Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (73 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Death of Crazy Horse

“Stab the son-of-a-bitch! Stab the son-of-a-bitch!”

The Officer of the Day at Camp Robinson,

Nebraska, September 6, 1877

“Let me go, my friends. You have got me hurt enough.”

Crazy Horse, September 6, 1877

June 25, 1876, had been a good day to die, a better one than Crazy Horse got for himself, and thereby hangs a tale.

Following the battle, the Indians moved south, toward the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. After traveling fifteen miles or so, the great camp broke up, Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapas going to the southwest, Crazy Horse with the Oglalas and Cheyennes heading southeast.
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The hostiles burned the grass behind them, making cavalry pursuit impossible, and the country was filled with smoke. Soon the Cheyennes left Crazy Horse’s camp, and many of the agency Indians did too, as the Sioux continued to scatter. The agency warriors had got what they wanted, a big fight with lots of honors won and plunder captured, and they were ready to go back to the reservation. Many of the Indians were also confident about their future—they figured that such a crushing defeat would teach the Army a lesson it wouldn’t soon forget, so that they would be free to hunt the Powder River country once more in their small bands, unmolested. Perhaps there would be a little fighting again next summer, but for now the war was in the bag.

The Army, meanwhile, was refitting before coming after Crazy
Horse. Following the Custer disaster, it got everything it wanted. Congress promptly voted funds to build two forts along the Yellowstone, forts that Sheridan had been asking for since 1873. Some 2,500 new recruits were authorized and sent to the Sioux country to reinforce Generals Terry and Crook. Congress took control of the agencies out of the hands of the Indian Bureau and gave it to the Army. Despite all this effort, Crook stayed on the Powder River all through the rest of June and July, while Terry stayed in camp on the Yellowstone. Neither general would move until his command had been doubled in size by reinforcements, saying it would be unsafe to venture into Sioux territory without at least two thousand soldiers.

The hostiles spent the month of July dancing, feasting, going into the Bighorns for lodge poles and deer, coming back to the prairie, and again dancing and feasting. Meanwhile, the same Army officers who for years had been hoping for orders to march against the Sioux and who bragged that they would give the hostiles a five- or even ten-to-one superiority and still whip them, sat where they were. Without overwhelming numerical superiority they dared not enter Sioux territory. The absence of marching troopers in the Powder River country helped convince the warriors that they had won a decisive victory.

But Crazy Horse seems to have realized that he had won a battle, not a campaign. White soldiers were still surrounding the Indians’ only remaining hunting grounds, and with so few warriors—Crazy Horse had less than six hundred with him now—he could do nothing about that. Crazy Horse did, however, try to follow up his victory by harassing the white miners in the Black Hills in South Dakota. In early August he moved east from the Bighorns, across the hot, dusty prairie of eastern Wyoming, to attack the intruders in
Pa Sapa,
still legally Sioux territory. Once on the edge of the Hills, camping near Bear Butte, Crazy Horse led small war parties against the miners’ camps—small because most of the warriors were tired of fighting. Sometimes Crazy Horse went out on his own. Once he led back into the village some captured mules, loaded with goods; another time he brought home two sacks of raisins, which he had not tasted since he was a child living with Old Smoke along the Holy Road. Crazy Horse called the children of his village to him and held the sack open for them as they grabbed handfuls of raisins.

He Dog strongly opposed Crazy Horse’s lone forays. “My friend,” he admonished, “you are past the foolish years of the wild young warrior; you belong to the people now and must think of them, not
give them such uneasiness.” Still Crazy Horse persisted in his raids.

The United States Army, meanwhile, had to do something, and in August it tried. Crook, with two thousand men, double the number he had in his battle with Crazy Horse two months before on the Rosebud, marched overland to the headwaters of that river. Terry, with two thousand reinforcements, moved up the Rosebud. The two forces blundered into each other along the river, then decided that even two thousand men apiece was no guarantee of safety while Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were loose, and they joined forces. They then made some half-hearted attempts to follow Crazy Horse’s trail to Bear Butte near the Black Hills but soon gave it up, Terry returning to the Yellowstone. Crook got lost north of the Hills, his men nearly starved, and he was soon engaged in a struggle against the elements for survival. On September 7 he sent Colonel Anson Mills and 150 men and horses (the other horses had been eaten) on an expedition to the town of Deadwood in the northern Black Hills for supplies. At dawn on September 9, 1876, near Slim Buttes, Mills discovered a Sioux camp of thirty-seven lodges, agency Indians who had left the Crazy Horse people the previous day and were making their way back to the reservation in Nebraska. Mills attacked immediately and drove the occupants of the village to the nearby bluffs. As the starving soldiers gorged themselves on buffalo meat, the Brulés sent runners to fetch Crazy Horse. He got to the scene about noon, with two hundred warriors, and attacked Mills. But the soldiers were well armed and held their ground until late afternoon, when Crook came up with 1,850 more men. Crazy Horse withdrew. The next day he kept up a harassing action against Crook’s rear guard, while Crook—after burning the village—made for Deadwood.

The great Army campaign of 1876 was over. Crook and Custer had been defeated, Terry and Gibbon had yet to see an Indian, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull held the field and thought they had won. But, as Slim Buttes revealed, the future for the Sioux did not look good. The Indian force dwindled steadily while the Army’s columns grew in size; at Slim Buttes the soldiers outnumbered the warriors, as would be the case from that time onward.

While Crazy Horse was trying to regain
Pa Sapa,
the United States Government stole the Black Hills. The United States had been unwilling to pay the seller’s price for the Hills and unable to defeat the Sioux in war, so it decided to use its ultimate weapon, economic coercion. On August 15, 1876, Congress passed the Sioux appropriation bill. It specified that further provisions would be given
the Sioux only if and when the Indians gave up the Black Hills and the Powder River and Bighorn country and removed themselves to an agency on the Missouri River in central Dakota or to Oklahoma. In other words, its Army having lost its biggest battle between Appomattox and San Juan Hill, the government was now demanding unconditional surrender of the Sioux and threatened starvation if the demand was not met!

The inevitable commission sent out to Red Cloud Agency to get the chiefs to sign a treaty managed the impossible—it dragged the honor of the United States even deeper into the mud. Arriving with remarkable haste (appointed by President Grant on August 24, they held their first council at Red Cloud Agency on September 8), the commissioners consistently lied to the chiefs, except about one thing —if Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and the others did not sign, their people would starve. Young Man Afraid said he was raised in this country and did not want to leave it. He was willing to sell the Hills, if necessary, but only for a big price and only after he had met with the Great White Father. The chiefs then left the council, but they were back on September 19, worn out from arguing among themselves, their people pitiful in their hunger. They all signed the treaty, although only after each one made a speech (Fire Thunder held his blanket to his eyes and made his mark on the treaty blindfolded). Young Man Afraid said, “I give notice it will take me a long time to learn to work, and I expect the President will feed me for a hundred years, and perhaps a great deal longer.” After the signing, all the agency Indians were disarmed and dehorsed.

Pa Sapa
was gone, even while Crazy Horse continued to fight for it. The Powder River was gone, and the Tongue, and the Rosebud, and the Yellowstone, and the little Bighorn—all signed over to the whites. Soon even Red Cloud’s and Spotted Tail’s agencies would be gone, with the Sioux moved back to the Missouri River, which they had crossed four generations earlier. The people and government of the United States had cast their eyes over the Sioux country and found it good. Now it was theirs, won not on the field of battle but in the counting house. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull had suddenly become aliens, with no right to be where they were.

By late September, Sitting Bull was being chased all over Montana by Colonel (later General) Nelson A. Miles and a force of five hundred infantry and artillery. Miles had built a fort on the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Tongue River, which he used as a supply base. Sitting Bull grew impatient at all the fuss and dictated a letter
to a half-breed for Miles. He left it stuck on a stick on the prairie, where Miles found it. The letter read:

I want to know what you are doing traveling this road. You scare all the buffalo away. I want to hunt in this place. I want you to turn back from here. If you don’t I’ll fight you again. I want you to leave what you have got here and turn back from here.

I am your friend Sitting Bull

P.S. I mean all of the rations you have got and all of your powder.

Miles pushed on, fought a couple of skirmishes with Sitting Bull’s people, and forced them to scatter.

Crook, meanwhile, was reorganizing to come after Crazy Horse, who had moved to the upper Tongue. “Three Stars,” as the hostiles called Crook, was furious. He Dog had gotten away from him in March, Crazy Horse had beaten him in June, he had been sitting on his duff while Custer was wiped out, he had chased Indians all through August without catching any, and when he had finally pinned some down at Slim Buttes, it was only to have them get away. Crook needed to take out his frustrations on someone, and Red Cloud was at hand. Storming into Camp Robinson on the Red Cloud Agency, Crook announced that Red Cloud was deposed from the leadership for refusing to move to the Missouri River; Spotted Tail was now chief of all the agency Sioux.

Crook had yet to capture a single Sioux, but he was a master at ordering prisoners around with a lordly wave of his hand. He told the Red Cloud Indians that all warriors would have to sign on as scouts and help fight Crazy Horse. When Spotted Tail protested, Crook thundered that the government was feeding these lazy bastard braves and they could damn well get off their asses and start working for a living. (Crook’s pretense that the warriors lived on the dole was a shocking travesty of the facts. These Sioux had just signed over lands worth their keep for one hundred years or more, and got nothing in return.) Still the chiefs opposed him, but by promising to give each scout a gun and a horse, Crook got sixty Sioux to join up. One at least had a personal motive—No Water, Black Buffalo
Woman’s jealous husband, was one of the first to sign on to go looking for Crazy Horse.

No expense was spared in mounting Crook’s winter campaign of 1876–77. Each soldier got a buffalo robe, fur mittens and hats, buffalo-hide overshoes, extra pairs of long johns, and so on. Crook had 2,200 soldiers, 60 Sioux scouts, and 350 Shoshonis and Crows. Moving up the old Bozeman Trail from Fort Fetterman, Crook’s scouts discovered Dull Knife’s and Little Wolf’s Cheyenne village at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. The inevitable attack came at dawn on November 25, 1876. The Cheyennes were taken by complete surprise (as Mari Sandoz remarks, if only these Cheyennes could have watched for soldiers the way they could fight them). The Cheyennes fought back—it was rather like the Washita—but Crook was far too strong. Actually, the Indian scouts seem to have done most of Crook’s fighting. The Cheyennes lost forty men, women, and children, their ponies, and the village.

Naked on the prairie, the Cheyennes slowly trudged northeast, looking for Crazy Horse, who was back in the Powder River country. The night after the battle the temperature plummeted to —30
⁰
F. Eleven babies froze to death in their mothers’ arms. For two weeks the Cheyennes plunged through the snow, toward where they hoped Crazy Horse was camped. Occasionally a warrior managed to bring down a buffalo, and the mothers wrapped their babies in green hides to protect them from the cold.

Early in December the Cheyennes found Crazy Horse, and he took them in. The Oglalas shared what little they had; as Billy Garnett put it, “the Indians are a great people in such respects; their natural liberality is almost unbounded.” Or, as Short Bull said more modestly, “We helped the Cheyennes the best we could. We hadn’t much ourselves.” At least the starving, freezing Cheyennes could sit by a fire, under shelter, and chew on some dried buffalo meat.

In mid-December, shortly after the Cheyennes found him, Crazy Horse decided to give up. The buffalo were too scarce to replenish the losses the Cheyennes had suffered. The children were coughing, the women’s ribs showing, the old men downcast. His young men were short on guns and shorter on ammunition. He had only five hundred or so warriors left. His own wife, Black Shawl, had tuberculosis. His responsibility was to his people, not to his own reputation. It was time to surrender.

Colonel Miles, from his fort on the Tongue River, had sent out several runners to ask Crazy Horse to come in, promising him fair treatment. Around Christmas, Crazy Horse led his people down the
Tongue. When almost within sight of the fort, he stopped the moving column and made camp. Then he sent eight men on ponies ahead, with a white flag and a string of American horses stolen from the fort the preceding month. Miles’ Crow scouts saw the peace delegation first. Whooping and hollering, the Crows sprang to their ponies and rode down on the Oglalas before Miles could stop them. They killed five Sioux. Miles, furious, took away the Crows’ horses and sent them, along with some tobacco and an apology for the mistake, to Crazy Horse as a gift. But he refused it. With the other warriors, he turned away from the fort.