Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (23 page)

Crazy Horse, in other words, had just as hard a time in figuring out where he stood with regard to the opposite sex as Custer did. How he handled his ambivalence we do not know, but we do know that at about the age of twenty-one years he began courting Black Buffalo Woman with the thought of making her his wife. But she was popular, and he had to wait his turn. Besides, although he was a highly respected hunter and warrior, his family was of no great standing among the Oglala, and Black Buffalo Woman, as a niece of Red Cloud, could expect to make a better match. Among her suitors, for one, there was No Water, brother of Black Twin, a leading man in the council. Still, Crazy Horse hoped, and continued to court.

In the early summer of 1862 matters came to a head. Red Cloud sent word that he would lead a big war party against the Crows.
Black Twin and No Water were going along, as well as Crazy Horse’s oldest friend, Hump. Little Hawk and Crazy Horse joined up. The morning the expedition started out, however, No Water sat on the ground, moaning and holding his face with his hand. He had a great pain in his tooth. Since No Water’s medicine was the two fierce teeth of the grizzly bear, none questioned his decision to stay home on the grounds that his medicine was of no use when he had a toothache.

The war party was gone two weeks. It captured some Crow horses, killed one enemy, and in general had a fine time. When it was still a day or so away from the village, Woman’s Dress rode out to meet the returning warriors. Woman’s Dress was a
winkte;
a grandson of Old Smoke and known as a boy as Pretty One, he had grown up with Crazy Horse, as we learned earlier. Bursting with news, Woman’s Dress grabbed Crazy Horse by the arm and led him off, away from the others, to whisper in his ear that Black Buffalo Woman had married No Water while the war party was away.

Crazy Horse went immediately to his mother’s lodge, where he stayed for two or three days, no one daring to disturb him. Then he packed his horse and started once again for Crow country, this time alone. No one ever heard him say what he did there, but when he came home toward the end of the summer he threw two Crow scalps to the dogs—the only scalps he had taken in five years.
²¹

Over the next half decade Crazy Horse continued his travels, but he frequently returned to the Bad Face camp of the Oglalas, where he could see and on occasion chat with Black Buffalo Woman. Soon he was paying so much attention to her that they became objects of gossip. According to He Dog, “No Water did not want to let the woman go,” which might indicate that Crazy Horse or Black Buffalo Woman had approached No Water on the subject. In any event, it was common knowledge that Crazy Horse loved Black Buffalo Woman, that she was at least willing to flirt with him, that No Water was furious about the situation, and that consequently trouble was coming.
²²
When he became a shirt-wearer in 1865, however, Crazy Horse was under a strong injunction to do nothing that would bring discord to the tribe, so he stuck to his no-woman medicine, did not marry, and put his energies into fighting. That he did so was fortunate for the Oglalas, because in 1866 the white soldiers had returned and were marching into the Powder River country.

* The quotation is from Short Bull, who in 1930 recalled hearing that these were Crazy Horse’s words.

CHAPTER NINE

Guerrilla Warfare, Indian Style

“Crazy Horse and Little Big Man carried on a lively business in horse-stealing and the killing of white men.”

Billy Garnett

By the early 1860s the Sioux were in a position not only to stop the flow of emigrants through their territory or to defend what was still theirs, but even to drive the whites away from the Platte River country that the Indians had lost in the 1850s. The whites were busy from 1861 to 1865 fighting a ferocious civil war which required nearly the full military strength of the United States, and the frontier of the American empire was left almost defenseless. The Sioux opportunity to strike was even more glittering because never before had there been so many emigrating whites along the Holy Road or so few soldiers to protect them. Draft dodgers, fortune seekers, deserters, bounty jumpers, every white man who wanted to avoid the Civil War, it seemed, was headed west. They came in small, ill-organized groups, which made them an ideal target for the Sioux hit-and-run tactics.

But the Sioux did not strike an effective blow. At first they failed to do anything to take advantage of the situation, and they never attacked as a whole tribe. Crazy Horse’s northern Oglalas were fat, happy, and secure in the Powder River country, wanting nothing more than to be left alone. They were content to hunt buffalo and send out war parties against the Crows. While the other Indians were fighting the whites to the north, west, south, and east of the Powder River, the Oglala Sioux continued until 1865 to act as if they had solved the problem of white encroachment for all time by the simple expedient of moving out of the way of the whites.

The “might have beens” in the situation are too numerous to enumerate in detail, but it is possible that had the Plains Indians produced a leader with the vision, organizing ability, and charisma of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, they might have rolled back the
white frontier. Certainly they could have forced the whites to pay a far higher price for the conquest of the Plains and, perhaps, in the process made the whites accept a compromise that would have left the Indians with more freedom and larger reservations than they got. One cannot go too far with this kind of speculation, however, because white society had an enormous latent power, even in the midst of a civil war; when the whites made that power real and directed it against the Sioux, there was no doubt as to the final outcome. Still, whatever the long-term results, the Sioux and their allies certainly missed a grand opportunity during the Civil War.

Crazy Horse was as blind to the possibilities as his comrades. For the first three years of the Civil War he stayed in the Powder River country. To the southwest, the Shoshonis were raiding the whites on the Holy Road and cutting their telegraph wires; to the east, the Santee Sioux had staged a bloody uprising in Minnesota, which soon led to trouble all along the Missouri River north of Oglala territory; to the south, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes were engaged in constant struggle with white soldiers. From Fort Laramie to the Bighorn Mountains and north to the Yellowstone River, however, all was peace.

Eventually Crazy Horse joined the war against the whites; he left the northern Oglalas and moved south to participate with the Cheyennes and his southern relatives in raids on white outposts. It is impossible to tell what his motives were, but the circumstantial evidence indicates that he was drawn into the conflict by the mere promise of excitement and the chance to win additional honors. The Indians south of the Platte River were having a fine time, shooting up whites, stealing their stock, raiding their wagon trains and supply depots. While Old Man Afraid and the other big men among the northern Oglalas continued to argue for peace and kept their bands out of the way of the whites, young braves like Crazy Horse rode south on their own and joined in the fray. They had a great fondness for such a war—they were getting big American horses for themselves, and cattle, and all kinds of fine goods, such as new rifles, ammunition, canned food, blankets, and so forth. By attacking isolated outposts and ranches and by killing all the inhabitants, the Indians made retaliation impossible. The raids on the whites, in short, were much more profitable than attacking the Crows or Shoshonis, and less dangerous. For the Cheyennes there was a vengeance motive involved, at least after the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 (see below), but for most of the Sioux braves, including Crazy Horse, it was all just fun.

Indeed, far from hating the whites, Crazy Horse had formed a fast friendship with a white Army officer, Lieutenant Caspar Collins. Young Collins was stationed at Fort Laramie, where his father, Colonel William O. Collins, was in command. Lieutenant Collins enjoyed traveling alone through the Indian country, stopping off at various camps for a few days, getting to know the Sioux as people rather than as savages or enemies. He spent much of the winter of 1863-64 with the Oglalas, where Crazy Horse taught him the ways of the Sioux, taking him on hunts, showing him how to make a bow and arrows, helping him learn the Dakota language. It is one of the great misfortunes of American Indian history that Lieutenant Collins did not record his experiences.
¹

Colonel Collins was a man of common sense and decency, playing a significant role in the maintenance of peace north of Fort Laramie. His men were itching for a fight. The 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry had been raised for the Civil War and the men who volunteered expected to do their bit to save the nation, but the War Department had sent it west following the Santee uprising in Minnesota. Finding themselves in what Lieutenant Collins called “one of the most desolate regions on the American continent,”
²
bored, frustrated, and resentful at the injustice of it all, they wanted a go at the sea of Indians surrounding them. Rather like Lieutenant Grattan a decade earlier, the Ohio soldiers were sure they could send the Indians packing with a show of force.

Discarding their uniforms, the Ohio boys decked themselves out in buckskins and moccasins and acquired Indian ponies. (“The laziest things on earth,” Caspar Collins called the ponies, “unless it is their Indian masters.” He added that the pintos “have two good traits: one is being able to live on sage brush … and the other is that they can travel on a slow lope for almost incredible distances.”
³
) Thus dressed, the Ohio soldiers assured each other that they were as tough as the toughest frontiersmen, and they eagerly awaited their chance to show their prowess as Indian fighters.

That they did not bring on a war was due to Colonel Collins, who realized that his major responsibility was to keep the peace. The men wanted to go out on search-and-destroy missions, but he kept them close to Fort Laramie. Collins was one of those rare Army officers who was able to see both sides to a question. He did not want war and he knew that the Sioux leaders were also men of peace. In May 1865, following a year of almost continuous fighting south and east of Fort Laramie, Collins reported that the Indians in his region were still friendly and wanted to remain so. Collins also had a nice
feel for the difficulties the chiefs were having in keeping their daredevil warriors in check, problems so similar to his own. Probably basing his observations on verbal reports from his son, Collins informed the War Department about the number of Indians in the vicinity, who the headmen were, and so on. Colonel Collins said there were 350 lodges of Oglalas north of the Platte, 150 south of the river; the Brulés had 350 lodges, while there were 80 lodges of hostile Cheyennes and 100 or so of friendly Cheyennes; the various bands of Sioux near the Yellowstone and Little Missouri rivers numbered 350 lodges. This is probably the most accurate census available on Sioux numbers at this time. The usual estimate is that there were two to three warriors living in each lodge; that number would include boys of twelve and men over forty years of age.

“It is proper to remark,” Colonel Collins concluded, “that almost all the Indians are just now liable to become hostile. The rush of emigrants through their country is immense, and their game is being rapidly destroyed or frightened away; the whites who come in contact with them generally know nothing of Indian habits or character and often do them injustice; and then they [the Indians] complain that the treaty promises of the Government are not kept. War with somebody is also the natural state of an Indian people. Every tribe has some hereditary enemies with whom it is always at war and against whom it makes regular expeditions to get scalps and steal ponies … To heal these difficulties perfectly is impossible, as there is always some wrong unavenged. It is by war that they obtain wealth, position, and influence with the tribe. The young men especially look up to and follow the successful warrior rather than the wise and prudent chiefs.”
⁴

Throughout Colonel Collins’ report one can hear the voice of his son, telling him of the things he had learned from his Indian friends. Colonel Collins was a stranger to the frontier, having been there less than a year, but thanks to his son and his own wisdom he had come to understand the Sioux better than any Army officer west of the Mississippi. Of Old Man Afraid, for example, Collins wrote: “This chief is prudent and sensible, and has always been, and I think still is, friendly to the whites. He does all in his power to restrain his people, but complains that some of his young men are bad.”
⁵
(Crazy Horse was almost certainly one of those Old Man Afraid regarded as “bad.”) If other white officers had possessed Collins’ ability to understand and even sympathize with their opposite numbers among the Indian tribes, much tragedy on the Plains would have been avoided.