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THE MAN WHO TOOK the name Sword was in New York City on the day Crazy Horse was killed. Sword had been one of the Oglala scouts who led Generals Crook and Sheridan to the Little Bighorn battle site in the summer of 1877. It was during that trip that Hunts the Enemy discarded his old name and took his brother’s—Man That Owns a Sword (Miwakan Yuha). Back at the Red Cloud Agency in late August, Sword was hired to appear in a new play starring William F. Cody, a scout and guide for the Army who was already nationally famous as Buffalo Bill, hero of many dime novels. Sword and the Hunkpapa Sioux Two Bears traveled east with Buffalo Bill and his wife and daughter to the Cody home in Rochester, New York, arriving about the 1st of September. In a saloon on Front Street during their stay “two beakers of foaming lager [were] placed before them,” courtesy of Buffalo Bill. “The chiefs took their glasses with as much grace and ease as if natives of Berlin,” wrote a correspondent for the Rochester Union. “[They] quaffed the amber-colored fluid without flinching and when another pot was placed before them were nothing loth.”1
Sword and Two Bears played roles as friendly Indians who helped Buffalo Bill in May Cody, or Lost and Won, a play written by one of Cody’s Army friends, Captain Andrew S. Burt. It opened at the Bowery Theater in New York on September 3, the day Crook had planned to meet with Crazy Horse in council. On succeeding days, when Crazy Horse fled the agency, when he was killed, and when his body was taken away by his parents, Sword appeared nightly on the stage of the Bowery Theater. By this time he had decisively cast his lot with the whites. In an account of his life written in Lakota, Sword said that the power of the white Army convinced him that Wakan Tanka was inferior to the white man’s god. He put aside his identity as a traditional war leader or blota hunka, a bear dreamer, a pejuta wicasa, and a leader of sun dances and joined the Episcopal Church, eventually becoming a deacon. He took the Christian name George. He cut his hair. He built a house. He accepted appointment as captain of police on the new Pine Ridge Agency and once defied Red Cloud, saying, “I wear the uniform of the Great Father, and the army of the Great Father is back of me.”2
But respect for Lakota religion did not die in George Sword. “The scars on my body show that I have danced the sun dance,” he told the new agency doctor in 1896, James R. Walker. “No Lakota will dispute my word.” When Walker wanted to study Lakota religion, Sword came to his aid. One of Walker’s interpreters was Bruce Means, a son-in-law of Fast Thunder. The most serious health problem at Pine Ridge in 1896 was tuberculosis; as many as half the Oglala were infected. Walker concluded that his work would be easier if he had the help of traditional medicine men, of whom five remained active at Pine Ridge. Three were very old. None would speak freely to Walker until Sword convinced them that Wakan Tanka did not want them to carry their knowledge to the grave.
The traditional knowledge of the Sioux was in jeopardy on all the Sioux reservations, where the medicine men and women were growing old while younger people were not interested in the old songs and ceremonies. Officials encouraged this pattern, saying they wanted to kill the Indian to save the man. Sun dances, giveaways, and coming-of-age ceremonies for young women were all prohibited, and the rules were enforced by a Court of Indian Offenses. In school, Sioux children were forbidden to speak Lakota. Traditionals said the circle had been broken, and the life of the Lakota was coming to an end. “We come to you as from the dead,” Old Buffalo (Tatanka Ehanni), born in 1845, told the anthropologist Frances Densmore on the Standing Rock Reservation. “The things about which you ask us have been dead to us for many years. In bringing them to our minds we are calling them from the dead, and when we have told you about them they will go back to the dead, to remain forever.”3
Before they died the medicine men passed on some of what they knew to self-selected students like Densmore and Walker. In effect, Walker became an Oglala. Once ordained, or formally accepted into the ranks of medicine men, Walker was free to ask any question and eligible to learn any secret, with only a few exceptions. The final steps required him to have a vision and to receive a sicun, or sacred bundle. Both were provided by Short Bull. A sicun was a collection of objects of power, consecrated in sacred ways. Any man could have a sicun but no man could safely treat it with disrespect. George Sword told Walker that he might be a Christian but he still feared the power of his medicine bundle. “I will write of the old customs and ceremonies for you,” he said. “But the secrets of the shamans I am afraid to write, for I have my old outfit as a shaman, and I am afraid to offend it. If a shaman offends his ceremonial outfit, it will bring disaster on him.”
Into Walker’s ceremonial outfit, or medicine bundle, Short Bull placed the following objects of power: “the tusk of a bear, the claw of an eagle, the rattle of a rattlesnake, a wisp of human hair, and a wisp of sweetgrass.” These objects were wrapped inside the skin of a fawn, tanned to the softness of butter.4
George Sword died in 1910.
Matthew King, a grandson of Fast Thunder, learned to smoke cigarettes from his great-grandmother Cane Woman (Sagyewin) about 1906, when Matthew was four years old. The family lived on Fast Thunder’s allotment a few miles north of the community of Wounded Knee and a few miles south of the community of Manderson on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Fast Thunder had chosen good bottomland along the creek where he planted crops and pastured cattle and horses. By the time Matthew was born, Fast Thunder’s family had moved from a canvas lodge to a log cabin on a rise overlooking what was called the Manderson Road. Cane Woman, mother of Fast Thunder’s wife, Jennie Wounded Horse, was in her nineties and blind. It was Matthew’s job at four to keep Cane Woman company and lead her around by the elbow. The two of them spent the day together.5
Cane Woman loved to smoke, Matthew King remembered, but her hands shook too much to roll a cigarette. She had to ask others to hold the paper and shake out the Bull Durham tobacco when she wanted a smoke. “Nobody wanted to roll all those cigarettes for Cane Woman,” King said, “so she had me do it for her.” This was not easy for the boy, but in time he learned to make a tolerable cigarette. “Matthew,” Cane Woman would say when the mood struck, “roll one and light me!” It was natural to get it going with a few puffs himself. Soon he liked a smoke as much as Cane Woman. She didn’t mind. One day she said, “Roll one for yourself.” After that he generally made two cigarettes and they smoked together.
Fast Thunder was counted among the “progressives” on Pine Ridge, the men who had one wife, sent their children to school, drove wagons, attended church, earned money by freighting or farming, and made no show when performing traditional ceremonies. He raised ducks and chickens. Baptiste Pourier and Fast Thunder were the first on the reservation to raise oats, and after that, remembered his grandson, Paul Red Star, “he was the first Indian to own a horse-powered threshing machine.” During the ghost dance trouble he sided with the government. Black Elk remembered that Fast Thunder and American Horse came to urge him “to put this ghost dance aside quietly.” At a huge meeting of seven thousand Oglala a week before the killing at Wounded Knee, Fast Thunder was elected to ride out with Big Road and Little Wound to talk peace with the ghost dancers, who had taken refuge in a protected valley in the Badlands known as the Stronghold. There was no game in the Badlands, so the ghost dancers and their families lived on beef stolen from white ranchers and the progressives. After the trouble was over, Fast Thunder submitted a claim to the government for the loss of fifty-six cattle. He was luckier than American Horse, whose house was burned.6
But in other ways, Fast Thunder remained a traditional. It was said that moccasins were the first thing whites adopted from Indians, and the last thing Indians gave up. But it was not just the wearing of moccasins that connected Fast Thunder to traditional life. He had two wives until 1895, when he separated from the second, a cousin of Jennie Wounded Horse named Locator. He did not cut his hair, he counted a man rich who had many horses, on important occasions he smoked a traditional pipe with a red catlinite bowl and a wooden stem decorated with porcupine quills, and when he did not feel well, or wanted to pray, he prepared a sweat bath. The rocks found along Wounded Knee Creek were no good for a sweat, in Fast Thunder’s view; they cracked and broke when water was poured on them. The right kind of rocks, heavy and dense, could be found sixty miles southwest near the new town of Chadron, across the line in Nebraska. One of his granddaughters, Stella Swift Bird, remembered that Fast Thunder always returned home with some of these rocks when he went to Chadron.
But most importantly, Fast Thunder talked to his grandchildren of the old days. His reputation as a fighter was well known. George Sword, who became a captain of the Indian police at Pine Ridge, said Fast Thunder had been the bravest fighter at the Wagon Box Fight in 1867—he was the one who rode closest to the enemy. William Garnett said it was Fast Thunder and Scraper, both wearing eagle-feather warbonnets, who had charged first into the Cheyenne camp on the Red Fork of the Powder River in November 1876.
It was natural that Fast Thunder’s grandchildren, growing up in the quiet poverty of the reservation, should sit breathless listening to the old man’s stories. When he took off his shirt they saw the sun dance scars on his back and on his chest. He told them he once stood for four days on a high spot overlooking Beaver Creek until a snake came to him in a vision and spoke to him. He was afraid of water because a bear came to him in a dream and bears are afraid of water. As a bear dreamer, Fast Thunder had the power to heal; he was a pejuta wicasa. At a naming ceremony when he was little, Matthew King was given names by his grandparents. His grandmother Jennie Wounded Horse said her husband helped everybody so she named Matthew “Helper” in honor of Fast Thunder.
Matthew’s grandfather also gave him a name. In his youth, he explained, he was once in a big fight with Pawnee who killed some of his friends and wounded Fast Thunder badly with arrows. One arrow he pulled right out, but the other went all the way through his body. Fast Thunder said he reached around and broke off the point where it emerged from his back and then pulled the shaft of the arrow out the front. “I hid in a gully in some tall grass and used my medicine herbs to treat my wounds,” he told Matthew. “I’m hard to kill.”
That was the name Fast Thunder gave his grandson: “Hard to Kill.”
The boy Matthew often went out walking with his grandfather in the country along Wounded Knee Creek, sometimes up in the hills, sometimes down by the water. Fast Thunder would bring his old scout gun with him, a Springfield trapdoor carbine. He told many stories of the old warring and hunting days but sometimes he talked about the time Crazy Horse was killed. He told Matthew he was one of those who persuaded Crazy Horse to go back to Camp Robinson. The white soldiers told him Crazy Horse would not be harmed. They only wanted to talk to him. Crazy Horse feared a trick but felt he had no choice. All his life Crazy Horse had gone out alone, but he did not want to leave the people and go out alone now. “How can I be free all by myself?” he said to Fast Thunder.7
When he urged Crazy Horse to go back and explain himself to the white soldiers, Fast Thunder thought he was doing the right thing. When the soldiers tried to put Crazy Horse in the guardhouse many people had seen Fast Thunder holding Crazy Horse as he struggled to break free. As the years passed Fast Thunder and his wife remembered that moment differently, as if he only caught hold of Crazy Horse when he was stabbed, and helped lower him to the ground. Jennie Wounded Horse told her grandchildren that she began to sing a brave song as soon as Crazy Horse was stabbed, and covered him with her blanket.
But one memory nothing could soften. Jennie told her grandchildren that when Crazy Horse was lying mortally wounded on the ground, he accused Fast Thunder of betrayal. “Cousin, you killed me,” Jennie remembered him saying. “You are with the white people.”8
Fast Thunder suffered with these memories. “I never saw anyone so sad,” said his grandson Matthew. The old man, then in his seventies, would sit down by the creek and shake his head and say, “They tricked me! They tricked me!” Sometimes it was sorrow he expressed, sometimes anger. When he was angry he would ride into town and shoot his gun.
To Matthew, the old man was a kind of hero, a brave warrior in the old days, and then a farmer who made himself rich raising cattle and horses. His brand was “707,” Matthew remembered, because that was how many horses he had. His cousin Paul Red Star also remembered hearing about that big herd of horses. Fast Thunder spoke for the people in council, defended the people against agency officials, went to Washington, helped others. But there was a shadow on him. “All most people remembered about him,” Matthew King said in the mid-1980s, when he was eighty himself, “was that he helped do in Crazy Horse. They never let him forget it. People had no mercy on him. Even today they haven’t forgiven him.”9
Fast Thunder died on March 4, 1914, in the town of Manderson. To his widow Jennie Wounded Horse he left $215 cash, ten horses valued at $300, and the log house he had built along the Manderson Road. Jennie Wounded Horse lived in the house until her own death on January 2, 1934.10
When He Dog, Big Road, and Little Hawk returned from Canada in 1881 they settled near the community of Kyle on the Pine Ridge Reservation, far from Red Cloud’s people and from Red Cloud himself, who slept on a metal frame bed and lived in a two-story clapboard house built for him by the government in the village of Pine Ridge, near the agency offices. Bitter feelings between the followers of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were never dispelled. When Eleanor Hinman and her friend Mari Sandoz visited Pine Ridge in 1930 to research the life of Crazy Horse they took care not to side openly with one faction or the other, but some of the old-timers still refused to say anything. When the interpreter John Colhoff sought out Crazy Horse’s uncle Little Hawk, he refused to meet with the two women. “No questions had been asked about Crazy Horse at the time of his death,” Colhoff explained, “and he did not care to answer any now.”11 Another interpreter helping Hinman and Sandoz was Samuel Stands. Sensing that some of the Indians were telling less than they knew, Stands went out on his own one night to meet privately with a man he would identify only as an “old timer.”
“The old man’s reply as quoted by Stands was, ‘I’m not telling anyone—white or Indian—what I know about the killing of Crazy Horse,’ ” Hinman wrote. “ ‘That affair was a disgrace, and a dirty shame. We killed our own man.’ ” 12
If He Dog blamed anyone for the death of Crazy Horse, it was Red Cloud. He had confronted the chief angrily in the first moments after Crazy Horse was stabbed, while he still lay writhing on the parade ground. “You said nothing like this would ever happen again,” He Dog said. “You promised there would be no more blood shed. Now look …!” He told his son that he accused Lieutenant Clark of the same thing at the same time, and even slapped the officer in the face.13
But He Dog never flatly blamed Red Cloud, Clark, or anyone else by name for engineering his friend’s death. “I am an old man now and shall not live many years longer,” he told Hinman in the first of their three interviews. “It is time for me to tell these things.”14
When He Dog had enlisted as a scout, Clark put the name He Wolf down on his enlistment papers. In the 1920s, when He Dog applied for a pension the Army could not find his records and denied his application. Hunger and even outright starvation, especially of the elderly in isolated cabins in remote corners of the reservation, was common at Pine Ridge until the 1940s. He Dog in his eighties could not walk, could not see, and had no source of income. “It used to be a disgrace to the Sioux to eat horse meat,” He Dog told General Hugh Scott. “Now we can hardly help ourselves from it.”
To live, He Dog depended on a niece, on his younger brother Short Bull (who did get a pension), and on the provisions his friend John Colhoff brought him from time to time. He told Colhoff he could not repay his kindness in this world, “but when he got ‘there’ he would have it announced in the camp just what J. had done for him on earth.”15 Black Elk asked Eleanor Hinman for two cents a word to talk about Crazy Horse, and estimated the story would take two weeks to tell. But He Dog asked for nothing.
Much of what is known about the life of Crazy Horse comes from He Dog. He told General Scott in 1920 that he still mourned Crazy Horse fifty years after his death. Of his friend, He Dog implied only one criticism: he should have bent more, he should have said yes more. But his weakness was small compared to the thing that made him the greatest fighter of the Sioux. “When he came on the field of battle,” He Dog told Scott, “he made everybody brave.”16
He Dog died in 1936.