1

“When we were young, all we thought about was going to war.”

IT WAS NEARING MIDDAY on the shortest day of the year in 1866 when Indians attacked a detachment of soldiers sent out from Fort Phil Kearny in northern Wyoming to cut firewood for the post. The weather was mild and clear. A light powdering of recent snow lingered in the shadows of the hills. The Indians could not be seen from the fort itself, but a soldier stationed on a nearby hill signaled the opening of the attack. Through the gates of the fort emerged a relief party of eighty men, cavalry in the lead, infantry hurrying behind. They circled north around some low hills, passing out of sight of the fort. Ahead of the soldiers, retreating back up the slope of a ridge, were ten Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, all practicing the oldest ruse of warfare on the plains. Each man in his own way was hurrying without hurrying, like a quail skittering through the brush away from her nest, trailing a wing, showing herself to hungry fox or coyote. It was the custom of decoys to lure and tantalize—to taunt the soldiers with shouted insults, to show their buttocks, to dismount and check their horses’ feet as if they were lame. The decoys would linger back, just at the edge of rifle shot, almost within reach.¹

This moment had a long history. Fort Phil Kearny was the first of three posts established in the early summer of 1866 to protect whites traveling north to the Montana goldfields along a new road named after the man who had mapped it out a year earlier, John Bozeman. For twenty-five years the Sioux Indians had traded peacefully with whites at Fort Laramie two hundred miles to the south and east, but the Bozeman Road threatened their last and best hunting country. The chiefs spoke plainly; the whites must give up the road or face war. In June, they had been invited to gather at Fort Laramie, where white officials hoped to patch together some kind of agreement for use of the road. A friendly chief of the Brulé Sioux warned an Army officer that talk was futile. “There is a treaty being made at Laramie with the Sioux that are in the country where you are going,” Standing Elk told an officer heading north. “The fighting men in that country have not come to Laramie, and you will have to fight them. They will not give you the road unless you whip them.”²

All that summer Fort Phil Kearny was under virtual siege by the Indians. They prowled the country daily, watching or signaling from the ridges. They often attacked soldiers sent out to cut wood or hay and they killed numerous travelers—thirty-three by the end of August, according to the commander of the fort. At every chance the Indians ran off horses and cattle, threatening the fort with hunger. When the fall buffalo hunting was over, thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne converged on the isolated fort, but they hid themselves, taking care that the soldiers never saw more than a few at a time. During one midday raid on the fort’s dwindling cattle herd in November, soldiers on horseback suddenly charged out of the fort in angry disorder, infuriated by the endless attacks. This set the Indians to thinking.

In early December the decoy trick almost succeeded in luring reckless soldiers into an ambush. On December 19, the Indians tried again, but the decoys were too clumsy, or the soldiers too cautious; they turned back when the Indians passed up over the ridge north of the fort. But two days later, encouraged by a promise of success from a “two-souled person” or winkte, the Indians organized a second effort on a still larger scale and this time everything was done right. The great mass of warriors hid themselves in the grass and brush on the far side of the long ridge as it sloped down and away from the fort. No overexcited young men dashed out ahead of the others. The horses were held back out of the way. The decoys were convincing. The eighty soldiers never slacked their rush up the ridge after the men they feared were getting away.

In that group of ten warriors retreating back up the ridge, but not too quickly, nor lingering too obviously, were some of the leading men of the Oglala Sioux—Man That Owns a Sword, American Horse, and Crazy Horse.³ All were respected warriors, men in their late twenties, known for courage in battle. Among that group Crazy Horse did not impress at a casual glance. He was a slender man of middle height. He dressed simply. He wore his hair loose with a few feathers or sometimes the dried skin of a sparrow hawk fixed in his hair. For battle he painted himself with white hail spots. A zigzag line of paint down his horse’s shoulder and leg gave it the power of lightning. He had dusted his horse with the powdery earth from a prairie dog mound to protect it from bullets. His usual weapons were a stone war club and a gun. If he ever fired an arrow at a white man it was not recorded.

None of the whites would have recognized Crazy Horse on December 21, 1866. Only a few had met him or knew his name. But Crazy Horse and the others were about to lure eighty soldiers into an ambush where all would die in the second of the three humiliating defeats inflicted on the U.S. Army by the Sioux Indians and their Cheyenne allies. Ten years later Crazy Horse would do it again. But no trickery would be involved in that third and greatest of Indian victories. His friend He Dog, who was in both fights, said Crazy Horse won the battle of the Little Bighorn with a sudden rush in the right spot at the right moment, splitting the enemy force in two—the kind of masterstroke explained only by native genius, in answer to a prayer.

The Sioux Indians of the northern plains had a phrase for the leading men of the band—wicasa yatapika, “men that are talked about.” From earliest times, whites had called the leader of any Indian community the “chief,” and the word matched the reality: in any band, one man was generally respected, listened to, and followed more than any other. But among the Sioux no chief ruled as an autocrat for long; wise chiefs consulted others and were supported in turn by various camp officials, men with authority over decisions about war, hunting, the movements of the band, and the enforcement of decisions and tribal law. For each office the Sioux language provided a distinct term, but all might be called chiefs without doing violence to the meaning, and all were drawn from the wicasa yatapika. The talk about those men generally started with some notable deed, and the deed was most often performed in battle.

From an early age the man who would be remembered as Crazy Horse attracted attention, first for his skill as a hunter, then for his courage in war. Many stories are told about the early life of Crazy Horse but few are completely firm. His friend and religious mentor Horn Chips said he was born in the fall on a creek near a sacred hill known as Bear Butte in what is now South Dakota; his friend He Dog said that Crazy Horse and He Dog were born “in the same year and at the same season of the year”—probably 1838, but possibly 1840. The name Crazy Horse belonged to his father before him, an Oglala of the band led by Smoke; when the band split after a killing in 1841 the father remained in the north with Smoke’s people. The mother of Crazy Horse was a Miniconjou named Rattle Blanket Woman who “took a rope and hung herself to a tree” when the boy was about four years old. The reason is unclear; she may have been grieving over the death of a brother of her husband. In 1844–45, the elder Crazy Horse led a war party against the Shoshone Indians to the west, probably seeking revenge for the killing of this brother, whose name may have been He Crow, who may have been a lover of Rattle Blanket Woman, and whose death may have led to her suicide. It is impossible after so many years to be certain about any of it. To a boy of four all of this would have been frightening and vague.

Some facts are a little firmer. The elder Crazy Horse took a second wife said to be a relative of the Brulé chief Spotted Tail, possibly even the chief’s sister. All witnesses agree that the boy was called Curly Hair until he was about ten years old, and some say that for a few years afterward he was known as His Horse in Sight.⁴

Of his earliest life we know only what his friend He Dog said: “We grew up together in the same band, played together, courted the girls together, and fought together.” Childhood ended early among the Oglala and by the time Crazy Horse was fifteen or sixteen in the mid-1850s his life was increasingly absorbed by episodes of war and violence. The stories that survive follow a familiar pattern: despite great danger horses were stolen, an enemy was killed, or a friend was rescued. On one early raid against the Pawnee when he “was just a very young boy,” according to Eagle Elk, Crazy Horse was shot through the arm while rushing an enemy to count coup—that is, to touch him with his hand or a weapon. “From that time he was talked about,” said Eagle Elk. Many accounts of Crazy Horse’s early fights and raids end with a similar remark—that he was first into the fray, that his name was known, that people talked about him.

“When we were young,” said his friend and mentor Horn Chips, “all we thought about was going to war.” It was fame they sought; to be talked about brought respect and position. “Crazy Horse wanted to get to the highest station.”⁵

When Crazy Horse was about eighteen he lived for a year with the Brulé Sioux, probably with relatives of his father’s second wife. The Brulé were bloodily attacked about that time by the American Army, but Crazy Horse’s friends in later life did not remark on that. It was his abrupt return to the Oglala which excited curiosity. His friend He Dog asked around to learn what had happened. “I was told he had to come back because he had killed a Winnebago woman,” said He Dog.⁶ Where the transgression lay is not clear; women were often killed in battle, and He Dog himself later killed a Crow woman, sometime around 1870, although telling about it made him uneasy, as if he were ashamed.⁷

It was at about this time, in the later 1850s, that Crazy Horse acquired the name he was to carry for the rest of his life. His friend Horn Chips said the new name was given to him after his horse ran around wildly—crazily—during a fight with the Shoshones. He Dog offered two stories; one said Crazy Horse got the name when his horse ran down an enemy woman who was hoeing her corn. But it is He Dog’s second story that offers the most detail and makes the most sense. About 1855 or 1856 the young man, then still known as His Horse in Sight, took part in a fight with Arapahos, returning with two scalps. For most of the middle decades of the nineteenth century the Arapahos were allies of the Sioux, and of the Oglala in particular, but on one occasion the Oglala chief known as Red Cloud led an attack on a group of Arapahos who were on their way to visit the Prairie Gros Ventres, traditional enemies of the Oglala. This may also have been the occasion when Crazy Horse rescued a leading man of the Miniconjou named Hump, whose horse had been shot. In any event, the young man’s feat—two scalps taken from enemies forted up on a rocky hilltop—made the father proud.

It was a custom among the Sioux to celebrate a son’s achievement with a feast and the giving away of presents. When a boy killed his first buffalo his father might ask the crier to call out the news throughout the camp, then feed those who came to hear about the feat and perhaps give a horse, or even several horses, to people in need. After the fight with the Arapahos, in which His Horse in Sight twice charged the enemy hiding among the rocks, the father gave the son his own name, Crazy Horse. For the next two decades the father was known by an old nickname, Worm, for which the Lakota word is Waglula.⁸

The meaning of Crazy Horse’s name requires some explanation. In Lakota it is Tasunka Witko, and a literal translation would read “His Horse Is Crazy.” Tasunka is the word the Lakota coined for horse sometime in the early 1700s, a combination of sunka (dog) and tatanka (big). The word witko is as rich with meaning as the English word “swoon.” It might be variously translated as “head in a whirl,” delirious, thinking in all directions at once, possessed by a vision, in a trance. In the sign language of the plains witkowas indicated by rotating the hand in a circular motion, but the word’s meaning was far from simply “crazy” in the sense of the vernacular English. The meaning of the name Tasunka Witko would be something like this: his horse is imbued with a sacred power drawn from formidable spiritual sources, and specifically from the thunder beings who roil the sky in storms. The operative word is power in the classic Lakota sense—imbued with force and significance. In short, the name of Crazy Horse implied that the bearer was a person of great promise and consequence, and soon his name and his feats were the talk of the plains. Honors followed.

In the late 1860s Crazy Horse and He Dog led a war party west of the Big Horn Mountains to raid the Crow or Shoshone Indians, traditional enemies of the Oglala. On their return to the village they were met by a large group who had come out to greet them, singing praise songs and inviting them back for a feast and the bestowal of an important gift. “The whole tribe,” He Dog said, honored the two warriors with a gift of lances decorated with feathers and fur. These were not weapons but emblems of membership in the Kangi Yuha—the Crow Owners society, named after the dried crow skins attached near the base of the spears. “These spears were each three or four hundred years old,” said He Dog, “and were given by the older generation to those in the younger generation who had best lived the life of a warrior.”⁹

The lances brought honor and a stern duty. Members of the Kangi Yuha accepted a “no-flight” obligation: in battle they must plant the lance in the ground and stand fast until death or a friend released them.

The ten decoys on December 21, 1866, were men honored for their exploits in war. All were respected and widely known, all were committed to driving the white soldiers back down the Bozeman Road. But the man controlling events, the man who came closest to having the power to command, was Red Cloud, who was nearing fifty years of age and had dominated the northern Oglala for twenty-five years. Whites would call the war over the Bozeman Road “Red Cloud’s War”; he was the man more than any other who determined when it began, and when it would end. His influence was unmatched during Crazy Horse’s life. His hand was often evident in the unfolding of events. He would be standing only a few feet away when Crazy Horse was killed.

Red Cloud was born about 1821, some said on the very night that a meteor streaked across the nighttime sky of the northern plains. “A large roaring star fell,” Cloud Shield recorded in his winter count. “It came from the east and shot out sparks of fire along its course.” White Cow Killer described the sound as “a great noise”; The Flame said it made a “hissing.”¹⁰

Oglala were not born equal. The fame of a father or grandfather made a difference, and a chief’s son was expected to succeed him—if he measured up to the job. Red Cloud’s mother, Walks as She Thinks, was a sister of Smoke, one of the two leading Oglala chiefs. While the boy was still in the womb his father died, possibly of drink, and the name Red Cloud (Mahpiya Luta) was passed to a nephew, then about ten years old, who was like a brother to the half-orphaned boy. But in 1837 on a raid into southern Nebraska the cousin was overwhelmed in battle by the Pawnee. When Cloud Shield returned with news of his death, the whole band clamored for revenge. In later life the chief told the trader Sam Deon that despite his mother’s opposition he insisted on joining the war party going out to kill Pawnee to avenge his cousin’s death. At that time the sixteen-year-old boy was known as Tall Hollow Horn, but when the people saw him approaching to join the warriors they cried out, “Red Cloud is coming! Red Cloud is coming!” In that moment he assumed the name that had been carried by his cousin, his father, and his grandfather.¹¹

It was war that dominated the life of Red Cloud. On several occasions in later life he said that he had counted eighty coups or had been in eighty battles.¹² In about 1840, when Red Cloud was already recognized as a leading warrior of the Oglala, he was shot through with a Pawnee arrow during a raid on a village on the Middle Loup. The arrow penetrated his body up to the feathers, and the iron arrowhead emerged entirely from his back a few inches from his spine. At the shock of the wound Red Cloud lost consciousness; he felt nothing when one of his fellow warriors cut the sinew binding the iron arrowhead in place and then pulled the wooden shaft back through Red Cloud’s body. Two months passed before he fully regained his strength, and even then the wound periodically bothered him for the rest of his life.¹³ When he told his story to Sam Deon, who had married one of his wife’s sisters, Red Cloud’s tale was a list of battles. Included was the attack on the Arapaho village where Crazy Horse distinguished himself and won his name. Sometimes Red Cloud went out on raids at the head of a war party, sometimes he went alone. He made a song about his life as a warrior which went,

The coyotes howl over me.

That is what I have been hearing.

And the owls hoot over me.

That is what I have been hearing.

What am I looking for?

My enemies.

I am not afraid.¹⁴

But Red Cloud’s position among the Sioux was not the result of raiding traditional enemies. Nor was it the result of having a large family, although he did, or because he was the son of a noted man, although he was.¹⁵ Red Cloud won his position by killing a leading chief of the Oglala—the climax of a long-festering animosity between the chief named Bull Bear and Red Cloud’s uncle, his mother’s brother, the chief named Smoke. Crazy Horse was only a few years old when this killing took place, but he would have been present in the camp because his father was a member of Smoke’s band. The killing was the signal event in Oglala history before the tribe’s confinement to a reservation. Crazy Horse would have grown up hearing stories about this killing; from them he would have learned the harsh truth of the way chiefs were made and deposed.

In the 1830s, Smoke and Bull Bear were each recognized as the leader of about half the Oglala. Both were friendly to the few whites who came to trap and trade. In 1834, Bull Bear brought his people south to trade at the post near the Platte River that would later be called Fort Laramie, and one of his daughters, Bear Robe, married the French trapper Henry Chatillon, whom the Oglala called Yellowhaired Whiteman. Chatillon would later tell the story of Bull Bear and Smoke to the young American writer Francis Parkman. In 1835, following Bull Bear’s lead, Smoke also brought his people south to the Laramie plains, and the two bands often camped near each other. The bands had long been known as the Koyas and the Bad Faces (Ite Sica), but they were also known for their chiefs and were called the Bear people or the Smoke people.

What first caused the enmity of the two chiefs is not recorded. By reputation Bull Bear was “fierce and impetuous” and “recognized no will but his own,” but the watercolor portrait painted of the chief in 1837 by Alfred Jacob Miller shows a handsome man of serene aspect. Two years later a German doctor and naturalist, wandering Nebraska, encountered a different sort of Bull Bear, and described him as “rather aged, and of a squat, thick figure.” It was said that the chief often invited the opinion of his leading men, but in the end he did as he pleased. Smoke seems to have been a more accommodating man, but a line was crossed in 1840 or 1841 when the bands were camped together. The incident was described by Bull Bear’s son-in-law Henry Chatillon to Francis Parkman, who had come to the Indian country to write a book. In his journal for June 23, 1846, Parkman wrote,

Bull Bear’s connexions were numerous and powerful. Smoke and he once quarrelled. Bull Bear ran for his gun and bow, and Smoke withdrew to his lodge, Bull Bear challenged him to come out, but Smoke, fearing the vengeance of the enemy’s relatives in case he should kill him, remained quiet, on which Bull Bear shot three of his horses.¹⁶

The killing of Smoke’s horses was a blood offense, and Smoke’s refusal to fight, whatever the motive, was inevitably a source of shame for his relatives, among whom was the twenty-year-old Red Cloud. There were two ways for dealing with difficult or oppressive chiefs at the time: splitting off to form a new band, or killing the offender. In November 1841, the humiliation of Smoke was squared in a bloody fray variously described as an orchestrated murder or a drunken brawl.

That autumn the two bands were camped near each other on a creek called the Chugwater not far from Fort Laramie. Traders brought some kegs of whiskey into the camps as a present for the Oglala but the word “whiskey” does not adequately describe the poisonous swill routinely prepared for the Indian trade by mixing grain alcohol with water, then adding a measure of tobacco juice, perhaps some molasses, and enough red pepper to make it burn going down. Whiskey was the backbone of the fur trade in the 1830s and ’40s; once drinking, Indians might pay anything for more. A band on a drunk was ugly and dangerous. When a fight broke out, one white trader wrote, “it was likely to be serious, for they knew but two ways to fight—with whips and clubs, and then with the more deadly weapons.”¹⁷ Bloody clashes were routine, killings common. But the settling of accounts with Bull Bear was something different; for years it was the news of the plains. Stories multiplied about what happened on Chugwater Creek, and their details refused to line up neatly. But all accounts agreed on the core event: Bull Bear died, and it was Red Cloud who killed him.

The Indians called the place Buffalo Falls—Tatanka Hinhpaya. Whites bringing striped Mexican blankets and silver jewelry came to trade with the Oglala, but first they opened some of the one-gallon wooden kegs filled with whiskey brought by the traders. Drinking led to shouting, and shouting to fighting. It was said later that Bull Bear was angry at a young man of the Smoke people for running off with a girl related to the chief. As the fighting became general, Bull Bear or a friend shot and killed the young man’s father, or perhaps another relative. This early casualty might have been Yellow Lodge, the brother—others say brother-in-law—of Red Cloud. A Bad Face warrior named Trunk shouted a taunt: “Where is Red Cloud? Red Cloud, are you going to disgrace your father’s name?”

Some said that it had fallen to Red Cloud to avenge Smoke’s humiliation, that the brawling was staged to lure Bull Bear from his lodge, that Red Cloud was waiting for the chief when he emerged. Some said Red Cloud killed two people in the battle, others said it was three. When the fighting ended, by one account, eight Indians were dead or dying and another fourteen had been wounded. Chief among the victims was Bull Bear, who had fallen to the ground with a gunshot wound in the leg. Red Cloud rushed up to the injured man. “You are the cause of this,” he shouted, according to one story, and shot the chief in the head. A different story says Bull Bear did not die immediately, but lingered for a month, then died of blood poisoning.¹⁸

The Oglala believed that no crime was worse than killing a relative or a member of the band; they said that the breath of a man guilty of such a killing would develop a bad smell, and all might know of his crime. But revenge killings were different; Red Cloud had killed the man who killed his brother or was in any event responsible—somehow—for an out-of-control battle that led to the death of his brother. The killings therefore canceled each other out, it was said, and for this reason Red Cloud’s breath was clean, and people did not turn away from him.

From the killing of Bull Bear in the fall of 1841 Red Cloud was the dominant figure of his generation, a man of such personal authority and commanding force that Indians and whites alike always treated him as a prime mover of events, the man to watch. But it is also apparent that some stigma lingered from his killing of Bull Bear. His leading position was not denied, but it was not entirely recognized, either.

“Red Cloud was never a Short Hair,” said Short Bull, a younger brother of He Dog. By this he meant that Red Cloud was never formally recognized as a member of the chiefs’ society.¹⁹

Red Cloud was denied another honor as well. At wide intervals the chiefs’ society selected four camp officials called Ongloge Un, or Shirt Wearers, because they were permitted to wear the distinctive shirts traditionally made of two skins from bighorn sheep, often painted blue on the upper half and yellow on the lower. These were decorated across the shoulders and down each arm with dyed porcupine quills woven into bold strips of color, and with scalp locks—each a pinch of human hair, half as thick as a child’s little finger, wrapped with pericardium at the top and hanging free for eight or ten inches. The making of such a shirt involved much singing, feasting, and burning of aromatic strands of sweetgrass, whose smoke was believed to be cleansing. An Oglala leader was never recognized with greater public ceremony than when he was named a Shirt Wearer, given a shirt of his own, and instructed in the many and difficult duties of the Ongloge Un.²⁰

But despite Red Cloud’s record in battle and his long history as a leader of the Oglala, this honor was never given to him. “Those whose prowess and battle accomplishments and characters were undisputed were feasted and honored,” said Short Bull. “He Dog and Short Bull were so honored many times while Red Cloud was not, although he was a chief.”²¹

Red Cloud was a chief, not a general. He had no power to tell others what to do in the fight at Fort Phil Kearney. Many leading men after long discussion chose the strategy, picked the site for an ambush, and named the decoys. After their early failures, the still-determined Sioux summoned the aid of the spirit world, giving the task to one of the men called a winkte—a contraction of the Lakota winyanktehca, or “two-souled person,” by which was meant a man with womanly qualities. A winkte was not a hermaphrodite, as some early writers would have it, but an effeminate man—in fact, a homosexual. Berdache was the Cheyenne word.²²

The Sioux were of two minds about winktes but considered them mysterious (wakan), and called on them for certain kinds of magic or sacred power. Sometimes winktes were asked to name children, for which the price was a horse. Sometimes they were asked to read the future. On December 20, 1866, the Sioux, preparing another attack on the soldiers at Fort Phil Kearny, dispatched a winkte on a sorrel horse on a symbolic scout for the enemy. He rode with a black cloth over his head, blowing on a sacred whistle made from the wing bone of an eagle as he dashed back and forth over the landscape, then returned to a group of chiefs with his fists clenched and saying, “I have ten men, five in each hand—do you want them?”

The chiefs said no, that was not enough, they had come ready to fight more enemies than that, and they sent the winkte out again.

Twice more he dashed off on the sorrel horse, blowing his eagle-bone whistle, but each time the number of enemy he brought back in his fists was not enough. When he came back the fourth time he shouted, “Answer me quickly—I have a hundred or more.” At this all the Indians began to shout and yell, and after the battle the next day it was often called the Battle of a Hundred in the Hand.²³

With this assurance of a big victory, the Sioux and their allies prepared again to lure the soldiers out of the fort. The mass of Indians concealed themselves among the ravines and brush of the long hill—the Cheyenne and Miniconjou on the eastern slope, the Oglala and others on the west. The decoys rode on ahead with a larger group of attackers to threaten the train of woodcutters that left the fort each morning for the hills to the north and west. Among these ten may have been Crazy Horse’s two close friends Lone Bear and He Dog who both took part in the battle that followed.

It was late in the morning when the picket on Pilot Hill signaled the fort that Indians were approaching. The gates opened and soldiers sallied forth, not quite a hundred strong. Eighty-one, in fact, was the number of men who rode or marched out at quick time with Captain William Fetterman that morning. As they moved up the valley along the western side of Lodge Trail Ridge the mass of Indian attackers disappeared as they had two days earlier, and the decoys began to pull back toward the north, going up over the ridge and then retreating down the long hill toward the forks of Peno Creek in the valley beyond.

The Indians lying in ambush on the slopes of the long hill pinched the noses of their ponies so they wouldn’t whinny. The white cavalry came steadily down the hill, not charging but firing at the retreating decoys while the infantry hurried along behind. By the time the decoys got to the very bottom of the long hill and dashed across Peno Creek all the whites were between the hidden Indians. This was the moment. With a great shout and drumming of horses’ hooves, the Indians charged up and out of the brushy ravines and long grass. The soldiers hesitated and then turned back up the hill. By the time the Indians caught up with the infantry they had taken shelter among some rocks partway back up the hill. The cavalry had been in front going down, and they soon overtook the infantry going back up, quickly reaching the top of the hill. There the sheer weight of enemies brought them to a stop and a desperate battle began—a pushing, shoving, club-and-knife sort of fighting which the Sioux called “stirring gravy.”²⁴

Among the infantry in the rocks were two white civilians armed with Henry repeating rifles.²⁵ They kept up a hot fire, the brass cartridge shells piling up beside them, and it was some time before the last of the panicked infantry around these two were killed by the Indians. Hunts the Enemy, the brother of Man That Owns a Sword, recorded that he counted a coup when he dashed in among soldiers forted up behind rocks, and it is likely this is where he did it. The battle then surged up the hill toward the cavalry where Fetterman, still mounted, was in command. In the charge on these men American Horse rode his own mount directly into Fetterman. The collision of their horses threw the captain to the ground. In a moment American Horse jumped down, knife in hand, and killed Fetterman before he could regain his feet—a battle honor that would help convince the Oglala chiefs to name him a Shirt Wearer.²⁶

Few Indians were armed with guns on this day. When the guns fell silent it meant the whites had quit fighting, and a noisy, shouting melee followed while a thousand or more Indians swarmed over the field. They finished off soldiers they found still breathing or moving, not leaving it to chance. They tugged off boots, then stabbed iron arrow points between the soldiers’ toes. At the same time they began to look for their own dead, care for their wounded, gather up fallen guns, pull cavalry tunics and trousers from bodies, empty pockets of coin and paper money. The coins they would turn into ornaments, the greenbacks were later given as playthings to children back at camp. The fight had lasted perhaps ninety minutes. The Cheyenne White Elk said,

After all were dead a dog was seen running away, barking, and someone called out: “All are dead but the dog; let him carry the news to the fort.” But someone else cried out: “No, do not let even a dog get away”; and a young man shot at it with his arrow and killed it.²⁷

While the Indians were cleaning up the field and the first groups began to move off through the valley of Peno Creek, a second detachment of soldiers appeared on the brow of Lodge Trail Ridge, evidently drawn by the sounds of battle. The Indians shouted and called to the soldiers, inviting them to come and fight, but the soldiers waited beyond rifle shot. With them were five wagons. As the Indians retreated down the long hill and made their way north across open country, shouting and singing their victory, the detachment of soldiers cautiously made their way forward over the rough ground. Soon they reached the first bodies of the men killed with Fetterman and began to load them into the wagons.

Later that night, after the soldiers and wagons had gone back to the fort, a few Indians returned to look for missing friends. The mild day had turned cold. A brief, spitting snow about sundown had stopped. Two of the searchers were the Miniconjou chief known as Hump, or High Backbone, and his friend Crazy Horse. They were looking for a third friend, companion of many war parties, Lone Bear. He was known as unlucky, often wounded in battle. He had been in the thick of the fighting, but when it was over no one knew where he was to be found.

With the end of the snow the sky had cleared again; the moon was full on this longest night of the year, and its brilliance reflected by the scattering of snow made night seem almost day.²⁸ Lone Bear was not dead when Hump and Crazy Horse found him, but he had been badly wounded, he had lost blood, his arms and legs were frozen. This was one of the moments people talked about in later years. Our only substantial account comes from the enigmatic Frank Grouard, who lived with Crazy Horse’s friend He Dog in the early 1870s. Grouard was told, probably by He Dog himself, that the night after the Fetterman fight Hump cried when he and Crazy Horse found their dying friend. There was nothing unusual in that; Indians made no secret of crying, but wept their grief loudly. Grouard added that Lone Bear died in the arms of Crazy Horse. Another account reported only that Lone Bear was shot in the leg, blood poisoning set in, and he died.²⁹

Red Cloud’s war lasted another year and a half, ending in the spring of 1868 when the chiefs gathered at Fort Laramie to sign a new treaty. Crazy Horse and his friends were not among the thirty-nine Oglala who touched the pen, signaling agreement. This treaty, the last with an Indian tribe to be ratified by the United States Senate, established a “Great Sioux Reservation” incorporating all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River. The government in Washington also recognized the right of the Sioux to ban all whites from a large tract of additional territory, agreed to close the Bozeman Road, and promised that no other lands belonging to the Sioux would be taken without the agreement of three-quarters of all adult males. The government soon regretted this promise. Fort Phil Kearny and the other posts were burned by the Indians as soon as the last soldiers marched out.

In May after signing the treaty the Oglala chiefs went back north sixty or seventy miles to a favored camping site near the headwaters of the Cheyenne River. Nearby were some large blocks of sandstone convenient for the whetting of knives. The people set up their lodges in groups composing a great circle on the flat between two creeks. In the center was the council lodge where the chiefs met to smoke and talk. On special occasions the lodge would be made up of two or three ordinary tipis set up in a row, making a kind of long shelter. Many hundreds of people could gather at such a lodge, some inside, others peering in from the outside. One day in late May or June 1868, a party of men on horseback began to circle around the Oglala camp, stopping first at the tipi of one man, then at the tipi of another, calling them to the council lodge.

As the men on horseback circled the camp, a group of boys were distracted from their play. Wanting to know what was going on they joined the crowd following the men on horseback. One of the boys was a mixed-blood who had just turned thirteen. His mother was Looks at Him, an Oglala of Red Cloud’s Ite Sica band. His father was an Army officer, commander for a time at Fort Laramie before he went away. The boy’s name was William. Like everyone in the camp, he knew the names of the four men being led to the big council lodge. All had distinguished themselves in the Battle of a Hundred in the Hand—Young Man Afraid of His Horses, Man That Owns a Sword, American Horse, and Crazy Horse. The boy William watched as the chiefs in the lodge solemnly named Crazy Horse and the others as the last Ongloge Un—the last Shirt Wearers of the Oglala tribe. Nine years later William would be present again during the last months of Crazy Horse’s life. He would listen while white men and Indians discussed the killing of Crazy Horse. He would be standing only a few feet away when Crazy Horse was stabbed. Again and again over the next fifty years he would describe what had happened. It seemed one had only to ask.