13
IN EARLY SUMMER, IT was the habit of the buffalo to move westerly up the Yellowstone, crossing from one north-flowing river valley to the next, drawing the Indians in their wake. By June the big village of Sioux and Cheyenne was camped on the Rosebud, where it was growing almost daily with new arrivals from the agencies. The chiefs had been urging the young men to let the whites alone, but trouble seemed inevitable. Scouts had reported a big force of white soldiers to the west, near the point where the Bighorn River emptied into the Yellowstone. Indians arriving from the agencies on the Missouri said soldiers were coming that way, too. On June 9 some northern Cheyenne hoping to steal horses from the whites happened across a big Army camp on the headwaters of the Tongue—General Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, in fact, but the Indians, led by a Cheyenne in his late twenties named Little Hawk, did not know that. An effort to run off the soldier horses failed and the Cheyenne, perhaps a dozen men in all, showed themselves on a bluff across the river, overlooking the camp. For no good reason they began to fire into the camp. Soldiers scrambled for cover and an officer’s favorite horse was wounded in the leg. The skirmish ended when the soldiers charged the Indians on the bluff and sent them running. Crook thought “a hundred or so” Indians had fired into the camp. The Chicago Times reporter John Finerty put their number at fifty. Bourke believed they were Sioux sent by Crazy Horse to make good on his threat to attack as soon as Crook’s men “touched the waters of the Tongue.” The Cheyenne gave up their horse-stealing raid to carry the news back to the big camp on the Rosebud, about forty miles distant.1
The chiefs in the big camp all knew by mid-June that white soldiers were converging on them from three directions, but they were encouraged by their own numbers, steadily growing as young men from the agencies came in, and by a sense that the sky beings favored their cause. This good news had been delivered to Sitting Bull, best known among the Sioux as a spiritual leader, not a war leader. Twice that spring he had experienced powerful visions foretelling the future. The first came in the third week of May when the chief had climbed to a hilltop to pray. Later, speaking to a gathering of leading men back in the camp, he described what had happened. On the hilltop he had prepared himself, then prayed, and after a time fell asleep. In a dream he saw a cloud of dust propelled by wind as if charging into a skyscape wall of billowing clouds that looked, in Sitting Bull’s dream, something like a village of tipis camped before a range of mountains. From the east the cloud of dust came and thunder crashed when it collided with the sky village of clouds. Sitting Bull explained to the others that the dust cloud was a force of white soldiers, the sky village was their own big camp, and the storm meant a big fight was coming. If the Sioux and the Cheyenne kept watch and remained alert, the chief said, they would win a big victory.2
A week later Sitting Bull prayed again and this time vowed to sacrifice his flesh during the sun dance. The village was camped on the Rosebud. It was early June, two or three days before the Cheyenne Little Hawk discovered Crook’s camp at the headwaters of the Tongue. The dance on these days was conducted by the Hunkpapa, but of course all the bands in the big village gathered to watch. A sun dance is not a one-day affair; preparations begin weeks, even months in advance. The climax starts with the choosing of a center pole, made from a straight cottonwood tree. This year it was Crazy Horse’s friend Good Weasel who cut down the tree and oversaw its removal to the dance ground. It is on the fourth day that the sacrifice occurs.
In the past Sitting Bull had danced in the classic way, tied to the sun dance pole in the center of the dance ground by rawhide straps pulling on wooden skewers inserted beneath the flesh and muscle of his chest. This time he had something different in mind. First the chief purified himself with a sweat in the lodge, then he seated himself on the ground, smoked in the sacred way, and finally leaned back against the dance pole. He was now assisted by his adopted brother, an Assiniboine captured in battle when a boy about 1857. At the time some of the warriors had wanted to kill the boy, but Sitting Bull had spared him, just as he would do later when some of the chiefs wanted to kill Frank Grouard. The adopted brother was sometimes called Stays Back, sometimes Kills Plenty, sometimes Little Assiniboine, and sometimes Jumping Bull—the name of Sitting Bull’s father. Now in the sun dance, Jumping Bull, using an awl and a knife, began to cut out bits of Sitting Bull’s flesh. With the awl he pricked a bit of skin and lifted it up. With the knife he cut off a piece about the size of a grain of wheat. He took fifty flesh offerings from one arm, then fifty from the other.
The purpose of this ordeal was not to show bravery, but to offer a blood sacrifice to the unseen powers of the world, to make a gift. Sacrifice was a token of gratitude to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit; a pinch of tobacco before smoking, a bit of food before eating, a splash of water on the ground before drinking were routinely sacrificed to acknowledge the greater gift of life. A small sacrifice was appropriate to a small request. A hundred pieces of flesh opening a hundred streams of blood was a big sacrifice. In this way Sitting Bull was praying for the lives of his people, who were threatened by the columns of soldiers invading their country.
As the blood began to flow Sitting Bull cried out in prayer. When the cutting was done he got up and danced around the pole for many hours until at last, exhausted, he fell unconscious to the ground. His helpers revived him with cold water. When his eyes opened the chief told his uncle Black Moon, one of his helpers in the sun dance, what he had seen. Black Moon then repeated his words in a big voice to the whole crowd gathered around.
Sitting Bull had seen a great many white soldiers in the sky—as many as locusts during a plague—but the soldiers were upside down and they were falling into the Indian camp. A voice in his dream told the chief there would be a big fight and the Indians would win. “I give you these,” the voice said, “because they have no ears”—that is, all the soldiers would die.3 This dream made a powerful impression on all who heard it described.
A few days after Sitting Bull’s vision, the Cheyenne Little Hawk with some friends went out again on a scout to the south, hoping to steal horses from the white soldiers. The first night they stopped in the Wolf Mountains. The next day about noon on the Rosebud they killed a buffalo bull and stopped to roast some meat. No sooner was it cooking than some buffalo cows appeared over a hill. These were much better for eating, so Little Hawk and a few others rode to see if they might kill one. Then Crooked Nose, who was tending the fire, signaled that he saw some men in the distance. Little Hawk thought they were probably Sioux, and he decided to sneak up on them; it was a joke he had in mind, but he proceeded like a man taking the necessary precautions on the plains. He rode up a ravine, got off his horse, carefully made his way to the crest of the hill. His friends followed him.
On the plains, every man who hoped to live would take care to see without being seen. Little Hawk raised his head slowly—it is movement that the eye picks up first—then lowered his head again. In a low voice—a very low voice—he told his friends there were soldiers over that hill—“it seemed as if the whole earth were black with soldiers”—and they were right there. The whole party crept away, mounted their horses, rode down into the brush along the Rosebud, and took off for the big camp a day’s ride to the north and west. That first section of their escape was rough—Little Hawk said later that “he left a good many locks of his hair in the brush.”4
When Little Hawk and his friends reached the camp with their news after a hard ride the people became greatly excited. Some of the women were frightened and even began to strike their tipis; many of the young men wanted to prepare for war and ride out at once, but the chiefs—Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and others meeting in council—at first said no. The camp criers—eyapaha—went out to announce the chiefs’ decision: “Young men, leave the soldiers alone unless they attack us.”5
But the young men refused to accept these directions. That night they began to slip out of their respective camps and head south, more of them all the time until at least five hundred were on their way to attack the soldiers. At that point the chiefs realized they could not avoid a fight, and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse also prepared for war, then headed south across country toward the Rosebud, where the soldiers had been seen. Sitting Bull was still recovering from swollen eyes and arms, the result of staring at the sun and sacrificing the hundred bits of flesh. He was in no condition to fight and in any event was beyond the age when a man customarily went to war. For Crazy Horse it was different. He did not sacrifice his flesh in the sun dance in this or any other year. He had been chosen war leader of the big camp and he rode out toward the Rosebud with many of his close friends from other fights—among them were He Dog and his brothers, Bad Heart Bull, Short Bull, and Little Shield. Others named were Black Deer, Good Weasel, who had been in the fight where High Backbone had been killed, and Kicking Bear, the man with the bad heart who had killed Frank Appleton at the Red Cloud Agency.
Not since the Bozeman War had the Sioux gone out in such numbers to attack soldiers, and they went prepared, dressed in their war clothes, with faces and horses painted in the right way, wearing the protective amulets called wotawe, singing their sacred songs. Some Indians said the warriors did not number more than 750 in all; others said maybe a thousand. Only a few had the best new guns—Henry or Winchester repeating rifles. Others had the one-shot military guns using cartridges, the kind Crazy Horse called “open and shoot,” or old trade guns, much repaired. The Cheyenne Wooden Leg said he brought his six-shooter. Perhaps two-thirds of the Indians had firearms of one kind or another. But it was not numbers or weapons alone that made the Sioux strong, in their view; it was the protection that comes from the favor of Wakan Tanka and the power acquired in dreams or visions.6
June was the month of gathering, feasting, and dancing—not only the sun dance but others as well, some for fun, like the night dance that brought the young men and women together, and dances of the men’s societies to pray for help and strength. Just before the fight on the Rosebud, according to He Dog, the cult dreamers had conducted some of their most powerful dances, elaborate ceremonies invoking the special power of the black-tailed deer, the elk, and the bear.7 All are sources of power, and the religion of the Sioux was an intellectual discipline for understanding and partaking in that power.
Sioux religion is a complex body of thought that defies neat description, but at its heart is a sense of the world as fluid and interconnected, controlled by an animating power that inhabits the Four Winds. This power is sometimes called Taku Skanskan—“that which stirs” or “something that moves”8—a godlike spirit or entity that shares its power with every creature and thing. These in turn can grant favor or withhold it. On the spirit level, accessible principally in visions or dreams, all creatures and things speak a common language. What they say is sometimes transparent, sometimes obscure. The men whites call medicine men the Sioux call wicasa wakan, or men sharing in holy or sacred power, as opposed to pejuta wicasa, who are herbal doctors. The sacred medicine men can query or intercede with Wakan Tanka, and can interpret the instructions received in visions or dreams, thereby helping men to control the power given to them by the animal or natural world. These powers reside not only in the world of the spirit but in things themselves—the speed of the hawk, for example, in the body of a hawk; the power of the eagle in an eagle’s talon; the ferocity of the bear in a bear’s tooth or claw; the elk’s power to attract females with his bugling call in the horn or ivory tooth or dewclaws of the elk. These physical things, properly prepared, share their inherent power with the man who carries them on his person or ties them to his shield or lance. It is the same with the representation of things: the image of a dragonfly gives a man some element or aspect of the quickness of the dragonfly; the zigzag lightning streak down the leg of a horse gives it the trampling power of thunder, making it fearful to enemies; a drawing of a bear or even of its claws can convey the actual power and ferocity of the bear.9
When Sitting Bull’s twenty-six-year-old nephew White Bull joined the Indians riding toward the Rosebud it was not only his “open and shoot” carbine that he carried to make him strong. In two other ways he was prepared as well. First he dressed for battle in the finest clothes he owned or could borrow. He wore leggings of woolen trade cloth in dark blue, a favorite color of the Sioux. Beaded strips ran down each leg, with blue triangles on a white background. The beading of his moccasins matched his leggings. Over his regular loincloth he wore a long breechcloth of red flannel reaching to his ankles front and back. To complete his array he borrowed from his brother-in-law Bad Lake a single trail warbonnet with alternating groups of seven white eagle feathers and then four red feathers indicating the many wounds which Bad Lake had received in battle. White Bull donned all this splendid garb, he said, because it made him feel brave and helped him fight well. Besides, if he was killed in battle he did not want men to sneer at his body lying on the ground, and say, “This was a poor man … See how shabby he lies there.”
But more important was White Bull’s wotawe—his war charm—which hung on a thong across his chest from right shoulder to left side. Under his left arm supported by the thong was a hoop of rawhide, and attached to the hoop were the tail of a buffalo, the first and strongest of the creatures that lived on the surface of the earth; then a feather from an eagle, first among the creatures that fly in the air; and finally four small leather pouches, each containing different kinds of earth with magical properties. His horse, a roan, was painted with lightning streaks in red down his legs, from the horse’s ears in front and from the hip in back, right down to the hoof. In the mane and tail of the roan White Bull had tied golden eagle feathers. In White Bull’s view the warbonnet and the feathers on his horse made the two of them handsome; the wotawe under his arm and the painted lightning streaks down the horse’s legs made them strong.10
Crazy Horse too went into battle with the aid of a wotawe, prepared for him by a friend and mentor, the medicine man Ptehe Woptuha, whose name in Lakota meant something like the crushed residue of a pulverized buffalo horn. Whites called him Horn Chips, or just Chips.11 It is said that Horn Chips was three or four years older than Crazy Horse, that his father and mother died when he was still a boy, and that after he went to live with a grandmother the cruelty of village children made him so unhappy he determined to kill himself. But on his way to the spot where he planned to end his life, Horn Chips was stopped by the voice of Wakan Tanka telling him no, he had another destiny—to become a great man. The voice told him “to go to a high mountain, dig a hole four feet deep, cover it with boughs, and stay there four days with no food or drink.”12 Horn Chips did as the voice directed and was rewarded with a dream in which a snake came to him with instructions. Later, he also dreamed of eagles, thunder beings, and rock, all sources of great power.
It was Horn Chips who had interpreted for Crazy Horse the meaning of his vision many years earlier, which the twelve-year-old Billy Garnett had heard Crazy Horse describe. In the vision he had seen a man emerging from the lake on a horse. Horn Chips had prepared protective charms for Crazy Horse. He directed that Crazy Horse should wear only one feather, plucked from the center of the tail of a war eagle. From an eagle’s wing bone Horn Chips made for him a whistle to blow as he rode into battle. About the year 1862 or 1863, according to Red Feather, Horn Chips prepared for Crazy Horse the most powerful of all his protections. It was made from a rock, drilled through the center, which Crazy Horse was to wear on a thong under his left arm. Another tiny stone he wore behind his left ear. Such stones were known as tunkan wasicun—spirit rocks; they possessed magical properties given by their nature, their shape, their source, or the songs sung over them.13
Chips was a stone dreamer; he went about with painted stones in a medicine bag. With the aid of these stones, which could fly through the air, Chips could find lost things, horses, or people. According to Ota Kte (Kills Plenty), the stones “could be heard striking the teepee and after we moved into houses I have heard them dropping down the chimney and have seen them lying about on the floor where they had fallen.”14 It was commonly believed by the Oglala that Crazy Horse was protected by the wotawe Horn Chips had given him. With their aid, he could hide from bullets in battle, or bullets were knocked away by the power that dwelt in his stone.
But that was not all. It was said that Horn Chips conferred power on Crazy Horse in many other ways. On his body the chief carried a medicine bundle or war sack. There are several descriptions of the sack itself and what it contained, some provided by those who knew him, others by a later generation for whom Crazy Horse had already become a mythic figure. Some say the chief’s bundle was wrapped in deerskin, suspended on a braided thong. Bundles typically were made of the skin of a small animal like a badger, weasel, or otter. They might be decorated with beads or quills. The sacred objects within would be carefully wrapped in trade cloth, or tied in small pouches of leather or muslin. A medicine bundle of this type was prepared for the white medical doctor James Walker in the 1890s by the Brulé medicine man Short Bull,15 who called it a sicun.
Short Bull chose the material, which consisted of a soft-tanned fawn skin as the container, the tusk of a bear, the claw of an eagle, the rattle of a rattlesnake, a wisp of human hair, and a wisp of sweetgrass. The holy men consecrated the container by each invoking the potency of his sicun to make the container sacred. Then I was required to smear a little of my blood on each of the things to be enclosed in the container. When this was done I was required to hold them all in my hands while the holy men placed their hands on my head and implored the gods to give me their aid when I should need it. Then the articles were carefully enclosed in the container and it was folded about them and bound with cords made of sinew, each holy man tying a knot in the cords, muttering his special formula while doing so.
The medicine bundle given to Crazy Horse by Horn Chips would have been prepared in a similar way. A grandson of James Bordeaux the trader, Peter Bordeaux, who was born two years after the chief’s death, said that this medicine bundle contained the dry seed of the wild aster, mixed with the dried heart and brain of an eagle. A son of Fire Thunder reported that Crazy Horse “had on his person a little medicine bag. Just before each battle he would chew a small portion of this medicine and rub it on his body.”16 Chips himself said that eagle claws were part of the medicine bundle, and that he further instructed Crazy Horse to make “a zigzag streak with red earth from the top of his forehead, downwards and to one side of his nose at the base, to the point of the chin. This was done with one finger.” He added that the chief “striped his horse with a mould from the earth.”17 Many of these details were included in an account by Eagle Elk, who described what he had watched Crazy Horse do as he readied himself to go into battle:
He always wore a strand of braided buckskin—at the lower end was something like medicine tied up in the buckskin. He had an eagle wing whistle tied on. He had it with him all the time. Just before the start of a battle when they were ready to go into it, he got off his pony and got a little dirt from a molehill and put it between the ears of his horse and then on the hips of the horse and then he took some and got in front of the horse and throws it over toward the tail, and then he got around behind the horse and threw some toward his head. Then he went up to the horse and brushed it off and rubbed it on. Then he rubbed a little on his hand and over his head. Then he took a spotted eagle feather and put it upside down on the back of his head instead of standing up, as most did … Chips was the one who directed Crazy Horse to do these things so he would not be hurt.18
The dirt from the molehill had the power to make his horse invisible from the front and the rear, and to hide from enemies both the chief himself and the weapon in his hand. Thus Crazy Horse rode to war protected and strengthened by magic, secret knowledge, the power of animal guardians, the favor of gods and spirits. Many stories survive of the ways in which he used sacred power. It is evident he believed they kept him from harm and helped him defeat his enemies. But he was not the only one to benefit from the favor of the spirit beings. When he came onto the battlefield, his friends said, everybody felt stronger. Crazy Horse had dreamed of horses, which were thunder beings. As a thunder dreamer he enjoyed power that went beyond the ordinary calculation of weapons, numbers, or clever plans.
Some of his friends were also thunder dreamers, including Kicking Bear, a man Crazy Horse called cousin. In the summer of 1902, when the wars were long over, Kicking Bear told the anthropologist Clark Wissler what thunder dreamers could do. Their power came from Wakinyan, the sky bird whose beating wings were heard by men as the sound of thunder. Inyan, the rock, was the first of all things. Inyan created Wakinyan as companion, the second of all things. To dream of Wakinyan could complicate a man’s life almost beyond imagining, requiring him to behave as a heyoka—a contrary, who laughed when he was sad, plunged his hand into boiling water, went naked when it was cold. But there was a second kind of thunder dreamer and these also had very great power—so great that they could control the weather. By this it was not meant only that they could provide a blue day for a ceremonial event, or make it rain during a dry season. Their power was much greater and more explicit. Kicking Bear described this power to Wissler. Surprised once in the open by an approaching storm, Kicking Bear said, he did not hide as the Sioux usually did. They were frightened by lightning and for good reason; lightning often killed men and horses trapped in the open, sometimes many horses at once when they were all pressed together, tails to the storm. On this occasion, Kicking Bear related, he took a pipe and climbed a hill directly in the path of the storm as if inviting the sky beings to strike. He lit his pipe in the sacred way and offered a prayer to the Great Spirit and with the power granted him … he split the storm. By this Kicking Bear intended no figure of speech. He meant that the roiling clouds and black sky and flashes of lightning divided in two and passed on either side of him—split down the middle by Kicking Bear’s power. “He says that anyone can do this if they are worthy,” reported Wissler.19
That is what rode south toward the Rosebud on the night of June 16–17, 1876: thunder dreamers, storm splitters, men who could turn aside bullets, men on horses that flew like hawks or darted like dragonflies. They came with power as real as a whirlwind, as if the whole natural world—the bears and the buffalo, the storm clouds and the lightning—were moving in tandem with the Indians, protecting them and making them strong. Frank Grouard had tried to explain the power of the Indians, but it is doubtful that Crook’s officers understood what he was telling them. The whites all thought they were a match for any rabble of ignorant savages.