THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, meanwhile, during the most intense years of warfare with the Plains Indians, pursued a carrot-and-stick policy that was consistent only in its inconsistency. The army almost always underestimated Indian ability, and then, when they were whipped through some foolish action of their own—as with Grattan—they just as invariably overreacted. Every white military defeat from Grattan to the Custer battle came because some white commander arrogantly supposed that he could whip any number of Indians, on any field at any time. When this stupid assumption was disproven, the army, or in some cases, such irregulars as could be pulled together, reacted by punishing whatever Indians they could catch, whether they had taken part in a particular attack or not.
Thus the fate of the wise and considerate Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, a peace Indian from the start. Black Kettle first had his village riddled by Chivington at Sand Creek, and then had it riddled again by Custer on the Washita, in 1868, even though up at Fort Laramie Red Cloud had just signed a major peace treaty.
At this juncture the two military systems, white and Sioux, suffered from similar elements of unpredictability, especially where their young warriors were concerned. Though Black Kettle was for peace, his young men could not always be restrained, and neither could young white men such as Custer. No Plains Indian ever completely controlled the young warriors, except briefly, nor did any white leader long control George Armstrong Custer.
About a year after the Grattan massacre near Fort Laramie (1854), the army finally got up a punitive expedition against the Sioux, although the Sioux involved in the massacre—Brulés, mainly—were by then scattered here and there across the prairies. An expedition of about six hundred men under General W. S. Harney (the Sioux were to call him Mad Bear) set out to avenge Grattan. At first they found no Sioux to punish. Six hundred men was a huge force; nothing like Harney’s army had yet been seen on the northern plains. Nobody was expecting it—many Sioux bands were unaware that a large body of white men were marching across the prairie, out for their blood. Some did know, because runners had gone out to the tribes, telling them that the U.S. government wanted them south of the Platte River; those who didn’t go would be considered hostile. Many Sioux bands were south of the Platte, but the Brulés weren’t, and neither were the Minniconjous.
General Harney, after considerable frustration, finally located the village of Little Thunder, a Brulé headman then camped on the banks of the Bluewater River. There had been a good hunt; the women of the village were busy working the buffalo hides.
Little Thunder knew the soldiers were coming—it would have been hard not to know it—but he seemed to have disregarded whatever warning he received. When the soldiers arrived, there was some parleying, but only because General Harney wanted to get his troops into position. When he had them in position, he proceeded to destroy Little Thunder’s village, killing nearly ninety Indians in a few minutes and taking many captives. Spotted Tail fought in this battle and never forgot the carnage he witnessed that day.
It is thought that Crazy Horse was living with Little Thunder that summer, but was out hunting when the terrible attack came. This may be the sort of rumor that makes Crazy Horse a kind of Zelig, turning up wherever the action is. Spotted Tail was so awed by the power of white weaponry that he later came to Fort Laramie and turned himself in; he served two years in jail and was probably the first of the major Sioux leaders to conclude that the Sioux could not hope to win in sustained conflict with the whites.
Most authorities think that Crazy Horse came back to what had been Little Thunder’s village, saw the carnage, and rescued a young Cheyenne maiden called Yellow Woman; he took her back to her people and began what was to be a long and friendly association with the Cheyennes.
With his easy victory on the Bluewater, General Harney, Mad Bear, had essentially won control of the Platte River and the Oregon Trail. The war for the northern plains was just beginning, but this was a significant victory nonetheless. That the whites were willing, almost casually, to destroy a whole village was a new fact that the Sioux would have to come to terms with. In the warfare between tribes such a thing did not happen; there was no such imbalance of weaponry. The scorched-earth policy that General Sherman was to pursue so effectively a few years later—warfare as terror—hadn’t come to the west, or anywhere else, at this time. The carnage at the Bluewater was the closest thing to it. Spotted Tail, who saw that carnage close up, from then on believed that the whites could wipe out the Sioux whenever they chose to.
Throughout Crazy Horse’s life, he, like all the other Plains Indians, would have to grapple with a too-rapid pace of change. The Sioux and the Cheyennes and the other tribes still hunted buffalo, in the main, with bows and arrows. In their warfare they had bows, lances, clubs, tomahawks, etc. They knew about guns, of course, but only a few had firearms at this time. That the whites could use guns so effectively as to kill ninety Sioux in a few minutes was a new thing. Crazy Horse, whether he saw the destruction at the Bluewater or merely heard about it, spent the rest of his life either avoiding whites or fighting them.
He would have preferred, I imagine, simply to avoid them and go on living a traditional Sioux life, raiding, hunting, dreaming; but the option of avoidance was not available to him for very long. The whites were too many, and they weren’t satisfied with the Holy Road. They weren’t satisfied with any one place or one road; they wanted everything. So he fought: on the Bozeman, on the Powder River, on the Yellowstone, in the Black Hills, on the Tongue and the Rosebud, at the Little Bighorn. He was a participant and possibly a catalyst at three of the Indians’ greatest victories: Fetterman, the Rosebud, the Little Bighorn. He didn’t win the war. What is hard to judge is how long he really expected to, if he ever expected to. Despite much urging, and unlike Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull, he never went east, never saw the whites in their seats of power; had he done so, he might have drawn the same conclusion they drew. But he went his own way, traveled his own road, until it dead-ended at Fort Robinson in September of 1877. Looked back on from the perspective of one hundred and twenty years, his doom seems Sophoclean, inevitable; but perhaps all dooms do, once the roads taken and not taken deliver the character to his fate.