WHAT DID THE SIOUX and Cheyenne leaders think at this point? What did they feel? Several commentators have suggested that once the jubilation of victory subsided, a mood of foreboding returned. Perhaps the tribes recognized that they were likely never to be so unified again—and they were not. Probably the leaders knew that they were likely never to have such a one-sided military victory again, either—a victory that was thrown them because of the vaingloriousness of one white officer.
Or perhaps they didn’t think in these terms at all—not yet. With the great rally over, the great battle won, they broke up and got on with their hunting. Perhaps a few did reckon that something was over now, but it is doubtful that many experienced the sense of climax and decline as poetically as Old Lodge Skins in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man: “Yes, my son,” he says,
it is finished now, because what more can you do to an enemy than beat him? Were we fighting red man against red man—they way we used to, because that is a man’s profession, and besides it is enjoyable—it would now be the turn of the other side to whip us. We would fight as hard as ever and perhaps would win again, but they would definitely start with an advantage, because that is the right way. There is no permanent winning or losing when things move, as they should, in a circle. . . .
But the white men, who live in straight lines and squares, do not believe as I do . . . With them it is everything or nothing, Washita or Greasy Grass . . . Winning is all they care about, and if they can do that by scratching a pen across a paper or saying something into the wind, they are much happier. . . .
Old Lodge Skins was right about the army wanting to win. Crook’s defeat at the Rosebud had embarrassed the army, and the debacle at the Little Bighorn shamed it. The nation, of course, was outraged. By August of 1876 Crook and Terry were lumbering around with a reassuring force of some four thousand soldiers. Naturally they found few Indians. Crazy Horse was somewhere near Bear Butte, harrying the miners in the Black Hills pretty much as the mood struck him. There was a minor engagement or two, of little note. The Indians were not suicidal—they left the massive force alone. Crook and Terry were such respecters now that they were bogged down by their own might.
In the fall of that year the whites, having failed to buy the Black Hills, simply took them. There was a travesty of a treaty council at which the theme of farming was again accented. Young Man Afraid, after hearing a great deal about farming, sarcastically ventured the view that it might take him one hundred years to learn how to do such work—he wanted to make sure that the government meant to take care of his people well during this learning period. With this disgraceful treaty the Indians lost not only the Black Hills but the Powder River, the Yellowstone, the Bighorns. There was even talk of moving the settled Sioux at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies to a reservation on the Missouri River, a move they all bitterly resisted. Crook, at this point, wanted to depose Red Cloud, insisting that he had not been forceful enough when it came to bringing in the hostiles. He wanted to promote Spotted Tail, not because he was better about the hostiles but because he was somewhat easier to deal with than the argumentative Bad Face.
From this point in 1876 on, the bitter factionalism of agency politics—in the Sioux’s case, the factionalism of the defeated—has a place in the story. Everyone was getting more than a little tired of Red Cloud, but he was both tenacious and smart. He was to be one of the very few Plains Indian leaders of this period who survived everything, dying of old age in 1909.
By the late fall of 1876 General Crook had been in the field for almost a year, with no significant victories and one embarrassing defeat, the Rosebud. In November he finally had a victory, hitting the Cheyennes under Dull Knife and Little Wolf in their winter camp in the Bighorns. The Cheyennes who got away struggled north in weather so terrible that eleven babies froze in one night; when the survivors finally reached Crazy Horse, he took them in and provided for them as best he could.
By the end of what was in some ways a year of glory, 1876, Crazy Horse had to face the fact that his people had come to a desperate pass. It was a terrible winter, with subzero temperatures day after day. The Indians were ragged and hungry; the soldiers who opposed them were warmly clothed and well equipped. The victories of the previous summer were, to the Sioux and the Cheyennes, now just memories. They had little ammunition and were hard pressed to find game enough to feed themselves.
Colonel Nelson A. Miles, then camped on the Tongue River, badly wanted Crazy Horse’s surrender. (Though he couldn’t have known it at the time, if he could have persuaded Crazy Horse to come in to his camp he would have ended up claiming three great surrenders, the other two being Chief Joseph and Geronimo.) To entice Crazy Horse, Miles sent many runners promising fair treatment for himself and his people.
Near the end of the year Crazy Horse apparently decided he had better consider this offer. He approached, but stopped well short of Miles’s camp and sent a number of emissaries ahead to discuss the matter. Unfortunately, some of Miles’s Crow scouts saw the Oglalas coming and attacked them, killing several. Miles was furious when he heard of this and tried to make amends, but the damage was done. Crazy Horse turned back.
When the New Year came, Miles attacked and kept attacking until the weather finally stopped him. Crazy Horse moved north and hung on. It was during this time that he is said to have shot the horses of Sioux who wanted to give up and go to the agencies, a charge that is still debated.
During this hard period, with the soldiers just waiting for spring to begin another series of attacks, Sitting Bull decided to take himself and his people to Canada. Crazy Horse perhaps considered this option, but rejected it. It may have been because in Canada it was even colder—or it may have been because he just didn’t want to leave home.