Crazy Horse: A Life

by Larry McMurtry

  The high, keening tension held only until it began to be realized that Crazy Horse had been dealt a fatal blow.

  Then the tension broke. No shot was fired, and Crazy Horse—a man who had lost his brother, his daughter, the woman he loved, several friends, his way of life, and even, for a time, his people—began his leaving as a man and his arrival as a myth, a man around whom stories that are like little gospels accumulate. A variorum death of Crazy Horse would consist of at least a score of versions, all contributed or recollected by people, white and red, who were in the fort that night.

  These recollections, of course, diverge on many points of detail, overlap, contradict one another; probably most of them are partly true, probably none of them can be said to be completely, definitively true. Violence produces shock, and shock distorts memory: a patrolman trying to sort out varying versions of a rush-hour car wreck has the same problem as the biographer of Crazy Horse. Many saw what happened, but no two witnesses remembered it exactly the same.

  Not long before Crazy Horse left for the Spotted Tail agency he had a much-reported conversation with his old friend He Dog. Crook wanted all the Sioux at Red Cloud to move across the creek, nearer to White Butte, so he would have them handy for a big council. Crazy Horse didn’t want to move across the creek, but He Dog thought it might be best to do as he was told. He was nervous, though, about what this move might mean for their friendship, so he asked Crazy Horse if such a move on his part would mean that they were enemies now. Crazy Horse laughed, perhaps for the last time; then he reminded He Dog that he was not speaking to a white man. Whites were the only ones, he said, who made rules for other people. Camp where you please.

  So it is with the death of Crazy Horse: the reader is invited to camp where he or she pleases amid the many recollections and recountings.

  Crazy Horse, right after receiving the fatal wound, cried out, “Let me go, my friend—you have hurt me plenty bad!” or words to that effect. Then he sank down. Once the high tension between the two groups died, two or three people claim to have stepped forward and covered Crazy Horse with a blanket. He Dog says he tore Crazy Horse’s own blanket in two and covered him with half of it, which seems odd. Why not cover him with all of it? Then Dr. McGillycuddy came, looked at the wounds, saw how it was. Some say that Little Big Man howled when Crazy Horse whirled and cut him; others say Crazy Horse merely cut him on the thumb. Lieutenant Clark was sound asleep, perhaps drunk—his men had to sling him around roughly to get him awake. The dying man on the parade ground was still under arrest; the orders were to put him in the guardhouse. General Bradley would not, at first, relax the order. But when the soldiers started to move the wounded Crazy Horse to the guardhouse, Touch-the-Clouds intervened. Touch-the-Clouds said that Crazy Horse was a chief. He could not be put in the guardhouse.

  The Indians, now, were quiet—perhaps chastened, perhaps numbed. Many among them, some of them his old allies, realized that for reasons of politics they had killed a man who had no politics, just the conviction that he wanted to live his life in accordance with the precepts of his own people, as he had been taught to live it.

  There were a lot of Indians on the parade ground, and they were mainly, now, on the side of Touch-the-Clouds. Dr. McGillycuddy had to go twice to General Bradley to persuade him not to attempt to move this dying Indian to the guardhouse. The general was irritated by all this; perhaps he thought Crazy Horse was shamming. Not until Dr. McGillycuddy convinced him there would be a very big fight if such a move was attempted did the general relent and allow Crazy Horse to be taken into the adjutant’s office instead.

  This move the Sioux allowed, although they would rather have moved him outside the fort and let him die with the rites of Sioux tradition, as Conquering Bear had died so long before. Once in the office Crazy Horse refused a cot and was put on the floor. Exactly who was with him in his last hours is unclear. Mari Sandoz says both his parents were allowed in; others mention only his father, Worm. Touch-the-Clouds, after surrendering his weapons, was allowed to go in. Ian Frazier thinks that the fact that Crazy Horse refused the cot and died on the floor meant that he was his own man to the end.

  In Peter Nabokov’s Native American Testimony there is a Crazy Horse deathbed statement—Evan Connell Jr. thinks this statement was taken down by Baptiste Pourier, the fort’s interpreter. But neither Mari Sandoz nor He Dog nor most other accounts of his death mention Baptiste Pourier. Here, for what it is worth, is the statement, supposedly spoken to Agent Jesse Lee:

  My friend, I do not blame you for this. Had I listened to you this trouble would not have happened to me. I was not hostile to the white man. Sometimes my young men would attack the Indians who were their enemies and took their ponies. They did it in return.

  We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing, and our tipis. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservations, where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt.

  We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government then. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages. Then “Long Hair” came in the same way. They say we massacred him but he would have done the same to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses, but we were so hemmed in we had to fight.

  After that I went up on Tongue River with a few of my people and lived in peace. But the government would not let me alone. Finally, I came back to the Red Cloud agency . . . I came here with the agent to talk to the Big White Chief, but was not given a chance. They tried to confine me, I tried to escape, and a soldier ran his bayonet into me.

  I have spoken.

  In contrast to this lengthy speech, Black Elk maintained that Crazy Horse said only three words after he was stabbed: “Hey, hey, hey!” an expression of regret. Though Crazy Horse may indeed have wanted to assure Agent Lee that he didn’t blame him for what had happened, such a long apologia seems peculiar for a man who had never liked to talk and who, moreover, would have had little interest in neatly tidying up the record.

  Others say that his father, Worm, spoke to him at some point, saying, “Son, I am here.” Crazy Horse then roused himself long enough to say, “Father, it is no good for the people to depend on me any longer—I am bad hurt.” In its tragic simplicity this exchange between father and son puts us back with the Greeks.

  Some say that soldiers came and went—others say that only Dr. McGillycuddy came and went.

  If the last exchange between father and son—assuming we have it more or less correct—is like the Greeks, Touch-the-Clouds’ final tribute is quietly Shakespearean. When he saw that Crazy Horse was dead, he pulled the blanket over him and said: “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” He may also have said: “This is good. He sought death and now he has found it.”

  If it is true that the destination the government had in mind for him was a cell dug into the coral on the Dry Tortugas, then Touch-the-Clouds was right. A man who had lived his whole life under the great western skies would not have lasted long in any prison. Sitting Bull, Spotted Tail, and Geronimo all survived the white man’s prison, but the Kiowa chief Satanta did not. He found confinement so irksome that he jumped head first from a high window. Crazy Horse, daring and brave as a warrior, was in other ways not as tough a nut as Sitting Bull or Geronimo. It is hard to imagine him signing photographs for tourists at the big St. Louis Exposition, as Geronimo did—always insisting on his price, one dollar.

  But that is speculation. The fact is that Crazy Horse died later that night, September 6, 1877, on the floor of the adjutant’s office in Fort Robinson, Nebraska.

  When Touch-the-Clouds went out to bring the news of his death to the waiting Sioux, a wail and a howling went up from the parade ground and from the many, many tents, near and distant: a wailing and a howling of grief, of fear, of torment, frustration, de
spair. No Sioux had exceeded him in charity. The women remembered the charity—it was the women who wailed and howled in the night.

  Someone mentioned that taps was played, which seems extremely unlikely. The wailing of the women of the Brulé and Oglala Sioux was the taps for Crazy Horse.

  Many of the white people in the fort that night expected to be killed. The fact that the Sioux themselves had meant to kill Crazy Horse—and had helped—meant nothing now. Agent Jesse Lee was sure he faced certain death for having led Crazy Horse back to Fort Robinson; he even instructed his wife in how to kill herself, should they be overwhelmed.

  The Sioux, however, did not revolt. They had plenty of leaders, but the one who had never learned to walk the white man’s road was dead on the floor.

  Mrs. Jesse Lee, the agent’s wife, said it made her blood boil to think of all the promises made to the Indians and then broken. Angie Johnson, the captain’s wife, seconded that sentiment. Whatever their views on Indians generally, these women didn’t like broken promises. Both wrote in outrage to their families.

  The same two women, and several men as well, testified to the terrible, pitiable, Lear-like grief of Crazy Horse’s parents: they wandered the fort for three days, sobbing, wailing, rending their garments, refusing all succor. When they were finally allowed to have their son’s body, they put it on a burial scaffold outside the fort. Later, when the miserable, predictable exodus to the Missouri River began, they took his body on a travois and then slipped off and buried him. Nobody knows exactly where he is buried, but legend has it that his burial spot is close to the creek called Wounded Knee. It is of course near this same creek that the Ghost Dance Massacre occurred, on the last day of 1890.

  General Miles, perhaps vexed that he had failed to get his surrender, called Crazy Horse “the embodiment of ferocity.”

  General Crook, though, seems always to have regretted that he had let Woman’s Dress turn him away from that last council. He had, no doubt, by then figured out that Woman’s Dress was a shit-stirrer, a “two-edged sword to his own people,” as one Sioux described him.

  An old Sioux who wouldn’t give his name to Mari Sandoz or Elinor Hinman said: “I’m not telling anyone—white or Indian—what I know about the killing of Crazy Horse. That affair was a disgrace and a dirty shame. We killed our own man.”

  Before Crazy Horse was even in the ground, Little Big Man and a delegation of the Sioux leaders were in Washington to discuss the relocation issue. There exists a curious artifact, a medal presumably given Little Big Man for his bravery in subduing Crazy Horse. Who made this medal, and who issued it, are not clear. President Hayes may have had a few medals struck off, but none are known to exist for the other members of the delegation. This medal is on loan to the Nebraska State Historical Association.

  It may be true, as Black Elk says, that Crazy Horse during his life never owned a very good horse; but he has a powerful horse now: a horse as strong as a mountain. If the Ziolkowski family can only keep it up, he will finally—in a few more years, and in spirit at least—have risen forever over the Black Hills. He will have managed to take back the road General Custer opened: the road the Sioux call the Thieves’ Road.

  SOURCES

  Ambrose, Stephen E. Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

  A good book, though not free of abundant speculation. The author is riding a hobbyhorse and keeps it in a high trot throughout.

  Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial, 1964.

  Easily the best novel about the Plains Indian wars. The author finesses the question of Crazy Horse thusly:

  I seen that great warrior once before we split off by ourselves: he had a face full of sharpened edges, wore no ornamentation whatever, no paint, no feathers; he was like a living weapon. He surrendered to the military a year later and was stabbed to death in a scuffle at the agency while his arms were being held by another Indian called Little Big Man—Not me. He was a Sioux and therefore it was a different name, though Englishing the same. . . .

  Bourke, John Gregory. On the Border with Crook. New York: Scribner’s, 1881.

  A famous memoir, much reprinted, and still readable. The author went on to write a famous work of anthropology, Scatological Rites of All Nations (1891).

  Brininstool, E. A. Crazy Horse, the Invincible Oglala Sioux Chief. Los Angeles, 1949.

  Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, 1971.

  Not an Indian History history but a valuable overall account nonetheless.

  Clark, Robert A. The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse. Glendale: Arthur H. Clark, 1976.

  Contains the scout Billy Garnett’s account, which differs in some respects from all the others.

  Connell, Evan S. Jr. Son of the Morning Star. San Francisco: North Point, 1984.

  Its topic may be Custer and the Little Bighorn, but its theme is the American character, as revealed in the struggle for the Great Plains.

  DeMaillie, Raymond (ed.). The Sixth Grandfather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1984.

  In 1932 the writer John G. Neihardt published Black Elk Speaks, his attempt to preserve the teachings of the Sioux holy man Black Elk, whose father had been a contemporary of Crazy Horse. There has long been debate about how much of the book is Black Elk and how much is Neihardt. The Sixth Grandfather contains a kind of digest of the memories and teachings of Black Elk, as given in the interviews recorded by Neihardt’s daughters, Hilda and Enid. These are the rough interviews, stripped of the literary art with which Neihardt later rendered them.

  Frazier, Ian. Great Plains. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

  Chapter 6, pp. 93–119, is a fine meditation on Crazy Horse.

  Heyen, William. Crazy Horse in Stillness. Brockport, N.Y.: Boa Editions, 1996.

  A powerful book of poetry, showing that the imagining and reimagining still goes on.

  Hyde, George E. Red Cloud’s Folk. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1937; and Spotted Tail’s Folk. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1961.

  George E. Hyde deserves a short biography himself. Rendered completely deaf and nearly blind while in his early twenties, he had to do his scholarly work entirely through correspondence, and with the resources of the Omaha Public Library, or what it could obtain for him. Despite these handicaps, his histories respectively of the Oglala and the Brulé Sioux have not been bettered. They are very lively reads. He didn’t think Sioux memory was any worse than white memory, but he didn’t think it was any better, either. He was cranky and impatient, but a very good analyst of the often inconsistent and contradictory sources.

  Kadlecek, Edward, and Mabell Kadlecek. To Kill an Eagle: Indian Views on the Death of Crazy Horse. Boulder: Johnson Books, 1981.

  Gathers some interesting accounts; the more one reads about this death, the more one is likely to sink into confusion.

  Manning, Richard. Grassland. New York: Viking, 1995.

  An essential book for students of the plains.

  Nabokov, Peter. Native American Testimony. New York: Viking, 1991.

  Contains the speech Crazy Horse is said to have made on his deathbed; no source is given for it.

  Sandoz, Mari. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. New York, 1942.

  Mari Sandoz’s book is still the only full-length life of Crazy Horse. Its inception was a series of interviews she and the journalist Elinor Hinman conducted with Sioux elders in 1930–31. Hinman had intended to write the biography herself but withdrew and gave her research to Mari Sandoz, who made the decision—unfortunate, I think—to tell the story from a Sioux point of view. This makes for so many narrative awkwardnesses that the book reads like an historical novel with a biographical basis. Sandoz is not nearly so critical as George Hyde was when it came to evaluating sources, whether white or Sioux. (She once “authenticated” a so-called scalp-shirt said to have belonged to Crazy Horse. This shirt, in the collection of the Nebraska State His
torical Association, contains something like 491 locks of hair, but turned out to have been machine-sewn and is no longer thought to have any connection with Crazy Horse.) Nonetheless, Mari Sandoz’s book has its value; it is a considered and sympathetic study of Crazy Horse the man, and of the Sioux way of life as well.

  Utley, Robert. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1984; and The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull. New York: Holt, 1993.

  Both are useful books.

  Vestal, Stanley. New Sources of Indian History, 1850–1891. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1934.

  Stanley Vestal (Walter Stanley Campbell) is almost as cranky as George Hyde, with whom he frequently disagreed. This book reprints a lot of Ghost Dance material but also contains documents of wider relevance to Sioux history.

  The Nebraska State Historical Association kindly made available to me a copy of the Hinman-Sandoz interviews with He Dog and others. A pamphlet reprint of these interviews is currently out of print. One can hope that someday Judge Eli Ricker’s interviews, done in 1906–07, can also be reprinted—or, rather, printed. They can only be read now on microfilm.

  Beyond the sources, there are stories—always the stories.

  One that I like comes to us from Red Feather, the younger brother of Black Shawl, Crazy Horse’s first wife.