33

“He still mourns the loss of his son.”

LOUIS BORDEAUX AND BAPTISTE Pourier were the first to tell William Philo Clark that Crazy Horse was dead. It was not yet daylight; the lieutenant had been out somewhere. On entering his quarters, where Bordeaux and Pourier had been sleeping, Clark asked, “How is my friend, Crazy Horse, getting along?”

“He is dead,” said Pourier.

Bordeaux remembered that Clark was slow to believe what he had been told. He seemed confused, almost stunned. He started to leave the room, then abruptly turned back. “Is it true that he is dead?” he asked.

Bordeaux told him it was true. He said Crazy Horse had been dying when Pourier had come to relieve him a little after eleven. About midnight Pourier came back with the news that the chief was dead.

“It is a shame! It is a shame!” said Clark. Bordeaux remembered the lieutenant as “a man of great humanity.” He was overcome; he sat down, covered his face with his hands, and wept. “That man ought not have been killed,” he said. “It’s a shame the way he was treated.”¹

But within an hour or two, when Clark reported the news to General Crook in a short telegram, he had worked his way to a broader view. He assured the general, “The death of this man will save trouble.” A day later General Sheridan in Chicago told reporters much the same: “Crazy Horse was a mischievous and dangerous malcontent, and it is a good thing that he is dead.”²

An oppressive consciousness of guilt visited Lieutenant Jesse Lee the day after Crazy Horse was killed. “No one can imagine my feelings this morning,” he wrote in his diary. “Was it treachery or not? … My part in this transaction is to me a source of torture.” It was Lee who had persuaded Crazy Horse to return to Camp Robinson, Lee who told him he could explain himself to Colonel Bradley, Lee who assured him repeatedly that he would not be harmed. “I had a long talk with General Bradley,” Lee wrote. “He did most of the talking. I felt so miserable that I could scarcely say anything.”³

In a letter to Bradley six months later Lee said that the day after the killing of Crazy Horse was one of the few times when he felt overwhelmed, unable to go on. “You saw me once in that condition, and the good word from the good friend came from you,” Lee wrote. “You may have forgotten the occasion but I never shall.”⁴

Lee lived another fifty years, distinguished himself in China and in the Philippines, and retired as a general, but he never shook his sense of guilt. In the small standing army of the day it was well known among officers that Lee counted the killing as “the saddest reminiscence” of his career.⁵

But “sad” did not explain his torment. Lee believed it was treachery that killed Crazy Horse. His part had been to mask the treachery with promises. Crook’s name was on the orders, and Bradley said there was nothing he could do to change them. No one blamed Lee, but he blamed himself. He remembered too clearly the many hesitations of Crazy Horse, and the six times Lee promised he would not be harmed. Over the years, Lee discussed the killing often with his friend Captain Charles King, and King made his own inquiries about the orders to confine Crazy Horse in the guardhouse. He concluded the orders came from department headquarters in Omaha, or division headquarters in Chicago. Who told Crook or Sheridan that Crazy Horse had to be jailed and sent into exile? On this point, King wrote to a friend in 1921, “John Bourke was always mysterious and non-committal, and Philo Clark impressively silent.”

But it made little matter who insisted that Crazy Horse be jailed. It was Lee who led him to his fate. “Lee grieved long over the incident,” King wrote.⁶

Jesse Lee died in Washington in April 1926.

News of the chief’s death was widely reported in the press. Follow-up stories insisted that most of the Indians were glad to be rid of him. The chiefs said that Crazy Horse had brought it on himself. It was reported that by his own count he had killed thirty-eight whites—four of them women. Crook meanwhile abandoned the Nez Percé campaign in Wyoming. On September 9 he returned to Omaha, then left for Washington on the 13th—lucky to be alive, the Omaha Bee reported. According to “a friend of General Crook,” Crazy Horse had planned to kill Crook in council—“he intended to talk pretty saucy to the general, and in case the general should say anything about it, he would kill him.” Only then, the Bee said, had the chief’s arrest been ordered.⁷

The usual source of anonymous stories from the Omaha headquarters of the Department of the Platte was the adjutant general, General Robert Williams. It seems likely he had this story from Lieutenant Clark, who passed through Omaha on his way to Washington for the long-planned meeting of the chiefs with President Hayes. There Red Cloud again protested the government’s plan to move the Indians east. “The Missouri River is the road to whiskey and ruin,” Red Cloud said at a meeting with Hayes in the White House.⁸

But Hayes was adamant. Rations for the winter had already been shipped to the Missouri. “It is too late to remove your supplies,” said Hayes. “The winter will soon come on, the streams be frozen up. Next spring places can be selected near White River that will suit you.”⁹

With this promise the Indians had to be content. Preparations for the move were already far along when the chiefs returned to Nebraska. The undertaking was immense. About ten thousand Indians of all ages and conditions of health would be required to ride or walk two hundred miles across open prairie at a season of the year notorious for sudden snowstorms and plunging temperatures. Driven along with the Indians would be fifteen thousand ponies and two thousand beef cattle for rations. Lieutenant Jesse Lee hired thirty wagons and teams to move goods and people, many of whom had no horses and were too old or sick to walk. To complicate matters a thousand northern Indians who had surrendered in the spring, Miniconjou under Touch the Clouds and the Sans Arcs under Red Bear, now refused to travel east to the Missouri with the Brulé. They were joined by the thousand or more Indians who had stampeded to the Spotted Tail Agency after the killing of Crazy Horse. In a meeting with the chiefs on October 15, General Crook gave them permission to travel instead with Red Cloud’s Oglala. He had little choice. In a cable to Sheridan in Chicago, Crook reported that the Indians had “expressed a desire to comply with the wish of the President that they should go near the Missouri.” This meant only that they had agreed to start out. Much ambiguity lingered around the word “near.”¹⁰

In the last days of October the Indians from both agencies set out. On November 2, Lieutenant Clark and Red Cloud’s Oglala joined up with the Miniconjou and the remnants of Crazy Horse’s band where Beaver Creek emptied into the White River. The weather was foul—“snow, rains, wretched roads,” Clark reported to Crook. Clark did not want to add the northern Indians to his own. He spent an entire day arguing, but the chiefs refused to rejoin the Spotted Tail Indians traveling with Jesse Lee.

“It was useless to try and get them to go on and overtake Lee,” Clark told Crook. “If forced, they would, I think, have gone north.”

It began to snow heavily on November 3 and the weather continued foul for three days. When the combined camps finally resumed their march the northern Indians “moved slowly and reluctantly towards the Missouri,” reported a cavalry officer. Gradually the northern Indians, covering only seven or eight miles a day, fell behind the larger party of Red Cloud’s Oglala. To Billy Garnett they blamed the condition of their horses, saying they were “jaded and could not stand to travel faster.” At the end of each day’s march there was drumming and singing in the huge camp, spread out along three miles of riverbank. The talk went on deep into the night. Some of the northern chiefs had traveled to Washington to see the president but Clark sensed the fragility of the consent that kept them moving east. Five or six days into the march, Clark reported to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz that “these people are wild, stubborn, restless and still smarting under the bitter feelings engendered by the killing of Crazy Horse.”

Even Clark’s most trusted scout, Three Bears, was full of anger. The Indians were going east through their own land, he said. If the commissioners said they had given the land up when they signed away the Black Hills, they were lying. “I was then a soldier on the Indian side and at that very Council I had one hundred young men there to see and know that nothing of the kind was done,” Three Bears told Clark. “We had ears and heard what was said.” Three Bears was one of the men Clark had trusted to take over the remnants of Crazy Horse’s band. To lose the trust of Three Bears, in Clark’s view, was to risk losing all. Sitting among the Indians at night, fascinated and repelled by “their painted faces looking particularly savage and wild by the light of their campfires,” Clark said, “civilization and gentleness and kindness look very faint and far off.”¹¹

The handful of Army officers and enlisted men were too few to keep the big assemblage together and moving by force. The Indians must come of their own will or not at all. The Oglala agent James Irwin did not trust the “northern fire eaters … It is an even question with me,” he wrote early in the march, “whether the northern Indians will go with us or break off … and go north.”

The answer came about three weeks into the journey when Clark and the Oglala approached the present site of Interior, South Dakota. Here the White River bent away from its northerly course to point east toward the Missouri. Beyond the White River to the north, stretching away over a sea of grass, was a ladder of rivers—the Bad River, the Cheyenne River, the Moreau, the Grand—climbing up through traditional Sioux hunting grounds all the way to “grandmother’s land,” the Sioux name for Canada, then ruled by Queen Victoria. First one group of northern Indians wheeled away and left the line of march, then a second. The Indians had been “possuming,” said Billy Garnett, “saving their horses for a hard march after they should break away.”

There was little to be done. Clark sent a small group after the first defectors, hoping to coax them back, but none returned. Finally, in late November, the larger part of the northern Indians—Clark said a hundred of 250 lodges; Garnett said half; Irwin said all but thirty—headed off into the prairie with ponies, baggage, women, and children. Among them were at least six chiefs who had just returned from the trip to Washington: Big Road, Red Bear, He Dog, Little Hawk, Jumping Shield, and Touch the Clouds. The last, keeping a promise to Jesse Lee, only led his people back to their old agency at the mouth of the Cheyenne. But the rest of the northern Indians intended to leave the white world behind for good, and go back to the old life of hunting and raiding. All Clark’s patient working of the Indians was undone in a moment. Only two northern chiefs stayed behind: No Water and Little Big Man. Both had made enemies by helping the whites to capture and kill Crazy Horse. “They dared not trust themselves up north,” said Garnett.¹²

Not long after the northern Indians broke away, Red Cloud and his people stopped about eighty miles short of the new agency. The next year, with Crook’s help, the Oglala moved back west to the rolling prairie and pine-studded hills around Big White Clay and Wounded Knee creeks just across the Nebraska line in South Dakota. The new agency, the Oglala’s fourth and last, where they still live today, was named after the tree-covered hills which traversed the countryside: Pine Ridge.

For the rest of his life, which was not long, Clark pondered his failure with Crazy Horse. He told himself nothing could be done with the chief. “He attributed every concession and kind act to fear,” he wrote. On the march to the Missouri, Clark learned that Crazy Horse, dead for two months, was traveling with the people. Clark records this discomfiting fact in a letter of November 7 to Secretary Schurz written “In camp on White River.” Likely the fact was told him one night as he sat conversing by sign language with the Indians in their blankets around campfires. Or it may have been Billy Garnett who translated a remark from the Lakota. Somewhere among the baggage piled on wagons and horse-drawn travois, Clark was told, the Indians were “hauling along” the body of Crazy Horse, wrapped in his red blanket. Clark did not know—perhaps he never asked—why the family of Crazy Horse would bring his body on such a journey. Normally a curious man, he let this question lie. The presence of the body made him uneasy. “Even as a dead chief,” he wrote, “he exercises an influence for evil.”

“In camp on White River”—with these words Clark recorded the last known location of the body of Crazy Horse.

As the news spread of the killing of Crazy Horse on the night of September 6, the Indians in their camps were “thrown into the greatest fever of excitement,” according to the Episcopal priest at the Spotted Tail Agency, the Reverend William J. Cleveland. Louis Bordeaux cited “intense excitement” at both agencies, and Lieutenant Jesse Lee said a general stampede was threatened by “wild rumors” of Spotted Tail’s arrest and of impending attack by Pawnee scouts or the Army. Angry and afraid, more than a thousand Oglala fled the Red Cloud Agency. Most went east to the Spotted Tail Agency to be near the northern Indians, but some went out into the open country north of the agencies, just beyond the easy reach of the Army or the friendly scouts. Most of the chiefs had urged Crazy Horse to make the trip to Washington, but his killing brought many of them up short. Some thought he had been killed in cold blood—lied to, tricked into entering the guardhouse, stabbed by prearrangement while three men held him. “Fast Thunder … was shocked,” said his grandson Matthew King, who often heard the old man talk about the fatal moment. “He got mad … he left the fort and camped someplace in the hills between what is now Hay Springs and Chadron, to cool down.” With friends, Fast Thunder “discussed the tragedy of their leader. They didn’t know what to do … [or] who could be trusted.”

“Turning Bear tried to rally the hostiles to action,” said a mixed-blood woman who wrote histories of many of the leading Sioux of the period. “Half the Indians were for fighting and half were against it. All the chiefs had to talk a good deal to keep their men from breaking out.”

“The chiefs by good counsel kept them quiet,” Lieutenant Lee said.

He Dog said Red Cloud and Bad Wound held a big feast so they could talk to the Indians who wanted to fight and take revenge. “Start nothing,” said Red Cloud, according to He Dog. “Bad Wound cautioned them to behave themselves, and not to start anything.” Horses and blankets were given out to pay for the killing of Crazy Horse. “Indians have been making presents to his kin,” said Clark. The danger flared up and then faded over a period of four days. “Now everything is again as quiet as though nothing had ever occurred,” wrote Lucy Lee when it was over. Four days was the traditional time for an initial outburst of grief at the death of a leading man. Much of the excitement which alarmed the whites was only natural lamentation and tears.¹³

In the small hours of September 6, Waglula and his wife left the adjutant’s office, where the body of Crazy Horse lay on his red blanket. He crossed the parade ground to the quarters of Lieutenant Clark, looked in through an open window, and saw Billy Garnett sharing a bed with Louis Bordeaux. He reached in, took Garnett by the shoulder, and shook him awake. “Nephew,” he said, “get up, my son is dead.” He wanted the return of his knife and bow and arrows but Garnett said no, they could not be returned till daylight.

The old couple waited nearby through the night. From the camps could be heard the crying and singing and drumming which began when the people learned that Crazy Horse was killed. At first light, Angie Johnson heard Waglula wailing his grief and asked her husband to offer him something to eat. “But he couldn’t eat much,” she remarked in a letter to her sister. “Then the mother of Crazy Horse came and both of them went across the parade ground and down to the office where his body was, both crying and singing their mournful death song.”

At the adjutant’s office the parents were given an Army wagon with a team of mules to move their son’s body. Jesse Lee remembered that the parents were crying loudly as they walked beside the wagon carrying their son. As the little group made its way along the road to the Red Cloud Agency two miles distant the white teamster driving the mule team was suddenly approached and threatened by a man on horseback carrying a gun. Garnett was told that this was the uncle of Crazy Horse who had been so active the day before. Now, rushing up to the wagon, the uncle pointed his gun at the teamster but was halted by a shout from Touch the Clouds, who was riding in the wagon. Once again the uncle allowed himself to be talked away. Reaching the agency without further incident, the party sought out the lodge of relatives, where they prepared the body of Crazy Horse for burial.¹⁴

Among those in the lodge were the father and stepmother of Crazy Horse, his brother-in-law Red Feather, and several others, including a woman named White Woman One Butte. It would have been customary to ask a wicasa wakan to be present. Horn Chips, although injured in the struggle the day before, would have been a natural choice. He would have shared a pipe with Waglula before doing anything further. If those preparing Crazy Horse’s body had followed custom they would have painted his face red and cut a lock of hair from above his forehead, because one of the souls, or ni, of a person was believed to reside in the hair. This lock of hair would have been presented to his stepmother. She would have wrapped it in a piece of cloth and put it aside, not to be disturbed for four days. All the while, many prayers and songs would have been recited or sung. But those who were present recorded only a few details. Red Feather said he helped to remove the chief’s clothes, stained with his blood. Low on one side of Crazy Horse’s back, Red Feather saw the inch-long cut where the bayonet had gone in. White Woman One Butte cleaned the chief’s body. When she was done Red Feather helped to dress him in a fresh buckskin shirt. Finally his body was wrapped in his red blanket.¹⁵

About the middle of the day, when Crazy Horse’s body had been properly prepared, his parents tied it to a travois drawn by a buckskin horse. According to the correspondent Philander, this was “just before noon.” The parents refused an offer to keep the Army ambulance they had used in the morning. They preferred to take their son’s body back to the Spotted Tail Agency on a travois in the customary way. Jesse Lee remembered that a small boy led the buckskin horse pulling the travois. Black Elk saw the parents leaving and remembered “that Crazy Horse’s father rode a white-faced bay with white hind legs … The mother was riding a brown mare with a bay colt.” He Dog said Crazy Horse’s body had been placed in a coffin lashed to the travois. He said the chief’s wife, Tasina Sapawin, was one of the group, and that a party of twenty-three mourners, stripped to their skin, followed the travois. Such a group would have been singing and crying out in noisy grief. Many members would have cut their hair or gashed their arms and legs or driven wooden pegs through their skin. He Dog said that Waglula sang out as they traveled that his son “died in victory. That’s the way brave men die—in victory.”¹⁶

For seven or eight hours the travois carrying Crazy Horse’s body made its way across the prairie toward the twin buttes known as Sheridan’s Gates. Earlier that day, Standing Bear had arrived in his camp on Beaver Creek with news of the chief’s death. “They were preparing a travois when I left,” he said, according to his son, Kills Plenty, “and they are going to bring his body here.” Standing Bear’s wives along with other members of the band gathered on the bluff just west of Beaver Creek to wait for the arrival of the chief’s body. “My stepmothers and their mother were all in mourning, and were crying most of the time,” remembered Kills Plenty. “Soon we saw them coming in the distance. They had his body on a travois and were moving slowly.” The family of the dead man were all singing and walking apart from the others, “because they had a dead body with them.” It was nearly dark—seven or eight o’clock in the evening—when the group mounted the last ridge of hills overlooking Camp Sheridan. Many of the whites at the post down on the plain below were frightened by the sound of the singing of the Indians. As dark fell, big fires were lit on the hill where the travois stopped and in the camps along Beaver Creek. Singing, drumming, and chanting continued throughout the night.¹⁷

Jesse Lee and his family returned to the agency the following day. Fearing an attack by angry Indians during the long ride across open country, the anxious lieutenant gave his wife a revolver so she might kill herself to avoid capture. He promised that he would kill their daughter Maude and then himself. But the journey was quiet, and the Indians at the agency, far from blaming Lee, posted a guard to watch over his quarters the night of their return. In the morning, on going to his office, Lee could see on the hill above the camp the body of Crazy Horse wrapped in a red blanket. It had been placed in the branches of a tree on the bluff above Camp Sheridan, “not half a mile away.” Some days later, perhaps fearing that his son’s body would be disturbed by wolves, the father asked Lee to surround the site with a fence to protect it. “So Jack Atkinson and I loaded a spring wagon with a few posts and some rough planks and went up there,” Lee remembered, “and in an hour made a fence.” Lucy packed a basket of food for the old man and his wife, who were grateful.

“Old Crazy Horse said, in sobbing tones,” Lee remembered, “ ‘Ottah (Father) you and the other white men are my friends in this great sorrow.’ ” ¹⁸

Soon after the death of Crazy Horse, his father took back the name he had given his son and ceased to be known as Waglula. The fact that Lee called him “old Crazy Horse” may mean he had already taken back the name by the time Lee built the fence.

A few days later Lieutenant Henry Lemly paid a visit to Lee at the Spotted Tail Agency, where the singing and drumming still continued at night in the camps. Like most other whites, Lemly found the loud, prolonged grief of the Indians disturbing. He described what he saw in the New York Sun:

The grave was left in charge of the chief mourners … without food or drink, naked, and hideously blackened, eight figures lie around the corpse and howl. Night and day they do nothing but howl, and every Sioux, be it a buck or a squaw, who passes near, howls, too.

Lemly somehow felt safer using the word “howl” to describe the cries of grief. But he did not feel safe enough to visit the burial site of the chief himself. A civilian photographer who had been staying at the Spotted Tail Agency, James Hamilton, was braver; he mounted the hill above the agency and took two stereoviews of the burial site.¹⁹

Gradually, as Army officers and agency officials kept assuring their bosses, things quieted down. For about five weeks the body of Crazy Horse remained on the hill overlooking the agency. During this period, Red Feather remembered, “a war-eagle came to walk about on the coffin every night. It did nothing, only just walked about.”²⁰ It seems likely that during this period Crazy Horse the father began the extended ceremony known as ghost keeping. The anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who made a seven-week journey across the plains with a party of Oglala a few years later, described in a paper for Harvard’s Peabody Museum the difficult duties of a father keeping the ghost of a child:

During this interval [of six months to a year] he cannot eat dog meat or any flesh scraped from the skin or hide of an animal. He cannot cut open the head of any animal to get the brains, strike or break any ribs or do any butchering. He cannot take a gun, pistol, arrows or any weapon in his hand. He cannot run, go in swimming, make any violent movement, shake a blanket, his clothing, or in any way disturb the air. No one must pass before him or touch him, and to prevent this disaster a coal of fire is always kept about two feet in front of him as he sits in his tent. Although he remains with his family he must live apart from his wife, and on no account take a child in his arms, for if he should so forget himself the child would surely die.

The ceremony of ghost keeping had several purposes. One was to soften the shock and pain of separation for the soul of the dead person as well as for those who survived. It was thought that the soul of the deceased would linger about a lock of hair kept in the proper way. At the end of the ceremony in six months or a year a grand feast and giveaway would be held and the lock of hair would be taken from its special wrapping and buried or preserved by the mother. In either case, the soul of the dead child would then be free to depart. Another goal of the ceremony was to calm anger and reconcile enemies.

If at any time during the period of keeping the lodge the father should by any accident hear of any violent words or deeds, he must at once perform certain rites which will avert the evil consequences to him or his family. He must take a few coals of fire, and lay on them a bunch of sweet grass, or sprays of cedar. As the smoke rises he must crouch over the coals bringing his blanket close about his body, drawing it over his head and face so as completely to shut him in with the smoke … while the aromatic fumes circle his entire person … The keeping of a ghost lodge is a signal of peace and cancels all grudges between parties. The father may not smoke with any one lest he should consort with a man who was at enmity with some other person. The Indians in explanation pointed out that it was for the purpose of enforcing peace in a man’s actions and thoughts that he was forbidden to take weapons in his hand; and the coal of fire placed before him while sitting in his tent was indicative of his setting himself apart for this religious duty, “the coal being like a partition between the father and all the world.”

During the period of ghost keeping, the lock of hair in its wrapping would be added to other objects in a special bundle prepared by the mother and sisters or other close female relatives of the dead child. In addition to the lock of hair the bundle would contain the pipe smoked at the outset by the wicasa wakan and the father of the dead child. The parents might enclose other items as well—things sacred to the deceased, or merely small items of comfort, anything they thought appropriate. All were rolled into a bundle about six inches thick and two feet long. A male relative would cut three crotched sticks and the ghost bundle would be hung from this tripod in the ghost lodge, a small, separate dwelling used for this purpose alone. The lodge and the bundle on its tripod would travel with the family wherever it might go for the next six months or a year. Setting up the tripod would be a first order of business on arriving at a new camping place.

To travel with the tripod was customary, but to bring the actual body of the dead child was unusual. It is likely that Crazy Horse the father decided to do so because the whole tribe was making a permanent move and no one could be sure of his ability to return. In the last week of October 1877, Crazy Horse the father started out with the northern Indians, Miniconjou under Touch the Clouds and the remnants of Crazy Horse’s Hunkpatila band. They were camped at the confluence of Beaver Creek and the White River in the first days of November when Clark and Red Cloud’s Oglala joined them. It was there Clark learned that Crazy Horse’s body was being “hauled along,” a fact commonly known by the Indians. When the journey east was resumed Crazy Horse the father brought along the travois bearing the body of his son, now apparently placed in its wrapping inside a raised, cage-like wicker frame attached to the drag poles of the travois. In the family group were the wife of Crazy Horse the father; his full sister, Rattling Stone Woman (Tunkanawin), and Tasina Sapawin, widow of the dead Crazy Horse. A granddaughter of Rattling Stone Woman, eleven years old at the time of the removal, said the group traveled in the rear of the procession, which meant that they would be the last to leave camp in the morning and the last to arrive in the evening. In late November, they ended their journey with Red Cloud’s Oglala at the forks of the White River, where they spent the winter and following spring. All returned at the end of the summer of 1878 when both agencies moved back away from the Missouri to new sites just across the line in South Dakota. Crazy Horse the father and his wife settled on the Rosebud Reservation with a band known as the Salt Users. With them on arrival, according to Kills Plenty, was the travois with its wicker cage which the people believed to contain the body of Crazy Horse. But something was now different. “They did not build up a tripod at this time,” remembered Kills Plenty, referring to an important part of the ceremony of ghost keeping.

One day we heard that the parents had opened this bundle which was supposed to contain the body of their son, and there was nothing but rags inside! What had they done with the body and where was it buried? Nobody could tell. It was a secret of Crazy Horse’s family.²¹

Over the following years, stories gradually emerged about the secret burial of Crazy Horse. It seems that his father when he fell behind one day early in the journey took the body and hid it in a crevice among the white clay buttes lining the route to the White River. The granddaughter of Rattling Stone Woman, a first cousin of Crazy Horse once removed, told several people that the body was initially hidden on the way north at a site between the later reservation communities of Wounded Knee and Porcupine. In the following year, the father secretly moved the body to a new location, telling no one, not even Tasina Sapawin. “They were afraid [she] would marry again and reveal the burial place,” said the cousin. But Tasina Sapawin never married again. Her brother Red Feather confirmed this story. “His father hid his body so not even my sister knew where it was buried,” he said.

But Jennie Fast Thunder said that was not so. She knew Tasina Sapawin before she died in the 1920s in the Porcupine district of the Pine Ridge Reservation. In the summer of 1932 she told Kills Plenty, now known as Luther Standing Bear, “Whenever anyone asked her about the grave of her husband she always replied, ‘I shall never tell anyone where he is. It was your jealousy that killed him.’ ”

Horn Chips in the early 1900s claimed that he had been present at every burial and reburial of Crazy Horse and knew where the body was. He told Walter Camp the chief’s bones were buried for the last time in 1883 in a rawhide sack. According to Billy Garnett, Horn Chips offered to sell the secret but found no takers. Woman Dress told his friend James Cook in 1911 that “just one man know where the place he was buried. But I don’t see that man.” The sister of Crazy Horse who was married to Red Sack told Cook that “she helped bury him at a secret place in the Pine Ridge hills,” but she refused to name the place. As recently as 1999 Woodrow Respects Nothing, then in his seventies, grandson of Jacob Respects Nothing and Sophie White Cow Tribe, told a white friend that his grandparents had helped move the body to a site along the clay buttes between Wounded Knee and Manderson. “But it was never told where his body was buried,” Respects Nothing added.²²

Crazy Horse the father often talked about his son in the years after his death. He said things might have turned out differently if his son had prayed and prepared his medicine properly on the fatal day. He told Red Feather that he thought Doctor McGillycuddy might have poisoned his son. He saw the doctor fill his syringe and inject some stuff into his son’s body. “He died awful quick after that,” said Crazy Horse the father.

The chief of the Sans Arcs who went north to Canada, Red Bear, explained to his son why the old man kept Crazy Horse’s burial site a secret. “He did not want any white or any one of the jealous Indian chiefs who had helped the white soldiers by betraying Crazy Horse to touch Crazy Horse’s body.”²³

But Crazy Horse the father managed to put aside bitter feelings, and in August 1879 he found an opportunity to extend the hand of friendship to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz. It is not likely that Crazy Horse the father had been told of Schurz’s role in the cascading events which resulted in the death of his son. But Schurz was the highest government official Crazy Horse the father ever met, and it was to Schurz he made his gesture. In the last days of August, the secretary came west with a party of friends to visit the Spotted Tail Agency before continuing on to Wyoming where General Crook planned to take him hunting. Traveling with Schurz were a New York Times reporter, John M. Carson; Count Donhoff, the secretary of the German legation in Washington; and Webb Hayes, son of the president and godson of Crook. The previous year, when it had become safe at last for whites to travel in the old Sioux hunting grounds, Hayes, Crook, and the Fort Laramie trader John S. Collins made the first of twelve annual fall hunts in the mountains around Laramie.

Schurz’s party arrived at the agency on August 28, after a fourteen-hour, eighty-seven-mile wagon journey from the Rosebud landing on the Missouri. On Saturday, about twelve hundred Indians gathered to meet Schurz, who was sitting with his companions on a raised platform built for the occasion by the agent, Major Cicero Newell. In a grand circle on the ground in front of the platform were the chiefs and leading men of the new agency, and between the chiefs and the platform, sitting in a chair, was Spotted Tail. “He was dressed in plain blue, without ornament of any kind,” Carson wrote the following day. The gathering formed a scene of “barbaric splendor” which both impressed and disgusted Carson. The Indians were all dressed in their finery and mounted on “their best ponies,” but Carson was evidently a fastidious man. “Some of the warriors were dressed and painted with taste,” he wrote, as if a critic at the opera, “but the large portion of them were hideous with paint and repulsive in dirty garments.”²⁴

Schurz made some general opening remarks, followed by Spotted Tail, who spoke of Indian aspirations to become civilized. Then other chiefs rose to speak in the customary way. The turn arrived of Crazy Horse the father. In his hands he held a gift for Secretary Schurz: a war club which Crazy Horse the father, having completed the ceremony of ghost keeping, was now permitted to hold. John Carson, the Times reporter, made inquiry about the father. “He still mourns the loss of his son,” he wrote, “and moves about in an aimless way, descanting upon the qualities of the dead Crazy Horse.” A member of Schurz’s party summarized the father’s remarks:

Old chief Crazy Horse made a speech to him [Secretary Schurz], presenting the tomahawk he had carried all his life and which he had received from his father. He said that as he had no son who could inherit it, and he was at peace with the White Father and had no further use for the weapon, he presented it in token of friendship.²⁵

Crazy Horse the father died about 1880. His wife had died the previous year.²⁶