Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (78 page)

General Sheridan succeeded Sherman as General-in-Chief of the Army in 1884 and was promoted in 1888 to four-star rank. He completed his memoirs a few days before his death in 1888.

No Water, Black Buffalo Woman’s husband, became leader of a small band and was a participant and something of a leader in the Ghost Dance of 1890. He put in a claim to the United States Government for the two horses he had killed attempting to capture Crazy Horse on September 5, 1877, but it apparently was not paid.

Woman’s Dress, the
winkte,
remained an enlisted scout for the Army. In 1879 he was wounded at Camp Robinson by the Dull Knife Cheyennes, who were attempting to break out of the reservation. He was a great favorite with the Army officers and lived in glory until his death in 1920.

The Oglalas ended up on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, where there are today 11,500 of them. The Brulés are just to the east, on Rosebud Reservation; their population is 7,400. The Hunkpapas are on Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota (4,890). Shoshonis and Arapahoes (4,280) share Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. The Crows (4,100) remain at Crow Agency, Montana, in the Crow Reservation, near the site of the Little Bighorn battle. The once mighty Pawnees are reduced to 3,390 and have no reservation of their own. The northern Cheyennes, after their forcible removal to Oklahoma, fled in October 1878 and fought their way back to Montana (Dull Knife and Little Wolf were the leaders). Eventually the United States Government allowed them to have their own
reservation, of which Lame Deer is the center, where today there are 2,490 of them.

All these Indians live under conditions of dire rural poverty. It makes no difference what their ancestors did or what their attitude toward the whites was—the United States Government treats them all alike. Thus Spotted Tail’s Brulés, who quit fighting in 1860, are no better off than Red Cloud’s Oglalas, who fought until 1868, or Crazy Horse’s people, who continued the struggle until 1877. Nor are the Crows, who were allied with the government throughout the Indian wars, much better off than the northern Cheyennes, who fought the government until 1878.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although it is not customary to thank authors who are dead or whom one has never met or corresponded with, in this instance I must at least attempt to indicate my debt to those whose labors made my work possible. And while I am grateful to all those listed in the bibliography, I must single out three women and three men, who between them were the
sine qua non
of this study. They are Eleanor Hinman, Mari Sandoz, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Jay Monaghan, George E. Hyde, and George Bird Grinnell.

I want also to thank Dan Davis, Noni Carey, Henry Blake, and Arti Blake, for introducing me to the Great Plains; Ron and Louise Kroese for leading me to the Black Hills; and Dr. Clyde Ferguson for teaching me about life on the Plains. My typist, good friend, and former student, Josephine Sibille Kuntz, was absolutely indispensable.

My students at the University of New Orleans have been extraordinarily helpful, in ways too numerous to elucidate. Dr. Joseph Logsdon provided many insights on Civil War and Reconstruction politics; Dr. Jeffery Kimball helped me put the Indians in perspective. Dr. John Fluitt was a careful critic. Colonel Roger Willock, USMC, provided me with expert guidance on the frontier Army and gave me many tips on Custer’s tactics and leadership. Dr. William A. Williams, who has forced all American historians to rethink their assumptions and attitudes, and whose example has encouraged us to take risks in our attempt to understand American history, read large parts of the manuscript. As always, his insights were sharp, his questions penetrating. John Homer Hoffman shared with me his knowledge of the Sioux and his own great good humor. My colleagues at the University of New Orleans read the early chapters and, in a department seminar, made numerous helpful suggestions.

The librarians at the University of New Orleans, Tulane University, and Kansas State University, along with that marvelous institution the interlibrary loan system, were exceedingly kind. So were the staffs of the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Custer Battlefield National Monument, and the Denver Public Library.

John Ware and Sam Vaughan of Doubleday & Company made me believe that the idea of a dual biography was feasible at a time when I had serious doubts and, indeed, thought the whole project pure madness. Throughout the writing, they provided me crucial support and important ideas.

My children, Stephenie, Barry, Andrew, Grace, and Hugh, were cheerful participants in the search for Crazy Horse and Custer. Moira was indispensable. Custer used to make Libbie sit with him while he wrote. I’m not quite that bad, but I did make Moira stop what she was doing at 6
P.M.
and sit back and listen while I read aloud to her the day’s outpouring. I can’t think of a change she suggested that I did not make. If there appears to be rather a lot about women in this book on two men of violence, it is because of what Moira has taught me.

Most of all, Moira and the kids put up with me—and with Crazy Horse and Custer—and beyond that made it all seem worth while.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. Walter P. Webb,
   The Great Plains
   (Boston, 1931), 10–47. Readers who know this classic will realize how dependent I am on Webb’s great work.
   

2. Ibid., 22.
   

3. Ibid.
   

4. Ibid., 39.
   

5. Wayne Gard,
   The Great Buffalo Hunt
   (Lincoln, Neb., 1959), 4–7.
   

6. Clark Wissler,
   Indians of the United States
   (rev. ed., New York, 1966), 8. Folsom points were chipped dart points, named after the New Mexico town where they were first found in 1926.
   

7. Robert H. Lowie,
   Indians of the Plains
   (reissue, Garden City, N.Y., 1963), 15–16; Ruth M. Underhill,
   Red Man’s America
   (rev. ed., Chicago, 1971), 144–48.
   

8. Frank Gilbert Roe,
   The Indian and the Horse
   (Norman, Okla., 1955), 78.
   

9. Ibid., 135–55, for an excellent summary.
   

10. Ibid., 135–55; Thomas E. Mails,
    The Mystic Warriors of the Plains
    (Garden City, N.Y., 1972), 218.
    

11. Walker D. Wyman,
    The Wild Horse of the West
    (Lincoln, Neb., 1945), 90.
    

12. Doane Robinson,
    A History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians
    (Minneapolis, 1904), chaps. 2 and 3; Underhill,
    Red Man’s America,
    144–53.
    

13. Webb,
    The Great Plains,
    48.
    

14. George E. Hyde,
    Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux
    (Norman, Okla., 1961), 3.
    

15. Lewis O. Saum,
    The Fur Trader and the Indian
    (Seattle, 1965), 38.
    

16. Ibid., 164.
    

17. Ibid., 165.
    

18. Ibid., 95.
    

19. Francis Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail
    (Washington Square Press, 1967), 215.
    

20. Saum, Fur
    Trader,
    xi; italics in original.
    

21. Robinson,
    History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians,
    112–14.
    

22. Wissler,
    Indians of the United States,
    182.
    

23. Saum,
    Fur Trader,
    197.
    

24. See the James D. Hart introduction to Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail.
    

25. Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail,
    222.
    

26. George E. Hyde,
    Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians
    (Norman, Okla., 1937), 60.
    

27. Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail,
    74.
    

28. Ibid., 89.
    

29. Ibid., 190.
    

30. Ibid., 166.
    

31. Ibid., 86–87.
    

32. Ibid., 200.
    

33. Roe,
    Indian and the Horse,
    376–77.
    

34. Saum, Fur
    Trader,
    245.
    

CHAPTER 2

1. J. D. B. DeBow, ed.,
   Statistical View of the United States … Being a Compendium of the Seventh Census to Which Are Added the Results of Every Previous Census, Beginning With 1790
   … , in the
   Demographic Monographs
   series (New York, 1970), 61, 117.
   

2. Ibid., 63, 74.
   

3. Ibid., 125, 128.
   

4. Ibid., 163.
   

5. Ibid., 51.
   

6. Ibid., 133.
   

7. R. Carlyle Buley,
   The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840
   , I (Bloomington, Ind., 1950), 385.
   

8. Henry Steele Commager,
   The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880’s
   (New Haven, 1950), 5.
   

9. Ibid., 4–5.
   

10. R. E. Banta,
    The Ohio,
    in
    Rivers of America
    (New York, 1949), 10.
    

11. DeBow,
    Statistical View,
    155–56.
    

12. Max Lerner,
    America as a Civilization
    (New York, 1957), 48.
    

13. D. S. Stanley,
    Personal Memoirs
    (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), 1–2.
    

14. Ibid., 2–3.
    

15. DeBow,
    Statistical View,
    292.
    

16. Arthur K. Moore,
    The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersman
    (Lexington, Ky., 1950), 56.
    

17. Ibid., 95.
    

18. See Henry Nash Smith,
    Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
    (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), 61–63 for a discussion.
    

19. The text for such beliefs was Vattel’s classic
    Law of Nations,
    the standard authority for Americans on international law. E. de Vattel,
    Le Droit des Gens,
    trans. Charles G. Fenwick (Washington, 1916), III, 37–38, as quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce,
    The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization
    (rev. ed., Baltimore, 1965), 70.
    

20. Moore,
    The Frontier Mind,
    187.
    

21. Merle Curti,
    The Growth of American Thought
    (2d ed., New York, 1951), 403–7, has a good discussion on this point.
    

22. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed.,
    Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
    VI (New York, 1959), 98.
    

23. Pearce,
    The Savages of America,
    68.
    

24. Alexis de Tocqueville,
    Democracy in America
    (Mentor Books ed., New York, 1956), 26.
    

25. Ibid., 52.
    

26. Ibid., 194.
    

27. Ibid., 256.
    

28. Quoted in D. A. Kinsley,
    Favor the Bold: Custer: The Indian Fighter
    (New York, 1968), 34.
    

CHAPTER 3

1. John Stands-in-Timber and Margot Liberty,
   Cheyenne Memories
   (New Haven, 1967), 27–41.
   

2. The date of Crazy Horse’s birth is disputed. Mari Sandoz puts it circa 1842–45; see her
   Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas
   (Lincoln, Neb., 1942), xiii. Chips, however, an Oglala who grew up with Crazy Horse, said in an interview in 1930 that Crazy Horse was born “in the year in which the band to which he belonged, the Oglalas, stole one hundred horses, and in the fall of the year”; see Chips interview, in the Eleanor Hinman interviews, Nebraska State Historical Society. A Sioux winter-count—a pictographic history—kept by Iron Shell puts 1841 as the year of the Big Horse Steal, when the Sioux captured many horses from the Shoshonis; see Royal B. Hassrick,
   The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society
   (Norman, Okla., 1964), 348. This is not, of course, conclusive, for He Dog told Hinman that both he and Crazy Horse were born in 1838.
   

3. Hassrick,
   The Sioux,
   310; Erik H. Erikson, “Observations on Sioux Education,”
   The Journal of Psychology,
   Vol. VII (1937), 134–36.
   

4. Hinman interview with He Dog; Ricker interview with Chips, in Ricker tablets, Nebraska State Historical Society.
   

5. Hyde,
   Spotted Tail’s Folk,
   11–13; Sandoz,
   Crazy Horse,
   18.
   

6. Erikson, “Observations on Sioux Education,” 136–37; Hassrick,
   The Sioux,
   313–14.
   

7. Erikson points out that under the Sioux system “the tension from the ambivalent fixations on the parents most probably cannot accumulate to the dangerous point which is often reached in our narcissistic use of the one-family system as a system of self-chosen prisons.” See Erikson, “Observations on Sioux Education,” 146.
   

8. “In their bewilderment,” Erikson writes, the Sioux “could only explain such behavior [the physical chastisement of white children] as part of an over-all missionary scheme—an explanation also supported by the white people’s method of letting their babies cry themselves blue in the face. It all must mean, so they thought, a well-calculated wish to impress white children with the idea that this world is not a good place to linger in and they had better look to the other world where perfect happiness is to be had as the price of having sacrificed this world.” Erik Erikson,
   Young Man Luther
   (New York, 1958), 69.
   

9. Erikson, “Observations on Sioux Education,” 141.
   

10. Ibid., 134. It is Erikson’s opinion that “the Sioux system of child training tended toward that pole of education where the child in most respects … is allowed to be an
    individualist
    while quite young …”
    

11. Ibid., 146.
    

12. Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    317–19; Luther Standing Bear,
    My People the Sioux
    (Boston and New York, 1911), 28–48; Mails,
    The Mystic Warriors of the Plains,
    516; Robert H. Lowie,
    Indians of the Plains
    (Garden City, N.Y, 1954), 131–36.
    

13. Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    216.
    

14. Ibid., 191.
    

15. Mails,
    The Mystic Warriors,
    519, 544; Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    319.
    

16. There is a good discussion of Sioux myths in Stephen Return Riggs,
    Dakota Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography
    (Washington, D.C., 1893), Vol. IX of
    Contributions to North American Ethnology.
    

17. Sandoz,
    Crazy Horse,
    19, makes Hump considerably older than Crazy Horse, but both He Dog and Red Feather told Hinman that these intimate friends were close in age; see Hinman interviews, Nebraska State Historical Society.
    

18. Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    319.
    

19. Mails,
    The Mystic Warriors,
    531; Claude Lévi-Strauss,
    The Savage Mind
    (Chicago, 1966), 37.
    

20. Ibid., 510–37.
    

21. Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail,
    170–71.
    

22. Sandoz,
    Crazy Horse,
    17.
    

23. Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail,
    133.
    

24. Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    320.
    

25. Ibid., 134–35.
    

26. Erikson, “Observations on Sioux Education,’’ 150–51; Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    134; Sandoz,
    Crazy Horse,
    16–17.
    

27. Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    321.
    

28. Ibid., 73.
    

29. Ibid., 17.
    

30. Lowie,
    Indians of the Plains,
    112.
    

31. Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail,
    204.
    

32. Robert H. Lowie,
    The Origin of the State
    (New York, 1927), 76–107.
    

33. Lowie,
    Indians of the Plains,
    125.
    

34. There is a vast literature on Plains Indians’ government; incredibly small details are known, recorded, analyzed. I have not gone into the subject in any depth because, first, the experts disagree with each other over the names of offices, functions, authority, and everything else. Second, I am in full agreement with Lowie, who takes a common-sense view: “So far as essentials go, it is therefore of no significance whether there was one chief, or a pair of chiefs, or, as among the Cheyenne, a council of forty-four in a population of about 4,000, nor whether a man by virtue of his lineage could or could not ever qualify for the title of chief”; Lowie,
    Indians of the Plains,
    125. The standard authority on Sioux government is Clark Wissler, “Societies and Ceremonial Associations in the Oglala Division of the Teton-Dakota,” American Museum of Natural History
    Anthropological Papers,
    XI (1912). See also James O. Dorsey, “The Social Organization of the Siouan Tribes,”
    Journal of American Folk-Lore,
    IV (1891); Hassrick,
    The Sioux,
    Chap. 1; and the various works by George Hyde. Central to study of Plains Indians’ government is the classic work by K. N. Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel,
    The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence
    (Norman, Okla., 1941); the title is formidable, but the text is absolutely fascinating and, as a bonus, beautifully written.
    

35. This sketch of Crazy Horse’s character is based on Eleanor Hinman’s interviews with his contemporaries, now in the Nebraska State Historical Society, especially the ones with He Dog, Short Bull, Red Feather, and Little Killer. All these men lived with Crazy Horse and two were closely related. All agree that he was unusually reserved, quiet, not boastful—in short, not a hail-fellow-well-met back-slapping type—and that he was that way as a youth. And, obviously, my view of Crazy Horse is much influenced by Mari Sandoz’ great work.
    

36. Hyde,
    Red Cloud’s Folk,
    54–55; see also James C. Olson,
    Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem
    (Lincoln, Neb., 1965), 20–21.
    

37. Parkman,
    The Oregon Trail,
    165.
    

38. Hyde,
    Red Cloud’s Folk,
    56.
    

39. Ibid., 58.
    

40. Hyde,
    Spotted Tail’s Folk,
    44.
    

41. Robinson,
    A History of the Dakota,
    221. Sandoz,
    Crazy Horse,
    Chap. 1, emphasized the extreme hunger the Indians underwent before the wagons arrived with the goods; so does Hyde,
    Spotted Tail’s Folk,
    44–45. But De Smet was there, and he wrote: “Not withstanding the scarcity of provisions felt in the camp before the wagons came, the feasts were numerous and well attended.”
    

42. Robinson,
    A History of the Dakota,
    222.
    

43. Ibid., 223.
    

44. Hyde,
    Spotted Tail’s Folk,
    47.
    

45. Ibid., 47–48.
    

46. Hinman interview with Short Bull, Nebraska State Historical Society.
    

47. Hinman interview with He Dog.
    

48. Chips interview, Ricker tablets, Nebraska State Historical Society.