Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (21 page)

His major activity—what he “did for a living,” as the whites put it—was hunting. He usually brought down the most cows at the tribal buffalo hunts, but he was even more notable for his success as a lone hunter, quietly slipping away from the village in the morning and returning at dusk with an elk, a deer, a couple of antelope, or, during the spring and fall migrations, with scores of fat, juicy ducks or geese.

Crazy Horse went on innumerable war parties and fought countless battles. The expeditions were usually successful, in part because the other Oglalas thought that Crazy Horse’s medicine was most powerful and when it was known that he was going on a war party, other braves were eager to go along. For the Oglala warriors, it was axiomatic that no wounded brave nor the body of a dead one would be left on the battlefield if Crazy Horse could help it. Some of these battles were recorded, but establishing a chronology for them is impossible. The Indians gave them names, often after the nearest geographical feature (they would speak of the “Arrow Creek Fight” or the “Captive Butte Battle”) or some notable event of the fight (“where Red Feather did his brave deed”). But it is not clear in
what year a specific battle occurred or in what order the fights came. The most that can be said is that there were skirmishes nearly every summer between the Sioux and their allies against the Crows and Shoshonis, with the Sioux consistently winning and gradually forcing their enemies back up against and beyond the Bighorn Mountains.
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One big fight that can be dated with some precision came in June 1861. Crazy Horse was living with the Cheyennes at the time. A runner came flying into camp to report that the Oglalas were organizing a war party against the Shoshonis, who were hunting along the Sweetwater River, just south of where the Wind River joins the Bighorn River. Washakie himself, for decades the famous headman of the Shoshonis, was with the camp. A few of the younger Cheyennes, along with the twenty-year-old Crazy Horse, decided to go along.

After a long march of several days, the Oglalas and Cheyennes came to the Shoshoni village. While the
akicita
kept the warriors under control, scouts checked on conditions in the village. They reported a large pony herd, ripe for the picking. Following a sleepless, fireless night, Crazy Horse and his comrades rode to a bluff from which, at first light, they could make out the sleeping Shoshoni camp. With a whoop, they rode at full gallop down the bluff and into the village.

The old Shoshoni women, first risers in the camp, began screaming, “The Sioux are upon us! The Sioux are here!” Dogs barked, ponies neighed, children shrieked, while the Shoshoni warriors yelled at their women to get them their weapons. The attackers never paused. Galloping through the camp, they went straight to the pony herd and cut out four hundred head, more than half the total herd and started the captured ponies back toward the bluff and the faraway Oglala territory.

The Shoshonis kept their war horses tethered outside their lodges for just such a situation, but the Sioux had stampeded most of them as well, so it took Washakie’s people some time to organize a pursuit. The Sioux were slow in getting away, however, because they had taken so many ponies that it was difficult to keep the captured herd together as they headed toward the east. Crazy Horse, along with seven or eight others, dropped behind to fight a delaying action against the pursuing Shoshonis.

It was just the sort of fight Crazy Horse loved best. He never liked to stay with the mass of warriors, preferring to do battle on his own or with only a few others. He leaped from his pony, got behind a rock or tree, and fired a dozen or so well-aimed arrows at the enemy,
checking the pursuit and giving the main body of Sioux with the herd a chance to get away. When the Shoshonis pressed too close or attacked his position in overwhelming numbers, Crazy Horse jumped back on his pony and rode away. After he and the others in the rear guard had put some distance between themselves and the enemy, Crazy Horse found another protected spot and repeated the process. If a small body of Shoshonis got out ahead of the rest, Crazy Horse charged them, forcing them to fall back to their slower companions. Little Hawk, Crazy Horse’s younger brother, was along, and the two brothers fought side by side.

At one stand-off, with Crazy Horse and Little Hawk firing arrows as fast as they could and the Shoshonis returning the fire (thus providing Crazy Horse with more ammunition, as he could pick up their arrows from the ground), Crazy Horse’s pony was hit in the leg. Then Little Hawk’s pony was wounded. The brothers found themselves alone, Shoshonis pressing toward them, the brothers’ comrades riding as fast as they could to the east. So furiously did Crazy Horse and Little Hawk keep fighting, however, that the Shoshonis feared to press home the attack. Instead, they encircled the trapped Sioux, firing arrows and shouting taunts. Then two brave Shoshonis rode forward for individual combat, intending to ride down Crazy Horse and Little Hawk.

As the two Shoshonis charged, Crazy Horse shouted to Little Hawk, “Take care of yourself—I’ll do the fancy stunt”
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Stepping forward from his protected position, Crazy Horse stood directly in the path of a charging Shoshoni. When the man and pony were almost upon him, Crazy Horse, with his head and shoulders, feinted to his right. The Shoshoni took the fake and turned his horse in the direction he expected Crazy Horse to move. But at the last second Crazy Horse twisted to his left, grabbed the leg of the passing Shoshoni, and jerked him from the pony. The man hit the ground with a thud, knocked unconscious. Crazy Horse jumped on the Shoshoni pony, looked around, and discovered that Little Hawk had hit the other enemy with an arrow, unseating him from his pony. Little Hawk mounted up and the brothers dug in their heels and took off for the east, laughing gaily.
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Still the Shoshonis came on, anxious now for revenge and desperate to get their ponies back. They were furious, too furious for their own good, because no longer did they stay together. Instead, each Shoshoni rode as fast as he could to get at the retreating Sioux,
which left them stretched out and incapable of delivering a telling, collective blow.

One Shoshoni got way ahead of the others. Soon he came up on Crazy Horse and the rest of the Sioux rear guard. Instead of checking his pony and waiting for help, he came right on, riding smack into the middle of the eight Sioux. He shot one Oglala with each of his pistols before someone brought him down with a lance. The Sioux immediately recognized him as the son of Washakie and proudly took his scalp before resuming the retreat. Later, they returned the scalp to Washakie, telling him how brave his son had been.

The running fight continued for three hours. Once Washakie led his warriors around the Sioux flank, cut into the tiring herd of ponies from the side, and recaptured half the animals. Finally the Sioux found a good stand of trees along a stream and hustled the remaining captured stock into the grove, then set up a defensive perimeter around the edge of the woods. The Shoshonis charged several times but were unable to dislodge the defenders, much less get at the ponies. When darkness came the Sioux got away, carrying three dead Oglalas and one dead Cheyenne with them, along with the captured ponies. In a few days they were safely back in their own village, where they mourned the dead, then held a victory dance. Then the camp settled back into its accustomed lethargy. That was enough war for one summer.
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Nearly every summer for the rest of his life, Crazy Horse went out on war parties against the Crows or Shoshonis. In 1862 or 1863 a medicine man named Chips, a friend of his youth, made him a special charm to ward off danger, a little white stone with a hole through it, suspended from a buckskin string that Crazy Horse wore slung over his shoulder and under his left arm. Six decades later Red Feather, who fought in many a battle with Crazy Horse, was still awed by the power of that stone. Crazy Horse, he said, had been slightly wounded twice before he began to wear it, but afterward, although he had eight horses killed under him, he was never wounded by an enemy of the Oglalas.
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Crazy Horse was no fool, however, nor was he suicidal. Warriors who had a blackness in their hearts, from whatever cause, would sometimes throw away their bows and arrows and charge the enemy with a war club, singing their death songs at the top of their lungs. In 1930 Eleanor Hinman of the Nebraska State Historical Society, who was interviewing Crazy Horse’s associates, asked his childhood friends if the rumor were true that Crazy Horse often fought in that manner. He Dog denied it with a chuckle. Crazy Horse, he said,
“always stuck close to his bow or rifle. He always tried to kill as many as possible of the enemy without losing his own men.” By the mid-1860s, Crazy Horse was a recognized war-party leader among the Oglalas. He Dog characterized his activities in that role: “Crazy Horse always led his men himself when they went into battle, and he kept well in front of them. He headed many charges.”

He Dog was struck by another typical Crazy Horse action in combat against other Indians: “All the times I was in fights with Crazy Horse, in critical moments of the fight Crazy Horse would always jump off his horse to fire. He is the only Indian I ever knew who did that often. He wanted to be sure that he hit what he aimed at. That is the kind of a fighter he was. He didn’t like to start a battle unless he had it all planned out in his head and knew he was going to win. He always used judgment and played safe. His brother and Hump were reckless.”
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A word about Eleanor Hinman’s interviews with Crazy Horse’s friends is perhaps in order here. Obviously anything they said is suspect, sixty or more years having passed between the event and the telling. Direct quotations are especially open to question. But it should also be mentioned that though these old men were illiterate, illiterate people everywhere are noted for their excellent memories. The early Greeks passed on the long Homeric tales from one generation to the next with hardly a phrase out of place, a phenomenon that occurs again and again among primitive cultures. Further, Hinman often interviewed the old Indians in groups, so that they could check on this or that fact with each other. They seldom disagreed, and when they did it was over some minute detail. In any event, those old men’s memories are all we have to go on for many of the details of Crazy Horse’s life.
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One such disagreement, for example, involved the Second Arrow Creek Fight, which took place around 1870. In a sketch of the battle Bad Heart Bull had numbered the warriors who counted first, second, third, and fourth coup on a fallen Crow. He Dog disagreed with the order in which Bad Heart Bull had placed the fortunate Oglala coup-counters, saying that the man listed as third was really second.

It was at the Second Arrow Creek Fight, with the Crows, that Crazy Horse came closest to death at the hands of his enemies. The Crows had great admiration for Crazy Horse and said he was the bravest Sioux they had ever known. They tried by special means and select warriors to put an end to his life and had made a special trip to the country of the Nez Percés, west of the Rockies, to buy medicine
that would make it possible for them to shoot Crazy Horse’s pony from under him.
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Red Feather told the story of one such attempt: “Crazy Horse charged the Crows, his horse was shot under him, and he was surrounded by the enemy. The Oglalas tried to help him but could not get near him. A man named Spotted Deer made a last effort to reach him. He broke through the enemy and Crazy Horse got onto his pony behind him and they made a charge for the open.”
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In the summer of 1865 the Oglalas decided to revive a governmental system that had fallen into disuse after they started hanging around the Holy Road. The system had been given to them early in the century by a great medicine man who had learned it from the Blackfeet. It called for seven older leaders, men over forty, called the “Big Bellies,” to act together as a chiefs’ society. The Big Bellies would advise and govern the people when they camped or moved, hunted or made war. To execute their orders, the Big Bellies selected four strong young men, called “shirt-wearers.” All this was done on a rather haphazard basis. The people chose the Big Bellies by common consent, without anything like a formal election, and for both the chiefs and the shirt-wearers their duties and responsibilities were exacting and precise, although their powers were somewhat vague.

The installation ceremony was impressive. The Oglalas were camped on a creek about seventy miles northwest of Fort Laramie. The camp was a circle with an opening to the east. A large lodge, comparable to a circus tent, stood in the middle of the circle. Billy Garnett, a white trader and interpreter, was there, and he later described the scene.

Warriors on horses, bedecked in all their finery, rode around the inside of the circle, as the people stood in front of their tipis. Four times the warriors made the circuit, each time selecting a young man from the people and leading him to the center lodge. As the shirt-wearers were selected, the women made the trilling and called out the names of the heroes—Young Man Afraid, Sword, and American Horse. All were sons of Big Bellies, and it was expected that the fourth man selected would also come from a prominent family. But the horsemen passed by the obvious choices, went behind the mass of warriors, and from the rear of the crowd selected Crazy Horse.

He was led to the center lodge, where he joined the others, the rest of the people following and filling up the huge tipi. The selected shirt-wearers sat in the middle; across from them were the Big Bellies, the greatest of them all, Old Man Afraid, in the center of the
chiefs. Garnett went in, too, and was treated to a feast of buffalo and boiled dog.

When the food had been cleared away an old man noted for his wisdom and knowledge of the way things had been done in the past rose to address the young men in the middle of the group. They would head the warriors in camp and on the march, he said, and see to it that order was preserved and no violence committed. They were required to make certain that every Oglala man, woman, or child had their rights respected. They must be wise and kind and firm in all things, counseling, advising, and then commanding. If their words were not heard, they could use blows to enforce their orders; in extreme cases, they even had the right to kill. But they must never take up arms against their own people without thought and counsel and must always act with caution and justice.