CRAZY HORSE

by Kingsley M Bray

  Unaware of Red Cloud’s escalation of the intrigue, Crazy Horse had every reason to be satisfied with developments as the council with Clark closed. With the hunt restored to the top of the agenda, the following day brought more encouraging news. At the regular ration issue, Black Shawl and other claimants were issued new tickets. Having completed his revised census, Dr. Irwin had authorized ration increases of 15 percent—increases that went some way toward alleviating the northern village’s repeated demand for an increase in the beef ration.27

  Lieutenant Clark also received instructions from General Crook on the 28th, lifting restrictions on sales of ammunition. Indians preparing for the departure of the hunting expedition could stock up on powder, lead, and fixed ammunition. The stores of J. W Dear and Frank Yates prepared to order new supplies. Influenced by Red Cloud’s assessment of the hunt question, Irwin was reluctant to cooperate with the new military directive and advised his superiors of his concern.28

  24

  MANY BAD TALKS

  August, the Moon of Black Cherries, opened auspiciously at Red Cloud Agency. The northern village was in better temper than at any time since the surrender. Even Crazy Horse’s suspicions were allayed by the announcement about the hunt: Billy Garnett recalled that the war chief seemed “well satisfied” by the latest developments.1

  Busying itself with the preparations for the hunt, the village was in a happy hum of activity by August 1. Farewell feasts were announced to assure agency hosts of the northern village’s intentions to return in time for the delegation’s mid-September departure for Washington. On the 1st of the month, Lieutenant Clark reported to Crook that he had received invitations for no fewer than three such feasts.2

  From Washington, authorization for the trip east finally arrived. The Indian Office wired Crook on August 2, asking the general to “select a delegation of 15 or 20 Indians from Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies [to be sent] to Washington under charge of Agent Irwin, or some suitable army Officer.”3 Instructions were promptly wired to Camp Robinson. The news coincided with the lifting of the ban on ammunition sales, and the two trading stores opened for a day or two of boom business. In the agency council room, Clark hosted another talk and read Crook’s telegram aloud. It met with measured approval, although the Oglala leaders were emphatic that a larger group should be authorized.4

  Aware of the need to field a representative body of leaders, Clark advised that the recognized band chiefs form the core of the delegation. Addressing the issue of northern village representation, Clark proposed Crazy Horse and Little Big Man as the obvious candidates. This too was accepted quietly. As the meeting broke up, Clark held an informal talk with the northern leaders. At their request, he went over the telegram’s main points again, explaining it “kindly and fully.”5 Crazy Horse’s party then rode home to make their final plans for the journey north.

  Several hours earlier, in the northern village, Crazy Horse’s Miniconjou kinswoman Iron Cedar Woman noticed a strange woman walking across the campground. Crazy Horse’s tipi skins were rolled up, and Black Shawl was inside, sewing. The stranger entered and spoke quietly to Black Shawl. To the intense interest of village gossips, Nellie Larrabee had arrived and entered a long conversation with her lover’s wife.6

  In the month or more of courtship, the one unknown quantity had been Black Shawl’s attitude to her husband acquiring a second wife. Nellie forthrightly told Black Shawl of the depth of feeling between her and Crazy Horse. However divided might be her feelings, Black Shawl decided not to stand in the way. Despite medical care from the Camp Robinson surgeon, her respiratory sickness lingered and she nursed a painfully swollen arm. She generously told Nellie that a new wife might “enliven [Crazy Horse’s] spirit.” Black Shawl would offer no objection if Crazy Horse wished to bring home a second wife.7

  Black Shawl’s generosity of spirit was matched by Nellie’s courage and determination. Aware of the opposition to her marrying the war chief, Nellie may have feared that the first thrilling weeks of courtship were stalling into impasse. Later in the afternoon, the northern leaders returned from the agency. As Crazy Horse tethered his pony, Nellie stepped out of the door place, and to the war chief’s surprise, she told him she had won Black Shawl’s consent to their match. A little abashed, Crazy Horse accepted the unorthodox proposal and awkwardly told Nellie to move in her gear. As the gossips watched agog, Nellie reentered the tipi. For the next thirty days, she would be Crazy Horse’s second wife.8

  On the following morning, Nellie’s father and mother appeared in the northern village. After some words with their daughter in her new home, they returned to announce the news to her worried brothers and sisters. For the moment, Long Joe decided to accept his daughter’s headstrong fait accompli, but he was disgruntled with the development and made no secret about the agency of his displeasure.9

  Within a day or two, Crazy Horse’s goodwill was placed under sudden and serious strain. On August 5 a message from Lieutenant Clark arrived at Spotted Tail Agency instructing military agent Lieutenant Jesse M. Lee that all Indians who desired could join the hunting expedition with Crazy Horse’s village. Immediately, the Brule leadership moved to quash the plan. Upon leaving the agencies, Spotted Tail contended, the northern Indians might resume hostilities, or even make a break to join Sitting Bull in Canada.10

  Spotted Tail and Swift Bear pressed Touch the Clouds and the northern Deciders at Spotted Tail Agency to postpone the hunt. Since the delegation was due to leave in six weeks, this amounted to cancellation. At Red Cloud, the agency leadership also favored deferring the hunt, asserting the overriding importance of formulating a united tribal position to present in Washington. Even Young Man Afraid of His Horse, key agency supporter of the hunt, agreed on the preeminence of diplomacy.

  At Crazy Horse’s village, though, plans for departure were already complete. One newspaper report indicates that Yellow Bear and part of the agency Spleen band, also committed to the hunt project, were readied for departure. Fulfilling Crook’s schedule, on August 5 the Deciders led a short move to Little Cottonwood Creek.11 Seven miles north of the agency, the campsite was squarely on the trail to the hunting grounds, skirting the edge of Hat Creek Bluffs before angling northwest toward Warbonnet Creek and the crossings of the South Cheyenne.

  But now word was received from Touch the Clouds that his village would not join the northern Oglalas on the hunt. At the same time, Clark began renewing his invitations for talks on the Washington trip. He made at least one personal visit to the village. Crazy Horse told him that “he wanted to do right, but wanted plenty of time to consider” the delegation matter. Clark decided not to press Crazy Horse for an immediate decision, “hoping that the influence of his head men might be sufficient.”12

  Further messages followed up Clark’s visit, inviting the northern leaders to private talks at his quarters at Camp Robinson. Little Big Man and the other Deciders, in formal control of the hunt operation, rode to the post, but Crazy Horse, recalled Billy Garnett, “did not like this arrangement.” Yet another delay was added when the army paymaster visited Camp Robinson and all scouts were invited to draw their back pay on August 7. Again Crazy Horse refused to attend. Concluding that protracted talks were indefinitely deferring departure, Crazy Horse told the village council that “he wanted to go on with the hunt” immediately13 He repeatedly declined Clark’s invitations, still refusing to state categorically whether or not he would go to Washington. In a bitter play on words, the war chief told Clark’s messengers that he “was not looking for any Great Father [the President]. His father was with him and there was no Great Father between him and the Great Spirit.”14

  The message harked back to wartime rhetoric. Dissatisfied with delay, Crazy Horse began to listen to voices that reawakened all the old suspicions of wasicu intentions. Images of arrest and even death, first kindled in the days preceding surrender, returned to haunt him.

  Clark asked Frank Grouard to pay a call on Crazy Horse and “do what he
could” to talk him around. Grouard found his old friend grimly resigned, as in the days after the death of They Are Afraid of Her. Crazy Horse told Grouard he had woken from a dream in which he stood on a mountain peak and watched an eagle soar far above him. Suddenly, the eagle folded its wings and fell dead at Crazy Horse’s feet, its body pierced by an arrow. In the vivid super-logic of dream, Crazy Horse knew the eagle was himself, and told Grouard “he was looking for death and believed it would soon come to him.”15

  The dream shook him, its memory disturbing his sleep patterns. Nellie Larrabee became a key influence during these critical days. She confirmed Crazy Horse’s deepening paranoia, telling him the delegation was a trick, that once in the government’s power, he would be imprisoned and never allowed to return. Although later historians have been quick to discredit Nellie, imputing a bewildering mix of malign motivations, she was only repeating the gossip of the intermarried community at Red Cloud, gossip that had its roots in newspaper stories, off-the-record talks around Camp Robinson, and the spin placed on events by a Byzantine array of political factions. Rumor it may have been, but we shall see that much of Nellie’s suspicion had a strong grounding in reality.16

  Nellie’s intervention marked the beginning of a new phase in Crazy Horse’s alienation. Hitherto, the voices discouraging him from going to Washington had been those of political rivals. Now his closest associates and relatives also urged withdrawal. His Miniconjou uncle Spotted Crow advised Crazy Horse that “going to Washington is only a decoy. They want to get you away from us and then they will have you in their power.” Another uncle, Black Elk, concurred with Nellie’s analysis and even brought over his son-in-law, half-breed John Provost, to supply supposed inside information. An enlisted scout demoted from sergeant in the July reorganization, Provost confirmed Black Elk’s claims, stating that Crazy Horse would be imprisoned if he went east, perhaps on an island in the sea.17 Aware of the fates of southern plains war leaders, incarcerated in a Florida prison since the Red River War in 1875, Crazy Horse grew ever more suspicious.

  But Clark, as well as Agent Irwin and Lieutenant Colonel Bradley, only pressed the issue harder. Clark primed the more tractable Deciders and akicita leaders to bring around the war chief. Irwin did the same with agency leaders, which only deepened Crazy Horse’s distrust of Red Cloud and the other chiefs.18

  Crazy Horse had always resented this sort of pressure, retreating into silence. He Dog, one of Clark’s go-betweens, remembered, “after a while Crazy Horse became so he did not want to go anywhere or talk to anyone.”19 After a visit to Red Cloud, Major George M. Randall observed that Crazy Horse was being “talked to too much, but if they would let him alone and not ‘buzz’ him so much he would come out all right.”20

  But the “buzzing” only got worse. Crazy Horse was also aware that not all Clark’s runners were messengers. About midmonth, the lieutenant asked a few of his most trusted Oglalas to watch the war chief. Woman Dress, a cousin of Red Cloud’s serving in Crazy Horse’s scout company, had a plausible pretext for loitering in the northern village. Woman Dress, the brothers Lone Bear and Little Wolf, and Frank Grouard operated as Clark’s key informers. Little Wolf began to visit regularly the tipi next to Crazy Horse’s, paying court to the daughter of the lodge and, holding her in the chaste embrace of the Lakota suitor, listening with one ear to the conversations next door.21

  From now on, Crazy Horse’s nerves would suffer from exhaustion both mental and physical. The war chief’s behavior echoed the profound mood swings of the previous winter, but the cycle of resignation and furious activity began to spin faster, its troughs deeper and its peaks more frenzied and desperate. Tensions deepened in midmonth. A military rethink on the hunt issue resulted in a War Department directive rescinding Crook’s permission for the agency traders to sell ammunition to the Indians.22

  Realizing that the hunt was becoming a dead letter, Crazy Horse prepared to notch up his opposition to the delegation. Many followers began to feel disquiet at their war chief’s intransigence. A slow drip of defections began during the second week of August, as the moderate began to consider seriously the option of attaching themselves to the bands of agency relatives. Red Cloud in particular stepped up appeals to kin to leave the northern village ahead of a final reckoning.

  The first defector of significance was Crazy Horse’s old comrade He Dog. Already nursing serious misgivings about the war chief’s alienation, He Dog was asked by Clark to extend a personal invitation for Crazy Horse to come with him to the post. He Dog was hurt when Crazy Horse was pointedly absent from home, and “felt bad” when, upon finally contacting the war chief, Crazy Horse flatly turned down the invitation. Nevertheless, Crazy Horse was not simply evasive or negative. For Clark’s information, he reformulated to He Dog his position on relocation: “If they would have the agency moved over to Beaver Creek, then he would go to Washington as they asked him.” But He Dog felt snubbed and ordered the lodges of his Sore Backs tiyospaye struck. As Red Cloud’s nephew, He Dog had the strongest ties with the agency hierarchy. Moving across the White River valley, the Sore Backs pitched camp near his uncle.23

  After ten days of withdrawal and reflection, Crazy Horse was ready to launch one of his intense bursts of activity, seeking to formulate a strategy that could shape events rather than merely react to them. When a new invitation from Bradley asked Crazy Horse and Little Big Man to attend talks at post headquarters, the war chief accepted the tobacco—perhaps another gibe at Clark’s expense. On August 15 Crazy Horse and Little Big Man rode to Camp Robinson. Bradley reiterated, “the Great Father at Washington had sent word to them that he wanted them to come and see him. ‘Little Big Man’ immediately gave his consent to go, but ‘Crazy Horse’ would give no satisfactory reply as to what he would do.”24

  Bradley was left still in doubt about Crazy Horse’s intentions. He telegraphed departmental headquarters that Crazy Horse “refuses now” to go to Washington, leaving open the possibility that after further deliberation he might agree to go east.25 This only restated the position taken ten days before. But Crazy Horse’s actions show that he was now pursuing a dual strategy. In meeting Bradley, he was appeasing the moderate wing of the northern village, and buying time with the military authorities.

  Yet immediately upon return to camp, Crazy Horse began implementing his second line of strategy. As evening drew on, he invited twenty trusted followers to a private talk where the war chief outlined his plan. Under cover of darkness, the party, headed by Two Lance, was to make the forty-mile journey to the northern village at Spotted Tail Agency and invite Touch the Clouds and the other leaders to move their camp to unite with Crazy Horse on Little Cottonwood Creek. As dusk deepened, the envoys left the village “secretly” and slipped quietly east.26

  As private messengers of the war chief, Two Lance’s party represented the first clear-cut break in the village organization. Crazy Horse was now willing to risk the delicate accord between him and the Deciders. Crazy Horse was willing to act unilaterally in a high-risk strategy that he calculated would force matters to a head. As always, that strategy was rooted in uniting the two northern villages. Such a union would create a joint village of about four hundred lodges, fielding a warrior force of over five hundred fighting men—a force that could shape events on White River. Then, Crazy Horse might finally force a resolution of the impasse stalling the fundamental question: relocation to the hunting grounds.

  Crazy Horse would already have been aware of what threatened to become a crucial factor in the situation. The Oglala agency bands were preparing to form a united tribal village to facilitate debate over the Washington trip and to formulate a single tribal policy on the new agency location.27 All too aware that union might lead to compromise, or even the acceptance of an agency site on the hated Missouri River, Crazy Horse felt the need for allies who would staunchly uphold the northern reservation scheme. He must have awaited anxiously the return of Two Lance’s party.

  During the day, A
ugust 16, the messengers returned quietly from Spotted Tail Agency, piecemeal like a defeated war party. At a hurried night council, distinctly not the done Lakota thing, Touch the Clouds and the other Deciders had given the messengers “a very cool reception.”28 Crazy Horse’s tobacco packages were returned unopened. Just what reasons the Miniconjous and Sans Arcs gave Two Lance is unreported. But at the Brule agency, the hunt was already a dead issue. On agency location, the Brules had agreed to retain the existing site, naming Wounded Knee Creek, farther down the White River valley, as a fallback position. A northern site was emphatically not on the Brule agenda. Spotted Tail was determined to present a united Brule front in Washington and was already pressuring northern leaders to toe his line.29

  As further inducement, a special annuity distribution for the Miniconjous and Sans Arcs had been scheduled for August 20, only five days away30 If Touch the Clouds moved his village to join Crazy Horse, he would jeopardize his people’s receiving the blankets, clothing, and domestic implements they still badly needed after the winter’s privations. Village consensus favored no intemperate action in accepting the Oglala war chief’s tobacco. Crazy Horse could expect no support from the Miniconjous and Sans Arcs.

  On August 17 all Oglala and Arapaho leaders were called to Red Cloud Agency and addressed by both Agent Irwin and Lieutenant Clark. Clark read aloud the latest telegram from Crook, stressing that Crazy Horse was requested “particularly to go” on the Washington delegation. Reporting to Crook the following day, Clark stated:

  I explained to [Crazy Horse] that in addition to the other interests involved, you wished him to come on with the others and work with you in regard to their Agency and, if possible, prevent any undesirable change. That the President wanted him to come and you were anxious to have him go; that it was important and necessary for us all to work earnestly and honestly together in the matter &c &c.31