The Killing of Crazy Horse, page 1
Also by Thomas Powers
Intelligence Wars
The Confirmation
Heisenberg’s War
Thinking About the Next War
The Man Who Kept the Secrets
The War at Home
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Powers
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Powers, Thomas.
The killing of Crazy Horse / By Thomas Powers.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59451-8
1. Crazy Horse, ca. 1842–1877—Death and burial. 2. Oglala Indians—Kings and rulers—Biography. I. Title. E99.03C7255 2010 978.004′9752440092—dc22 [B] 2010016842
v3.1
For Halley and Finn,
Toby and Quinn
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Introduction. “We’ll come for you another time.”
1. “When we were young, all we thought about was going to war.”
2. “I have always kept the oaths I made then, but Crazy Horse did not.”
3. “It is better to die young.”
4. “Crazy Horse was as fine an Indian as he ever knew.”
5. “A Sandwich Islander appears to exercise great control in the Indian councils.”
6. “Gold from the grass roots down.”
7. “We don’t want any white men here.”
Photo Insert 1
8. “The wild devils of the north.”
9. “This whole business was exceedingly distasteful to me.”
10. “I knew this village by the horses.”
11. “He is no good and should be killed.”
12. “Crook was bristling for a fight.”
13. “I give you these because they have no ears.”
14. “I found it a more serious engagement than I thought.”
15. “I am in constant dread of an attack.”
16. “General Crook ought to be hung.”
17. “You won’t get anything to eat! You won’t get anything to eat!”
18. “When spring comes, we are going to kill them like dogs.”
19. “All the people here are in rags.”
20. “I want this peace to last forever.”
21. “I cannot decide these things for myself.”
22. “It made his heart heavy and sad to think of these things.”
23. “They were killed like wolves.”
24. “The soldiers could not go any further, and they knew that they had to die.”
Photo Insert 2
25. “It is impossible to work him through reasoning or kindness.”
26. “If you go to Washington they are going to kill you.”
27. “We washed the blood from our faces.”
28. “I can have him whenever I want him.”
29. “I am Crazy Horse! Don’t touch me!”
30. “He feels too weak to die today.”
31. “I heard him using the brave word.”
32. “He has looked for death, and it has come.”
33. “He still mourns the loss of his son.”
34. “When I tell these things I have a pain in my heart.”
35. “I’m not telling anyone what I know about the killing of Crazy Horse.”
Afterword. “No man is held in more veneration here than Crazy Horse.”
Methods, Sources, and Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Photographic Credits
A Note About the Author
MAPS
The Northern Plains in the Great Sioux War
Lieutenant Clark’s Map of the Little Bighorn Battlefield
The White River Agencies in September 1877
Camp Robinson in September 1877
INTRODUCTION
“We’ll come for you another time.”
The half-Sioux interpreter William Garnett, who died a dozen years before I was born, first set me to wondering why Crazy Horse was killed. He made it seem so unnecessary. I read Garnett’s account of the killing in a motel at Crow Agency, Montana, not two miles from the spot where Crazy Horse in 1876 led a charge up over the back of a ridge, splitting in two the command of General George Armstrong Custer. Within a very few minutes, Custer and two hundred cavalry soldiers were dead on a hillside overlooking the Little Bighorn River. It was the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States Army by Plains Indians. A year later Crazy Horse himself was dead of a bayonet wound, stabbed in the small of the back by soldiers trying to place him under arrest.
Dead Indians are a common feature of American history, but the killing of Crazy Horse retains its power to shock. Garnett, twenty-two years old at the time, was not only present on the fatal day but was deeply involved in the unfolding of events. In 1920 he told a retired Army general what happened. A transcript of the conversation was eventually published. That’s what I read lying on my back on a bed in Crow Agency’s only motel.1
It was Garnett’s frank and thoughtful tone that first caught my attention. He knew the ins and outs of the whole complex story, but even near the end of his life he had not made up his mind how to think about it. Garnett was present on the evening of September 3, 1877, when General George Crook met with thirteen leading men of the Oglala Sioux to plan the killing of Crazy Horse later that night. A lieutenant who had been working with the Indians promised to give two hundred dollars and his best horse to the man who killed him. The place was a remote military post in northwest Nebraska, a mile and a half from the Oglala agency, as Indian reservations were called at the time. Pushing events was the Army’s fear that Crazy Horse was planning a new war. Then came a report from an Oglala scout named Woman Dress2 that Crazy Horse was planning to kill Crook. Something about that story aroused doubts in Garnett when he heard it. Crook was a little in doubt himself. He wanted to know if Woman Dress could be trusted. The answer was close enough to yes to propel events forward.
In the event, nothing went according to plan. Killing the chief that night was altered to arresting him the following day, but that plan ran into trouble as well. It was not the Army that finally seized Crazy Horse in the early evening of September 5, 1877, but Crazy Horse who gave himself up to the Army, then walked to the guardhouse holding the hand of the officer of the day. The chief had been promised a chance to explain himself to the commanding officer of the military post, and he trusted the promise until the moment he saw the barred window in the guardhouse door.
In my experience the seed of a book can often be traced back a long way. This one began with a childhood passion for Indians. It was acquired in the usual way, picked up on the playground in the 1940s and ’50s when the game of Cowboys and Indians enjoyed a last flowering. Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and the Lone Ranger were predictable staples of kids’ television, in my view, but the game itself, played with cap pistols across suburban backyards, invited somebody to take the part of the Indians.
From the beginning I thought cowboys dull, Indians mysterious, compelling, and something that did not fit easily into the game—their road had been a hard one. Kids have quick sympathies, and mine took shape early. My father helped them form with the books he gave me, which went beyond the usual fare. I still own a lot of the books that kept me up late when I was twelve and thirteen: James Willard Schultz’s My Life as an Indian, Mari Sandoz’s Cheyenne Autumn, Edgar I. Stewart’s Custer’s Luck. They gave me a lifelong appetite for the particular, and a solid grasp of certain truths. One was the fact that the Indian wars were about land, and specifically about removal of Indians from land that whites wanted. Another was the existence of sorrow and tragedy in history—loss and pain that cannot be redeemed. That was not the way I would have put it at the time, but I got the central idea clearly enough. By the time I was fourteen I understood that the treatment of Indians was something people did not like to describe plainly.
Then I grew up. I quit reading about Indians and was caught up by other sorrows, tragedies, and moral complexities. I became a reporter and moved from one subject to another in a progression that always seemed to make sense. The antiwar movement was the first thing I wrote about seriously. From that I learned something about intelligence organizations, and wanted to know more. Study of that in its turn brought me to the history of nuclear weapons, and eventually I was prompted to wonder why the Germans in World War Two failed to build an atomic bomb of their own. Each of these subjects involved much that was hidden, and each absorbed years of work. That was the personal history I brought to Crow Agency in 1994 when my brother and I decided to spend a couple of days at the Little Bighorn battlefield.
The voice of William Garnett thus found a ready listener. What he said prompted many questions. I hadn’t thought about Indians for decades, but Garnett brought me back around. Nothing quite opens up history like an event—the interplay of a large cast pushing a conflict to a moment of decision. It is the event that gives history its narrative backbone. Very
But I confess it was wanting to know why Crazy Horse was killed, not the abstract lessons to be drawn from his fate, that drew me on. It’s my working theory that pinning down what happened is always the first step to understanding why it happened. That’s where the appetite for the particular comes in, the who, what, and when. Those who watched or took part in Crazy Horse’s killing seemed to understand immediately that something troubling had occurred, but the public’s interest ended with a week of newspaper stories. No official called at the time for a public accounting, and none was made. Histories of the Great Sioux War have treated the killing as regrettable but forgettable, something between a footnote and an afterthought. The event itself remained obscure, muffled, sketchily recorded. In the histories, William Garnett was typically given a sentence or two, if his role was noted at all.
But in the decades after the killing, witnesses and participants occasionally published a memoir, or spoke to a reporter, or, like Garnett, answered the questions of a researcher. In 1942, Mari Sandoz gathered much of this material into her life of Crazy Horse, which I somehow missed in childhood. I was prompted to read it by William Garnett. Sandoz’s book has more art, but not as many facts, as Kingsley Bray’s now authoritative biography of the chief.
The sound of Garnett’s voice was the small beginning of my own effort to understand why Crazy Horse was killed, but a long time passed before I took the next step. That was to drive out to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where I spent a week walking the ground, the first of many trips. The killing of Crazy Horse is not abstract at Fort Robinson. The original officers’ row remains intact. Huge cottonwoods shade the buildings now, but in the 1870s it was treeless. There, a week before his death, Crazy Horse met with a young Army lieutenant in the large front room of his quarters. It was not his first visit. Generally, he sat in a chair while his friends sat on the floor. In a similar building at the other end of officers’ row, General Crook helped to plan the killing of the chief. Across the parade ground to the south a log replica of the old guardhouse has been built on the footprint of the original. You can stand on the spot where Crazy Horse was stabbed by a guard. Sixty feet away is a log replica of the adjutant’s office, also erected on its original footprint. You can look at the spot in that room where Crazy Horse lay on the floor for five or six hours until he died. From Fort Robinson, an hour’s drive over gravel roads will take you to the Pine Ridge Reservation, a site the Oglala picked for themselves in 1878, and where they have lived ever since. Among them survive people who knew people who knew Crazy Horse, and sometimes a word from them can illuminate an old mystery.
The research materials for this book come principally from books and from manuscripts found in libraries and archives, big ones like the Library of Congress and small ones like the Sheridan County Historical Society in Rushville, Nebraska. But just as important were many encounters with historians long immersed in the history of the western Indian wars, and with descendants of the Oglala of the 1870s. All are identified in the notes or in the acknowledgments at the end of the book. But one struck me with unusual force at the time, and it helps to explain how the people and events of the 1870s gradually became vivid in my mind. The encounter began with a document given to me by Tom Buecker in the Fort Robinson Museum which led eventually to a phone conversation with Allyne Jane Pearce, a descendant of William Garnett’s Virginia grandfather. Pearce gave me the name of Joanne Cuny, one of William Garnett’s granddaughters, who lives in Rapid City, South Dakota, not far from Pine Ridge. Cuny told me that the family historian was her older brother James, known in the family as Heavy, and she took me to see him.
From Rapid City, Cuny and I drove up to the veterans’ hospital in Sturgis, where James Garnett was recovering from an accident in which he had shattered a leg, already broken several times previously in car accidents. From the hospital, James could see Bear Butte, a longtime sacred place of the Sioux and the Cheyenne. It rises some seven hundred feet abruptly from the level plains, tree covered and rocky but from a distance rounded something like the form of a sleeping bear. The Sioux call it Mato Paha and still climb the hill to pray for visions. In the old days some Sioux believed the hill was the center of the world, and was the petrified kidney of a great bear. An old fort near Bear Butte had been turned into the veterans’ hospital. James had served in the Navy after dropping out of high school in 1952, and he lived nearby in Rapid City, so it was the natural place for him to recover from his broken leg. The doctors told James Garnett it would be many months before he could walk again.
James related to me a remarkable story about “the Old Man,” as everybody in his childhood called William Garnett. James talked about the Old Man in tones of great intimacy and respect. As the Old Man aged he thickened; his back rounded, and his head settled into his torso. The full head of hair turned gray and was slicked to one side. A heavy gray moustache hid his mouth. In early photographs Garnett is watchful, alert to the camera, but in later pictures he seems to have his mind on other things. When James was growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1930s and ’40s, the Old Man was the subject of much discussion in the household, where old-timers gathered to drink coffee and talk with the Old Man’s widow, Fillie, the daughter of an early trapper and trader named Nick Janis. Among Fillie’s visitors were men with resonant names like Frank Hairy Chin, grandson of a noted practitioner of bear medicine in the old days. Four days before the fight with Custer on the Little Bighorn, the elder Hairy Chin, with the help of the Black Elk family, had performed a healing ceremony for a man named Rattling Hawk, who had been shot through the hips at the Rosebud. On the day of the Custer fight, Rattling Hawk stood on a hill west of the big village and watched the final moments of the general and his men across the river. Still too weak to fight, Rattling Hawk held a sacred lance of the Tokala (Kit Fox) society and sang a Fox song to encourage the fighters: “Friends, what you are doing I cannot do.”3
Frank Hairy Chin told James Garnett, and Garnett told me, that his grandmother—the medicine man’s wife—“couldn’t stand to look at a white man; when a white man came in she would pull a shawl over her head.” Frank and Fillie always spoke in Lakota, but that’s not the word James used. “She talked nothing but Indian,” he said. I often heard that said by people around Pine Ridge.
James told me that another regular visitor to Fillie’s kitchen was Dewey Beard, with his second wife, Alice. They used to drop by the Garnett house on the northern boundary of the reservation in the place called Red Water. Red Water was in the Badlands, seventeen miles from the community in Kyle where the band of Little Wound had settled in the early days on the reservation at the end of the Great Sioux War. Red Water Creek was dry most of the year, but after a big rain it fed into the White River not far from a gap in the hills where the “Big Foot trail” came through—the route followed by the Miniconjou in December 1890 when they were hurrying to join their relatives at Pine Ridge during the ghost dance trouble. The U.S. Cavalry was hot on their heels. James Garnett’s little brother, Martin, used to prowl along the old trail near the Garnett house. Once he found a rusted four-shot pistol, and another time he found a sword engraved with the name of an Army lieutenant. Very likely the pistol had been dropped by the hurrying Indians, the sword by a cavalry officer chasing them.
In the Garnett household, everybody called Dewey Beard Putila—Beard. He had added the “Dewey” after meeting the hero of the Battle of Manila Bay in Washington. But in the old days Dewey Beard was known as Iron Hail, and he had been in the fight at the Little Bighorn as a young man of twenty. By the time Big Foot came through Red Water in 1890 Iron Hail was a grown man with a wife and an infant daughter. The wife was killed at Wounded Knee, and the daughter died three months later. Iron Hail escaped only by running up a draw, just ahead of the soldiers. He was badly wounded in the right arm and held his right thumb in his teeth as he ran to keep the arm from flinging about.
Henry Young Bear was another regular who joined Dewey Beard at the Garnett house, and so were Eddie Herman, a mixed-blood who often wrote about the old days for the Rapid City Journal, and Frank Kills Enemy’s mother, who had been at the Little Bighorn.4
