Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (7 page)

Just northeast of the Hills a volcanic bubble erupts out of the earth. Called Bear Butte, it gives an unsurpassed view of the Plains stretching out to the north, east and west, and of the Hills to the south. The Belle Fourche River runs along the northern base of Bear Butte, which has a special place in Indian mythology. The great Cheyenne lawgiver, Sweet Medicine, received the Four Sacred Arrows and the laws of his tribe from spirits who lived in a cave on Bear Butte.
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The Sioux often gathered at the foot of the butte for what amounted to an annual convention, most of the scattered bands coming together at the beginning or end of the summer to exchange news and gossip, to trade for goods, and to carry out various religious rituals.

At one of these gatherings, in the fall of the year 1841,
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a Brulé woman, her name unknown to history, wife of Oglala holy man Crazy Horse, went down to the stream, where, on a piece of soft deerskin placed over a bed of sand, assisted by a midwife, she quietly delivered her second child and first son. If the baby cried, she pinched his nose with her thumb and first finger, holding her palm over his mouth, until he stopped. No one, not even an infant, could be allowed to give away the tribe’s position, not when an enemy might be lurking nearby.

The boy’s first meal was a community project. The Sioux believed that the colostrum (the first secretion from the milk glands) was poison for the baby, so mothers did not offer the breast until there was a good stream of perfect milk. Relatives and friends prepared the baby’s first meal; they gathered the best berries and herbs the prairie afforded and put the juice from these into a buffalo bladder, which served as a nursing bottle. The mother, meanwhile, had the colostrum sucked from her breast by an older woman who had been commanded in her dreams to perform this office.
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This boy was different from other Oglala babies. He had light, curly hair and a light complexion. As he would not receive his real name until he had accomplished a notable deed or had a memorable dream, the Indians called him by various nicknames, all connected to his distinguishing physical characteristics. Sometimes he was “Curly Hair,” sometimes the “Light-Haired Boy”; as he grew older he usually was called “Curly.”
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Curly’s family was a solid, respected one among the Indians, rather than prominent. His father, Crazy Horse, was not a warrior but a healer, a dreamer and an interpreter of dreams. He had two wives, although the older one had died; both women were Brulés and both were sisters of Spotted Tail, already a famous young warrior although only about twenty years old when Curly was born. Eventually Curly’s uncle would be head of all the Brulés, their leader for nearly three decades.
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It was customary for Sioux men to have more than one wife; ordinarily they would marry sisters, as did Crazy Horse, on the sensible basis that if two women were going to live with one man under the same roof, the chances of their getting along together were better if they were sisters.

Curly spent most of his infanthood on a cradleboard. He was fed on demand, not on schedule. By the time he was one year old he was receiving supplementary feedings, such as a piece of buffalo meat chewed first by his sister and dipped in soup, on which he sucked. When he was two he ate soup from a spoon. These extra feedings,
however, had little to do with weaning, for he was free to take the breast as long as he wanted to do so—most Sioux children were off the breast by the age of three or four, but sometimes a child would nurse until he was six. In any event, the decision to stop nursing was the child’s. White observers often saw Sioux children of two or three years of age stop their play, casually nurse for a few moments from the nearest woman, then return to play. The system gave the mothers more freedom than they could have enjoyed had they been solely responsible for the nurture of their children, while it implanted in the children the fundamental Sioux doctrine that everything the tribe had was to be shared equally.
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As soon as he learned to talk, Curly called all his maternal female relatives “mother” and all his paternal male relatives “father”; the aged, whether related or not, were “grandmother” and “grandfather.” He had a strong sense of being welcome and of belonging, for he had a wide variety of personalities to deal with and a knowledge that his well-being was a tribal, not just a family, responsibility. He was free to stop in any tipi anytime he chose, to be feasted and petted.
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The Sioux treated their children with great love and tenderness. Fathers and other men would play with children for hours on end. That they would do anything for their children was exemplified by the fact that as long as a child was nursing, his parents slept apart because intercourse might lead to pregnancy which would stop the flow of milk. Once Curly was permanently off the cradleboard and free to roam the village, he knew practically no restraint. He was never struck by an adult.
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Some dangers the children learned about from their older friends; others they discovered on their own. When infants went creeping around the tipi floor, for example, no one stopped them from reaching into the fire. The children thus learned a quick and probably permanent lesson without being yelled at or yanked away from the source of danger. The adults did not frustrate the child’s natural curiosity or take onto themselves the blame for hurt and pain that rightly belonged to the fire. Nor did the Sioux directly threaten the child who irritated them. Instead, they warned that if he did not cease the “owl” or the “sioko” (frightener of children) would “take him away.” Later, the threat was that “the white man is going to take you away.”
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Curly ran naked much of the time before his seventh or eighth birthday, especially in summer and even in winter within the tipi. Toilet training was in the hands of older children in the village, and it was done by example, not force. Indian children quickly learned
to follow slightly older siblings to designated spots outside the village to relieve themselves. This was, incidentally, a sanitary method of disposal, partly because of frequent moves and partly because the sun, wind, and rain soon broke down the feces on the open prairie. The white man’s outhouse kept the elements out but let the flies in.
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Toilet training was but one aspect of a general socializing pattern; Sioux children learned by imitating older children, not from adults.
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Games were an important part of the process. Curly’s first games revolved around home life; older children would make little tipis, travois, and implements for the youngsters so that they could play house. During these play sessions and by observing what was going on in the village, Curly absorbed the basic social customs of his people. A married man, for example, never spoke directly to his mother-in-law, something Curly learned when he played the role of husband in a game or when his father asked him to say something to his grandmother. The children gossiped incessantly, again imitating their elders, gossip being a basic form of social control among the Sioux.

As Curly grew toward adolescence his games became rougher and more diverse. The main, unspoken and unacknowledged, object of the games was to prepare him for adult tasks. Skill, endurance, brute force, and the ability to withstand pain were the major elements within the myriad of games the boys played. There was a wide diversity to the games, involving every physical activity, most skills needed for survival on the Plains, and much excitement, for the Sioux were gamblers and even the children gambled on their games, using their toys for bets. The children played on the snow or grass or ice or whatever suited their fancy.

A favorite boys’ game was “Throw at Each Other with Mud.” Teams of boys would attack each other with mud balls which they threw from the tips of short springy sticks. In the “Buffalo-Hunt” game a boy attached a large cactus to a five-foot stick; the center had been cut from the cactus to represent the buffalo’s heart. As the boy walked about holding the cactus above him, playmates tried to pierce the heart with their arrows. If they missed, the “buffalo” chased them a little with the cactus, but if an arrow went through the heart, he chased the hunter until he could poke him on the buttocks with the cactus.

In the “Fire-Throwing” game teams of boys would set fire to piles of brush. After each player had picked up a few flaming sticks, the teams attacked each other, the players hurling the sparkling brands
at the “enemy.” The object was to drive the other team away from its brush pile, but if neither team retreated the players would meet in the center and strike at one another amid sparks and smoke. One player recalled, “In close fighting after you have hit an enemy two or three times, your torch goes out. Then you get your share until his stick dies out.”
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Perhaps the most popular boys’ game was stealing meat from the drying racks. Sioux women cut buffalo meat into long, thin strips, which they hung on a rack in the sun to dry before storing for the winter. The racks were high enough to keep the dogs from the meat, but not the boys. The women kept guard over the racks and would shoo away Curly or any boy they caught near them; worse, they would tease the boy for getting caught, making him an object of ridicule with his age mates. But the boys got their share of meat, too, and in the process learned stealth, daring, and the other essential attributes of the successful thief—all of which they would use when they grew up and began stealing horses from neighboring tribes.
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By the time Curly was stealing meat and playing the “Fire-Throwing” game, there was a sharp division between his activities and those of girls his age. Girls never stole meat or participated in the rough-and-tumble games. Instead, they played with infants or dolls and were beginning to learn beadwork, food preparation, and other household tasks.

Shooting arrows from a bow was a major pastime of Sioux boys, nicely suited to stirring up Curly’s competitive instincts. His father or an uncle probably made Curly’s first bow, but by the time he was ten years old he was making his own, and testing himself with them against his peers. Who could shoot the farthest, the quickest, the straightest? Day after day, year after year, Curly and his friends found out. Most Indians became amazingly proficient; Colonel Richard Dodge stated that a Plains Indian could “grasp five to ten arrows in his left hand, and discharge them so rapidly that the last will be on its flight before the first has touched the ground, and with such force that each would mortally wound a man …” A full-grown Sioux warrior could drive an arrow clear through a buffalo.
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As soon as Curly could saddle a pony, his father Crazy Horse gave him a colt of his own. This became Curly’s pony to do with as he wished and was his responsibility. He also assumed responsibility for the village herd when it was his turn to keep watch at night for wandering horse thieves. During the day he rode to his heart’s content, while at night he observed the herd and came to understand
horses’ habits and their needs. And he was always learning—how to sleep while riding, how to get the most out of a horse, how to gallop past a fallen comrade and jerk him up onto the back of the horse, and a thousand other tricks.
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During the long winter nights, when the village was snugly settled in a valley, Curly learned the tribal traditions. Grandmothers and grandfathers were the storytellers, satisfying the children’s curiosity about where the Sioux came from, why a tipi always opened to the east, where and how a particular animal species acquired its distinctive character traits, the origin of Sioux law and political organization, and much else. The myths usually had a moral—tricksters would get tricked, the evil were punished, generosity brought rewards—and, along with gossip, were fundamental to the socialization process.

The myths emphasized the relatedness of life, for in them plants and animals talked and exhibited other human characteristics. The myths taught young Curly that everything had its place and function and that all things and animals were important The stories also gave him a feeling of balance; one, for example, told how the animals got together one day and decided to get back at mankind for killing and eating them. Each animal decided on a different disease he would give to man in retribution. Upon hearing of this, the plants got together and each one decided to provide a remedy for a specific disease. The telling of this myth might lead to the handing down of ancient wisdom about the medicinal properties of various leaves, bark, roots, and herbs.
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Sioux boys often paired off in special friendships, called “kolas”; they agreed to be partners in all undertakings, to share material belongings, and to hunt and make war together. Kolas were above all loyal, and it was considered good to be a kola. Curly’s kola was High Back Bone, called “Hump” for short, a Miniconjou-Oglala slightly older than Curly.
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Curly and Hump did everything together. They organized hunting parties, which mimicked those of their elders, except that the game was not buffalo but rabbit, small birds, and the like. They acted as leaders, persuading others to go along and directing them once on the hunt.
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By the time he was ten, Curly was well on his way to knowing the significance of everything that happened around him. The prairie was his schoolhouse. Each morning when he left the tipi, his father, Crazy Horse, would tell him to study his environment. When Curly returned in the evening, Crazy Horse would sit with him for an hour or so and question him about the day. Curly had to know which
side of the trees had lighter-colored bark and which side had the more regular branches. He had to be able to describe the birds he had seen that day and their activities. Crazy Horse would then explain to him the meaning of the jay’s call or that when swallows flew with their mouths empty they were going to water but if their mouths had mud in them, they were coming from water. From these and scores of other signs, Curly learned the most fundamental lesson of survival on the Plains; as Thomas Mails puts it, “wherever he was, a first requirement was that by merely looking at the country, a warrior should be able to judge accurately in what direction water could be found and the approximate distance to it.”