CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  The unprecedented intervention hardened attitudes against Crazy Horse within the Miniconjou–Sans Arc villages. Through the next day, the envoys openly pressed a daylight departure. Upwards of 150 lodges approved the proposal. Slowly, women began the work of packing and striking tipis, but then akicita threw a cordon around the villages. Eagle Shield recalled the heralds’ announcement: “[N]o Indians could leave that camp alive.” A defining moment passed, and the women started to pitch their tipis again. Akicita ordered Important Man and Fool Bear to leave the village, but over succeeding nights, they returned singly to lead away four lodges, close relatives of the hostages. Some moderate headmen sent word to the Cheyenne River authorities, arguing for concessions, hoping to deepen dialogue.

  The final departure of Important Man and Fool Bear marked a hiatus in the diplomatic offensive against Northern Nation solidarity. What it did not remove was a disturbing level of mistrust aimed at Crazy Horse. Moderate leaders were appalled at his marching into other villages and deploying his bodyguard to threaten and cajole. Although the constituted village leaderships supported the no-surrender line, many must have resented the high-handed intervention in their affairs. Dissatisfaction grew. Through the first half of January 1877, leadership began to shift ground.

  No Water, invisible since his fall arrival from the agency, is twice mentioned in a Cheyenne account as being in the Oglala village. No Water could exploit this juncture to talk up conditions at the agency. Hitherto dismissed as propaganda for the dependency culture, his reports of the weekly beef issue, or the distribution of blankets and lodge coverings, took on a different cast in the Moon of Frost in the Tipi. With the new year, an incipient polarization was once more threatening Oglala society.2

  As this drama had unfolded, the decoy warriors arrived near Tongue River Cantonment. Skilled horse thieves targeted Miles’s stock, driving away 150 head of cattle from the beef contractor’s herd. Miles took the bait. He detailed three infantry companies to follow the raiders’ trail, and on December 28, the patrol clashed with four warriors guarding the herd, recapturing 108 head. The easy victory persuaded Miles to commit more men to the pursuit, and later that day another company marched out from base, hauling a twelve-pounder Napoleon gun.3

  On the 29th Miles assumed command of operations. In thirty-below-zero cold, three more Fifth Infantry companies, including a detachment mounted on captured Lakota ponies, followed their commander up the Tongue. Huddled in buffalo skin overcoats and sealskin caps and gauntlets, Miles’s entire command numbered 436 officers and enlisted men. A second artillery piece, a ten-wagon supply train, and a handful of civilian and Indian scouts completed Bear Coat’s strike force. Compared with Crook’s brigades, it seemed puny. The men were tired after a punishing winter. Even after the troops united with the forward detachments on the thirtieth, Crazy Horse’s warriors could hope for another victory such as their leader had shaped throughout the past year.

  On New Year’s Day, 1877, and again on January 3, gunfire was exchanged between scouts and Bear Coat’s troops. Miles had projected a pursuit for sixty or seventy miles, but the carefully staged demonstrations recommitted him to the chase. About the 5th, as the command neared the village site at Hanging Woman, Crazy Horse and the war council ordered tipis struck and declared that the villages themselves would assume the decoy function, leading the soldiers up the Tongue through the foothills of the Wolf Mountains. The bold but dangerous plan speaks of Crazy Horse’s supreme confidence, after the Little Bighorn, in his ability to exploit the military mindset. Alarm sounded among the moderate, and dissension probably lay behind a split in the villages. The main Oglala village pressed straight up Tongue River. With them traveled Ice and Two Moons, leading the core of Cheyennes still committed to resistance. Another group of Cheyennes and Lakotas followed up the valley of Hanging Woman Creek. Snow lay over a foot deep, and both parties traveled slowly through the subzero cold and stinging snow flurries.

  Behind them, Miles’s command passed the deserted village sites on January 6. On the seventh, the command bivouacked early on the east side of the Tongue, in a pocket of timber below an elevation that Indians called Belly Butte. The valley was hemmed by the foothills of the Wolf Mountains, a jumble of rugged ridges, their north-facing slopes whitened with snow. That afternoon Miles’s scouts rounded up an unwary group of seven Cheyenne women and children and one shame-faced youth, traveling between the two camps. Word of the troops’ approach had passed quickly upstream. Seeking the security of numbers, the contingent following Hanging Woman had quickly crossed the ridges to reunite with Crazy Horse.

  On the Tongue, the people encamped near the mouth of Deer Creek, about thirty miles upstream of Belly Butte. A full council debated the crisis of the captives. Some argued for a parley, others for an immediate assault. The Cheyenne Sacred Arrows Keeper, backing the latter option, staged a dramatic ritual. An arrow was fired straight into the air. Startled Oglalas remembered that, as it fell to earth, the arrow circled the throng of Cheyenne warriors, each man holding out his own arrow to gain some of its awesome power. At length councilors reached an uneasy compromise. The Cheyenne White Frog recalled that a strong party “went back to meet Miles and [to] fight or make peace.” Black Elk’s recollection indicates that two chiefs were named to represent the factions. The Cheyenne Dull Knife was on hand to temporize, and Crazy Horse represented the war front.4

  The two hundred warriors attempted no negotiations. Espying a second sortie by Miles’s scouts, an advance party attempted a small-scale ambush of its own. The civilians were only extricated by Miles ordering his mounted unit to cross the Tongue, secure a commanding hill, and plant one of the field pieces. As dusk settled over the valley, firing briefly flared, until darkness and several artillery rounds dispersed the attackers.

  At the village, dissension rocked councils into the night, as men debated Crazy Horse’s demand for a full-scale assault. Many wished to hurry the village south to safety. At length the headmen turned over the decision to the warrior societies. The war front itself showed signs of serious fracture. Some urged that the decoys continue operations, luring Miles into the broken country farther upstream. Others argued for an immediate offensive. Two miles upstream of Belly Butte, the breaks of Wall Creek afforded excellent terrain for an ambush. Crazy Horse knew that infantry demanded a different response than the frontal close-quarter fighting he had mastered against cavalry. A fixed-position ambush offering maximum cover to the attackers was the best tactic.

  Backed by Little Big Man, Crazy Horse urged this option. Ice and Two Moons concurred for the Cheyennes. Despite the backing of Hump, most Miniconjous wavered. The authoritarian excesses of the war front had, disturbingly, alienated many of Crazy Horse’s traditional supporters among his mother’s people. Soon after midnight, a party of five to six hundred warriors—little more than half the available force—mounted and turned their ponies downstream. With anger at the half-hearted response breaking his composure, Crazy Horse ordered the assembled people “to go down and meet [Miles]. . . or else move camp.”5

  Snow flurries stung the blackness. Soon after 6:30 A.M. on January 8, overeager Cheyennes showed themselves atop a ridge upstream of Miles’s bivouac. The alert commander, scanning from the dawn heights, made out massed Indian movement and hurried to make his dispositions. Crazy Horse and his war leaders, pausing only to divide the force—most Cheyennes crossing to the east bank of the frozen Tongue, Lakotas continuing down the west—poured in a charge like the one that almost carried the day at the Rosebud. Topping the heights above both banks, lines of warriors briefly drew rein and shouted a challenge to the breakfasting troops.

  The Battle of Wolf Mountains, January 8, 1877

  As Winchesters barked an opening salvo at 7:00 A.M., Crazy Horse’s warriors raced along the western bluffs. Defying a single company line drawn above the west bank, the charge sought to outflank the main command across the river. The shrill of war whistles signaled orders and directions. Warriors gallop
ed from the timber for a position directly opposite the wagons, unlimbered in two rows beneath a sheltering cutbank. Riding back and forth along the snowy slopes, they levered a persistent fire into Miles’s camp. Suddenly, from emplacements above the opposite bank, the two artillery pieces opened up. Shells burst along the bluffs, exploding in midair and propelling screaming shrapnel among the warriors. From their tight infantry formations, buffalo-coated troopers poured in heavy fire. Ponies reared in fright, slipping on the ice, or fell under the hail of lead. A passing artillery shell momentarily felled horse and rider before it passed on to leave them miraculously unhurt. Crazy Horse was one of the unlucky riders. The last of nine or more war ponies to die beneath the Oglala war chief was shot from under him, leaving him to scramble up behind a comrade as the warriors withdrew out of range.

  Crazy Horse made a quick reassessment of the tactical situation. The main action was now on the east side of the river, where the Cheyenne contingent had seized a line of ridges and bluffs extending south from Belly Butte. Although a troop unit controlled an isolated knoll, these heights commanded both it and the bivouac. Offering the cover of ravines, boulders, and the cedar-studded crests, a consolidated position there could neutralize the infantry strengths of unshakable lines and accurate fire. Crazy Horse and his fellow war leaders decided to concentrate the attack there. A force of warriors was left in the bottomland timber to apply continued pressure from the rear. As midmorning drew on under iron gray skies, Lakota warriors swung down to the river. Around a sheltering bend, they strung across the ice, then up the far bank. Dismounting in the ravines, they scrambled on to the heights.

  Snow had resumed falling. Crazy Horse was among the warriors who seized the exposed spur of Belly Butte, taking up positions behind the boulders and loosing a sustained barrage from their repeaters and Sharps carbines. Across the flat crest, in full view of the troops, the Cheyenne Big Crow capered, sniping with his Custer battle Springfield. Miles ordered Captain James S. Casey and Company A, Fifth Infantry, to seize the butte. In double time, the unit hurried in line up a draw, exposed to heavy fire. Crazy Horse and his comrades flattened themselves behind the boulders, dodging ricocheting bullets before peeping out to shoot as Casey’s men stormed uphill. The low elevation caused most warriors to shoot futilely over the troopers’ heads, but the army fire raked the crest. One shot felled Big Crow, and while warriors tried to retrieve his fatally wounded body, a blistering fire enfiladed their position. Undaunted, Crazy Horse’s contingent made a charge on foot as A Company topped the ridge. Amidst thickening snow, the contending forces fought briefly hand to hand, the Indians wielding their carbines as clubs. One or two Lakotas were killed in the close-quarters fighting. At length, the warriors disengaged to augment comrades along the southern heights.

  Casey’s sally was now exposed to flanking fire, and Miles threw forward another company to take the second line of ridges. Stumbling up the icy boulder-strewn slope, the walk-a-heaps marched relentlessly forward. Officers shouted commands, and the line halted to fire volleys up the slopes. In a gathering blizzard, the warriors mounted a stiff resistance behind rocks and fallen cedars, levering a rapid fire into the whiteout. Blinded by the snow and disconcerted by the resumption of shelling from the Rodman gun, the warriors withdrew. It was noon, but the deteriorating conditions made it seem like nightfall, and the engagement had lasted five hours.

  As the war party paused at Wall Creek, a small rearguard fell out. Crazy Horse detailed ten warriors to follow the command. Then, as the main body pressed homeward, Crazy Horse and three comrades screened the retreat. For two days, Miles lingered at Belly Butte, mounting reconnaissance patrols upstream but attempting no further advance. Careful to avoid the charges laid at General Crook’s door, he waited until January 10 to abandon the field and withdraw to base, arriving at Tongue River Cantonment on the eighteenth. The deteriorating weather and the exhaustion of Miles’s men and stock marked the end of winter campaigning in the Great Sioux War.

  Nearly equally matched, Indians and troops had acquitted themselves well in the Battle of Wolf Mountains. Both Miles and Crazy Horse had projected a campaign to end the war; both had been disappointed in a clash that ended in strategic stalemate. Contemporary military reports acknowledged that the battle was far from a walkover. “Nor was Crazy Horse, the Indian leader, that day, an adversary to be despised,” conceded Captain Edmond Butler in a dispatch to the Army and Navy Journal. “He tried every point of our lines, but [Miles]. . . anticipated every move and foiled and punished each successive attempt.”6

  In fact, Wolf Mountains represented another tactical breakthrough for Crazy Horse and his war leaders. Fighting infantry had been the Indian blindspot throughout the war. Crazy Horse’s mobile tactics could match anything the cavalry deployed, but Lakotas frankly admitted they were stalemated by infantry defenses and firepower. If the Rosebud, in its frontal charges and close-quarter combat had been an unusual Plains Indian battle, Wolf Mountains’ protracted duel over the commanding heights was positively anomalous. Posterity has favored Miles at the expense of Crazy Horse. Taking the commander’s own claims at face value, historians have asserted that the tactical defeat convinced the Indians of the inevitability of surrender. In truth, the factors compelling capitulation were already in place. They related more to deep-seated morale problems, reservation diplomacy, and winter game dispersal than to the short-term effects of a battle many warrior recollections treated as an inconsequential skirmish. Miles’s withdrawal, like Crook’s after the Rosebud, in fact freed the Indians to resume hunting. Short term, the battle, and a brief interlude of successful surrounds, actually boosted war front morale.

  Late on January 10, Crazy Horse and the rearguard rode wearily into the village. Near the junction of Tongue River and Prairie Dog Creek, it had regrouped in two sprawling camps—one of Oglalas and Cheyennes, and one of Miniconjous and Sans Arcs. Scouts reported buffalo herds only miles north of the villages, and hunters replaced depleted stores. A flurry of feasts relieved the pressure on the war front.

  One week after Wolf Mountains, the cycle of celebration spun into higher gear. On January 15 Sitting Bull made his long-deferred arrival. After Baldwin’s attack, his people had regrouped along lower Powder River. One hundred Hunkpapa lodges and the ammunition train represented a welcome fillip to Crazy Horse. Feasts, dances, and councils went into overdrive as he and Sitting Bull propounded a united line of total resistance. Tales of arrests and internments rebuked moderates who dared to talk surrender.7

  Sitting Bull presided over the redistribution of the Métis trade goods. Besides ammunition for the warriors, blankets and beads targeted the flagging support of the women, while tobacco conciliated wavering elders. Miniconjou Decider Black Shield publicly welcomed the revival of the war spirit. One of the architects of the victory against Fetterman ten years previously, Black Shield lent his prestige to the war front, stating, “he wants to fight—wants war.” Others were able to channel Sitting Bull’s ammunition to further the war front’s strategy. Holy man Yellow Grass cornered the Sans Arc consignment. He hosted a series of yuwipi-like night rituals, conjuring up ten boxes of cartridges at one meeting.

  Within twenty-four hours of Sitting Bull’s arrival, private feasts testified to the underlying discontent. Roman Nose, a Miniconjou leader with strong ties to Spotted Tail Agency, recruited the tacit support of moderates, including Crazy Horse’s kinsman Touch the Clouds, and deputed two Brules, Charging Horse and Make Them Stand Up, to slip away to Spotted Tail Agency “to get the news.” They were to request that Spotted Tail “go there to them with tobacco,” assuring agency chiefs and army officers that the embassy would net large-scale surrenders—at least one hundred lodges. The two messengers left secretly that day, January 16.8

  Still others favored surrender at Cheyenne River. Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law Red Horse recalled good treatment and regular rations there. Addressing the skeptical war chief, he stated that he recognized the U.S. president as his Gr
eat Father, conceding the government the kinship status that Crazy Horse so bitterly disputed.9

  In the ten days after Sitting Bull’s arrival, the mood of fractious division deepened. If the war front could have proclaimed a united strategy, it might have convinced waverers—or soldiered them into obedience. After the first days of reunion, however, it was not common ground that was on display, but the distance between the leaders. Still supremely confident in his military capabilities, Crazy Horse intended for the Northern Nation to remain on the hunting grounds, even in the certainty of renewed campaigning.

  Sitting Bull, however, was pulled toward Canada. On the plains of the Northwest Territories, the Buffalo North still grazed in substantial herds. The pace of wasicu settlement was much slower than in the United States. Building on old British trade ties, coexistence seemed possible with the red-coated North-West Mounted Police. Now headmen like Four Horns argued vehemently for an early start to unite with their tribespeople already gone into Grandmother’s Land. Seeking to maintain coalition solidarity, Sitting Bull declared that his people intended to cross the Missouri once more to trade, leaving ambiguous his long-term plan—a return to the hunting grounds, or refuge in Canada.10

  Illustrating the crippling divisions within the Miniconjou–Sans Arc village, ranking Decider Spotted Eagle was shifting toward the Canadian option. Lesser leaders, like the Miniconjou chief Flying By, headman Red Thunder, and Sans Arc war leader Turning Bear, were also swayed by Hunkpapa reasoning. As if the defection of the emerging peace party was not enough, a third faction crystallized around Lame Deer, who supported Crazy Horse’s position.