Joseph M. Marshall III (25 page)

But when the goods were distributed again, even some from the Crazy Horse camp struck their lodges in the night and went south. They returned before the summer was over, trying not to make a big thing over new skillets and white-man clothes. But they also brought disturbing news of hide hunters coming up from the Grandfather River with their wagons and far-shooting guns, bragging that each man could kill a hundred buffalo in one day.

The geese were starting to fly south when Black Shawl returned from the woman’s lodge with a small bundle in her arms and a shy, uncertain smile on her face. Inside the bundle was not the future warrior son her husband had been yearning for, but a daughter. Crazy Horse lifted the tiny bundle gently and looked into the black eyes already trying to open.

“Good!” he said. “She shall be the mother of warriors and she shall be called They Are Afraid of Her.”

A hard winter came on the heels of a short autumn, almost as cold as the Winter of the Hundred in the Hands, five years past. Many Oglala camps had moved north away from Fort Laramie, bringing smiles to the faces of the Crazy Horse people. Perhaps the power of the white man’s annuities faded quickly, some women said. Until more come, others reminded.

Crazy Horse and the old men passed the winter worrying over all the things that those do who have the welfare of the people to carry on their shoulders. The Holy Road had caused the buffalo to move their trails. There were still a few herds in the Powder River country, a few more along the Tongue, it was said. And the Crow seemed to have plenty in their country, so perhaps it was time to think about moving and staying closer to the Elk. The Crow would have something to say about that, cautioned some. Yes, but life isn’t worth living unless you have to defend it now and then, others replied.

And so the camps moved north and the Oglala joined the Mniconju and Hunkpapa south of the Elk for the Sun Dance in the Moon When the Sun Stands in the Middle. In the Moon When Calves Turn Dark some Hunkpapa found a large column of soldiers near a small tributary of the Elk. Warriors were sent out but Crazy Horse stayed behind a few days, worried that his young daughter seemed to have the white man’s coughing sickness. When he joined the warriors, he saw that the soldiers had dug themselves in and they seemed to be shooting the same back-loading rifles he had seen at the wagon box a few years back. And, as then, a few Lakota had already been killed trying to be foolishly brave. Crazy Horse talked with Sitting Bull and the warrior leaders of the Hunkpapa and Oglala. The soldiers had too many guns and bullets, enough to defend themselves. It would be wise to withdraw and watch them. So long as they stayed away from any encampments, they should be left alone. So the Oglala and Hunkpapa rode away, though many thought it was not the right thing to do. One good Lakota lost left a bigger hole than one dead soldier, the older warriors said. Scouts caught up with Crazy Horse on his way back south to tell him that the soldiers rode away fast as soon as the Oglala and Hunkpapa were out of sight.

As the leaves were falling news came from the south. There had been some trouble over whiskey, and soldiers were sent to chase some Lakota. Red Cloud was also growling at the agent, but no one was certain what he was complaining about this time. Crazy Horse took this news with a smile.

They Are Afraid of Her was growing quickly, and the most powerful warrior among the Oglala was turned into a willing playmate with only a curl of her tiny mouth or a sparkle in her large dark eyes. Both her mother and father worried that she caught the coughing sickness often, and even her grandfather’s medicine couldn’t help. Nonetheless, she filled the lodge with the spirit of innocence and hope and mystified her parents.

Though the weather was not as harsh, the camps had to move far to find buffalo for the autumn hunting. Another lean winter passed. But spring has a way of chasing away the memories of even the bitterest of winters, and so it did. Summer came with good grass and just enough rain, and once again the people came together in the Moon When the Sun Stands in the Middle for the Sun Dance.

They clashed with the Crow, a little raid that turned into a hard fight lasting for several days. When it was all over, some good Lakota had been lost, but it was good to fight an honorable enemy, some said—though we still despise them, others laughed.

In the Moon When Calves Turn Dark, soldiers came up the Elk again, this time guarding canvas-topped wagons like those that traveled the Holy Road. Fearing that another Holy Road was being made, Crazy Horse and his young men rode out. But as they watched from a distance through their farseeing glasses, they saw no women and children, only men busy doing puzzling things that white men had a way of doing. One of the Sahiyela among them recognized the little markings that the soldiers wore on their blue coats and became angry. He was sure they were the same soldiers that had killed many of Black Kettle’s people camped peacefully along a river called the Washita, down in the flat prairie country. The man was so angry he charged across the river after the soldiers, and the fight was on.

Though some joined the Sahiyela, they were fired upon heavily by the soldiers and had to return. Crazy Horse pulled his men back when he saw the soldiers preparing to fire a wagon gun. They moved away, leaving a few scouts to watch. They returned to report they had counted nearly a hundred soldiers.

Though Crazy Horse had more than twice as many fighting men by then, there were not half as many guns among them. The next day an ambush was tried, but the soldiers didn’t chase the decoys, so Crazy Horse decided to simply harass them, hoping they would make some mistake the Oglala could take advantage of. They followed along the river for days, shadowing the soldiers, but the soldiers kept to their column and wouldn’t chase them. One morning, the Oglala decided to try the ambush again; they charged across the river in a large group this time and drew the soldiers out once more. Back across the river they scattered into small groups, but the soldiers ended the chase before they - could be led into the ambush. Their ammunition running low, Crazy Horse gave up the chase.
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The autumn winds were too cold, the weather women warned—a bad winter was coming. They were right. Hunters had to roam far to find the buffalo, and when the snows came, the meat containers were not full. So they had to probe along the river for elk and deer, but young cottonwoods were thin this year, so even those four-leggeds were hard to find.

News came up from Fort Laramie that Red Cloud’s agency had been moved to the White Earth River, far north of where he had wanted. But his complaining to the agent fell on cold ears, and he was forced to move.

These things Crazy Horse listened to with deep concern. If the whites wouldn’t listen to Red Cloud, then no Lakota had words that would open their ears, he thought. During a break in the weather during the Moon of Frost in the Lodge, he went alone south to the Medicine Water to fast and pray—to seek guidance so that he could carry all that fell on his shoulders. But though the winter seemed to pause to give him days of silence to be alone with his thoughts, no vision came to him.

He returned to his lodge still troubled by many things. One big concern was the buffalo becoming fewer and fewer since the one good year up on the Tongue. But he was most concerned about the coughing sickness that had now come to his wife. First his daughter and now his wife. He watched them sleep as he rubbed the scar on his face, remembering that so many changes had happened so quickly in only a few years. He prayed that the hard winter would be chased away by warm winds, and that the spring would bring strong new life.

Sixteen

Hunters returned empty-handed time after time to the encampments along the Powder River, with worn-out horses and the same frightening news: the buffalo were harder and harder to find. Many reported seeing nothing at all. A few saw only old bulls and let them go, knowing their meat was tough and stringy. Old meat was better than no meat, others said, but the elders kept their counsel, knowing there was something bigger to worry over. Their way of life was changing.

True, there was still elk that could be found anywhere—the black-tailed deer in the mountains and the white-tailed deer on the prairies. But the buffalo had always been the mainstay of life. They had covered the prairies from horizon to horizon only within the past generation. Now hunters had to ride for days to see just one. There was good reason for worry.

Crazy Horse hunted as often as he could. Like other hunters, he pursued elk or deer, often taking two packhorses with him far up into the foothill slopes of the Shining Mountains. Hunters were almost constantly in the field because the meat of seven or eight deer and four or five elk was equal to the usable meat of only one buffalo. Furthermore, lodge coverings could not be patched or repaired without fresh buffalo hides. It was out of the question to make new lodges since about twenty or more hides were required. Word came from the agency Lakota that the white man’s canvas was very good for making lodges. Some of the old ones said, however, that canvas lodges rattled in the breeze and were outright noisy in a wind. Buffalo-hide lodges - didn’t make any noise even in the strongest wind.

Crazy Horse pondered all of these new and unwanted realities as he sat in his lonely hunting camps, the burden of a leader’s responsibility heavy on his shoulders. Were the Lakota facing a future of living in noisy canvas lodges? It seemed unavoidable when hunters had to travel for days before they could find one or two buffalo.

No one but Wakantanka could replenish the buffalo. First the whites had to be driven away, completely out of Lakota country. That was for the Lakota to do, not Wakantanka. Within the span of his lifetime, they had always been around. Who could forget the day twenty years ago now that old Conquering Bear was killed, and the loudmouthed soldier Grattan who caused it? The cold hard truth was that white men brought trouble. The hide hunters killed buffalo in numbers that were hard to imagine, for example. One hunter with a powerful gun could kill hundreds in one day. Hundreds of hunters over hundreds of days over many years were most of the reason the buffalo were gone in this part of the country.

There was another cold, unbending truth: driving out the whites would take more fighting men than Crazy Horse had, and more guns, bullets, and powder than all the Lakota fighting men had together. To make matters worse, more and more Lakota were slipping away to live at the agencies, yearning after the material goods of the white man. His uncle Spotted Tail had taken his Sicangu Lakota people to an agency. And a goodly number of Oglala Lakota had followed Red Cloud out of the Powder River country to his own agency near the mouth of the White Earth River to the southeast. Who was left to resist? Who was left to say that the Lakota way of living was still good? Who was left to fight, if it came to that? Not many, Crazy Horse knew. Not even the buffalo, as it turned out.

As far as he could tell, Crazy Horse had about 150 fighting men. Most of them were hardened veterans, all of them skilled and committed. He would lead them without hesitation against any enemy, Crow or white. And they would follow without hesitation. But what could 150 men, as good and brave as they were, do against a people whose numbers were like hailstones in the sudden thunderstorm? It was a bothersome sign of the times that he had to always think of fighting and resisting the whites. It was a sign of the times.

Undeniably, the whites were like the two-faced giant in the childhood stories the grandmothers told during the long winter nights. With an endless hunger, the giant ate anything and everything and trampled the land as he did, smashing all that lay in its path. The more it ate the larger it grew until it could leap across lakes and shake the Earth when it ran. For Crazy Horse, the giant was real. It had eaten all the buffalo.

He knew the two hundred or so families in his encampment - could adjust to life without the buffalo in order to keep their free-roaming ways. At least most of them would. Life was always changing, after all. But this was different. This was unforeseen, unwanted change. Perhaps they were destined to live in noisy canvas lodges. If he had to, he would—so long as it meant staying free of the agencies, though he could not speak for everyone. Messengers came now and then from the agencies with stories of the easy life, stories that would have anyone believing that the new life with the whites was good, with the agency Lakota not wanting for anything. Soon after such visits, a few families would take down their lodges in the night, as if leaving at night would make their departure less painful for the relatives and friends left behind. The buffalo were becoming more and more scarce and so were the “wild” Lakota, as the agency people called the Crazy Horse camp as well as the Hunkpapa Lakota who were with Sitting Bull to the north.

The buffalo were almost gone, unbelievably, and more and more Lakota began living on the agencies. Such realities plagued Crazy Horse as he sat alone at a dying fire in a shadowy gully far below the craggy peaks of the Shining Mountains. As a more-than-proficient hunter he could provide for Black Shawl, They Are Afraid of Her, and his parents. For any given year, every family needed fresh meat equal to one buffalo and perhaps the hides from twenty to thirty deer and elk for clothing and items for the household, such as sleeping robes and rawhide clothing and food containers. If survival depended only on hunting, life would be good. But even if there were enough elk and deer to feed the “wild” Lakota, there was always the problem of the whites. Survival also meant doing something about them.