formal recognition of the agency Black Twin had so long withheld. Crazy Horse was less conciliatory. Nevertheless, he was not quick to break openly with Black Twin. Intelligence gleaned by Red Cloud indicated that for some time, Crazy Horse was torn between conflicting loyalties. The outcome, however, was not in doubt: “Crazy Horse will probably join the War party,” concluded Saville. During the second week of February, as the agency violence climaxed and army intervention became inevitable, the Oglala war chief came to a decision.13
“Crazy Horse has declared for war,” Saville updated the situation on February 20; “Crazy Horse is on the war Path.”14 Behind the laconic telegraphese, imagine a council tipi packed with upwards of 250 Miniconjou and Oglala chiefs and warriors, with Crazy Horse and Lame Deer at the honor place. In a terse sentence or two, Crazy Horse announced his decision: war against the intruders on the Lakota domain. It would be left to Lame Deer to expand on the declaration, asserting that American bad faith left the Lakota people no choice but to withdraw from the peace made with the wasicu. War meant not simply military action, but unraveling the tentative accords established since the treaty of 1868, dismantling the policy of conciliation enshrined in the whole reservation system.
News of Crazy Horse’s declaration startled the agency Oglalas. As tribal war chief, he targeted his words as much at Red Cloud’s people as at his immediate audience. The agent, swinging between panic and the reassurances of the Oglala chiefs, renewed his appeal for military assistance: “Affairs among the Indians,” Saville concluded, “are too complicated to trust to them for protection.” Almost immediately, however, the agency Oglalas reasserted control of the situation. American Horse took the lead in building consensus to preserve order at their agency. Crazy Horse’s old enemy No Water was one of the first men to be recruited as an agency “soldier.”15
Convinced of his supporters’ solidarity, Saville tried reversing his appeal for troops. It was t
oo late. From headquarters in Chicago, Division of the Missouri chief Phil Sheridan had already authorized the transfer of troops to Fort Laramie. The anarchy created at the White River agencies afforded the opportunity that he and General Sherman had awaited. Sheridan hurried to Fort Laramie to oversee affairs personally. Over March 2–3 he watched eight companies of cavalry and eight of infantry march out of Fort Laramie, a total of 949 officers and men, backed by two new Gatling machine guns and 120 supply wagons, ordered to seize control of the White River agencies and establish permanent military posts.
News of the march panicked the Oglalas. Large numbers of agency people fled toward the Black Hills in the wake of the decamping northern visitors. Smith established Camp Robinson one mile upstream of Red Cloud Agency, and Camp Sheridan at Spotted Tail’s location. Four infantry companies were left at each post, busily replacing sketchy tent camps with permanent log buildings. The army was in the Lakota interior to stay.16
News of the military takeover forced a reunion between Black Twin and Crazy Horse. The army invasion smoothed differences in opinion between the war chief and his principal rival. Deepening the trend of the previous twelve months, Black Twin moved closer to Crazy Horse’s agenda of rejecting all treaty links with the wasicu. The two men had briefly been dangerous enemies after the No Water shooting, and since 1870 had warily competed for primacy, but for the next two years, they would evince growing cooperation, presenting a united northern Oglala front as government pressures piled up against the nontreaty Lakotas. As in his deepening affinity with Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse’s fence mending with Black Twin speaks to a growing maturity in the war chief, a capacity for patient diplomacy that promised the emergence of a great chief.
Crazy Horse knew that strong leadership remained rooted in warrior solidarity. As spring drew on, he moved to consolidate his authority. Conditions at the agencies vividly demonstrated the shortcomings of the warrior societies as mouthpieces of a united nontreaty ideology. The Kit Fox Society had assumed a role policing the annuity distribution, while the Omaha Society oversaw the beef issue. In 1874 Man Afraid of His Horse united the chapters of the White Packstrap Society around a pledge to keep order at Red Cloud Agency.17
Even the Crow Owners, Crazy Horse’s club, had relaxed its position, when his kola and fellow lance owner He Dog briefly visited the agency before removal. After 1873 the war chief evidently dropped his membership. Instead, Crazy Horse had observed Sitting Bull’s own creative juggling with the problem of warrior society solidarity. Repeatedly, the Hunkpapa leader countered wavering unity by forming clubs of core supporters, creating channels of influence both to the chiefs and elders and to the key brokers of warrior opinion. To ensure a loyal body of committed followers, he recruited an informal bodyguard—. “Sitting Bull’s Soldiers” — of devoted supporters. Loyalty was focused not on a diffused hierarchy of officers, but on Sitting Bull himself.18
Crazy Horse recruited his own personal bodyguard, Hoksi Hakakta, the Last-Born Child Society, to solve the problem of warrior solidarity. With characteristic idiosyncrasy, Crazy Horse selected as members the younger sons of prominent families. Older sons, Crazy Horse was well aware, were typically favored with preferment and the family birthright, and therefore, they were most amenable to the consensual compromises of the elders. With less to lose, the Last-Born were more likely to hold stubbornly to the principles of nontreaty status. Psychologically, too, Crazy Horse showed keen insight into warrior motivation. Society member Eagle Elk observed that younger sons were fiercely competitive. “If they did great deeds or something very brave, then they would have greater honor than the first child. They were always making themselves greater.”19
Crazy Horse selected over forty members. “They were all very brave warriors,” continued Eagle Elk, “and always went out with him and fought with him.” In size, the Last-Born resembled a typical warrior society, but true to the war chief’s individualism, there was no hierarchy of officers or regalia. Even the ritual feast that concluded society meetings was dropped in favor of an informal meal and conferral at Crazy Horse’s tipi. Culled from across the northern Oglala tiyospaye, the membership roll stressed the war chief’s concern to maximize his authority outside the Hunkpatila band.
Of the known members, only Little Killer habitually traveled with the Hunkpatila, and significantly, he spent as much time in Black Twin’s tiyospaye. Other key Bad Face recruits were He Dog’s youngest brother, Short Bull, and Good Weasel, a man Crazy Horse increasingly trusted as a battlefield aide. From the Oyuhpe band, the Last-Born recruited the redoubtable Low Dog and two of Crazy Horse’s cousins: Kicking Bear, the killer of the agency clerk, and Eagle Elk. Targeting the support of his mother’s people, Crazy Horse invited Flying By, Lame Deer’s son, and Looking Horse, a son of Miniconjou headman Roman Nose, to join the club. Most of these men were between five and twelve years younger than Crazy Horse, evincing his consistent concern with the coming generation. At thirty-eight years old, only Shell Boy, another Oyuhpe who may have served as society herald, is known to have been older than the war chief.20
Scouts reported buffalo drifting northward from the east flank of the Bighorns toward the upper valleys of Rosebud Creek and the Little Bighorn River. Crazy Horse’s people, still nursing winter-poor stock, tracked slowly after the herds. Oglalas fleeing the army takeover at Red Cloud began to swell the camp. In the village reorganization, Crazy Horse and Black Twin were renamed as Deciders. Part of the Miniconjous, drifting back from the Black Hills, joined the Oglalas for communal hunting. Prominent among their warriors was twenty-seven-year-old Hump, a nephew of High Backbone who had earned his reputation as a youth fighting with Crazy Horse in the Bozeman Trail War. It was probably at the spring 1874 village organization that Crazy Horse named Hump as one of the four head akicita for the village. The young Miniconjou was invested with a hair-fringed war shirt by the northern Oglala council.21
The tightening of warrior organization soon proved well founded. Early in April, messengers from Sitting Bull appeared to warn of new intruders on the hunting grounds. About March 27 Hunkpapa scouts spotted a train of twenty-two wagons and two artillery pieces trekking east toward the lower Rosebud. The civilian Yellowstone Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition had left Bozeman, Montana, six weeks earlier to assess rumors of gold deposits in the Powder River country. Some 150 men, well organized and armed to the teeth with the latest breech-loading rifles, made a formidable reconnaissance force.22
On April 4 Sitting Bull’s warriors launched an assault on the train as it ascended Rosebud Creek, only to be repulsed by the expedition’s devastating firepower. Crazy Horse and Hump cooperated with Sitting Bull in planning a second attack at the head of Ash Creek, an upper fork of the Little Bighorn. When Crazy Horse found the defenders well fortified in rifle pits, he called off the charge, restricting the assault to long-range sniping, the Lakota marksmen felling twenty-one horses. The defenders were capable and ruthless. Having recouped their stock losses by capturing Indian ponies, they laced abandoned provisions with strychnine. On the Little Bighorn they buried a slain Lakota in a shallow grave, booby trapping the body with a howitzer shell overlaid with bolts, nails, and scrap iron that hurled the curious Oyuhpe warrior High Bear thirty feet through the air.
Along Lodge Grass Creek, beyond the Little Bighorn, some six hundred warriors struck the moving train simultaneously from front and rear. As in the survey clashes of the previous summer, the warriors were well armed. Although the majority still relied on smoothbore muskets, revolvers were becoming common, and Spencer and Winchester repeaters ever better represented. Several. .50 caliber Sharps carbines boomed from the Lakota lines, reflecting intense winter trade at the agencies. Despite the improving firepower, neither Crazy Horse nor Sitting Bull could instill the necessary courage to overrun the defenders’ concerted fire. After a determined sortie cleared a ravine of warriors, and the two cannons began shelling the timber, Crazy Horse and the other leaders ordered a withdrawal. With relie
f, scouts reported late in April that the Yellowstone Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition had forded the Bighorn bound for home. Although outfought by the civilians, the Lakotas had dissuaded further intrusion from the Montana settlements.23
The season continued to mock the nontreaty bands’ resolve. The coalescing buffalo herds of spring were smaller than ever and rapidly tracked across the Yellowstone into lands held by the Crows and Blackfeet. The Oglala circle, augmented by agency deserters to perhaps three hundred lodges, was the strongest it had been since the agency divided the people, but scarcity of game ate at tribal solidarity.24
Two more serious wasicu incursions were mounted during the summer, both at the personal order of General Sheridan. The first came from an unexpected quarter. During midsummer, raiders had targeted the Shoshone reservation. Crazy Horse’s people, Cheyennes, and Arapahos had all participated in the cycle of raids. Sheridan, arriving at Camp Brown on an inspection tour, ordered a determined pursuit. Guided by Washakie and his eager Shoshone warriors, Captain A. E. Bates and a single company of the Second Cavalry struck the northern Arapaho village on July 4. In the battle, fought in the southern Bighorn mountains not far from where High Backbone had been killed in 1870, about twenty Indians were killed, including an old Oglala visiting from the agency. Although the defending warriors mounted a stiff counterattack, the Arapahos fled toward the sanctuary of Red Cloud.25
Preliminary reports at the agency indicated that Crazy Horse’s village had been attacked, but, despite this error, the Bates Battle had a compound effect on northern Oglala morale. Hunger already weakened the young, the old, and the infirm, and there was much sickness in the village. The prospect of a hungry season dodging the soldiers held little appeal for the unaligned. Within days of the Bates Battle, a groundswell of opinion favored visiting the agency. Crazy Horse and Black Twin refused to sanction the visit, but by mid-July, the village broke up. Many northern Oglalas assured the agency visitors they would shortly follow them to Red Cloud.26
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