Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (49 page)

The Indians had about one thousand warriors gathered in the area, with perhaps as many as two hundred rifles, but the guns were mostly single-shot muzzle-loaders and the Indians were woefully short of ammunition, with probably less than two bullets per gun. The warriors agreed that a direct attack against Powell’s corral was impractical, but perhaps they could lure the soldiers out of the tiny fortress, get them into the open, and then overrun them as they had Fetterman’s command. Certainly it was worth a try. Crazy Horse and Hump agreed to lead the decoy party in an attack on the woodcutters; Red Cloud would send the bulk of the warriors into the fight when Powell’s men rushed from their corral to protect the woodcutters.

It was a good plan, but its success depended on patience and
discipline, qualities the warriors sadly lacked. Crazy Horse and Hump, joined by Little Hawk, Little Big Man, and two others, did their part, setting off shortly after dawn to hit the woodcutters while the thousand warriors waited behind the hills. But when a soldier shot at Crazy Horse, the warriors broke ranks and came streaming out of the hills, whooping and shouting, spoiling everything. Some swept down on the American horse-and-mule herd and drove it off, while others joined the decoy party for an assault on the woodcutters’ camp. Crazy Horse attacked with them, killed one white and saw Little Hawk kill another, and then started to chase the fleeing woodcutters into the mountains. But he soon found that he was alone—his comrades had stopped at the camp to scalp, plunder, and then burn the white men’s tents. When Crazy Horse rode in from the mountainside he found them squatting in the shade, eating molasses and hard bread. He yelled at them, told them they were fools, slapped one or two, spilled the molasses on the ground, and eventually got them back on their horses. Then he led them over to the corral, where the soldiers and a few woodcutters who had escaped were gathered.
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Crazy Horse and Hump now led a grand circling of the corral, the warriors holding onto their ponies with one foot, riding at top speed, firing arrows from under the ponies’ necks. The other shirt-wearers made sure no one went too close. Their idea was to get the soldiers to expend their ammunition, then rush the corral as the whites paused to reload. But to Crazy Horse’s vast surprise, the firing never slackened. Powell had almost forty men inside the corral and they kept up a continuous fire with their Springfields. After five or six ponies had been shot, Crazy Horse called off the circling and pulled the warriors back into a ravine. He, Hump, and the other shirt-wearers agreed that they were not going to get anywhere with a circling, so they decided to leave the ponies in the ravine and attempt to approach the corral on foot. Red Cloud, watching from a distant bluff, sent a smoke signal warning them to be careful.

At this point in the fight, the Indians suffered from the absence of firm, unified leadership. The ravine narrowed as it approached the corral, so the Indians attacked in a V formation, with Crazy Horse and Hump at the point of the V. The trouble was that the men in front masked the mass of warriors in the rear, making it impossible for them to fire. A second difficulty was that the Oglalas were attacking from one side of the corral only, so Powell was able to shift all his men to that part of the corral. Had Red Cloud signaled for half
the warriors to ride around to the other side of the corral and launch a simultaneous attack, Powell’s position could have been overrun. As it was, Powell only had to deal with a handful of Indians, Crazy Horse and his fellow shirt-wearers at the apex of the charge.

Despite these handicaps, the Indian charge was a frightening spectacle. They came on painted and dressed for war, their spears and shields held high, chanting war songs, zigzagging, firing arrows ahead, dropping into low places and rising to run closer to fire again. “It chilled my blood,” one of Powell’s men later recalled. “Hundreds and hundreds of Indians swarming up a ravine about ninety yards to the west of the corral. . . formed in the shape of a letter V. Immediately we opened a terrific fire upon them. Our fire was accurate, coolly delivered and given with most telling effect, but nevertheless it looked for a minute as though our last moment on earth had come.”
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Crazy Horse was growing desperate. The wagon boxes that formed the corral looked like pincushions, so covered were they with arrows sticking into the wood, but the arrows could not penetrate as a bullet could have done and the fire of the whites still did not slacken. Hunkering down in a low place near the corral, Crazy Horse started motioning the braves back. Just then a tall Oglala named Jipala, stripped to his breechcloth, started walking toward the corral, singing his war song. All the warriors watched this brave deed. When Jipala got close he drew his bow, leaped high in the air, and fired an arrow into the corral. Then he shot another and another, firing faster than even the breech-loading Springfields could. But the soldiers began to concentrate their fire on him and Jipala was cut down. Crazy Horse then led the warriors back down the ravine, away from the murderous fire. He had lost six killed and six wounded, far too many, even though the Indians had killed several woodcutters, one officer, and five enlisted men, and had captured the horses and mules. Powell’s fire power was too much for Crazy Horse to overcome, and when he heard from a scout that a hundred-man force was coming from Fort Phil Kearny to relieve Powell, he led the warriors back into the hills. The Wagon Box Fight was over.
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That was the last charge Crazy Horse ever led against whites occupying a strong defensive position. He had learned that Indians armed with bows and arrows could not overwhelm whites armed with breech-loaders inside a fortification, no matter how greatly the Indians outnumbered the whites. With arms and ammunition the Indians could do better, he knew, but where were they to obtain them? Besides, if the warriors would not obey orders, it hardly mattered
if they had rifles or not. In a running fight over open ground it would be a different story. Though the individual bravery of the Sioux warriors was of little use in attacking a fort defended by breech-loaders, it could be put to good use in combat with troops caught out on the prairie. For the remainder of the summer of 1867 Crazy Horse concentrated on hit-and-run raids against any whites foolish enough to venture out onto the Bozeman Trail, but he left Fort Phil Kearny alone.

This war on the Powder River was just the kind the Sioux liked best As George Hyde puts it, “The soldiers did not bother them, permitting them to take matters into their own hands and run the war to suit their own convenience. They went to Fort Laramie in the spring to talk, and to attempt to obtain ammunition; then they had their buffalo hunt and Sun Dance; after that they went to Fort Phil Kearny and had a good fight, then to Fort Reno and made some raids, obtaining more horses and plunder. The autumn hunt ended the year’s activities, and they then retired to their winter camps, happy and in perfect trust that the white soldiers would not come out and force them to fight at this season, when they wished to be quiet.”
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In the fall of 1867 Black Buffalo Woman had her third child by No Water. Crazy Horse was often seen hanging around her tipi, exchanging a few words with her, or just watching as she played with her children and did her tasks. Gossips wondered if they would run off together. Eagle Foot’s wife had just left him for another man, and Eagle Foot had acted as a Sioux warrior was supposed to act in such circumstances. He had accepted the two ponies that the man who took his wife offered in payment and even had his former wife’s mother come to live in his tipi and care for his lodge. But, the gossips said, No Water was a different case. He was a jealous man and if Black Buffalo Woman moved in with Crazy Horse, No Water would be sure to make trouble. As a shirt-wearer, Crazy Horse was under a strong injunction to cause no trouble within the tribe, so he would have to be content with an occasional glimpse of the woman he loved. No Water’s brother, Black Twin, had just been made a shirt-wearer too, so Crazy Horse had another reason to keep his distance.
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There was already trouble enough in the Oglala camp. The Indians were quarreling. They had been living the wild life for five years and some of them longed for the good things of the white men. These people began to argue that the Oglalas should emulate
the Laramie Loafers. Let us go down to Fort Laramie for the coming winter, they said, and enjoy some coffee and sugar, perhaps a little whiskey. Possibly we can get some ammunition. In the spring we can come back up here for a good hunt and a little fighting. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and most of the warriors would have none of it They did not trust the whites and would not move near them under any circumstances. They could no more abide the thought of being penned up on a reservation, even if only temporarily, than Custer could abide the thought of Libbie’s being captured alive by savages.

The Oglala women quarreled, too. One afternoon following a successful buffalo hunt, two women were working over the hides. They got into a fight over the question of going down to Fort Laramie and one woman slashed at the other with her skinning knife. When the husband of the woman who did not want to go tried to calm her down, she marched back to their tipi and threw his pipe, his weapons, his medicine bag, his back rest, everything that was his, out of the lodge. “Take your warrior stuff to the white man!” she shouted. “It may be that you are still man enough for a Loafer woman, but not for my lodge!”
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But some of the Oglalas were receptive when messengers arrived from General Sherman and the new peace commission, requesting Red Cloud’s presence at a big council at Fort Laramie that fall of 1867. Some wanted to go, but most held back. Crazy Horse and the other shirt-wearers were strongly opposed to going to Fort Laramie until the soldiers abandoned the Powder River forts. Sherman was prepared to promise to do just that, as the messengers indicated, but promises were unsatisfactory. The warriors wanted proof.

This was the first time the whites had asked for Red Cloud by name, which caused another problem. Red Cloud was a war leader, not a Big Belly, and besides, no one man could speak for all the Oglalas, not even Old Man Afraid, the acknowledged head of the Big Bellies. So the tribe stayed on the Powder River, sending word that there could be a peace council at Fort Laramie when the forts were abandoned.
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Old Man Afraid, whom everyone trusted, carried the message.
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The whites, meanwhile, were making widely exaggerated claims about the Wagon Box Fight. Powell himself estimated that his men had killed sixty Indians; as was typical of the Army on the frontier, he had inflated the body count by a factor of ten. But that was just the beginning. By the time the story got back to civilization, hundreds
of Indians had bitten the dust. Eventually, white writers claimed that Red Cloud lost 1,500 warriors that day.
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Sherman knew better. He doubted that the body count could have gone over fifty, and in any case what stood out was the presence of a mass of warriors. Red Cloud had been able to hold his force together and it would have to be whipped in fair fight before it retired from the field. But there was not the slightest chance that Sherman could get the necessary funds from Congress to wage a successful campaign against the Oglalas. Making things worse, the day before the Wagon Box Fight more than five hundred Cheyennes had attacked Fort C. F. Smith. This was a war of an altogether different magnitude than the relatively small affairs on the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers. The hostiles in the Powder River country were simply too strong for the Army.

Besides, Sherman reasoned, it did not matter at the moment, since the Kansas Pacific tracks were far south of Oglala territory. He could leave the Red Cloud forces alone for a while, let them hunt buffalo and fight the Crows for a few more years. like any good counterinsurgency general, Sherman knew that the only way to win a guerrilla war was to round up the people and put them into concentration camps, where they could be watched and controlled. He would do that to the Indians of the central Plains first, then put the Oglalas on their reservation when the time came. Meanwhile, the Army needed peace in the Powder River country in order to fight in Kansas, the politicians demanded peace, and the Indians seemed ready for peace. Much as he wanted to punish the Oglalas, Sherman himself was willing to accept a truce. He set off from St. Louis in search of one.

Sherman and his fellow commissioners made a whirlwind tour for peace. They went up the Missouri to talk to the wild Sioux of the far-north country, Sitting Bull’s people, then down to Fort Mc-Pherson, in Nebraska, where in early October 1867 they met with Spotted Tail. The Brulé chief told them to get the white people off the Bozeman Trail and said that although he was one of those who had signed the treaty of 1866, which had provided that he would move onto a reservation and go into farming, he was in no hurry to begin. Spotted Tail indicated that he much preferred hunting to farming and if the commissioners wanted to make him happy, they should give him some guns and ammunition. Sherman said no: Spotted Tail must learn that he could no longer live by the chase. Then Sherman threatened to exterminate the Indians. If the Brulés tried to interfere with the building of the railroads, Sherman said,
“the Great Father, who out of kindness for you, has heretofore held back the white soldiers and people, will let them out, and you will be swept out of existence.”

Following the lecture to Spotted Tail, Sherman went down to the vicinity of Fort Larned, in Kansas, where in mid-October 1867 the peace commission met with some Apaches, Arapahoes, southern Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas. The Indians took their presents and touched the pen to a treaty that required them to vacate the country between the railroads, moving south of the Arkansas. They also agreed to take up farming as soon as there were insufficient buffalo south of the Arkansas River to justify the chase. When the hunting played out, they would stay within the boundaries of their concentration camps.
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