BY MOST ACCOUNTS, Crazy Horse spent the winter of 1856–57 with Yellow Woman’s people, in Kansas. Young Man Afraid, son of the much-respected Old Man Afraid, was with him; the son would one day be much respected too. It may have been about this time that a Cheyenne medicine man convinced the young warriors that he had a medicine so strong that it would turn away bullets, a belief that has surfaced frequently among native peoples. The Comanche prophet Isatai convinced Quanah Parker and others that bullets would not harm them, whereupon they attacked some buffalo hunters who were securely forted up in the old trading post called Adobe Walls. Alas, the bullets proved easily able to penetrate both the medicine and the Comanches, perhaps because a warrior spoiled it by riding a mule rather than a horse. The dervishes believed themselves to be bulletproof when they lined up to be slaughtered at Omdurman; and the belief has cropped up again in Africa within recent decades.
But the young Sioux and Cheyennes in Kansas in the summer of 1857 never got to put this strong magic to a test. They ran into a party of soldiers and prepared to attack, but the soldiers, indifferent to whether the Sioux were bulletproof or not, charged them with drawn sabers. The Sioux may have thought themselves bulletproof, but they knew they weren’t saberproof, so they fled—an embarrassing rout.
Later that summer several thousand Indians gathered at Bear Butte to parley—ineffectively, as it proved—about the whites. Crazy Horse was probably there, with his friend Hump; it may have been at this gathering that he met Touch-the-Clouds, the seven-foot Minniconjou warrior who attended him in his last hour.
Also, it may have been at this large conclave that Crazy Horse met the woman who was to be the love of his life: Black Buffalo Woman, one of Red Cloud’s nieces. It was because of his great, irrepressible passion for Black Buffalo Woman that he was later to fail in his grave responsibility to the tribe, once he had been given the high honor of being made a Shirt-wearer, a story we will get to in good time.
This parley at Bear Butte in the end changed nothing. There was general agreement that the tribes needed to take a sterner line with the whites, before their hunting grounds were completely destroyed; but how exactly they were to do that, with each band moving along with the game and looking essentially to their own needs, was hard to say. The whites had a great advantage: they were one nation (though soon to be split, temporarily); the native peoples of the plains were many nations.
The bitter lesson all the Plains Indians had to begin to absorb in the late 1850s was how very quickly nature’s abundance—that is, game—could become scarcity. The hunting along the Platte was already much diminished; the great masses of buffalo upon which all the tribes were dependent had by then been split into a northern and a southern herd. The hard fighting between Brulé Sioux and Pawnee, which so occupied Spotted Tail, was intensified by the fact that the two peoples were competing for a dwindling supply of game.
For the Oglalas, the same need to stay where the game was abundant forced them west and north and brought increased conflict with the tribes already there, namely, the Arapahos, the Shoshones, and the Crows.
It was on a raid against the Arapahos, probably in the summer of 1858, that Crazy Horse—he would have then been about sixteen—finally earned his name. He charged straight at a party of enemy warriors, untouched by either arrows or bullets; his bravery was so exceptional that the Sioux began to sing in his honor. When two Arapaho warriors rode out to challenge him, he killed both of them and took their scalps, forgetting in the heat of battle that his dream had told him never to keep anything for himself. While he was taking the scalps, he was hit in the leg by an arrow. He threw the scalps away and his friend Hump removed the arrow and treated the wound. When the Oglalas returned to their camp, old Crazy Horse, the father, made a fine ceremony and transferred the name to his son. Thereafter the old man was called Worm and Crazy Horse took the name by which history knows him.
These were not his first kills. Sometime earlier, in a skirmish with some Omahas, he shot at what he thought was a warrior, crouched in some bushes, and discovered that he had killed a woman. He did not take this scalp.
In the main the Oglala effort to edge into the game-rich Powder River country was successful.
The years of Crazy Horse’s early manhood were years of relative prosperity for the Sioux; one reason for this was that the whites were soon fighting a terrible civil war, a war so destructive that, by contrast, their conflicts with the Plains Indians seemed almost like frolics. From 1861 to 1865 the army had all it could handle elsewhere; the best officers, naturally, wanted to fight in that fight, leaving the western forts ill manned, usually by officers who resented the fact that they weren’t fighting the Rebs. Some very ugly incidents—for one, the great Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862—took place during the Civil War; but farther west, where Crazy Horse was, the fighting during these years was mainly Indian against Indian. It was in these years that Crazy Horse earned the high reputation among his fellow Indians that he would carry all the way to the Little Bighorn.