22
CRAZY HORSE MAY HAVE vowed to use a fork and learned to sit in a chair, but he did not abandon Oglala ways and in June 1877 his village presided over one of the largest sun dances ever held by the Sioux. A sun dance was not a casual affair. Preparations properly began when snow was still on the ground. One or more medicine men would begin to instruct those who would take part—men who sought the help of Tunkasila, or wished to give thanks for some special favor. Fast Thunder had danced when his only sister survived a serious illness. Red Fox danced after the war party on which he first killed an enemy. Black Wolf danced when the women and children escaped from soldiers by safely crossing the Platte River in 1865. The medicine man Sorrel Horse, who impressed John Bourke with his feats of magic, danced with heavy buffalo skulls attached to the skin of his arms and shoulders—he showed Bourke the scars. Hunts the Enemy cited his own sun dance scars as proof his word could be trusted. Preparation for the sun dance might involve prayer, fasting, the ceremony of the sweat bath, committing no violent acts, or forgoing sexual relations. Left Heron said that only a wicasa waste—a good man—could preside over the sun dance.
“A good man is one who had no bad thoughts or desires,” he explained, “who is not cruel to animals and treats them as human beings. A person like this would be chosen to paint his hands red in the Sun Dance.” Only a man with his hands painted red could touch or raise the sun dance pole, bless the dancers, or pierce their flesh. Every sun dance was a little different, according to the understanding of the man in charge, and of course the Sioux calendar allowed for setting no invariable date. Instead, the dance was held when the time was right, and the time was right, all agreed,
When the buffalo are fat
When new sprouts of sage are a span long
When chokecherries are ripening
When the moon is rising as the Sun is going down.1
June was usually the month chosen, but not always. In 1877, the four-day celebration of the sun dance held by the village of Crazy Horse began on the 26th of June. The dates are clear, but many other details about this sun dance are difficult to pin down. The Cheyenne Leader reported that the sun dance was run by Kill Eagle, a Blackfoot Sioux who had been at the Little Bighorn and soon after provided whites with one of the first Indian accounts of the battle. Many years later an Oglala named Dana Long Wolf said that the leader was a man named Fool Heart, with the help of three assistants. Others, whose fathers had witnessed the sun dance, said the man with red hands who pierced the flesh of the dancers was Fast Thunder. It is possible that one, all, or none of these men took part. Similar confusion attaches to the number and identity of those who danced. Colonel Bradley, the new commander at Camp Robinson, said that seven dancers were pierced on the fourth and final day. Lieutenant Schwatka estimated the number at “six to twelve.” Lieutenant Clark, who took a close interest in everything the Indians did, reports that in the beginning three men vowed to dance but that ten in all took part on the day of piercing. Clark did not record any of the dancers’ names, but many years later a son of Chase in Morning, brother of an Oglala killed at the Little Bighorn, reported the names of five dancers—all identified as blood cousins of Crazy Horse. The dancers named by James Chase in Morning were Eagle Thunder, Walking Eagle, and three well-known brothers who were all close companions of Crazy Horse: Kicking Bear, Black Fox, and Flying Hawk.2
The purpose of the sun dancers was to gain power, and their method was to endure pain and shed blood as a sacrifice. It was the blood that would make the deepest impression on Lieutenant Clark. The Oglala Left Heron said the sun dance was given in a vision to a medicine man named Iglukati (Stretches Himself), who conducted the first dance about seventy years after White Buffalo Woman taught the Sioux the proper use of the sacred pipe. Left Heron also noted that Iglukati received his vision about thirty-five years before the Sioux first encountered white men, which the Sioux winter counts generally date as occurring in the late 1700s.3 If these dates are correct then the sun dance witnessed by Clark, Bradley, and Schwatka was about a hundred years old.
Variants of the plains sun dance were encountered by whites on the upper Missouri in the 1830s, but many decades passed before anthropologists obtained a full description of all the prayers, songs, and beliefs incorporated in the dance. Clark was one of the first educated whites to witness and describe a sun dance, and he may have been the very first to have gone out on the first day of the ceremony to watch the moving of the sun dance pole—a carefully selected cottonwood tree, perhaps seventy-five feet tall, which branched at just the right distance above the ground. Billy Garnett was not surprised to find him on the scene. “He was quick to observe and get into anything brewing,” said Garnett of the lieutenant. Clark brought with him not only a lively curiosity but the authority of his position as commander of the three companies of Indian scouts, and as the special representative of General Crook.
Crazy Horse’s entire village of about a thousand turned out for the felling and moving of the sun dance pole on June 26. “Spring was radiant in her beauty,” Clark recorded, “and the savages decorated themselves and their ponies with crowns and shields of wild clematis and other foliage.” Old women howled, chanted, and sang as they crowded in around the designated tree while men distinguished for bravery approached and each took a swing or two at the tree with an ax. These men then handed sticks to the old women, each representing the gift of a pony. Thus blessed, the old women, Clark says, “chanted and danced more vigorously and hideously than before.”
Young women beautifully dressed in elk-tooth dresses also struck at the tree, which was actually felled by the headmen in charge of the ceremony. Using ropes, the headmen lifted up the tree and started in the direction of the sun dance ground a few miles away. But they did not go far before they lifted the tree onto the running gear of a wagon. Once unknown, wagons had now become common at the agencies; every leading man wanted the government to give him one. Sitting near Clark was an elderly Oglala who said he did not like to see a wagon used to move the tree. This was not the old way. He explained to the lieutenant that “he was afraid the Great Spirit looking down would see it, and would not like it.”
On the first day of the ceremony a kind of sham battle was traditionally staged as the sun dance pole approached the special camp prepared as a site. In 1877, according to Colonel Bradley, this camp was about seven miles north of the Red Cloud Agency on a flat near the White River. There, perhaps 250 lodges of the Crazy Horse people were arranged in a grand circle about a third of a mile in diameter. In the center of that grand circle was the sun dance arbor itself, a structure made of poles and covered with branches to form a kind of circular gallery big enough to shade the several thousand people who would gather beneath it. In the center of the ground surrounded by this gallery, about a hundred feet across, the sun dance pole would be erected.
But before this happened an effigy of a man was placed on the spot where the pole was to go—or perhaps just outside the dance ground on the approach to it; Lieutenant Clark and Billy Garnett, who both describe what happened next, are not quite clear on the point. On this occasion, Garnett tells us, the mixed-bloods (including himself) and the “friendly Indians” were assigned to represent one side in the sham battle, while the warriors in Crazy Horse’s village took the other. Perhaps inevitably, it was not just any generic battle that was reenacted, but the Custer fight which had taken place almost exactly a year earlier. Clark sat on a nearby hill and watched as the sham battle commenced. Both sides on horseback, with shouts and war cries, were to rush on the effigy and touch it, in effect counting coup, showing their prowess and bravery, and then engage in a running “fight,” lightly touching instead of striking violently at each other as they would in a genuine battle.
But almost immediately the sham battle veered toward a real one. The Crazy Horse Indians with their war clubs and bows charged right up to the mixed-bloods and “friendly Indians” and struck them solid, painful blows. Anger flared up in Garnett and the others. Pistols were drawn. As the mounted men charged each other with yells and gunshots, Clark felt he was watching the battle of a year ago—the same men wheeling about the flat, led by the same chief, had swept in and overwhelmed Custer and his soldiers. Garnett felt it too; something real had been unleashed. The Crazy Horse warriors were “killing” the friendlies as they had killed Custer. Real killing might have followed if Clark had not rushed down the hill just as the mixed-bloods, with their pistols drawn, were driving the Crazy Horse people away from the sun dance ground. Clark’s sudden arrival in the center of things, Garnett recorded, “stopped the firing and prevented what might have been a serious affair.”4
Clark remained in the middle of things for the whole of the next three days, his curiosity intact but his conscience under assault. He was not ready for what he saw. On the second day he watched the setting of the sun dance pole and on the third day he was present for the customary gathering of parents with small children at the foot of the pole. Blood was the coin of the sun dance. Iglukati had ruled that all should take part. “Even the children had to have their ears pierced,” said Left Heron. Clark saw no sense or beauty in it. Custom said that the parents of the children must not comfort them until the piercing had been accomplished. What the medicine men with their knives did to “these little wretches,” Clark wrote, was nothing more than “cutting holes in the ears of the babies.”
On the fourth day the shedding of blood reached its climax when the dancers were “mutilated … in this horrible worship called a Sun Dance.” With the word “horrible” he judges the event before he has described it. Throughout the day Clark busied himself with fieldwork, asked questions, and took notes. One of the Sioux explained to him that the whole of the sun dance ground and its enclosing gallery should be seen as a church. The grass and the sage tied to the pole represented Unci, Grandmother Earth. A cross was drawn at the foot of the pole to represent the sun and the stars. A careful observer might see that every particular of the Sioux view of the world, and of man’s relationship to the unseen power called Wakan Tanka, were incorporated into the sun dance. Clark acted the earnest student, but it was “the horrible”—the cutting, the bleeding, and the suffering—that impressed him.
How many whites gathered to watch on the fourth and final day is unknown, but Garnett, Clark, Schwatka, and Bradley were all there, and we may imagine that they sat together. There was only one member of the Christian clergy in that corner of Nebraska: the Reverend William J. Cleveland, who ministered to the Brulé at the Spotted Tail Agency. He may have been present and sitting with the officers. The day was clear, but violent winds from the south had been whipping up the white dust of the bare earth for more than a week—“dust storms that beat anything I ever saw,” wrote Bradley in his diary. The winds were so strong on the 29th that some whites gave up plans to attend the dance and never left Camp Robinson at all.5
But the Indians were not deterred. All the bands had gathered for the dance and the crowd was immense—Clark thought it reached six thousand. The sun dance pole had been painted with the colors of the four directions: black, red, yellow, and white. The upper branches shimmered with colored strips of cloth, pinches of tobacco tied in bits of cloth, medicine bags, and the tattered remnants of two silhouettes cut from rawhide of a man and a buffalo bull, both with exaggerated sexual organs. The air was filled with singing, chanting, and the high ululating cry of the women.
The shedding of blood began about two o’clock in the afternoon when the leader of the dance and his assistants cut small bits of flesh from the upper arms and shoulders of about twenty-five young men. In addition to the blood which ran freely down their arms the bodies of these young men were painted. “Later,” wrote Clark, “the women kinsfolk, wives, sisters and sweethearts came in singing, and had their arms slashed by the medicine man’s knife, thus endeavoring to support with their suffering the pain and torture undergone by the men.”
Finally it was the turn of the dancers themselves. Each had selected the form of sacrifice he was to make—some to drag buffalo skulls attached to the skin pierced above their shoulder blades, others to be pierced in the chest or back and then tied to the sun dance pole by leather thongs. Schwatka describes the procedure in fullest detail. When the moment came for piercing, the dancers lay on the ground, head nearest to the sun dance pole.
Each one of the young men presented himself to a medicine man, who took between his thumb and forefinger a fold of the loose skin of the breast, about half-way between the nipple and the collar bone, lifted it as high as possible, and then ran a very narrow-bladed but sharp knife through the skin underneath the hand. In the aperture thus made, and before the knife was withdrawn, a strong skewer of bone, about the size of a carpenter’s pencil was inserted. Then the knife blade was taken out, and over the projection of this skewer, backwards and forwards, alternately right and left, was thrown a figure-of-eight noose with a strong thong of dressed skin. This was tied to a long skin rope fastened, at its other extremity, to the top of the sun pole in the center of the arena. Both breasts are similarly punctured, the thongs from each converging and joining the rope which hangs from the pole. The whole object of the devotee is to break loose from these fetters.
Breaking loose meant tearing through the pierced skin. The sliver of bone “about the size of a carpenter’s pencil” says much; it was thick enough to withstand great stress, and needed to be, because the whole weight of the body of the dancers would be thrown against this bone piercing the skin of the chest.
When the dancers were ready they were led out to the end of the thongs attaching them to the sun dance pole. Drummers began to beat and the singing rose in intensity. Clenched between the teeth of each dancer was a whistle made from the ulnar bone of the wing of an eagle, and the high scree of these whistles was added to the din. With a mirror in his hand the dancer reflected the light of the sun. Then he pulled back against the thong attached to his chest, gently at first, according to Schwatka, “to get him used to the horrible pain.” Between whistles he shouts out and cries—“huge drops of perspiration pour down his greasy, painted skin.” In Clark’s description one can almost hear the dancer’s gasp as he threw himself full force back against the thongs, trying but failing to rip through the skin. “One or two were very weak-kneed, heart-sick with fear and fasting,” he wrote. “If I ever saw regret, it was on their painted faces.”
Colonel Bradley, a different kind of man, said the dancers went at it “with right good will.” He found the whole experience “very interesting.” Schwatka in contrast continues almost brutally explicit. As a dancer threw himself back, he writes, “every muscle stands out on his body in tortuous ridges, his swaying frame … being convulsed with shudders.” But tearing the skin does not come easy.
The wonderful strength and extensibility of the human skin is most forcibly and fearfully displayed in the strong struggles of the quivering victims. I have seen these bloody pieces of bone stretched to such a length from the devotee that his outstretched arms in front of him barely allow his fingers to touch them.
How long does it take a dancer to break free? Schwatka says, “generally in two or three hours.” Bradley thought not so long—“from fifteen minutes to an hour and a quarter.” It was in Clark that the horror ran deepest. “Horrible torture,” he called it. He shrank from describing “this horrible ceremony in detail.” But he watched till the end. After one man fainted his friends came forward and ripped him free. In the whole process Clark saw not just courage and endurance but anger tinged with despair. He seems to have sensed a terrible intensity of feeling in the dancers, something born of the moment when they gave up their guns, their ponies, and their freedom. The dance shouted defiance, a readiness, even a longing to die.
At about this time the Cheyenne chief known as Ice, also called White Bull, told Clark it hurt to think of what was happening to his people—“The spoilation of his country, the driving away of all the game, and the crowding out of existence of his people.” White Bull said “it made his heart heavy and sad to think of these things.” It was probably this same man who described to Clark the agony of making his mark on papers that sold his country: “The clouds pressed down close above me, and the earth seemed to tremble when the first paper was signed.”6
Like the Cheyenne, the Oglala knew their world was slipping away. In describing the suffering of the Crazy Horse dancers, Clark cites another sun dance he witnessed a few years later among the Ponca in the Indian Territory, where they had been forcibly removed to make room for the Sioux in their old home along the Missouri River. The Ponca, too, were “suffering great sadness at the loss of their country.” One man insisted that the incisions be made very deep, so deep he could not break free on his own. He instructed his companions to hitch a pony to his legs and drag him away from the pole by brute force—“Which was done,” Clark writes as if slamming his fist on the table. “Another cut off his little finger and ate it.”
Clark, Garnett, Schwatka, and Bradley while watching this spectacle all independently thought of the same thing: these were the Indians who had killed Custer—“the very ones,” Bradley wrote in his diary. A year and four days had passed since the shock of the greatest defeat ever suffered by whites on the plains. Clark had talked to Crazy Horse about the Custer fight. The lieutenant was under instruction to gather from the Indians an account of the battle. He knew that the chief believed he was protected by his magic—“he could not be killed by a bullet.” The chief told him that at the Little Bighorn he “had two ponies shot and killed under him.” Watching the dancers, Clark in his imagination saw the chief “in his demon-like way” riding into the confusion of Custer’s men to kill them with his club or his gun. Three hundred men had ridden into the Red Cloud Agency with Crazy Horse; all or almost all of them had been at the Little Bighorn. They had not been driven into the agency. The victors of the Little Bighorn thought things over, debated in council, and chose to come in. The Oglala sun dancers were not men who had been crushed, broken, or whipped. They glistened with sweat, courage, pride, and anger.
From the sun dance on June 29, 1877, we may date the beginning of the erosion of Lieutenant Clark’s confidence that he knew how to work the Indians.