Positions hardened on both sides following the failure of the Black Hills summit. Early in October, Lakota independence was underwritten by the return of buffalo from the north. Crossing the Yellowstone, sizeable herds again filtered south, up the Tongue River valley. Through the fall, agency relatives, distinguished by their bright new tipis of reservation-issue duck cloth, journeyed north to unite with Crazy Horse’s people. As the new arrivals detailed the role of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and his headmen distanced themselves. Dismissing the Seven Generations Plan as inadequate—or irrelevant—they singled out Red Cloud as “a cheap man” and froze the conciliatory dialogue that had marked the previous twelve months.53
With thousands more miners pouring into the Black Hills, the council approved retaliations. Uniting with disaffected agency relatives, northern Lakota war parties targeted the miners, their wagon trains, and the settlements blooming along the east edge of the hills. As the season snapped cold, the Oglala war chief had begun to reconnoiter the Black Hills personally. He saw that simple panning operations were being replaced by hydraulic systems that raised scaffolding and sluices above the creek bottoms he remembered from childhood. In valleys and parkland meadows that had been buffalo wintering grounds, log cabins and frame buildings were replacing miners’ tents. The fifteen hundred prospectors in August had, before winter’s end, grown to fifteen thousand: as many miners as people in the whole Lakota nation were living within the heart of the Great Sioux Reservation.54
In Washington, too, opinions were hardening. Within a week of the breakdown of the Black Hills summit, President Grant telegraphed General Sheridan to attend a White House emergency session. Convening on November 3, the meeting hosted, besides the president and his Division of the Missouri commander, the secretaries of War and the Interior, and the commissioner of Indian Affairs. General Crook, as Sheridan’s field commander on the ground, completed the roll of top brass and high officialdom. In conditions of high secrecy, the summit meeting projected a strategy to neutralize the Lakota threat and seize the Black Hills.55
Sheridan and Crook readily agreed to withdraw troops from eviction duty in the hills. As the pressure of events forced agency chiefs toward a sale, Indian reprisals could be used to justify ration stoppages on the reservation and military operations on the hunting grounds. Jurisdiction of the off-reservation Indians would be transferred to the military. An ultimatum would be announced to the northern Lakotas. If they failed to enroll promptly on the reservation, troops would march them there, breaking their capacity to block another sale proposal.
The summit’s decisions were implemented with speed and efficiency. Just six days after the meeting, the Indian Office produced a report recommending preemptive military action against the people of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, while winter kept them fixed in snowbound, hungry camps. During November, the report passed through channels from the Indian Office to the Interior Department to the secretary of War. Finally, on December 3, the secretary of the Interior instructed the commissioner of Indian Affairs to order the nontreaty bands onto the reservation. Three days later, a circular letter, the Smith directive, was prepared for all Lakota agents. Messengers should immediately be sent to summon the non-treaty people. Any bands that had not responded by January 31, 1876, would be turned over to War Department control and driven in. The stage was set for war.
With winter already slowing communications, it was December 20 before the Smith directive appeared at Red Cloud Agency. The new agent, James S. Hastings, secured reluctant messengers only on the promise of substantial payment. Early in January 1876, the villages on Tongue River had broken up. Alarmed by Crow raiders and a new minicrisis—the establishment by Montana adventurers of Fort Pease, a stockade opposite the mouth of the Bighorn—many agency visitors sifted toward the reservation. While the Miniconjous moved down the Yellowstone valley toward Powder River, Crazy Horse and Black Twin had moved back toward the Black Hills. Along the Belle Fourche, deep snows halted their progress, and they went into camp near Bear Lodge Butte. Hastings’ messengers arrived the third week of January. The response to the agent’s tobacco was vague but reassuring. Black Twin affirmed that the people would come to the agency in early spring. For now, he indicated, snow blocked the trails. Diplomacy must wait. The army deadline, with not three weeks to run, was underplayed by everyone.56
Similar responses were made by Lame Deer and Spotted Eagle, promising a spring visit to trade and consider settling permanently at Cheyenne River. Even from Sitting Bull’s camp, the response was encouraging.57
But the army was set on war. As its deadline expired, the Interior transferred jurisdiction over the nontreaty bands to the War Department on February 1. From his Chicago office, General Sheridan readied his long-projected winter offensive against the Lakotas. He had originally conceived the sort of pincer operation that had crushed the southern plains tribes, but the extremes of a northern February indefinitely stalled deployment of the Department of Dakota’s offensive. Not to be outdone by the Wyoming winter, General Crook concentrated his Department of the Platte forces at Fort Fetterman, springboard for an offensive up the old Bozeman Trail. A force of almost nine hundred officers and men, comprising five companies each of the Second and Third Cavalries, and two of the Fourth Infantry, was augmented by Crook’s famous packtrain, a crack civilian unit the general had used against the Apaches in Arizona. Some eight hundred mules, and a rearguard of eighty supply wagons, would carry Crook’s provisions and forage. On March 1, as a window of fine weather opened across the region, the command crossed the North Platte and started north. Fanned far ahead of the column traveled a contingent of thirty-one civilian scouts and guides. Beside Louis Richard, Big Bat Pourier, and a cluster of iyeska recruited from around Red Cloud Agency rode Crazy Horse’s old comrade Frank Grouard.58
Through the Moon of the Dark Red Calf, the northern Oglalas sat out the closing storms of winter. Then, in an unpredictable twist, Black Twin died. For five years the Bad Face Shirt Wearer had guided the nontreaty Oglalas. Twice in 1872 he had led his personal followers to share annuities with Red Cloud’s people but had never conceded the Oglala agency the approval of a formal visit. Together with Crazy Horse, he had tightened his opposition to American intrusions in the mid-decade, but over the previous year, he had steadily moved the war chief toward accepting the inevitable—negotiating with the reservation leaders and the wasicu officials.59
A vital voice of moderation was stilled, and Crazy Horse was freed from constraint. The war chief ordered a camp move—not south, toward the agency, but north, down the windswept rim of the Little Powder valley. Wary of Crazy Horse’s inflexibility, He Dog’s tiyospaye joined the Cheyenne camp on Powder River, also preparing to travel to Red Cloud. Lame Deer and Sitting Bull’s camps were barely forty miles north across the Blue Earth Hills.60
Through late February and early March, messengers and visitors from Red Cloud continued to appear, bearing invitations as well as warnings of Crook’s imminent march. One of the last to appear was Crawler. To his brother He Dog, he presented gifts of coffee, sugar, and tobacco, with a personal message from their uncle Red Cloud: “It is spring,” Crawler recited curtly; “we are waiting for you.” When hunters sighted soldiers descending the Tongue River valley, He Dog conferred with his headmen and the Cheyenne chiefs. The joint council declared the camp should reunite with Crazy Horse, then work “in slowly toward the agency.” The camp descended Powder River to a point forty miles upstream of the forks. There, despite repeated reports of troops traversing the snow-lashed Tongue River divide, the people squirreled into their sleeping robes the night of March 16.61
Atop the western hills, the pitch black sky snapped with oncoming snow. Frank Grouard examined the hunters’ trail, then led down the tortuous ridges into the Powder River valley. Behind him strung out Crook’s strike force, six companies, 374 officers and men, under the command of Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds. Just before daybreak, Grouard declared the village was in the valley bottoms
, one thousand feet below. As the weary, frozen men gingerly led their mounts down the precipitous slopes, broken with gullies and snarled with fallen timber, the gathering daylight revealed through the bare plum thickets and ragged cottonwoods a cluster of seventy-four tipis. Beside the frozen river, a stir of movement became audible with the whicker of ponies and then, still distant but closer with every step, the barking of dogs.
Dividing his force to deliver a frontal assault, contain the enemy flight, and secure the vital horse herd, Reynolds ordered his troops to the attack. As the thunder of ironshod hooves and the clink of cavalry harnesses alerted He Dog’s people of the charge, at 9:00 A.M., March 17, 1876, the phony war of ultimatums was over. The Great Sioux War had begun.
Forty miles across country, Crazy Horse’s camp was unaware of the imminent approach of war. His fifty-odd tipis represented a core of people who had longest resisted the lure of the agencies. They included “some of the strongest men from a mental stand point that the Sioux as a nation possess today,” conceded one officer who would face them in battle and in council: such men like Crazy Horse “worked from conviction and held fast to their non treaty ideas.”62Yet even Crazy Horse had to face the necessity of opening dialogue at the agencies, if any part of their old life and hunting range was to remain.
Crazy Horse was thirty-five years old. For a nineteenth-century Lakota, he was approaching a key transitional phase in life. Typically, in his later thirties, a man might be grooming a teenage son to succeed him as hunter and warrior. He would begin to drop out of war expeditions, spending more time in camp, bringing up the new generation more by word than example. Crazy Horse had no son, and he would never forget the incomparable rush of battle, yet in the past few seasons, he had haltingly evinced a growing maturity. These qualities were those of a great Lakota leader in embryo. With his mystical leanings, they suggested a future as a wise councillor and holy man. Already younger warriors sought Crazy Horse’s aid in painting protective designs on shields, respecting his unparalleled favor from the wakan.63 Visions over the next year would sketch out a possible calling as a healer like his father. They suggest something of the human possibilities of a complex, multilayered personality.
But war consumes. Because the Great Sioux War is now a distant pageant, alive with courage, dash, and the moral example of dogged endurance, tuned to the quick tempo of horseback action and the glorious verve of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors—. “the finest light cavalry in the world,” as one officer conceded—it is easy to forget that, like all wars, it devoured human potentialities.
Crazy Horse was not to realize those capacities for personal growth and the service of his people. Nineteen months later, he would be dead.
Five
DAYS OF THE WHIRLWIND
16
I GIVE YOU THESE BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO EARS
Late in the Moon of the Snowblind, on the morning of March 23, 1876, the war came to Crazy Horse’s camp. Across the bleak white benchlands rimming the Little Powder, early hunters and horse herders made out a dark moving string of people. At the head rode He Dog and a knot of Cheyenne leaders. All were half-naked in the fierce cold, some clothed in ragged shirts and dresses, and here and there a figure huddled in a salvaged winter robe. Gaunt women opened meager packs to feed chunks of jerky to hungry, frostbitten children.
Crazy Horse briefly conferred with He Dog, while his people rushed out to greet the refugees. Householders stood outside their tipis, calling, “Cheyennes, come and eat here.” Eagerly, the new arrivals responded. In every tipi, matrons roasted what fresh meat was to be had, or boiled up nutritious broths. Every family donated spare robes to the guests and supplied lodgeskins or bark sheeting to construct dome-shaped wigwams.1
Six days earlier, He Dog told Crazy Horse, soldiers had attacked his camp on Powder River. A mounted charge from upstream swept away the horse herd. Slashing open lodge covers, families fled toward the bluffs, seeking cover in the ravines and plum thickets while their men laid down a determined covering fire. Clutching two rifles, a revolver, and his bow and quiver, He Dog first assisted his wife onto a picketed horse and ordered Little Shield to get her safely away; then he knelt behind a big cottonwood to fire into the bluecoats re-forming for a follow-up assault. Reinforced by Cheyenne snipers like Black Eagle and Two Moons, He Dog’s ragged fire ultimately killed or wounded ten soldiers.
The resistance stalled Reynolds’ attempt to head off the refugee flight, but as He Dog’s comrades disengaged, they were forced to watch troopers torching their lodges, igniting tons of vital stores, household gear, family heirlooms, and craftwork masterpieces. As the flames grew higher, the explosion of gunpowder kegs propelled stacks of eighteen-foot lodgepoles as if they were matchsticks. Then, demoralized by the Indians’ fire, Reynolds ordered a hasty withdrawal, driving away seven hundred ponies but abandoning four dead troopers on the field. With Indian casualties confined to one man, a youth herding horses, and a woman, shot in her lodge and abandoned, the defenders had won the tactical encounter, but the true losses were in lodges and winter stores. All afternoon, the freezing fugitives scavenged the charred remains of their homes for robes and unburned meat stores, then pitched camp amid the wreckage.
As Crazy Horse digested his friend’s story, Short Bull took up the thread. An adept Oglala horse thief, Short Bull and a gang of comrades had tracked Reynolds’ retreat and driven off 376 of the precious ponies. One of the herders, fleeing “like a scared rabbit,” Short Bull observed, had looked like Frank Grouard.2
For another day, the fugitives had huddled amid the frozen wreckage while warriors distributed recaptured ponies and dried meat. Then, after a sudden chinook thawed the valley, the people had struck across country to find Crazy Horse, enduring rain, mud, and nighttime freezes. The evening of their arrival, Crazy Horse hosted a council. The Cheyenne headmen fielded Two Moons, an officer in the Kit Fox Society, to plead eloquently for aid in arms and ponies, before a fight to the finish with the troops.
In the pause between speeches, Crazy Horse assessed the mood, then made his laconic response. Turning to acknowledge Two Moons, the war chief declared, “I’m glad you are come.” Then, to rising murmurs of “hou,” he quietly concluded, “We are going to fight the white man again.” The Cheyennes warmly approved the Oglala war chief’s declaration of a war in defense of the hunting grounds.3
Scout reports established that Crook’s reunited force had already withdrawn to Fort Fetterman, but everyone knew that continued resistance depended on national unity. Crazy Horse’s own depleted stores were soon used up, and after five days of recuperation, heralds ordered the camp struck, and the procession angled northwest along the Powder divide to Sitting Bull’s village in the Blue Earth Hills. Augmented by Lame Deer’s Miniconjous, the host camp numbered 125 lodges. The refugees were welcomed at two great tipis set up on the campground. Matrons shuttled back and forth carrying steaming kettles. Sitting Bull called for his people to double up their families and donate their tipis to the guests. Women and girls presented families with robes and lodgeskins, while men brought up horses, saddles, and ammunition; some replaced pipes and sacred items.4
For the next week the people feasted, visited, conferred. The heroes of the Reynolds fight were honored in song:
The soldiers charged our village, my friends cried,
soldiers and Sioux charge, and my friends cried.
Hitherto moderate chiefs called for war. Two Moons repeated his harangue, but Sitting Bull did not need convincing. The destitution of his visitors bore out his conviction that full-scale war must follow. Skeptical Cheyennes were won over by Hunkpapa generosity. Intelligence from the agencies confirmed that fresh troop movements were being planned for spring.5
“This is it,” declared Crazy Horse, predicting the coming fight. According to visitors from Red Cloud, he declared in open council that he had “never made war on the white man’s ground, but that he would now strike a blow that would be remembered by those who invaded his
country.” For over a year, the war chief had resisted calls to contest the occupation of the Black Hills, but the Reynolds fight was the last straw. As the camps prepared to move after buffalo, Crazy Horse departed south, alone. Scouting a freight route in the Black Hills, he spied a small party leaving the French Creek diggings. Prospector Charles Metz, with his wife, their maid Rachel Briggs, and three other men, was returning to Cheyenne. As they passed through Red Canyon, Crazy Horse picked off the party one by one. The maid fled up the canyon, but her body was found with a single arrow through the back. In the lone warfare style of a Thunder dreamer, Crazy Horse had emphatically declared that for him, the war had begun.6
Late in April, a straggle of Santees, following the implacable Inkpaduta, arrived from Canadian exile, welcomed as refugees from an earlier cycle of American aggression. Crazy Horse returned about the same time. Although the war chief did not proclaim the Metz party killings as coups, Inkpaduta acclaimed Crazy Horse as a worthy heir—. “a swift hawk” against his people’s enemies.7
Turning west over the greening divide, the growing village—now exceeding four hundred lodges—camped on Tongue River through early May. As ponies fattened, hunters made successful surrounds. Messengers including Little Big Man were dispatched to the agencies. “It is war,” they declared, inviting all to attend the Northern Nation Sun Dance on the Rosebud in early June.8
Hunts continued successfully as the Northern Nation swung west into the valley of Rosebud Creek. Food packs were filled, and clean white tipis replaced the smokesmudged skins of winter. Warrior societies held reunion feasts, stoking the rhetoric of total resistance. On May 21, as tipis were pitched barely seven miles upstream from the mouth of the Rosebud, scouts topped the ridges overlooking the Yellowstone. Across the river were visible the white tents and unlimbered wagons of a major troop bivouac. One element of Sheridan’s spring campaign had reached the hunting grounds.
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