CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  Over the next couple of days, the village descended the Powder. Alerted by Crazy Horse to the prospect of plunder, a large body of people arrived at the landing stage early on August 2 and ripped open the forage sacks. Indian ponies balked at the oats, and the contents were poured out across the dock, the sacks retained for camp use. Women had loaded the travois with corn for parching when the hoot of another steamboat dispersed the gathering. The Far West had arrived to rescue the forage stocks and ship them upstream to Terry’s new headquarters. In a day of low-key skirmishing, the boat’s twelve-pounder shelled the bottomlands, gradually forcing the Lakotas to withdraw. Crazy Horse’s comrade Runs Fearless was killed.14

  On Powder River, the great village was ready to break up. New arrivals from the agencies compounded the problems of food and pasture. About sixty lodges of Cheyennes, led by Dull Knife, arrived in camp with word of increased military activity around Red Cloud Agency—the war chiefs concluded that Crook’s summer hibernation was about to end.15

  Buffalo were scattering downstream and across the Yellowstone. Already Hunkpapas opposed to Sitting Bull’s leadership, like Iron Dog, were ready to track northward to hunt: a few even spoke of continuing north across the invisible medicine line of the 44th parallel to seek refuge where Inkpaduta assured Lakotas of a welcome, in Grandmother’s Land. Others were ready to depart for home agencies. Neither alternative was acceptable to Crazy Horse, but subsistence demanded an immediate solution. The Deciders agreed that the core of the village would press east across the Little Missouri. Prospects for deer hunting were good in the wooded uplands like Killdeer Mountains, Slim Buttes, and Short Pine Hills; and more Hunkpapas, Sans Arcs, and Miniconjous were ready to travel to Fort Berthold to trade horses and robes at the harvest fair of the Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas.16

  Back in camp only a few days, Crazy Horse was already impatient for the warpath. With no prospective military pursuit, he was free to plan another small-scale raid. Black Fox, Dog Goes, four Cheyenne warriors, and bodyguard members Looking Horse, Short Bull, and Low Dog agreed to follow him into the Black Hills. Such a party might couple raiding activities with intelligence gathering on the intruders in the hills, even looting vital provisions. About August 3, while the main village continued east, smaller ones fanned south. As Crazy Horse’s war party angled southeast onto the Little Missouri divide, they would have seen behind them the black rolling cloud of smoke that covered the Montana plain, billowing high above fires set to call homeward the elusive Buffalo North.17

  Two days after the Northern Nation scattered, General Crook finally broke camp on Goose Creek. Reinforced by Colonel Wesley Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry, units of the Second and Third Cavalries, and ten infantry companies, Crook commanded a force of over eighteen hundred effective troops. Two hundred fifty Shoshone scouts and two hundred civilian guides and packers completed the roll of the strongest command ever to penetrate the Lakota domain. Early on August 5, it started down the Tongue to unite with Terry.18

  As the steamboat traffic observed by Crazy Horse demonstrated, Terry was also readying his command to march. Reinforcements were busily shipped up the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers to Terry’s new headquarters at the mouth of the Rosebud. As he prepared to march on August 8, he could count seventeen hundred effective troops, consisting of the reorganized Seventh Cavalry, four companies of the Second Cavalry, and four battalions of infantry. Notable among the walk-a-heap reinforcements were six companies of the Fifth Infantry, under their regimental commander Colonel Nelson A. Miles. Able and supremely ambitious, more than any other officer Miles would set his stamp on the campaigning to come.

  On August 10 Crook and Terry foregathered on Rosebud Creek. Following the month-old village trail across fire-blackened plains quagmired by late summer rainstorms, the two commands turned east. With intelligence focusing on Hunk-papa movements crossing the lower Yellowstone, Terry detailed Miles to patrol the crossings, while he oversaw provisioning of a new post at the mouth of Tongue River, intended to headquarter Miles’s infantry in the field. With water falling daily in the Yellowstone, Terry worked to transfer steamboat shipments from Fort Buford to supply trains outfitting Tongue River Cantonment.

  Crook was convinced that Crazy Horse—for the first time reckoned by military analysts as equal with Sitting Bull—and his Oglala, Brule, and Cheyenne followers would not cross north of the Yellowstone. Instead, they would veer south toward the Black Hills, threatening the security of his Department of the Platte. On August 26 Crook followed the main trail east from Powder River, making slow progress over the rain-lashed plains; on September 3, as the command straggled into the Little Missouri valley past the landmark of Sentinel Buttes, the main trail finally broke up, lost beneath three weeks’ worth of Badlands gumbo. Crook’s dispiriting dispatch convinced Terry to wind up his campaign on the fifth, dispersing his command to posts overseeing the agency Lakotas.

  As Crook’s bedraggled command crossed the Badlands, conditions worsened, and by September 5, barely two days’ provisions remained. When scouts located a more recent trail pointing south, Crook ordered pursuit. Camping in mud, reduced to eating foundered mules and horses, the command soon found the crisscross trails of people dispersing after security and small game. On the seventh, Crook ordered Captain Anson Mills to take the trail to Deadwood, the nearest mining settlement, and buy supplies on army credit. In the last light of evening, with Frank Grouard in the lead, some 154 officers and men of the Third Cavalry followed Mills south. The following afternoon, near Slim Buttes, Grouard reported sighting Indian ponies, then a cluster of tipis. Three months after the Rosebud, Crook’s command was again in contact with the enemy.19

  Crook’s vanguard had entered the fall hunting zone. By early September, the Indians were grouped in two large villages and ten or more satellite camps. On the north fork of Grand River, barely seven miles west of the main command, camped up to four hundred lodges of Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, and Hunkpapas. Tracked by Terry, their satellites had drifted north, away from the war zone toward sanctuary in Canada.

  The second large village, some three hundred lodges, was the main Oglala-Cheyenne camp, situated on the headwaters of the south fork of Grand River. In the wooded hills all around, satellite camps were hunting deer. One camp, thirty-seven lodges, was tucked away on the east side of the Slim Buttes. Iron Plume’s tiyospaye had been joined by relatives drifting south from Sitting Bull. Disheartened inside their rain-soaked tipis, some people favored surrender. Messengers opened a dialogue at Cheyenne River, indicating that the Crook-Terry pursuit had reinstated the war leadership in both main villages. Crazy Horse again presided in Oglala councils, assisted by akicita leaders Little Big Man, Kicking Bear, and He Dog.20

  The war chief had returned from the Black Hills the third week in August. Since Crazy Horse’s April hike through the hills, settlements had grown. Boom-towns like Deadwood, Crook City, and Custer City flourished. Trails were lined with supply trains, incoming miners, and a new stagecoach service. To feed an insatiable market for meat, cattle and even sheep were being herded in high country pastures. Almost overnight Paha Sapa had become one of the most densely settled sections of the trans-Mississippi West.

  In the misty dawn of September 9, Captain Mills’ detachment charged Iron Plume’s sleeping camp, quickly rounding up most of the four hundred ponies. Behind door flaps lashed tight against the rain, people cut their way out of tipis. Two men and a woman were killed in the first minutes, but most managed to flee behind a determined fire from their warriors. Soon they were stringing over the buttes to Crazy Horse’s village, twenty miles away. Others took refuge in a ravine and mounted a fierce defense as they witnessed their camp looted—three tons of dried meat, dried fruit, and a cache of flour making a welcome dietary supplement for the veterans of the “Horsemeat March.” Pitiless firing into the ravine soon killed another warrior, three women, and one infant. Crook soon arrived on the scene, and by midafternoon, the entire command was bivouacked in a natural
amphitheater, surrounded on three sides by the pine-topped crags and outcrops of the Slim Buttes. Led by the mortally wounded Iron Plume and his brother Charging Bear, the twenty-one survivors in the ravine were persuaded to surrender. With the first military victory of the war under its belts, the command settled to naps and cooking fires.21

  A funeral service had begun for two soldiers and a civilian scout when, at about 4:15 P.M., the crack of distant Winchesters snapped Crook’s pickets into action. Crazy Horse had arrived. Alerted in midmorning of the attack, as many as five hundred warriors had followed the Oglala war chief. The odds were severely stacked against them. Expecting to confront Mills’s detachment alone, Crazy Horse had projected a Rosebudlike charge to sweep away the captured herd and release the captives. Instead, he faced the largest army ever engaged in the Plains Indian wars. Despite odds of four to one, Crazy Horse urged his warriors forward. A frontal assault was no longer feasible, but the warriors took up positions on the granite outcrops and poured a heavy fire into Crook’s camp from the southwest.

  Warriors spread around the hills, following the war chief’s lieutenants—Kicking Bear, Wears the Deer Bonnet, He Dog, and Brave Wolf. One of their contingents darted forward to cut off some stampeding cavalry mounts, but a corporal’s cool presence of mind turned the lead horse. Crook ordered his units forward. Testifying to the conviction of the Lakota attack, the general had to commit his whole force. While a unit of mounted cavalry protected the open eastern flank, infantry and dismounted cavalrymen advanced under steady fire toward the hills. Smoke hung low in the moist atmosphere, wreathing the slopes. As at the Rosebud, the range and accuracy of infantry rifles availed. The right of the Indian line first gave way, as the bluecoats secured the hilltops. Although Crazy Horse was able to preserve order, his line unfolded west, fighting a protracted duel across a five hundred-yard gap.

  At the extreme left, one Lakota contingent even mounted a bold charge at the Third Cavalry position, snaking across the plain and darting for gaps in the skirmish line behind volleys from their repeaters. A distinctive figure, believed by reporter Finerty to be Crazy Horse, “mounted on a fleet white pony, galloped around the array and seemed to possess the power of ubiquity” as he urged on the attack.22The dazzling maneuver was worthy of the victor of the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, but the odds were too much. Facing concerted fire, the charge dissolved to regroup beyond range. Finally, as the wet dusk turned to darkness, the warriors disengaged. It was no precipitate flight but, faced by overwhelming odds, none of their tactical objectives had been achieved. “There was no one commander,” summed up Short Bull. “No leader did anything extraordinary.”23

  The following morning, as Crook’s command prepared to march, renewed fire from the hills signaled that Lakota resolve was not eroded. Through the rainy morning, as troops torched the camp, lines of converging warriors charged on the cavalry rearguard, seeking to cut off units as at the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. After a two-mile running fight, the warriors conceded the engagement. Most of the captives had been freed, and Crook was able to push his exhausted command toward the Black Hills. While his men camped near Deadwood, the general was summoned to a strategy summit with General Sheridan at Fort Laramie.

  Over the next month, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition trended south. They were no longer a military threat, but the screen of Lakota scouts monitoring their progress only confirmed what Crazy Horse had learned a month earlier. The massive infrastructure of communications and supply lines that already linked the booming Black Hills settlements to the Union Pacific line had achieved what no army could: the seizure of the heart of the Lakota domain. Processing these reports, and new intelligence from the agencies, Lakotas would commemorate the Battle of Slim Buttes as The Fight Where We Lost the Black Hills.

  During the centennial summer of 1876, news of the Custer catastrophe convulsed a nation celebrating a landmark in its history. One hundred years after the American War of Independence, the United States stood on the world stage as a powerhouse of the new industrial age and a symbol of liberty and opportunity to millions of European emigrants fleeing oppression and poverty in the Old World. The status of world power beckoned. To visitors at the great centennial exposition in Philadelphia, confidence in American enterprise and know-how seemed justifiably unbounded. The startling word wired to press agencies early in July—that a horde of painted savages had annihilated the flower of the U.S. Army on a remote stream in Montana Territory—stunned the nation. Through the second half of 1876, the public mood in the East swung sharply against conciliating the brutal killers of Custer.

  General Sheridan adeptly cruised the zeitgeist. Besides ordering units from across the Division of the Missouri to converge on the war zone for a projected winter campaign, the general tightened control of the Great Sioux Reservation. Since spring, he had argued forcefully that the reservation Lakotas gave aid and comfort to hostile bands on the hunting grounds. To halt the drain in manpower, materiel, and intelligence, Sheridan urged that the agencies be turned over to army control. On July 22, in the wake of the national scandal of the Little Bighorn, he finally received the go-ahead from Washington. That same day, wires from the Indian Office were transmitted to the agents, and over the ensuing weeks, the army assumed command of the Great Sioux Reservation.24

  Reinforcements were rushed to Camp Robinson. Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie assumed command of the District of the Black Hills on August 13, bringing six companies of the Fourth Cavalry. Units of the Fifth Cavalry, the Fourteenth Infantry, and the Fourth Artillery followed, quadrupling the effective strength of Camp Robinson to some 850 officers and men.

  Tensions heightened at Red Cloud Agency when a new commission arrived on September 6 and in short order browbeat the chiefs into signing an agreement surrendering title to the Black Hills and to hunting rights in the Powder River country. Over the objections of the Oglalas and Brules, the commissioners insisted on the removal of their agencies: either to the Missouri River or, more alarming, to new locations in Indian Territory—the hot arid plains of modern Oklahoma. Through the fall, the commission toured the other agencies, securing agreements from bitter chiefs who were told the alternative for their people was starvation.25

  Disquiet at the commission’s work and the tightening army control of the reservation forced a new exodus from the agencies. Moderate leaders like Touch the Clouds and Roman Nose refused to submit their bands to army counts and the surrender of arms and ponies. With about sixty-five lodges leaving Cheyenne River alone, the policy of repression and confiscation was backfiring badly.26

  The capitulation confirmed Crazy Horse’s fears about the reservation leadership. Disregarding the stark economic realities that lay behind the enforced signing, the Oglala war chief would reject every agency overture for the next five months. Feelings ran high at the news that the unceded territory was included in the cession. War chief and council declared Red Cloud Agency off-limits. Families favoring surrender would be soldiered into line, deserters whipped, their property confiscated or destroyed.

  As fall approached, game dispersed and pasture thinned along the Little Missouri. If the northern Lakotas were to remain free, they had to hunt to build winter surplus. Crazy Horse and the Oglala leaders argued for a return to the Powder River country, a move the Cheyennes also favored. Sitting Bull argued for a move north across the Yellowstone, where he could reunite his Hunkpapas. Most Miniconjous and Sans Arcs warily approved Sitting Bull’s line.

  At the very end of September, the Northern Nation again divided. Up to 465 lodges followed Sitting Bull slowly down the Little Missouri valley. Almost as many Oglalas and Cheyennes followed Crazy Horse west. At the junction of Powder River and Clear Fork, the people divided again. Most Cheyennes trended up the creek into the Bighorn Mountains. Locating their fall hunting operation along the upper Bighorn River, the Cheyennes happily renewed their feud with the Shoshones. When the Cheyennes settled into winter quarters high up Red Fork of Powder River, during
the third week of November, they signaled a clear intention of sitting out future hostilities.27

  From Clear Fork Crazy Horse’s people turned northwest. About 250 lodges—comprising Oglalas, some Brules, ten Cheyenne families, and straggling Miniconjous and Sans Arcs—followed the war chief, but along Tongue River, game still proved elusive. Pushing on to the head of the Rosebud, the village trekked over plains still blackened from the summer burning. But here the progress slowed. For about a month, the village moved along the upper Rosebud, an indication that the Buffalo North had made its hoped-for crossing of the Yellowstone.

  For a few weeks, life settled into old routines, and Crazy Horse was happy to mount his traditional end-of-season raid into the Crow country. Crazy Horse was victorious in the skirmish, “and brought back a lot of scalps,” recalled Black Elk. A Crow woman was killed, reportedly by Crazy Horse, and one hundred vengeful Crow warriors agreed to enlist as scouts for Colonel Miles against the Lakotas. On November 12 a Crow reprisal party made off with some Oglala ponies, but a fresh Crow scalp added to the illusion of life as normal.28

  In truth, Crazy Horse’s war council was already troubled by news of the new military presence on the hunting grounds. Scouts confirmed that Miles was settling in for the winter along the Yellowstone, establishing Tongue River Cantonment as winter quarters for his regiment and six companies of the Twenty-second. From Glendive Creek, Lieutenant Colonel Otis’s command, comprising four more troops of the Twenty-second Infantry and two of the seventeenth, escorted the supply trains that channeled provisions, forage, and even a beef herd upstream to Miles. In mid-October, as Sitting Bull’s village crossed the Yellowstone, he began to harry Otis’s trains, varying frontal attacks with dialogue through reservation visitors.