Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (62 page)

Over the next three weeks Custer explored the Hills, marveling each day at new, breathtaking scenes. He encountered only one small band of Indians, twenty-seven Oglalas from Red Cloud Agency who had come to the Hills for a hunt. A man called Stabber was the chief of the band; his wife was Red Cloud’s daughter. Custer tried to bribe them with provisions in order to secure their services as guides, but the Oglalas ran off. Meanwhile, the miners searched for gold, while Custer went exploring and hunting. He climbed the highest point in the Hills (slightly over 7, 200 feet, named Harney Peak, in honor of the soldier who had defeated Little Thunder two decades earlier). At the summit, Custer drank a toast to the old Indian fighter. He got lost, killed dozens of deer, and with Bloody Knife’s help participated in bringing down a grizzly bear. Although Bloody Knife finished the bear off, Custer posed with his foot on the dead beast. It was the supreme moment of his hunting career. “I have reached the hunter’s highest round of fame,” he reported proudly to Libbie.
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Custer’s prowess as a hunter, about which he bragged incessantly, failed to impress George Grinnell, who reported that “Custer did no shooting that was notable. It was observed that, though he enjoyed telling of the remarkable shots that he himself commonly made, he did not seem greatly interested in the shooting done by other people.” One day Luther North killed three running deer with three shots. Grinnell took some of the venison over to Custer’s tent and reported on the impressive marksmanship. Custer’s only response was, “Huh, I found two more horned toads today.”

On another occasion, Custer saw some ducks swimming on a pond. Custer got off his horse and announced, “I will knock the heads off a few of them.” Captain North also dismounted and sat on the ground beside the general. Custer fired at a bird and missed it; North
shot and cut the head off one of the ducks. Custer shot again and missed; North cut the head off another bird. Custer gave North a long, silent look, then shot again. Again he missed; again North cut off a head. Just then an officer came galloping up and complained that Custer’s bullets were skipping off the water and singing over the heads of some troopers on the opposite side of the pond. “We had better stop shooting,” Custer muttered, and without another word mounted up and rode off.
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On July 27 the expedition, then camped in Golden Valley, near present-day Custer, South Dakota, found what it was looking for. The miners reported gold had been discovered on French Creek. Tremendous excitement prevailed. The troopers began to form joint stock companies. Custer wrote that he had before him “40 or 50 small particles of pure gold, in size averaging that of a small pin-head, and most of it obtained today from one panful of earth.” After other discoveries were made over the next few days, Custer wrote a preliminary report. So did the newspapermen. Then Custer sent Charley Reynolds on a dangerous ride south to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in order to telegraph the news to the country. Riding at night, Reynolds made it through the hostile territory to the fort, and by the end of August 1874 the New York
Tribune
and other papers were carrying sensational stories about gold in the Black Hills.
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By August 15 Custer had marched out of the Hills and was camping at the foot of Bear Butte, Crazy Horse’s birthplace. From that spot he wrote his full report. As Doane Robinson wrote, “It would be difficult to frame language better calculated to inflame the public mind and excite men to enter this country or die in the attempt.” Custer said there was gold among the grass roots, gold in paying quantities in every stream. There were other attractions for more permanent settlers. Custer gushed about the Hills: “There are beautiful parks and valleys, through which flow streams of clear, cold water, perfectly free from alkali, while bounding these parks, or valleys, is invariably found unlimited supplies of timber, much of it being capable of being made into good lumber. In no portion of the United States, not excepting the famous bluegrass region of Kentucky, have I ever seen grazing superior to that found growing wild in this hitherto unknown region.
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I know of no portion of our country where nature has done so much to prepare homes for husbandmen and left so little for the latter to do as here. The open and timber spaces
are so divided that a partly prepared farm of almost any dimensions can be found here. … Cattle could winter in these valleys without other food or shelter than that to be obtained from running at large.”
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Custer marched east from Bear Butte, pushing the men hard. After the weeks in the Hills, the Plains seemed even hotter, dustier, and more monotonous than ever. Some Indians tried to burn the prairie grass in order to immobilize Custer, but he managed to find a little grass each night for a campsite. Indian signs were all around. One night, in front of Custer’s tent, Luther North remarked that they were lucky the Indians seemed to have cleared out of the way, as there were evidently a great many of them. Custer snorted, then commented, “I could whip all the Indians in the northwest with the Seventh Cavalry.”
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The expedition arrived at Fort Abraham Lincoln on August 30. The column marched in as it had gone out, with the band playing “Garry Owen.” It had covered 1,205 miles in sixty days; as Max Gerber notes, “a truly remarkable achievement from a physical standpoint alone.” Custer’s preliminary report had already created a sensation; half of Bismarck was planning to go to the Black Hills by the time Custer returned, while the other half was figuring out how to make a fortune by selling wagons, food, and mining equipment to those who planned to take their chances with the Sioux. Yankton, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa, were already advertising that they were the ideal jumping-off place for the new Eldorado.
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Custer’s full report added to the excitement, and all over the country jobless men began the trek toward the Black Hills.

There was one major embarrassment—the treaty of 1868. Friends of the Indians (joined by Fred Grant, still smarting from being placed under arrest by Custer) charged that Custer had exaggerated and insisted that there was no gold in paying quantities in the Hills. The United States Government made pro-forma warnings, telling prospective prospectors that the Black Hills belonged to the Sioux and that no white man could enter. The Army along the Missouri made a half-hearted effort to keep the miners out. Given the condition of the economy, however, nothing was going to stop the gold rush—not the country’s honor, nor the pledged word of the government, nor any sense of Sioux rights. The Hills had too much to offer to allow them to remain in the hands of the savages.

Custer provided the classic rationale—the Indians were not using the Hills, so they should give them up to whites who would. “It is a mistaken idea that the Indian occupies any portion of the Black
Hills,” he wrote in a message of September 8, 1874, to the War Department (and gave to the newspapers, which gleefully reprinted it). “They neither occupy nor make use of the Black Hills, nor are they willing that others should. … If the Black Hills were thrown open to settlement, as they ought to be, or if simply occupied by the military, as they must be at an early date … a barrier would be imposed between the hostile camps and the agencies, and the well-disposed Indians of the latter would be separated from the evil influences and war-like tendencies of the hostles.” In other words, it was, as Custer saw it, in the best interests of the Sioux to give up the Black Hills.
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The Grant Administration could not have agreed more, and it immediately began hatching plots to find a way to relieve the Sioux of their legal title to the Hills.

While on the march back to Fort Abraham Lincoln, Custer had written Libbie to report that, “The Indians have a new name for me, but I will not commit it to paper.” The name was “thief,” and the route Custer followed the Indians named “The Thieves’ Road.”
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The absence of Sioux opposition to Custer’s penetration of the Black Hills is something of a puzzle. In both 1872 and 1873 Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the other leaders had gathered together an impressive force to block the path of the surveyors along the Yellowstone, but in 1874 there was no concerted Indian opposition to Custer’s foray. Perhaps the explanation is simple: in 1873 Custer went much farther west than he did in 1874, right into hostile territory on the Yellowstone, and the hostiles did resist. But the wild Sioux hardly used the Black Hills any longer—they lived to the west, along the Powder and Bighorn rivers—and as the presence of Stabber indicated, the Hills were used primarily by the agency Indians. Whatever the reason, Sitting Bull stayed to the north and west of the Hills, and so did Crazy Horse, while Custer stole
Pa Sapa.

Perhaps, too, Crazy Horse simply did not feel like fighting, for he had suffered another grievous blow. Early that summer he had led a raid to the west against the Crows. When he left, his people were camped near the Little Bighorn River, but when he returned the village had moved. Sticks laid on the ground pointed the way toward the Tongue River and within a couple of days the war party saw smoke rising from the campfires. As Crazy Horse entered the village, Worm grabbed his arm and pulled him away from Black Shawl’s tipi. Sadly, Worm informed his son that They-Are-Afraid-of-Her had caught cholera and died.

Frank Grouard was living with Crazy Horse at this time, and he
later said that Crazy Horse’s grief was pathetic. Late that night, Crazy Horse managed to ask where his daughter’s scaffold was located; Worm warned him that it was seventy miles away, deep in Crow country. He urged his son not to go, hut Crazy Horse was determined to visit the scaffold of his beloved daughter. Crazy Horse asked Grouard to accompany him. It took them two days to make the journey. When they found the scaffold, Crazy Horse climbed up and lay down beside They-Are-Afraid-of-Her’s little body, wrapped tightly in a buffalo robe. Grouard said he stayed there for three days and nights, mourning.
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Hump, Little Hawk, Black Buffalo Woman, and now They-Are-Afraid-of-Her—the effect of this succession of tragedies on Crazy Horse seems to have been to intensify his basic personality traits, rather than change them. He became even quieter, evidently almost refusing to speak in public. Certainly he made no attempts to rouse the people with harangues, as Sitting Bull did; instead, when it was necessary, Crazy Horse made plans quietly with his leading warriors. The testimony from his contemporaries is unanimous—he made no attempt to seize power, nor did he seek power in any way. He asked only to be left alone and to be allowed to fight for the people. He became more reckless than ever in combat, so much so that his friends feared he was deliberately seeking death. In battle he jumped off his pony whenever he fired, in order to steady his aim. He took more chances, it was said, than the young and foolish Little Hawk had. But still he was never wounded, as had been promised in his vision. The enemies who knew him best, the Crows, were more afraid of him than ever; one Crow reported that it was well known among them that Crazy Horse had a medicine gun that hit whatever it looked at and that he himself was bulletproof.
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Over the next year and a half, until the winter of 1875-76, Crazy Horse often went out from the village alone, disappearing for weeks at a time. No one knew where he went or what he did, but over that time period dozens of white miners who had invaded the Black Hills were found killed, an arrow stuck in the ground beside their bodies, their scalps intact.

The winter of 1874-75 was long and cold on the Plains, with immense snowdrifts and temperatures sometimes below −45 degrees. The Custers, at Fort Abraham Lincoln, with a fireplace in every room and a cavalry private whose sole job was to keep the fires going, had a gay time. Libbie has described it all in
“Boots and Saddles,” or, My Life in Dakota with General Custer,
a classic of western literature.
She loved being the Queen Bee at the fort, entertaining, gossiping, riding on sunny days. Custer’s niece, Maria Reed, was there— primarily to meet eligible Army officers. They played charades and held amateur theatricals. Custer wrote and wrote and had the intense satisfaction of getting his name on the jacket of a book—
Galaxy
brought out his series of articles on the 1867-68 campaign in book form under the title
My Life on the Plains.
It was a popular success. Encouraged, Custer worked some more on his Civil War memoirs, wrote articles on fighting against the Sioux on the Yellowstone, and generally established himself as something of a literary lion.

He was a complicated man, George Armstrong Custer, as unsure of himself in the study as he was confident on the battlefield. When he wrote, he made Libbie sit across the table from him. He would read aloud to her as he put words down on paper. Overhead he had hung portraits of his two favorite generals, McClellan—and Custer. Antelope heads and horns, guns, stuffed animals (he did his own taxidermy), the head of the grizzly he had helped bag in the Black Hills, and other trophies surrounded him. Everything, in short, reminded him of his accomplishments, but still he could not rest easy. Amazingly, at thirty-five years of age, a veteran soldier, he decided he needed to learn something about the military art, and he began reading Sir William F. P. Napier’s six-volume study of Wellington’s campaign in Portugal and Spain,
History of the War in the Peninsula.
He found the subject so difficult he had to read the paragraphs over three or four times; if Libbie interrupted him, he had to begin again at the top of the page.
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One can fairly assume that Custer found the reading boring. That is hardly surprising—many readers would find such a mass of detailed material boring. The wonder is that Custer kept at it. His persistence provides a fitting symbol for one of the marked contrasts between Custer and Crazy Horse and, beyond them as individuals, for one of the contrasts between their societies. Custer was always trying to improve himself, as were many members of his society, where the traditions of “self-help” and “self-improvement” flourished. So strong were the traditions that even Custer was affected by them, at a time when he was one of the most famous men in the country. That need to improve himself, to do better, to
be
better, permeated Custer’s whole life. It is one of the connecting links between the unruly boy, the West Point cadet, the Civil War general, and the world-renowned Indian fighter, just as it was one of the connecting links between Custer and the American tradition.