INTRODUCTION
The half-Sioux interpreter William Garnett, who died a dozen years before I was born, first set me to wondering why Crazy Horse was killed. He made it seem so unnecessary. I read Garnett’s account of the killing in a motel at Crow Agency, Montana, not two miles from the spot where Crazy Horse in 1876 led a charge up over the back of a ridge, splitting in two the command of General George Armstrong Custer. Within a very few minutes, Custer and two hundred cavalry soldiers were dead on a hillside overlooking the Little Bighorn River. It was the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States Army by Plains Indians. A year later Crazy Horse himself was dead of a bayonet wound, stabbed in the small of the back by soldiers trying to place him under arrest.
Dead Indians are a common feature of American history, but the killing of Crazy Horse retains its power to shock. Garnett, twenty-two years old at the time, was not only present on the fatal day but was deeply involved in the unfolding of events. In 1920 he told a retired Army general what happened. A transcript of the conversation was eventually published. That’s what I read lying on my back on a bed in Crow Agency’s only motel.1
It was Garnett’s frank and thoughtful tone that first caught my attention. He knew the ins and outs of the whole complex story, but even near the end of his life he had not made up his mind how to think about it. Garnett was present on the evening of September 3, 1877, when General George Crook met with thirteen leading men of the Oglala Sioux to plan the killing of Crazy Horse later that night. A lieutenant who had been working with the Indians promised to give two hundred dollars and his best horse to the man who killed him. The place was a remote military post in northwest Nebraska, a mile and a half from the Oglala agency, as Indian reservations were called at the time. Pushing events was the Army’s fear that Crazy Horse was planning a new war. Then came a report from an Oglala scout named Woman Dress2 that Crazy Horse was planning to kill Crook. Something about that story aroused doubts in Garnett when he heard it. Crook was a little in doubt himself. He wanted to know if Woman Dress could be trusted. The answer was close enough to yes to propel events forward.
In the event, nothing went according to plan. Killing the chief that night was altered to arresting him the following day, but that plan ran into trouble as well. It was not the Army that finally seized Crazy Horse in the early evening of September 5, 1877, but Crazy Horse who gave himself up to the Army, then walked to the guardhouse holding the hand of the officer of the day. The chief had been promised a chance to explain himself to the commanding officer of the military post, and he trusted the promise until the moment he saw the barred window in the guardhouse door.
In my experience the seed of a book can often be traced back a long way. This one began with a childhood passion for Indians. It was acquired in the usual way, picked up on the playground in the 1940s and ’50s when the game of Cowboys and Indians enjoyed a last flowering. Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and the Lone Ranger were predictable staples of kids’ television, in my view, but the game itself, played with cap pistols across suburban backyards, invited somebody to take the part of the Indians.
From the beginning I thought cowboys dull, Indians mysterious, compelling, and something that did not fit easily into the game—their road had been a hard one. Kids have quick sympathies, and mine took shape early. My father helped them form with the books he gave me, which went beyond the usual fare. I still own a lot of the books that kept me up late when I was twelve and thirteen: James Willard Schultz’s My Life as an Indian, Mari Sandoz’s Cheyenne Autumn, Edgar I. Stewart’s Custer’s Luck. They gave me a lifelong appetite for the particular, and a solid grasp of certain truths. One was the fact that the Indian wars were about land, and specifically about removal of Indians from land that whites wanted. Another was the existence of sorrow and tragedy in history—loss and pain that cannot be redeemed. That was not the way I would have put it at the time, but I got the central idea clearly enough. By the time I was fourteen I understood that the treatment of Indians was something people did not like to describe plainly.
Then I grew up. I quit reading about Indians and was caught up by other sorrows, tragedies, and moral complexities. I became a reporter and moved from one subject to another in a progression that always seemed to make sense. The antiwar movement was the first thing I wrote about seriously. From that I learned something about intelligence organizations, and wanted to know more. Study of that in its turn brought me to the history of nuclear weapons, and eventually I was prompted to wonder why the Germans in World War Two failed to build an atomic bomb of their own. Each of these subjects involved much that was hidden, and each absorbed years of work. That was the personal history I brought to Crow Agency in 1994 when my brother and I decided to spend a couple of days at the Little Bighorn battlefield.
The voice of William Garnett thus found a ready listener. What he said prompted many questions. I hadn’t thought about Indians for decades, but Garnett brought me back around. Nothing quite opens up history like an event—the interplay of a large cast pushing a conflict to a moment of decision. It is the event that gives history its narrative backbone. Very often the excavation of an event can reveal the whole of an era, just as an archeologist’s trench through a corner of an ancient city can bring back to light a forgotten civilization.
But I confess it was wanting to know why Crazy Horse was killed, not the abstract lessons to be drawn from his fate, that drew me on. It’s my working theory that pinning down what happened is always the first step to understanding why it happened. That’s where the appetite for the particular comes in, the who, what, and when. Those who watched or took part in Crazy Horse’s killing seemed to understand immediately that something troubling had occurred, but the public’s interest ended with a week of newspaper stories. No official called at the time for a public accounting, and none was made. Histories of the Great Sioux War have treated the killing as regrettable but forgettable, something between a footnote and an afterthought. The event itself remained obscure, muffled, sketchily recorded. In the histories, William Garnett was typically given a sentence or two, if his role was noted at all.
But in the decades after the killing, witnesses and participants occasionally published a memoir, or spoke to a reporter, or, like Garnett, answered the questions of a researcher. In 1942, Mari Sandoz gathered much of this material into her life of Crazy Horse, which I somehow missed in childhood. I was prompted to read it by William Garnett. Sandoz’s book has more art, but not as many facts, as Kingsley Bray’s now authoritative biography of the chief.
The sound of Garnett’s voice was the small beginning of my own effort to understand why Crazy Horse was killed, but a long time passed before I took the next step. That was to drive out to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where I spent a week walking the ground, the first of many trips. The killing of Crazy Horse is not abstract at Fort Robinson. The original officers’ row remains intact. Huge cottonwoods shade the buildings now, but in the 1870s it was treeless. There, a week before his death, Crazy Horse met with a young Army lieutenant in the large front room of his quarters. It was not his first visit. Generally, he sat in a chair while his friends sat on the floor. In a similar building at the other end of officers’ row, General Crook helped to plan the killing of the chief. Across the parade ground to the south a log replica of the old guardhouse has been built on the footprint of the original. You can stand on the spot where Crazy Horse was stabbed by a guard. Sixty feet away is a log replica of the adjutant’s office, also erected on its original footprint. You can look at the spot in that room where Crazy Horse lay on the floor for five or six hours until he died. From Fort Robinson, an hour’s drive over gravel roads will take you to the Pine Ridge Reservation, a site the Oglala picked for themselves in 1878, and where they have lived ever since. Among them survive people who knew people who knew Crazy Horse, and sometimes a word from them can illuminate an old mystery.
The research materials for this book come principally from books and from manuscripts found in libraries and archives, big ones like the Library of Congress and small ones like the Sheridan County Historical Society in Rushville, Nebraska. But just as important were many encounters with historians long immersed in the history of the western Indian wars, and with descendants of the Oglala of the 1870s. All are identified in the notes or in the acknowledgments at the end of the book. But one struck me with unusual force at the time, and it helps to explain how the people and events of the 1870s gradually became vivid in my mind. The encounter began with a document given to me by Tom Buecker in the Fort Robinson Museum which led eventually to a phone conversation with Allyne Jane Pearce, a descendant of William Garnett’s Virginia grandfather. Pearce gave me the name of Joanne Cuny, one of William Garnett’s granddaughters, who lives in Rapid City, South Dakota, not far from Pine Ridge. Cuny told me that the family historian was her older brother James, known in the family as Heavy, and she took me to see him.
From Rapid City, Cuny and I drove up to the veterans’ hospital in Sturgis, where James Garnett was recovering from an accident in which he had shattered a leg, already broken several times previously in car accidents. From the hospital, James could see Bear Butte, a longtime sacred place of the Sioux and the Cheyenne. It rises some seven hundred feet abruptly from the level plains, tree covered and rocky but from a distance rounded something like the form of a sleeping bear. The Sioux call it Mato Paha and still climb the hill to pray for visions. In the old days some Sioux believed the hill was the center of the world, and was the petrified kidney of a great bear. An old fort near Bear Butte had been turned into the veterans’ hospital. James had served in the Navy after dropping out of high school in 1952, and he lived nearby in Rapid City, so it was the natural place for him to recover from his broken leg. The doctors told James Garnett it would be many months before he could walk again.
James related to me a remarkable story about “the Old Man,” as everybody in his childhood called William Garnett. James talked about the Old Man in tones of great intimacy and respect. As the Old Man aged he thickened; his back rounded, and his head settled into his torso. The full head of hair turned gray and was slicked to one side. A heavy gray moustache hid his mouth. In early photographs Garnett is watchful, alert to the camera, but in later pictures he seems to have his mind on other things. When James was growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1930s and ’40s, the Old Man was the subject of much discussion in the household, where old-timers gathered to drink coffee and talk with the Old Man’s widow, Fillie, the daughter of an early trapper and trader named Nick Janis. Among Fillie’s visitors were men with resonant names like Frank Hairy Chin, grandson of a noted practitioner of bear medicine in the old days. Four days before the fight with Custer on the Little Bighorn, the elder Hairy Chin, with the help of the Black Elk family, had performed a healing ceremony for a man named Rattling Hawk, who had been shot through the hips at the Rosebud. On the day of the Custer fight, Rattling Hawk stood on a hill west of the big village and watched the final moments of the general and his men across the river. Still too weak to fight, Rattling Hawk held a sacred lance of the Tokala (Kit Fox) society and sang a Fox song to encourage the fighters: “Friends, what you are doing I cannot do.”3
Frank Hairy Chin told James Garnett, and Garnett told me, that his grandmother—the medicine man’s wife—“couldn’t stand to look at a white man; when a white man came in she would pull a shawl over her head.” Frank and Fillie always spoke in Lakota, but that’s not the word James used. “She talked nothing but Indian,” he said. I often heard that said by people around Pine Ridge.
James told me that another regular visitor to Fillie’s kitchen was Dewey Beard, with his second wife, Alice. They used to drop by the Garnett house on the northern boundary of the reservation in the place called Red Water. Red Water was in the Badlands, seventeen miles from the community in Kyle where the band of Little Wound had settled in the early days on the reservation at the end of the Great Sioux War. Red Water Creek was dry most of the year, but after a big rain it fed into the White River not far from a gap in the hills where the “Big Foot trail” came through—the route followed by the Miniconjou in December 1890 when they were hurrying to join their relatives at Pine Ridge during the ghost dance trouble. The U.S. Cavalry was hot on their heels. James Garnett’s little brother, Martin, used to prowl along the old trail near the Garnett house. Once he found a rusted four-shot pistol, and another time he found a sword engraved with the name of an Army lieutenant. Very likely the pistol had been dropped by the hurrying Indians, the sword by a cavalry officer chasing them.
In the Garnett household, everybody called Dewey Beard Putila—Beard. He had added the “Dewey” after meeting the hero of the Battle of Manila Bay in Washington. But in the old days Dewey Beard was known as Iron Hail, and he had been in the fight at the Little Bighorn as a young man of twenty. By the time Big Foot came through Red Water in 1890 Iron Hail was a grown man with a wife and an infant daughter. The wife was killed at Wounded Knee, and the daughter died three months later. Iron Hail escaped only by running up a draw, just ahead of the soldiers. He was badly wounded in the right arm and held his right thumb in his teeth as he ran to keep the arm from flinging about.
Henry Young Bear was another regular who joined Dewey Beard at the Garnett house, and so were Eddie Herman, a mixed-blood who often wrote about the old days for the Rapid City Journal, and Frank Kills Enemy’s mother, who had been at the Little Bighorn.4
They used to “skin us kids outside,” James said, but the kids hung around, crept back, listened to the old-timers speaking Lakota, remembering the last days on the plains and the first days on the reservation, when the Oglala learned to drive wagons, make fry bread, live in cabins, and call themselves Christians. Many of the old ways were declared illegal, and a special court of “Indian offenses” sentenced men who took part in the sun dance or held a giveaway after the death of a relative. But out on the prairie, away from the agency offices, little changed. In remote places like Red Water the people practiced the old ways in secret. They built sweat lodges down in the creek bottoms and they went up alone into the hills to pray for visions.
What James Garnett remembers of his life till he was twelve or thirteen is the story told by many elderly Lakota on the reservation—living with grandparents, listening to old stories of leading men and remarkable war deeds. Kitchens were the usual scene for these sessions, but sometimes they were held outside around a fire. The older people known as traditionals wore their hair long and sometimes kept tipis and slept in them in the summer. James is a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, a catechist, and a twelve-step counselor who has worked for many years in the prisons of South Dakota, but he grew up in the world of the traditionals. Every week or two as a child he rode with his family in a wagon into Kyle, to collect rations or visit the store—seventeen miles each way, sitting beside Unci, his grandmother Fillie Garnett. Fillie had been born in Wyoming on Goose Creek in 1856, twenty years before General Crook passed through on his way to and from the Rosebud, where he was beaten in a fair fight by Crazy Horse. In winter before leaving the house at Red Water, Fillie would heat old irons on the stove and then put them in the wagon under the blankets to keep their feet warm. Seventeen miles each way, twice a month or more, while the wheels creaked and the tug chains rattled and the horses snorted and clopped and their harness slapped against their sides.
For fifty years, Fillie’s husband William Garnett had been at the very heart of life on the reservation. He knew hundreds of old-timers, the obscure and the celebrated alike. Before he died in 1909, Red Cloud used to ride over to Garnett’s house, American Horse was Garnett’s friend, and scores of Indians depended on Garnett to help them get pensions for their service as scouts. Occasionally during those years white men hoping to write the history of the Indian wars would come by with questions. Garnett had learned to read and write and he sent many letters to friends from the early days. In conversation he talked freely. Walter Camp, Eli Ricker, and General Hugh Scott all recorded long accounts of Indian war times during talks with Garnett. Much of what is known about Crazy Horse comes from Garnett. He saw Crazy Horse often during the last four months of his life, he carried messages between the chiefs and the Army officers during the last week, and he was present—indeed, came close to being shot—on the fatal day.
Fillie Garnett in James’s childhood always walked with a cane, but she was the core of warmth in the household in Kyle, and James says, “She spoiled me rotten.” That was the way of grandmothers but it probably had something to do with the actual physical James as well. The old-timers who came to drink coffee said James looked a lot like the Old Man. James’s father, Henry Kocer Garnett, was the son of William Garnett’s daughter known as Dollie. She was nineteen when Henry was born, and twenty-two when she died three years later, in 1912. There was a streak of bitterness in Henry. Hearing his son compared to the Old Man brought it out. He told his son, “You might look something like him, but you’ll never be the man he was.”
That bitter note is another thing you sometimes hear from elderly Lakota, especially the men—a regret that the people today don’t measure up, themselves included. Henry admired the way the leaders in the old days knew how to take care of the people in big ways and little. “At Christmas they made sure everybody got something,” James told me. No longer. “My dad said when those old-timers died they took all that with them.”
What the old-timers didn’t take was turned upside down when the United States entered the Second World War. One day in 1942, the Garnetts and all their neighbors on Red Water Creek received official notice from the U.S. Army that they had thirty days to pack up and move out; their homes and the surrounding fields and pastures were being requisitioned by the Army Air Force as a bombing range. There was no appeal. Everybody had to go. “They all lost a lot of stuff then,” said James.
The Oglala were never rich. Their cabins and houses were small, two or three rooms. But everybody had something wrapped up in a trunk or under the bed from the old days, and those objects—beaded leggings; quilled shirts; the small amulet bags in the shape of turtles or lizards in which every man preserved his umbilical cord—were often lost in the turmoil of packing up and pulling out so the Army could begin to practice bombing runs. Henry had a trunk full of old things that he left behind, thinking it would be safe in the house. After the war it took a long time for the Garnetts to get their land back, more than ten years. When the Army finally let go the house was a wreck, and the trunk was empty.
But by that time the Garnett household had broken up for good. As a boy James spent most of the year at the Holy Rosary Mission in Pine Ridge as a boarding student in the Red Cloud School. He was there when Fillie died in 1946 and the coffee-drinking sessions in the Garnett kitchen came to an end. James didn’t go to Unci’s funeral; Holy Rosary was too far, there was no way to fetch him back. When James got out of the Navy he returned to high school for a time, then left the mission for good the day before he turned twenty-one on March 3, 1957. The following period James Garnett refers to as “my wild days.” It’s what James draws on as an alcohol counselor in the prisons—not just the drinking, but the wildness itself, the reckless fury that ends the lives of so many young Indians in car wrecks, in fights with knives or baseball bats, passed out in ditches alongside country roads on sub-zero nights. You would think these young men wanted to die. James Garnett has a big phone bill every month; Indians call him up collect from the county jail in Rapid City and he talks them down over the phone. Succeeding at that he describes as the central work of his life. But it almost didn’t happen.
About a year after he left the Red Cloud School, James Garnett was in a car that did not belong to him at a truck stop in Glasgow, Montana, not far from the Canadian border. He was not thinking too clearly. He saw a highway patrol car suddenly pull in, and without hesitating he pulled out. It was pure reflex: run when they’re after you. A highway patrolman said, “Kid, you’re lucky you’re not going back in a pine box. When we got to you, you were already turning blue.” When they got to him his car had been crushed by a big tractor trailer that hit him broadside when he roared out of the truck stop onto the highway without looking. Somehow the doctors kept him alive at the local hospital for a week while he was in a coma.
But in James’s view it wasn’t the doctors who kept him alive. The Old Man spared his life. He knows this because he heard the Old Man say so.
On his sixth night in the hospital, James Garnett woke up when he heard something. It was late, quiet, dark but not pitch black. What James heard first was the tug chains. Immediately he knew it was the old wagon pulling up outside the window of his room on the second floor of the hospital. He heard the tug chains rattling, the creak of the wheels, the harness, the hooves of the horses, and the voices of two people. One of them was Unci. The other was the voice of the Old Man. William Garnett died in 1928, eight years before James was born, but James recognized the Old Man’s voice right away, and he could tell that the Old Man was irritated about something. He was grumbling.
In Lakota the Old Man said, “Ho, iyahna ichuo”—Well, go in and get him.5
Fillie started to get down from the wagon. James heard her. But then the Old Man leaned over and whispered something to Fillie. James heard her stop. She wasn’t getting down after all. The Old Man was whispering something in a grumbling, irritated kind of way. James realized Unci was not going to come and get him. Despite his condition, he got out of his hospital bed and went to the window and called out, “Ah mapeyo!”—Wait for me! He did not want to be left behind.
Fillie turned around and she said, “Hiya, dosha ake un kupikteh”—No, we’ll come for you another time.
The Old Man chucked up the horses and they drove off. James saw them clearly—the Old Man with his rounded back and his hat half tilted back, sitting up on the driver’s seat with the reins in his hands. Beside him was Fillie wearing a long dress with her hair in nice tight braids down her back. Next day in the Glasgow hospital James came out of his coma and startled his doctors but he himself understood perfectly what had happened: it was not the right time. The Old Man had decided. He told Unci not now, and Unci told James. They would come back for him another time.