CRAZY HORSE
Page 28
Preoccupied with disagreement and meat, Crazy Horse’s people were in no state to oppose the most serious of all trespasses on the Lakota domain. Through 1873 Sheridan had urged an army reconnaissance of the Black Hills to locate a military post controlling the road between the agencies and the hunting grounds. Fort Abraham Lincoln, headquarters of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, was selected as the departure point. Over the vocal protests of Indian rights’ supporters, Sheridan ordered Custer to ready a reconnaissance in force. Besides assessing locations of military potential, two civilian “practical miners” were to assay the Black Hills streams for paying quantities of gold.27
In loosing the miners, Sheridan was appeasing Dakota Territory boosters who had been talking up the rumors of untold wealth in the Black Hills and arguing for a reduction in the Great Sioux Reservation. He also scored a public relations coup in a year of economic downturn following the panic that bankrupted the Northern Pacific. In “golden age” America, a gold strike was seen as a national panacea. If the rumors proved true, an irresistible public mood, fed by the newspapers and adeptly surfed by politicians and army chiefs, would demand the sale, transfer, or confiscation of the Black Hills from the reservation land base.
Custer’s reconnaissance departed Fort Abraham Lincoln on July 2 with a column over one thousand strong. Testifying to the intense media interest the expedition was contrived to generate, three professional journalists and a photographer accompanied Custer’s staff.
As far as Indian resistance was concerned, the expedition was a profound anticlimax—most Lakotas were on the hunting grounds or settled at the agencies. On July 30 the practical miners turned up pay dirt in the gravel of French Creek. After three days of assay work, they announced gold in moderately paying quantities. While the jubilant troops pressed every utensil into panning service, guide Charley Reynolds was dispatched to carry the news to Fort Laramie. Then Custer marched home, arriving at Fort Lincoln on August 30. Already the transcontinental telegraph lines were humming with Custer’s sensational dispatches, announcing to an America wallowing in slump that within the Black Hills of the Great Sioux Reservation there was “Gold from the grass-roots down!”
Through the fall of 1874, the impending Black Hills crisis underwrote a mood of foreboding in the Lakota country. Sheridan’s forcing through Custer’s expedition over a storm of high-level protest underlined that the highest echelons of the Grant administration were now prepared to abandon the conciliation policy that had dominated Indian Affairs for five years. Since 1857 Lakotas had defined the Black Hills as the geographical and spiritual heart of their domain, and they deeply resented the intrusion. Agency chiefs knew of the gold fever infecting the American towns across the Missouri and along the Union Pacific. They realized that Custer’s reports made likely a mass invasion of the reservation by ordinary men made gold-hungry prospectors after the Panic of 1873. In December, an advance party penetrated the hills and started prospecting along Custer Gulch.28
Showing amazing forbearance, the Lakotas protested at the trespass but mounted no reprisals against the miners. Briefly, it seemed as if the government would act to protect Lakota land rights. Unlike military surveys, civilian parties remained illegal trespassers on the reservation, and General Sherman had to order their expulsion. On September 3 Sheridan issued a reluctant directive to his field commanders to halt civilian trains and burn their wagons—a measure forceful enough to satisfy even suspicious Lakotas. Everyone recognized that a diplomatic response to the Black Hills crisis must be formulated. The remarkable calm points to a crucial new factor threatening to unravel completely Crazy Horse’s nontreaty ideology: hunger. At the close of a truly defining year on the northern plains, the realization that the old life was unsustainable was taking hold. Holy men might trust in prayer to renew the Buffalo Nation in their caves beneath the earth, but Sun Dance pleas and the cries of the hungry were not answered. The Buffalo North remained stubbornly beyond reach.
To empty bellies amid thinning herds, the only alternative was the reservation. Down the length of the northern plains, Lakota hunting bands drifted into the agencies, not as visitors but as people forced on hard times. Hunkpapas and Lone Horn’s Miniconjous were shifting toward the Missouri River agencies. During August the northern Oglalas also started south. Some two hundred lodges drifted in to Red Cloud over the next two months. Frank Grouard was one of the visitors, curious to see American faces again. By September only about eighty tipis, the tiyospaye of Crazy Horse, Black Twin, Big Road, and He Dog, lingered uncertainly near the Black Hills.29
Reflecting the maturity of the relationship between the two leaders, Crazy Horse moved tacitly to reciprocate the concessions made to him by Black Twin. Maintaining their public unity, the two Deciders acknowledged that a visit to the agency was desirable. Early in October, they sent Little Big Man to assess the mood at Red Cloud. The positive response, coupled with the sufferings of his people, convinced Crazy Horse finally to consider the unthinkable. He sent word to Saville, which the agent released to a visiting journalist: Crazy Horse “will soon come in and draw his rations regularly hereafter,” confidently predicted the Denver press on October 11. Updating the situation on the nineteenth, Saville wired the Indian Office that “All of the Ogallallas will be here this week.”30
Messages from Red Cloud, resentful of the agent’s independent channel to the nontreaty Oglalas, played on their wariness and insecurity to queer the momentous visit. Crazy Horse and Black Twin stayed out. Then, late in October, buffalo herds disturbed by Crow hunters recrossed the Yellowstone and sifted up Powder River. Jubilantly, Crazy Horse’s people moved away from the agency hinterland. Nevertheless, Little Big Man assured Agent Saville they would come to the agency as soon as winter hunting closed in February, to trade robes and to parley. Saville presented Little Big Man with gifts to share with Crazy Horse and Black Twin. Little Big Man left the agency with Frank Grouard, carrying a far-reaching proposal from Saville. Although no direct response was heard from the war chief, Crazy Horse did not reject the agent’s presents. To the suggestion of a new delegation to Washington, to settle the Black Hills issue with full representation of the northern bands, Crazy Horse indicated assent, provisionally agreeing to meet the man that agency Lakotas called their Great Father. After the war council of barely ten months earlier, this was a startling about-face.31
Besides Little Big Man’s people, hundreds more lodges of Miniconjous and Sans Arcs had descended on White River. A crisis rose early and was nipped in the bud. When Saville attempted to raise the Stars and Stripes over the Red Cloud stockade on October 23, Miniconjou warriors hacked up the flagpole while Red Cloud sat calmly smoking atop a pile of lumber. The White Packstrap Society, backed by troops from Camp Robinson, was left to intervene. Disgusted at their kinsmen’s accommodation of American interests, most Miniconjous drifted away, some following Lame Deer west to join Crazy Horse’s people. Many hundreds more trekked in to their home agency at Cheyenne River during the first weeks of 1875. Lone Horn’s people knew that the hunting grounds could no longer sustain them, and they reluctantly prepared to settle down.32
Despite Little Big Man’s promise to Saville, the northern Oglalas did not appear at Red Cloud. Briefly, buffalo were back along Powder River. Surpluses had to be rebuilt, and the cold weather lingered, with blizzards sweeping the plains into the first week of April. Then again, Crazy Horse and Black Twin were the victims of competing agendas. Red Cloud’s messages continued to confound, and runners from Sitting Bull argued against premature concessions. The Hunkpapa war chief scheduled a Sun Dance on Rosebud Creek, a ceremony to unite the Northern Nation as never before behind his uncompromising ideology.
Then, in mid-April, Oglala envoys appeared to announce a sudden acceleration of the diplomatic calendar. Fort Laramie post trader John S. Collins had made semiofficial overtures to the chiefs at both Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. Advising them that the government was powerless to prevent a massive invasion of the Black Hills, Colli
ns proposed that the Lakotas sell the entire tract of land between the forks of Cheyenne River. The chiefs requested an urgent audience with the president. Although in disagreement over the details of compensatory payment, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Lakotas roughly agreed that a sale was acceptable. An Indian Office telegram directed the agents at Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Cheyenne River to ready delegations. Underlining the urgency of the Washington officials, they outlined a tight timetable. Agent Saville should be ready to entrain his Oglala delegates at Cheyenne by May 1.33
Knowing that northern Oglala consent was essential, Saville ordered envoys to Crazy Horse and Black Twin on April 1, but immediately a fierce blizzard closed down travel. Finally departing on the eighth, the messengers projected a fifteen-day round trip, but the crammed timetable proved unworkable. Upon arrival at the northern Oglala village, the envoys had to press for an immediate response and a virtually overnight start for the agency. Not surprisingly, talks stalled. Quizzed about affairs at Red Cloud, the envoys were forced to reveal unsettling facts—bickering among chiefs, agent, and traders about the trip, the size and composition of the delegation, and the approval of rival interpreters, as well as Red Cloud’s ongoing feud with Saville. To secure a tribal consensus and a coordinated strategy, Man Afraid of His Horse had proposed that the united warrior societies nominate delegates, but dissension ensured that councils remained divided at band level. In December Crazy Horse had “purposed accompanying” the delegation, but the news left him suspicious, silent, and unhappy at the unwonted speed urged on him. Most of all, his instincts revolted at the ease with which the agency people contemplated the sale of Paha Sapa.
After protracted talks, the two chiefs announced another united position. “Crazy Horse and Black Twin refuse to come in,” summarized Saville. In the guest place next to the chiefs, Lame Deer concurred, and the headmen sounded their validating hou. Expanding on his refusal, Crazy Horse declared he had “concluded to remain behind to guard the Black Hills.” The disappointed messengers turned for home, followed by a straggle of goodwill visitors, including Frank Grouard, who had privately concluded that the hunting life was finished.34
Through the winter, several hundred miners had staked claims along French Creek. Amid January blizzards, an army eviction exercise mounted from Camp Robinson was called off. On April 7, cavalry patrol out of Fort Laramie succeeded in evicting from a rudimentary stockade one small party, but the expulsion was token, and defiant miners warned they would return.
To monitor this situation, Crazy Horse chose to remain on the hunting grounds. His words cut two ways—a warning to new intruders and an injunction to the delegates to make no premature sale. In a formalization of the war chief’s role, the northern Oglala council charged Crazy Horse and his old comrade He Dog with guarding the Black Hills. According to the memories of He Dog’s son, Oglala elders and holy men lectured the pair that the Black Hills were the “Heart of the Earth. . . and they were to guard this place because there were buffaloes, antelopes, and elk, and all kinds of game there in the Heart of the Earth.” Crazy Horse and He Dog each nominated two “orderlies” to act as their messengers and scouts, including closely monitoring the mining parties in the hills. With spring opening the trails, that duty would be a demanding one—and dangerous: within one year, as tensions tightened and both sides became trigger-happy, miners had killed two of Crazy Horse’s scouts. Yet something of the orderlies’ success is reflected in the tight coordination of Oglala response to developments in the Black Hills throughout 1875.35
The village prepared to unite with Lakotas returning from the reservation. The White Horse Owners’ council recalled Crazy Horse and Black Twin to sit in the honor places in the council tipi. This year Little Hawk and Little Big Man were summoned to share the honor, the four presiding over council deliberations, shaping agendas, and controlling village movements. A rendezvous had been announced on the west edge of the Black Hills, on the busy trail between the hunting grounds and the White River agencies. By mid-May some four hundred lodges, including Hunkpapas, Miniconjous, and Sans Arcs, had gathered within seventy miles of Red Cloud. With new grass spelling revived solidarity, the nontreaty bands grew increasingly skeptical about the negotiations opening in Washington.36
More new arrivals brought the bitterest news. After receiving their annuities early in May, many northern Cheyennes had left the agency, bringing with them some seventy lodges of southern Cheyenne relatives. Like the refugees after Sand Creek ten years earlier, the visitors were desperate, grieving, and bitter. Their story held unsettling parallels with the predicament of the northern plains peoples. Frustrated at encroaching reservation controls, the anger of Kiowas, Comanches, southern Arapahos and Cheyennes had boiled over at the tide of American hide hunters rolling south across the Arkansas onto the last buffalo grounds in the Texas panhandle. Through the summer and fall of 1874, commanders from three military departments had coordinated a massive pincer campaign that gradually squeezed shut every option but surrender for the southern plains tribes.
On April 7 fighting erupted at the Darlington Agency over the shackling of surrendered warriors. A core of irreconcilable Cheyennes broke away, scattering north toward refuge with the northern Cheyennes. Halfway home, as they crossed the old buffalo range of the Republican River country, now dotted with ranch and homestead buildings, one band was surprised along Sappa Creek on April 23. Half the party managed to escape, but some twenty-seven people were caught afoot and trapped in a dry gully. Under slow sniping attrition, every one—all but seven of them women and children—was killed.37
The venerable Medicine Arrow, most revered of Cheyenne holy men, was among the arrivals. Visiting at the Cheyenne Sacred Arrow tipi, reverently seated before the tribal ark of the Arrow Bundle, Crazy Horse knew that these grieving people mourned more than their relatives: as the army enforced total control across the southern plains, and hide hunters targeted the last scattered buffalo herds, the old nomadic Plains Indian culture was dead everywhere south of the Platte. The Powder River country was a last refuge for his way of life. Processing the intelligence of his scouts from the Black Hills he had pledged to guard, the war chief was only more determined to protect his homeland.
This spring buffalo were not thick, but the year promised better than the famine of the previous season. For a little longer, the pull of the agencies could be resisted. Crazy Horse and the other Deciders ordered the village to follow the northward shift of the spring herds. Along the Little Bighorn, they rendezvoused with Sitting Bull’s people. The Hunkpapa war chief had formulated a new ideology of resistance, one that he would vocally propound through the summer. First, Sitting Bull would hold a great Sun Dance and forge a sacred unity for all the disparate peoples met here as the Northern Nation.
Crazy Horse continued to have little time for the great set-piece pageants of Lakota ceremonialism. Perhaps too he realized that opportunities for the sort of carefree horse raid he loved would be few in the months to come. He had Black Shawl prepare a feast for Last-Borns and other warriors, representing all the tribes present but centered on old comrades—Eagle Elk, Kicking Bear, and Low Dog, from the Oglalas; Lame Deer’s son Flying By and Iron Plume from the Sans Arc circle. In all, thirty-seven men gathered. Outside, Sitting Bull and the holy men were readying the village for the ritual camp removal before locating the Sun Dance circle. Over their pipes, Crazy Horse’s warriors agreed on a little extracurricular activity: “We do not feel like having [a] good time,” his cousin Eagle Elk recalled their irreverent conversation; “We are going out like men and try to take some ponies from enemies.”38
The party rode north at a fast clip, swimming the Yellowstone and cutting across the divide and the Musselshell valley. Scouts reported that a large war party of Crows, Nez Perces, Flatheads, and Atsinas was descending the Missouri. Crazy Horse decided on a rapid crossing to get ahead of the enemy. Approaching the river, the party intercepted a buffalo herd and paused to hunt and cut saplings for bullboats.
Over a long willow framework, the warriors lashed green bullhides. After pitching the seams, they loaded their war gear into the canoes. A few men skilled with horses rousted the herd into the turbulent, June-high Missouri. Confined between steep banks, the 250-yard span of water ran deep, snaggy, and turbid. The wary animals balked, but when a lead mare was prompted into the surge, the other ponies followed. Meanwhile, most of the men stripped to cross with the canoes. Hide ropes were lashed to the boats, and while comrades steadied the gunwales, the strongest swimmers headed for the north bank, their teeth clamped on the lines. Safely across, the war party hid their bullboats in the bottomland cottonwoods.
As they cut across the Little Rockies, Crazy Horse steered his followers in a night journey through unfamiliar terrain, skillfully evading the Crow scouts. As a new day dawned, the Lakotas found themselves on a butte top, viewing the wide valley of Milk River that stretched north toward Unci Makoce, Grandmother’s Land, the British possessions of Queen Victoria. Off to the west, the choppy ridges climbed to the Bearpaw Mountains, fronting the white-peaked splendor of the Rockies, but square north lay their objective. Around the log buildings of the Fort Belknap Agency clustered hundreds of Atsina, Assiniboin, and River Crow tipis. Horse herds grazed far out over the flat.
Two scouts approached from the plain. Crazy Horse assumed the pipe owner’s seat at the center of the arc of blotahunka. The pipe was lighted and a stack of dried buffalo chips was raised, which the reporting scouts kicked over before kneeling, panting, before their chief. Each took a whiff from the proffered pipe, then made his report. The scouts urged an immediate attack. The large village was breaking up and scattering over the valley. Several bands were approaching the butte, they concluded, so “as long as they are just small parties coming up here we had better attack now instead of waiting until the next come.”39 After surveying the plain, Crazy Horse concurred. Keeping to the gullies, the war party looped toward the approaching camps. After the enemy paused at noon, Crazy Horse shouted the order for a charge, placing himself far in advance of the long line of Lakotas slicing toward the grazing herd. With a whoop, the warriors dashed among the enemy horses, stampeding the herd and wrenching up the picket ropes of tethered war ponies. With almost two hundred horses galloping south, the kicamnayan tactic of unexpected sudden attack had worked again.