Twelve, The Journey of Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse, like so many Oglala, had no desire to go near the Holy Road or Fort Laramie. Since Woman Killer Harney had attacked Little Thunder’s camp on the Blue Water, he had seen no white men, but he understood the concerns of those who warned that the absence of whites in the Powder River country didn’t mean they had gone away. The Holy Road was still crowded each summer. That fact alone was an unsettling indication that there seemed to be an endless supply of them. How many more summers? some wondered.

The old men reminded their sons and grandsons that whites had been part of Lakota life for three and perhaps four generations—since a group of them had come from the south by boat on the Grandfather River and then north up the Great Muddy. They had wintered along the Knife River to the north, it was said, saved from cold and starvation by the People of the Earth Lodges. Years later, others came alone or in small groups. As more and more came, they put up trading posts and forts for soldiers to live in. Whites were not going away, the old men warned. How to make them go away was not the question; rather, they advised every council of old men in every encampment in Lakota country to talk about how to keep them from completely taking over Lakota lands. And when someone thought of the plan that would work, it would then be carried out by every Lakota man, woman, and child. Otherwise, they warned, there would be fighting at our very lodge doors.

“The Snakes, Crows, and Pawnees have been our enemies for longer than anyone can remember,” said a very old man. “So we know them, where they live, how they fight, and how they think. When we meet them on the field of battle, sometimes their medicine is stronger and other times ours is. That’s how things are. The whites don’t understand war. They don’t understand that the power of an enemy is a way to strengthen our fighting men. They are killers. A killer does not respect something or someone he knows he can kill, or must kill. Therefore he does not measure victory by the strength of his medicine. He measures his victories by how many he has killed. If we are to defeat this kind of - people, we must come to know them in every way. It is not a pleasant thought, but it is necessary.”

Crazy Horse decided to see for himself how things were at Fort Laramie. He found the Loafer camp a short way from the fort and stayed with them a few days to hear what they knew. Annuities were late again, they complained, and the longhorn cattle were skinnier every year. They noticed, not without some degree of envy, that while Crazy Horse carried a rifle and a pistol and a farseeing glass, he was not dressed in white man’s clothes, as they were. He reminded them that he was a hunter. Though some took his remark as an insult, others knew that living off the promises of annuities was not really living.

The white man named Bordeaux could speak Lakota very well and he was surprised to see someone from the northern camps among the Loafers. He told Crazy Horse that more soldiers were coming to be posted at Laramie. He knew this because the whites had a way of talking over great distances that was much faster than the letters carried by stagecoaches and the pony riders: they had a tapping language by which they sent messages along a wire faster than even the prairie falcon could fly. Crazy Horse had noticed the tall poles planted in the earth in a long line, with a thin rope that seemed to connect one with the next. A message from Fort Laramie, Bordeaux told him, could be sent at sunrise and cross the Great Muddy River before the sun was halfway in the morning sky. Such a thing was not hard to believe since they had made the farseeing glass and the flint striker that made sparks to start fires.

On the way home, Crazy Horse followed the Shell but stayed well north of the Holy Road. He wanted a look at the settlement around the Reshaw Bridge where the immigrant wagons were said to cross the river on the way west. He happened on another camp of Loafers led by a man named Two Face, an acquaintance of his father before Two Face came to Deer Creek. Two Face was a gracious old man known for his friendliness to the whites. He told Crazy Horse that there was a camp of a few soldiers where Deer Creek emptied into the Shell. So Crazy Horse gave the camp a wide berth after he watched them through his field glass.

The river crossing used by the wagon trains was a half day’s ride west of Deer Creek. Elk Mountain rose suddenly to the south and the Shell meandered below its ridges and then turned east. Crazy Horse stayed to the rough and rolling open hills north of the river, and from a distance he spotted a bridge, though he could see no whites near it through his field glass. He watched for most of an afternoon but saw no activity. Whites were known to bustle about even when they had nothing to do, as at Fort Laramie. A thin column of dust a little further to the west prompted him to have a look before he went north.

He saw over forty soldiers among the assortment of wooden buildings, as well as a few canvas tents inside a sharp bend in the river, as he sat among the tall sagebrush on a ridge to the north. The distance was too great for the field glass to provide a clear image, but the activity in the settlement near yet another bridge was easy to see—activity that was cause for worry. A few wagons were standing in line to cross the bridge, showing the whites as busy as ever. This was a part of the Holy Road not seen by many Lakota. On the Lakota raid into Snake country, they had traveled southwest toward the Sweetwater River and passed far to the west of the end of Elk Mountain, though they could see it in the distance. They had not seen the bridge.

The activity at the bridge and the settlement was annoying. Like Fort Laramie, there was an air of permanence. The presence of soldiers always bothered the old men because soldiers were brought in to protect the other whites against the Lakota, or any other people through whose lands they dared to travel. Soldiers always meant that more whites were not far behind.

With the day growing short, Crazy Horse headed north through the broken and dry hills. Bordeaux had said more soldiers were coming to Laramie. And more soldiers did come. The Loafers sent word to the northern camps that these soldiers were anxious to fight and kill any Lakota that got in their way. Some of the young men like Little Hawk were also anxious to prove to the new soldiers that carrying a big rifle and wearing a blue coat - didn’t make a man skilled as a fighter, or give him a brave heart. But the old men cautioned against going south against them. “If we kill them all, they will only send more the next time,” they said. “They will send a hundred Woman Killer Harneys against us and fill the land with their stink. Wait; we must choose our battles as much as we can.”

Word came from near the Black Hills that made the young men even more eager to go chasing after whites. Some Sicangu were three days out of Fort Laramie when they spotted a group of white hunters with their long shooting rifles. The Sicangu stayed on a hill to watch. The hunters were killing buffalo from a very long distance. The buffalo didn’t run as one after another fell until the entire herd was killed, totaling over a hundred. Then the hunters skinned the dead animals by using horses to pull off the hides with ropes tied to the dead animal’s nose. Fresh hides were then scraped and loaded on several big wagons, each piled very high and the team horses straining to pull the load. No meat was taken, except for what the hunters sliced off to cook and eat as they worked. When the Sicangu rode in after the hide hunters left, the flies, worms, ravens, buzzards, and coyotes were already at work.

Crazy Horse and Little Hawk went with a group of young men to the high meadow country west of the Black Hills, a land of tall grass and blue sage and the white-bellied pronghorn. They found buffalo bones scattered in several places, indicating that large kills had been made. All they could do was turn the skulls to face the east, to make the final sign of respect that the hide hunters knew nothing about. The Hunkpatila had struck their camp and caught up with them, and the old men decided to pitch their lodges north of the Black Hills to hunt and make meat for the winter. Perhaps they would find some white hunters, they thought, but didn’t come across any.

They made much meat again that autumn and wintered within sight of the Black Hills. After the hunts, High Back Bone and Crazy Horse led a small group of warriors north to the edge of Crow lands, mainly to do a little scouting and give a few inexperienced boys the opportunity to know a little of the warrior’s trail. A strange thing happened when they came to a narrow creek in a little valley and saw a like group of Crow approaching from the other side: the two groups stopped to watch each other from a distance, just beyond bowshot but within the range of a rifle. The man riding at the head of the Crow lifted an arrow into the air and it landed a stone’s throw from the Lakota. High Back Bone rode forward to retrieve it and studied it closely. Then he strung his own bow, notched an arrow on its string and sent it - toward the Crow. The Crow leader took the arrow and inspected it. After a wave from their leader the Crow rode away. High Back Bone showed the arrow and said it was from a man known for his reputation as a courageous fighter. On this day, mutual respect was more important than anything. High Back Bone took the arrow back and placed it in his own quiver and later hung it up in his lodge among his warrior accoutrements.

After the spring thaw, they moved back to the Powder River country and heard news from far to the east and from the south. Their Dakota relatives near the lake country had fought a long war to drive the whites from their country, and had lost. The whites had trampled on their own promise to honor boundaries that were to protect Dakota lands from encroachment. Old men nodded gray heads knowingly. It seemed whites everywhere were the same when it came to land and promises. But there was worse news from the Dakota. Thirty-eight of their men had been hanged at once, on orders from the “great father” in the east. That bit of news brought a long, deep silence to the council lodge, causing even the wisest old man to stare long into the coals of the fire, trying to find the sense in such a thing. There was none to be found.

From the soldier settlement on the Shell below Elk Mountain came word that more soldiers had arrived and put up dwellings near a bridge so they could guard the white emigrants as they crossed. But it seemed there was no end to the strange things the whites could do. One was reportedly marking a trail north from Fort Laramie across the Powder River country to the lands of the Crow, staying east of the foothills of the Shining Mountains. It was said that he was marking the trail by pounding stakes in the ground. The strangeness of it was that he was doing this alone, with only a horse and a pack mule. Out of curiosity, young men searched the country and some did find him by the time he was near Crazy Woman Creek.

Worm, as usual, asked why and the answer came. The man had a purpose, although many Lakota thought he was crazy. He soon returned with other whites, including women and children, leading pack trains and wagons and following the trail marked with stakes. News came from the fort that the whites had found gold to the west and north of the Elk River, west of Crow lands, and the stake-planting man had found an easier trail to the gold fields. Gold or not, men like High Back Bone said, our land is our land and no one, especially a white man, should be allowed to make a trail through it. If it isn’t stopped, the land on either side of it will die from the stink of their passing, like the Holy Road. Saving the Powder River country from becoming a dumping ground was a strong and necessary purpose, and hundreds of young men flocked to the staked trail.

After several days’ travel north of the Shell River, the people in the gold-seeking train awoke to an unexpected sight. They were surrounded by hundreds of mounted Lakota and Sahiyela fighting men positioned on the hills and ridges around them. The trail north and south was blocked. The blockaders stayed out of rifle range and didn’t make any aggressive moves, simply maintaining their positions as the day wore on—a ring of men and horses seeming to have risen out of the rocks. After nightfall, a ring of small fires burned. Morning light revealed the blockaders were still in place.

During the night, scouts had slipped up close to the wagons. Women and children were frightened and crying, they reported, and their men could do nothing but stare at the distant ring of fires. During the second night, two of the white men made an attempt to slip south. Warrior leaders told the young men to let them pass, guessing they were going for help.

Days and nights passed into five, and then six. After the fourth day, a Lakota messenger rode up from the Shell. Soldiers were coming to the aid of the gold seekers. The warrior leaders decided to wait to see if there would be soldiers, and if so, to see what they would do.

There were only two ways for the whites to go: continue north or return south. If the soldiers came and tried to take the gold seekers north, the Lakota and Sahiyela would attack, it was decided. If they turned back south, they would be allowed to return, hopefully with the knowledge that the Powder River country would not be another trail for the whites whatever their purpose or destination.

Crazy Horse and Little Hawk, along with Lone Bear, stood watch on the ridges. The whites could do nothing but stay near their wagons and work hard at keeping their animals close to them. The overwhelming sentiment in the minds of the young men and warrior leaders on the ridges was singular and straightforward. Crazy Horse agreed. What did they expect? He told Little Hawk about some of the things that had happened at the fort when the little soldier Grattan came with his men and wagon guns. They had killed a venerated old man over a cow. Thirty of them had died for that same cow, as he saw it. Now they were willing to risk their women and children for the soft iron called gold. There was no sense in it.

Soldiers came, perhaps fifty of them. They were allowed to pass through the line of warriors to the south and the line closed again when the soldiers reached the gold seekers. Their purpose was almost immediately clear. After the wagons were hitched and the pack mules loaded, they turned the train south.

The soldier-escorted column was allowed to pass, although several scouts shadowed them all the way to the Shell. However, a small group of men from the train slipped away from the soldiers and headed toward the Elk River. Gold must be very important—perhaps a kind of medicine so valuable to the whites that it drove them to take such risks, some presumed. But they had left their group alone, knowing that it was likely they would meet their deaths some other way than at the hands of Lakota warriors.

Crazy Horse would always remember the strange episode on the staked trail, especially in light of all that was to follow. He carried a lesson from it that he would use as a measure every time he took to the trail as a fighting man: all the warriors on the ridges surrounding the gold seekers had invoked a feeling by virtue of simply coming together, a feeling of strength that comes from pursuing the same purpose. Several hundred had responded, some of them Sahiyela and perhaps a few Blue Clouds married into Lakota families. He knew several by name, but most were unknown to him. On those windswept ridges for six days, however, they had shared the kinship of purpose.

More soldiers were coming to Laramie, it was said, and with them came many Pawnees, old enemies of the Lakota. Having never seen a Pawnee, Crazy Horse went to the fort and took Little Hawk with him. Along the way, several other young men joined them. They camped north of the fort and found a high place to settle in and watch with the long field glass before venturing any further.

They watched a long column of soldiers return to the fort, and instead of taking their mounts to the horse barns, they turned them loose in the open area in the middle of the buildings after unsaddling them. Long ago, the soldiers had stopped posting sentries, perhaps lulled into thinking that no one would dare attack them, especially in daylight. The sight of so many horses loose and unguarded was like waving a blanket in front of a buffalo bull and daring it to charge, especially since all the whites were in their dwellings out of the hot summer sun.

The plan was made in an instant. Blankets and robes were unfurled. Two men were sent to wait north of the fort while - everyone else would go after the horses. With Crazy Horse leading the way, they circled to the west staying out of sight in the gullies and rode up out of the creek to the south, just past the stone building where the soldiers had a large wood-cutting apparatus of some sort. By the time the raiders gained the open area, they were at a full gallop, yelling and waving their blankets and robes and firing pistols. Panicked immediately, the big Long Knife horses bolted and broke past a large building on the northeast corner as groups of wide-eyed soldiers emerged from the buildings, but all they could do was watch helplessly. The Pawnees were sitting in the shade of some trees, watching.

The two Lakota waiting north of the fort helped point the horses in the right direction and then were joined by Crazy Horse as a rear guard. The herd and their new, gleeful owners were several hills and creeks away before the soldiers organized a pursuit. On into the afternoon and night, the raiders kept the horses moving, but the soldier pursuit was nothing to speak of. Sometime during the following day the soldiers turned back - toward the fort.

In the Powder River camps, the horses were given away mostly to the old and the widows for packhorses or to pull the drag poles. They were not suited for much else since it was well known that they had difficulty in the rough country. First, the curved iron shoes nailed to their hooves were removed—they were too noisy.

Worm welcomed his two sons home. The older one, as usual, said nothing of his particular part in the horse raid—only that it had been done. Little Hawk, however, was not at all bashful about providing the details, to which his mothers and father listened with no small amount of pride, and amusement. Worm was especially pleased that Crazy Horse seemed to have put the disappointment over Black Buffalo Woman behind him. More than a few available young women had cast hopeful glances in his son’s direction, especially since his reputation as a fighting man was rising rapidly. Yet it was difficult to know if he had any interest in any particular one. Now and then someone would deliver a gift of moccasins from Yellow Woman, the Sahiyela girl he had helped after she had lost her husband and child. But she looked on him as a younger brother and nothing more. There was time. Crazy Horse was still a young man. Meanwhile, while they waited for grandchildren, Worm and his wives would bask in the knowledge that few households had two such fine, strong sons.

But there was another reason for a little fatherly pride. Several of the warrior societies had approached him seeking to make Crazy Horse not only a member but to offer him positions of leadership. His exploits as a fighting man were well known even though he did not participate in the accepted ritual of telling victory stories. His uncle Long Face had made a fine staff for him covered with red trade cloth and attached the eagle feathers given to him to commemorate his achievements. Already there were nearly twenty. As a proven warrior, he was entitled to carry the staff in any ceremony or occasion, but he chose not to do so. Perhaps it was his way, Worm surmised, to honor the calling of the Thunder Dreamer. Worm knew that it was simply not in his son to brag or show off, but he also knew that his son understood that a Thunder Dreamer had to live his life as an example to others. Humility was a good example. A Thunder Dreamer was also called upon to do the opposite of what people expected. So it made sense that he would not carry the eagle feather staff or talk publicly about his exploits in the victory ceremonies, which was expected from an accomplished warrior. All in all, Worm was pleased to see his oldest son honor his calling.

Summer passed lazily, and people talked of making presents to the buffalo scouts and sending them out looking, so the planning for the autumn hunts could be made. So it was done, and once more the Lakota renewed the bond they shared with the buffalo, careful to observe all the rituals of honor and respect and keeping in mind the sacrilege of the white hide hunters. The meat was good and plentiful once again for the coming winter.

As the first heavy snows fell, troubling news came from far south, from the Sahiyela who lived along the southern fork of the Shell River: soldiers—it was always the soldiers. Three hundred - people had been killed at a place called Sand Creek, most of them Sahiyela and some Blue Clouds led by Black Kettle and White Antelope. Both leaders were regarded as wise and always working for peace. The killing was bad enough because those killed were mostly women and children, but the soldiers who attacked did more than kill.

The white agent trusted by Black Kettle and White Antelope had advised them to find a place to pitch their lodges that was away from the main trails, it was told. There were many whites in that part of the country, many living in a large town called Denver, and there was a hatred among them for the Sahiyela and any people of the Earth. The camp was to fly the white banner of peace as well as the striped banner of the Long Knives to signify they were peaceful. But the soldiers found them and the banners meant nothing to them.

The messengers could barely tell the story, trying to keep back the anger and the tears as well as the bile that rose in the throat from remembering. Women and children were butchered after they were killed, it was told. Parts of their bodies were cut away, such as a woman’s breasts and genitals, a child’s hand or fingers, and boys’ genitals. Brains were bashed out with gunstocks, and eyes were gouged out. Some babies not yet born were cut from their mother’s stomachs. The final insult came when the soldiers attached body parts to their blue coats and rode in a victory march through the streets of the large town as the other whites cheered.

The Lakota did not want to believe the news—not because they wanted to deny the truth of it, but because it was much too difficult to believe that anyone could do such unspeakable deeds. Some asked after friends or relatives, fearing they might be among the dead, and the messengers would speak ever so softly the names they knew.