28

“I can have him whenever I want him.”

DURING HIS DAYLONG RIDE north to Camp Robinson, Crook had plenty of time to think about the trouble brewing with Crazy Horse. Colonel Bradley thought Crook could still talk the chief around and it is likely that Crook thought so, too. But Crook was not sentimental about such matters; once he determined that a chief could not be worked around to a compliant way of thinking, the general hardened his heart against the man and acted vigorously to get him out of the way. Crook had hoped to make use of Crazy Horse by setting him against the other chiefs, and bringing them down a peg or two. But he did not make the mistake of thinking Crazy Horse harmless, or a man who could be pushed around. Crook paid his adversaries the respect of considering them dangerous. One such had been the Apache chief Eskiminzin, leader of a “saucy, impudent lot of cut-throats … [who] would walk through our camp in that defiant, impudent manner, as much as to say, ‘I would like to kill you just for the fun of it, just to see you kick.’ ”

Crook called him Skimmy, kept clear of his men, and wrote in his Autobiography, “I must confess I was afraid of them.”¹

Skimmy only looked daggers, but another Apache chief named Ochocama devised an elaborate plan to murder Crook at a council in September 1872. A Hualapai Indian scout delivered timely warning of the plot. As Crook and the chief exchanged greetings in the first moments, Ochocama would begin to roll a cigarette. Then he would light it. His first puff would be signal for another Indian to shoot and kill Crook.

Despite this warning, Crook went ahead with the meeting anyway, perhaps thinking it too good a chance to arrest the Indians he wanted. He made sure the Indians at the meeting were outnumbered by soldiers and mule skinners but he noted that even so a nervous Ochocama started to roll his cigarette. Then events parted from the script. An Indian stabbed a soldier, a shot was fired, and Ochocama’s confederate swung his rifle on Crook. The shot that might have killed him went wild when a lieutenant kicked the Indian’s rifle aside. A furious hand-to-hand fight ensued; several Indians were killed or wounded while the rest, including Ochocama, succeeded in escaping to the mountains, leaving Crook with a deepened respect for the difficulty of laying hands on a wild Indian. He did not forget this episode. We might liken the effect to what occurs in the mind of a man who has once stepped over a log onto a rattlesnake. He will think twice about every log for the rest of his life.²

Another problem chief who could not be tamed with words was the Tonto Apache known as Deltchay,³ who promised peace in April 1873 but ran off to the mountains with his fighting men a month later. As this pattern was repeated over the next several years Crook developed an especially intense dislike for Deltchay. In frequent letters the general directed his young lieutenant, Walter Schuyler, in his efforts first to manage Deltchay, then to chase him down and capture him, and finally, when all patience had been exhausted, to kill him and prove it with the delivery of Deltchay’s head. Little of this extended campaign is recorded in Crook’s autobiography or preserved among his official papers. Crook sometimes instructed Schuyler to burn his letters after reading them, but for whatever reason (perhaps pride) Schuyler held on to the Deltchay letters. In these letters we may observe Crook’s mind at work.⁴

Crook’s care in planning is evident in the letter he wrote to Schuyler at Camp Verde, Arizona, in September 1873. Deltchay had come in promising peace yet again but made so much trouble that Schuyler sought permission to arrest him. Crook supported the lieutenant’s plan and suggested he might begin with a raid on some of Deltchay’s confederates still hiding in the nearby mountains. “Killing a few of them,” Crook wrote, “will go to weaken Delche’s influence and make his capture more easy, as doubtless this insubordination in the main originates with him.” For the arrest itself he urged caution, careful planning, swift action, and the use of overwhelming force.

Get sufficient men from the post so as to prevent a collision and do your utmost to prevent one, but should one unavoidably occur, have your men so posted that they can kill all the ring leaders who support Delche in his opposition. As soon as you make the arrest tell Delche that if his people make any attempt to rescue him that he will be the first one you will kill … Don’t attempt to make the arrest unless you are sure of success as a failure will lead to bad consequences … make your disposition in such a manner that you will have the Indians completely in your power … As soon as you make the arrest I wish you would advise me by messenger … I shall feel very anxious about you until I hear from you again. I have confidence in your doing the best under the circumstances.⁵

But things did not go as planned. Deltchay was one jump ahead of the young lieutenant. When Schuyler told the chief he was under arrest, Deltchay laughed. Schuyler then discovered that his Winchester rifle had been emptied of cartridges, and Deltchay’s comrades all pulled rifles and pistols from beneath their clothes or blankets. Schuyler would have died where he stood if his Mojave scouts had not intervened. Deltchay and the other chiefs fled for the mountains. Soon some of the runaways came back, telling Crook they were sorry and begging the general to let them stay. At first he refused, saying he preferred to “drive them all back into the mountains, where I could kill them all.” The Apache pleaded. “I finally compromised by letting them stay,” Crook wrote, “provided they would bring in the heads of certain of the chiefs who were ringleaders.”⁶

Deltchay’s was among the heads Crook desired, and he was not speaking figuratively. He wanted the heads and he promised to pay for them. Schuyler meanwhile led a small group into the mountains after Deltchay. “I have only 15 men but they are picked shots and with two scouts we can make it lively for this chief if I can catch him,” Schuyler wrote his father in December 1873. “His death will settle the business as he is the king thief of them all.”

But Deltchay eluded Schuyler’s small party. The following June, Schuyler went after him again, urged on by Crook, who wrote, “Start out your killers as soon as possible after the heads of Delche and Co. The more prompt these heads are brought in, the less liable other Indians, in the future, will be to jeopardize their heads.” In mid-July 1874, Crook wrote yet again: “If you think you can make sure of Delchae you can make a scout against him.” A week later some Tonto Apache brought Deltchay’s head to Verde, and claimed the bounty. Soon thereafter another group delivered Deltchay’s head to officers at the San Carlos Reservation. They also claimed the bounty.

In October, Crook wrote Schuyler to say he had solved the mystery. An Apache woman said the gossip on the San Carlos Reservation was that the first head belonged to Deltchay’s son. But Crook was not put out by the deception, and he never complained about the request for double payment. “Being satisfied that both parties were earnest in their beliefs,” he wrote, “and [since] the bringing in of an extra head was not amiss, I paid both bounties.”⁷

Crook’s approach was entirely practical. He did not share the attitude of western newspaper editors, who blamed every conflict on the Indians and called openly for their extermination. Crook believed that white avarice—“the almighty dollar”—caused most of the trouble. “The fact is there is too much money in this Indian business,” he wrote to his friend Rutherford B. Hayes in November 1871. But in Crook’s view there was no profit in arguing the justice of every clash till kingdom come. The fighting had to stop. Indians who resisted had to be got out of the way. By the time Crook’s ambulance pulled up before Colonel Bradley’s office at Camp Robinson on the morning of the second day of September, Crook had made up his mind that Crazy Horse had to be got out of the way. His plan was to place the chief under arrest and have him transported under military escort to a federal prison in Florida. Crook entrusted the job to his chief of scouts, Lieutenant William Philo Clark.

That something big was brewing at Camp Robinson was immediately apparent to Lucy Lee, the wife of Lieutenant Jesse Lee, when they drove into the military post sometime in the afternoon of September 2. Several companies of cavalry had just arrived from Fort Laramie and the place was alive with the coming and going of officers and men. General Crook had reached the post earlier in the day and was conferring with Colonel Bradley. “We found something unusual going on,” Lucy Lee wrote a few weeks later to her hometown newspaper in Indiana, the Greencastle Star. “But of what nature,” she added, “the mysterious manner of the knowing ones precluded all possibility of finding out.”⁸

Lieutenant Lee, of course, had a pretty good idea what was hatching. As soon as he had safely deposited his wife and daughter at the home of a friend he set out to find Crook and Bradley. “I at once … told them there was some mistake,” Lee wrote later. “All the Indians at Spotted Tail were quiet and had no intention of going north on the warpath.”

Crook told Lee to make his case to Clark, who was busy with plans for the simultaneous arrest of Crazy Horse and Touch the Clouds. The discussion which followed, Lee said, “was by no means tame.” Clark and Lee were friends, but Clark did not trust Lee’s assurances about Touch the Clouds. Clark’s mind was made up; nothing seemed to shake his faith in what he had been told by Frank Grouard. When Lee stated flatly that he could “guarantee no Indian from Spotted Tail would go north,” Clark was incredulous and smiled in a dismissive, even jeering way.⁹

Lee countered by relating the whole story of the confrontation in Daniel Burke’s house the previous day—what Touch the Clouds said, the argument between Grouard and Louis Bordeaux, how Grouard gradually backed down. Lee believed that it was his explanations, firm and patient, which eventually carried the day. “I finally succeeded in getting myself listened to,” he wrote. Lee was assured that the roundup would be abandoned; the Indians “would not be disturbed.” He felt the situation had been safely turned around. “Mister Lee,” General Crook said to him soberly, “I don’t want to make any mistake, for it would, to the Indians, be the basest treachery to make a mistake in this matter.”

That was exactly how Lee saw it. Crook said he was glad Lee had come. With that, Lee felt “greatly relieved.”

But soon Lee was worrying anew. Nothing was said about Frank Grouard’s mistranslation, cause of the original alarm. Bradley called off the roundup with a very different explanation. He said news had arrived of the approach of a party of Miniconjou, the remnants of Lame Deer’s band. Nothing should be done that might stampede this last group of hostiles. Waiting till the band came in meant delay of a day or two at most. Lee sensed a lingering reservation in Clark’s mind, as well. “It still seemed to be the intention of Clark to have something done to Crazy Horse and his band—just what, I did not then know.”

It was Bradley’s custom to jot a few words in his diary about the events of the day. He recorded Crook’s initial order to surround and disarm the chief, then added, “After consideration the movement was deferred.”

Lieutenant Bourke wrote nothing in his diary about these unfolding events at the time, and when he came to it a year later he omitted all mention of the heated argument between Clark and Lee. Bourke described the delay in rounding up Crazy Horse’s band as the result of Crook’s innate caution and desire to be fair. “To give Crazy Horse one last chance for self-vindication,” Bourke wrote, “General Crook sent him word that he wanted to hold a council with him … and hear what he had to say for himself.” The time appointed was early the following morning, September 3. The place was the camp of Red Cloud and American Horse on Little White Clay Creek about two miles southeast of the agency. Not just Crazy Horse but all the chiefs were asked to be present.¹⁰

——

While Crook was meeting with Lee at Camp Robinson, Crazy Horse in his lodge on White Clay Creek was trying to read the minds of two Army officers who had ridden out for a visit. Later that day, Crazy Horse told He Dog that one of the officers was “the soldier chief from Fort Laramie,” which may have meant Colonel Bradley, who had commanded at Laramie some years back. But it is more likely the officer was Colonel Julius Mason, commander of three companies of cavalry which had just arrived from Fort Laramie. In any event, the identity of the chief’s visitors cannot be established with certainty. But they were Army officers, and they were but two more in the stream of men who came to tell Crazy Horse what to do. The chief was in a troubled frame of mind. Only a week earlier he had dreamed of death. He did not like these two visitors.

That afternoon, He Dog arrived in Crazy Horse’s camp with a message from White Hat. He Dog’s visit was serious and formal. He met in council with Crazy Horse and other leading men in the camp of the Hunkpatila. He said that White Hat had asked all the chiefs to move their lodges to a place near the foot of White Butte, a high wall of clay which dominated the skyline across the White River to the north of the agency. He Dog said that Three Stars—General Crook—was coming to the agency and the next morning wished to meet with the chiefs in council. He Dog knew that there was trouble, that feeling was bad, and he spoke plainly:

All who love their wife and children, let them come across the creek with me. All who want their wife and children to be killed by the soldiers, let them stay where they are.

Crazy Horse did not share this view of the matter and did not want to meet with Three Stars, but he did not quarrel with He Dog. Instead he asked He Dog and Iron Hawk, a friend of both men, to come to his lodge to talk further. Here the historian is hungry for detail. Who else was in Crazy Horse’s lodge when the three friends sat down to talk? The close followers of Crazy Horse were often at his side when he discussed important matters. Some had gone over to White Hat, like Iron Crow, Little Big Man, and He Dog himself. Others remained loyal to the chief, such as Looking Horse and Black Fox, a man He Dog did not trust. Both had been riding at Crazy Horse’s side the day he surrendered at Camp Robinson. Were the chief’s wives present? If Black Shawl was indeed consumptive, as the surgeon McGillycuddy reported, she may have been lying quietly in the gloom of the lodge, coughing up flecks of blood. The new wife, Ellen Larrabee, may have been sitting nearby, fastening on every word, looking for its hidden meaning. But of such matters He Dog says nothing, only tells his story.

Crazy Horse described for his friends the visit from the two officers earlier that afternoon. With them, he said, they brought gifts: a knife and two cigars. Tobacco was a sign of peaceful intent, but the gift of the knife disturbed the chief. He Dog later summed up Crazy Horse’s uncomfortable thoughts:

He did not like the way they shook hands with him, and he did not like their talk, and he did not like their gift. He thought the gift of the knife meant trouble was coming. He thought they shook hands with him as if they did not mean him any good. He was afraid there would be trouble at that council.

As for himself, He Dog said, he had made up his mind. He did not want trouble, he would do as White Hat requested, he would meet with Three Stars. He asked Crazy Horse, “Does this mean that you will be my enemy if I move across the creek?”

He Dog said the chief laughed in his face. Crazy Horse said:

I am no white man! They are the only people that make rules for other people, that say, “If you stay on one side of this line it’s peace, but if you go on the other side I will kill you all.” I don’t hold with deadlines. There is plenty of room; camp where you please.

Crazy Horse himself would not cross the creek or come to the council, on that he was adamant. But he did not speak harshly or angrily of this latest request from White Hat. He told He Dog,

Tell my friend that I thank him and I am grateful, but some people over there have said too much. I don’t want to talk to them anymore. No good would come of it.¹¹

General Crook planned to meet with the chiefs the day after He Dog’s talk with Crazy Horse. Billy Garnett and Baptiste Pourier were instructed to join Crook’s party at the agency store in the morning to accompany the general to the Indian camp. The two men spent the night previous in the house where Garnett lived near the agency compound with his new wife, Emma Mills, then in the first months of pregnancy.¹²

Early on the morning of September 3, as Pourier and Garnett were heading to meet the general at Frank Yates’s store, they were approached by Pourier’s relative Woman Dress, then in his early thirties. In tribal politics, Woman Dress was close to his relative Red Cloud and “always stayed with him,” according to Red Feather, brother-in-law of Crazy Horse. He meant that in political affairs Woman Dress sided with the chief. About this time he was photographed in the outfit given to him when he enlisted as a scout—military tunic with a yellow neckerchief. The expression on his face was watchful and grim. As so often, Garnett gives the fullest account of what happened next.

“Where are you going?” asked Woman Dress, who had been enlisted by Lieutenant Clark as a scout in Company B.

“We told him that we were going to White Clay,” Garnett remembered, “to an Indian Council with General Crook and Lieutenant Clark.”

“Don’t you go there,” said Woman Dress. “When you hold this council at White Clay, Crazy Horse is going to come in with sixty Indians, and catch General Crook by the hand, like he is going to shake hands, and he is going to hold on to him, and those sixty Indians are going to kill Crook and whoever he has with him.”¹³

Woman Dress said he had been told of the plot by Lone Bear, one of Clark’s informants, who had in turn learned of it from his brother Little Wolf. Woman Dress said Little Wolf had been spying on Crazy Horse over a period of time by pretending to court a girl in a nearby lodge. Enfolding the girl in his blanket in the customary way he would linger by the chief’s lodge, close enough to hear what was going on within. He heard Crazy Horse say he was going to the council with Crook and there he would kill the general.

Garnett knew Woman Dress well. He had helped him to enlist as a scout in Company B, Garnett’s own outfit at the time of the fight on the Red Fork of the Powder River. He considered Woman Dress a friend. But something about the man’s story struck Garnett as wrong. For many years, Little Wolf had been in the north with Crazy Horse, he had been in the Custer fight, and he had come in to surrender at the agency only a few weeks before Crazy Horse himself, whom he called a friend. Little Wolf did not seem a candidate for spying on Crazy Horse. Whatever the cause, some doubt was forming in Garnett’s mind.

“Just about then,” Garnett remembered, “General Crook came up with an ambulance which would hold nine men.” With the general were Lieutenants Clark and Bourke and some others, all heading for the council at White Clay Creek. As the ambulance approached, Baptiste Pourier ran up to catch the lead horses and brought them to a halt, then turned to Garnett, saying, “Now tell Crook what this Indian said.”

“This Woman Dress, he was right there,” Garnett recalled. “So the team was stopped, and I told General Crook just what this man, Woman Dress, said”—that Crazy Horse planned to kill Crook at the council—“if,” Bourke recalled later, “Crook’s words did not suit him.” Bourke added that Woman Dress said he had been sent to warn Crook “by Spotted Tail and the other Indians.”¹⁴

“Then General Crook studied a little bit,” Garnett continues, “and he asked me, ‘What do you know about this man, Woman Dress? Is he reliable? Does he tell the truth?’ ”

Garnett was not ready to pronounce. “General,” he said, “this is a big undertaking and I could not say—I am going to leave it up to Baptiste Pourier, a man who is with me and he will tell you.” Garnett explained that Pourier and Woman Dress were married to women who were first cousins.

Garnett recalled the exchange that followed.

Bat says, “General, I want to tell you this man is a truthful man and whatever he tells you is the truth.”

So Crook studied again and said, “I never start anyplace but what I like to get there.”

Lieutenant Clark said, “General, it is no use to go.”

He built an argument for turning back on the example of General Custer, killed at the Little Bighorn. Like Custer, Crook was irreplaceable; they could not afford to lose another such man, and Crook was traveling with too weak a party for protection.

“There is no use for you to start in there.”

General Crook says, “What excuse I can make I do not know.”

Lieutenant Clark says, “You leave that to me.”

And General Crook said, “All right.”¹⁵

It was probably the interpreter in Billy Garnett that backed away when Crook asked if Woman Dress told the truth. Over the course of his life Garnett rarely explained how it felt to be so often in the middle, as much white as red, an employee of the government but still an Indian. His job as an interpreter was not to decide which loyalty came first. He occupied a middle ground. He did not choose sides, or decide who was to be trusted. It was an interpreter’s job to render one man’s meaning as accurately as he did another’s. But something changed when Crook said all right. The inquiry into the motives of Crazy Horse had ended. What to do about him was the question now, and Garnett found himself willy-nilly one of those dragooned for the job. It was Clark who gave him his instructions.

First was to tell the chiefs gathered in the camp on the White Clay there would be no council. Crook worried the Indians might think he lacked grit, but Clark ignored that. He chose a simple explanation. “Billy,” he said, “you go to the council and tell them a message has come for General Crook and he had to go back.”

That was for all to hear. But Clark wanted to see a smaller group back at the military post as soon as they could come without causing remark. He gave Billy a list of names. First was American Horse, trusted completely ever since he had killed Sioux Jim for the Army. The others were all reliable men—no northern chiefs who had come in with Crazy Horse. It was only a couple of miles to the big Indian camp at the base of White Butte, an easy twenty-minute ride. American Horse was the chief Garnett approached when he arrived. “There was a lot of Indians there when I got to this place,” he remembered. He took note of one man’s absence but failed to see immediately what it meant: “Crazy Horse was not there and none of his followers were there either. I did not see any of them in this council.”

American Horse listened to Garnett’s message and the list of names, then told the interpreter, “I will attend to that.” He went into the big council tent and loudly called out the news that Crook would not be coming, an important letter had pulled him away on other business, there would be no meeting. In the hubbub as the leading men gathered themselves to leave American Horse circulated quietly, whispering to those on Clark’s list. “You go home,” he told Garnett; “I will bring these men up.” Garnett remembered that two or three hours passed in all between Clark’s instructions outside Frank Yates’s store and the arrival of the chiefs at Camp Robinson, where they gathered in the quarters of Colonel Bradley at the eastern end of officers’ row.

Each of the buildings providing officers with quarters faced the parade ground and was surrounded by a covered porch. From the porch one looked out across the hard-packed parade ground. In the center at the far end, 160 yards distant, were two log buildings, the adjutant’s office on the left where the business of the military post was conducted, and the guardhouse on the right where prisoners were confined. To the west of the parade ground were the cavalry barracks, to the east the infantry barracks. The road from the Red Cloud Agency and Little White Clay Creek approached the rear of officers’ row, where entrance might be gained past a woodshed and through the kitchen. The Indians might have tied their horses out front, in plain sight, and climbed the porch for the meeting with Crook, or entered less conspicuously from the rear. Either way, it was quite a crowd that gathered in Bradley’s big room in the afternoon of September 3, but not the colonel himself. Bradley was in his office on the far side of the parade ground; it seems likely that Crook wished to exclude him from the deliberations to follow.

Running the meeting in Bradley’s big room were Crook and Clark, the general and his lieutenant. The deliberants included nearly twenty scouts and Indians. Garnett in his various accounts listed them by name: after the general and Clark came Garnett, Baptiste Pourier, and Frank Grouard as interpreters, followed by the chiefs and their leading men: Red Cloud, American Horse, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, Little Wound, No Water, and nine others.¹⁶ No Water was the man who shot Crazy Horse in the face with a borrowed revolver when the chief ran off with No Water’s wife. Every Indian in the room was Oglala; none had been at the Custer fight on the Little Bighorn. All had long histories of siding with Red Cloud and favoring peace with the whites. Garnett called them “friendly Indians.” He reported that all were “surprised” when told the reason the morning’s council had been called off—that Crazy Horse had plotted to murder the general by seizing his hand and stabbing him to death at the outset of the meeting. “They didn’t know anything about it,” Garnett related.

On the agenda was a single item: getting Crazy Horse out of the way. The discussion seems to have lasted an hour or more but the plan adopted was simple in the extreme. No argument over substance or details is recalled by Garnett, who summarized the talk in his customarily direct and unadorned way:

So it was planned that every one of those Indian chiefs was going to pick out four brave men of their respective bands, and that night, those picked men were going to the Crazy Horse village and kill Crazy Horse. The man who killed this man was going to get $300. There was a horse Lieutenant Clark had, and he was going to get that horse … So they said they were going to draw some ammunition, and they did and took it with them, which was late in the afternoon then. I was there and was told to stay around the post close.¹⁷

At the end of the meeting the Indians separated to make their arrangements for the move against Crazy Horse and his camp. Billy Garnett recalled that Crook and Bourke left the post more or less immediately, resuming their interrupted journey to the Wind River country in pursuit of the Nez Percé. No record survives of what Crook told Colonel Bradley before riding off, but the unfolding of events suggests the general said little—only that Crazy Horse was to be rounded up by Clark, the scouts, and the friendly Indians. Garnett says the meeting ended in late afternoon. Straight west of Camp Robinson was a range of high forested hills separating the various forks of Soldier’s Creek as they dropped down into the White River. Dusk came abruptly when the sun fell behind those hills. Billy Garnett retired to the sutler’s store run by J. W. Dear on the military post. There, he kept himself available as the lamps were lit with the approach of night.

Crook and Clark had planned to move quickly, before word got out, but it was no use. When Clark helped the Indians draw ammunition after the meeting ended, there was either commotion or talk. Very quickly first one friend of Crazy Horse, then another, brought word to him in his camp at the mouth of Little White Clay that cartridges were being secretly distributed. They told the chief that the whites were preparing to kill him. Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law Red Feather learned of the bounty promised by White Hat to the man who killed Crazy Horse—money and the lieutenant’s much-envied running horse, sorrel in color. Red Feather rode to Crazy Horse’s camp to tell the chief what he knew, and other reports followed as night came on. From several people Crazy Horse learned about the story Woman Dress told—that he planned to kill Crook at the council. It disgusted Crazy Horse that people might think him capable of such an act. “Only cowards are murderers,” he is said to have remarked.

But Crazy Horse did not ignore these many reports. He told his friends that he would take his sick wife to her parents for safety. “She was sick with a swollen arm,” said Red Feather. Black Shawl Women’s parents were camped on the creek that ran through the Spotted Tail Agency, forty miles to the east. Two friends planned to go with the chief: Kicking Bear and Shell Boy.¹⁸

It was probably close to the bugling of taps when Billy Garnett was approached in the sutler’s store by an orderly from the commander’s staff. It was night. The post was settling down. “Garnett, you are wanted at General Bradley’s quarters,” said the orderly, using Bradley’s brevet rank from his service in the Civil War. “You are to take the back way and go into the house.”

Garnett made his way to Bradley’s house at the eastern end of officers’ row, entered through the kitchen, and went into the big front room where Crook and the Oglala chiefs had planned out the killing of Crazy Horse a few hours earlier. In the big room, Garnett found Bradley and three others—the new agent for the Oglala, James Irwin; his interpreter, Leon Palladay; and a northern Indian. It was the last that aroused Garnett’s caution. With Irwin was He Dog, the longtime friend of Crazy Horse. Clark may have convinced himself that He Dog was on the side of the whites now, but Garnett was not so sure.

Bradley went to the point. “What is that council that is held here today in my room?” he asked Garnett.

Garnett did not want to answer in the presence of He Dog. “General,” he said, “isn’t there some other room where you and I can go?”

Bradley took the point. He led Garnett through one room, then another, where Garnett then asked the general why he was asking such a question in front of a northern Indian. “Was it not planned out in my room there,” Bradley answered, “for these Indians to kill Crazy Horse? The man who kills Crazy Horse to get three hundred dollars and Lieutenant Clark’s running horse?”

The true answer was not complicated but Garnett still hesitated. “Is there any catch about this?” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“These men came up here with this story,” Bradley answered.

“General,” said Garnett, “that is supposed to be a private council and not to be given out, and I see you have a Northern Indian in there and I did not want to talk to you in his presence.” Then he confirmed all Bradley had been told: the plan made, the bounty offered, the ammunition drawn, the chiefs sent off to ready themselves for killing Crazy Horse. Bradley’s reaction was direct and simple, Garnett said later:

Bradley said it was too bad to get after a man of the standing of Crazy Horse in this manner in the nighttime without his knowing anything about it. “They ought to do this in broad daylight … The life of Crazy Horse is just as sweet to him as my life is to me.”¹⁹

Bradley’s mind was made up quickly. He told Garnett, “You go back where the orderly found you, and stay there.”

Again Garnett crossed the darkened parade ground to the sutler’s store. Thirty minutes passed before another soldier approached, this time the orderly for Clark. “Garnett,” he said, “Clark wants you.”

Now Garnett made his way to the last dwelling on the western end of officers’ row. Inside he found Clark pacing up and down, disgusted and out of sorts. “These Indians can hold nothing,” he said.

“Bradley has got hold of that council we had with the Indians today,” he explained. What Bradley thought of the plan was obvious in what Clark said next. The nighttime operation to kill Crazy Horse was off. In its place was the previous daylight plan to arrest the chief and send him out of the country. A direct order from Bradley must have left the lieutenant with no choice. “You go down to the Indian village right away,” Clark told Garnett, “and stop those Indians approaching Crazy Horse. When you go down, tell those Indians not to disturb Crazy Horse, but tell all to report to Camp Robinson before sun-up in the morning.”

Garnett made his way to the big camp on White Clay and sought out the lodge of American Horse. A large group of Indians had gathered behind the lodge, “plotting up something,” Garnett said later. “I told them not to bother themselves, not to kill Crazy Horse that night.”

Garnett’s last translation at the end of this long day was to put Clark’s new instruction into Lakota—to tell American Horse and the men gathered at his lodge to come instead to the military post before sun-up to draw guns and ammunition for a different and larger operation with the same ultimate purpose as the first, which was to get Crazy Horse out of the way.

While these events were unfolding Lieutenant Jesse Lee’s wife and daughter were settling in with their old friends, Major Thomas B. Burrowes and his wife Ellen, who had been given a house on officers’ row after Burrowes’s return from sick leave in June. Burrowes was a man broken by the hardships of frontier duty and Civil War wounds from which he never fully recovered. He had already been waiting for years for an opening on the Army’s retired list. Over time the two couples had often exchanged long visits.

During the evening, Jesse Lee learned that the following morning “the Crazy Horse band would be surrounded and their ponies and arms taken away and Crazy Horse taken prisoner.” In a final meeting, Lee pressed his case with Clark and Bradley but found Clark, in particular, “fussy and headstrong and … determined in carrying out their plan.” Concluding that further argument was useless, Lee told Clark and Bradley that he wanted to return at once with Spotted Tail himself to the agency to let Captain Burke know what was impending, and to give Spotted Tail time to organize his followers to talk the Indians through any excitement. “They wanted to keep Spotted Tail there but I insisted that if they were going to stir up excitement I would prefer to have Spot with me,” Lee said later. On this point he prevailed.

Before departing Camp Robinson with Spotted Tail at about four in the morning, Lee left Clark with a final caution: to hold on tight once he got his hands on Crazy Horse. “Don’t let Crazy Horse get away; he might come to Spotted Tail Agency,” Lee cautioned.

“Lee,” Clark replied in a sarcastic tone, “don’t you worry about that. Crazy Horse can’t make a move without my knowing it, and I can have him whenever I want him.”²⁰