22. Warren journal, Sept. 22, 1855, J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 110.
23. Twiss to CoIA, Oct. 18, 1855, UPA, LR, OIA, RG 75, NA; Harney to Secretary of War, Nov. 10, 1855. Ruby, Oglala Sioux, 97.
CHAPTER 5
1. The traditional sources dating Curly Hair’s first vision quest are late. Most detail is provided in interviews collected by Edward and Mabell Kadlecek in the 1960s and published in To Kill an Eagle. One of the best-informed interviewees was Frank Kicking Bear, son of Crazy Horse’s comrade, who stated on May 5, 1969: “When [Curly Hair] was 14 years old he received the Holy Message on the top of a hill now called Scottsbluff” (116). Scott’s Bluffs are a prominent landmark on the south side of the North Platte, fifty miles downstream from the Laramie River, a location confirmed by my own Lakota informants. A dating prior to fall 1855 is indicated, after the Hunkpatila band crossed south of the North Platte (late August) into the peace zone. The September bracket fits the aftermath of the Blue Water Creek battle and suggests that Curly Hair’s wish for “power to serve his tribe” is in the context of that defeat and the captivity of Lakota relatives. Joseph Black Elk, in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 80–81.
None of the oral sources confirm Sandoz’s placing of the vision quest immediately after the Grattan incident (Crazy Horse, 40–44,103–106), which must be viewed as obeying the dramatic unities of fiction, not historical evidence.
Literature on the vision quest is vast. Always fundamental is Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, but consult first DeMallie, “Lakota Belief and Rtual in the Nineteenth Century.” In the following reconstruction, I have mapped Curly Hair’s individual circumstances onto a generic account grounded in J. E. Brown, Sacred Pipe, chap. 4.
2. According to Oglala holy man Mathew H. King: “As a young man [Curly Hair] had a dream that he would receive his powers from the Thunder Gods” (Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 126).
3. Joseph Black Elk, in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 80–81.
4. Henry Crow Dog and Carl Iron Shell statement, in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 96,116, expressly identify the Thunder as giving Curly Hair power. Luther Standing Bear, whose stepmother was Curly Hair’s cousin, writes in Land of the Spotted Eagle, 209: “The Lakotas believe that the hawk was his protecting power,” confirming the statement of Frank White Buffalo Man, in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 149, that Curly Hair “dreamed of red hawks and received power.” Hawks were believed to be messengers of Thunder. Good on Thunder visions is Densmore, Teton Sioux Music and Culture, 157ff, with primary accounts and invaluable song texts.
5. Frank Kicking Bear, in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 116.
6. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk, 73–75; Carl Iron Shell, in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 115, details Iron Shell’s offer.
7. Twiss to CoIA, Oct. 18, 21, 28,1855;Twiss to Supt. A. Cumming, Nov. 14, 1855.; Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 58, 60–61.
8. Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 60.
9. Council minutes, Senate Executive Documents, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, S. Doc. 94. Covering the Oglala negotiations, Harney to Secretary of War, Apr. 22, 1856, Main Series, LR, AGO.
10. Senate Executive Documents, 34th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 94, 24 ff.;Vaughan to CoIA, Sept. 10, Oct. 27, 1856, ARCoIA 1856.
11. Vaughan to CoIA, Sept. 10, 1856, ARCoIA 1856; McDonnell, “Fort Benton Journal,” 120,122,178,186–87; K. M. Bray, “Lone Horn’s Peace,” 37–38.
12. On the heyoka, see Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, 155–57; Hassrick, The Sioux, 272ff; Wissler, “Societies and Ceremonial Associations,” 82–85; DeMallie, “Lakota Belief and Ritual,” 36ff. Very useful for modern comparison is Lewis, Medicine Men, chap. 7.
13. Wissler, “Societies and Ceremonial Associations,” 85.
14. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, 155–57; Hassrick, The Sioux, 272ff; Wissler, “Societies and Ceremonial Associations,” 82–85; DeMallie, “Lakota Belief and Ritual,” 36ff; Lewis, Medicine Men, chap. 7. For the activities of the mail coach raiders, see Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk, 81–82.
15. He Dog, in Riley, “Oglala Sources,” 9. He Dog’s remarks are crucial to understanding Curly Hair’s youth and to correcting earlier interpretations. He says simply: “When we were 17 or 18 years old we separated. Crazy Horse went to the Rosebud [Brule] band of Indians and stayed with them for about a year. Then he came home.” With no other dating pointers, Mari Sandoz placed the Brule sojourn in the twelve-month frame ending fall 1855 (Crazy Horse, 69–85), fortuitously locating Curly Hair in the Blue Water Creek battle. Curly Hair would then have been fourteen, but since Sandoz’s preferred year for Curly Hair’s birth is 1842, she would make him only twelve or thirteen years old, decidedly not He Dog’s “17 or 18.” Unravelling the dating is complicated by He Dog’s assertion that he and Curly Hair were exactly the same age. Estimates of He Dog’s birthdate cluster in the frame 1835–41, with Pine Ridge censuses (RG 75, NA) consistently suggesting 1838–39—indicating that he was really a year or two older than his friend. He Dog probably was “17 or 18” from summer 1856 to summer 1857; Curly Hair was fifteen or sixteen. Placing the Brule sojourn later does not fit what we know of the young Crazy Horse’s warrior career, which after 1857 focuses in the north against Crows and Shoshones, not in the Brule zone against the Pawnees. Moreover, the return of his uncle Spotted Tail from captivity makes a plausible context for an extended family visit in 1856, climaxing with Curly Hair’s first war party against the Pawnees the following spring, and ending with his independently attested visit to the Cheyennes before an August 1857 return home.
16. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk, 77ff, ably assesses the impact of captivity on Spotted Tail and his companions.
17. Twiss to CoIA, Sept. 1, 1859,ARCoIA 1859,134. The Oglala and Brule Kit Fox Society would act as akicita, supervising the distribution of treaty annuities, a function noted by Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 146.
18. Twiss to CoIA, Sept. 12, 25, Oct. 13, 1856,ARCoIA 1856, 87–88, 99–103, and Twiss to CoIA, Nov. 7, 1856, UPA, LROIA. For general background on the Cheyenne troubles, see Grinnell, Fighting Cheyennes, 111–17.
19. For Cheyenne attempts to engage the Brules in their war against the Americans, see Hafen and Hafen, Relations with the Indians of the Plains, 18–19n.
20. Curly Hair’s first warpath is referred to in John Colhoff to Joseph Balmer, Dec. 3, 1951 (transcript in author’s collection); Eagle Elk, Nov. 27, 1944, 12, Neihardt Papers; White Bull, in Hardorff, Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 268–69. The context clearly fits Curly Hair’s Brule sojourn, and Colhoff’s mention of “field cultivators” suggests a May 1857 dating. At this time, the Pawnees were grouped in two villages on the lower Platte, with American settlements right across the river. This confirms White Bull’s location of the battle “down near Omaha.”
21. Eagle Elk, 12, Neihardt Papers.
22. Ibid.
23. Wissler, “Societies and Ceremonial Associations,” 84.
24. He Dog, July 7, 1930, 9.
25. Ibid.; see also Hinman’s editorial note, 50. Although Hinman is surely mistaken in assuming a war honor, her point is well made that the Brules may have already adopted American attitudes toward the killing of noncombatants. Given the establishment of Twiss’s police force, an attempt to impose such rules is exactly what we might expect. Sandoz, although present at the interview with He Dog, and following up with more questioning of the old man a year afterward, gleaned no more details. Her presentation of the killing as an accidental coup in the 1855 Omaha battle (Crazy Horse, 69–72) is therefore a fictionalized attempt to gloss over what looked disturbingly like a blot on her hero’s reputation.
He Dog may have known more than he was prepared to tell to strangers. The evidence is simply too fragmentary to admit of narrative reconstruction, but it may be significant that another of Crazy Horse’s boyhood names was Buys a Bad Woman: see R. A. Clark, Killi
ng of Chief Crazy Horse, 68. As a skim over the outer margins of plausible reconstruction, we might posit that Curly Hair, having proved himself in battle, felt ready to take a wife. In some unknowable combination of private circumstance and heyoka compulsion, the affair turned to tragedy.
CHAPTER 6
1. Curly Hair’s hunting trip to the Cheyennes is attested by Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 78. Background on the Sumner campaign against the Cheyennes is supplied in Chalfant, Cheyennes and Horse Soldiers.
2. Chalfant, Cheyennes and Horse Soldiers, chap. 4–7, is the most comprehensive account of this phase of Sumner’s campaign. See also Utley Frontiersmen in Blue, 120 ff.
3. For Cheyenne movements in July see Chalfant, Cheyennes and Horse Soldiers, 56–58, 174–76; also Powell, People of the Sacred Mountain, 1:211–12.
4. For the Sumner fight, see Grinnell, Fighting Cheyennes, chap. 10.
5. On the flight north see Chalfant, Cheyennes and Horse Soldiers, 218–19, 233–37;J. Hudson Snowden journal, entry for Aug. 11, 1857, J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 178.
6. Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 78. For troop movements to Utah, a handy source is Hafen and Young, Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West, 284–302.
7. He Dog, in, Riley, “Oglala Sources,” 9–10. He Dog states that Curly Hair returned to the Oglalas about one year after his departure to join the Brules, indicating a return in late summer 1857. On Iron Whiteman’s feat, see Bad Heart Bull and Blish, Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 503.
8. Much discussion of the 1857 council has been generated: see especially Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 82, and Spotted Tail’s Folk, 90; Sandoz, Crazy Horse, 98–101; K. M. Bray, “Lone Horn’s Peace,” 42–43. These secondary sources follow Hyde in locating the council at Bear Butte. From Bear Butte’s spiritual resonance and geographic centrality, Hyde’s conjecture may be correct, but Warren, the only significant primary source, simply locates it on the Belle Fourche. My presentation of the council, expanding on the account in “Lone Horn’s Peace,” is based on Warren’s journal for September 1857,printed in J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 158–67; and Warren, Preliminary Report, 18–21,51–53. Warren’s accounts embody and quote key statements from Lakota participants, including Bear Ribs and Elk Bellows Walking. Upper Missouri Agent A. H. Redfield also learned something of the council’s resolutions at Fort Clark in September (ARCoIA 1857, 424). Significant background is also supplied in Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 68–69, 77–78. In the following discussion, I have limited footnoting to quotations and critical or neglected points.
9. Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 69.
10. See Bear Ribs, in J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 166; and Warren, Preliminary Report, 20 (includes quotation).
11. On territorial claims and the Black Hills as Lakota heartland, see especially Warren, Preliminary Report, 19 (includes quotations). The 1857 Belle Fourche council may be interpreted as the key event in the crystallization of Lakota proprietary concepts regarding the Black Hills, which dominate reservation politics to this day. The most comprehensive coverage of the latter-day Black Hills issue is Lazarus, Black Hills, White Justice.
12. For deserters, see Message of the President of the United States Communicating a Report of the Proceedings of a Council Held at Fort Pierre by General Harney with a Delegation from Nine Tribes of the Sioux Indians, Senate Executive Documents, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, S. Doc. 94, 27. On expulsions of white intruders, see Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 82, and Spotted Tail’s Folk, 90; Sandoz, Crazy Horse, 98–101; K. M. Bray, “Lone Horn’s Peace,” 42–43; J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 158–67; Warren, Preliminary Report, 18–21, 51–53; Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 68–69, 77–78; and cf, e.g., Lower Brule speeches to Snowden party, Snowden journal, Oct. 11, 1857, J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 185; Lone Horn speech to Indian Peace Commission, Fort Laramie, May 28, 1868, “Transcript of the Minutes and Proceedings of the Indian Peace Commission Appointed By An Act of Congress Approved July 20, 1867,” vol. 2, 107–10, ID.
13. See Bear Ribs, in J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 158–67.
14. On Sitting Bull’s public career in the mid-1850s, see Utley Lance and the Shield, chap. 2; K. M. Bray, “Before Sitting Bull” ;Vestal, Sitting Bull, 30–32; G. C. Anderson, Sitting Bull and the Paradox of Lakota Nationhood, chap. 2. These sources, rooted in Vestal’s interviews with Lakota associates of Sitting Bull, reflect the significant role that the Strong Heart Society played in articulating an ideology of resistance to American expansionism.
15. “We fight the Crows because they will not take half and give us peace with the other half” : Black Horse (Cheyenne chief) speech to Col. H. B. Carrington, July 1866, Hebard and Brininstool, Bozeman Trail, 1:264; Bear Ribs, in J. A. Hanson, Little Chief’s Gatherings, 165.
16. Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 88–89, is the source for Curly Hair’s following High Backbone to war against the “Gros Ventres.” The term could apply to the Gros Ventres of the Missouri, the horticultural Hidatsa tribe of northern North Dakota, but consideration of Eastman’s other uses of the name indicates that he means the Atsinas, sometimes known as Gros Ventres of the Prairie, of north-central Montana. The Atsinas speak an Algonquian language closely related to Arapaho.
17. For the preparations and procedures of a war party, see Wissler, “Societies and Ceremonial Associations,” 54ff; George Sword, in DeMallie, “Teton Dakota Kinship and Social Organization,” 150–53; Walker, Lakota Society, 95. High Backbone’s personal organization of a later war party is recorded in Vestal, Warpath, 39–40.
18. A war party parade is graphically illustrated in Bad Heart Bull and Blish, Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 202–11, 291–97, with valuable notes on the heyoka at 204.
19. Wissler, “Societies and Ceremonial Associations,” 55–59.
20. He Dog, in Riley, “Oglala Sources,” 10. I believe that He Dog’s recollection of the fight with the Arapahos refers to the same battle reported by Eastman. Both accounts indicate that this battle was the one in which Curly Hair’s adult reputation was founded, and it is unlikely that there were two such battles involving the Arapahos (or Atsinas). Some difference in age is indicated: Eastman believed that Curly Hair (born according to his reckoning ca. 1845) was sixteen years old; He Dog (after asserting that both he and Curly Hair were born in 1837–38) states that Curly Hair was “about 18” at the time of the fight. Since he believed that he and Curly Hair were seventeen or eighteen during the latter’s yearlong sojourn with the Brules (and Cheyennes), the dating of the Arapaho (Atsina) battle fell within one year of and more likely very soon after Curly Hair’s return. A fall 1857 dating therefore looks most likely for the fight, just as Curly Hair approached his seventeenth birthday.
The internal chronology in Sandoz, Crazy Horse, 115–18, dates the fight to 1860, when according to her reckoning, Curly Hair was seventeen. Having already discarded He Dog’s dating of Curly Hair’s birth and his Brule sojourn, she further scrambles her principal informant’s chronology by placing the Atsina fight five years later. She also ignores He Dog’s identification of the enemy and equates the fight with yet another tradition that the battle was fought with Shoshones or a people related to them, “speaking a changed tongue.” In doing this she used details from a letter by Walter S. Campbell (Stanley Vestal) to Eleanor Hinman, Oct. 13, 1932, setting out an account of Curly Hair/Crazy Horse’s war deeds obtained (through Joseph White Bull) from Owns Horn, one of Crazy Horse’s Miniconjou cousins (see Hardorff, Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, appendix B). In this account, two coups are credited in a fight (or fights) with “the Grass House People (who lived where the Shoshoni do now).” These enemies were probably northern Shoshones and Bannocks. This fight probably took place in 1858. Details of the fight, and the identity of the enemy, are fully discussed in chapter 7.
Sandoz took the Campbell data a
nd synthesized it with material from Horn Chips’ 1907 statement to Judge Ricker. Horn Chips also gave details of the fight in which Curly Hair received his adult name but identified the enemies vaguely as “the Crows and Rees [Arikaras] and others whose language they could not understand.” (Horn Chips interview, tablet 18, Ricker Papers). The unlikely combination, underlined by Horn Chips’ indeterminate catchall (converted by Sandoz into an ethnonym, “the people of the unknown tongue” ) and his further identification of Shoshones among the enemy, probably demonstrates simply that Horn Chips knew little of the details: there were blank spots in his knowledge of his hunka brother’s life, as chapter 7 explores further.
At face value Horn Chips’ dating also seems inconsistent: Ricker set down that the fight took place when Curly Hair “was just twenty-one years old,” i.e., in 1861–62. However, at the end of his account of the fight, Horn Chips was at pains to state that he was four years older than Curly Hair (i.e., born in 1836). Horn Chips may have meant that he was “just twenty-one” at the time of the fight, placing it (per this independent reconstruction) in 1857, just as Curly Hair passed his seventeenth birthday, thus squaring neatly with Eastman’s and He Dog’s placing of Curly Hair in the age frame sixteen to eighteen.
Selecting her material at will, Sandoz did take up He Dog’s observation that Curly Hair took two enemy scalps in the fight and was wounded. He Dog does not specify where Curly Hair was hit. The Owns Horn material, however, states that in the fight with the Grass House People, Curly Hair was wounded in the left calf. Believing, from the Hinman interviews with Red Feather, that Curly Hair was wounded only twice, the second time by No Water in 1870, Sandoz then synthesized He Dog and Owns Horn. However, Eagle Elk’s 1944 statement to John G. Neihardt establishes that there was a third wound, in the arm—most likely sustained in the fight to which He Dog refers. Unlike He Dog, Sandoz makes a causal relation between the wound and the scalp taking, indicating that Curly Hair was violating the taboos of his youth vision. No such taboo is mentioned in the Ricker and Hinman interviews, Sandoz’s major sources.
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