The full extent of the alienation from Crazy Horse was only beginning to register. Outside of the people already committed to surrender, no one responded to the war chief’s runners. The main Miniconjou–Sans Arc village moved east to the Little Missouri, responding warily to Spotted Tail’s request for dialogue. From Sitting Bull, no response was heard. Compounding Crazy Horse’s isolation, on February 26–27, Spotted Eagle’s village crossed the frozen Yellowstone, hurrying up Cedar Creek to overtake the Hunkpapas. The curt rejections of Crazy Horse’s tobacco ironically underscored just how deeply his war front had rocked national morale.32
As if this were not enough, his own tiny following had begun to fragment. Four lodges, including Worm’s, left on a hunt down the Little Powder. Most demoralizing of all, another four tipis turned south to catch up with No Water’s party, surrendering at Red Cloud on March 14. The victor of the Little Bighorn was left with a following of two lodges. On March 3 Four Horns crossed into Canada with fifty-seven lodges of Hunkpapas. On the 4th, the delegation sent to talk with Miles arrived home in the main Oglala-Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn. To people capitulating at Tongue River, and enlisting as scouts against hostile Indians, Bear Coat offered a home—effectively a reserve on the hunting grounds. Several Cheyenne leaders acclaimed the news. Most were more wary, but the council called a formal end to hostilities. Heralds “cried through the camps that the war was over, and that no more hostile expeditions would be allowed against the white man.” The village was struck and moved slowly toward Tongue River.33
After the departure of Hunts the Enemy’s party, news from the agencies focused on the Spotted Tail mission. Locating a base camp on the upper Moreau River, Spotted Tail opened dialogue with the Miniconjous and Sans Arcs. His runners arranged a grand council of the Northern Nation to be held on the Little Powder three weeks hence.
The prospect of total capitulation loomed. Spotted Tail’s co-opting of Crazy Horse’s own abortive rendezvous can only have rankled, but deeper misgivings animated the war chief. Spotted Tail had been the idolized uncle of his boyhood, but over the past twenty years, he had traveled further than any other Lakota chief on the wasicu road. Crazy Horse correctly concluded that the integrity of the northern hunting rounds was low on Spotted Tail’s priority list. Profound distrust was only compounded by Crazy Horse’s fear that Spotted Tail might invoke an uncle’s compelling authority.
Since the village breakup, Crazy Horse had felt the need to seek guidance from the wakan powers in this greatest crisis of his nation’s history. Wary, suspicious, Crazy Horse was yet realistic enough to realize that to “hold our land” might now be possible only through negotiation. Visionary revelations might give him the moral strength to engage with the Spotted Tail delegation, and with the army hierarchy controlling his people’s destiny. He underwent the purification of the sweat lodge, reimposing the self-denying celibacy of the vision seeker. About March 5 Black Shawl packed their tipi and belongings. Her condition made solitude impracticable, so a second family accompanied the couple. In weather still subject to savage reversals, the tiny procession angled northwest, into the snowy hills between the forks of Powder River. For three weeks they would disappear off even the Lakota radar, confounding envoys and runners as Crazy Horse sought the vision of guidance in what Lakotas called mani’l, the vast absent space of the wilderness.34
20
TO KEEP MY COUNTRY
For three weeks, Crazy Horse disappeared into the bleak hills east of Powder River, straddling the modern Wyoming-Montana boundary. Only one eyewitness account exists from those missing weeks. Soon after his departure, the Black Elk family, hurrying in to surrender, happened upon the family.
We found Crazy Horse all alone on a creek with just his wife. He was a queer man. He had been queer all of this winter. Crazy Horse said to my father: “Uncle, you might have noticed me, how I act, but it is for the good of my people that I am out alone. Out there I am making plans—nothing but good plans—for the good of my people. I don’t care where the people go. They can go where they wish. There are lots of caves and this shows that I cannot be harmed. . . . This country is ours, therefore I am doing this,” said Crazy Horse.1
For days at a time, carrying only pipe and tobacco bag, Crazy Horse left his tipi to seek the vision of guidance. Sheltering in caves and cliff overhangs when late winter storms blasted the plains, he fasted and prayed, wept and begged for the vision that could show him how best to preserve his people’s lands—a vision that eluded him. At the end of endurance, he would return home to take purifying sweat baths, but characteristically, Crazy Horse revealed little. Building on the prophetic vision of 1875, when he saw his homeland despoiled, he could offer only raw convictions. To Sitting Bull he had spoken of “holding our land.” Over the troubled months to come, he would remark of his will “to keep my country.” To Red Cloud, he observed, “makoce kin tewahila, I cherish the land.”2 This bedrock principle of preserving the hunting grounds would animate his remaining months of life. The lonely ordeal of hanbleceya only deepened the commitment.
As the days of solitude lengthened, however, other issues impinged on his meditations. Black Shawl’s health increasingly concerned Crazy Horse, focusing the subliminal energies of the dreamer. By late winter her condition was deteriorating. Army surgeon Valentine T. McGillycuddy attended Black Shawl during the following summer, diagnosing tuberculosis. Fits of bloody coughing recalled the troubled days of courtship; under the extreme privations of the wartime winter, the fits were exacerbated, leaving Black Shawl exhausted, feverish, and bed bound. The interminable weeks before spring continued to weaken her. Concern for her condition contributed to Crazy Horse’s slow realization that surrender was inevitable.3
In this same intense phase of vision questing, Crazy Horse was granted new spiritual power. After appealing through his old guardian spirit the red-tailed hawk, he received aid from the spotted eagle, the bird that flies closest to the powers of the Upper World. Passed down through three or four generations of practitioners on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the origin of Eagle doctoring is still attributed to Crazy Horse. That this is no facile piece of New Age hokum is confirmed by the red hawk connection—and still more significantly by the fact that the rite is used specifically to treat cases of tuberculosis. The eagle imparted key instructions to Crazy Horse. Over succeeding weeks, through consultations with the holy men, he would shape the raw data of vision into a ceremony of healing.4
About March 26 Crazy Horse, gaunted by three weeks of hunger and exposure, rode into the valley of Powder River twenty miles north of the forks. During his absence, messengers had kept him apprised of political developments and camp movements. During the Moon of the Snowblind, diplomacy focused on Tongue River Cantonment and the Spotted Tail mission. Little Hawk, and the Hunkpatila akicita Hard to Hit, participated in a second round of talks with Miles but rejected Bear Coat’s overtures. Instead, the main Oglala village projected a rendezvous with envoys from Red Cloud at Bear Lodge Butte. Spotted Tail’s mission secured surrender pledges from the majority of Miniconjous and Sans Arcs. First Touch the Clouds, with seventy crowded lodges, agreed to surrender at the Brule agency, responding to assurances that Spotted Tail had secured not only Crook’s approval of a northern agency but also crucial concessions on surrendering arms and ponies. In a final round of talks near Powder River forks, Spotted Tail convinced Roman Nose and Black Shield to surrender ninety more lodges.
Worm, visiting in the village with his four tipis, was won over by his brother-in-law’s arguments—exactly as Crazy Horse had feared. Concerned by the war chief’s no-show, Spotted Tail pressed for information on his whereabouts. Worm was guarded, saying simply that his son “was out hunting by himself.” Nevertheless, Crazy Horse had authorized his father to assure Spotted Tail that he remained committed to the wishes of his people. Worm said that his son would come to the agencies, “and shakes hands through his father the same as if he himself did it.” To interpreter Jose Mer
rivale, Worm presented a pony “as a token that Crazy Horse himself makes peace.”5
Spotted Tail detailed one Brule and one Oglala warrior to take tobacco and search for the war chief. Dissatisfied with the reports of the new rendezvous at Bear Lodge Butte, from which the Oglalas projected a simple courtesy visit to parley and trade at the agencies, Spotted Tail sent his last package of tobacco to Bear Lodge, warning the Oglalas “not to come in unless they brought their women and children—that they must bring their wives and children with them.”6
Early on March 26, Spotted Tail turned homeward. Thirty miles southwest, Crazy Horse returned to the Powder River valley, the end of his vision questing coinciding suggestively with the completion of the Spotted Tail mission. The main Oglala-Cheyenne village approached from the west. For the first time in seven weeks, village and war chief were reunited.
Testifying to a tight synchronization of movements, ten agency envoys also arrived. Seven Cheyenne delegates quickly convinced a majority of their tribes-people that surrender at Red Cloud was the best remaining option. Three Oglala messengers—Bear Don’t Scare, Shoulder, and Standing Rabbit—assured their relatives that they would be well treated. Contrary to scare stories, no one was being punished for his role in the war. “If [Crazy Horse] would go in to the agency,” the spokesman intimated, “the agent would issue rations, blankets, and clothing, and then allow him to go back home.” Most listeners divined that this statement was loaded with well-meaning optimism, but as they surveyed their people’s poverty, they found little to range against it. Once more, Iron Hawk crystallized the consensus position. “You see all the people here are in rags,” declared the herald, “they all need clothing, we might as well go in.”7
Eyes turned to the war chief. “They thought that Crazy Horse would have lots to say to them because he had been out meditating in the wilderness,” Black Elk recalled. Instead, Crazy Horse sat silently through the debate. He indicated his tacit approval, reiterating his weary mantra of acceptance. “Crazy Horse said whatever all the rest decided to do, he would do,” recalled Red Feather. “So they all agreed to go in. They promised to go over, get the rations and the clothing, and return west of the Black Hills again.” Solemnly, the pipe was lit and smoked. A morning departure for Bear Lodge was agreed, and the council broke up.8
As Crazy Horse returned to his tipi, the inevitability of surrender bore in. To Spotted Tail, Worm had pledged his son’s capitulation; now Little Hawk had promised Miles that he “would take [Crazy Horse] and the entire camp” to surrender, either at the agencies or on Tongue River.9 On every side, options were closing down, funneling the war chief toward the indignity of defeat. Even the weeks of vigil had left him unenlightened. Then, as he sat silently with Black Shawl, visitors arrived and told Crazy Horse that Lame Deer had remained on the Little Powder that morning. Rejecting Spotted Tail’s tobacco, the Miniconjou war chief planned to leave the following day for a buffalo hunt along the Tongue.
Only fourteen lodges remained with Lame Deer, the visitors admitted, but the report galvanized Crazy Horse. His commitment “to keep my country” seemed to dovetail with Lame Deer’s objectives. The hunt offered a last opportunity to reunite the Northern Nation. Perhaps he reasoned that a dramatic departure would force a break in the Oglala village, with the core nonagency contingent following their war chief. Needing the solitude to contemplate, Crazy Horse walked up the hills overlooking camp. He met He Dog, seated on the slope, and confided his plan.
He Dog was dismayed at his kola’s intransigence. “You think like a child,” he chided. “You smoked the pipe of peace the same as I.” He pleaded for Crazy Horse to reconsider, but “Crazy Horse said nothing.” After a while He Dog rose, leaving the war chief lost in reflection.10
The following day, March 27, as the Oglala village forded Powder River, en route to Bear Lodge Butte, the next staging point on the trail to Red Cloud, Crazy Horse turned his pony and started down the valley. If he expected a break in village unity, his hopes were quickly dashed. Black Shawl followed her husband, leading a string of gaunt pack ponies. Low Dog, irreconcilable to the last, and his family tracked the war chief, then a straggle of other lodges. No more than a dozen, most were from Hump’s Miniconjou tiyospaye. Their willingness to defy their headmen’s order to surrender to Miles testified to the authority Crazy Horse could still command among his mother’s people. But there the drain of support ended. The main village strung east, bound for Bear Lodge and surrender. In a last bid for defiance, Crazy Horse’s party urged jaded horseflesh northward.11
The union with Lame Deer fizzled into anticlimax. For several days, the little camp zigzagged across the plains in search of game. To preserve their horses, the people were compelled to make short removes. Their vulnerability to a new strike by Miles was plain to all. Slowly, the reality of the situation bore in on Crazy Horse. Lame Deer had no strategic aim, stating simply that he wished to make one more buffalo hunt; then he might turn in his camp at Cheyenne River.
A few more irreconcilables strung into camp. From the Cheyenne village, a small group—fourteen or fifteen men, only half of them with families—following White Hawk, raised a tipi or two and a scatter of shelters and wigwams. They reported that the delegates from Miles had prevailed on some three hundred people, composing forty-three lodges of Cheyennes and four from Hump’s tiyospaye, to surrender. Already these people were drifting uncertainly toward Tongue River Cantonment. Most Cheyennes, however, were swayed by assurances of good treatment at Red Cloud Agency. After the council declared that every Cheyenne should choose a place of surrender, almost six hundred people opted to follow Standing Elk and Dull Knife to the Oglala agency—that place of sufferance that yet was the best home they knew.12
More arrivals only compounded Crazy Horse’s deepening sense of futility and despair. Five lodges of Hunkpapas arrived from Sitting Bull. Reunion with the Hunkpapas had animated Crazy Horse’s hopes for the hunt, but their news was categorical. Camped in the Missouri River bottoms forty-five miles north of Fort Peck, Sitting Bull’s village had been caught by a sudden thaw on the morning of March 17. His camp destroyed again, the Hunkpapa leader had withdrawn toward the Canadian border. Spotted Eagle’s village still shadowed Sitting Bull northward. As soon as grass fattened the horses, their people would make the final push into Grandmother’s Land.
For the rest, there were only promises. At Bear Butte, from the Miniconjou–Sans Arc village en route to Spotted Tail, thirty lodges would break away. A few scattered family hunting parties also trended toward Lame Deer. Peaking at sixty-three lodges, wavering between defiance and the nostalgic wish for one last hunt before surrender, the camp offered no military solution to Crazy Horse’s quandary. For him, the dream of a revived Northern Nation, strong enough to defy another summer of army reprisals, was over.
A final consideration turned Crazy Horse’s thoughts homeward—Black Shawl. Her condition was patently deteriorating. Her hacking bloody cough had dominated their domestic life for weeks. Intimacy was compromised by the sickness. Through succeeding months, more disturbing symptoms accumulated: a badly swollen arm testified to secondary infections inflaming the joints. Unsightly and painful, it reduced Black Shawl’s capacity to run her own household. Further hurried removes between hungry camps would fatally undermine her health. To the end, Crazy Horse would remain solicitous of his wife’s welfare. If during his vision quest, his wakan helpers had extended to him the strength to heal, to test that calling required taking Black Shawl home, to the security and care of relatives.13
Crazy Horse readied his lodge to travel. Probably at this time, to aid Black Shawl in running the tipi, relatives offered to accompany the pair. The gigantic Tall Bull, now a fixture next to the war chief, two women, and two boys joined the couple, living in the family tipi.14 A travois nag hauled the lodgeskins. Other ponies were hitched with the lodgepoles or carried the packs, parfleches, and saddlebags that contained what was left of the family’s wealth—mostly worn buffalo robes, ma
ny that had been cut down to share with the winter refugees; household implements and a few metal items like battered kettles and a coffeepot; depleted meat packs of rawhide etched in fading paint; and Crazy Horse’s weapons. Tall Bull’s boys rousted the loose stock, and Black Shawl was attended by her kinswomen.
About April 3 the party approached the fluted volcanic upthrust of Bear Lodge Butte. Between cutbanks of red earth and meanders studded with bare cotton-woods, the Belle Fourche wound its placid course. Along the near bank stood a circle of tipis—cangleska wakan, the sacred hoop of the northern Oglalas. With no announcement, the little group rode through the entrance gap and across the campground to the Hunkpatila segment of the circle. Between the tipis of Iron Whiteman and Little Hawk, the women quietly unlimbered the lodgepoles and began the work of making camp. Crazy Horse had come home.
By early April, agency Oglalas prepared to welcome their relatives from the north. Reports were still ambiguous about the intentions of Crazy Horse, but from the statements of returning envoys, General Mackenzie concluded that the war chief was unlikely to surrender, and that the winter roaming segments of the nontreaty Oglalas and Cheyennes “will almost certainly stay out.”15
Oglala diplomacy fashioned a twin strategy to secure total surrender. After debriefing his brother, the envoy Running Hawk, Young Man Afraid of His Horse revived his plan for an agency in the north. Taking account of northern aspirations as well as the rivalry between the Department of the Platte and Miles’s independent command, he meshed his scheme with Crook’s plan for a northern reservation. In mid-March, after enlisting the support of fellow band chiefs American Horse and Yellow Bear, he approached Mackenzie. In return for locating their three bands, over two hundred lodges, at a new reserve on Tongue River, the chiefs promised to make peace with neighboring tribes and work as scouts against hostile Indians. Mackenzie reported favorably up the chain of command.16
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