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 Water 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.
Crazy Horse could not, after this, be a Shirt-wearer. He had failed in the Shirt-wearer’s first duty, which was to put the interest of the tribe first. When Elinor Hinman asked He Dog all those years later who had been made a Shirt-wearer in Crazy Horse’s place, He Dog replied that nobody had. The institution itself fell into disuse after this foolishness, which left such a bad taste in people’s mouths that the whole thing lapsed.
Black Buffalo Woman’s fourth child, a daughter, was notably light-skinned; perhaps the child of Crazy Horse, she lived into the 1940s.
Not long after this the tribe saw to it that Crazy Horse took a wife, an agreeable woman named Black Shawl, whom he accepted and, it would seem, came to love. Rather like Yeats, who after his failure with Maud Gonne came to be happy with his kind wife George, Crazy Horse seems to have achieved domestic content with Black Shawl, who, unfortunately, was afflicted with tuberculosis. One of the reasons Crazy Horse developed a friendship with Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy was that the doctor was so steadfast in his efforts to cure Black Shawl.
Later, Crazy Horse took a second wife, a half-Cheyenne, half-French girl named Nellie Larrabee (sometimes spelled Laverie); there is a picture of her in Ian Frazier’s Great Plains. Very probably he never quite got over Black Buffalo Woman, about whose later life nothing is known.
Thus the great passion of Crazy Horse’s life failed and brought serious disorder to his people. It was not long after this that he also suffered the loss of his reckless brother Little Hawk, who was killed when he foolishly attacked some well-armed miners.
Meanwhile, though the Sioux had their treaty, the railroads were coming and with them the whites. There was no serious attempt made to police the area that was then, by law, off-limits to the whites. Who was supposed to have policed an area that vast, anyway? By 1872 the railroads had come so far that Custer, Sheridan, Buffalo Bill Cody, and other dignitaries could take Grand Duke Alexis of Russia on a buffalo hunt, with the grand duke traveling well into Kansas in the comfort of his railroad car.
To the north, things were still quiet. The Northern Pacific was only just edging into North Dakota. It would be a while before it threatened the Sioux sanctuary.
But no quiet, no peace, really lasted long; the endgame was now about to begin. In late summer of 1872 a force of several hundred soldiers pushed up the Yellowstone River into eastern Montana, precipitating the first major conflict between the wild, mainly undisturbed northern Sioux, including Sitting Bull’s people, the Hunkpapas.
Crazy Horse had perhaps drifted north by then; he may have been dissatisfied with the more and more passive conditions to the south, where both Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were now firmly (and permanently) committed to peace. Both had been given agencies of their own; they made no more war on the whites. Spotted Tail was criticized in some quarters for being, in a manner of speaking, a kind of Vichy Indian—but this is quite unfair. Spotted Tail was never a toady, and never sycophantic in his dealings with the whites. Given a choice, probably he would have been happy just to get out of the way; but the Brulés, whom he led, really couldn’t get out of the way. So Spotted Tail negotiated, for the most part effectively. He survived his two-year imprisonment with his dignity intact, and it was to remain intact until the end, when, like Sitting Bull, he was killed by one of his own people, a rival named Crow Dog.
But agency life, with its endless compromising and its constant haggling with the white agents, would never have appealed to Crazy Horse, any more than it appealed to Sitting Bull.
The engagement that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse fought in August of 1872 came near to being a disaster for the Indians. The force against them, some four hundred soldiers, was well armed and could not be tempted into any rashness. Crazy Horse had learned at the Wagon Box Fight how ineffective bows and arrows were against soldiers who were both well armed and competently led. In this fight in the north the Sioux were very daring, but simply could not get close enough to the soldiers to inflict any damage without paying a huge price in lives. As it was, several of the unrestrainable young Sioux were killed early on. It was in this fight that Sitting Bull astonished everyone, Sioux and soldier alike: he sat down in a meadow, in range of the riflemen, casually filled a pipe, lit it, and smoked it, while bullets cut the grass all around him. Crazy Horse, perhaps jealous of Sitting Bull’s sangfroid, reportedly made a reckless dash right across the soldiers’ front, and had his horse shot out from under him for his trouble, after which the Sioux called off the battle.
Throughout the later stages of these conflicts on the plains, up to and including the Custer battle, the Sioux were at a disadvantage because they were so poorly armed. Only a small percentage had guns, and they were usually poor guns at that; even the Sioux who had reliable firearms seldom had much ammunition. They could never afford to match the white men gun for gun and bullet for bullet. From the first the white authorities had been farsighted enough to deny the Indians guns. Even the bravest warrior, armed with a bow and arrow, could only do so much when up against a well-prepared soldier with a gun.
Though the financial panic of 1873 slowed the progress of the Northern Pacific somewhat, its surveyors were nonetheless pushing relentlessly west, well protected by a force that in the popular mind was commanded by George Armstrong Custer. In fact the commander was a modest officer named Stanley. It was while this large force proceeded along the Yellowstone, obviously now in what was supposed to be Sioux country, that Crazy Horse encountered Custer for the first time. The Sioux and the Cheyennes caught Custer and his small detachment napping—literally, in the case of Custer himself—but the Sioux initially intended no big fight. They tried to run off the army’s horse herd, and when that plan was thwarted, tried a decoy maneuver similar to the one that had worked with Fetterman. Custer didn’t go for it; but then the Cheyennes noticed Custer’s hair, which was still long, and remembered the massacre on the Washita—perhaps a few of the warriors who had survived that fight were now back visiting their northern cousins. The Cheyennes attacked, but Custer drove them off. Custer then turned back, and the Indians disengaged. There was little loss of life. Custer thought Sitting Bull was the leader in this skirmish; what he knew of Crazy Horse, if anything, is unclear. Crazy Horse had never been to a meeting with the whites. He had a big reputation with his own people but had as yet received no mention in the popular press. Back east the severe financial panic had for a time driven mere Indian fights off the front pages anyway: the gilding was suddenly beginning to flake off the Gilded Age; all was confusion, dismay, frustration. There no longer seemed to be enough money; specifically, not enough gold. The conservatives were happy to have the country on a gold standard, as long as there was enough gold for the economy to expand; but in the summer of 1873, there wasn’t enough. Paper money had not yet fully caught on.
Fortunately for the nation, unfortunately for the Sioux, the Black Hills awaited; there had long been rumors of large gold deposits in the Sioux’s holy hills. Awkwardly, though, for the leaders of the whites, there was the binding and much-publicized treaty of 1868, unequivocally giving those very hills to the Sioux forever, with unusually clear provisions that they, the whites, were to be kept out. The U.S. government had broken many treaties with the Indians; some would say they had broken all of them—the writer Alex Shoumatoff recently reckoned the total at 378—but few of these breakages involved so much squirming and soul searching and public posturing as the treaty of 1868. General Sheridan began to mutter unconvincingly about treaty violations on the part of the Sioux, but in fact the Sioux were behaving nicely at the time, as the same general had admitted in another context. There were no grounds for breaching the treaty of 1868 except the grounds the whites finally always used: The United States wanted the Black Hills and all the gold that might be there. A big first step toward the taking of them was the expedition that brought General Custer back to the west and produced the famous photograph of a seemingly endless line of wagons proceeding through a valley in the Black Hills. This expedition soon fulfilled its main, though unstated, purpose, which was to find gold in sufficient quantities to quench the thirst of the starving markets.
In Custer’s excited imagination the gold his geologists located at French Creek was so abundant and so easy to get that he could kick it up with the toe of his boot. In reality it was not quite that easy to get, but the gold was there, and, as time has proven, there in quantity. The trail Custer blazed into the Black Hills on that occasion became known to the Indians by a name he despised: the Sioux called it the Thieves’ Road.
Many of Custer’s scouts refused to go into the hills with him, fearing the Sioux, but he went anyway; as soon as traces of gold were detected, he sent the famous white scout Lonesome Charley Reynolds through dangerous country to Fort Laramie to announce this great find to the world. Lonesome Charley made it through and sent the telegram. In August, Custer emerged and described the beauties of the Black Hills in mouthwatering terms. In another life he would have made a wonderful real-estate developer. In this case he sold one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate in the west to a broke, depressed public who couldn’t wait to get into those hills and start scratching up gold.
The Sioux did not oppose this expedition; Custer saw few Indians on his trip. Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapas were to the north and west; and Crazy Horse, about this time, was grieving for his little daughter They-Are-Afraid-of-Her, who had died, probably of cholera. When he returned to his camp and found that she had died, he located her burial scaffold and stayed with her several days. He did not get to raise the light-skinned daughter of Black Buffalo Woman, and his parentage of that child is conjectural anyway. But They-Are-Afraid-of-Her was his child, and he loved her deeply. Her loss took some of the fight out of him, for a while.
Again, though, I would enter the caveat that for much of his life only Crazy Horse’s immediate companions knew where he was or what he did. In the early 1870s personal losses began to pile up: Hump, Lone Bear, Little Hawk, They-Are-Afraid-of-Her. Many commentators, Erik Erikson among them, have spoken of the Sioux’s profound devotion to their children—the loss of this child would have been a terribly severe blow.
The historians who have concerned themselves most closely with Crazy Horse perhaps naturally slip into a Crazy Horse–centric view of Plains Indian life; they put too much weight on the memories of a few old Sioux and begin to believe that if there was a battle that Crazy Horse might have been in, he was in it. In a curious way the historians’ approaches to Red Cloud and Crazy Horse are opposite: they tend to take Red Cloud out of battles he may well have been in and put Crazy Horse in battles he may well have missed. Of course it is true that Crazy Horse got noticed in most of the battles he fought in because of his extreme daring. He would usually have been the Indian the soldiers shot at first. How much of a tactical sense he developed from all this fighting is not easy to know. Since fighting was a big part of his life, we may safely assume that he observed and learned; how much of what he learned was merely common sense we don’t know. He Dog says Crazy Horse was the only Indian he knew who always dismounted to shoot, which certainly shows good sense; and he did not want to fight the Shoshones the day Hump was killed for the excellent commonsense reasons that the ground was slippery and the Shoshones had better horses.
The fight with Crook on the Rosebud, which we will come to later, was on a different scale. Perhaps this was a strategically thought-out attack on the part of the Sioux Indians; or it may have been only an unusually persistent attack, because, for various reasons, the Sioux were particularly confident that day and had caught Three Stars Crook on disadvantageous terrain. For once they may simply have felt they had the numbers to do the job. But to pretend that we can follow Crazy Horse’s thinking at the Rosebud is hubris, in the main. In a great many shadowy cases where Crazy Horse fought, or may have fought, the data is simply not firm; in making him a master strategist—as opposed to merely a very daring warrior—the historian walks on very thin ice indeed.