Crazy Horse was the popular English name for Tasunke Witko (“His Horse Is Crazy”), a leader of the Oglala band of the Lakota Sioux. As with many aspects of indigenous history, accounts often differ from one another. He was born in the early 1840s in what is today central South Dakota, although accounts differ as to the particular date of his birth. Such familial developments were often linked to larger, contextual events impacting the band. The birth of Crazy Horse has often been linked to the time when the Oglalas stole 100 horses, which was thought by early indigenous historian American Horse as having happened in the winter of 1840–1841. Oral histories from family and friends, however, tend to suggest a later date of birth, perhaps as late as 1845.
Crazy Horse led the Oglala Lakota in their campaign of resistance to the U.S. military in the Sioux Wars of the 1870s. He is mostly known for his victory over General George A. Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. This photograph depicts the Crazy Horse Memorial near Custer, South Dakota, which sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began in 1948; sculptors continued to work on the memorial after Ziolkowski’s death in 1982. (Cindy Daly/Dreamstime.com)
Crazy Horse grew up on a Lakota reservation. As a youth, he witnessed the Grattan Massacre (August 19, 1854), which would become the flashpoint for the First Sioux War (1854–1856), an event that some believe convinced the United States of the need to adopt a more aggressive policy when dealing with the indigenous tribes of the northern plains. The massacre occurred when a dispute over a butchered cow resulted in the death of a Lakota chieftain and the full contingent of thirty U.S. army troops who had been sent to seek restitution for the cow. The event served to radicalize Crazy Horse, who reportedly began having visions at this time and was soon embraced as a warrior. In numerous skirmishes with the Shoshone and other traditional plains nations rivals, he proved his skill in battle and began to assert himself as a leader of his band. In 1864 he joined the growing Sioux resistance to the U.S. military, following the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado Territory. By the next year, he was anointed as one of the war leaders of the Lakota tribe.
During the late 1860s, Crazy Horse participated in the Fetterman Massacre (December 21, 1866), the Wagon Box Fight (August 2, 1867), as well as numerous skirmishes with the U.S. army, state and local militias, white settlers, and other indigenous tribes. It was during the Great Sioux War of 1876, however, that he established his reputation and secured his legend. The impetus for this conflict was the 1874 discovery of gold in the Black Hills region of the Dakotas. The resulting flood of white settlers to this area, and to nearby locations in the Montana and Wyoming Territories, resulted in increased conflict, much of it violent. Federal mandates regarding the routing of railroads across reservations were also part of the problem. Negotiations with President Ulysses S. Grant failed, as did government attempts to divide the various tribes and bargain individually. While Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, and other Sioux chieftains argued about what course of action they would take, the Grant administration began making plans for war, including action against the neighboring Northern Cheyenne tribe whose lands were also coveted for settlement by whites moving into the area. Although Spotted Tail and Red Cloud began to prepare for peaceful relocation, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull organized their respective bands, the Oglala and Hunkpapa, for war. When these two chieftains had not acquiesced to the relocation orders by the end of January 1876, the U.S. Army began winter operations in hopes of catching these two Lakota bands and their Cheyenne allies unaware.
By that time, the army had constructed and staffed a number of forts largely encircling the lands occupied by the Sioux Nation. More than 2,000 soldiers were stationed at these forts, many equipped with the latest Springfield rifle, a breech-loading weapon that allowed for a quick refire rate. Many of these soldiers were poorly trained, however, and most of the commanding officers did not know the territory well and did not always trust or value the advice of their indigenous guides. The Lakota-Cheyenne alliance also had their share of obstacles. They were somewhat weakened due to long-standing conflicts with the Crow Nation and Eastern Shoshone tribe. Although it is estimated that about half of the 2,000 to 4,000 indigenous combatants were armed with rifles, ammunition was generally in short supply, and the other half fought with bow and arrow. In their reliance upon horses for mobility against a much better armed opponent, the Sioux were vulnerable to attack in the spring, when the horses were recovering body fat after being largely starved during the inactive winter season.
Although not involved in the early fighting, Crazy Horse led a coalition of more than 1,000 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors at the Battle of Rosebud Creek on June 17. There they faced a force of about equal size and strength led by General George Crook. Crook’s force was largely made up of U.S. infantry and cavalry but was augmented by Crow and Eastern Shoshone warriors, as well as armed civilians. After six hours of fighting, the Lakota-Cheyenne retired from the battlefield. The result was far from a victory for the U.S. Army, however. If not for the heroic actions of the Crow and Shoshone, the main body of Crook’s force would have been surrounded before he even knew Crazy Horse was in the area. By the end of the day he realized that he needed reinforcements and a shorter supply line to continue his campaign. And most critically, he was not able to participate in the Battle of Little Bighorn eight days later. Although it is unknown how the addition of his troops to General George Armstrong Custer’s would have impacted the later battle, certainly Crazy Horse’s success at Rosebud Creek contributed to his more noteworthy victory a week later.
On June 25, Crazy Horse led a force of up to 2,000 warriors as they ambushed the Seventh Cavalry Regiment near the Little Bighorn River. General Custer had been sent into this area of the Montana Territory to scout the way ahead for the bulk of the U.S. Army forces. Shortly before the attack, he had divided his force of 700 soldiers into several groups. Custer’s main force of 268 men was overwhelmed and killed down to the last person. According to Lakota legend, Crazy Horse personally led the charge against the final resistance. Modern archaeological evidence has suggested the Lakota account is accurate, with a single, overwhelming charge rather than the encircling “Last Stand” engagement portrayed in the eastern newspapers of the time. Whether or not Crazy Horse led this final charge, he had become a hero to his people and a villain to an American public horrified at what transpired during the Battle of Little Bighorn.
The next January, the fighting began again with renewed vigor, as a better trained and equipped army under Colonel Nelson Miles began to grind away at the Lakota forces, many of whom had surrendered, slipped back onto reservations, or fled to Canada to seek asylum. By the spring of 1877, the attrition was too great, and Crazy Horse formally surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska on May 5, 1877. For several months, he was left to his own devices, but in August the escape of Chief Joseph from his Idaho reservation increased tensions in the area. Due to a misunderstanding, General Crook ordered Crazy Horse’s incarceration. The Lakota leader was tracked down on September 5 and, in the course of resisting arrest, was stabbed to death by a soldier posted to the reservation.
Crazy Horse’s legacy is one of determined resistance. Even before he turned to violent action as a defensive strategy during the mid-1860s, he was well known for his stance on indigenous self-reliance. One reason so little is known about him is that he kept his interactions with whites to a minimum: no photograph of him is known to exist. In dying at the hands of the U.S. Army following his peaceful surrender, like Sitting Bull, he was a casualty of the duplicity that typified the Indian Wars and a martyr for indigenous rights. Crazy Horse is also the subject of an unfinished, and controversial, memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Begun by Korczak Ziolkowski in 1948 as a sort of counterpoint to Mount Rushmore, much work remains to be done on the memorial, which is being sculpted out of a mountain. The finished product will feature the Oglala leader riding a horse and will be 641 feet long and 563 feet high. Proceeds from the entry fees to the site have funded a museum and educational center at the base of the mountain. This museum is annually visited by larger and larger numbers of tourists who, in addition to celebrating the American presidents of Rushmore, now flock to the memorial to learn about this important indigenous leader.
Crazy Horse Monument: A Native American Rushmore?
Perhaps the most iconic American image of all time is the gigantic sculpture of the heads of four presidents on the southeast face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Sixty-foot-high visages of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt look down from the side of a peak nearly 6,000 feet tall. Used and reused in nearly every context imaginable, this massive sculpture, completed in 1927, is a touchstone of American culture, and indeed can be used as a sort of visual shorthand for “America.” Mount Rushmore, however, is not without controversy, nor without competition. The Black Hills, sacred to the Sioux, were promised to that nation in perpetuity by the United States, which reneged when gold was discovered there. The giant faces of leaders of the country that oppressed them—writ large upon a sacred mountainside—are thus perceived by many Sioux as a particularly tactless indignity. An even larger memorial to Crazy Horse was conceived nearby, therefore, and although it has critics of its own, it may seem to some an appropriate Native American answer to Mount Rushmore.
C. Fee
Andrew Howe
See also Chief Joseph; Custer, George Armstrong; Geronimo
Further Reading
Brown, Dee. 1972. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Bantam.
“Crazy Horse.” 2009. History.com. http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/crazy-horse. Accessed July 1, 2015.
Crazy Horse Memorial. CrazyHorseMemorial.org. http://crazyhorsememorial.org/. Accessed July 1, 2015.
“Crazy Horse/Tashunkewitko, Oglala.” 2014. Indians.org. http://www.indians.org/welker/crazyhor.htm. Accessed July 1, 2015.
Marshall, John M., III. 2005. The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History. New York: Penguin Books.
Powers, Thomas. 2010. The Killing of Crazy Horse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Crazy Horse—Primary Document
Battle of the Little Bighorn and Crazy Horse (1876)
The Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876 birthed the legend of Crazy Horse, or Tashunca-uitco (also spelled Tasunke Witko or Tashunkewitko), one of the Lakota chiefs who fought against General George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. In the following selections, Secretary of War J. Donald Cameron explains to President Ulysses S. Grant the background of the Great Sioux War and gives news of Custer’s defeat, while Crazy Horse gives his perspective on the conflict in what are alleged to be his last words before his murder while in U.S. Army custody in 1877.
Secretary J. D. Cameron, Letter to President Grant (1876)
During all the stages of this correspondence, the General of the Army and his subordinate commanders were duly notified, and were making preparations for striking a blow at these hostile savages, an enterprise of almost insurmountable difficulty in a country where, in winter, the thermometer often falls to forty degrees below zero, and where it is impossible to procure food for man or beast. An expedition was fitted out under the personal command of Brig. Gen. George Crook, an officer of great merit and experience, which, in March last, marched from Forts Fetterman and Laramie to the Powder River and Yellowstone Valleys, struck and destroyed the village of Crazy Horse, one of those hostile bands referred to by Indian Inspector Watkins, but the weather was found so bitter cold, and other difficulties so great arose, that General Crook returned to Fort Laramie in a measure unsuccessful so far as the main purpose was concerned. These Indians occupy parts of the Departments of Dakota and Platte, commanded by Generals Terry and Crook, respectively, but the whole is immediately commanded by Lieutenant-General Sheridan, who has given the matter his special attention. Preparations were then made on a larger scale, and three columns were put in motion as early in May as possible, from Fort Abe Lincoln, on the Missouri River, under General Terry; from Fort Ellis, in Montana, under General Gibbon; and from Fort Fetterman under General Crook. These columns were as strong as could be maintained in that inhospitable region, or could be spared from other pressing necessities, and their operations are not yet concluded, nor is a more detailed report deemed necessary to explain the subject-matter of this inquiry.
The present military operations are not against the Sioux Nation at all, but against certain hostile parts of it which defy the Government, and are undertaken at the special request of that bureau of the Government charged with their supervision, and wholly to make the civilization of the remainder possible. No part of these operations are on or near the Sioux reservation. The accidental discovery of gold on the western border of the Sioux reservation, and the intrusion of our people thereon, have not caused this war, and have only complicated it by the uncertainty of numbers to be encountered. The young warriors love war, and frequently escape their agents to go on the hunt, or warpath, their only idea of the object of life. The object of these military expeditions was in the interest of the peaceful parts of the Sioux Nation, supposed to embrace at least nine-tenths of the whole, and not one of these peaceful or treaty Indians have been molested by the military authorities.
The recent reports touching the disaster which befell a part of the Seventh Regular Cavalry, led by General Custer in person are believed to be true. For some reason as yet unexplained, General Custer, who commanded the Seventh Cavalry, and had been detached by his commander, General Terry, at the mouth of Rosebud, made a wide detour up the Rosebud, a tributary of the Yellowstone, across to the Little Big Horn and down to the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Yates; Lieutenants Cook, Smith, McIntosh, Calhoun, Hodgson, Reilly, Porter, Sturgis, all of the Seventh Cavalry; and Lieutenant Crittenden of the Twentieth Infantry, Lieutenant Harrington, Assistant Surgeon Lord, and Acting Assistant Surgeon DeWolff, are missing.
The wounded were carried back to the mouth of the Big Horn, in the Yellowstone River, which is navigable, and where there were two steamboats, one of which was sent down the river to Fort Abe Lincoln with the wounded, and to communicate these sad facts.
General Terry is therefore at the mouth of the Big Horn, refitting, and will promptly receive re-enforcement and supplies, and will resume his operations immediately.
Meantime, General Crook had also advanced from Fort Fetterman, and on the 17th of June, eight days before General Custer’s attack, had encountered this same force of warriors on the head of the Rosebud, with whom he fought several hours, driving the Indians from the field, losing nine men in killed; one officer and twenty men wounded. General Crook reports his camp as on Tongue River, Wyoming. Re-enforcement and supplies are also enroute to him, and every possible means have been adopted to accomplish a concert of action between these two forces, which are necessarily separated, and are only able to communicate by immense distances around their rear.
The task committed to the military authorities is one of unusual difficulty, has been anticipated for years, and must be met and accomplished. It can no longer be delayed, and everything will be done by the Department to insure success, which is necessary to give even an assurance of comparative safety to the important but scattered interests which have grown up in that remote and almost inaccessible portion of our national domain.
Crazy Horse’s Final Speech (1877)
I was not hostile to the white man. Sometimes my young men would attack the Indians who were their enemies and took their ponies. They did it in return. We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and our tepees. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservations, where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt. We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government then. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages. [He referred to the winter before when his village was destroyed by Colonel Reynolds, Third Cavalry.] Then “Long Hair” [Custer] came in the same way. They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses, but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight. After that I went up on Tongue River with a few of my people and lived in peace. But the government would not let me alone. Finally, I came back to Red Cloud agency. Yet I was not allowed to remain quiet. I was tired of fighting. I went to Spotted Tail agency and asked that chief and his agent to let me live there in peace. I came here with the agent [Lee] to talk with the big white chief, but was not given a chance. They tried to confine me, I tried to escape, and a soldier ran his bayonet into me. I have spoken.
Sources: Secretary Cameron to President Grant, July 8, 1876. Senate Executive Document No. 81. Serial Volume 1664. Crazy Horse speech reprinted in Homer W. Wheeler. Buffalo Days. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1905, pp. 199–200.