AFTERWORD
STRANGE COMBINATIONS OF FORGETTING and remembrance followed the death of Crazy Horse and, in time, of those who knew him. Now even those who knew those who knew him are disappearing. Among the general public the memory of Crazy Horse at first faded. In 1927 one of General Crook’s favorite mule packers, Henry W. Daly, wrote a brief memoir of the 1876 summer campaign, conceding that Crook did not win at the Rosebud. The explanation was not far to seek, in Daly’s view: “Crazy Horse was the greatest strategist among the western Indians.” But by the 1920s, Daly found, all the talk was about Sitting Bull. “One scarcely ever hears of Crazy Horse,” Daly wrote. “He has, I mean, left no impression on the popular mind.”1
This did not remain true for long. In the 1940s, the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziólkowski was seized by an ambition to carve a mountain in the Black Hills that would dwarf even Mount Rushmore. Henry Standing Bear, who had been in the Custer fight, suggested that Crazy Horse would be a proper subject for the sculptor, and in 1948 Ziólkowski began his herculean project to blast a mountain into a likeness of the chief. When Ziólkowski began, few survived who still remembered Crazy Horse, and despite much searching no one had found a photograph of him. One of the first to look was John Gregory Bourke, who wrote Crook’s widow shortly after the general’s death to ask if a Crazy Horse photograph was among his papers. Mary Crook said there was not, and suggested that Bourke contact the old Fort Laramie sutler, John Collins, the general’s hunting friend. Collins did not have one, either, and told Bourke to ask Ben Paddock, a trader at Fort Robinson. So it went for fifty years. Many photographs were touted for a time but all proved to be of someone else. Ziólkowski admitted he could get no closer than a likeness of the “spirit” of Crazy Horse, which in his sketches, and later as carved into the mountain itself, gave the chief a noticeably Slavic cast.
In 1949, on his way home from Rapid City where he had taken a job in the Sioux Museum, John Colhoff happened by the sculptor’s project in the Black Hills. From the window of his bus, he saw a sign pointing to the Crazy Horse mountain. There a collection box had been set up beside the road, with a sign asking for money. “Poor old Crazy Horse,” Colhoff wrote a friend, “the one thing he fought against the whites for—[they] are now using his name to make money.”2
The face on the mountain belonged to a figure of defiance and resistance, but among the Oglala the chief was remembered in a different way, for the power given him by the Wakan Tanka. Fast Thunder’s grandson, Matthew King, did not seek the spirit of Crazy Horse among the granite crags in the Black Hills but nearby on the gently rounded Bear Butte, where Lakota and Cheyenne still go to pray. King was born in 1902 and was active in the revival of traditional Lakota language, religion, and culture until his death in 1989. What he knew about Crazy Horse came mainly from his grandparents. “Crazy Horse used to say, ‘When I die I’ll come back as thunder and lightning.’ ” King did not think of this as poetry or metaphor. “Sometimes when I go up on Bear Butte,” King told a friend, “he speaks to me from the sky. His voice is thunder, his tongue is lightning.”3
Matthew King’s were not the only stories about Crazy Horse to pass down through the Fast Thunder family. Several of his grandchildren lived with their families along the Manderson road on the flats and hills west of Wounded Knee Creek. When Theodore Means, son of Fast Thunder’s daughter Fannie, came back from the war in Europe he quit drinking, established the first chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous at Pine Ridge, and began to take sweat baths and study traditional religion with Ben Black Elk, son of the well-known wicasa wakan who lived in Manderson. Beginning in the 1930s, Black Elk, although a practicing Catholic, set out to preserve the rituals associated with the sacred pipe, teaching them to the white scholars and writers John Neihardt and Joseph Epes Brown, who was living in Black Elk’s home when he met Ted Means in the 1940s.4Brown was impressed by Means, and developed a strong feeling for his eighty-year-old mother, Fannie, who gave Brown a bow that had belonged to her father, Fast Thunder. It was not only Black Elk who told Brown about the last of the buffalo-hunting days and the greatest of the warrior chiefs who fought the whites. “No man is held in more veneration here than Crazy Horse,” Brown wrote in a letter home. “He is always being talked about when any group gathers. His place of burial is still a mystery, and probably always shall be, which is good; but it is believed that he is not over a mile from here.”5
Not only the memory of Crazy Horse but certain items belonging to the chief had been preserved as well by the people living on the Manderson road, including one that had been entrusted to Ted Means some time in the late 1930s. It seems unlikely that Ted ever told Joe Brown what it was, where it was, or how it was obtained. The story was told to me by Ted’s granddaughter, Barbara Means Adams, who had learned it from her grandmother Theresa, Ted’s wife, in the late 1960s. Ted had been dead four or five years by then. Barbara was in her early twenties and already the mother of four children, the youngest still toddlers. One day without warning or preamble of any kind Theresa asked Barbara to drive her down to Minatare, Nebraska, a small town near Scott’s Bluff on the North Platte River. It’s a three-hour drive down to Minatare; Barbara protested that she had no one to leave the kids with, but Theresa was agitated and adamant—she had to go, there was something she had to get, Barbara had a car and there was no one else to take her. So Barbara piled all four boys into the back seat and headed down the Manderson road to Wounded Knee and Pine Ridge, following the old route to Minatare. On the way, Theresa told Barbara what they were going to get, and forty years later Barbara told me.
For many years before the Second World War, Theresa said, Pine Ridge Indians went south in the fall to pick potatoes on the big farms along the Platte River down in Nebraska. Every September hundreds of them would gather in tent camps on the farms where they worked, often setting up in the same place, under the same big old cottonwood tree or in the same grassy spot along an irrigation ditch, year after year. Among those taking their families south for a month or six weeks every year were Ted Means and his first cousin Stella Swift Bird, daughter of Fast Thunder’s oldest boy, carried as Mark Red Star on the agency rolls, but called Old Man Flesh by his family. Until the war got in the way, Ted Means and Stella Swift Bird pitched their tents side by side every year along a windrow of cottonwoods on a place owned by a Japanese farmer just outside of Minatare. The last trip down, Theresa said, was in the fall of 1942, just before Ted joined the Army and everything changed.6
Barbara’s cousin, Pete Swift Bird, remembers Theresa well. She was a daughter of Edward Two Two, an Oglala who often toured with Wild West shows and died in Germany at the beginning of the First World War. After Ted died in the mid-1960s, when Pete Swift Bird was still a toddler, Theresa remained in the house on the Manderson road. The old log house built by Fast Thunder had been replaced by a newer, one-story, stucco structure, but there was an outhouse and a water pump out back. Theresa was a round, grandmotherly type who loved to feed people, and she “did magic with that old ledge-back, wood-burning kitchen stove,” according to Pete. In the 1960s, when Pete was a small child and his parents were working, he lived with his grandmother, Stella, out in the country in a house with no electricity. They often visited Theresa Means on the Manderson road, and there Pete would see his cousin Barb, who was in her twenties.
“My grandma was a slim, frail figure,” Pete Swift Bird remembered of Stella. “Living with her was like being in a mother’s womb.” She was in her late sixties, born in 1897, old enough to start a family the year Fast Thunder died in 1914. She loved to tell stories of the old days and she told them in Lakota. Pete’s teacher in third grade was Mabell Kadlecek, the wife of a Nebraska rancher with a place on Beaver Creek a few miles south of the old Spotted Tail Agency. Mabell and her husband, Edward, were friendly with a number of elderly Pine Ridge Indians, including Pete’s grandmother, Stella Swift Bird. The Kadleceks had come to believe that a big old cottonwood tree down along the creek on their place had been the first burial site of Crazy Horse. When the body of Crazy Horse was moved, the Kadleceks believed, its final resting place was in a crevice between some big rocks on a pine-covered hillside overlooking their ranch. Every year, Mabell Kadlecek would take her third-grade class in a bus down to the ranch and show them the grassy flat along Beaver Creek where Fast Thunder had conducted a sun dance in 1877, so the old Indians said. And she pointed out to her students the big old cottonwood tree, then still standing (but now gone), where the body of Crazy Horse was first buried.
Pete saw the tree like all the other kids, but when he was in the sixth grade his grandmother, Stella Swift Bird, told him it wasn’t so. She said the body of Crazy Horse had been hidden in the white clay buttes along the Manderson road. She said her father, Old Man Flesh, remembered all his life something Crazy Horse told him when he was only twelve or thirteen years old. “He told Flesh never to trust those people, the wasicus,” Stella Swift Bird told her grandson. She said Crazy Horse left everybody and went out into the country alone. She said Old Man Flesh kept Crazy Horse’s chekpa, which Pete Swift Bird called a medicine bundle. “It was a black, beaded ball with his belly button in it and Old Man Flesh buried it with him,” Pete remembered. “That’s the story I heard from Stella and from my Dad. It was in the sweat lodge when you heard that kind of thing.”
When Barbara Adams told me Theresa’s story she also used the words “medicine bundle,” but she clearly meant something different—the much larger object containing a man’s sicun. Theresa told Barbara she knew exactly where she was going. It was the place where they used to camp. They set up the tent every year in the same place, on the farm owned by the Japanese man, under a great big old cottonwood tree. When they got to Minatare, Theresa would tell Barbara exactly where to go.
But when they got to Minatare, everything seemed strange and misplaced. Theresa grew agitated. She couldn’t understand what had happened. Barbara drove her four boys and her grandmother all around Minatare for an hour, turning up every road, looking for that cottonwood tree. But they never found the tree, and nothing in the town itself looked familiar. The fields were bigger, the old windrows of Chinese elms had been taken out, the road into town was wider and followed a different route, buildings were boarded up or missing. Theresa discovered in an hour everything that had changed in twenty years—the potato and sugar beet farms had moved to the center of the state, retail business had all migrated eight miles up the road to Scott’s Bluff, the big cottonwood dooryard trees had been mostly cut down. By the end of that hour Theresa admitted she could no longer find the spot where they had pitched their tent in 1942.
They did not get back home till after dark. On the long drive home Theresa told Barbara what she had gone to retrieve. It would be a very interesting thing to have. On the last day of his life, Theresa said, Crazy Horse gave Fast Thunder his medicine bundle for safekeeping. After Crazy Horse was killed, Fast Thunder took this medicine bundle to the Pine Ridge reservation and kept it in his log house on the Manderson road. After Fast Thunder died in 1914 his wife, Jennie Wounded Horse, preserved the medicine bundle, telling no one about it outside the family. Before Jennie died in 1934 she entrusted the medicine bundle to a relative who lived on the Manderson road, Nellie Ghost Dog, who passed it on in turn to Ted Means, Fast Thunder’s grandson. In 1942, fearing the dislocations of war, Barbara’s grandparents decided to bury the medicine bundle in Minatare. They pitched their tent right beside the big cottonwood tree so they would always be able to find the place again. Inside the tent at night the family dug a hole six feet deep.
But before they buried the medicine bundle, Theresa told Barbara, they decided to open the bundle. When I asked Barbara how big it was, she said her grandmother described it as about the size of a baby. On the outside of the bundle was a blanket. Inside the blanket were several layers of cloth. Inside the cloth was a bag made of tanned deerskin. It was this bag which would hold a man’s sicun—special stones that had power, or certain herbs and sweet-smelling grasses, or parts of animals that had visited the owner in visions and dreams.
What Crazy Horse had placed in his medicine bundle Theresa did not know. When the family started to open the deerskin bag, she said, they suddenly heard a great roar of flapping wings against the walls of the tent; scores of owls were beating their wings outside, loud as thunder. Traditional Lakotas believe that owls warn of death. The sound frightened all of them. They wrapped up Crazy Horse’s bundle and buried it right away.
On the way home from Minatare, Theresa was in despair; she felt they had all failed somehow—lost the precious thing entrusted to them. This was not Barbara’s conclusion. She thought a powerful message of assurance could be read in the beating of the owls’ wings. My own view shifts back and forth. In one mood it seems to me that Crazy Horse did not want the wasicus to get his medicine bundle and they didn’t. Thus he died in victory, as his father said. But at other moments it seems that Theresa’s story is plainer in meaning, and marks a divide between the things that have been lost and the things that survive.7