CRAZY HORSE
Page 59
Worm’s family was among the people who stayed behind. Preparing for departure, the family opened the coffin and removed Crazy Horse’s body lashing the bundle again to the travois for travel. Worm wished to follow the Spotted Tail column, but public opinion compelled him to remain with the northern village. Low Dog and his adherents seized on Crazy Horse’s body as political capital, using the corpse to inflame warrior opinion and inspire a mass breakout. This sat uneasily with Worm’s commitment as Ghost Owner, and he grew increasingly disenchanted with Low Dog’s intransigence.
As the Red Cloud column made slow progress down White River, the northern village struck tipis to intercept it. On November 1 Lieutenant Clark and the Oglala chiefs held a lengthy parley with the northern leaders, failing to persuade them to rejoin Spotted Tail. Fearful that undue pressure would lead to a breakout, Clark and Agent Irwin permitted the northerners to join the Oglala march, but inadequate rations threatened a logistical nightmare. Impeded by rainy weather that reduced trails to gumbo, the march slowed to a crawl. The northern contingent traveled behind the Oglalas, dawdling to preserve its stock, firing the prairie, and making demonstrations against the small cavalry escort. Each night a few individuals slipped away north. Some people favored assimilation into agency bands, but all attempts at conciliation foundered on the resolve of Low Dog, Red Bear, and the growing body of headmen and warriors who favored flight. We “belong to the North,” they taunted, exhibiting Crazy Horse’s body to back-sliding kinsfolk, exhorting a breakout to carry off his remains to the sanctuary of Grandmother’s Land. “[E]ven as a dead chief,” Clark grimly observed, Crazy Horse “exercises an influence for evil.”17 Underlining the dangerous mood, fifty more lodges had broken away from the Brule column, laid over at the head of Wounded Knee Creek, intending to join the mass breakaway.
Worm was deeply dissatisfied at the turn of events. Each day his family traveled at the rear of the eight-mile column, a buckskin horse hauling his son’s body. After his son’s death, Worm wanted no more bloodshed, and flight to Canada could only defer the inevitable—accepting the reservation. On November 7, as the villages laid over near the old robe trade landmark of Butte Cache, a beef issue was organized. Amid the bustle, Worm’s family quietly prepared for departure. Unreported at the time, they left under cover of darkness, evading Low Dog’s akicita and angling south up the valley of Big White Clay Creek. Besides Worm and his wife and sister, Black Shawl remained with her husband’s family. Crazy Horse’s hunka brother Horn Chips accompanied the little group. Having left Wounded Knee on November 5, the Brules were already stringing down the south fork of White River. Seeking a permanent place with his wife’s relatives, Worm was determined to catch up.18
First, there were other duties. Crazy Horse’s body must find a final resting place. Although the exact location of this second burial is obscured by enigma and misdirection, Horn Chips indicated that it was in Pine Ridge north of the head of Wounded Knee Creek. While the women made a stopover camp, Worm and Horn Chips dug a hole and buried Crazy Horse in a rude coffin they had fashioned. Wood was scarce, and Crazy Horse’s legs had to be unjointed at the knees. This was to be no scaffold grave boldly commemorating the dead, but siting it to overlook the Wounded Knee valley silently underwrote Spotted Tail’s claim to a permanent home here.19
There was no time to pause. Turning east, the family hurried to catch up with the Brule column. Putting aside the agonies of his son’s adjustment to the new life, Worm knew that the only long-term future for the Lakota people lay on the reservation. So the family urged on their ponies, soon lost to sight in the rolling folds of prairie from the lonely spot where its pride lay buried.
September 1878, Moon of the Black Calf: Lining the south fork of White River and its tributary Rosebud Creek stood hundreds of Lakota lodges. Scores of wagons, idling beside tipis or driven by Lakota teamsters, marked a people in transition toward the agrarian dream of the social improvers. Buildings under construction, heavy freight wagons, and tarpaulined stores, marked the location of the new Rosebud Agency, permanent home to Spotted Tail’s Brules and their remaining northern guests. A neat row of Sibley tents signaled the presence of troops. Captain Henry W Wessells and a unit of the Third Cavalry had established the temporary outpost of Camp Rains in the preceding weeks, once Spotted Tail received the go-ahead to depart the hated Missouri River and locate his people at the new site.20
Forty miles downstream, at the forks of White River, Red Cloud’s people were fretfully awaiting permission to remove to their chosen location farther up the White River valley in the lea of Pine Ridge. In the months since Crazy Horse’s burial, the interminable contention over agency relocation had finally narrowed to these sites within the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation. Although the Oglalas and Brules would continue to see their remaining land base eroded by agreements, sales, leases, and allotments, in 1878 they came home for good. Soon log cabins would replace tipis along these same creeks, as bands and tiyospaye crystallized into permanent communities around frame schoolhouses and the spires of churches. The old nomadic life was at an end.
The northern village straggled along the Rosebud, its irregular clusters marking the factional divides that had riven it during the previous twelve months. As ever, a sentiment existed to break away for sanctuary with Sitting Bull’s people in Canada. Just as Worm had foreseen, the lure of the last buffalo herds, and the collapse of hopes for a northern reserve, had caused mass breakouts during the previous winter. His brother Little Hawk had joined the flights, along with old war comrades of his son like He Dog and Big Road, Low Dog and Iron Crow. In mid-September 1878, with winter impending, a few more diehards were preparing a break. Fifteen lodges led by Red Eagle and Bad Mustang were laying down a smokescreen of talk about joining Red Cloud, but only the troops were fooled.21
After them, as the reality of life in exile impinged, the drain of reservation disaffected would dry up. Exposed to renewed campaigning from Bear Coat Miles and diplomatic pressure from Ottawa, and starved by the relentless attrition forced on the remaining Buffalo North, the people, over the next three years, began a reverse movement. Hungry stragglers drifted back to the reservation, or surrendered to Miles and sat in vast transit camps at Fort Keogh, Wolf Point, and Fort Buford, until sent by steamboat down the Missouri to the agencies that were the only home left them. Last to surrender would be Sitting Bull, enduring the indignity of two years’ off-reservation detention before settling to the inevitability of the new life.22
Besides the breakaways, a larger faction of the northern village was preparing to resettle with Oglala kinsfolk. Oglala chiefs had extended gifts and invitations to secure the defection. Some fifty lodges, resisting continued pressure from Spotted Tail and the Brule leadership to assimilate with their hosts, prepared to depart as soon as word was received that the Oglala remove had begun. Black Shawl, who had joined the household of her mother Red Elk Woman, was one of the women preparing for the move to Pine Ridge.23
Yet a core of people remained for whom the Brule agency had become home. Apolitical, prepared to accept Spotted Tail’s deciding vote on any issue, they revered Worm as their ranking elder. Now, twelve months after his son’s death, Worm was preparing for a major ceremonial to commemorate Crazy Horse and validate this homecoming to Rosebud. Outside the Ghost Lodge stood a sturdy tripod bearing a large bundle—the pack that contained the lock cut from Crazy Horse’s hair. The year-long Ghost Owning would culminate in a magnificent giveaway in Crazy Horse’s name, and the release of his nagila to the Land of the Spirits.24
A day was announced to release the soul. Worm prepared invitation wands to summon kinsfolk from as far afield as Cheyenne River Agency, pledging gifts of women’s craftwork, food, awls, knives, tobacco, horses, blankets, and yard goods. Outside the Ghost Lodge, a rack was set up on which to hang finery. Kettles were laid on to boil food for the closing feast. While a ring of curious onlookers gathered, those honored to attend the ceremony entered the tipi and assumed
seats flanking the Ghost Bundle and an effigy post representing Crazy Horse, dressed in clothing he had worn in life. Lances and shields were propped against the post and tripod. A stack of parfleches bulged with presents. Women hugged the post in a final farewell, presenting dried meat and cherry juice that the holy man mentoring the ceremony ordered poured into the earth before the effigy.
After the pipe, low chants gave way to reverential hush as the holy man gently addressed the bundle, telling it that it was about to leave on a great journey. The bundle was first presented for Worm to embrace against each shoulder, then reverently unwrapped.25
At sight of the hair lock at the center, the mourners wailed. Songs of gratitude were sung, recalling to all the obligations of sharing and generosity, verities that must bind the Lakota future as they had shaped the past. Now these key gifts— imprinted so powerfully with the war chief’s spirit—were presented to relatives and allies. Preserved, treasured, circulated in the eternal cycle of giving, they must carry into the Lakotas’ new world the strength of their greatest warrior. More goods were carried outside and laid beside the rack as a herald summoned the poor to take one last time from Crazy Horse’s unequaled largesse. As soon as the rite was completed, women would rush forward to cut up the Ghost Lodge, the covers shared among guests and visitors.
Chants of praise died away as the procession exited the Ghost Lodge. The holy man led the way, bearing before him the hairlock at the heart of the Ghost Bundle. In the high singsong tone of the Lakota priest, he cried out, admonishing Crazy Horse’s soul to behold his people below. Behind him stepped Worm and his wife and the chief mourners. Three times the holy man gestured forward with the hair lock, as if freeing a reluctant thing. On the sacred fourth gesture, the movement seemed cleaner, final, as if this soul might at last break its bonds to earth. Perhaps Worm, holding aloft the pipe in a final salutation, felt through the stabs of grief and memory a compensatory joy, now that his son had no more need of a country.
NOTES
Short titles are generally used in note citations. Frequently cited archival material and collections, government publications, and organizations are identified in citations by the following abbreviations:
AGO — Adjutant General’s Office, War Department
ARCoIA — Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Reports, 1851–1878
BIA — Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Canadian Papers — Papers Relating to the Sioux Indians of the United States Who Have Taken Refuge in Canadian Territory
Carrington Papers — Papers Relative to Indian Operations on the Plains (Senate Executive Documents, 50th Cong., 1st sess., 1888, S. Doc. 33.)
CoIA — Commissioner of Indian Affairs
CRA — Cheyenne River Agency
DPR — Department of the Platte, Records from the U. S. Army Continental Commands
DWR — Department of the West, Records from the U. S. Army Continental Commands
DS — Dakota Superintendency Field Office Records of the Office of Indian Affairs
Fetterman Investigation — Records Relating to the Investigation of the Fort Philip Kearny (or Fetterman) Massacre, Miscellaneous Unbound Records, BIA, RG 75, NARS
ID — Records of the Indian Division, Secretary of the Interior
Indian Hostilities — Information Touching the Origin and Progress of Indian Hostilities on the Frontier (Senate Executive Documents, 40th Cong., 1st sess., 1867, S. Doc. 13)
LR — Letters Received
LS — Letters Sent
NA — National Archives and Records Service
NACPR — National Archives—Central Plains Region
OIA — Records of the Office of Indian Affairs
NSOIA — Records of the Northern Superintendency, Office of Indian Affairs
PRA — Pine Ridge Agency
RCA — Red Cloud Agency
Red Cloud Investigation — Report of the Special Commission Appointed to Investigate the Affairs of the Red Cloud Indian Agency, July 1875, Together with the Testimony and Accompanying Documents.
RIPC — Records of the Indian Peace Commission
Sioux War Papers — Papers Relating to Military Operations in the Departments of the Platte and Dakota against Sioux Indians, 1876–96, file 4163, Letters Received (Main Series), AGO
SW File — Sioux War, File 6207, Special Files of the Military Division of the Missouri.
STA — Spotted Tail Agency
UMA — Upper Missouri Agency
UPA — Upper Platte Agency
WA — Whetstone Agency
CHAPTER 1
1. The clearest statement dating the birth of Crazy Horse (Curly Hair in childhood) is that of his father (also Crazy Horse): His son was born “in the fall of 1840.” New York Sun, Sept. 14, 1877. The date is confirmed by Horn Chips, Crazy Horse’s close friend and spiritual mentor; see Horn Chips, interview by Eli S. Ricker, Feb. 14, 1907, tablet 18, Ricker Papers. Horn Chips dates it to the fall of the year the Oglala stole one hundred horses, corresponding to the winter of 1840–41 in American Horse’s winter count. Cf. Hardorff, “‘Stole-One-Hundred-Horses Winter.’”
Most other oral statements are vague. He Dog links his year of birth with Crazy Horse’s, but the uncertainty over his own date (ca. 1835–41) is unhelpful. A kinswoman of Crazy Horse’s stated that he was born in spring of the year Left-Handed Big Nose was killed by the Shoshones—according to American Horse’s winter count, 1839–40. See Bordeaux, Custer’s Conqueror, 22. Although this informant, Julia Iron Cedar Woman, a. k. a. Mrs. Amos Clown, was related through Crazy Horse’s stepmothers, she lived most of her life with the Miniconjous and Sans Arcs.
As to location, Crazy Horse’s father remarked that it was on the south fork of Cheyenne River, but Horn Chips twice stated that it was at or near Bear Butte: see also Horn Chips, interview by Walter M. Camp, ca. July 11, 1910, Camp Papers, Brigham Young University (BYU). Josephine F. Waggoner located the birth near modern Rapid City, “on Rapid River (Creek) near the [Black] Hills, at or below where Quaking Asp empties into the Rapid.” Quoted in DeLand, Sioux Wars, 354. All these locations are along the east flank of the Black Hills.
2. Hassrick, The Sioux, 310–14, details a typical birth. See also Powers, Oglala Women, 53–57.
3. Hassrick, The Sioux, 310.
4. Dorsey, Study of Siouan Cults, 483. On the boyhood names of Crazy Horse, see Horn Chips interview, tablet 18, Ricker Papers, and statements of He Dog and his son Joseph Eagle Hawk: R. A. Clark, Killing of Chief Crazy Horse, 68. The latter source gives Crushes Man and Buys A Bad Woman as names used before Crazy Horse reached maturity.
5. This discussion of Lakota history follows closely K. M. Bray, “Teton Sioux Population History.” Standard references on early Lakota history are Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk and Spotted Tail’s Folk; also White, “Winning of the West.”
6. K. M. Bray, “Oglala Lakota and the Establishment of Fort Laramie.”
7. White, Roots of Dependency, chap. 6 (Pawnees); Hoxie, Parading Through History.
8. The most valuable printed sources on Lakota social life are found in Walker, Lakota Society. Capsule ethnographies are contained in two chapters by DeMallie: “Sioux Until 1850” and “Teton.”
9. DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 102, 323. On Kapozha, see Red Feather statement, Buechel, Dictionary of Teton Sioux, 288; W K. Powers, Winter Count of the Oglala, 34. Makes the Song seems to have been a member of the Horse Dreamer cult. His widow, [Old] “Crazy Horses Mother,” aged ninety, is listed in the STA 1887 census, Northern Camp, BIA, RG 75, NACPR.
10. On the background of Hunkpatila, see Bray and Bray, Joseph N Nicollet, 261; Left-Hand Heron statement, “Field Notes/Summer of 1931/White Clay District/Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota” (hereafter “Field Notes” ), 50, Mekeel Papers.
11. Left-Hand Heron, “Field Notes,” 50, Mekeel Papers. “Old” Man Afraid of His Horse (1808–89) was the third in direct line to bear this famous name (Tasunke-Kokipapi, correctly They Fear His Horse). T
he earliest references to him are found in C. E. Hanson, Jr., David Adams Journals, 19, 71, 81, 83, 86.
12. Bray and Bray, Joseph N. Nicollet, 261. To trace Lakota bands through the historical record, consult Culbertson, “Journal of an Expedition to the Mauvaises Terres” ; Hayden, Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology; and Dorsey, “Siouan Sociology.”
13. The four prime Lakota virtues are discussed in Hassrick, The Sioux, 32 ff. Central to an understanding of the Lakota ethos of generosity is the work of Yankton ethnolinguist Ella C. Deloria. For an assessment of her unique contribution to Lakota ethnology, see Raymond J. DeMallie’s afterword in Deloria, Waterlily. An overview based on her work is Mirsky, “The Dakota.”
14. On family background, see Hardorff, Oglala Lakota Crazy Horse; and cf Black Elk, in DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 351, which states that Male Crow was one of six brothers, four being slain with him. The identity of Curly Hair’s father as the sixth is confirmed by the Cloud Shield winter count entries for 1844–45 and 1852–53 (for discussion, see chapter 3). Short Man winter count, 1838, Walker, Lakota Society, 139, and pls. after 144; Ruby, Oglala Sioux, 96.
15. DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 350–52; Powers, Winter Count of the Oglala, 31.
16. Quotation in DeMallie, Sixth Grandfather, 351. Denig, Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri, 21.
17. C. E. Hanson, Jr., David Adams Journals, 71–72.