IT IS PERHAPS appropriate to pause during this nominal lull in the plains warfare—nominal because there was never a total cessation of hostilities—to say a word about the plains themselves: this great American steppe was Crazy Horse’s home during his whole life. His attachment to these plains never weakened; he was born to those great skies and those long horizons, and he kept to them as long as he could. When Nelson A. Miles attacked him and his people in their winter camp on the Tongue River in January of 1877, Crazy Horse knew that the terms of the conflict had changed. For the Sioux, warfare was mainly a summer sport. In the hard northern winters they had enough to do just to keep their old and their young warm and well fed. It is true that they wiped out Fetterman on a cold day in December, accomplishing that task just before a blizzard struck, but, in the main, winter warfare was not something they enjoyed. Fighting was a great deal more pleasant in warm weather.
Bearcoat Miles came anyway, and kept coming, forcing Crazy Horse to make an awkward and painful retreat. Then the winter stopped even General Miles; and Crazy Horse, in the breather it allowed him, had the opportunity to do what Chief Joseph had hoped to do and what Sitting Bull did do: escape into Canada. Neither Miles nor Crook could have followed him there; the Canadian government would not have tolerated it, although, almost a decade later, Crook found the Mexican government far more pliant when he went in after Geronimo.
Crazy Horse refused to go to Canada. It was even colder in Canada, and the game was uncertain; but it may be that he didn’t go because he refused to be chased from his home country. The range that he traveled in his life was spacious, but it wasn’t infinite. He went south a few times into Kansas, west as far as the Bighorn Mountains, north and east to the Missouri country; but the land where he roamed and fought mainly was plains country: Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, eastern Montana. Rarely if ever was he east of the 100th meridian, that important line on the map that told the whites where the Great American Desert began.
It wasn’t desert, of course—Geronimo lived in a desert. Crazy Horse lived near the center of the great grassland steppe that stretched from Texas well into Canada. Then and now, the central plains were the least populated part of the United States. To those not attuned to their subtleties the plains are merely monotonous emptiness. But to those who love them, the plains are endlessly fascinating, a place where the constant interplay of land and sky is always dramatic; gloomy sometimes, but more often uplifting. Despite their unpopularity with the general public, many writers have penned rhapsodies to the plains, and the eyes of many artists—from Catlin and Bodmer on—have been challenged by them.
The American plains, like all the world’s great steppes, are the natural home for grazing animals and nomadic peoples, and are particularly ideal for certain large ruminants such as the buffalo. The plains have never welcomed either the plow or the fence. The balance of the grasses, the wildlife, and the climate is delicate, easily disturbed. Not merely Crazy Horse but all the Plains Indians recognized with dismay that the whites were indifferent to this balance and likely to destroy it.
Nomads, of course, can be wanton too; like most humans they are inclined to the binge. But, in the main, they held a sacramental attitude toward the earth and its creatures, whereas the white attitude from the first was essentially commercial.
Nomadic lifestyles are often vulnerable to the technologies of settled people; and yet the appeal of what appears to be freedom—the freedom of the nomad, whether Sioux Indian or lone cowboy—remains very potent. It may be that one reason writers from the American west have had such a hard time getting their words taken seriously is that they have been competing from the first with one of the most powerful visual images of all: the image of horses running. The Indian and the horse have been together in movies for as long as there have been movies: I now own a tape of a fragmentary silent film called Old Texas, made in 1913, in which the great cattleman Charles Goodnight appears briefly at a picnic before the film—possibly it is supposed to represent his reminiscences—dissolves into grainy images of Indians on horses.
Crazy Horse was not unaware of mountains. He knew the Bighorns and the Black Hills, was born near and died not far from Bear Butte. But for most of his life he was a man of the Great Plains. His rivers were the Platte, the Niobrara, the Powder, the Yellowstone, the Tongue, the Little Missouri. He lived under one of the most generous skies in the world. Again, many commentators have recognized that such skies, hovering over the rolling land, with the horizons a mystery, with mirages frequent, make the plains a place that calls forth imaginings. Those long vistas, those splendid clouds tempt the imagination as the plains of Castile tempted Don Quixote. When Plains people die, white or Indian, they speak of a going up, for where would the spirit go except into that sky? It is easy on the plains to imagine things not seen, worlds not known. Crazy Horse, in his wanderings over the summer plains, would have seen many mirages, which perhaps encouraged him in his belief that this world, with its buffalo and horses, is only the shadow of the real world. He was in a way a prairie Platonist, seeing an ideal of which the day’s events were only a shadow. His belief in the two worlds seems to have made him exceptionally cautious where the camera is concerned. He didn’t want any white man to snatch his shadow, coax it into a little box. He wouldn’t even allow his friend Dr. McGillycuddy, the doctor who so faithfully treated his wife Black Shawl for tuberculosis, to take his picture. He believed it would shorten his life; and his life did indeed end not long after he came to the place where cameras—the little boxes that snatched shadows—were common.
This strange man of the Oglalas was always a man of the central plains. He would not be driven from them, rejecting, in a crucial decision, even the plains of Canada. He was determined to hold to the country that was his own, and in the end, that is what he did.