Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (8 page)

Curly learned that there were signs everywhere on the Plains. If the wild horse herd was strung out and walking steadily along, it was headed for water; if the horses were scattered and grazing they were coming from water. Crazy Horse and other adults encouraged Curly to study all the animals, unobserved, for they had much to teach. Eagles and hawks gave lessons in patience and how to strike; coyotes showed how to elude capture. Tracks told their own story, to those who could read them, as did droppings.

The idea of the animals as teachers was deeply ingrained in Indian life and was one aspect of what the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss calls the “science of the concrete.” To illustrate his point, Lévi-Strauss quotes a North American Indian: “We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has been only a short time in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught long ago by the animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married the animals, learned all their ways, and passed on the knowledge from one generation to another.”
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Plains Indians knew the medicinal properties of more than two thousand plants, they understood weather patterns, and so on. All this information was passed on from one generation to the next. Thus, though Curly’s society had no written language to pass on information, he was nevertheless the recipient of a vast amount of knowledge.

By keeping his eyes open, both when he was moving with the tribe or wandering alone or with Hump, Curly could draw a basic map of the High Plains in his mind. He came to know every ridge and valley, every stream, every landmark between the Platte River
and the Black Hills and beyond. He developed an acute sense of direction, common to all Plains Indians. The country looked distressingly similar to whites, but an Indian seldom got lost.

Curly often went off camping, either alone, with Hump, or with a group of age-mates. The boys learned to cook their meals using a buffalo paunch as a kettle to boil the water holding the meat. They would suspend the paunch from four green poles, half fill it with water, place the meat in the water, and then drop in heated stones, which made the water boil and cooked the meat, providing a nice soup as a bonus. Curly also learned to move his sleeping robe a few hundred yards away from the fire so that he could not be surprised at night by an enemy.
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Curly was a full-fledged hunter before he became a teen-ager. Most boys participated in their first tribal hunt at ten or eleven years of age, or as soon as they were strong enough to kill a buffalo with an arrow. Parkman saw an Oglala boy, called Hail-Storm, drop a buffalo, and described the scene in detail: “A shaggy buffalo-bull bounded out from a neighboring hollow, and close behind him came a slender Indian boy, riding without stirrups or saddle, and lashing his eager little horse to full speed. Yard after yard he drew closer to his gigantic victim, though the bull, with his short tail erect and his tongue lolling out a foot from his foaming jaws, was straining his unwieldy strength to the utmost. Hail-Storm … dropped the rein on his horse’s neck, and jerked an arrow like lightning from the quiver at his shoulder.

“‘I tell you,’ said Reynal [Parkman’s white companion] ‘that in a year’s time that boy will match the best hunter in the village. There, he has given it to him!—and there goes another! You feel well, now, old bull, don’t you, with two arrows stuck in your lights! There, he has given him another! Hear how the Hail-Storm yells when he shoots! Yes, jump at him; try it again, old fellow! You may jump all day before you get your horns into that pony!’

“The bull sprang again and again at his assailant, but the horse kept dodging with wonderful celerity. At length the bull followed up his attack with a furious rush, and the Hail-Storm was put to flight, the shaggy monster following close behind. The boy clung in his seat like a leech, and secure in the speed of his little pony, looked round towards us and laughed.” Soon after, the bull fell dead.
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Hail-Storm’s accomplishment, impressive as it was in the telling, was commonplace among the Oglala boys. So were other hazardous feats. When Curly was eleven he joined Hump and others on a horse-catching
expedition. The boys went south to the Sand Hills of present-day northwestern Nebraska, where the wild herds roamed. They pushed a bunch of horses until the animals tired, then moved in on them and secured the horses with rawhide ropes. Curly was the first boy to mount and break one of the wild horses. When the party returned to the village, Crazy Horse gave his son a new name, His Horse Looking, but it did not stick and most Oglalas continued to call him Curly.
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Throughout his childhood, Curly was encouraged to emulate the young warriors of the village. They were the center of attention, the ones that the children and the women and the aged discussed, the heroes who brought in meat or went off on war parties. The warriors were extraordinary braggarts, entitled (and expected) to sing their own praises at all opportunities, but especially at tribal dances, with the women, children, and old men sitting around in a great circle while the young braves danced and showered themselves with boasts about their accomplishments.

They were an impressive sight, those young braves, sticking together for the most part and highly picturesque when bedecked for war. They wore crests of feathers, robes of individual and colorful design, with scalp locks of their enemies hanging from the fringes. Many carried shields, painted and fluttering with eagles’ feathers. Some wore war bonnets with feathered streamers that trailed to the earth. All had bows and arrows at their backs; some carried long lances and one or two might have had a gun. Their ponies, too, were individually decorated.

Francis Parkman described the return of a group of braves to his Oglala village in the summer of 1846: “The warriors rode three times round the village; and as each noted champion passed, the old women would scream out his name, to honor his bravery, and excite the emulation of the younger warriors. Little urchins, not two years old, followed the warlike pageant with glittering eyes, and gazed with eager admiration at the heroes of their tribe.”
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Curly may have been present on that occasion; if not, he would have witnessed similar scenes frequently throughout his childhood.

As one of the most daring boys in his group, Curly knew that someday he too would ride around the village to the adulation of the multitude. It could not happen soon enough, however; like most Sioux youth, Curly probably snuck off on his first war party when he was eleven or twelve years old. Mothers nearly always tried to stop their fledglings from going off to war, and fathers and other adults made pro-forma objections, but with most boys nothing
could hold them back. They would listen as the braves planned an expedition, watch as the party left the village, and then that night crawl out of their tipis, catch their ponies, and ride off to join the warriors. When a boy arrived at the first night’s camping place the braves would try to talk him into returning to the village, but they did not try very hard, since each of them had likely gone on his first war party under similar circumstances. Instead, the warriors made the neophyte’s trip rather miserable, appointing him water boy, horse watcher, and general servant. He had to stay behind and hold the horses when the men crept into the enemy camp to steal horses; thus he would be far from the scene of action and consequently out of serious danger. But though he had no opportunity to win honor for himself, he did get the feel of an expedition and he had broken the bonds of childhood through his own initiative. Now he could smoke the pipe with the other men, speak in the presence of his elders, and strut in front of his peers.
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Not all boys chose to be hunters and warriors. Pretty One, for example, son of Bad Face and grandson of Old Smoke, chose a different path. Pretty One was Curly’s childhood friend and later played a crucial role in his career, but by the time he was ten Pretty One wore paint and quilled buckskin and beads every day. He did not enjoy the rough boys’ games that Curly reveled in. Pretty One was well on his way to becoming a
winkte,
or homosexual, a man who dressed in fancy clothes, sometimes even wearing a dress, did bead and quill work as well as a woman and often became a shaman. The
winkte
was recognized as
wakan,
or holy; a Sioux woman told Royal Hassrick that “there is a belief that if a
winkte
is asked to name a child, the child will grow up without sickness.”
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Even the bravest warriors sometimes slept with a
winkte,
although the general attitude toward homosexuality was negative. There was obvious ambivalence; the
winkte
was held in awesome respect on the one hand and in disdainful fear on the other. Curly and his friends sometimes teased Pretty One, but usually ignored him. The important thing was that no one questioned his choice, for his life role had been revealed to him in a dream, and no Sioux would ever consider arguing with someone’s dream. As Erikson points out, there was no conscious deceit involved in the process, but a true psychological wisdom, for “the dreamer was not conscious of and was not held individually responsible for the psychological reality which alone could have made his experience visionary and convincing, namely, the strength of this own abnormal wishes.”
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Others of Curly’s childhood friends chose different occupations,
selecting hunting or becoming wild-horse catchers, medicine men, or holy men like Curly’s father. Most, however, became warriors, or at least thought of themselves as such, for in truth they would spend most of their active hours during their adult lives hunting. But if successful hunting brought respect and some prestige, it did not give a young man the right to sing of his exploits before the camp circle.

A Sioux boy was constantly reminded of his duty as a warrior. He heard the old men recite their exploits, saw his mother and sister celebrate victories in the Scalp Dance. He saw teen-aged braves proudly displaying their feather badges of honor. In the tipi he studied the war record painted on the warrior’s shield or on the tipi cover; he rode on a pony stolen from the Crows or Pawnees. And he heard, time and again, from women, old men, and braves that it was best to die young in battle and in glory.
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Everything in his society encouraged Curly to be brave. The Sioux were not born brave, and certainly they had their share of cowards as well as reasonably prudent men who saw no point to taking unnecessary risks. But the tribe had techniques of self-encouragement to help these warriors live up to society’s expectations, such as growling like a grizzly in times of danger or uttering the war whoop; these sounds frightened the enemy and, more important, encouraged those who made them. Bragging about one’s exploits in front of the assembled village served the same purpose, as did the feats of physical endurance Sioux boys underwent.
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The emphasis on bravery and self-assertion, however, led to problems. On communal hunts, for example, when it was crucial to strike the buffalo herd as a unit, young braves had to be closely watched to prevent them from dashing forward into the herd in the hopes of killing the first, or the largest, or the most buffalo. The same problem plagued Sioux war parties; just when an ambush was about to succeed, a young hot-shot might dash forward into the enemy’s ranks and spoil everything.

Some system was necessary to channel the impulsive bravery of the youth into acceptable and useful activity; the Sioux found it with the
akicita
societies. The primary purpose of the societies was to serve as a men’s club, and at its lodge a member would lounge, sleep, eat, dance, sing, and gossip with his fellows. The societies were private and membership was open by invitation only. Cowards, men guilty of murder or adultery, or those who amassed wealth by not giving away their extra ponies were excluded. So were the poor hunters or inept warriors; as one Sioux put it, “Such men just live.”
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There were a number of such societies in each village, such as the Brave Hearts, the Crow Owners, the Kit Foxes, and the Lance Owners. Each had its own traditions, songs, regalia, and ceremonies.

The original function of the
akicita
societies seems to have been military; leaders were always men of proven valor and their songs were designed to encourage members to brave deeds done for the benefit of the whole tribe. The Kit Fox song ran:

I am a Fox

I am supposed to die

If there is anything difficult,

If there is anything dangerous,

That is mine to do.
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By the nineteenth century, however,
akicita
societies had taken on new functions, serving as legislative and executive bodies and thereby becoming more powerful than the nominal tribal chiefs. The
akicita
societies decided on new law when events required it, then acted as police to enforce the law and to punish the guilty. As Parkman noted, “While very few [Oglala] chiefs could venture without risk of their lives to strike or lay hands upon the meanest of their people, the ‘soldiers’ in the discharge of their appropriate functions, have full license to make use of these and similar acts of coercion.”
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The
akicita
kept order in camp, when the tribe was on the move and most of all during tribal hunts or on war parties. They beat offenders who broke ranks, exiled murderers from the village, destroyed the tipi of a man who had stolen property, stopped fights, and generally upheld law and order. Anthropologist Robert Lowie sees in the
akicita
the germ of civil government, the origin of the state.
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