Joseph M. Marshall III (17 page)

Worm said as much to his sons. Crazy Horse said that perhaps in the spring a few good men should ride south to have a look. His father and mothers were glad to hear his words. It meant that he was putting something behind him.

A wound on the outside can be watched to see that it heals well, as everyone knew. Wounds on the inside could not be seen but for the pain in the eyes. Several months had passed since Black Buffalo Woman had taken No Water as her husband. Soon after, they had moved away from the Hunkpatilas, for, as - everyone knew, No Water was afraid of Crazy Horse. The old women knew that best of all. But if their young man, as they called Crazy Horse, bore any ill will, it could not be seen in the way he conducted himself or heard in any words he had spoken. So they hoped that the wound inflicted by Black Buffalo Woman was healed, though some didn’t blame her. She was, after all, only sixteen, and how could one so young stand up to the powerful ambitions of her father and uncle?

There were many realities in life that could not be avoided, the old women reminded one another, and two most of all: heartbreak falls into every life as surely as snow falls in winter, and life moves in a circle.

Reflections: The Call to Adventure

From two worlds the future came calling long before Crazy Horse was given his adult name—first from the world he was in and then from the world of dreams.

Several bands of the Oglala and Sicangu Lakota were encamped south of Fort Laramie (in what is now southeastern Wyoming) in August 1854, waiting for the army to distribute the annuity goods promised in the 1851 treaty. The annuities were late, the weather was oppressively hot, and the people were impatient. White emigrants on the Oregon Trail, which cut through the southern part of Lakota territory, didn’t exactly help the Lakota state of mind either. Fort Laramie was a stop along the trail, which was an irritant at the very least and an outright intrusion at the most. Many of the older Lakota leaders were afraid that trouble would develop because of the emigrants. Their fears came to pass when an old cow strayed away from its Mormon owner and wandered into a Sicangu encampment.

In his complaint to the officer in charge at Fort Laramie, the cow’s owner alleged that it was stolen outright by “thieving Indians.” How the cow actually ended up in the village of Conquering Bear is up for debate. Playful Lakota boys might have frightened it, causing it to run into the village, or the owner might have simply let it wander off since it was reportedly old and gaunt. Nevertheless, it was fresh meat and it was quickly killed and butchered. After all, the annuities were sitting in wagons waiting for someone to give permission for them to be distributed, and the people were hungry. That much is certain.

The dispute over the Mormon’s cow led to the Grattan incident, which in turn led to General Harney’s retaliatory attack on Little Thunder’s camp one month shy of a year later. The Mormon cow incident, then, was a pivotal event in Lakota-white relations. It was probably
the
pivotal event of the Holy Road/Oregon Trail era because it tipped the balance toward conflict and confrontation and away from honest negotiation. It set the tone for life on the northern Plains for the Lakota—as well as other indigenous nations—and the Euro-Americans. These events shaped the attitude of many Lakota males, from the elder counselors and leaders to the fighting men and their leaders, down to the older boys on the verge of manhood—those who, as adults, would fight the fights in the ensuing forty years. One of those older boys, who actually witnessed the Grattan incident that August and saw firsthand the horrible aftermath of Harney’s annihilation of Little Thunder’s village, was, of course, Light Hair. Light Hair became Crazy Horse four years later.

Light Hair and his young friends were somewhere outside the Sicangu village, but close enough to have an unobstructed view, when Lieutenant John Grattan, a professed Indian-hater, brought his contingent of thirty soldiers and two mountain howitzers to the village. Like everyone else, Light Hair and his friends watched with a mixture of amusement and apprehension, expecting nothing more than for Grattan to strut around and make threats. Everyone was surprised when the soldiers opened fire with their rifles and the howitzers.

Light Hair looked to his father, Crazy Horse, and his mentor, High Back Bone (aka Hump), for guidance—not that he asked for it, but he simply observed and listened. That was his way. Not only was his father a healer, he was also a thoughtful man whose opinions were respected. The main topic of discussion centered on the Grattan incident, but there was also the broader issue of white people. There were varied opinions, of course, just as there are today with issues facing the Lakota. Most of the opinions expressed were antiwhite because they were the “boogeyman.” There was a small but vocal group of Lakota who were known as “coffee coolers” and “loaf-about-the-forts” that advocated close ties with the whites. While they might have been welcome as guests in the Crazy Horse lodge, their opinions would have been met with stony silence.

History told from the viewpoint of those who consider themselves the winners in the so-called “clash of cultures” casts the indigenous people as the bad guys because they stood in the way of progress and “manifest destiny.” The whites, so far as the Lakota—and many other Plains tribes were concerned—were the bad guys. They were not considered honored enemies, such as the Crow, Shoshoni, and Pawnee. The newcomers were arrogant intruders and loud, brash interlopers whose movement into Lakota territory was like a prairie fire consuming everything in its path. As one old man put it, “. . . if they were like the wind, we wouldn’t mind, for the wind passes, bends the grass and breaks a branch here and there, but it passes and becomes a bad memory.” That same old man likely chided his grandchildren by saying, “Be good or the white man will get you.”

So far as those who witnessed the Grattan incident were concerned, the whites were more like a bad toothache than a bad memory. Even as an older boy, Light Hair lacked the perspective of experience to draw on, so he listened to people he respected and trusted. What he heard coincided with what he had seen. To understand his reaction, think of the emotional impact if suspicious and pushy people suddenly drove an armored troop carrier into your quiet suburban or rural neighborhood, deployed men with guns, made unreasonable demands that couldn’t be satisfied, and opened fire, killing and wounding your friends, neighbors, and relatives. Any who witnessed such a horrific incident would be suspicious and distrustful of such intruders forever.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the attack on Little Thunder’s camp—located at the time in what is now northwest Nebraska—by General William Harney would certainly have solidified the idea in young Light Hair’s mind that the whites were indeed “boogeymen.” After the Grattan incident a year earlier, he had the benefit of adult perspective to help him sort it out. After the Harney attack, however, he was as alone as he could be as he returned from a hunting trip to find a burned-out village, and, worst of all, dead and mutilated bodies.

Most of us can only imagine the searing, gut-wrenching impact the sight of a horribly mutilated body would have on us. Such an experience would—and does—assault all of the physical senses. It burns indelible imprints into the memory that may fade a little through the passage of time but will never go away. As young Light Hair wandered, probably somewhat dazed, through Little Thunder’s camp finding one dead body after another, he certainly must have yearned for someone to lean on emotionally. Understanding the emotional shock he felt at that moment in his young life will give us, in the here and now, some insight into the feelings he had about white people thereafter. That raw and ugly episode set the stage for his later interaction with whites. It was likely the single most compelling reason he - could not bring himself to think of whites as caring or nurturing people, or as anyone to be trusted.

One wonders what Crazy Horse would think of the modern-day irony associated with General Harney, dubbed “Woman Killer” by the Sicangu Lakota: In the middle of the Black Hills is the highest of all the granite peaks. Like Bear Butte to the north, it was a favorite location for vision quests and other ceremonies. It was, and is, considered by the Lakota to be the spiritual center of our world. That highest and holiest of places was named Harney Peak by the whites. I have seen old Lakota men simply shake their heads at what they considered to be the most grievous of insults, because they could find no words to adequately describe their feelings.

 

Few of us would consider using the word “adventure” in the context of our lives. Those of us who would narrate our lives to others may use words like ordinary, routine, or even mundane. Many of us might admit to occasional episodes of unexpected excitement or heart-stopping news or occurrences, but by and large most us would probably say we lead fairly quiet lives. Those of us who place ourselves in this category are the prime market for novels with larger-than-life heroes who perform almost impossible deeds. We gladly pay the going price for escapism on the movie screens that transports us to places and circumstances we think we are certain never to encounter in our ordinary, routine, and mundane lives. Furthermore, we would probably scoff at any statement that suggests life itself is an adventure, and turn our attention to the pile of bills on the kitchen table or look for the television remote control.

If you subscribe to the definition for the word “adventure
”
as “exciting undertaking or enterprises,” it would be understandable that, for many of us, our daily lives do not live up to it. If one searches further, however, there is a definition that does describe life itself: “a bold, uncertain and usually risky undertaking.” It is, in my opinion, entirely appropriate for all of us to think of our journey on this Earth in those terms. Of course, whether we make our lives into an adventure is entirely an individual choice. On the other hand, adventure as life itself does come calling - every now and then, most often when we least expect it. Like it or not, life came calling that day along the Blue Water River, and young Light Hair would not have been able to disregard it even had he wanted to.

The gut-wrenching experience in Little Thunder’s camp compelled Light Hair to reveal to his father a dream he had had almost a year earlier, shortly after the Grattan incident. His earlier reticence was probably due to the fact that the dream did not come to him in the usual process of a
hanbleceya,
or “to cry or call out for a vision,” otherwise called a “vision quest.”

The seeking of a vision is a serious, highly ritualized process undertaken respectfully, prayerfully, and under the guidance of a medicine man. To seek a vision is to seek guidance for one’s life or an answer to a problem or predicament. Young Light Hair was probably afraid that the dream he had that night he spent atop a sandstone butte would not be taken seriously, because he had not followed all the rules. But it came nonetheless.

The dream, that vision, has been told and retold thousands of times since. The fact of the matter is we cannot be certain of the exact description Light Hair later gave to his father. Furthermore, it is critical to understand that much of the discussion and interpretation of the vision has occurred—and is still occurring—since Crazy Horse’s death.

There are those who see the vision as a foretelling, almost a blow-by-blow revelation of what lay ahead for Light Hair. It depicted a powerful Lakota warrior rising out of a lake during a thunderstorm on a horse that changes colors, riding unscathed through a hail of arrows and bullets until he is eventually pulled down by his own kind, grabbing and holding back his arms. The vision might have been as much a consequence of wishful thinking as it was a glimpse into the future, for every Lakota boy grew up with dreams of being a warrior and winning glory and honor on the battlefield. Light Hair was no different. One elderly Lakota storyteller was of the opinion that Light Hair and his father chose not to tell everything about the vision, speculating that a warning was part of it—a warning that the boy would die as a young man in his prime.

Such a warning could explain Crazy Horse’s daring and often reckless exploits in combat as a younger fighting man. Perhaps he believed, each time, that he was about to perform the last act of his life and wanted it to be powerful and meaningful.

The vision was most certainly a consequence of the uncertainty of the times, since a new force had pushed squarely into Lakota territory and life. The passage of so many white emigrants along the Oregon Trail was such a spectacle that young Lakota men and boys would sit atop the ridges and watch the frenzy of activity that was usual for a wagon train. Part of the trail cut through the southern part of Lakota territory in what is now northwest Nebraska and southeastern Wyoming. In a relatively short span of time, the flow of whites into the northern Plains had grown from a trickle to a flood, and the impact went far beyond the narrow corridor of the Oregon Trail itself, which followed the North Platte River. Carcasses of dead livestock were left to rot, household goods were discarded, rivers and streams were polluted, migration patterns of bison herds were disrupted, and human graves dotted the landscape along the trail. Initial curiosity gave way to suspicion on both sides. Near confrontations terrified white immigrants primed with horror stories of Indian depredations, prompting them to call for help from the army and the United States government. The first treaty council in 1851 was convened as a result of such fears. The primary objective of the government’s “treaty men” or “peace talkers,” as the peace commissioners were labeled by the Lakota, was to secure assurances that white emigrants could pass unmolested, so long as they stayed on the Oregon Trail. “We need land only as wide as our wagon tracks,” was the assurance given by the peace commissioners, “because we are only passing through.” To win the promise of safe passage from the Lakota and other tribes, the commissioners promised payment in the form of annuities.