Three, The Journey of Crazy Horse

Light Hair knew his father was different from other men because he spent many days and nights away from his family. He knew he was curing fevers or treating broken legs or rattlesnake bites, and he also helped families prepare for burials when there was a death.

The boy didn’t completely understand all about his father. But he did know that Crazy Horse didn’t hunt like the other men or go to war. A father who was a medicine man and didn’t do the things all men did caused the boy to feel all the more different. He wondered most of all why he looked different than other boys. Each summer gathering when several encampments came together, he always looked for other boys with light hair like his. To his dismay, the only other children with light hair were girls. Older boys also noticed and teased him by pulling on his breechclout—their way of suggesting that he should be wearing dresses instead.

Hunting was the Lakota lifeblood. Like the wolf, fox, eagle, mountain lion, and hawk, the Lakota were hunters. At age seven, Light Hair realized more and more that hunting was the way to have fresh meat, and deer and elk hides for clothing, and buffalo hides for lodge coverings. He also sensed that he would be part of the process somehow.

Like all boys, Light Hair was becoming skilled with his bow. He had progressed to a stouter bow, stronger than the first he was given—one made in proportion to his size and strength. His favorite game had changed as well. Shooting arrows through a rolling willow hoop had become too easy and boring, so his uncle Little Hawk and a few other men introduced him to a new game—shooting at grasshoppers. The rules were simple: Walk along the prairie with an arrow on the bowstring, and shoot at a grasshopper when it flew. A rolling hoop was a much easier target. A grasshopper was about the size of his little finger and flew erratically, and fast. The men would suppress smiles when, at first, the boy was unable to get off a shot. Before he could pull back the string the insect was back in the grass. But as he learned to hold his bow ready, he could send an arrow in the general direction of the flitting grasshopper. Shooting at grasshoppers was not boring. It was, he learned, a very humbling experience.

As the summer wore on, his reaction became faster and more and more his arrows only narrowly missed. Grasshoppers, an old man told him, have much to teach. Many Lakota hunters bring down rabbits or deer because grasshoppers taught them how to shoot with unerring marksmanship. If you want to sharpen your shooting eye, they said, or if you ever think you are as good as you’ll ever be, chase grasshoppers.

But fortunately for Light Hair there was more to his training than humiliation by grasshoppers. Across the prairies, through brushy creek bottoms and up mountain slopes, he followed his mentors, and each kind of terrain offered ample opportunities to learn. Whitetail deer, he noticed, left a nearly perfect, matted circle in the grass where they had been resting the day away. They lay in hiding most of the day and grazed at night. A wolf’s paw print was almost as large as a grown man’s hand. After sundown, warm air flowed up from the floor of a valley; therefore, the best place for a night camp was high on the slope.

Lying beneath the branches of a pine tree, Light Hair watched a young coyote approach. “Stare at him,” whispered the teacher. “Stare at his eyes.” Light Hair did as he was told. The coyote was about to pass when he stopped and turned to stare back directly at the boy hidden among the branches, and then fled.

“No matter how far, the eyes have the power to draw the eyes,” said the teacher. “A good thing to know when scouting in Crow lands. Do not stare at the enemy’s eyes too long. He will feel your stare. He will know you are looking. Just as the coyote did.”

Light Hair’s teachers were not loud, vociferous men. They made no speeches espousing grandiose philosophy. Their approach involved action more than words. They took him away from the comfortable confines of his boyhood environment and into the realm of their knowledge and experience. They introduced him to the various dimensions of his world. Day by day he learned its rhythms, its moods, its colors and textures, and he began to form his own experiences, build his own knowledge, and develop his own intimacy with it. What he thought was merely endless space had its own life, its own spirit. He began to appreciate that the grasshopper had something to teach him. More importantly he began to understand that, like the grasshopper, he had a place in the world around him.

As a child, Light Hair saw men ride into the encampment with deer, elk, and antelope either hanging across the back of a packhorse or on drag poles behind the horse. It was a mystery to him how exactly the hunters were able to find such game. Buffalo hunting was not so much a mystery. He’d watched a few chases from hilltops, horses and riders on the edges of an undulating black river, dust billowing, a low rumble coming across the prairie. It was the most exciting thing he had ever seen. He knew it was dangerous, but he couldn’t wait to chase buffalo. Now, under the tutelage of men like his uncle Little Hawk, he began to understand the practical aspects of hunting.

Much of it was repetition and practice, which was not exciting at all. Sitting along a game trail waiting for a mountain black tail was almost as boring as shooting arrows through a rolling willow hoop. He would have preferred to watch the clouds billowing above the horizon, or the eagles circling overhead. But if he didn’t have the patience to wait for the deer to come, or the patience to wait for it to come into range of his bow, and if he missed when he had the right shot, his family would go hungry.

“The family of a good hunter looks well fed,” he was told. “They wear fine clothes because he takes deer and elk so the women can tan the hides and sew them into shirts and dresses and make moccasins. The family of a poor hunter is thin, with worn clothes because there are no new hides to sew. What do you want everyone to say about how you provide for your family?”

Light Hair put down his weapon and did as he was told, or tried. The hare was off and running in a heartbeat and out of sight before the boy had run ten strides. He returned complaining that he couldn’t catch the animal.

“True,” said the teacher. “Remember that we all have weaknesses and strengths. Sometimes the hare will win, sometimes you. Even the wolf fails more often than he wins, but he doesn’t stop. He has great fangs, he can smell a trail two days old, and he can hear you over the next hill. But his real strength is endurance. He never quits.”

As he was learning the skills necessary to hunt, Light Hair was also learning that the hunter had much in common with the hunted. We all live to sustain the life of others, he was told. The grass feeds off the earth; the rabbits, buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope feed off the grass, and wolves, foxes, and men feed on them. In the end, the hunters feed the earth when the life of even the mightiest hunter comes to an end. To acknowledge this practical and spiritual connection, Lakota hunters performed a simple ceremony. Light Hair was taught to offer a bundle of prairie sage to acknowledge the gift of life the animal had given, whether it was a squirrel or an elk.

As the days passed he unknowingly attracted the interest and curiosity of a man called High Back Bone. He was a Mniconju with an Oglala wife, and he liked what he saw in the shy Light Hair. Perhaps it was the boy’s quiet determination or his innate humility.

High Back Bone himself was a quiet man, not given to pursuing the path of glory, but he was deeply committed to achieving the status of wica, the complete man. The complete man embodied the best qualities of the hunter and the fighting man. Though all men necessarily filled roles of both provider and protector—the hunter/warrior—not everyone could achieve the highest ideals for both callings. High Back Bone was one of the few.

High Back Bone was a leader of fighting men, muscular and broad shouldered, exuding the confidence of a man who not only had physical strength but also a lifetime of experience and accomplishment. He knew that Little Hawk and the Light Hair’s other teachers had taught him a variety of physical skills, but had also laid the foundation for an important quality that would stand him in good stead throughout his life: self-confidence. Most important, he also saw in the boy the proverbial stillness of deep water. The day he visited the lodge of Crazy Horse and asked to take the light-haired boy under his wing was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. From the first time High Back Bone rode out of the camp with Light Hair at his side, the future of the Oglala Lakota rode with them.

The Oglala had been slowly pushing westward from the Black Hills before Light Hair was born. By the time he was seven, there was a consistent Lakota presence as far west as Elk Mountain at the northern tip of the Medicine Bow Mountains, and north into the Powder River country east of the Shining Mountains. Buffalo and pronghorn antelope were plentiful on the prairies, as were the elk and deer in the mountains. All were essential to survival and comfort. The Snakes, also known as the - Eastern Shoshoni, had prior claim to the lands near Elk Mountain. Likewise, the Crow, who called themselves Absaroka, long roamed the Powder River region. Those ancient Lakota enemies grudgingly gave way but only because they were outnumbered. Numerical advantage was the basis for strength. A willingness to fight added to it, and when the Lakota did fight and win, their victories stayed in the minds of those they defeated. They were not better than their enemies, simply stronger. And Light Hair would learn where that strength came from.

High Back Bone reminded the boy that he was born in the Year a Hundred Horses Were Taken. In a daring raid on a Snake encampment, a handful of Lakota warriors swooped in and drove off a hundred horses without losing a single man or horse. Perhaps it was a sign that he was born in a year designated by warrior accomplishments. Every man was a hunter and every man was a warrior. A few warriors set themselves apart with their exploits on the battlefield. Such men seemed to be born to the calling, more than others. High Back Bone sensed that in his slender, light-haired charge. The stillness of deep water.

High Back Bone’s choice did not go unnoticed. A man with his reputation might have been expected to pick the son of an influential family, the kind of association that would enhance High Back Bone’s standing in the community and in the warrior societies. More than a few men were puzzled over his selection of the light-haired son of a humble medicine man. On the other hand, Crazy Horse’s wives were the sisters of Spotted Tail, an important man among the Sicangu. Perhaps, some said, High Back Bone selected the nephew of Spotted Tail, rather than the son of Crazy Horse. But the Mniconju paid no heed to such opinions. If anyone would have asked him, he would have told them, but no one did.

A broad-shouldered man with serious, chiseled features and a shy slender boy with wavy brown hair were an unlikely pair, but they became a familiar sight in the Hunkpatila camp. Light Hair emulated his teacher from the way he rode his horse to how he wore a quiver of arrows across the small of his back. The boy was a willing student and never failed to attempt to do anything High Back Bone asked him to do. He was slowly being shaped into a warrior in much the same way the fire-cured bow is made.

The preferred process for curing a wood stave for a bow was to cut it in winter when the sap was down, hang it high in the lodge beneath the smoke hole, and simply allow it to cure for five years. But the Lakota had made their living and protected themselves with the bow for countless generations and had learned effective shortcuts out of necessity. Using fire, it was possible to cure a green stave in a matter of days.

The summer of his eighth year, when the Hunkpatila were encamped near the southern fork of the Powder River, Light Hair and High Back Bone found a stand of young ash trees guarding a spring in a gully. A straight tree a little taller than the boy was selected. Before he instructed the boy to chop it down, High Back Bone smudged it with sage and offered tobacco bundles to the tree to acknowledge its life and the sacrifice it was about to make. With a hand axe the boy cut the tree down, marking the bottom. They hauled it to their camp where a fire with a deep bed of coals was already burning.

Over a bed of hot coals the fresh stave, mostly white in color, slowly turned a deep yellow as it became harder and harder. After the fire-cure came the tools: a hand axe, several knives, a flat piece of sandstone, and elk antler tines. An outline was carefully drawn on the stave to mark the bottom end, and to show the excess wood to be removed with the axe. That done, a knife was used for the next phase of shaving off excess wood.

The bow maker watched his pupil closely, with a patient word here and there, making sure the bow was taking shape as it should. Then he took the bow and refined it, explaining his methods as he worked. Finally, the bow had the desired shape and design. In the exact middle it was two fingers wide from side to side and tapered away to each end, which was about the size of a man’s little finger. From the top to bottom profile it gradually tapered away to each end.

On the top near the tip a single notch was carved in one side for the bowstring. On the bottom two notches were carved, one on each side. Just as it is important to mark the bottom of the tree so that as a finished bow it remains in line with the flow of life, upward from the Earth, when the bow is kept in its natural direction, it is less likely to break. Strength comes from balance, as all bow makers know. The bow stands on its feet, bow makers are quick to point out, like humans do.

With the antler tine the bow maker rubbed the wood, giving it a smooth sheen as well as closing the grains to give it more strength. With the addition of a sinew string the weapon became a force to be reckoned with. Shaping a stave into a bow was the story of any boy’s journey on the path to becoming a warrior.

High Back Bone watched the slender boy and wondered what fires of adversity lay ahead on his journey. Of one thing he was certain: the boy would become strong as a result, in the same way the ash stave became harder as it dried over the coals. The fires of adversity, as High Back Bone knew, were already smoldering along a wide, flat river far to the south known as the Shell.

The Shell River flowed north out of the Medicine Bow Mountains, turned east on the sagebrush plains, then southeasterly as it entered the short grass prairies until it emptied itself into the Great Muddy River after a slight turn to the northeast. People traveled west along this river, though they were calling it the Platte and then the North Platte. The corridor along the river was called the Oregon Trail. The travelers were a trickle the two summers past, but now the trickle grew to a thin but steady stream. These were a people strange to the Lakota, though not unknown. Their kind had been encroaching on Lakota lands for several generations, perhaps for nearly a hundred years, though only a little at a time.

These travelers along the Shell were from the nation of whites to the east beyond the Great Muddy River. They had already established outposts mostly on the fringes of Lakota lands, and traveled up and down the Great Muddy in large smoke-belching houseboats. A trading settlement northeast of the Medicine Bow Mountains along the Shell became an outpost called Fort Laramie. Soldiers in blue coats came to the fort, carrying knives as long as a man’s arm. Thus they became known as the Long Knives. And they and the travelers heading west along the Oregon Trail were the first wisps of smoke from the smoldering embers that would grow into flames of adversity for all the Lakota, and for Light Hair.

In the summer of his ninth year Light Hair’s Hunkpatila encampment moved southeast to the area northwest of Fort Laramie. They were curious about the stories coming from the southern encampments that seemed difficult to believe—stories of lines of wagons pulled by teams of cattle, mules, and horses moving west along the Shell, not unlike the migration of large buffalo herds. Men, women, and children rode in the covered wagons and many walked as well.

The corridor on either side of the Shell River had been a trail for elk and buffalo for thousands of years. Human beings used it as well. The first whites in the area were trappers and mountain men, who learned of the trail from the Ponca people to the east and the Kiowa and Blue Clouds, called the Arapaho by many, to the south as well. When one ant sets off on a trail, others follow.

Light Hair accompanied High Back Bone to the Shell. There they joined over a hundred other curious men and boys sitting on the hills and ridges north of the river to watch a line of wagons plodding westward. The stories were true.

Amusement was the predominant state of mind. Men and boys stood, sat, or reclined in the grass and among the rocks on the hills. There were many questions and much speculation. Where were these people going? And why did they obviously leave behind their homes? Some of the older men told alarming stories connected with whites. The whites, they said, likely carried illnesses that were very dangerous. The Kiowa far south of the Shell had lost half of their people in less than two months to disease brought among them by whites, it was said. Perhaps as many as four thousand Kiowa had died, it was said, and this only the past summer.

The Lakota themselves had suffered. The Sicangu living near the Great Muddy had lost over a thousand to the running-face sickness, called smallpox, just over ten years earlier. One of the large houseboats came up the Great Muddy, stopping at various landings to trade or take on wood. People and goods from the boat had come among the few Sicangu who met the boat to trade. Very soon after the boat departed upriver smallpox swept through several encampments. People became ill, their faces and chests marked with pustules. Death came in a matter of days. Though medicine men worked day and night, they were powerless against the illness that moved like a wind-driven fire. The only possible cause of the sudden and terrifying outbreak was contact with the people and goods from the houseboat. In the autumn, word came down from the upper reaches of the Great Muddy that the People of the Earth Lodges, the Mandan, had been all but wiped out by the same running-face sickness. They had also traded with the houseboat.

The men and boys who heard the stories for the first time stared somberly from the hills and ridges at the line of wagons and people. For some, curiosity turned into a sense of foreboding. Perhaps something should be done, a few suggested. Perhaps they should be prevented from coming into Lakota lands. In spite of their concerns, the Lakota men did nothing more than watch. Most, if not all, of them had never seen a white man up close.

Light Hair watched as well, but he didn’t know what to think. The distant wagons and people yielded no specific features. Though some of the Lakota described white men as having beards, it meant nothing to those on the hill because the people in the wide valley below were small, shadowy outlines. On either side of Light Hair were men and boys with brown skin, long hair flowing in the breeze or worn in tight braids, most of them dressed in leggings, breechclouts, and moccasins due to the warm weather. Dozens of pairs of curious or intense dark eyes fixed on the spectacle below. He knew them, who they were and what they were. The people below, although he was aware there were men, women, and children, were nothing more than distant shapes moving slowly to some unknown destination for unknown reasons.

Light Hair had never seen a wagon. Canpagmiyanpi—“Wood that is rolled,” they were called. No doubt difficult to move since four horned cattle in line two by two were needed to pull them. He returned to the Hunkpatila encampment with High Back Bone, saying little and nothing at all about the wagons and the shadowy travelers.