Disconsolate, Red Feather demanded of Turning Bear why the Brules “left Crazy Horse and ran out [of the guardhouse]. I told them,” recalled the war chief’s brother-in-law, “they made it worse when they said, ‘Look out, this is the jail!’ and ran out.” Anger, grief, and frustration boiled over as Red Feather received no reply from the Brules: “I started to cry. I had my gun with me, and they thought I was starting to fight. The Rosebud men held me.”89 As the last of the northerners scattered back down the parade ground, Red Cloud stepped forward to deliver his parting harangue: “There is nothing to do. You fellows. . . [wanted it] this way, and now it happened.”90
In the dimming adjutant’s office, a lantern was lit. Touch the Clouds and Bat Pourier had followed inside, quickly joined by Spider and White Bird, key Oglala akicita. No more Lakotas were permitted in the building. Lieutenant Clark sent over Louis Bordeaux to be on hand in the office vigil.91
Inside, McGillycuddy and post surgeon Charles E. Munn were attending the wounded man. After McGillycuddy administered a first injection of morphine to sedate Crazy Horse, the surgeons were able to examine the wounds more closely. From the blood lacing his lips and nostrils, they knew that the right lung had been pierced. The lower wound, traversing the bowel mass, had now raised a dark purplish bruise over the right side of Crazy Horse’s groin. Although little blood was visible on the body, both wounds were bleeding internally. The surgeons knew that their patient could not survive past midnight. Beyond alleviating his pain, there was little to be done. Discussion in the room centered on whether Crazy Horse had been wounded by a bayonet or his own knife. Before he slipped into unconsciousness, the war chief said that he had felt the sentry’s bayonet enter his side. Anxious to save a still critical situation, McGillycuddy tried to convince the Lakotas present that Crazy Horse had inadvertently stabbed himself. He took a sheet of paper and pierced it with both the war chief’s knife and a guard’s bayonet. Pointing as he examined the wounds, he sought to show that their configuration matched that of the knife. His audience unconvinced, he at length laid down the paper on the office table.92
A little later, a commotion outside heralded a new arrival. Worm and one of his wives had arrived. Guards demanded their business, but at a word from Touch the Clouds, the guards stood aside. In the narrow orbit of the kerosene light, Worm knelt by the rude bed and said, “Son, I am here.”
At his father’s voice, Crazy Horse turned and forced himself through the morphine haze to respond. “Father,” he gasped, “it is no use to depend on me; I am going to die.” He sank back. His stepmother sobbed; then Worm and Touch the Clouds began to weep.93 At last the little group stood back, and Touch the Clouds sent a message to call Agent Lee. While the group awaited Lee, McGillycuddy poured a glass of brandy and held it to Crazy Horse’s lips. Worm objected, signing with his hands that his son’s brain whirled, and the doctor withdrew. At 10:00 P.M. Lee entered the office and crouched beside the dying man. According to Lee’s account, Crazy Horse took his proffered hand. Disjointedly the war chief began to speak, first in personal justification, then in bitterness at Little Big Man, and finally in qualified exculpation of Lee. At length he sank back.94
His audience strained to hear more, but Crazy Horse did not speak again. Pain visibly worked his features, and McGillycuddy administered another hypodermic of morphine. Weary with the strain of vigil, Worm and Touch the Clouds sat together on the floor at the opposite end of the office. The old man was suspicious of the surgeon’s medicine, and through Bordeaux, McGillycuddy told him that it was no use to let his son suffer; soon he must die. Reluctantly, Worm made the “hou” of approval. As Crazy Horse drifted into fitful slumber, the end had begun.95
For the little group, normal sounds took on unsettling clarity. The steady beat of the sentry outside, faint exchanges from the parade ground, the irregular exits and entrances—all punctuated the strained breathing of the dying man. Suddenly, from outside the melancholy trumpet call of Taps pealed end of day. To McGillycuddy the sound seemed briefly to rouse Crazy Horse, who murmured as if, the surgeon fancied, he woke on the afternoon of his greatest victory. Then his head sank once more.96
About 11:30 Pourier was admitted to relieve Bordeaux. Before he left, the interpreter felt Crazy Horse and knew he was growing cold. Despite the morphine, he turned restlessly, in great pain. Worm, knowing the end was near, rose to begin a harangue about his son’s life and greatness. Newspaper accounts depict his review of the family’s history, Crazy Horse’s deeds in war against the Crows and Shoshones, and the causes of the late conflict in the north.97 Every messenger from the agencies had said, “‘Come in! Come in! Or the Gray Fox [General Crook] will drive you after Sitting Bull” into Canada. At last Crazy Horse had come to the reservation, and Red Cloud and Spotted Tail “had to stand aside and give him the principal place in council, and on this account they and their young men became jealous. They were the cause of his poor boy lying there. He was killed by too much talk.”98
After a pause, Worm praised his son’s dutifulness. “[H]is son had been his only protection,” a journalist rendered Worm’s words. “While they were north, his son had taken good care of him, and they always had plenty of game to eat.”99 He trailed off into exhausted silence. Briefly everyone drifted into reverie; then Pourier sensed that the rattling breath of the dying man had ceased. Quietly, he remarked to McGillycuddy that Crazy Horse was dead. The surgeon crossed the room and saw it was true: at about 11:40 Crazy Horse had quietly died. McGillycuddy and Pourier were unsure how to break the news to Worm, fearing that in his grief he might seek revenge. A bottle of whiskey was on hand, and Pourier suggested they give Worm a glass to steady his nerves. Nervously, McGillycuddy poured the liquor: Pourier took a good pull before passing the drink to Worm. The old man swallowed and thanked Pourier, calling him “son” : “It was good, that will open my heart.”
“Don’t take it hard,” counseled Pourier; “your son is dead.” Worm wrenched and grunted a cry of grief. “My son is dead,” he lamented, “without revenging himself.”100 As Worm sank into silence once more, eyes turned on Touch the Clouds. The Miniconjou surveyed the faces lit and shadowed by the lantern bloom. Slowly, he drew himself to his full height and offered his hand to each of the men in the room: to McGillycuddy and Pourier, to Captain Kennington and Lieutenant Lemly. As the wasicu anxiously awaited his reaction that, transmitted to the waiting camps, could spell peace or war, Touch the Clouds searched for the words that would complete the circle between doing honor to his kinsman’s memory and preventing further agony and bloodshed. Then he stooped over his kinsman’s body and drew the blanket over his face, laying his hand on Crazy Horse’s breast.
“It is good,” he said at last; “he has looked for death, and it has come.”101
30
OWNING A GHOST
At daylight, September 6, an unearthly wail rose above the Camp Robinson quadrangle. Driven by two agency Oglalas, a mule-drawn ambulance started down the agency trail, bearing the body of the Oglala war chief to his tribal village. Ahead of the vehicle walked Worm and one of Crazy Horse’s stepmothers, while a detail of scouts brought up the rear of the procession. Through a sepulchral hush they moved, past watching soldiers, officers’ wives, and a straggle of journalists.1
At the Oglala village, the excitement of the night notched up once more. Hundreds of women and children stood outside their tipis, voices raised in a general wail at first sight of the procession. Part of the Crazy Horse village—about twenty lodges of Oyuhpes and Miniconjous, led by Black Fox—had stampeded during the night to join relatives at Spotted Tail, and the approach of the war chief’s remains threatened to provoke more demonstrations. Red Cloud, Young Man Afraid of His Horse, Little Wound, and Little Big Man all called for calm. Crazy Horse, they cried, was “‘[t]he man without ears, who would not listen to counsel.’” His death was regrettable, but he brought it on.2
Up the trail, the ambulance came to a halt as Crazy Horse’s Miniconjou uncle le
veled his gun at the driver, who fell across his comrade’s lap. The latter, a cooler hand, calmed the situation, and at the nervous snap of reins, the vehicle lurched forward again. The ambulance drove onto the campground and drew up outside Worm’s tipi. Worm added his voice to the calls for calm. “[T]he whites had killed his son,” he harangued the crowd; but his son, he painfully conceded, “was a fool and would not listen; it was,” he echoed Touch the Clouds’s conciliation, “a good thing.”3
Then he entered the tipi. Red Feather, still numb from the loss of his brother-in-law, was called to help carry the body inside. Amid incense of sage and sweet-grass, he and other kinsmen unwrapped the blanket, unbuttoned the store-bought shirt Crazy Horse had put on the previous morning, then loosened leggings and breechclout. In turning the body, Red Feather briefly observed the wound between the war chief’s kidneys. Having stripped the corpse, he helped dress it in clean new buckskin. Weeping kinsfolk paused to survey their work. “Crazy Horse was a nice-looking man,” Red Feather recalled over half a century later.4
Amid the solidarity of relatives, Worm stated his wish to perform the Ghost Owning ceremony in honor of his son. The most prestigious of Lakota ceremonies, Owning a Ghost committed mourning relatives to months of self-denying observances. No violent act could be undertaken or even witnessed by the Ghost Owner; instead, he must inculcate powers of contemplative meditation. Above all, his household, living in the Ghost Lodge, must be a byword for generosity.
A holy man first purified a knife in the smoke of burning sweetgrass. Then, as the women loosened Crazy Horse’s hair, combing it out to reach his waist, the holy man cut a lock from near the forehead and wrapped it in red cloth. The hair lock, like the fringes on a ceremonial shirt, or the scalp wrenched from an enemy’s head, was believed to contain a person’s nagila, or spiritual essence. In preserving the lock, Worm’s family was retaining part of Crazy Horse’s being to remain with the people for the duration of the Ghost Owning.5
As the morning progressed, the village quieted into the blank silence of loss. Worm claimed that Crazy Horse had made a deathbed request to be buried at Spotted Tail. Although finessed by Worm’s declaration that “Red Cloud Agency is not on hallowed ground,” the move was a slap in the face to the Oglala tribal leadership. Fearful of the funeral rites sparking a landslide breakout, Oglala akicita proclaimed that anyone decamping for the north would be forcibly stopped.6
Then, a little before noon, the door flap of Worm’s tipi was thrown open, and Crazy Horse’s body was carried outside and laid upon the waiting travois. Securely bundled within rolled blankets and a haired buffalo robe, the body was lashed by rawhide thongs to the travois poles. Taking up the reins, Worm and his wife walked toward the camp entrance. Behind the travois walked Black Shawl, eyes downcast on the bundle. Behind the chief mourners, a knot of relatives followed onto the rolling prairie. Beneath the fading wails of mourners, a wary relief settled on the village and the anxious watchers behind the agency palisade.7
On the following morning, Worm’s procession wound through Camp Sheridan. Atop the bluff opposite the post buildings, Worm and his kinsmen built a scaffold, scarcely three feet high, on which they bound the body, now wrapped in a vivid red blanket. Day and night, the eerie wail of mourners echoed through the tipi camps lining the valley8
Gradually, an uncertain peace descended over Spotted Tail Agency. At Red Cloud the Oglala tribe asserted control over its northern contingent. Chiefs and officers had planned a breakup of the northern village, with families scattered among the agency bands. In the volatile atmosphere of recrimination, this plan was put on hold. Modifying rather than scrapping the village organization, the army hierarchy recognized Big Road as the ranking chief, once it became clear that Little Big Man’s role in Crazy Horse’s death was simply too controversial to permit his succession. Organized around a newly conciliatory leadership, willing to concede primacy to the Oglala hierarchy the northern village lost its appeal for the Miniconjou and Sans Arc people who had flocked to Crazy Horse’s chieftainship. In the wake of Worm’s departure, many more people stampeded to join relatives at Spot-ted Tail. Inclusive of the people formally transferred to the Brule Agency during the crisis, some 173 lodges deserted Crazy Horse’s village for Spotted Tail.9
Agent Lee sought to dissolve the new arrivals among his reliable bands, but most consolidated with Touch the Clouds’s village. Now topping four hundred lodges, the agency’s fragile balance was dangerously skewed by the accession of panicky, resentful Crazy Horse followers. It was further threatened by the simultaneous surrender of Fast Bull’s camp. These diehards were wary and skittish. Hardly had they arrived when Fast Bull and Low Dog, Crazy Horse’s old Oyuhpe comrade, began plotting the sort of breakout that had eluded the war chief. As the chiefs prepared to depart for Washington, the threat of violent outbreak seemed to be settling down, but it was a nervous and superficial calm, and the body of Crazy Horse—as much as his living presence—would prove a rallying point for competing constituencies.10
On September 11 Agent Lee requested that his wife prepare the wailing mourners hot food and coffee. Through Louis Bordeaux, Lee spoke briefly to Worm. The holy man stated his concern that in the night cattle might disturb his son’s remains. He asked that a fence be erected. Seizing an opportunity to ease the crisis, Lee and his carpenter, Jack Atkinson, loaded a spring wagon with tools and lumber and drove back to the grave. Near each corner, and midway along each long axis of the scaffold, they planted a sturdy post. To each side of the framework they nailed four roughhewn planks, “and in a hour made a fence to protect Crazy Horse’s body.”11
In gratitude, Worm and his wife each stroked Lee’s face “in devoted affection— an Indian way to demonstrate their love to a friend.”12 The kindness of the agent and his wife helped convince Worm that his place was at Spotted Tail Agency. Matching Lee’s generosity, Captain Burke had the Camp Sheridan commissary supply “the best coffin the Quartermaster’s department could turn out.”13 The grave validated the Lakota presence there, underpinning Brule attempts to retain the existing agency. As a Ghost Owner, Worm could not engage in the political debate, but he was in a position to make compelling symbolic use of his status— and Crazy Horse’s memory. In burying his son so conspicuously, Worm asserted the necessity of a new accommodation with the wasicu world.
Eight days after his death, on Thursday, September 13, a funeral marked Crazy Horse’s passing. The inner wall of planking that surrounded the scaffold was hung with red blankets. While hundreds of mourners watched, the coffin was lashed to the scaffold, and Crazy Horse’s body placed inside. Beside the body were laid a pipe and tobacco, a bow and quiver of arrows, a carbine and pistol with ample ammunition, and supplies from the agency warehouse of coffee, sugar, and hard bread. A few beads and trinkets—” to captivate the nut-brown maids of paradise,” opined one of the few correspondents left on White River—completed the grave goods, and the coffin lid was put in place.14
Crazy Horse’s favorite war pony was led up and slaughtered, to fall beside the grave. The heightened emotion of the event was sufficient to dissuade even Agent Lee from attending, but at length the crowds broke up and drifted homeward. Eight chief mourners remained at the graveside, and as night drew on, the howls of grief were echoed from the villages below. About this time, recalled Red Feather, people observed that each night, a war eagle alighted and walked around on the coffin. Crazy Horse’s wakan power had not deserted him in death.15
The funeral left only a matter of days until the delegation’s departure, and at both agencies, councils hurried forward. From Spotted Tail the Brule delegation was led by the head chief and Swift Bear, with Touch the Clouds and Red Bear to represent the northern village. All would quietly endorse Spotted Tail’s bid for an agency sited on Wounded Knee Creek, within the existing reservation. In one of the bitterest ironies of the Crazy Horse tragedy, Oglala tribal unity unraveled over the agency location. After so bitterly contesting Crazy Horse’s northern reserv
ation scheme, Red Cloud’s Bad Face band about-faced on the issue and requested the location on Tongue River that had been Crazy Horse’s first choice. Young Man Afraid of His Horse also reinstated his support for Tongue River. Accorded generous representation by the Oglala tribal council, the northern Oglalas fielded Big Road, Little Big Man, Iron Crow, and He Dog to represent them in Washington.
The delegations departed Camp Robinson for the railroad on September 17. In extensive talks in Washington, Big Road and other northern Oglala spokesmen argued cogently for a Tongue River reserve where their people could learn to raise cattle now that the buffalo were finished. President Hayes proved conciliatory. Providing that the Lakotas removed to the Missouri valley this winter, where rations and annuities were already stockpiled, they could select their permanent agency sites in consultation with a new government commission the following spring. While the existing reservation boundaries remained, and locations within the White River valley were favored, Hayes did not categorically rule out the Tongue River location.
The delegations returned home prepared to sell to their people this latest compromise. It was no easy task. During the delegation’s absence, sixty lodges of northern Indians had slipped away. Brule diplomacy brought some home, but Fast Bull rejected all conciliation and led forty lodges in a dash for Canada. Through the second half of October, with winter dangerously near, thousands of disgruntled Lakotas prepared for a move no one wanted. At Red Cloud on October 25, the movement got slowly underway behind two companies of the Third Cavalry16
At last, on the morning of October 29, the Spotted Tail column also started east. The Brule Deciders had decided on an upcountry trail along Pine Ridge. Freight wagons transported material and supplies, cowboys rousted a beef herd to subsist the march, and hundreds of travois straggled over the hills. At the northern village, some two hundred lodges of Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Oglalas, Brules, and Wazhazhas remained on the campground. They had prevailed on Agent Lee to permit them to travel with the Red Cloud column down White River, assuring him that they would rejoin the Brules on the Missouri. Touch the Clouds and the other northern Deciders were among their leaders, but their assurances hid a deep discontent. Low Dog, one of the war leaders in the lately surrendered Fast Bull camp, increasingly dominated councils with his call for a breakout for Canada. The Sans Arc Decider Red Bear broke the village’s fragile consensus when he endorsed Low Dog’s scheme.
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