Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (6 page)

Indian lovers tended to be reformers, or vice versa, and they saw so much to be done in the nation—starting with the elimination of slavery (Indian lovers and reformers were hard to find in the South)—that they had little time for the Indians themselves. Living on land only recently conquered from the Indians, they were content to defend verbally the rights of the Indians out West. Certainly they never developed the methods necessary to study the Indians. Rather, the Indian lovers, like the Indian haters, were satisfied with their own image of the red man.

Thus two myths existed together, irreconcilable but alive, available as a set of ideas, however contradictory, to any American who wanted to absorb them as part of his thought. To the American, the Indian was simultaneously always honest—and forever a liar; always courageous—and forever a coward; always happy—and forever downcast; always colorful and attractive in appearance—and forever dirty and disgusting. The Indian was faithful and kind—and disloyal and cruel.

Ambivalence always characterized American thought about Indians, but everyone used the Indian to prove some theory. To Southerners, Indians provided evidence of the inferiority of non-white peoples. To frontiersmen, Indian atrocities proved that the primitives were beasts, to be treated as such. Settlers used the Indians to prove their own economic ideas—removal of the red men was just, because they had not improved the land; putting it the other way around, settlers had a right to exclusive title to the land because they had worked on it and improved it, while the Indians who had neglected the land had no just claim to it.
¹⁹
To reformers, Indians were living proof that a rough form of social equality, with equal distribution and ownership, and a closeness to nature, made for a happy life, in contrast to the “miserable conditions” under which the bulk of the American people lived.

Another element in the attraction of the Indians, or at least the idea of Indians, was that of wildness. The Indians were wild; whites were civilized—and tame. Indians knew the mysterious ways of the forest; whites did not. Indians wore rough, loose fitting, comfortable clothes; whites wore smooth, tight, constraining outfits. Indians were tough and manly; civilized whites were soft and feminine. Indians
were at one with nature, while whites had somehow lost touch with the elemental forces.

“It is perhaps the consummate irony,” Arthur Moore writes, “that at each step up from savagery the human race has regarded the fruits of progress with a degree of misgiving and often longed against reason for a return to a simpler condition.”
²⁰
This desire for the not-here and the not-now has always existed, of course, nor without reason, but the point is that it added to the American’s ambivalent attitude toward Indians. Officers in the Indian-fighting Army after the Civil War were often heard to say that they much preferred the wild Indians to the tame ones, or that if they were Indians, they would most certainly be out with the hostiles, not drunk on the reservation. Custer expressed such sentiments frequently. These same officers took the lead in making certain that there were no more wild Indians.

So if Americans could not agree on what to think about the Indian, they did agree on what to do about him. If he stood in the way, he had to be moved. This fixed idea sprang, in part, from the nearly universally held notion that the United States had a “manifest destiny” to overspread the continent. Nothing could stand in the way of that achievement, not treaties, not truth, not courage, not suffering, nothing. No boundary lines were fixed and final, not until they became American boundaries. Each time any section or group within the United States cast jealous eyes on neighboring territory, be it Indian, or Spanish, or French, or Mexican, or British, the Americans readily agreed that the true, natural God-given boundaries of the country in actuality lay thither.
²¹

Nineteenth-century Americans went on a campaign of military conquest unrivaled in world history, a campaign that was crucial to keeping alive the fundamental ideas of American life. The conquered land was “unsettled,” and long before 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address on the meaning of the frontier, Americans knew the central importance of free land to the American way of life. For not only did the conquest of the continent add to the strength of the nation, it also nurtured in the breast of millions of young men the hope that they too could get rich. Expansion by conquest, in short, kept the economic boom, and the boom psychology, alive.

Even an Indian lover like Thomas Farnham, a Vermont lawyer who traveled in the Old Northwest in 1839, accepted the prevailing philosophy. “The Indians’ bones must enrich the soil, before the plough of civilized man can open it,” Farnham declared in a grisly
passage. “The noble heart … must fatten the corn hills of a more civilized race! The sturdy plant of the wilderness droops under the enervating culture of the garden. The Indian is buried with his arrows and bow.” Those Indians who did not serve as fertilizer, meanwhile, could be educated and civilized—i.e., made over into white men.

Here again the Indian lover and the Indian hater came together; once the Indian was removed from the path of progress, he should be civilized and Christianized. The problem was, how to do it? How could one change the virtually anarchic Indian, who was in the habit of doing as he pleased, into a stable and productive citizen? The answer was simple and direct, as it had been throughout the period of white contact with the red men.

First, make them dependent. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark saw this in a flash after their initial encounter with the Sioux, of whom they said, “These are the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri, until such measures are pursued, by our government, as will make them feel a dependence on its will for their supply of merchandise.”
²²
All that would then be needed to put the Indian on the road to civilization was, in the words of Henry Knox, the Secretary of War in 1789, to give the Indian “a love for exclusive property.”
²³

That statement cut through all the verbiage and philosophical dispute about what an Indian was or was not and neatly defined what he must be, if he were to “be” at all. It was the guiding light for the missionaries and other friends of the Indians; they taught their wards that a love for private property and a love for the missionaries’ Bible went hand in hand. Moreover, the statement recognized
the
fundamental difference between white and red society, the difference from which all others sprang. The Indians had a communal ideal and practice, while the whites had an individual ideal and practice.
*
The Indians had no real notion of the meaning of private property; the whites not only understood it, they embraced it and all of the consequences that went with it. Even those consequences that led to excesses, such as extreme competitiveness, were exalted into virtues when they furthered the acquisition of wealth or fame.

The way to make the red men into acceptable neighbors or even someday into members of the community was to nurture in them “a love for exclusive property,” for this was the glue binding white society together. Alexis de Tocqueville, looking at America with the eyes of a French aristocrat, was most struck by the “general equality of condition among the people.”
²⁴
What he meant was not equality of possession, but rather that Americans were equally free to get rich or famous. “I know of no country, indeed,” he wrote, “where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.”
²⁵

The absence of a feudal tradition, the presence of natural wealth in uncountable amounts, and a political system that put its stress on equality of opportunity, all combined to make America the most open society in the civilized world. Anyone could become rich, anyone could become famous. Social and economic mobility, down as well as up the ladder, was the rule rather than the exception. So was the assumption that every man should stand on his own feet, which meant in practice that he should regard all his fellow men as competitors. The co-operation between people that was so central to primitive life and feudal tradition was, if not entirely absent from American life, only incidental to it. Farmers got together to share the work that no individual could do by himself, and cornhusking or logrolling or haymaking became social festivals, but essentially a man farmed by himself and kept what he grew.

In the end, the American was lonesome. De Tocqueville captured this feeling when he wrote, “Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
²⁶

And the American was ambitious, always, to improve himself and his station in his society. “The first thing which strikes a traveller in the United States,” De Tocqueville noted, “is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition.”
²⁷
Opportunities to improve himself lay all around the American, but precisely because they did and because a man could fall even easier than he could rise, the American carried a heavy burden. There was no real security, no real sense of place, not even for the rich and famous, who necessarily wanted to become richer or more famous.

In pre-Civil War America a son was expected to do better in life
—i.e., make more money or own more land or become more famous or powerful—than the father had done. This expectation hung over the head of every boy in the United States. It was a revolutionary expectation. Never before, anywhere, had the mass of the citizenry expected an improvement in their condition, or acted on the assumption that things were getting better all the time, or—most of all—that where the father had eighty acres or a thousand dollars, the son would have one hundred sixty acres or ten thousand dollars. It put an immense strain on the boys, for if they just held onto what the old man had, they would be failures. The American definition of success was something new in world history; the pressure of that definition, that need to improve, to do better, was felt by every lad in the land.

The thought that a man could and should improve his station in life was, I think, what De Crèvecoeur had in mind when he wrote, “The American is a new man who acts on new principles.” Certainly he did not mean that Americans had left European influences behind, not when he saw Christian churches in every village he visited, European technology on every farm, European-style merchants in every town, selling European goods; not when every lawyer he met had read Edward Coke and every politician had read John Locke, not when he saw Americans enslaving black men and calling Indians savage inferiors. What was new in America was individual expectation of personal betterment. It made Americans into the hardest working people in the world, and the most ambitious.

Ambition was the key to the American character. It was the motive power that got the work done, and the one sentiment shared by all white Americans, who were otherwise so diverse. George Armstrong Custer knew it well; late in his life he wrote: “In years long-numbered with the past, when I was verging upon manhood, my every thought was ambitious—not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great. I desired to link my name with acts & men, and in such a manner as to be a mark of honor—not only to the present, but to future generations.”
²⁸
In the end his ambition was directly responsible for his early death.

* Obviously, as will be seen later, things were not quite that simple. Within the context of a communal society in which material goods were shared more or less equally, the Indians followed their own conscience and did whatever it was they wanted to do; within an individualistic society in which everyone was free to keep whatever he could get his hands on, most white individuals were tightly constrained in their actions by social and legal mores.

CHAPTER THREE

“Curly”

“When we were young all we thought about was going to war with some other nation; all tried to get their names up the highest, and whoever did so was the principal man in the nation; and Crazy Horse wanted to get to the highest station and rank.”

Chips, an Oglala Sioux

The Black Hills, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, rise up in the middle of the northern Great Plains. The highest point, Harney Peak, is slightly over 7,200 feet above sea level. About one hundred miles long, north and south, and some sixty miles wide, the Hills were not extensive enough to provide permanent homes for the Sioux, who in any case were people of the Plains unsuited for long habitation in mountains. The Sioux used the Hills as a refuge in periods of bad weather, for occasional hunting, and as a source of their lodge and travois poles. Generally, however, they must have felt somewhat uncomfortable in the mountain forest; in a vague sort of way the Hills became, for the Sioux, a place where spirits dwelled, a holy place, called
Pa Sapa.
In 1874 George Armstrong Custer led an expedition that opened the Hills to white gold miners, but until that time
Pa Sapa
belonged to the Sioux.