32

“He has looked for death, and it has come.”

HE DOG SAID THAT nonsense was sometimes talked about Crazy Horse—that he treated war like a game, did not kill his enemies, but rode right up to strike them with a quirt for the honor of the thing. It was not so, said He Dog. In battle Crazy Horse was practical and single-minded.

Crazy Horse always stuck close to his rifle. He always tried to kill as many as possible of the enemy without losing his own men … [he] would always jump off his horse to fire … He wanted to be sure that he hit what he aimed at … He didn’t like to start a battle unless he had it all planned out in his head and knew he was going to win. He always used good judgement and played safe.¹

But Crazy Horse was not afraid to risk death. Many Indians saw him make a brave run, riding past the enemy and giving them a target to shoot at. It had a practical purpose—to empty their guns. But it also had a moral purpose—to make the enemy weak. After that was the moment for all to attack. This risky tactic required boldness and a readiness to die, and the readiness could not be feigned. The Oglala did not expect always to win. They frankly admitted that death and sorrow were never distant. The four hard things in life, they said, were hunger in winter, defeat in battle, the death of a wife, and the death of a first-born child. To endure these sorrows, they said, four virtues were required: giving freely, showing bravery in battle, having fortitude in hardship, and keeping one’s word. To break one’s word drained away a man’s “brave heart”; it made him weak and fearful. Better to die young and lie naked on the prairie than live to walk with a cane and be wrapped up on a scaffold. The brave word which Crazy Horse used—H’g un or hengh—was described by Billy Garnett as a growl sound, by Baptiste Pourier as closer to a grunt, the sound a bear makes “when he seizes and squeezes.” To utter the sound of a bear called on the power of the bear, the courage a man needed when he was alone, surrounded by enemies.²

Outside the guardhouse, Garnett watched the struggling men emerge. He saw the soldier guard with his rifle lowered, bayonet pointed at Crazy Horse, “watching the scuffle.” All was in confusion. He Dog heard Red Cloud and American Horse shout, “Shoot to kill!” At the same moment, Captain Kennington, sword pointed up in the air, said, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Garnett said the guard was “gazing” at the struggling men. He extended his arms holding the rifle “as if making a thrust,” Garnett said. American Horse said that “he himself during the scuffle threw his gun down on Crazy Horse to shoot him,” but the crush was too great, others got in the way. While American Horse was maneuvering for a shot at Crazy Horse, the chief swung his body with great force trying to pull free of the men holding him, Swift Bear, Black Crow, and Fast Thunder. The shirtless Little Big Man had let go now; the blood was flowing freely from his slashed arm. Yellow Horse said the point of the bayonet was actually touching Crazy Horse in the small of his back on the right side, “just enough to make him feel the bayonet.” Then the butt of the guard’s rifle touched the wall of the guardhouse, and the surging weight of the struggling men pushed Crazy Horse onto the bayonet. Garnett said Crazy Horse threw himself into the guard’s extended bayonet. American Horse said, “[H]e surged against a bayonet.”

“It was more of an accident than otherwise,” said Garnett.

But He Dog said the guard “lunged—twice—with his bayonet.” As Sergeant William F. Kelly watched the struggling Indians come forward in his direction, “I saw Wm. Gentles, an old soldier, and a veteran of the Mormon campaign of 1857, give Crazy Horse a thrust with his bayonet. The thrust was delivered with lightning-like rapidity, and the next instant he had his gun at carry, as though nothing had happened.”

“The sentry came in behind them and ran Crazy Horse through once,” Red Feather said.

Louis Bordeaux said the guard made two heavy lunges with his bayonet. The first was “a heavy thrust … going nearly through him.” The second thrust missed and the bayonet stuck hard in the frame of the door that had stood ajar. When the guard pulled the bayonet free his rifle shot back and the butt hit Horn Chips in the shoulder, breaking his collarbone. Chips said his shoulder was dislocated by the guard’s gun when the guard “jerked the bayonet from Crazy Horse’s body.”

“Let me go,” said Crazy Horse, according to Billy Garnett. “You’ve got me hurt now!”

Swift Bear, Black Crow, and Fast Thunder all let go.

“Crazy Horse staggered backwards,” said He Dog. Bordeaux said Crazy Horse “was still on his feet [but] backed up and finally fell.” “Crazy Horse fell groaning,” said Yellow Horse. “Crazy Horse gave a deep groan, staggered forward and dropped his knife and fell,” said Sergeant Kelly. “I saw Crazy Horse fall down and groan,” said Charging First. When Standing Bear saw Crazy Horse fall he leveled his gun to shoot the soldier who had stabbed him, but he was grabbed and held back by Swift Bear and Thunder Hawk, who took his gun. Now Standing Bear approached Crazy Horse and reached down to him to help him up. Crazy Horse looked up at him and said, “Brother-in-law, I am finished.”

Ellen Larrabee appeared from the crowd and came up to the chief. One of her sisters—probably Zoe, wife of the post blacksmith—told a friend later that she saw the guard wipe his bayonet on Crazy Horse’s blanket.

Someone shouted that a guard had stabbed Crazy Horse with his bayonet.³

“They have stabbed me,” said Crazy Horse, according to He Dog. Jennie Fast Thunder heard Crazy Horse say, “They have killed me.” The bayonet went in “low down and pretty well around toward his back,” said Standing Soldier.

On the ground Crazy Horse was bent in on himself—“doubled-up,” said Lemly—convulsing with pain, writhing this way and that. People were crowding in around him. Woman Dress was standing nearby. Several times he heard Crazy Horse say, “Father, I want to see you.” Touch the Clouds had picked up Crazy Horse’s red blanket, dropped just outside the door of the guardhouse. As he leaned down to spread the blanket over Crazy Horse, the chief “seized him by the hair and jerked him this way and that,” said Red Feather, who watched it.

“You all coaxed me over here,” Crazy Horse said to Touch the Clouds, “and then you ran away and left me!” The words must have bitten deep; within a few minutes Touch the Clouds accused Lieutenant Jesse Lee of the same thing. “You fooled me,” Touch the Clouds said.

“I did not tell the guard to do that,” Lee protested.⁴

Touch the Clouds was not the only man Crazy Horse accused of betrayal. Jennie Fast Thunder said that after Crazy Horse was stabbed and fell to the ground, her husband helped Standing Bear place the injured man on a blanket. Jennie later told a granddaughter that she heard Crazy Horse accuse her husband, “Cousin, you killed me. You are with the white people.”⁵

In the first moments, Lieutenant Lemly thought Crazy Horse might be “possuming”—pretending to be hurt. Billy Garnett thought he had received “only a small stab.” It is likely that Touch the Clouds was the first to look closely at the wound itself. He dropped down beside Crazy Horse on the ground, raised his shirt, and saw a cut about an inch long. Charging First, close to his father, said the chief had been “stabbed right above the hip bone.” Blood was seeping from the hole in Crazy Horse’s lower back.⁶

Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy said he had been watching the commotion from twenty-five feet away. Soon after Crazy Horse fell to the ground, McGillycuddy made his way through the crush around the chief’s body and examined the wound closely enough to know that it was serious. “He was frothing at the mouth, pulse weak and intermittent, blood trickling from the upper edge of his hip.”⁷

By this time the soldiers of the guard, a dozen in number, had closed in around the wounded man, and were now surrounded in turn by hundreds of Indians. Half wanted to avenge the stabbing of the chief and the rest wanted to make sure he did not escape alive. For several tense moments it seemed a general fight would break out and there would be a big killing. Charging First knocked a gun aside which one of the scouts had pointed at his father. Standing Bear moved to stop someone from getting close enough to shoot Crazy Horse. The man said to be the uncle of Crazy Horse hit Little Big Man hard in the stomach with the butt of his gun, knocking him to the ground. “You are always in the way,” he said. Jennie Fast Thunder said, “By this time the excitement had increased and I was terribly frightened.”⁸

The northern Indians insisted that Crazy Horse must not be moved, but Kennington was determined to carry out his original orders. “Pick up that Indian and carry him to the guardroom,” he ordered, according to Lemly.

Four soldiers dropped their rifles and approached Crazy Horse. As they prepared to lift up the wounded man rifles and carbines immediately appeared from beneath Indian blankets. With shouts and vigorous signs they made it clear Crazy Horse must not be moved into the guardhouse. Lemly heard the hammers pulled back on many guns, but before a shot could be fired Baptiste Pourier stepped forward from the crush and said what Lemly could not. “For God’s sake, Captain, stop,” Pourier shouted, “or we are all dead men.”⁹

Things were quickly slipping out of control. At this moment General Crook’s favorite scout, Frank Grouard, rode up to Bordeaux on horseback. “Get on behind me, Louis,” said Grouard. “Let’s get out of here and go where there are more soldiers. There is going to be trouble.”¹⁰

When they rode off, McGillycuddy, Lemly, and Kennington were left without an interpreter. None knew a word of Lakota. None knew which were the friendly Indians and which were hostile.

While the standoff persisted at the spot where Crazy Horse lay, excitement swept through the Indians swarming about the military post. “Some of the friendly Indians stripped off their blankets and leggings like a flash, ready for war,” wrote Angie Johnson, the wife of Lieutenant Charles A. Johnson, in a letter to her sister two days later. “The crowds of Indians,” wrote Lucy Lee, “began yelling and running in the greatest confusion.” In the excitement, Red Cloud’s Oglala and Billy Garnett at first retreated across the parade ground to Clark’s quarters, where Garnett told the lieutenant that Crazy Horse had been stabbed.

The northern Indians meanwhile went to Bradley’s quarters at the opposite end of officers’ row. There Lucy Lee, Angie Johnson, and others had gathered to watch the confused struggle. “For a few minutes it looked like serious trouble,” Angie Johnson wrote. “The Indians were whooping and yelling and very much excited. The Indian soldiers [scouts] were very anxious to pitch into the northern Indians.” Among the northerners were many who wanted revenge for the stabbing of Crazy Horse. Lieutenant Lee in front of Bradley’s quarters tried to reassure the northern Indians, who feared that the soldiers forming a cordon around the parade ground would attack them next. While Lee was speaking the man said to be an uncle of Crazy Horse rode up, revolver in hand, apparently intending to kill either Lee or Bordeaux. “Two friendly Indians,” wrote Lucy Lee, “took hold of his horse and led it away.”¹¹

For a short period the small group around Crazy Horse was half forgotten but trapped in place by just enough northern Indians to make a fight of it if the chief was moved. McGillycuddy says that during this interval he crossed the parade ground to warn Bradley that “the Indians are ugly”—and moving Crazy Horse into the guardhouse would mean killing. Bradley was unmoved. His orders were to put the chief in the guardhouse. Heading back across the parade ground McGillycuddy spotted Grouard peering out “from around the corner of the commissary.” McGillycuddy called to him for help interpreting, but Grouard ducked back out of sight. A few moments later McGillycuddy caught sight of his regular interpreter in front of his quarters across the parade ground, John Provost. McGillycuddy waved him over and Provost joined the group around Crazy Horse.

Nothing had changed. The chief still writhed on the ground, and the northern Indians refused to let him be moved. McGillycuddy reports that he went to Bradley a second time. “The old chap hated to give in,” he wrote later, “but finally agreed.”¹²

Billy Garnett said Lieutenant Clark, standing in front of his quarters at the western end of officers’ row, gave him Bradley’s new instructions: “Take him and put him in the adjutant’s office.” Now, as suddenly as the two groups of Indians had rushed away, they changed their minds and charged back, recrossing the parade ground at a run. It was Red Cloud’s friendly Oglala who reached the guardhouse first, in effect seizing control of the spot where Crazy Horse lay in pain on the ground. On the parade ground swarmed the northern Indians who were angry and frightened. “The study now was to avoid a conflict over possession of the dying man’s body,” said Garnett. American Horse managed to quiet passions with a short, reasonable speech.

Maybe the man is badly hurt and maybe he is not. We will take him into the same place where they had the talk, and see how much he is hurt, and probably the Indians’ doctors can save him. It will not do to let him lie here.¹³

The place where they had the talk was the adjutant’s office, not the guardhouse. The change of place seemed to calm the passions of the northern Indians. Few of the Indians had seen the scuffle close up. They were in doubt how the chief had been injured, or how badly he was hurt. They favored letting the doctor look at him. The tension eased. “Presently the carbines were lowered and the dangerous hammers released,” said Lemly.¹⁴

As the scouts prepared to move Crazy Horse on a blanket into the adjutant’s office, the crowds of Indians began to disperse. At about this moment Lieutenant Clark for the first time approached the spot where Crazy Horse lay. He told He Dog that he might go up to the chief. It seems He Dog was the third person to look closely at the chief’s wound. Lying near Crazy Horse on the ground he noticed the bayonet used to stab him; close by was the chief’s knife with the six-inch blade. Both were red with blood. “He was gasping hard for breath,” said He Dog.

“See where I am hurt,” Crazy Horse asked his friend. “I can feel the blood flowing.”¹⁵

He Dog lifted away the shirt and saw two deep wounds. One had pierced the small of the back. A second stab had entered between Crazy Horse’s lower ribs. This thrust went deep too, said He Dog. The point of the bayonet almost came through on the other side, just under the chief’s heart. There, He Dog said, “a lump was rising under the skin where the thrust ended.” The swollen place was turning blue. He Dog saw blood leaking from Crazy Horse’s nostrils, suggesting that a lung had been pierced as well. “He was in agony,” said He Dog. “Blood flowed from his mouth,” said Charging Girl, a daughter of Red Cloud.¹⁶

When the crowds in front of the guardhouse had thinned and the danger of a clash had receded, several Indians picked up Crazy Horse on his red blanket and carried him into the adjutant’s office. There was a cot in the room but Crazy Horse insisted that he be placed on the floor. “He was restless and turning in great pain,” said Louis Bordeaux, who spent several hours that night watching over the chief in the adjutant’s office. McGillycuddy concluded there was nothing he could do to treat the chief’s injury; the bayonet had punctured one or both kidneys and he was bleeding to death internally. “His case was hopeless,” said McGillycuddy.

The only relief he could offer was morphine, part of every surgeon’s pharmaceutical kit since the Civil War. It was sometimes sprinkled directly into a wound but McGillycuddy used a hypodermic syringe. The dose recommended at the time was a quarter grain of morphine mixed in three or four drops of water. Relief was prompt. Crazy Horse relaxed; the twisting and turning ceased and his groans eased. Soon he was drifting in and out of sleep while the men in the room talked and waited for him to die. “McGillycuddy said he could not last till midnight,” remembered Bordeaux.¹⁷

Clark sent General Crook three telegrams in rapid succession after Crazy Horse was stabbed. The first reported the seizure and wounding of the chief. In the second he told the general, “I am trying to persuade all Indians” that Crazy Horse had stabbed himself with his own knife, and added, “The doctor reports he has no pulse in either arm.” The third requested Crook’s approval to discharge Crazy Horse from his position as an enlisted scout for the U.S. Army, backdating the official paperwork to August 31.¹⁸

Soon after Crazy Horse was moved into the adjutant’s office the parade ground emptied. Most of the Indians had gone back to their villages around the Red Cloud Agency, a mile or two east, while the northern Indians set up camp inside the agency stockade. For the moment it was quiet, but Bradley prepared for trouble. “They feared an attempt would be made to rescue him in the night,” Angie Johnson wrote to her sister, “so the soldiers were kept ready for instant action all night, pickets out in every direction and everything warlike.” Clark sent Billy Garnett to the agency to fetch Red Shirt, Tall Man, and some other scouts to help guard the military post through the night. Coming back along the road in the dark Garnett was suddenly fired at by a sentry who “thought we were hostile Indians.” Before he could call out his identity other nervous soldiers began shooting too, but none of the group was injured. Later, standing outside Clark’s quarters, Garnett told He Dog that it was dangerous to be out as the sentries were nervous. “You better stay there with Crazy Horse,” he said. But He Dog refused and made his way safely past the sentries heading back to his camp. When he reached the bridge on the road to the agency he encountered Waglula coming toward the military post with his wife. The old man asked about his son and He Dog told him, “They stabbed him but he is not dead yet … you must hurry to him.”¹⁹

McGillycuddy settled down for a death watch. “No one came to the adjutant’s office that night,” McGillycuddy said later, “and it was dismal and lonesome.” His only companions at the outset were Captain Kennington, the officer of the day; Lieutenant Lemly, the officer of the guard; and Louis Bordeaux, serving as interpreter. The senior surgeon on the post, Dr. Charles E. Munn, may have looked in from time to time. The little group was soon joined by Touch the Clouds, who had been stopped at first outside the building. Lee said he told Touch the Clouds he could not go in with his gun. “I have trusted thousands of you white people, and now all of you mistrust me—but one man,” Touch the Clouds told Lee. “You may not trust me, but I will trust you. You can take my gun.” Touch the Clouds entered the adjutant’s office with his son, Charging First, who said they were told that Crazy Horse had been “stabbed up through his kidneys.”²⁰

Shortly after the arrival of Touch the Clouds, Billy Garnett, standing outside Clark’s quarters, was approached by Crazy Horse’s father. “He wanted to go in,” Garnett remembered, but he was armed. “Old Man,” Garnett said, “you cannot get in there unless you give up your knife.” Waglula surrendered all his weapons: knife, bow, and quiver of arrows.

“Son, I am here,” he said as he approached the wounded man on the floor of the adjutant’s office. “How is it with you?”

“I am hurt bad,” said Crazy Horse. “I am going to die. Tell the people they cannot depend on me any more.”²¹

When she heard this, Crazy Horse’s stepmother began to cry. Waglula and Touch the Clouds also cried.

The watchers later agreed that the wounded chief was for the most part silent over the next few hours, drifting between drugged sleep and bouts of pain. When Crazy Horse spoke at all it was sometimes hard to hear or to understand. Lemly recorded shortly after the event that Crazy Horse at one point “spoke indistinctly about bayonets.” The correspondent writing as “Philander” said more plainly that Crazy Horse “asserted that he had been struck with a bayonet, as he felt it penetrate his side.” At that hour the Army’s official version of events insisted the chief had stabbed himself. Lemly recorded that McGillycuddy did what he could to convince Waglula and Touch the Clouds it was a knife, not a bayonet, which had pierced Crazy Horse.

Dr. McGillycuddy showed them the cross section of a bayonet by thrusting it through a sheet of paper, and also that of the knife, endeavoring to explain the different wounds the two would cause, but, I fear, with little success.²²

But during those hours of quiet, several witnesses report hearing some remark from Crazy Horse absolving them of blame. Late in the evening, Angie Johnson reported, he summoned the strength to shake hands with McGillycuddy “and said ‘Wash-ta.’ That is their word for ‘good,’ meaning it is all right.” Soon after Waglula’s arrival, Bordeaux reports, Crazy Horse told the interpreter, “I don’t know why they stabbed me.” He added, “No white man is to blame for this … I blame the Indians.” His anger was all focused on one man—Little Big Man. “But he got away.”²³

Bordeaux knew Crazy Horse was dying. “He was growing cold,” he said. At about ten o’clock, Touch the Clouds said Crazy Horse wanted to see Lieutenant Lee, and Louis Bordeaux was sent to deliver the request. He found Lee and his wife in the quarters of Captain Burrowes, who warned it could be dangerous. “He may never come back,” Burrowes said to Lucy. But Lee went, and recorded later that Crazy Horse did not blame him for what happened. “If I had listened to you,” the wounded man said, according to Lee, “I would not now be in this fix.”

“Things looked suspicious to me,” Crazy Horse explained to Lee. “I did not know what might happen, and I did not know whom I could trust.”²⁴

But during most of the vigil nothing was heard from Crazy Horse but the sound of his breathing and the occasional moan or gasp. After Waglula and his wife had cried themselves out the first time, the old man began to talk about his life and family. He said he was sixty-six years old, that a previous son was already dead, killed by the Shoshones. Crazy Horse did not want to fight the whites, he said, but the whites hunted him in his own country, they attacked the villages—“they had to defend themselves.” Crazy Horse did not want to live on an agency or eat beef, but hunt buffalo, of which there were still plenty.

He said that his son had been his only protection, and that, as he was now gone, he was poor and friendless; that while they were north, his son had taken good care of him, and they always had plenty of game to eat.

“But he was not left alone,” said Waglula. Every courier that came out from the agencies said, “Come in! Come in!” The whites promised to hunt him until he came in or was driven north into Canada to join Sitting Bull. “At last he came.” But that was not the end of the trouble. “Spotted Tail and Red Cloud … had to stand aside and give him the principal place in council.” They became jealous.

“They were the cause of his poor boy lying there,” said Waglula. “He was killed by too much talk.”²⁵

To speak of ultimate things like dying, death, and the spirit realm beyond this world, the Sioux used a kind of poetry of indeterminacy. They explained what they could and consigned the rest to a category of things humans cannot know, or had perhaps forgotten. There was no single correct way to explain these matters, and the hardest of all was to explain the wakan. Anything wakan was said to be sacred or powerful. The Oglala shaman Napsu (Finger) told a white doctor, “Anything that has a birth must have a death. The Wakan has no birth and it has no death.” Toyanke Waste Win (Good Seat Woman), born in the mid-1820s and speaking in her eighties, carried the explanation further:

Wakan was anything that was hard to understand. A rock was sometimes wakan. Anything might be wakan. When anyone did something that no one understood, this was wakan. If the thing done was what no one could understand, it was Wakan Tanka. How the world was made is Wakan Tanka. How the sun was made is Wakan Tanka. Where the spirits and ghosts are is Wakan Tanka.

The ni of a man is the breath of his life. When a man dies his ni—his spirit—leaves his body and makes its way to the spirit world. Some said the spirit world was in the south; others said it was in the west. Some called the spirit world the region beyond the pines that grow on the westernmost edge of the world. “That is where the shadows of the dead dance,” it was said. Conica Wanica (No Flesh) agreed that people in olden times said the spirit world “was beyond the pines,” but he also said, “No man knows where the spirit world is. It is at the other end of the spirit way.”

A man’s ni did not begin its journey to the spirit world right away. It lingered for a time near the place where the man had died. During this period his spirit had the power to harm the living, therefore people tried to please it, to help it prepare for the journey, to provide it with the things whose spirit would help it on its way—a horse, perhaps, or a gun, a shield, a book of drawings or anything else that had been precious to a person in life. To commend the spirit of the dead man his friends and relatives would blacken their faces and cut themselves with knives or drive wooden pegs through the skin of their legs to show the god that their grief was sincere.

The journey was not easy. “He must cross a river on a very narrow tree,” said Good Seat Woman. Not all succeed in making the journey. If a man had a companion on the journey it would go more easily. The ni of a man he had killed, or a man killed for him by a friend or relative, would help him on his way. That ni would be his captive and servant in the spirit world. A man who died fighting would try to kill an enemy so he would not have to travel alone.

To make the journey a man needed to pray for help. In his youth, sometime prior to 1850, the Hunkpapa Red Weasel was told by Sun Dreamer “that I may pray with my mouth, but if I sing the prayer it will be heard sooner by Wakan Tanka.” A dying man, therefore, knowing the mysteries that lie ahead, will sing a prayer to help him on his way. Every man should prepare such a song, said No Flesh.²⁶

Accounts of Crazy Horse’s final moments are difficult to sort out. At about ten o’clock, McGillycuddy remembered, he noted that Crazy Horse’s “heart was giving out … I started to give him a glass of brandy, but the old man objected, making signs that his son’s ‘brain whirled.’ ” Now, after Waglula’s talk about his son, the old man seemed so undone to McGillycuddy that he gave him a drink of whiskey. This, Lemly noted, “he seemed to relish amazingly. He rose and shook hands all around, exclaiming, ‘Hau, Kola!’ ”²⁷

The hour was late. Baptiste Pourier had replaced Louis Bordeaux as interpreter about the time Lee paid his visit. Crazy Horse uttered some final words but the immediate witnesses left confusing and garbled accounts of what he said.

Looking back over his life, McGillycuddy sometimes waxed poetic. In several of his accounts of the death of Crazy Horse he remembered that near the end the sound of a bugle came from the parade ground. He remembered that it was “the lonesome call for taps.” In one letter he said it was at about nine o’clock, the traditional hour for lights out; in another about eleven. He thought Crazy Horse had uttered a cry he used to sing out on going into battle—“A good day to fight, a good day to die! Brave hearts.”

There, McGillycuddy wrote, the chief’s voice faded off. But the doctor spoke no Lakota; he had no idea what the words were.²⁸

Lemly said the words came “in a weak and tremulous voice.” But it was not a war cry he uttered. Crazy Horse was not speaking but singing, Lemly reported—“the weird and now-famous death song of the Sioux.”

Baptiste Pourier was there. He remembered no last words and no singing. The hour was closing on midnight—some say eleven o’clock, others eleven thirty, or eleven forty.

Bat was the first to discover that Crazy Horse was dead. He remarked to the doctor that he was dead. The doctor said he guessed not, but on feeling of him found it was so. Then they feared to announce it to Crazy Horse Sr. on account of his grief. So Bat suggested giving him a drink of grog which was done, Bat getting his portion also. The old man expressed his satisfaction, saying it was good. Calling Bat his son, which he usually did, he said, “It was good, that will open my heart.”²⁹

Because he spoke Lakota, it was Bat’s job to convey the news to Waglula. The old man had called him Cinksi (Son); perhaps Pourier addressed the old man as Ate (Father).

“Don’t take it hard,” Bat said. “Your son is dead.”

It landed like a blow. The brave word burst out of Waglula: “Hengh!”—like the grunt of a bear.

Then Waglula said, “Micinci watoye sni te lo.”

It seems no one translated these words for Lee, Lemly, McGillycuddy, Bradley, Clark, or the correspondent writing as Philander. What Waglula said was, “My son is dead without revenging himself.” He would enter the spirit world alone. Then the old man and his wife began to sing and to cry, at first in a torrent which “seemed uncontrollable.”

Finally they became quieter, and settled in a crooning manner on their knees, bending over and caressing the prostrate and lifeless form, both chanting in an indescribably weird manner the now-famous Sioux death song. The deep guttural of the one blended with the shrill treble of the other, and both were cracked by age. No one who witnessed or heard the old couple can forget the sad scene, or their strangely impressive, and mournful dirge.³⁰

Various things were said after Crazy Horse was pronounced dead. Philander quoted Touch the Clouds as saying Crazy Horse “had courted death ever since his arrival here, and that at last he had met it, and that he had got what he deserved.” Philander was unfamiliar with the warrior culture of the Oglala and he missed the point. What Touch the Clouds said was:

“It is good. He has looked for death, and it has come.”³¹