CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  Miles promptly marched on Sitting Bull, dispersing his village in a two-day running battle. Along the Big Dry, the bands of Sitting Bull, Gall, and Pretty Bear reunited with some of the satellite hunting bands that had peeled off the main village in August. But fifty-seven lodges of Hunkpapas, following headmen Iron Dog, Long Dog, Little Knife, and Lodge Pole, pushed farther north, camping just across the border of the British possessions. The theme of refuge and exile in Grandmother’s Land had been sounded.29

  More amenable to dialogue with Miles were the Miniconjous and Sans Arcs. On October 26 five leaders gave themselves as hostages, pledging the surrender of their people at Cheyenne River Agency within thirty-five days. During the talks, the headmen wrung off-the-record concessions out of Miles. When the chiefs raised Lone Horn’s old plan of an agency near the Black Hills, Miles made some favorable noises. Once more, the prospect of an agency to secure their homeland in perpetuity animated Indian negotiators.30

  Crazy Horse was disturbed by the reports from his Miniconjou kinsmen. Clearly, Miles—whom the messengers already called Bear Coat, after his winter apparel—intended to remain in the field through the cold months. Unlike Crook and Terry, Bear Coat was unfazed by Lakota courage and ferocity and had already formulated a total strategy, forcing a wedge between the two main blocs of non-treaty people. If Sitting Bull could be pegged north of the Yellowstone, and Crazy Horse south, the two blocs could be defeated piecemeal. Miles’s dangling of a Black Hills agency, and the prospect of safe winter hunting in Canada, only further eroded Northern Nation unity. As the council progressed, Crazy Horse revealed something of the strains beginning to wear on his self-possession, indignantly protesting that he would not face the “whole force of the whites alone.”31

  Also attending the council were a number of new arrivals from Red Cloud Agency. Posing as goodwill visitors, they were in fact informers for General Crook. Guardedly, they revealed to Crazy Horse something of crucial developments south. At Fort Laramie, General Sheridan had outlined with Crook plans for a second winter campaign. As preparations matured, Crook had arrived at the Oglala agency late in October to enlist scouts. He also privately recruited a number of spies to infiltrate Crazy Horse’s village. The informers’ instructions were to talk up surrender, subtly undermine northern morale, and report on village movements once Crook’s command was in the field. Knowledge of these Oglala fifth columnists is unsatisfactory, but their number may well have included Crazy Horse’s old enemy No Water.32

  At Fort Fetterman, Crook assembled eleven mounted companies, drawn from the Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth cavalry regiments, as well as fifteen infantry troops and the Fourth Artillery. Augmented by the civilian packtrain and four hundred Indian auxiliaries—Pawnee, Shoshone, and Bannock volunteers serving alongside the Lakota recruits—Crook’s command topped twenty-one hundred effective men. On November 14 the Powder River Expedition started up the familiar route north from Fort Fetterman.

  Sixty-three Oglala warriors, fifty-five Arapahos, and ten Cheyennes served as scouts. They believed their motivation was patriotic. They realized that, although Lakota courage and leadership might yet win battles, the army’s logistical backup would prevail once winter pinched bellies and blanketed pasture. Continued warfare could lead only to futile suffering, and would further compromise Lakota claims to their hunting grounds—even to the reservation. Only after surrender, the scouts reasoned, could Crazy Horse’s people engage in the vital dialogue that might preserve the nation’s homeland.33

  Crazy Horse’s reading of scout motivation was not so charitable. The paranoia of betrayal that would characterize his final weeks had its roots in the troubled fall of 1876. Privately, he withdrew ever deeper from the prospect of dialogue with the agency leadership. But the village mood was subtly shifting, and Crazy Horse made no public objection when six of his warriors left for Red Cloud on November 19 to investigate conditions at the agency.34

  Whatever Crazy Horse’s private inclinations, his village had no heart for an offensive against Miles. Hunting to provide meat and winter robes would engage all the energies of his fighting men for weeks. Scouts located buffalo herds farther west, high up the Little Bighorn. To move there would only compromise the stretched communications with Sitting Bull. In mid-November Crazy Horse dispatched a Sans Arc messenger to locate Sitting Bull, urging that the Northern Nation reunite on Powder River and counter the threat posed by Bear Coat.35

  More heartening was word from the east. After its parley with Miles, the main Miniconjou–Sans Arc village had swung south to Slim Buttes. During the second week of November, a significant break took place. Only a minority of about forty lodges, close relatives of the hostages taken by Miles, decided to honor their pledge to surrender at Cheyenne River. Three hundred more lodges decided to return to the hunting grounds. The village council nominated four new Deciders—Miniconjous Lame Deer and Black Shield, and Sans Arcs Spotted Eagle and Red Bear. All determinedly wedded to the old life, the Deciders notched up akicita resistance to capitulation at Cheyenne River.36

  Their messengers proposed a union with Crazy Horse. Eager to consolidate, Crazy Horse announced a rendezvous between the Tongue and Powder rivers. Crazy Horse was gratified to learn that Lame Deer and his fellow Deciders were united against further capitulation at the agencies, but a strong sentiment favored following up on the negotiations with Miles. Oglala leaders were also amenable to a dialogue that might be an entering wedge to secure their territorial rights to the Black Hills and the hunting grounds. Although the constituted village leaderships of Deciders and war chiefs maintained a fastidious distance, they chose not to interfere with the peace process.

  Early in December, Crazy Horse’s people were camped along Beaver Creek, a small east tributary of Tongue River, barely sixty miles from Miles’s headquarters. Food packs were thinning, and some people were reduced to butchering weak ponies. Then, on December 6, a straggle of half-naked people staggered into camp. All that day and for several more, the drain continued. Destitute and hungry, many of the newcomers were disfigured by frozen extremities and limbs; many more nursed terrible wounds. On November 25 Crook’s cavalry arm, commanded by Mackenzie, had struck the Cheyenne village in the Bighorn Mountains. Cheyenne warriors mounted a stiff defense, but by midafternoon, the troops’ firepower prevailed. With forty people killed and their village torched, Cheyenne families watched seven hundred of their ponies divided among Mackenzie’s blue-coated Indian scouts.

  For eleven days, the frozen survivors fled over the mountains and the wind-scoured plains. Each night children died from exposure and hunger. Exhausted horses were cut open and babies held inside the steaming bellies to preserve warmth and life. At last the vanguard met hunters from Crazy Horse’s village. Reprising their reception after the Reynolds battle, Oglala heralds assembled the ragged procession on the campground. Again matrons brought out kettles and readied a feast of welcome. After eating, the Oglalas presented gifts of dried meat and pemmican. Robes, blankets, and packsaddles were stacked up, and the heralds announced that every married woman would receive skins enough to construct some kind of shelter. Men drove up horses and presented friends with tobacco.37

  The first arrivals, comprising a majority of people committed to the war, would echo the verdict of Wooden Leg: “The Oglala Sioux received us hospitably.”38 As the days passed, filling out the makeshift shelters with demoralized people who leaned toward surrender, that generosity narrowed. Stores were failing, and Crazy Horse ordered his akicita to consolidate resources. They circuited the tiyospaye clusters, collecting clothes and tipi covers. “We helped the Cheyennes the best we could,” admitted Short Bull a little defensively: “We hadn’t much ourselves.”39

  To many Cheyennes, Crazy Horse seemed preoccupied, detached. As winter deepened, an uncharitable observer might have read his steely resolve as pitiless. Crazy Horse “received them with very slight manifestations of pity,” surrendering Cheyennes would bitterly complain. Some late arrivals even
found themselves forced to trade for the few lodgeskins and shelters left. Increasingly, Crazy Horse channeled resources into bands and warrior factions supportive of the war front. Moderate chiefs like Dull Knife and Standing Elk were marginalized. Instead, the Lakotas recognized Black Moccasin and his nephew Ice—whom Crazy Horse remembered from his bulletproofing experiment nineteen years earlier—as principal leaders: men who had followed the Oglala village throughout the fall and were against any surrender.40

  In meetings of the war council, Crazy Horse sought to tighten village resolve. Intelligence from Red Cloud Agency reported that some incoming men from the hunting grounds not only had been forced to surrender arms and ponies but had been imprisoned at Camp Robinson. The village council declared the Oglala home agency completely off-limits, echoing Crazy Horse’s personal paranoia. Every arrival from the agencies was suspected as a spy. Camp removed fifty miles southwest, to the junction of Tongue River and Hanging Woman Creek. Impatiently Crazy Horse awaited a response from Sitting Bull, eager to launch a new offensive against Miles.

  Through November, Sitting Bull’s village had evaded Miles’s patrols. Sitting Bull agreed with Crazy Horse’s determination to rid the hunting grounds of the new bluecoat war house. Ammunition stocks, so badly depleted during the summer, had to be renewed if any offensive was to be launched. Early in December, Sitting Bull and his people spent a few intensive days at the border, trading with the Métis, eagerly exchanging their robes and dried meat for powder, lead, and cartridges. When Sitting Bull readied his people to reunite with Crazy Horse, his bodyguard warriors were able to organize a mule train to rival Crook’s—packing fifty boxes of fixed ammunition to equip the warriors for a winter campaign.

  On December 7 Sitting Bull recrossed the Missouri, followed by 122 lodges, but the pull of sanctuary continued to draw his people across the 49th parallel. Another fifty-two lodges, the tiyospaye of Black Moon, White Guts, and Crawler, opted to join relatives in Canada. For now, Sitting Bull could invoke Northern Nation unity to keep on board restive headmen like Four Horns and No Neck. Another disaster, though, might shatter that brittle consensus.41

  The Miniconjou–Sans Arc village had located on the Yellowstone only a few miles downstream from Tongue River Cantonment and reopened talks with Miles. On the morning of December 16, five delegates approached the post. A group of Crow scouts met them with handshakes. One Crow, the husband of the woman killed by Crazy Horse’s war party, recognized his wife’s horse and shot the rider, Miniconjou delegate Gets Fat with Beef, from his saddle. Other Crows wrenched his comrades from their ponies, clubbing and hacking the Lakotas to death before fleeing the scene. Vainly, Miles had iyeska scouts carry presents and placatory messages to the village, but it was too late. Within hours of the killings, Lame Deer and his fellow Deciders had their people moving to rejoin Crazy Horse.42

  Apprised of the tragedy, Crazy Horse immediately declared that the Crow atrocity was no unforeseeable tragedy but had been carried out at Miles’s orders. “Crazy Horse thought the soldiers had helped the Crows to do this,” remembered Black Elk, “so [the people] were mighty sore over this.” Nevertheless, village councils insisted that reprisals be limited to the Crow contingent, reflecting a growing consensus to limit the scale of hostilities.43

  Crazy Horse left the village alone. Vengeance was out of the question since Miles, still hopeful of placating Lakota opinion, had dismissed all his Crow scouts. Crazy Horse restricted operations to reconnaissance, surveying a quadrangle of log barracks and blockhouse stores built between the west bank of the Tongue and the Yellowstone. Miles’s infantry alertly manned the post. Crazy Horse recognized that the troops’ accurate firepower more than compensated for their lack of mobility: behind the extended range of their rifles, the inflexible squares and skirmish lines of the walk-a-heaps were less susceptible to panic than those of their cavalry comrades. A frontal assault on the post was out of the question. Only by drawing Miles far from his base, into the broken foothill country southward, was there a chance of neutralizing his strength.

  By about December 20, four villages—Oglala, Cheyenne, Miniconjou, and Sans Arc—were clustered at Hanging Woman Creek. As many as eight hundred standard tipis lodged a massive winter concentration, approaching the peak summer strength of the Northern Nation. Crazy Horse stepped up his war talk. In a characteristic surge of energy, he urged the new arrivals to join his offensive. Lame Deer and the Deciders were relatively easy to convince, but fear, hunger, and faction ran deep. After Slim Buttes and the Mackenzie fight, many people “were in a constant state of suspense and fear of a like disaster.”44

  The case for caution seemed all the stronger when Hunkpapa messengers brought shocking news. On December 18, three companies of the Fifth Infantry, led by Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin, caught Sitting Bull’s people unawares on the divide between the Missouri and the Yellowstone. Baldwin’s howitzer salvo found no target but served a warning to the Hunkpapas, who fled across the bleak tableland, abandoning their tipis and winter stores. Sitting Bull’s warriors were alert enough to save the ammunition mule train, but vital supplies were lost. The Hunkpapas had to scatter to restock food packs and refit lodges. Given winter privations, and the lure of Canada, Sitting Bull would have to exert every ounce of his moral strength to keep reunion with Crazy Horse on track.45

  The Oglala war chief was unwilling to sit out events. Any day blizzards might close the country, indefinitely delaying the offensive. War leaders, warriors, and cautious elders were at last swayed by Crazy Horse’s resolve. Fifty Oglala and Cheyenne warriors would draw out the troops from Tongue River Cantonment. In contrast to the highly mobile tactics deployed at the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, this would be an even more ambitious decoy strategy than High Backbone’s exactly ten years previously. Minute attention to detail would be necessary to ensure that Miles’s command was lured into an ambush one hundred miles south, where the broken terrain of the upper Tongue afforded the attackers some advantage.46

  Some reluctant headmen were intimidated by an increasingly dictatorial akicita force. Something of their misgivings, and the febrile paranoia that was taking hold of Crazy Horse, is suggested by the observation of his Miniconjou brother-in-law Red Horse. The headman was bemused by Crazy Horse’s insistence on keeping the offensive secret from the women and children. In a society as open as the Lakota, such secrecy was transparently futile and speaks to the conviction that public knowledge of the offensive would terminally polarize the villages. When the warriors left, about December 23, Crazy Horse was prepared to enforce total solidarity. Hitherto always respectful of local autonomies, famously compassionate to the poor and unfortunate, now he readied himself and his bodyguard to intervene wherever dissension appeared, or the cries of the hungry, the cold, and the frightened would signal the will to conciliate, compromise, and capitulate.

  19

  ALL THE RIVERS LIE ACROSS MY ROAD

  Within hours of the decoy force’s departure, the brittle solidarity Crazy Horse and his akicita had imposed on the Northern Nation was threatened. Two Lakotas dismounted in the Miniconjou and Sans Arc villages. Packages of tobacco wrapped in blue and red cloths made patent their purpose—envoys from the reservation had finally arrived to talk surrender. Relatives of the hostages secured by Miles pending surrender at Cheyenne River, envoys Important Man and Fool Bear stressed the predicament of the prisoners, pointed to the privations of winter, and urged immediate surrender.1

  A series of talks was hosted throughout the villages. Although Crazy Horse made no personal attack on the envoys, the Oglala response was immediate, negative, and intemperate. The Cheyenne war leadership, centered on Crazy Horse supporters like Ice and Two Moons, backed the Oglalas: “[T]he Cheyennes and Ogallalas would not listen,” reported the pair, “and abused us very much.” In a council presided over by Red Bear of the Sans Arcs, the envoys laid their tobacco before the Deciders, explaining that it came from Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell, commanding the post overseeing
Cheyenne River. The Deciders probed. Uncomfortably, Important Man and Fool Bear conceded that Buell’s terms were unconditional, demanding the surrender of all ponies and arms. Their account of the army takeover only compounded the unease audibly transmitted through the council tipi. Politely but firmly, the Deciders rejected the envoys’ tobacco, and the council closed.

  The envoys wasted no time in visiting the tipis of the hostages’ relatives. Over private meals, they assessed the deep underswell of opinion. Away from the public forum, many people admitted their fears and misgivings. White Eagle, a Sans Arc headman related to one of the hostages, had repeatedly tried to leave the village with his four tipis, but each time, akicita prevented a departure. Dissatisfaction with the dictatorial war front was deep rooted, but fear of punishment ran deeper. Crazy Horse was mentioned everywhere as the ideological architect of total resistance.

  As the envoys listened to the litany of increasing repression, the door flap was thrown open, and Crazy Horse stooped to enter the tipi. The Oglala war chief and a knot of bodyguards sat, and in a village not his own, without constituted authority, and riding roughshod over that of the Deciders, Crazy Horse openly threatened both envoys and their nervous hosts. “[W]e would never be allowed to take any one from that camp,” the envoys reported. “If any left they would be followed and killed.”

  After Crazy Horse’s astonishing declaration, Important Man and Fool Bear assumed a low profile, working to effect a secret departure. About December 25, thirteen lodges slipped away after nightfall, the envoys breaking trail over the frozen ridges. “We got quite a ways,” they reported, “supposing we had got away, when all at once ‘Crazy Horse[’] appeared with a good many warriors.” Backed by Little Big Man and the Oglala akicita, Crazy Horse ordered the breakaways to halt. Then the Oglalas “shot all our horses, took our arms and knives, and all our plunder, and then told us if we wanted to go to the whites to go on, but the snow was so deep we could not travel without horses, and we had to return to the hostile camp.”