Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (22 page)

Then the actual shirts, made of two bighorn sheepskins, were given to the four men. Each shirt was beautifully quilled, fringed with hair, each lock of hair representing a brave deed accomplished. Crazy Horse had over two hundred forty locks on his shirt.

Another, even older man, now rose and addressed the four shirt-wearers. He told them that from now on they must always help the others, never thinking of themselves. They were obliged to look out for the poor, the widows, the orphans, and all those of little power. As shirt-wearers they could think no ill of others, nor notice any harm done to themselves. Using a favorite Sioux expression, the old man said that if someone damaged the shirt-wearers, they should pay no more attention to it than if a dog lifted his leg at their tipi. The old man acknowledged that it would indeed be difficult to follow such strong injunctions, but the Big Bellies had chosen the four because they were greathearted, generous, strong, and brave, and he knew they would do their duty gladly and with a good heart.
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So Crazy Horse became a leader of his people. It brought him no riches; to the contrary, he was expected to live modestly (as he did anyway), keep only those ponies he actually needed for the hunt or war and give away the others, distribute his meat to the helpless ones, especially the choicest cuts such as the tongue or hump of the buffalo, saving only the stringy leg muscle for himself. He did have much honor and prestige, of course, and the right to enforce his orders, even up to the point of killing a hot-blooded young warrior who persisted in ruining a buffalo hunt or an ambush. But his power was strictly personal. He was not given an
akicita
to see to it that his orders were enforced, nor any special policemen, nor indeed any outside force at all.

A year or so later, in 1867, Crazy Horse and He Dog were given the lances of the Crow Owners Society, an
akicita.
The lances were reputed to be three or four hundred years old; it is certain that the Sioux had brought them across the Missouri River in the eighteenth century. He Dog recalled the occasion: “Crazy Horse and I went together on a war trip to the other side of the mountains [the Bighorns, called the White Mountains by the Sioux]. When we came back the people came out of the camp to meet us and escorted us back and at a big ceremony presented us with two spears, the gift of the whole tribe, which was met together. These spears were given by the older generation to those in the younger generation who had best lived the life of a warrior.” Again, there was great honor involved, and many duties and responsibilities, but no material benefits.
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At about the time of his twenty-first birthday in 1862, Crazy Horse had fallen in love. Her name was Black Buffalo Woman, a Bad Face Oglala, niece of Red Cloud. Crazy Horse had known her most of his life, watched her grow into her womanhood, stood beside the path to catch a glimpse of her swinging braids and laughing face as she carried water back to camp. By now a full-grown man, Crazy Horse was under some pressure from his parents and friends to take a wife. He began to formally court Black Buffalo Woman.
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To do so, he had to act within a rigid framework.

Relations between the sexes among the Sioux were as complicated as they are in most societies. Although Sioux women had some basic constitutional rights that were secure in both custom and practice, in general men disposed of women as if they were so much property. The only acceptable role for women was that of wife, housekeeper, and mother, and although there were exceptions, the woman living outside her assigned role in Sioux society was as rare as a business-woman in nineteenth-century white society. Indeed, at no other point were red and white cultures so close as in the relationships between the sexes.

Indian men expected their daughters to be chaste, their wives faithful. Teen-age girls were forced to wear a chastity belt, or submit to having their legs tied together each night. In part this was a realistic protection against the young braves, who were constantly encouraged to be bold and daring in all their activities and who liked nothing better than robbing a girl of her virginity. The boys considered it the equivalent of counting coup upon an enemy. But the father was also concerned with protecting his property. A virgin
bride would bring many horses when she was given to a proper suitor, while the deflowered girl would be lucky to find a husband at all, and even if she did, her father would receive no presents. The gifts themselves were relatively unimportant, for the parents of the bride had to return presents of equal value, but the prestige involved in giving away a virgin daughter was, to the Sioux, crucial.

In legal theory the girls had no say in the choice of a husband, but in practice most Sioux fathers would bend with the wishes of their daughters. In the usual case, the father of the prospective bride would put the matter to her. If she was willing to marry the suitor, she put the matter back into his hands, meekly submitting to her father’s will. If she disapproved she let her feelings be known; when that happened, the father would refuse the ponies and other gifts offered by the suitor. But the father might insist, in which case the duty of the girl to submit to his wishes was clear.
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The girls had little basis for making a choice, because courtship among the Sioux was terribly restricted. Teen-age boys were warriors and hunters, while teen-age girls were housewives and mothers in training. The two sexes seldom if ever did things together. The girls were always chaperoned by older women. Intimacy between unmarried teen-agers was well-nigh impossible. The Sioux placed such a high value on chastity for the unmarried and loyalty for the married women that the woman who could live up to the standard attained a goddesslike quality. Standing on a pedestal, however, sometimes made them more vulnerable, because it made it even more difficult for young men to get to know young women as human beings. Instead they became objects, a challenge to the young man’s masculine qualities of boldness and self-assertion.

The prescribed courtship procedure which Crazy Horse was now following with Black Buffalo Woman had the young man meet the girl of his choice at dusk in front of her tipi. There Crazy Horse would enfold Black Buffalo Woman in his robe; together, their heads covered from view, they could converse privately. But Black Buffalo Woman was popular; she had a long line of suitors waiting, blanket in hand, outside her tipi each evening. After only a few minutes with Crazy Horse, she would move gaily on to the next in line. When Black Buffalo Woman finally went into her lodge for the night, her mother tied her legs; the following day her mother saw to it that she had no opportunity to be alone with any of her amorous young men, not even one so widely respected as Crazy Horse. Young people, in short, had almost no chance of getting to know one another
intimately. Most of what they knew about each other came from public gossip and observation.
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Despite these handicaps, the Sioux did get married, usually successfully—i.e., the ordinary Sioux marriage seems to have lasted throughout the lives of the partners and was marked by mutual consideration, respect, and love. Worm and Crazy Horse’s mother, for example, remained together for fifty years. The Sioux had no marriage ceremony, either religious or civil, although there usually was a dance following the exchange of presents between the bride’s and groom’s families. By custom and practice, however, all that was required to seal a marriage was for the young man and woman to spend a night together. This arrangement neatly solved the problem of elopement, which usually came when a girl was being pressured by her father to marry someone she did not want to live with. In such cases the girl would sometimes run off with a boy she loved. When the elopers returned they presented the girl’s family with a
fait accompli.
Then the couple would settle down to the routine of married life, the woman doing all the household work, such as preparing the meat for storage, gathering the vegetables and berries, hauling water, putting up and taking down the tipi, packing for a move, making clothes, and so on, while the men hunted and made war.
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Both husband and wife expected their partner to be faithful. Divorce, which was easily accomplished, resulted more often than not from adultery (the laziness of a husband or the sharp tongue of a wife were also frequent causes of divorce). A wife could divorce a husband simply by throwing all his belongings out of the tipi, which was her private property. Sometimes, if angry enough, she would destroy his bow and arrows, his medicine bag, his robes and clothes, and so on. But the balance of legal prerogatives weighed heavily in favor of the men. While the woman could throw the husband out of her life, she had no regularized legal right to punish him. The husband, on the other hand, enjoyed that privilege with embellishments. If a husband caught his wife in adultery, he had the right not only to an immediate divorce, but also to cut off her braids and even her nose. Such a disfigurement not only marked his wrath upon her for life and reduced her attractiveness to other men, but it also made permanently public the male’s position of dominance and authority. Statistics on this gruesome practice are not available for the Sioux; among the Cheyenne, a tribe with similar custom, there was only one known case of cutting off a nose, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Still, the threat was always there.
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Under the circumstances, women were much better off if they
broke cleanly with their husbands and went to live openly with another man. This happened often enough—Crazy Horse himself got involved in one such case—but how it came out depended on the aggrieved husband. He was expected to accept the situation and usually did, taking the attitude that a runaway wife was not worth bothering about. The more important the man, the more likely he was to ignore the affair. Chiefs and shirt-wearers were formally required to pay no attention whatever to a wife’s defection. “His fellow chiefs would think less of him if he weakened,” was the way the Cheyennes put it.
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Among the Sioux, chiefs and other leaders were enjoined to pay no more attention to a defecting wife than they would to a dog pissing on the tipi. It did not fit a Sioux warrior’s ideal conception of dignity to chase after a woman who did not want him. Instead, most Sioux men would simply accept the pony or two that the new bridegroom offered as a token for the runaway wife, a practice that itself emphasized the concept of women as property.

The injunction to ignore the fleeing wife proved to be too much for some Sioux men, however, as Crazy Horse was to learn. Angry and humiliated, the aggrieved husband might shoot the favorite pony of the man who had taken his wife or, in extreme cases, shoot the man himself. Murder within the tribe was by far the worst crime known to the Sioux, and most murders occurred as a result of a wife leaving her husband for another man.

In day-to-day life women always took second place to the men, and the two were usually separated. When food was served, even in the privacy of the tipi, the woman waited upon the man and ate only after he had finished. At public gatherings, such as a dance or religious ceremony, men and women sat on opposite sides of the circle. Men danced or women danced; the two sexes did not dance together.
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Woman’s work was constant, but not terribly arduous. There was a gay, lighthearted spirit to their work, as they usually toiled together at their tasks. Unlike their white sisters who had settled on the prairie and who found themselves isolated from any companionship outside the immediate family, Sioux women had scores of female friends with whom they could exchange gossip, ideas, information, and experiences. What they chatted about among themselves we do not know—historians who interviewed old-time Sioux in the early twentieth century never thought to ask, and if the Sioux males knew, which is unlikely, they did not say—but the fact that Sioux women were a close-knit group is obvious.

One of the many factors holding them together was the attitude
of Sioux men in general toward women. The Sioux warrior loved, cherished, and cared for his woman, but he also feared her. Nowhere does that fear show so clearly as in menstrual segregation. The menstruating women moved to separate, communal lodges, where they were brought food and water and otherwise cared for by female friends. There they remained until menstruation ceased. This practice meant, incidentally, that every woman had four days a month of freedom from labor, a chance to catch her breath and restore her energy. The menstruating woman was segregated because Sioux men believed that their sacred objects and war paraphernalia were subject to contamination from such a woman. Women, even when not menstruating, were considered a sufficiently corrupting influence that for them to touch a man’s medicine or equipment was to defile it.
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Sioux men also believed that having intercourse with a woman before performing a religious ceremony or going on the warpath would be destructive, so they abstained from acts of love for four or more days before undertaking any important activity. Indeed, Sioux men believed that intercourse at any time weakened the body and mind, which may have had something to do with Crazy Horse’s late marriage. It is possible that he may have feared being contaminated or weakened if he lived with a woman. Sioux men used to speak proudly of mastering their sexual urges and directing that energy toward war.
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Roman Nose, a famous Cheyenne warrior whom Crazy Horse knew well and admired, was one of many Plains Indians who relied upon his “no-woman medicine” to help him in combat. These Indians had a vague idea that as the father of none they were the protector of all, defending the tribe as a husband and a father defended his helpless ones.
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