26
HE DOG, THE FRIEND of Crazy Horse, said the chief made no secret of what he wanted: a home in the north on Beaver Creek near the Tongue River, right in the middle of the last good hunting country. “First, I want them to place my agency on Beaver Creek,” Crazy Horse told He Dog. “Then I will go to Washington.” He left no doubt about the place he had in mind; he sent his sister’s husband, Club Man, to place a stone marker on the spot.
The chief did not believe he had to fight for his home in the north; it had been promised to him. But then General Crook broke his promise about the buffalo hunt. In almost the same moment Wapostan Ska, the chief of scouts who wore a white hat, told Crazy Horse that Crook wanted him to go to Washington—now.
Crazy Horse said no. He made no threats. “I came here for peace,” he said. “No matter if my own relatives pointed a gun at my head and ordered me to change that word, I would not change it.” He Dog heard his friend say this many times. But he would not go to Washington until his agency had been placed on Beaver Creek. “You have my horses and my guns,” he told the soldiers, according to He Dog. “I have only my tent and my will. You got me to come here and you can keep me here by force if you choose, but you cannot make me go anywhere that I refuse to go.”1
The stubbornness of the chief at first irritated and eventually angered Lieutenant Clark, but it did not worry him. Clark believed the chief’s power “could be easily broken” because over the summer with patient talk and promises of preferment he had steadily peeled away the allegiance of a number of Crazy Horse’s leading men. Among them was one of his oldest friends and allies, Little Big Man, who had been a war comrade since the early 1860s. Little Big Man had arrived at the Red Cloud Agency with a reputation as dangerous and untrustworthy. “Small but exceedingly vicious,” was the way one of General Crook’s aides, Captain Azor Nickerson, described him. John Bourke called him “crafty,” and added, “Little Big Man I did not like in those days.” He was speaking of the first month or two after Crazy Horse surrendered. “He and I became better friends afterwards,” Bourke continued—meaning after Little Big Man broke away from Crazy Horse, and tied his fate to the whites.2
By mid-August Little Big Man had shifted his loyalty completely. When Clark wrote Crook to urge the breaking of Crazy Horse he assured the general, “There is no trouble with Little Big Man.” Clark’s fellow officer Lieutenant Henry R. Lemly later said, “Little Big Man … was known to the officers as a paid spy in the employ of the agency.” It was evidently ambition that brought the change; it was said that Little Big Man dreamed of becoming a bigger chief than Spotted Tail. But Little Big Man represented the break with Crazy Horse as a quarrel. Horn Chips, the wicasa wakan who had fashioned powerful medicine for Crazy Horse, said a woman brought on the trouble. “Crazy Horse,” he said, “had forbidden Little Big Man to sleep with one of the squaws. They got into a fight over it and were never friends after that.”
“I don’t know what it was about,” an Army sergeant said of the quarrel in 1904, “but at all events the two were deadly enemies from that time forward.”3 Sometime in May, Little Big Man moved his people and their lodges away from Crazy Horse’s camp, some two miles up Little White Clay Creek, closer to Red Cloud and to the agency itself.
The sergeant, William F. Kelly, was stationed at Camp Robinson with Company F, 14th Infantry. In June, friction between Crazy Horse and Little Big Man erupted openly during a regular beef issue as the acting agent, Lieutenant Charles A. Johnson, was counting out animals. The interpreter—probably Billy Garnett—told Johnson that Little Big Man wanted the beeves for his people to be issued separately from those for Crazy Horse. Kelly described the tense moment as Johnson, who was also commander of the sergeant’s Company F, realized the difficulty of his position.
“The acting agent was perplexed,” said Kelly of his lieutenant. “He realized that whatever he did he was certain to arouse the anger of one or the other of the two men.” Johnson asked the interpreter what he should do. “The latter replied that he thought the best plan would be to issue rations as requested by Little Big Man,” said Kelly.
So Johnson instructed the chief herder, Ben Tibbetts, to count off the beeves for the people of Little Big Man, whose young men were waiting on horseback with guns and bows and arrows to run the animals as they were released. “Crazy Horse flew into a fury,” Kelly said, “refusing to accept his share, and riding back to camp followed by his people.”
Clark sent a measured report of this affair to Schuyler, who was passing on news of the agencies to Crook. “Some of the agency bucks here are a little restless,” Clark related; “Johnson has had some little trouble with his beef issue.” A later report in the Cheyenne Leader filled in a detail or two: “Crazy Horse refused to take the annuity goods provided for him, and his band, and did not take them while Lt. Johnson was agent.”
On the 1st of July, when James Irwin took over the agency from Johnson, he was told that part of the problem was the matter of signing for the receipt of supplies. “Many of them object to signing any paper,” Irwin wrote the commissioner of Indian affairs. The Indians had been tricked and bullied into signing away the Black Hills the previous year. They remained angry and suspicious. They could not read, did not know what they were signing, and did not trust the whites to tell them. Demanding that the Indians sign for every beef and bag of flour, Irwin concluded, would only “increase rather than diminish their deep-seated distrust.” He asked Washington to abandon the signing requirement. By the end of the month, Crazy Horse had resumed picking up rations for his band.4
The warrior Crazy Horse, who disliked speech making and politics, found himself as the summer progressed increasingly isolated. Lieutenant Clark sought his company, but many whites hated him for his victory over Custer. On a visit to the agency, W. R. Felton, the bitter survivor of an episode known as the Metz massacre, reported to the Cheyenne Leader that “Crazy Horse … is strutting around the agency bigger than a lord.” Rumor had it that Indians were paying “extravagant prices” for guns and ammunition; one report said even “an ordinary rifle” was worth four ponies. “A large number of young bucks have gone back north,” the Cheyenne Leader reported a few days after the big sun dance in Crazy Horse’s camp.
No one disliked or distrusted Crazy Horse more than Lieutenant Fred Calhoun, whose brother James had died with Custer. At the end of July, Calhoun left Camp Robinson for Kansas to join the families of other 7th Cavalry officers killed at the Little Bighorn. Scores of relatives were gathering in the town of Leavenworth, near the fort of the same name, where they waited for the military detachment bringing in the bodies of their dead fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Calhoun did not believe the Indian war was over. “In a year or two they will all go out again,” he had written to a friend in Cincinnati in April. In his view no peace would last until the Indians had received “a good sound whipping.” On August 3, he passed by the five caskets in the post chapel, then joined the procession of three hundred carriages to the cemetery for interment. By August 7 he was back at Camp Robinson, a post he detested.5
Calhoun’s hatred for Crazy Horse was intense but impotent; as a military officer under orders there was nothing he could do but grumble. More dangerous was the malice of the chiefs, who came to envy and resent Crazy Horse. They said and did nothing openly, but were active in a hidden way. At the end of the big council on Friday, July 27, when Lieutenant Clark had read out General Crook’s telegram describing the plans for the trip to Washington, the Indians made preparations for the traditional feast. Young Man Afraid of His Horses suggested that all should gather at the lodges of the new men at the agency, Crazy Horse and Little Big Man. At that moment the mood of the Indians was good; they were still expecting to go on the buffalo hunt promised by Crook. James Irwin made the customary gesture and promised to donate coffee, sugar, and three beeves for the feast. Sitting with Irwin at the council was an inspector or “special agent” from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, a man named Benjamin K. Shopp. These traveling inspectors moved from one agency to another, reporting on administrative matters or checking into claims of theft of supplies or inadequate rations. The two were frequently related. Shopp had come to report on Irwin’s progress in taking over control of the Oglala. The special agent noted that on July 27 several of the chiefs got up and left the council when Man Afraid suggested that Crazy Horse should host the feast. This struck Shopp as odd. No one had protested Man Afraid’s choice. There were no heated words or angry looks. Then why, Shopp wondered, did Red Cloud, still the biggest of the chiefs at the agency which bore his name, get up with one or two others and leave the room?
It seemed a small thing, but that evening at about ten o’clock, Shopp learned what lay behind the chiefs’ abrupt departure. Two Indians arrived at Irwin’s door, interrupting his conversation with Shopp, and pressed the agent to send at once for the interpreter. Shopp is our only witness to this conversation; he was new to the agency and did not note the name of the interpreter who arrived. Irwin told the Indians the hour was late; he asked if their trouble could not wait till morning. The Indians insisted the matter was too urgent for delay, and the interpreter was soon putting into English a flood of angry complaint about the attention and favoritism shown to Crazy Horse despite his recent arrival at the agency, his reputation for being difficult and stubborn, his history of hostility toward the whites, and his unpredictability. Irwin’s visitors said they spoke not for themselves but for Red Cloud and the chiefs of several other bands. It was apparent to Shopp that all had turned against Crazy Horse in a decisive way. In a report two weeks later, he summarized their angry complaint for the commissioner of Indian affairs:
Crazy Horse … had always been regarded by them as an unreconstructed Indian; he had constantly evinced feelings of unfriendliness towards the others; he was sullen, morose and discontented at times; he seemed to be chafing under restraints; and in their opinion was only waiting for a favorable opportunity to leave the agency and never return … The other Indians these men represented had no confidence in him. He was tricky and unfaithful to others, and very selfish as to the personal interests of his own tribe … These Indians told Dr. Irwin that they came with no lie—they simply presented a true story.6
Thus was planted a seed of growing distrust. Irwin, a month into the job, had expressed no anxious thoughts about Crazy Horse before the late-night visit on July 27, but now he told Shopp “that Crazy Horse and his band were not in a friendly attitude towards the government really, although nominally they were.” He said “trouble was to be apprehended” if Crazy Horse was turned loose to go hunting. Later, Shopp talked to the chiefs at the Spotted Tail Agency. “All the Indians here too,” he reported to the commissioner on August 15, “entertain the same ideas about the unfriendliness of Crazy Horse, etc.” This late-night tale bearing did not cause the trouble that followed, but it marks the first official expression of a swelling chorus of apprehensions about the chief that rapidly turned into a crisis.7
The wedge was the trip to Washington. Many of the chief’s friends and relatives, including his new wife and the interpreter John Provost, warned that the whites would kill him if he went, but most of his old war comrades favored the trip. Clark had patiently talked them around, visiting them in their lodges in the first ten days of August, or inviting them to his quarters at Camp Robinson. Big Road, Iron Crow, and He Dog, old allies of Crazy Horse, all urged him to go to Washington. The chief was whip-sawed by the conflicting advice and whispered warnings. The man driving events seems to have been Red Cloud, who sent his emissaries to warn Irwin that Crazy Horse was restive and could not be trusted. But at the same time, He Dog believed, many of those who warned Crazy Horse against going to Washington were put up to it by Red Cloud.
“That about going to Washington is only a decoy,” he was told by one of his uncles, Spotted Crow. “They want to get you away from us and then they will have you in their power.” Even Little Big Man, who had moved his camp closer to Red Cloud’s, said the whites would kill Crazy Horse if he went, and others said the same. “If you go to Washington,” they told him, “they are going to kill you … they are going to stuff you in the mouth of a cannon, and kill you.”8
But whites were not the only danger. Camp gossip said some of the chiefs also wanted to kill Crazy Horse. “One day during that summer,” it was said later by friends of Crazy Horse, a group of angry Indians took their “grievances” to his lodge. Only one of the group was named: Little Bear, whom the whites called Sioux Bob. According to Ghost Bear, Sioux Bob had an interest in Ellen Larrabee, the new wife of the chief, and had perhaps even been living with her. Horn Chips said there was an element of sexual tension in the quarrel between Crazy Horse and Little Big Man. What “grievance” brought Little Bear and the others to the lodge of Crazy Horse is not clear, but sexual tension and political jealousy are both common drivers of violence.
The story of Little Bear’s angry confrontation with Crazy Horse was related by George Colhoff, who collected information for a winter count from eight Oglala, all close friends of Crazy Horse, including the brothers He Dog, Little Shield, and Short Bull. Colhoff was told that Little Bear and two or three others challenged Crazy Horse “for some grievances that they had against him and shot his horse.” Among the Sioux, the shooting or stabbing of a man’s horse was the last stage of anger before open fighting began. It will be recalled that Bull Bear in 1841 provoked the plotting that ended his life when he stabbed and killed the horse of Smoke. Now the enemies of Crazy Horse killed the chief’s horse in front of his lodge. “But Crazy Horse did not do anything about it,” it was said.9
There is one additional source of tension and distrust to be considered. At the beginning of the summer, the scout Frank Grouard had been one of the few persons at the Red Cloud Agency who could speak easily with Crazy Horse. “Frank is the only one whom Crazy Horse seems at all glad to see,” Lieutenant Bourke wrote in his diary. “To the rest of the world he is sullen and gloomy.” For two years, it will be remembered, Grouard had lived in He Dog’s lodge as a member of Crazy Horse’s band. Grouard said later he had been close to the chief’s family, and that Crazy Horse’s father had given him a winter count that the old man had painted on deerskin. On the very night he had surrendered, it was Grouard who took Bourke to have dinner with Crazy Horse in the chief’s lodge. “We all believed,” Bourke recorded, “that if anybody could make Crazy Horse unbosom himself, Frank was the man.”10
Thus matters stood when Grouard left the agency in late May with the party of scouts sent out to guide Generals Crook and Sheridan up to the Little Bighorn. He was absent until late July, when Clark noted that “since his return,” Grouard has “done what he could” to persuade Crazy Horse to listen to the friends who urged him to go to Washington. Clark sensed nothing wrong. But according to Louis Bordeaux, the interpreter at Camp Sheridan, something had changed. Grouard by early August was no longer easy around Crazy Horse. At about that time, the scout later told his biographer, Crazy Horse “told Grouard he was looking for death and believed it would soon come to him.” This surprising confidence evidently troubled Grouard; a man looking for death was dangerous. “Grouard became afraid and very fearful of Crazy Horse,” Bordeaux reported. The scout told Bordeaux that Crazy Horse had turned against him, and now sought revenge for Grouard’s treachery in guiding the soldiers who attacked the village on Powder River. Bordeaux said he knew this was true; Crazy Horse himself had told him so.11
But Grouard had another cause for worry, in Bordeaux’s view. Crazy Horse told Bordeaux, and perhaps others, that Grouard was not what he seemed. He was no captive in the Indian camps, as he insisted to whites, but a full member of the band who fought alongside the rest. Crazy Horse said Grouard “used to kill mail carriers and bring in the mail and read the letters and tell Crazy Horse where the soldiers were, etc.” What Crazy Horse told Bordeaux appeared to confirm other charges against the scout which had been circulating since November 1876 when one of Grouard’s former employers, a freighter named George Boyd, had published a long article in the Bismarck Tribune claiming the Sandwich Islander had taken part in fights against whites, had secretly warned the Indians of the impending attack at Slim Buttes, and had served as a kind of adviser to Sitting Bull. As Bordeaux described it, Crazy Horse endangered Grouard from two directions at once: by threatening to take revenge for his betrayal of the Indians, and by denouncing him to whites as a renegade. Trapped between this rock and a hard place, Bordeaux said, Grouard concluded that “by stirring up trouble, Crazy Horse might be disposed of in some manner … Accordingly, Grouard began to circulate stories to the effect that Crazy Horse was becoming discontented and trying to stir up another war.”12
The chief who disliked talk was now, in early August, at the center of a whirlpool of conflicting rumor and accusation. The allies of Red Cloud and Frank Grouard were spreading stories of his unreliability, sullen discontent, and growing hostility toward the whites. The chief’s young wife and other intimates were telling him that the whites planned to lure him away from the agency so they could kill him. It was common gossip in the camps that Red Cloud and Spotted Tail wanted Crazy Horse out of the way.
The chief, threatened and unsure what to do, was closely watched in this period by spies reporting to Lieutenant Clark, who wrote later that one of them was openly courting a girl who lived near the chief. It was the custom for a young Oglala in love to intercept the woman he hoped to win as she made her way through the camp on some errand. If she did not object he would enfold her in his blanket, pulling it snugly around the two of them, covering head and all, so they might whisper or embrace unmolested. It was not unusual for such a couple to stand in the same spot for hours. In this manner, Clark wrote, his spy planted himself within earshot of the chief’s lodge, noting all that was said. By mid-August, Clark understood that Crazy Horse was torn and undecided, urged this way and that. He cautioned other officers to be patient; he said Crazy Horse told him that “he wanted to do right, but wanted plenty of time to consider.”
Clark’s fellow officer Captain George Randall picked up the same impression in late July on returning to Camp Sheridan from a long scout through the Black Hills in pursuit of white horse thieves. He told Lieutenant Lee and Captain Daniel Burke, commander at Sheridan, that Crazy Horse should be given plenty of leeway. “Crazy Horse was all right, was doing just what they wanted him to do,” Randall said. “If they would let him alone and not ‘buzz’ him so much he would come out all right.”13
But Clark did not heed his own counsel. The general stir among the Indians, and the difficulty of knowing what was passing through the chief’s mind, left him anxious about unanswered questions. Why, for example, had 150 northern Indians left the Spotted Tail Agency to join Crazy Horse on Little White Clay Creek in mid-July? Among them was Black Fox, married to a sister of Touch the Clouds and one of Crazy Horse’s closest war comrades. What was the significance, a month later, of a second visit to the Spotted Tail Agency by Crazy Horse’s friend and ally Two Lance, who tried to coax back another group of northern Indians?
There was nothing especially threatening about this effort. Transfers were common. Relatives wanted to camp near each other. But a big group breaking north with Crazy Horse would obviously threaten more trouble than a small group. A spy in the northern camp reassured Captain Burke that Two Lance got “a very cool reception.” Colonel Bradley at Camp Robinson was told that the Spotted Tail Indians all believed this rebuff of Two Lance would help persuade Crazy Horse to make the trip to Washington. Clark was not so sure. His trust in the chief was eroding.14
Everything hung on Crazy Horse’s willingness to go to Washington. To pressure him one last time, Colonel Bradley summoned Crazy Horse for a conversation at Camp Robinson on August 15. Bradley was a quiet, reasoning kind of man. He did not threaten Crazy Horse with arrest and punitive detail on the water wagon—bluster typical of Bradley’s predecessor, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie. He merely told Crazy Horse and Little Big Man that the Great Father in Washington had written to him and asked for the chiefs to come. “Little Big Man immediately gave his consent to go,” said Billy Garnett later, “but Crazy Horse would give no satisfactory reply as to what he would do.”
Both Bradley and Lee, the acting agent at Spotted Tail, were probably referring to this conversation when they later described the escalating quarrel, Bradley in a letter to his mother, Lee in a memoir. “Crazy Horse became more uneasy than ever,” Bradley related to his mother in early September. “[He] told us he did not intend to stay with us, that he had never agreed to stay at any agency, and that he intended to take his band away.”
To the request to go to Washington, Crazy Horse did not merely “give no satisfactory reply” to Bradley’s request, according to Lee. He rejected it with a flourish. “He was not hunting for any great father,” the chief said, as Lee remembered it. “His father was with him, and there was no Great Father between him and the Great Spirit.”15
But the whites kept the pressure up. On August 17, Crook sent another telegram to Camp Robinson, where Clark gathered all the chiefs in council, including Crazy Horse, to listen to the general’s words as Clark read the telegram aloud to all. He did not leave the matter there but urged and implored the chief:
I explained to him that in addition to the other interests involved, you wished him to come on with the others and work with you … That the president wanted him to come and you were anxious to have him go; that it was important and necessary for us all to work earnestly and honestly together in this matter, etc. etc.16
We should take Clark at his word, and assume that he meant what he said, and that he believed that talk, and the meeting with the president in Washington, and patient goodwill, could resolve all difficulties. But his patience ended decisively three days later when Crazy Horse returned to the military post to say all he had to say about the trip to Washington. He named several men from his own band whom he wished to go. The other chiefs—Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, Little Wound, and the rest—he wanted “thrown away and only the men he had picked … sent on.” Crazy Horse said the whites knew where he wanted his agency. He had been saying it all summer: Beaver Creek on Tongue River, the valley where Club Man had placed his stone marker. If the people in Washington wanted to know more, then the men he sent could tell them.
Clark insisted to Crook on August 18 that he had responded to these peremptory conditions “kindly and firmly,” then ended with a request for a clear yes or no. “He had been asked if he would work with the president and yourself in this matter and I wanted to know if he would do so.”
The chief’s reply, as related by Clark: “He had already stated he was not going.”
Both pride and frustration crept into Clark’s angry response. “Force is the only thing that will work out a good condition in this man’s mind,” he wrote to Crook. “I am reluctantly forced to this conclusion, because I have claimed and felt all along that any Indian could be ‘worked’ by other means; but absolute force is the only thing for him.”
About a week after this heated encounter, Crazy Horse had a dream. Clark called it “a most remarkable dream,” and recorded it in his diary. It seems likely he was told of the dream by one of his spies.
While walking on the prairie near his camp one day he came across a dead eagle. He went to his tepee and gloomily sat there for many hours afterwards. Being asked by some of his people as to what was the matter, he said “that he had found his dead body on the prairie near by,” and a night or two after this he dreamt that he was on an elevated plateau riding a white pony. He was surrounded by his enemies and big guns (cannons), and he was killed, but not with a bullet. He had always claimed that he bore a charmed life, and could not be killed by a bullet.
The dream is recorded by one other contemporary—Frank Grouard—who added a detail. He said that Crazy Horse was watching the eagle soaring in the sky when “presently it seemed to fold its wings and fall.” When Crazy Horse came up to the eagle he saw that its body had been pierced not by a bullet, but by an arrow, and he recognized that the eagle was himself.17