Joseph M. Marshall III Read online

  Table of Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part I - The Early Years

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Reflections: - The Way We Came

  Part II - The Rites of Passage

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Reflections: The Call to Adventure

  Part III - The Warrior Leader

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Reflections: - The Legacy of Leadership

  Part IV - The Road to Camp Robinson

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Reflections:

  Afterword:

  A Story:

  Sources

  Suggested Reading

  Index

  Praise for The Journey of Crazy Horse

  “The legendary Lakota leader receives due honor in this searching biography. . . . A fine and necessary work.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Captivating and enlightening . . . poignant . . . This reader was left with the feeling of having just experienced a cultural epiphany.”

  —Chuck Lewis, True West magazine

  “Marshall’s gloriously poetic and sweeping chronicle ushers in a new genre of American history—indigenous, oral, formerly supressed, a thrilling narrative based upon personal stories and hidden accounts only a trusted Indian scholar could collect and only a true-born writer could dramatize in print. Marshall renders the man and his times passionately alive. A tour de force.”

  —Peter Nabokov, professor of American Indian Studies and World Arts and Cultures, UCLA, and author of Native American Testimony

  “Born about one hundred years after Crazy Horse, Joseph Marshall has drawn on oral histories passed down across the generations to find the human being behind the hero who has become a legend for Lakotas and non-Indians alike. The result is a remarkable portrait of a remarkable man.”

  —Colin G. Calloway, professor of history and Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies, Dartmouth College

  “This story of treachery and honor has never been told better. Crazy Horse is no longer merely a symbol for the Oglala, or even for the Lakota, but has become an inspiration for all. Marshall’s scholarship is meticulous, his passion gripping. This is as composed and crafted as a fine novel.”

  —Roger Welsch, Ph.D., anthropologist and author of It’s Not the End of the Earth, but You Can See It from Here

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joseph M. Marshall III, historian, educator, and storyteller, is the author of six previous books, including The Lakota Way: Stories and Lessons for Living, which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA West Award in 2002. He was raised on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation and his first language is Lakota. Marshall is a recipient of the Wyoming Humanities Award, and he has been a technical advisor and actor in television movies, including Return to Lonesome Dove. He makes his home on the Northern Plains.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,

  Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004

  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  Copyright © Joseph M. Marshall III, 2004

  eISBN : 978-1-440-64920-2

  1. Crazy Horse, ca. 1842-1877. 2. Oglala Indians—Kings and rulers—Biography.

  3. Oglala Indians—Government relations. 4. Oglala Indians—Wars.

  5. Little Bighorn, Battle of the, Mont., 1876. I. Title.

  E99.O3C72457 2004

  978.004’9752—dc22

  [B] 2004049618

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Dedicated to the memory of two warriors

  To one who died young

  PRIVATE MELVIN C. MARSHALL

  Forty-fourth Infantry Division

  United States Army

  Born—16 October 1926

  Wounded in action—8 June 1945

  Died of wounds—12 June 1945

  Ohitiya Otanin

  (His Courage Is Known)

  Oglala/Sicangu Lakota

  and

  To another who made the most of the opportunity

  the first did not have

  JOHN R. WILLIAMS, ED.D.

  Husband, father, teacher, Korean veteran, and friend

  Born—13 June 1931

  Died—4 September 2001

  Mato Ihanbla

  (Bear Dreamer)

  Oglala Lakota

  Introduction to a Hero Story

  The winter of 1866-67 was bitterly cold and snows were deep along the foothills of the Shining (Big Horn) Mountains in the region the Lakota called the Powder River country, in what is now north-central Wyoming. Buffalo were scarce and hunters had great difficulty finding elk and deer. Crazy Horse, then in his mid-twenties, and his younger brother Little Hawk did their share of hunting, risking their lives in the frigid temperatures as they searched for whatever game they could find. One day a sudden blizzard forced them to seek shelter, but in the midst of it they happened to see several elk that were also hiding out of the wind. After the storm abated somewhat the two hunters brought down several elk with their bows and arrows, not easy to do in extreme subzero weather. They transported the meat home and saved their relatives and friends from starvation. Only weeks before, on another unbelievably cold winter day, Crazy Horse had led nine other fighting men in luring eighty soldiers into an ambush by several hundred Lakota and Cheyenne warriors and into a battle known in the annals of Western history as the Fetterman Battle or Fetterman Massacre. It was a hard-fought battle and a decisive victory for the Lakota and their Cheyenne allies. During the decoy action Crazy Horse stopped well within enemy rifle range and calmly scraped ice from his horse’s hooves just to infuriate the pursuing soldiers.

  He didn’t know, and wouldn’t have cared if he did, that he was laying the foundation for the m
yths and legends that surround his legacy.

  Say the name Crazy Horse and immediately events such as the Fetterman Battle, the Battle of the Rosebud, and, of course, the Battle of the Little Bighorn come to mind for those who have some inkling of Western American history. They think in terms of the legendary Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse was the Lakota battlefield leader who, in the span of eight days, got the best of two of the United States Army’s field commanders: Brigadier General George Crook and Lieutenant Colonel George Custer. His exploits off the battlefield are less well known, however. Deeds such as finding meat in the middle of a blizzard endeared him to those who knew him as an ordinary man. He became a hero to them long before he became a legend in other peoples’ minds after Little Bighorn and the defeat of the Seventh United States Cavalry.

  Crazy Horse has been my hero since I was a boy. He was arguably the best-known Lakota leader in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a turbulent time on the northern Plains. His name floats in the consciousness of most Americans, along with the names of indigenous leaders and heroes from other tribes, such as Geronimo of the Chiracahua Apache, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Washakie of the Eastern Shoshoni, and Quannah Parker of the Comanche, to name a few. He is certainly no less known than Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man and political leader who was his friend and ally, or Red Cloud, his fellow Oglala, who was not among his friends.

  At first I knew Crazy Horse only as a fighting man, the warrior. I didn’t know or care what he felt, what he thought; I cared only that he was Lakota and that he was brave and performed deeds that fired my imagination. But as time went on there were more stories. I now know Crazy Horse as a man first and a legend second, a very distant second. In fact, he is much like my father and my uncles and all my grandfathers. He walks straight, he is polite, and he speaks softly. But there is also an aura of mystery about him, as though sometimes I am seeing him in a mist that blends legend and reality. It’s that aura that seems to appeal most to people and I’m convinced that many want to connect with the mystery more than they want to identify with the man.

  I can consciously remember hearing his name for the first time the summer I was six years old. My grandfather Albert and a man I knew as Grandpa Isaac and I had just crossed the Little White River and stopped to rest. As they both fashioned their roll-your-own cigarettes, one of them compared the slow-moving Little White to the Greasy Grass River. I learned later that the Greasy Grass was in south-central Montana and was also known as the Little Bighorn. In the shade of a thick grove of sandbar willow, the two old men spoke about a battle, and names that I had never heard before—or at least that I couldn’t remember hearing before—rolled off their tongues that day along the river. Pizi, Tatanka Iyotake, Inkpa Duta, and Tasunke Witko and Pehin Hanska. Of course, they were talking about Gall, Sitting Bull, Red Butte, and Crazy Horse and Custer. Pehin Hanska meant Long Hair, the name many Lakota had for George Custer.

  The battle they spoke of was fought seventy-five years prior, ten or so years before either of them was born. They talked, however, as if it had happened only the day before. They could because they had heard of the battle from their fathers and uncles and from a generation who had been alive in 1876, and from some who had been there in the great encampment along the Greasy Grass.

  Long Hair and his soldiers had been decisively defeated, as far as I could tell. The Sahiyela, the Northern Cheyenne, were there with the Lakota. The soldiers had attacked the south end of the encampment along the Greasy Grass River, then the north end. Those from the south were stopped and routed completely, chased across the river to the top of a hill where they dug shallow pits in the earth to hide. Those who tried to attack from the north were stopped at the river and chased up a long slope. They were forced to fight a running battle, falling and dying as they fled until only a small knot of them were cut off at the end of a long ridge and were killed.

  One name was repeated more often than others in the story of that battle: Tasunke Witko, or “His Crazy Horse.” He was a leader of fighting men and his mere appearance on the battlefield was apparently enough to inspire others to fight. Tasunke Witko had led a charge of warriors against the soldiers in the second engagement of that battle. A Sahiyela leader commented on that particular action when recounting the battle years later by saying, “I have never seen anything so brave.”

  By the age of six I had already listened to many stories from these two grandfathers. I was well aware that being a fighting man was one way of being a man in the Lakota ways of old. I knew that men were often injured or wounded in battle and sometimes killed. And I knew that in battle a man could prove himself. For one man to obviously evoke such reverence and respect from the two grandfathers who told the story of the 1876 Greasy Grass Fight—the Battle of the Little Big Horn—was of some consequence. In my six-year-old world I could think of only two or three other old men in the same category as these two grandfathers, so when they respected someone it was no small thing. That day by the Little White River, Tasunke Witko became part of my life.

  Like any Lakota boy that heard of Crazy Horse’s exploits on the battlefield, I was awestruck, and immediately made him larger than life, thus setting him apart from reality. I can’t recall the exact moment I realized that the essence of Crazy Horse had something to do with more than his physical appearance and attributes or his accomplishments as a fighting man and a leader of fighting men. But the realization came because the stories from my grandfather and other elders took on a more realistic tone as they added details to correlate with my intellectual and emotional growth. Crazy Horse became more defined and I began to paint him with the brush of reality rather than the distortion of legend.

  In that reality every Lakota boy of the time grew up on a horse and Crazy Horse was no exception. As an adult he was described as a skilled horseman. Many who rode with him into battle remembered that he used two horses for a combat, a bay and a sorrel. He favored the bay, a gelding. Later he had a favorite riding horse, a yellow paint. He preferred geldings because they had more endurance than mares and stallions. The bay was not only fast but had unusual endurance. It was the horse he rode in many encounters with both native and white enemies. Crazy Horse liked to rest and refresh his horse by riding him to the top of a hill to catch a breeze or stand in the wind.

  Like every Lakota male, he was probably highly skilled with his bow because of the type of instruction and training he was given. In his day it was not unusual for teenage boys to hit grasshoppers on the fly with an arrow. Surprisingly, my boyhood image of him as a warrior was not too far from the truth. As a full-fledged fighting man he did prefer a stone-headed war club for close combat, and it was said he was highly skilled with it, especially mounted and in a running fight. Out of necessity, however, he did a acquire a single-shot muzzle loader and later a repeating rifle.

  Crazy Horse was certainly not the tallest or the strongest among the Lakota fighting men of his day. He was probably somewhere between five feet six inches and five feet ten inches tall. But courage and daring are not dependent on size or ability. In another way, however, he was not the prototypical Lakota fighting man in that he didn’t participate in a ritual called the waktoglakapi or “to tell of one’s victories.” It was a simple ritual in which fighting men were expected to recount their exploits on the battlefield. As a matter of fact, Crazy Horse barely talked about his exploits to his immediate family.

  Sometimes, however, Crazy Horse does seem to tower over me. He is intense and his eyes flash. These moments happen, I suspect, to remind me that there is a legacy that is larger than life, an aspect to Crazy Horse that sets him apart from others who have gone before us. In a real sense it has to do with something beyond his exploits, something that traditional Lakota know and understand, something often misunderstood by the non-Lakota world.

  My grandfather liked to watch the clouds building to the west on late summer afternoons, the kind of clouds that are folded and gray-blue, with quiet thunder rolling
in their bowels uttering a promise of lightning and rain. One summer evening as we watched storm clouds approaching and listened to that distant, quiet thunder, he made a soft comment. Wakinyan ihanble ske. They say he dreamed of the Thunders. He was speaking of Crazy Horse. So among other things he was a Thunder Dreamer.

  Anyone who dreamed of the Thunder Beings, the Wakinyan, was called upon to walk the path of the Heyoka (heh-yo’-kah), also known as wakan witkotkoka, which is roughly translated as “crazy in a sacred way.” A Heyoka was a walking contradiction, acting silly or even crazy sometimes, but generally expected to live and act contrary to accepted rules of behavior. In doing so a Thunder Dreamer sacrificed reputation and ego for the sake of the people. Throughout his adult life and with his last breath, this is exactly what Crazy Horse did.

  He has left us a legacy that is both a trail to follow and a challenge to follow it.

  Much later, when I was an adult, I realized that my research into the life of Crazy Horse had begun that day by the Little White River in the summer of 1951, nearly seventy-four years after his death at Camp Robinson, Nebraska. That research happened in the most natural way possible for me as a Lakota child.

  Home for me is the northern Plains because I was born there and shaped by the influence of the land as much as the people who were closest to it. I was privileged to grow up in and around the communities of Horse Creek and Swift Bear on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, where I had access to the friends and relatives of my maternal grandparents, Albert and Annie (Good Voice Eagle) Two Hawk. I also spent a few years in the Lakota community in and around Kyle, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where my paternal grandfather, Charles J. Marshall, served as an Episcopal deacon. There, too, were many elderly Lakota who were friends and relatives. All of these elders were born in the 1890-1910 era. Their parents were born in the 1860-1890 era.