Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (11 page)

Conquering Bear passed through the Oglala camp on his way back to his own village and told the Oglalas what Fleming had said he was going to do. It struck the Oglalas as a foolish thing, making such a fuss about one old cow, especially in view of all the far superior stock the Indians had run off over the past months and about which nothing had been done. But foolish or not, the threat was real; armed men were preparing to march into a Sioux camp with the announced intention of taking a Sioux warrior prisoner. Nothing remotely like that had ever happened to the Sioux and their immediate reaction was to begin preparing themselves for war. Curly must have watched fascinated as the men began to paint themselves, prepare their medicine, and sing their brave-heart songs. The older men, led by Old Man Afraid in the Oglala camp and Conquering Bear in the Brulé camp, tried to keep everyone calm. The last thing they wanted was an open clash with the whites, who were, after all, in possession of the yearly annuity goods, which had not yet been distributed. On the white side, meanwhile, older men like trader Bordeaux were trying to get the young Army officers to cool off, also without success.

The next morning Lieutenant Grattan, who had begged Fleming for the honor of commanding the expedition, led a volunteer force of thirty-one men, a 12-pounder field piece, and a small mountain howitzer past the Oglala camp. He either did not notice or did not care that the Oglalas had driven in their pony herd in preparation for a fight. There were six hundred or more Sioux lodges in the Laramie region; at an average of two warriors per lodge, there were 1,200 warriors in the area.
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Most of them had already gathered around the
Brulé village. Grattan stopped at the Bordeaux trading post and tried to induce Bordeaux, who had the trust of the Sioux, to go along and act as interpreter. But Bordeaux told Grattan that he was a damned fool and refused to do so. Outside the post, meanwhile, hundreds of mounted Indians, painted for war, were milling around.

Grattan had an interpreter with him, a half-French, half-Iowa Indian named Wyuse, but Wyuse did not speak Dakota well. Furthermore, he was drunk (Salaway says Grattan was drunk too). The Sioux hated Wyuse and had often asked Fleming to hire a new interpreter, but nothing had been done, and now Wyuse, backed up by the infantry and artillery, was whipping his horse back and forth, just as the Sioux did before a battle in order to give their ponies a second wind. Wyuse shouted insults and taunts at the watching warriors. He said the soldiers would give the Sioux a new set of ears, so that they could better understand the white man’s orders.
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Grattan marched on to the Brulé village, posted his men on its outskirts, and moved to the front of the line with Wyuse at his side, Wyuse shouting that he would cut out the Sioux hearts and have them for breakfast. Conquering Bear came out of his lodge and warned Grattan that there would be trouble. Grattan insisted on the surrender of High Forehead. Conquering Bear said he would see what he could do, consulted with the Miniconjou warrior, and returned to inform Grattan that High Forehead would not give himself up. The parley went on for half an hour or more, Conquering Bear moving back and forth between Grattan and High Forehead. Curly, along with hundreds of other Indians, watched the whole scene from the surrounding bluffs.

Grattan lost what little patience he had. He snapped out an order, then jumped aside. His men fired two volleys into the encampment. The howitzer had been laid too high and the grapeshot tore through the tops of the tipis without doing any real harm, but Conquering Bear—standing right in the middle, directly in front of the line of infantry—had nine bullet wounds and lay in a pool of blood in the dust.

The Brulés poured out of their lodges; the Oglalas rode down on the Grattan party from the bluffs. One quick volley of arrows and it was over. Grattan and all his men were dead.
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Wyuse escaped into a nearby tipi, but the Indians dragged him out, killed him, and mutilated the body. Then the warriors rode off for Bordeaux’s place, with the intention of shooting it up and taking his stock of goods.

Curly watched the whole thing. When the warriors left, he and Lone Bear rode down to the village, where they examined the bodies. Standing over Wyuse, they offered him the ultimate insult of the Sioux—each boy jerked up his breechcloth and stood bare before the staring eyes of the dead man. Then they rode back to the Oglala village.
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The main body of warriors, meanwhile, were whooping and hollering around Bordeaux’s place. The wily old trader had fortunately hidden his whiskey. He had many close friends among the Sioux and with the help of these men, plus a liberal distribution of his stocks, he managed to survive the night. The Indians argued with each other. Young braves were all for riding on to Fort Laramie, killing the handful of soldiers left there, and taking the annuity goods stored in the warehouse. The older men counseled against this and advised moving north instead. They could return later for their presents, but if they took them now, by force, there would be none the next year and the whites would be even more inclined to retaliate for the killing of Grattan and his men.

The young men were most interested in winning honors and loot, of course, but they may also have realized that war with the whites, so long brewing, was now upon them and that they were unlikely to ever again have as good an opportunity. Old Man Afraid and the other headmen wanted to deny the plain facts. They hoped that the whites would pass over the Grattan massacre as merely an incident, brought on by Grattan’s foolishness and a few unmanageable young Indians. For the elders, heavy with honors won against the Crows and Pawnees and accustomed to all the good things the whites had brought them, war made no sense at all.

The younger men either refused to see that their style of life was now dependent on the white man’s favors, or they were willing to reject that life-style and return to the ways of their ancestors. They had had enough of the whites and wanted to drive them, soldiers, emigrants, and even the traders, out of Sioux territory. The older men said that was impossible; they had heard from Bordeaux and from the Pawnees and other eastern tribes of the overwhelming power of the whites, but the young braves refused to believe such stories. Besides, the evidence to the contrary was right before their eyes—thirty-one dead white soldiers lay in and around the Brulé village. The Indians had suffered no losses, save for the badly wounded Conquering Bear. The braves indignantly demanded to know if the elders were going to allow the whites to march into a Sioux village and shoot down a chief. The headmen shouted back
that the braves were fools if they thought they could overrun Fort Laramie and escape unpunished.

All through the night the argument raged, Bordeaux right in the middle of it, pleading and cajoling the braves, emptying his shelves. In the end the Brulé and Oglala women decided the matter. Their impulse was to get away from trouble, and they had packed up their lodges and started north. Pointing out that the Sioux warrior’s first obligation was to protect the helpless ones who were now moving undefended over the prairie, the elders convinced the braves to ride away from Fort Laramie.
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Thus the first battle between the Sioux and the whites revealed the fatal weakness of the Indians. Without leadership, the Sioux were unable to turn a battle into a campaign. There is no doubt that they could have overrun Fort Laramie and then blocked the Holy Road, preventing the retaliatory force that the headmen so feared from even getting into Sioux country. The Holy Road was an extraordinarily vulnerable supply line or invasion route. There were dozens of ideal places for ambush, hundreds of spots from which the Indians could harass a moving column. The whites had no knowledge of the terrain, no maps, and no inclination to leave their supply wagons and cut overland in pursuit of enemies they could never catch anyway. The soldiers were roadbound, like most American soldiers before and since, but the Indians made no effort to exploit that weakness. Instead, having inflicted what they thought was a heavy blow, the red men split their forces and retired—just as they would have done had the thirty-one dead men been Crows.

The Sioux failure to follow up their advantage, however, was inevitable. They could not have done otherwise. To have mounted a sustained campaign they would have had to delegate real authority to one man, or at most a small group of men, who would have had to have the power to give orders and see to it that they were enforced. It would have required putting small groups of men along the Holy Road, there to wait in endless boredom for the white columns to come along. It would have meant attacking in concert, Brulés and Oglalas and others acting together with the object of destroying the enemy, not winning personal honors. It would have required specialization, with some men hunting all the time in order to support those who were full-time soldiers.

A sustained campaign, in short, would have meant an end to the Sioux way of life just as surely as defeat at the hands of the whites meant an end to the old life-style. The Sioux could not simultaneously be free and be effective soldiers. They chose to remain free.
Even the hot-blooded braves around Bordeaux’s place that terrible night, so eager to strike another blow, would never have submitted to the discipline that alone could have made the follow-up campaign work. Knowing this, the headmen thankfully turned their ponies’ heads north and rode away from the battlefield.

Curly rode with the Brulés, probably because his mother was a Brulé. The mortally wounded Conquering Bear was carried along with the tribe, which had headed east. Curly, who had just turned thirteen, must have been confused by the dramatic events he had witnessed. Conquering Bear was dying of his wounds; evidently Curly and Hump caught a glimpse of the old man wasting away on his robe on the lodge floor. Deeply moved, Curly rode out on the prairie alone.
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He was now in western Nebraska, country that Custer—at the time a fifteen-year-old Ohio farm boy—would later cross and recross on horseback.

Curly had decided to seek a vision. For the Sioux male, the vision quest was central to life. It was usually preceded by a fast, complicated purification rites, and a series of lectures from a holy man. The teen-agers then stayed alone in some sacred place, forcing themselves to remain awake until the vision came. A holy man interpreted the dream and it became the guiding star for the remainder of the dreamer’s life. From the vision the Sioux drew their inspiration. Their dreams might lead them to become medicine men, or warriors, or horse catchers, but whatever the vision proscribed for the dreamer, it was
wakan
and never to be disregarded.

The vision gave a man his power. Without it, he was nothing; with a vision he was in touch with the sacred forces. The power obtained in dreams became as much a part of the individual as his arms and legs or his character. It was usually bestowed through animals, who spoke to the dreamer, and like the power of animals was specific and limited to particular areas. Further, as a trust it carried grave responsibilities.

The vision forced a boy to make a choice, to decide what he would be. The successful vision seeker knew who he was, and what he was, and what he must do. It gave the Sioux an amazing degree of self-confidence. The dreams obviously reinforced choices that had already been made. Boys like Curly and Hump usually had a vision that compelled them to be warriors, while youngsters like Pretty One ordinarily had dreams that forced them to be
winktes.
The more or less established pattern of dreams (and their standard interpretations) were well within the structural needs of the society.
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The overwhelming
majority of Sioux males had broadly similar dreams, propelling them down similar warrior paths, but each individual Sioux felt that his dream was his own, and it gave him an unshakable sense of self.

The Sioux were not secretive about their dreams; indeed, they were anxious to tell them to others. Thus we know what Curly dreamed out on the prairie of the lake country in the Nebraska Sand Hills, for he later described it on a number of occasions to Indians and at least once to a white man. He also made a drawing of his vision in sand rocks after the Little Bighorn battle, twenty-two years later.
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After two days of fasting and keeping himself awake by placing sharp stones under his body when he had to lie down, Curly began to fear that he had made a terrible mistake. No dream came, perhaps because he had not made the proper preparations, perhaps because he was not worthy. He had given up and started down the hill to his pony, which he had hobbled beside a lake, when the dream came (most likely, he had fainted).

A man on horseback rode out of the lake. The horse kept changing colors, and it floated above the ground, so light was it, the man too, who sat well forward on the horse. He wore plain leggings and a simple shirt. His face was unpainted and he had only a single feather in his long brown hair. He had a small brown stone tied behind his ear. He did not seem to speak, but Curly heard him clearly nonetheless.

The man told Curly never to wear a war bonnet, nor to tie up his horse’s tail (it was the Sioux custom to tie up their ponies’ tails in a knot), because the horse needed his tail when he jumped a stream and in summer time to brush flies. He said that before going into battle Curly should pass some dust over his horse in lines and streaks, but should not paint the pony. And he should rub some of the dirt over his own hair and body. Then he would never be killed by a bullet or by an enemy. But he should never take anything for himself.

All the while the man and horse were floating, brushing aside constant attacks from a shadowy enemy. But he rode straight through them, straight through the flying arrows and lead balls, which always disappeared before striking their target. Several times the man and horse were held back, it seemed by his own people coming up from behind and catching his arms, but he shook them off and rode on. A storm came up and on the man’s cheek a little zigzag of lightning appeared and a few hail spots on his body. Then the storm passed, and the man’s people closed in around him, grabbing and
pulling, while overhead a hawk screamed. Then the dream faded and Curly was awake.
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