Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (3 page)

The fur traders, in their letters back to headquarters explaining their difficulties, provide a fascinating view of Sioux life on the
Plains before extensive contact with the whites had unalterably changed that life-style. The traders judged the Indians from a European perspective, of course, but the white men were in such a minority—hardly ever more than one to a village, if that many—that they made no attempt to force their value system or culture on the Indians, save for their futile and frustrating efforts to induce the Indians to work.

The traders found much to comment upon—the Indians’ bravery, endurance, horsemanship, and so on—but nothing impressed them so deeply as Indian gluttony. As the fur-trade historian Lewis Saum puts it, “They stood in awe of the red man’s ability to eat.” Pierre-Antoine Tabeau decided that in gluttony the Indian experienced his foremost happiness. Food monopolized most conversations. Edwin Denig tried to describe the Indians’ “incredible” gastronomical achievements but gave it up as hopeless—no one who did not know the Indians could even approach the truth, for “it can not be realized.”
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One Indian could consume five, even ten pounds of buffalo meat at a single sitting.

The other side of the coin was Indian improvidence. Most traders complained that the Indians did not have the slightest idea of a future, refused to lay up stores against a rainy day, and trusted to nature to supply needs as they arose. But the Indians did store food; what the traders really meant was that the Indians could not be made acquisitive, cared little if at all for manufactured products, and refused to run a trap line in order to earn knives, cloth, beads, or even firearms. The only item that the Indian wanted badly enough to work for was whiskey, which soon dominated the fur trade.

Even whiskey, however, was an insufficient spur. When they were not on a war party or a buffalo hunt, Sioux men liked nothing better than lazing around camp, smoking a pipe, telling stories, playing with the children, enjoying themselves. In 1822 Jedediah Smith described in his journal the serenely pastoral setting of a Sioux camp on the Plains and remarked that it would “almost persuade a man to renounce the world, take the lodge and live the careless, Lazy life of an Indian.”
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Francis Parkman, who lived among the Oglala Sioux in the summer of 1846, described a typical afternoon. He lay in a buffalo-skin lodge, “overcome by the listless torpor that pervaded the encampment. The day’s work was finished, or if it were not, the inhabitants had resolved not to finish it at all, and were dozing quietly within the shelter of the lodges. A profound lethargy, the very spirit of indolence, seemed to have sunk upon the village … The spirit of the place infected me; I could not think consecutively;
I was fit only for musing and revery, when at last, like the rest, I fell asleep.”
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Everything about the Indian was, for the white man, extreme. His laziness and improvidence had a counterpoint: once aroused, the Indian was capable of prodigious bursts of energy. Parkman was always impatient for action, for example, but when the time came he could not begin to keep up with the Oglalas on a buffalo hunt. A Sioux warrior could run all day, and the next, and on through the week if necessary to escape pursuers. The Sioux could pack up a village and be on the move in fifteen minutes. A war party, returning from a raid on the Crow camps near the Bighorn Mountains, would dance all night in celebration when the men arrived home with their loot, even though the men had been on the move for two weeks or more, chased by the Crows, with little sleep or food.

Indians were an enigma to the whites. As fur trader Henry Boller put it, “I could ‘paint’ you … two pictures: The One would represent the bright side of Indian Life, with its feathers, lances, gayly dressed & mounted ‘banneries,’ fights, buffalo hunting &c.

“The other, the dark side, showing the filth, vermin, poverty, nakedness, suffering, starvation, superstition, &c.
Both would be equally true—neither exaggerated, or distorted; both totally dissimilar!”
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Of all the puzzlements, none exceeded the Sioux method of making war. As in European armies, there were grades of honors which entitled the brave man to wear distinguishing marks, medals among the Europeans, feathers among the Indians. Unlike the whites, however, the Indians did not fight to kill, but to win prestige. With the red men the highest honors went to the man who touched a live enemy with a bow, spear, or hand, which was called “counting coup.” Killing an enemy from a distance with an arrow or bullet carried almost no prestige with it, for in the red man’s view it took no great bravery to fire a weapon at a distant enemy. Although the Indians would never have admitted it, their system of honors—common to all Plains tribes—had the salutary effect of holding down losses. And since the Plains were underpopulated and every able-bodied man was required for the hunt, holding down losses was crucial.

Intertribal “battles” hardly ever became full-scale fights, with one side or both committing all its strength. Rather, they tended to be individual duels. The Crows would gather on one side of a valley, the Sioux on the other. They would shout taunts back and forth. Occasionally, a young brave, eager to win honors, would dash forward on his pinto, gallop into the Crow line, arrows flying everywhere, count coup, and ride like hell to get out of there. The main idea
was to make sure that everyone was watching. After a few casualties had been sustained, the two sides would ride off in opposite directions. That night they would mourn the dead, then celebrate the new honors won.

A missionary who lived with the Sioux from 1835 to 1845, Reverend S. W. Pond, recorded the results of the constant warfare between that tribe and the Sac, Pottawatomie, Chippewa, and Ojibway. In that decade the Sioux killed or wounded one hundred twenty-nine of their enemies and lost in killed or wounded eighty-eight people. Since more than half the total in both cases were children and women, the Sioux lost less than four warriors per year. Hunting accidents were probably a more serious cause of manpower losses.

Pond cited Little Crow, a Santee Sioux, who in 1819 told an Army officer (who had urged him to give up the war with the Chippewas), that “it is better for us to carry on the war in the way we do than to make peace, because we lose a man or two every year, but we kill as many of the enemy during the same time.” Little Crow said if the Santees made peace, the Chippewas would overrun Sioux territory. “Why, then, should we give up such an extensive country to save the life of a man or two annually?”

Pond reported that “the Indians spent a good deal of time at war, but their attempts to kill their enemies were not often very successful.” Small parties of warriors were more successful than large ones, although both types usually returned to the village without any scalps. Pond gave examples of opportunities to strike a foe which the Sioux passed up and concluded, “Indeed, Indians consider it foolhardiness to make an attack where it is certain some of them will be killed.”
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Although boundaries between tribes were always changing, the Sioux did not drive the Ojibways or the Crees or the Crows out of an area; it would be more nearly correct to say that the Sioux forced their enemies back simply because of their superior numbers, which gave them a presence in the region that by itself was sufficient to deter opponents from attack and even to force them to withdraw. If the Sioux came upon a Pawnee hunting party, they would drive off the Pawnees. Or rather, they would if they outnumbered the Pawnees; and if they outnumbered them badly enough, they might slaughter the entire tribe—such cases, although rare, did happen. Otherwise the Sioux would count a few coup and wait for the Pawnees to ride off. When faced with superior numbers, Indians nearly always retreated, which was how it happened that the Sioux took over the prime buffalo range without having to fight any pitched
battles, much less campaigns. Certainly there were few tribal victories or defeats. To the disgust of the fur traders, Indian warfare was little more than individual combat.
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The fur traders could hardly understand the Indians’ attitudes toward war. William Laidlaẁ was delighted when the Sioux went on the warpath against the Arikaras, because the Sioux were trading with him and the Arikaras were not. But after killing only a few Arikaras the Sioux had grown tired of the war and were arranging peace. Laidlaw’s disgusted comment was, “so much for Indian Warfare——.” To illustrate the red man’s “great aversion to going to the ‘Spirit Land’ before his allotted time,” Henry Boller described an unexpected encounter between three Assiniboine and three Sioux. Although the two tribes were traditional enemies, both groups simply stood and looked at each other, so confounded were they by the equality of numbers. “What was to be done?” Boller wrote rhetorically. “Fight it out? Far from it——!” The Indians decided to hell with it, sat down, smoked a pipe, stripped, exchanged clothes, smoked again, and rode off in opposite directions. Boller said the story was “as true as it is ridiculous.”
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Fur traders generally found little to admire in the Indians, but then they were trying to make money off the red men and exploiters seldom find many admirable characteristics among the group they are exploiting. Francis Parkman saw them differently. Not yet twenty-three years old and fresh out of Harvard when he lived among the Oglala Sioux in 1846, Parkman was so steeped in James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic view of the red man that he once said he sometimes felt he could not say for sure where Cooper left off and his own observations began.
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Where the trader saw a lazy, filthy Indian, Parkman tended to see a noble savage. His views were tempered, however, by living among the Indians. As a proper Bostonian he was shocked by the Oglalas’ laziness and obscenity, horrified by their manners, dress, and smell, and entirely disapproving of their habits.

“For the most part,” Parkman wrote in a final judgment, “a civilized white man can discover very few points of sympathy between his own nature and that of an Indian. With every disposition to do justice to their good qualities, he must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him and his red brethren. Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that, after breathing the air of the prairie for a few months or weeks, he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast.”
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The generalization
was obviously too wide. Many civilized white men formed fast friendships with individual Sioux, while a goodly number married into the tribe and lived the wild life, refusing to return to civilization. The view was too extreme even for Parkman himself, who elsewhere indicated that he found much to admire in the Oglalas. Sioux historian George E. Hyde points out that Parkman “had an instinctive understanding of the Indians; they were neither Noble Red Men nor scurvy savages to him, but human beings each with his own characteristic faults and virtues.” Hyde also flatly and correctly states, “There is no other picture of these people in their wild, free state that is to be compared with” Parkman’s.
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Parkman hired a guide, Henry Chatillon, an illiterate hunter who was married to an Oglala woman; Chatillon took him to Old Smoke’s band south of the Platte River. It is probable that Crazy Horse, who was about five years old that summer of 1846, was living with the band at the time. When Parkman first saw the village, it was camped near the Platte River across from the recently opened Oregon Trail. The village covered several acres. “Warriors, women, and children swarmed like bees,” Parkman wrote. “Hundreds of dogs, of all sizes and colors, ran restlessly about; and, close at hand, the wide shallow stream was alive with boys, girls, and young squaws, splashing, screaming, and laughing in the water. At the same time a long train of emigrants with their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow procession by the encampment.”
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Despite the juxtaposition of moods that Parkman pointed out, the two races got on well. The emigrants were allowed to pass through Sioux territory without being molested, while the Sioux got coffee and sugar (to which they were addicted and wanted as much as they did whiskey) and some crackers. Indeed, Old Smoke’s band of Oglalas had traveled for three days just to reach the Oregon Trail and enjoy some sweet coffee and baked food. It was established custom that the emigrants had to feed all Indians who came to visit. The whites didn’t much like it, but it was better than fighting their way through the Plains.
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The red man-white man relationship, in short, was of mutual benefit. This had usually been the case when the Indians’ contact with whites was limited to traders, and it continued to be so before the Oregon Trail began to fill with emigrants, whom Parkman found uncouth and unpleasant, but with whom the Sioux had good rapport—until the trickle of white men passing over the Plains became a great flood.

Parkman was a keen observer of Indian life. Speaking of the Oglala children, he complained that the parents “indulged to excess” their youngsters, showering them with love and never punishing them for any transgressions. Nearly all whites commented on this phenomenon and attributed various Indian shortcomings to it; the Sioux, for their part, were horrified at the emigrants’ practice of beating their children, which the Indians decided was done in order to teach youngsters that the earth belongs to the powerful, who can do as they wish. In writing about Indian upbringing, Parkman let his prejudices show: “Their offspring became sufficiently undutiful and disobedient under this system of education, which tends not a little to foster that wild idea of liberty and utter intolerance of restraint which lie at the foundation of the Indian character.”
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Shocked as he was at the Oglalas’ lack of discipline and unable to recognize how necessary the wild bravery of the Sioux male was to a warrior-nomad society, Parkman was nonetheless wise enough to recognize that it was a
system
of education and that it worked.