Crazy Horse: A Life

by Larry McMurtry

  Fetterman was an arrogant young man who had no regard for Indians; he had publicly said that with eighty men he could march through the whole Sioux nation. On that cold December day he got his chance. He demanded that Carrington let him lead a troop of men in the defense of some woodcutters who were being harassed by a few Indians. Carrington consented, but with reluctance. He would have preferred to send a more reliable officer, but finally yielded to Fetterman’s demands—though he made it clear that on no account was Fetterman to follow the Indians over Lodge Trail Ridge.

  Captain Fetterman, having bullied his way into the assignment, rode out of the fort with eighty men, the very number he had said he could ride through the whole Sioux nation with. The Sioux and the Cheyennes, in large numbers, had been waiting with uncharacteristic patience, hoping a sizable group of soldiers would expose themselves. For once, the young warriors refrained from spoiling the ambush. Crazy Horse led a party of decoys whose job it was to tempt the soldiers to go where they had been told not to go: over Lodge Trail Ridge, a move that would take them out of sight of the fort.

  The soldiers, of course, were no strangers to the decoy tactics; they were not easily tempted. The legend is that it was Crazy Horse who skillfully and successfully played the wounded bird, leading the soldiers farther and farther from safety. He dismounted several times, pretending that his horse was lame; at one point he even built a small fire. Captain Fetterman had not insisted on taking this command merely to protect a few woodcutters. Eventually, ignoring his strict orders, he took the bait, led his soldiers over Lodge Trail Ridge, and went down the other side. The Indians, in this instance perfectly disciplined, sprang the trap: in half an hour or less Captain Fetterman and his eighty men were dead. By some accounts Captain Fetterman saved his last bullet for himself; American Horse, however, claimed that he clubbed him down and cut his throat. Red Cloud, who probably wasn’t there himself, later said that he couldn’t remember American Horse being there. There were so many arrows in the air at the same time that some of the Indians may have been wounded by what we now call friendly fire.

  Whether Red Cloud was present at this battle remains a matter for debate. Stanley Vestal thinks he wasn’t, but George Hyde believes he was somewhere around, being a general of sorts. Crazy Horse had his reputation enhanced, but the victory was somewhat spoiled for him by the death of his friend Lone Bear. The soldiers in Fort Phil Kearney expected to be attacked that night, but the Indians faded into a winter blizzard.

  General Sherman, like everyone else, underestimated the fighting spirit of the Plains Indians and misjudged their determination to resist the utter destruction of the hunting grounds upon which they depended. Sherman had the peace party to contend with, and an underabundance of funds besides. The railroads which would eventually bracket the Sioux were on their way but not yet far enough west to be decisive.

  The Sioux and the Cheyennes hacked up the bodies of Fetterman and his men in a terrible but customary fashion. Some of the Cheyennes probably remembered that Chivington’s men had done exactly the same thing to Black Kettle’s people at Sand Creek. The Indians vented their fury on corpses; this is likely to occur in every war—think of Bosnia—but when these mutilations were reported in the eastern newspapers, they had the usual inflammatory effect on the nonmilitary public. It was, however, a divided public. The likelihood is that the government could have bought off most of the hostile Indians if they had offered adequate monies and decently spacious reservations. But the government was invariably penny-pinching in its allocations, and much of what it did allot was immediately siphoned off by corrupt Indian agents. Sherman, in charge of a large and unwieldy district, was for a time helpless. He could not put enough men in the field to scorch the vast earth of the west, while the money that could then be offered for peace did not impress hardheaded negotiators such as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. If they were going to sell their patrimony for goods, they wanted fine goods, not tacky goods.

  The strategic flaws in the military approach were demonstrated conclusively in 1867 when General Hancock led a large and well-publicized expedition into the central plains, accomplishing almost nothing. This lumbering force annoyed the southern Cheyennes, who had not been causing much trouble at the time. George Armstrong Custer had some fun shooting buffalo along the Smoky Hill River, but very few Indians were fought or even seen. This campaign was such an embarrassing failure that the army, for a time, gave up on a military solution to the problem of the Plains Indians. It was once again demonstrated that large forces of soldiers, dragging mostly useless equipment, could rarely catch up with the hostile Indians; the army was far more likely to blunder into peaceful villages of Indians who were merely minding their own business.

  Not much has been written about Indians who scouted for the army—and such scouts existed virtually from the time the first white man met the first Indian—but the fact is that if the army had not been able to employ Indian scouts, they would never have found any Indians. The Indian scouts were essential, not merely to help the army find Indians but to help the army find its own way as well. A few such scouts, because of their great knowledge of the country, acquired a certain fame. Black Beaver, a Delaware who scouted for Captain Randolph Marcy in Texas, was said to know every creek between the Columbia River gorge and the Rio Grande. In any pursuit situation the army would have been helpless without their Indian—or, often, half-breed—scouts. General Crook would never have found Geronimo in Mexico without Apache scouts to lead him, and the same is true of much Plains Indian warfare. Even with the scouts the army was rarely able to move fast enough to catch up with the hostiles they sought. When the whites did surprise a village, as Custer surprised Black Kettle on the Washita, it was usually because the Indians felt too secure in the knowledge that they were living peaceably to post adequate guards. If they weren’t bothering the whites, they did not expect the whites to bother them. The lesson learned on the Bluewater in 1855 had to be learned over and over again: when white soldiers were in the mood to punish Indians, they would punish whatever group of Indians they came across, whether that particular group had committed hostilities or not.

  Stephen Ambrose believes that it was Sherman who decided, after the miserable failure of the Hancock expedition, that he might as well give the peace policy a chance. Ambrose’s contention is that Sherman, taking the long view, thought he saw a better way to eliminate the Indians than to keep sending out armies that couldn’t find them. The better way would be to wait for the railroads. In a decade or less the hostiles of the northern plains would be caught between the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific. Then the buffalo hunters—and, for that matter, the soldiers too—could ride at their ease right into the heart of Indian country and destroy the buffalo, the Indians’ subsistence animal. This amounts to a leisurely—but sure—version of scorched earth, with E. H. Harriman and the other railroad magnates bearing much of the expense. The railroads would soon hurt the Indians far worse than the army had yet managed to. If this was indeed Sherman’s thinking, then he was right. The buffalo lasted barely ten years after the railroads came.

  9

  THE VICTORY over Fetterman may have been sweet for the Indians, but the fort itself was still there, as were two others: Fort Reno and Fort C. F. Smith, all three in the heart of country that the Sioux felt was their own. Throughout the winter of 1866–67 the Indians kept a certain pressure on these forts, but, after Fetterman, the soldiers were cautious; about all the Sioux could do was make it difficult for them to gather firewood. To Red Cloud and the other Indian leaders the very presence of these forts was intolerable. In July of 1867, with Crazy Horse and a large force of warriors, Red Cloud attacked a kind of mini-fort that had been set up on the edge of the Bighorns, where wood could be cut in abundance. This little encampment, under the command of a Captain Powell, had only about forty men, but the wagons had been pulled into a tight circle and fortified with boxes stacked in and under them. The battle that ensued was thus called the Wag
on Box Fight. The Indians picked off a few woodcutters, but the charge against the mini-fort failed. The soldiers were good marksmen, with plenty of ammunition. Had the Indians tried hitting the little troop from two sides at once, they might have overwhelmed them, but they didn’t try that, and Captain Powell could not be induced to come out and play, as Fetterman had been. The Indians lost several warriors and the army regained a certain amount of face.

  In the fall of 1867 General Sherman made a whirlwind tour of the prairies. He went up the Missouri and talked with Sitting Bull’s people, parleyed with Spotted Tail in Nebraska, hurried south to Kansas, where he talked with the southern Cheyennes, the Arapahos, the Comanches, and the Kiowas, and then came back to Fort Laramie to talk, he hoped, with the Oglalas. Hurrying up and down the plains in pursuit of a general peace, Sherman preached farming, telling the Indians that it was finally time to give up the chase. The Indians were neither impressed nor persuaded. They hemmed and they hawed.

  The peace commissioners, in approaching the Oglalas, caused a bit of awkwardness by asking for Red Cloud by name; in their eyes the struggle for the Powder River had become his war. To the Sioux and the Cheyennes, it was not that simple. The “war” had consisted of a number of skirmishes and a few battles, some of which Red Cloud fought in and some of which he didn’t. He was neither the first Indian nor the last to discover that popularity—or at least prominence—with the whites was apt to complicate relations back home.

  To the Sioux and the Cheyennes the struggle for the Powder River was their war, not Red Cloud’s, who at this point, though a respected war leader, was not a Big Belly or a man with any special moral authority. Their most respected man was still Old Man Afraid, and it was he who finally journeyed to Fort Laramie to talk with Sherman and the peace commissioners. Old Man Afraid agreed to nothing, but he did let the dignitaries know that peace was not likely until the forts along the Powder River were removed, a step the government was not willing to take—not yet. General Sherman, who had talked to Indians all the way from the Missouri to the Arkansas, went home well aware that he had made few converts to the farming life—nor would he while the buffalo still roamed.

  In March of the next year, though, General Grant ordered the abandonment of Fort C. F. Smith, Fort Reno, and Fort Phil Kearney. The battle for the Bozeman had become a stalemate. General Sherman was as convinced as ever that all the Indians would become, in time, what Chief Justice John Marshall had called them long before: domestic dependent nations. But Sherman also recognized that he could not immediately subdue these Indians by military means. The army’s resources, whether of men or money, were not unlimited; the three little forts were soaking up money while producing nothing but aggravation.

  The result of this decision was the famous treaty of 1868. It closed the forts and gave the Sioux and the Cheyennes forever the lands they had fought for so hard: the Dakotas west of the Missouri, the Black Hills, the land between the Platte and the Bighorn Mountains. No whites would be allowed to enter this territory, on penalty of arrest, a stern provision that was violated before the ink was dry on the paper. The Indians agreed to become, in white terms, “civilized” once the buffalo were gone. It is doubtful that many of the Sioux understood some of the more extreme clauses in regard to civilization, such as the provision for compulsory education.

  Many dignitaries came to Fort Laramie in August of 1868 for the signing of this treaty, and some Indians came, but Red Cloud didn’t arrive. The whites who sat there, twiddling their thumbs—they included Sherman—got a good taste of Red Cloud’s hauteur. In the end they left the papers and went home. Red Cloud, who had pursued some buffalo he ran into, finally showed up at the fort in November. The hated forts were by then gone, and the Sioux in full possession of their hunting grounds. The whites, for once, had backed down.

  Meanwhile, to the south, in the same month that Red Cloud touched the pen, General Custer, in the famous dawn attack that was to provide a visual metaphor for so many movie westerns, wiped out Black Kettle on the Washita.

  10

  CRAZY HORSE had not gone to the peace conference at Fort Laramie in 1868. As usual, he avoided all conferences and continued to raid and hunt; now, free of the whites, he could again turn his attention to his traditional tribal enemies. He was a highly respected warrior, revered in the band for his willingness to share what he killed with the old and helpless; but he was not a chief, nor did he lead anyone other than his immediate companions, one of whom, his old friend Hump, was killed in a foolish raid on some Shoshones, a raid Crazy Horse had tried to discourage, mainly because it was rainy and slippery and the Shoshones were better mounted. (Black Elk said Crazy Horse never owned a good mount; no horse would carry him far, one theory being that the little stone pendant the medicine man Chips made for him was so heavy with magic that it broke the horses down.)

  About three years after Red Cloud touched the pen at Fort Laramie, Crazy Horse, still unmarried, experienced a crisis that was marital rather than martial in nature. Though he was a Shirt-wearer, one who was supposed to provide an example of stable family behavior, his passion for Black Buffalo Woman had not abated. Ignoring the tribe’s concern, he still hung around No Water’s lodge, paying Black Buffalo Woman an unseemly amount of attention, even after she bore No Water a third child. No Water was not pleased with the state of things, but, like many husbands, he bore it.

  Black Buffalo Woman, by Sioux custom, was not necessarily locked in for life with No Water. Any Sioux woman could divorce a husband who was no longer agreeable to her; all she had to do was place her husband’s effects outside the lodge and she was divorced. But Black Buffalo Woman never quite worked up to this drastic step. She neither divorced No Water nor discouraged Crazy Horse, who might, within the terms of Sioux custom, have made No Water a formal offer for her. He could have offered his best horse, or several horses. Very likely No Water would have rejected this offer—from what we can tell at this distance he loved and valued his wife and had no intention of giving her up. But if Crazy Horse had made some sort of offer, at least the norms of civility that were expected of a Shirt-wearer would have been observed.

  Crazy Horse, though, was indifferent to these formalities, or any formality. He always had been. What he did was wait until No Water had gone on a hunt, then he eloped with Black Buffalo Woman. The grand passion of his life could be denied no longer.

  No Water was hardly the sort of husband to take this sort of behavior sitting down. When he returned from his hunt, he immediately borrowed a pistol from a warrior named Bad Heart Bull and went in pursuit of the lovers. This too was a violation of Sioux custom—Black Buffalo Woman had a right to go if she wanted to. But No Water went after her anyway.

  The lovers enjoyed, at best, a very short idyll, perhaps only one night. They had not had time to go far before No Water found them, burst into the lodge where they were staying, and shot Crazy Horse just below his left nostril. Horrified, Black Buffalo Woman crawled out of the tent and skedaddled.

  Versions of this violent incident differ. Some say Crazy Horse might have been able to grapple with No Water had not Little Big Man grabbed his arm just as he was rising to meet the challenge. No Water said, “Friend, I have come!” or words to that effect; then he shot. If Little Big Man did grab Crazy Horse’s arm, it of course foreshadows what he did in the fatal struggle at Fort Robinson six years later; it also fulfills Crazy Horse’s dream, in which it was prophesied that he would only be injured if one of his own people held his arms to prevent him from fighting.

  That is the poetic version, but there are other versions, none of which mention Little Big Man at all. He Dog, who was much exercised by this grave misbehavior, doesn’t mention him. Since He Dog had to do much of the peacemaking, it would be odd that he doesn’t mention Little Big Man if the latter had indeed been an actor in this old drama. He Dog says the lovers had been in the lodge of Little Shield when No Water caught up with them.

  In any case, quite a mess had been made. No W
ater was brother to the prominent Sioux twins Black Twin and White Twin, of the Bad Faces, Red Cloud’s village. No Water went to his brother Black Twin, who made a sweat lodge, purified No Water of what he supposed was a murder, and prepared to fight Crazy Horse’s people, if necessary.

  Fortunately for all concerned, Crazy Horse wasn’t dead. The bullet broke his jaw, but after a day or two it was clear that he would live. Still, feelings ran high in both camps. The peacemakers had to work skillfully and quickly to prevent what could have become a bloody feud. Black Buffalo Woman, like many a wife taken in adultery, fled, but was eventually persuaded to return to her husband. Crazy Horse made it a condition that she not be punished, and she wasn’t. No Water gave Crazy Horse his best horse as a peace offering, but the two never really made it up. No Water and Black Buffalo Woman went to live with Red Cloud’s band. Once Crazy Horse encountered No Water while on a hunt and chased him all the way across the Yellowstone River before allowing him to escape.

  He Dog, remembering this sorry sequence of events sixty years later, was still indignant at the thought of the damage it had done to tribal harmony. No Water blamed the medicine man Chips, saying Chips had made Black Buffalo Woman a potion that had caused her to lose her reason; but among the elders of the band, Crazy Horse was judged to be the most at fault. He had taken another man’s wife and had done it with complete disregard for custom and propriety, thus seriously threatening tribal unity. Much diplomacy had to be practiced to prevent war between one band and the other. No Water, in particular, never forgot. He was an eager member of the party that went to the Spotted Tail agency to arrest Crazy Horse at the end.