IT IS AS WELL to say firmly at the outset that any study of Crazy Horse will be, of necessity, an exercise in assumption, conjecture, and surmise. We have more verifiable facts about another young warrior, Alexander, called the Great, who lived more than two thousand years earlier than Crazy Horse and whose career is also richly encrusted with legend, than we do about the strange man of the Oglalas (to adopt Mari Sandoz’s phrase). Crazy Horse lived about three and a half decades as a member of a hunting-raiding-gathering tribe that was not at all date obsessed. The dates and places where the historian can firmly place him are white dates: mainly the dates of a few battles he is known to have taken part in. For most of his life he not only avoided white people, he avoided people, spending many days alone on the prairies, dreaming, drifting, hunting. According to Short Buffalo, a fellow Sioux who knew him well, he was “not very tall and not very short, neither broad nor thin. His hair was very light . . . Crazy Horse had a very light complexion, much lighter than other Indians. His face was not broad, and he had a high, sharp nose. He had black eyes that hardly ever looked straight at a man, but they didn’t miss much that was going on, all the same. . . .”
There was something of the hermit, the eremite, in him; he was known to walk through his own camp without appearing to notice anybody. When, late in his life, his family began to worry about his tendency to wander off alone in dangerous country, he told them not to worry, there were plenty of caves and holes he could live in; and had it not been for his sense of responsibility to the people of his village—who knew that he would do his best to feed them—he might well have slipped away and lived in those caves and holes.
He came into Fort Robinson, in northwestern Nebraska, with the nine hundred people who, in desperation, had chosen to follow him, only four months before he was killed, and those four months were the only period in his life when he was in contact with the record-keeping, letter-writing whites; and even then, he camped six miles from the fort, rather than the prescribed three, and saw whites only when he could not avoid them. For almost the whole of his life he did avoid all parleys, councils, treaty sessions, and any meeting of an administrative or political nature, not merely with whites but with his own people as well.
Although he was given the great honor of being a Shirt-wearer, a position whose responsibilities he fulfilled as best he could by providing for the weak and helpless ones of the tribe, he was never a talker; for most of his life we know nothing at all of what he said or thought. He was a loner—now, in many respects, he is a blank. Professional writers and amateur historians, professional historians and amateur writers, have all written about him extensively and have not scrupled to put words in his mouth and even to report his dreams—or, at least, one dream that was of great significance in shaping the way he lived his life.
The basis for most of these conversations, reports, speculations are two sets of interviews with elderly Sioux, both sets to be found in the archives of the Nebraska State Historical Association. The first set was done by Judge Eli Ricker in 1906–07; the second, by the journalist Elinor Hinman and the Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz in 1930–31. Judge Ricker interviewed about fifty people, of whom only ten were Indian. The core of the Hinman-Sandoz interviews is the one with He Dog (brother of Short Buffalo), a lifelong friend of Crazy Horse. He Dog was in his nineties when the interviews were conducted; he outlived his friend Crazy Horse by fifty-nine years (Libbie Custer outlived her George by fifty-seven). He Dog may indeed have had a remarkable memory, but to ask him to look back over almost ninety years to the boyhood of his friend was asking a lot—and, anyway, the interviewers devoted most of their questions to the crucial last fifteen months of Crazy Horse’s life, when the famous battles were fought. Except for one or two incidents, the other thirty-five years of his life are barely touched on; and the interview, all told, is only about fifteen pages long, questions included. Mari Sandoz then wrote a biography which is 428 pages long, many of them purely speculative. Stephen Ambrose, a professional historian, writing in the mid-seventies, devotes about half of a 538-page book to Crazy Horse, and, like Sandoz, doesn’t seem to mind putting words in the mouth of this man of few words.
If the word “record” is to mean anything, one would have to say that for much of Crazy Horse’s life there is no record. He lived the life of a Sioux warrior, raiding and hunting on the central plains. Then, as white pressure on the Plains Indians began to intensify, Crazy Horse emerged as a determined resister whose courage and leadership was a factor in a few battles.
From 1875 on, the record grows steadily more dense, reaching maximum density only on the last day of his life. More has been written about his death—far more—than about the other three and a half decades of his life put together. This is perhaps only natural: there were many witnesses to his fatal stabbing, whereas most of his life went unwitnessed by anyone who would have had any reason to take notes.
The accounts of his death are so many and so varied that one could make a kind of Gospels of Crazy Horse, or, at least, an American Rashomon.
There is also—rarely mentioned but critical—the huge problem of translation. The old men who were looking back across the years and yielding up their memories of Crazy Horse did so in the Sioux language, a language seldom easily or accurately brought into English. Twice in his life, once when he was a young man and once near the end, Crazy Horse experienced the destructiveness that could result from sloppy, inaccurate, or biased interpretation. The slippage between the two languages as the result of ill-intended or merely vague translation was a source of huge frustration to the Indians who made themselves available at the treaty councils—Red Cloud and Spotted Tail in particular—and then found out that what they thought they had heard the whites promise was not in fact what they were getting. How much harder is it, then, for us who really don’t know his words, to trust that we know what this private man—who rarely spoke, even in the councils of his own people—felt or thought?
All this is not to say that we know nothing of Crazy Horse. He was a man, not a myth, and we do know certain things about him. We know enough from the testimony of his close associates to have some idea of the main events of his life, particularly his losses: of his brother Little Hawk, of his daughter They-Are-Afraid-of-Her, of his friends Hump and Lone Bear, and of Black Buffalo Woman, the love of his life, who married another man. We also know something of his behavior in two or three crucial battles.
Still, I am not writing this book because I think I know what Crazy Horse did—much less what he thought—on more than a few occasions in his life; I’m writing it because I have some notions about what he meant to his people in his lifetime, and also what he has come to mean to generations of Sioux in our century and even our time.
Ian Frazier, in discussing what he left out of his meditation on Crazy Horse, admits that he omitted a story about Crazy Horse kneeling to Crook the first time the two men met. He left it out, he says, because (a) he didn’t completely believe it and (b) he didn’t like it. Any biographer of Crazy Horse who has done due diligence with the record will at times be likely to apply that standard in judging this report or that.
I would also like to suggest that the traditions of genre exert their force here and there in the historical record. The genre I have in mind is the battle report, which falls back, if unconsciously, on Homer. When Stephen Ambrose says that forty thousand arrows were shot during the twenty or thirty minutes that it took the Sioux and Cheyenne to kill all the soldiers in the Fetterman massacre, I feel that what I’m getting is a trope, not a fact. Who would have been counting arrows on that cold day in Wyoming in 1866?
In the Crazy Horse literature, as well as the literature of the Plains Indians in general, the historians often chide the writers—Mari Sandoz, Evan S. Connell Jr., John G. Neihardt—for producing good writing but bad history; the writers seldom bother to chide back. The literature of Crazy Horse is about evenly divided between that produced by “writers” and that produced by “historians.” Neither, so far, have convinced many readers—and certainly not this reader—that they have an accurate grip on the deeds, much less on the soul, of the Sioux warrior we call Crazy Horse.