By late January deep snow drifted over the valley of the Tongue, keeping hunters indoors. As the game failed, the factions broke apart. Sitting Bull hosted a final feast to announce that his people would seek refuge in Canada. Soon soldiers would return, and the people were not prepared for another season of warfare. Gall underlined Hunkpapa unity on the issue. Agency defections, Gall told Crazy Horse, would leave the Northern Nation too weak to contest the hunting grounds.11
According to Stanley Vestal’s Lakota informants, Crazy Horse responded with some of the bitterness he had expressed after learning of Sitting Bull’s fall negotiations with Miles. But a new note, of fatalistic despair and sullen last-ditch intransigence, was also sounded. “My friend,” he began, “the soldiers are everywhere; the Indians are getting scattered, so that the soldiers can capture or kill them all. This is the end. All the time these soldiers will keep hunting us down. Some day I shall be killed. Well, all right. I am going south to get mine!”12
“I do not wish to die yet,” Sitting Bull quietly observed. The long maturing of the two men’s relationship as figureheads of the Northern Nation meant that no open break took place. Both were at pains to smooth over their differences and assert an integrated strategy. Remaining on the hunting grounds, Crazy Horse would try to “hold our land” against the inevitable army reprisals. If defeated, or seriously weakened by desertions, he might lead his core followers after the Hunkpapas: “He is looking at me to see if it is still good here,” declared Sitting Bull upon arriving in Canada.13 Sitting Bull told Crazy Horse that his people would move first to the forks of Powder River, near where buffalo herds were reported, and a later rendezvous on Blue Earth Creek was debated before final departure for Grandmother’s Land. Crazy Horse moved to conciliate, shaking hands with each of the Hunkpapa headmen before he departed. For all the assurances of solidarity, the parting was melancholy. The two men, who in the past seven years had risen above so many tribal differences to assert a national ideology, would not meet again.
On the following day, Sitting Bull led out fifty lodges of Hunkpapas. Many other people, uniting around the charismatic Spotted Eagle, agreed to rendezvous with him. The departures included significant numbers of the people most resolutely opposed to the Americans. They punctured the mood of unrealistic optimism that had followed Wolf Mountains. Key leaders in the war front—Crazy Horse’s akicita chief Little Big Man, Cheyennes Ice and Two Moons—sensed a turning and began to moderate their opposition to all conciliation.
A significant break immediately appeared in the Oglala facade of total resistance. The council deputed a headman named Red Sack to go to Red Cloud Agency “to ascertain how matters were and to return and let them know as soon as possible.” The reopening of dialogue indicated that the situation was slipping out of Crazy Horse’s control. Faced with council consensus, the war chief chose not to press the issue and rupture what remained of village goodwill. On January 24 Red Sack departed.14
The nearly simultaneous exit of another party bore no council imprimatur. When fifteen lodges of Brules, Oglalas, and Miniconjous started for Spotted Tail Agency Crazy Horse deployed the akicita. In a sinister echo of army surrender terms, the warriors seized the defectors’ arms and ponies. The confiscation hardened the resolve of the deserters and secured the pity of their tribespeople. The fact that friends and relatives secretly outfitted the party with fifty-four horses and a handful of firearms, to enable a nighttime departure, testifies that the war front was dangerously alienated from its own people. Although Crazy Horse might in the short term tighten his control, Lakota society could not run against the grain of public opinion.15
Through the last days of January, moderates defied the war front. At a warrior feast, Red Horse raised the stakes, telling his brother-in-law, “I was going where the whites lived and [would] give myself up to them. I told him he must not send his soldiers to intercept me, better for his cause if he did not for. . . there are many of his own people who like me.” Crazy Horse registered no immediate objection. Visiting his tiyospaye relatives, Red Horse arranged a piecemeal departure under cover of darkness, projecting a reunion on Powder River. Spotted Elk secured the cooperation of his kindred, and the defectors met no resistance as they slipped away. The Sans Arc White Eagle made the mistake of scheduling an open daylight removal. As White Eagle’s womenfolk completed their packing, Crazy Horse led “about a hundred of his soldiers, [and] surrounded my camp. Some of them dismounted, entered our lodges and took our guns. . . I was very angry then at the soldiers, and pulled down my lodge and started right in the face of them. They shot down two of my horses, but I moved on.” Some thirty-nine lodges, 229 people, left with the three headmen for Cheyenne River.16
Even in the Oglala village, defectors multiplied. On January 26 White Eagle Bull, with another man and a woman, left for Spotted Tail; three days later, five lodges of Brules followed. Already the akicita resistance had the feel of marking time. A final incident took place on February 1. The Cheyenne chief Little Wolf ordered struck the shabby windbreaks that his relatives occupied. Four families of ragged people rigged travois to skeletal ponies and started from the village. Crazy Horse led a line of akicita across the campground, but the redoubtable Little Wolf defied the war chief. The line closed around the defectors, and in an angry face-off, the akicita seized eleven Cheyenne ponies, shooting several to die kicking in the bloody snow. Undaunted, Little Wolf led away his people, swearing vengeance on Crazy Horse.17
Then, in the first days of the Moon of the Dark Red Calf, the facade crumbled. Bound for Canada, Spotted Eagle led away 150 lodges of Sans Arcs, Hunkpapas, and Miniconjous to reunite with Sitting Bull. Most remaining Miniconjous and Sans Arcs, another 150 lodges, soon drifted uncertainly in their wake. The mass departures left about 370 tipis, mostly Oglala and Cheyenne, on Tongue River. Lodges were cramped, some crowded with two families. Many Cheyennes remained housed in pathetic shelters stretched over branches. Famished people were desperate for meat and skins. Scouts reported sizeable buffalo herds grazing in the Bighorn foothills, barely forty miles to the west.18
Consensus quickly favored the Bighorn option. Only two leaders argued against the western move—for diametrically opposed reasons. No Water at last declared his hand, speaking openly for immediate surrender. Aware that Bear Coat would exploit the yawning distances between their villages, Crazy Horse proposed a move east to reunite with Sitting Bull at Blue Earth Creek. Most people were unconvinced by No Water’s trust in the army regime at Red Cloud, and only twenty lodges of Lakotas followed him south. Their departure was uncontested, however, revealing the total collapse of the war front. But if consensus failed to firm around the defectors, it totally eluded Crazy Horse. Testimony to the alienation even of key followers, only the war chief’s own tiyospaye elected to follow him east. Unthreatened by any troop movements, the main village, now comprising some 310 lodges, switched to the peacetime organization of Deciders and hunt akicita. About February 3 it headed west, over the bleak divide into the upper Little Bighorn valley19
For a day or two, Crazy Horse lingered at the old campground, as if expecting a change of heart, then he too ordered his tipis struck. Only ten lodges strung behind Crazy Horse, the families most intimately bound to him by blood, marriage, and adoption. Worm and Crazy Horse’s stepmothers urged their ponies through the drifts. Red Feather, always the devoted brother-in-law, and his little family were on hand to aid their sister Black Shawl. Oyuhpe warrior Tall Bull—at six feet, eleven inches and 280 pounds, “a corpulent and festive Sioux” —chose to remain with the war chief. Relatives and associates whom Crazy Horse could remember as lifelong neighbors, like the Iron Whiteman family, filled out the tiny procession as it wound into the valley of Powder River. In the bare bottomland timber at the junction with Clear Fork, where hunters might expect to flush deer and elk, they pitched camp. As family teams scattered to hunt and forage, for a few days the fact of war was suspended in the immediate imperatives of winning a living.20
Thrown back on the intimacies of tiyospaye life, he was forced to confront the consequences of resistance at all costs. Widows, and the old, always his first thought in peacetime, had suffered most. Elders like his aunt Big Woman, sharing Worm’s tipi, and seventy-eight-year-old Human Finger should be living comfortably, well provided for by dutiful children. Instead, they were hungry, anxious, and cold. Women, the guardians of family life, had suffered too in the blind obsession of resistance. Black Shawl was suffering from a resumption of the coughing sickness that had blighted their courtship. Surveying this legacy of the months of dictatorial control, Crazy Horse drew back.
“To hold our land” —so Crazy Horse had pledged himself to the departing Sitting Bull. What was to be done? The war chief realized that the answer, elusive as it was, had to encompass what had been unthinkable even days before: that the remnant Northern Nation could no longer resist the blue-coated troops he had last year defeated. He knew that some leaders were prepared to cooperate with the army commanders and seek a compromise on territorial rights. As winter ended, any day might witness the reopening of the stalled diplomatic initiative from the reservation.
Discouragements multiplied. Belated messengers brought the news that Sitting Bull, although stalling on the headwaters of the Big Dry, clearly planned to regroup in Canada, with only the sketchiest plan to return to the hunting grounds. “Our land” had become uniquely Crazy Horse’s burden.21
To any pious Lakota, the acquisition and manipulation of sicun was a process subject to wastage. In Crazy Horse’s case, the revelation of Thunder power was tripped by an on-off switch that left him periodically drained, burned out. Such phases emphasized the contradictions of the man, rendering him one day masterful and the next, terminally irresolute. To receive guidance and rebuild sicun, he must acquire more power from the wakan beings. Consulting the elders, he decided to renew his vision questing. “There were things that he had to figure out,” recalled young Black Elk, “and he was wanting the spirits to guide him. He would then go back to his people and tell them what he had learned.”22
Then, about February 11, events twisted to demand Crazy Horse’s public engagement. The cottonwood grove rang to shouts of visitors coming. Through the trees, thirty Lakotas rode into the cluster of shabby smoke-blackened tipis. A wary reunion yielded to joy as relatives recognized each other, and the visitors were led to the council tipi. Matrons donated meat for a feast. With no need of summons, all war-proven males assumed seats around the circle. Flanked by the elders and key warriors, Crazy Horse sat at the honor place. Then the visitors placed meat packs and packages of tobacco, wrapped in blue and red cloths, before the war chief. The peace talkers had arrived at last.23
With winter campaigning closed, the renewal of diplomacy marked a political offensive by the increasingly competitive field commanders—Miles on the Yellow-stone, and Crook from the Department of the Platte. First to engage were Bear Coat’s envoys, who departed Tongue River Cantonment on February 1. Locating the main Oglala-Cheyenne village in the Bighorn foothills, the messengers spent several days in intense debate, until key proponents of the Cheyenne war front backed dialogue. Both Two Moons and Ice, staunch Crazy Horse supporters in the winter soldiering regime, crystallized support. About February 12 a deputation of twenty-nine men, chiefly Cheyenne but including the Miniconjou Hump and three other Lakotas, left for Miles’s headquarters to discuss terms.24
Three hundred miles south, the White River agencies hosted intense talks between Crook’s subordinates and the reservation chiefs. Courted personally by Crook, Spotted Tail declined to lead an embassy until unconditional surrender terms were relaxed. At the Oglala agency, however, army proposals met with a warmer response, and thirty warriors volunteered. Representing all the agency Oglala bands, their leader was Hunts the Enemy, a nephew of Red Cloud and an akicita leader in the Bad Face band.
The party departed on January 16, making slow progress over the winter plains. At last, along the Little Powder, the envoys “met three Indians who told them that Crazy Horse was encamped some little distance above on Powder River and that Sitting Bull was just below the mouth of Little Powder.” Targeting Oglala relatives, the delegation swung upstream. A day or so later, they reached Clear Fork and were ushered to feast and parley with Crazy Horse.25
The war chief was surprisingly gracious, in deep contrast to his reception of the December envoys. After the meager feast, Hunts the Enemy made a forceful presentation. Skimming the unconditional surrender terms, he stressed the need for Oglala tribal solidarity in a new diplomatic battle to retain their lands. Other envoys spoke. “Their speeches,” they reported, “were not [immediately] responded to.”26
Etiquette prescribed that messengers sleep at the host camp after making their proposal, leaving the council to debate the issues. Red Feather recalled his kinsman’s mood. “Crazy Horse didn’t want to go [to the agency]. He didn’t answer them for a long time.” The second day’s talk, hosted by the visitors, was manifestly a stalling exercise. Nevertheless, the war chief continued to be gracious, affirming that the envoys “were relations and should be friends.” The envoys reported that after smoking their pipe, Crazy Horse spoke at length: “The smoke was good. He did not commence the war. His relations were at the Agencies; he could send for all the [Northern Nation] Indians and let them decide what they should do; that if he told them to stay they would do so, even if they were to die, but he would let them say.” Politely, he declined to open the tobacco. Instead, he told Hunts the Enemy to take it to the main Oglala village in the Bighorn valley. Whatever their decision, he reiterated, he would “do the same as the others did.”27
The speech revealed the depth of Crazy Horse’s change of heart. Careful to invoke his authority as war chief, for the first time he acknowledged its limits. The deputation divided. Only Hunts the Enemy and three comrades pressed on to the main Oglala village. Crazy Horse outfitted each man with a horse from his own herd, underscoring his tentative endorsement of their mission.28
In only two days of talks at the main village, Hunts the Enemy secured an Oglala consensus. Herald Iron Hawk announced the council decision—to travel to Red Cloud Agency and open diplomacy with the army. Hedged with provisos and warnings that travel would be slow, Iron Hawk’s speech nevertheless broke the impasse in dialogue. Debate on the problematic issues of pony and arms confiscations was postponed. On this momentous issue of peace and war, a decision had been reached without consulting Crazy Horse. Everyone was at pains to stress his amenability to consensus, but the council was now acting independently of its war chief.
Soon after the big council, runners from Crazy Horse arrived to invite all bands “to meet him on little Powder river.” They announced that six messengers from Spotted Tail had now arrived at Crazy Horse’s camp. The Brules brought the war chief a formal announcement that Spotted Tail was mounting the biggest peace initiative yet.29
On February 10 messengers Charging Horse and Makes Them Stand Up had arrived at Spotted Tail Agency. To the Brule head chief they carried the invitation to open dialogue. Immediately Spotted Tail went into intensive talks with Crook. Two days earlier, the first newspaper reports of Miles’s “victory” at Wolf Mountains had forced the general to drastic conclusions. Lest Miles scoop all the glory, off-the-record concessions were made to secure capitulations within the Department of the Platte. Crook agre
ed that all surrendered stock be turned over to enlisted Lakota scouts, who would be free to redistribute them to northern relatives. He pledged his influence in stopping the government drive to relocate the White River agencies on the Missouri. Even more significantly, the general would recommend to the Great Father that the Northern Nation be assigned a separate reservation on the hunting grounds, once all warring bands had surrendered. Armed with these concessions and a mule train of presents, Spotted Tail departed his agency on February 13, taking the trail along the east edge of the Black Hills. With him were 250 Brule headmen and warriors, including band chiefs Swift Bear, Two Strike, and Iron Shell.
Crazy Horse attempted to orchestrate a concerted response before Spotted Tail’s arrival. After dispatching runners to every village and camp, during the last week of February, he led his tiyospaye over the bleak divide into the upper valley of the Little Powder, camping in deep snows. A group of the envoys remained with the camp, and as it traveled, 110 lodges from the main Oglala-Cheyenne village, responding to the call for rendezvous, caught up. Briefly, Crazy Horse could have hoped for a revival of Northern Nation solidarity.
Game was poor, and the camps scattered along the valley. Many of the new arrivals were already committed to surrender, as soon as the trails were cleared. Whoever the leaders—Little Big Man, establishing a role as the moderate northern leader, is a real possibility—they were careful not to establish a village in which the war chief could reassert martial law.30
Straggling buffalo herds were sighted, and as February turned into the Moon of the Snowblind, two successful surrounds were made. Farewell feasts marked Hunts the Enemy’s departure for Red Cloud. The moderate leaders, confirming surrender, “requested that beef, rations &c. might be sent out to meet them at Hat Creek.” Pressed to speak, Crazy Horse reluctantly agreed he would “come in and hold a council” during the spring.31
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