Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (64 page)

The commissioners wanted as many Sioux at the council as possible because of a “three-fourths clause” in the treaty of 1868—no revision could be made in the treaty without the consent of three fourths of all adult Sioux males—but they got more than they bargained for. Perhaps as many as fifteen thousand Indians showed up, mainly Sioux, coming from the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder, and the agencies. They argued constantly among themselves, especially after the commissioners informed them that the government wanted to buy not only the Black Hills, but the unceded Indian territory in Montana and Wyoming as well—the Powder River country. Hardly a single Indian, and none of the leaders, was willing to discuss selling their only remaining hunting grounds, but the request indicated to the more discerning Indians the true implication of white policy. Young Man Afraid and others argued that selling the Hills would not satisfy the whites; nothing short of penning up the Sioux on a narrow reservation, without hunting rights anywhere, would satisfy them. Better to draw a line right here and hold on to the Hills. But Red Cloud and Spotted Tail wanted peace at any price and security for their people—they had seen other tribes, such as the Mandans and Pawnees, refuse to accommodate themselves to the whites and now there were scarcely any Mandans or Pawnees left. They wanted to make the best deal they could in a difficult situation.

A climax of sorts came on September 23, 1875. The commissioners set up their tent fly and sat down under it, their interpreters beside them and 120 cavalrymen, plus Indian soldiers, behind them. Thousands of Indians were riding, walking, or sitting on the nearby hills. At noon a great cloud of dust suddenly billowed up from behind the hills, and a force of two hundred warriors rode into the council area, all mounted on splendid ponies, each man wearing his bonnet and carrying his weapons. “They swept down toward the commission’s tent in a column,” George Hyde writes, “then whipped their ponies into a run and began circling madly around the seated white men in a whirl of dust, whooping and firing their rifles. Presently they drew off and formed a line facing the commission; then their chief dismounted, walked forward, and sat down facing the white men. A signal was given, and another band of warriors emerged from the hills and repeated the performance of the first band. Band by band the Sioux rode proudly out of the hills, until at length seven thousand
warriors were drawn up in a great circle surrounding the commission and its little guard of cavalry and Indian soldiers.”
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There was a great deal of shouting, young warriors shaking their fists or weapons at the whites.

Red Cloud was just getting ready to speak when the thousands of warriors began to seethe with sudden excitement. An opening was made in the circle of warriors and through it shot Little Big Man, a belligerent warrior from Crazy Horse’s camp. Whether he was acting on instructions from Crazy Horse or on his own is unknown, but he was an impressive sight. He was riding bareback on a magnificent horse, with a lariat tied to the lower jaw in place of a bridle. Little Big Man was naked, save for a breechcloth and an eagle-feather war bonnet, the long tail sailing out behind him in the wind. He had a Winchester in one hand, a fistful of cartridges in the other. Riding into the open space between the seated chiefs and the commissioners, Little Big Man announced with a roar that he had come to kill the white men who were stealing Indian lands.

Before Little Big Man could do any more than make his threat, Young Man Afraid with a few Indian police rode forward and quickly disarmed him. But the warriors had been roused to a fury by his performance. They began circling the commission and the 120 soldiers, bumping their ponies into the cavalry horses in the hope of starting a fight. They shouted the call for a charge, “Ho-ka hey!” and made little dashes back and forth with their ponies to give them a second wind before the fight started. It was a critical moment, to say the least; Louis Richards, the half-breed interpreter, who knew what the Indians were yelling, was plainly scared. “It looks like hell will break out here in a few minutes,” he told the commissioners under the tent fly. “The Indians are all mad, and when they start shooting we’ll be the first to catch it.”
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Spotted Tail hurried to the commissioners and urged them to get out of there while they still could.

Just then Young Man Afraid rode into the center of the mass of enraged warriors. The Indians respected him as a great warrior, son of a prominent chief, and a leader of the opposition to selling the Hills. Even though he was a law-and-order Indian now, and a policeman to boot, the hostiles would listen to whatever he had to say. Young Man Afraid knew that if the warriors slaughtered the commissioners and the cavalry, white retribution would be terrible to behold. He ordered the warriors to go home and cool off. After some more milling, arguing, and shoving, they obeyed. The crisis was past.
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The question of the Black Hills remained. Following the incident most of the hostiles rode north, thereby ending whatever slim chance the commission had of obtaining the consent of three fourths of the Sioux to the sale of the Hills. But the commissioners could not simply give up—the whites had to have some kind of legal justification for doing what they were going to do anyway. So the commission consulted with the friendly chiefs who were left, principally Red Cloud and Spotted Tail.

The talks took place on September 27, 28, and 29, 1875. The chiefs were becoming skillful politicians. Spotted Tail announced that “as long as we live on this earth we will expect pay. We want to leave the amount with the President at interest forever. I want to live on the interest of my money. The amount must be so large that the interest will support us.” Spotted Tail had been among white men long enough by now to know what was what.

So had Red Cloud. He said, “For seven generations to come I want the Great Father to give us Texan steers for our meat. I want the government to issue for me hereafter flour and coffee, and sugar and tea and bacon, the very best kind, and cracked corn and beans and rice and dried apples and saleratus [baking soda] and tobacco, and soap and salt and pepper for the old people. I want a wagon, a light wagon, and a span of horses and six yoke of working cattle for my people. I want a sow and a boar, and a cow and a bull, and a sheep and a ram, and a hen and a cock for each family. I am an Indian, but you try to make a white man out of me. I want some white men’s houses at this agency to be built for the Indians.
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… Maybe you white people think I ask too much from the government, but I think those Hills extend clear to the sky, maybe they go above the sky, and that is the reason I ask for so much. I think the Black Hills are worth more than all the wild beasts and all the tame beasts in the possession of the white people. I know it well, and you can see it plain enough, that God Almighty [Red Cloud had converted to Catholicism] placed those Hills here for my wealth, but now you want to take them from me and make me poor, so I ask so much that I won’t be poor.”
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The other chiefs agreed. Old Spotted Bear said, “Our Great Father has a big safe and so have we. This Hill is our safe. We want $7,000,000
for the Black Hills.” Somehow the translator turned the sum into $70,000,000, which astonished the commissioners, but it hardly mattered, for, as Billy Garnett said, the Indians “did not know a million from the number of stars in the sky.”
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The whites protested that the Sioux were asking for the impossible, and bickering continued. Finally Spotted Tail, sensibly, asked the whites to state in writing exactly what they were willing to pay for the Hills. The whites responded with an offer of $400,000 annually for mineral rights to the Hills or $6,000,000 for outright purchase but with no annuities or other obligations included. The commissioners also offered $50,000 for purchase of the Powder River country.
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The Indians would not accept, wisely enough, as $6,000,000 was far too low a price considering the value of the Hills,
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and the commission concluded that “the Indians place upon the Hills a value far beyond any sum that could possibly be considered by the government,” so the council broke up with nothing accomplished. The Army then withdrew its nominal opposition to miners going into the Hills, and whites began to fill
Pa Sapa.
By March 1, 1876, there were fully eleven thousand whites in the town of Custer alone, more than fifteen thousand in the Black Hills altogether. In just a year, in short, there were more whites in
Pa Sapa
than there were Oglalas on the Sioux agencies, and thousands more were headed toward the gold diggings.
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The United States Government was embarrassed, not at the way its citizens were violating the treaty but by its failure to obtain some legal excuse to take the Hills. It seemed to have little sense of the nation’s honor and little morality of its own. On November 3, 1875, President Grant held a high-level Cabinet meeting, with General Sheridan in attendance. It was decided that the hostiles were the ones standing in the way of a Black Hills take-over, so the solution was to drive the hostiles out of the unceded Indian territory in Wyoming and Montana and force them onto the reservations. On December 6 Grant ordered all Indians in the unceded country to move onto the agencies by January 31, 1876. Otherwise, they would be certified as hostile and the Army would come after them. The unceded country would become a free-fire zone. It was a declaration of war, although it should be added that neither Grant nor his advisers thought that the hostiles would put up a fight; in their view,
the Army would have an easy time of bullying Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the others onto a reservation.
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After making the decision to declare war (according to George Manypenny, a former commissioner of Indian affairs) the government then began to look for a
casus belli.
It found its excuse in a report made by Indian Inspector E. C. Watkins, dated November 9, 1875. Watkins accused the wild Sioux of raiding the Crows in Montana! Although such raids had been going on since time out of mind, the government announced with a straight face that it was reluctantly making war on the wild Sioux in order to protect the Crows.
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There are two sides to the story, and Robert Utley puts the best possible face on the government’s side: “The breakdown of negotiations for the Black Hills capped seven years of mounting frustration with the Sioux hunting bands. They raided all around the periphery of the unceded territory. They terrorized friendly tribes. They contested the advance of the Northern Pacific Railroad. They disrupted the management of the reservation Indians while obtaining recruits, supplies, and munitions at the agencies for these hostile activities. And now they interfered with the sale of the Black Hills. The right to roam outside the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation—in the unceded territory—made all this possible.” They had to be brought to terms.
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The order addressed to the Powder River Indians arrived at Red Cloud Agency just before Christmas. Acting with a heavy heart, the agents—who knew what would happen—sent out runners to tell the hostiles to come in to the agencies before January 31 or face the consequences. “The officials at the Indian Office in Washington must have known that the wild Sioux would take no action on this strange order in time to meet the deadline,” George Hyde wrote. “The military officers certainly knew it; and before there had been time to receive any reply from the Indian camps, Major General George Crook went to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte, west of Fort Laramie, and began the work of organizing a column to go and drive the Sioux out of their winter camps on the Powder River.”
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The government was going to make war on the northern Sioux because their relatives at the agencies would not sell the Black Hills to the United States.

The runners found Sitting Bull camped at the mouth of the Powder River. He sent back a friendly message—he couldn’t come in just now, but he would consider the order and might come in later on, perhaps next summer, maybe later. The evidence demonstrates that he was just being polite—in fact, he regarded the order as a good
joke. So did Crazy Horse and Black Twin. The runner found them camped at the foot of Bear Butte near the Black Hills, less than one hundred miles north of Red Cloud Agency. Crazy Horse let Black Twin do the talking. It was too far, Black Twin said, and besides the village couldn’t move in the deep snow and cold. Then, to give the lie to this excuse, Crazy Horse and Black Twin moved in a northerly direction, going almost twice as far as the distance to Red Cloud Agency, and joined forces with Sitting Bull. The Army would have to whip them before they became tame Indians.
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January 31, 1876, came and went without a response from the north. On February 1, therefore, Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler, Custer’s old friend, notified Secretary of War William Belknap that “Said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper under the circumstances,” and, as noted, the Army on the frontier promptly began preparations for a winter campaign.
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While the Army of the frontier prepared to march against its enemy, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer of the 7th Cavalry was up to his neck in politics in New York and Washington, and thereby hangs a tale.

It began back in the summer of 1875, which Custer had spent quietly at Fort Abraham Lincoln. The Northern Pacific surveyors stayed home during that summer of economic depression, and Sheridan would not allow the 7th Cavalry to interfere with the flow of miners into the Black Hills, so the regiment had nothing to do. Stuck at the garrison, the troopers began to complain, most of all about the high prices charged them by the post trader. The men claimed they could get the same goods for half the price in Bismarck, but Army regulations forbade such purchases; the troopers had to buy from the post trader. Custer knew the complaints were valid because the regulations and prices applied to him as well. It would not be easy to do anything about the situation, however, because behind this swindling of the troopers stood the Secretary of War. It really was a shocking business. The Secretary was solely responsible for the appointment of the post trader, and he sold the appointments for an annual kickback, which forced the traders to jack up their prices. Nor were the traders averse to getting a little extra profit for themselves out of the monopoly. Thus did the government in Washington support a scheme of petty graft at the expense of the troopers who were risking their lives on the frontier.
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