The Killing of Crazy Horse, page 65
7. Chicago Tribune, 3 September 1875.
8. Ibid.
9. Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 9, 39.
10. Ulysses Grant, Personal Memoirs (Library of America, 1990), 27. Anson Mills, My Story, 32.
11. Some close associates: Red Cloud chose Red Dog and Young Man Afraid; Spotted Tail picked Two Strike and Swift Bear. The understanding of Sioux tribal politics begins with lists of names like this one; in almost every major controversy confronted by Red Cloud we find Red Dog and Young Man Afraid playing a part; the same is true of Spotted Tail, Two Strike, and Swift Bear. Over the decades of the protracted Sioux war between 1854 and 1891 the lists of chiefs and their associates for the most part change only with death; once allied, always allied. The only exception occurs in the last few months of the life of Crazy Horse, who, almost unique among Sioux chiefs, was deserted by many of his friends.
12. Chicago Tribune, 21 September 1875.
13. Ibid., 20 September 1875.
14. In his memoirs the freighter Harry Young remarked, “Another prominent and very bad Indian [at the Red Cloud Agency in 1873] was Red Dog. He always wore a hunting jacket made entirely of scalps that he himself had taken … In the back of this jacket was a woman’s scalp. She in life was a white woman and a blonde. I suppose he killed and scalped her in the Minnesota massacre … as he took a very active part in that affair. I could have purchased that jacket at one time for about five dollars’ worth of powder and lead, and wished in later days that I had done so, as today [1915] it would be worth a large sum of money.” It is possible that this was the jacket which disgusted James Howard of the Chicago Tribune; at the same time it is unlikely Red Dog took any blond scalps in the Minnesota massacre of 1862, in which the Hunkpapas played no part. Harry Young, Hard Knocks, 116.
15. Chicago Tribune, 25 September 1875.
16. James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 207.
17. Dispatch of 27 September, Chicago Tribune, 29 September 1875.
18. Red Cloud’s son was known among whites as Jack Red Cloud; his sister Charging Girl provides his Sioux name. Charging Girl narrative, James H. Cook Papers.
19. Raymond J. Demallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 172.
20. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 209.
21. Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1875.
22. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 9 October 1875, reprinted from the New York Herald, 2 October 1875.
23. Bull Eagle was dragged from the battlefield to safety by White Bull, a fellow Miniconjou. Stanley Vestal, Warpath, 62.
24. William Welsh letter to Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior, 8 July 1872. Copy in author’s possession.
25. Chicago Tribune, 1 October 1875.
26. Although unannounced, President Grant’s policy is clear. It is best described by John S. Gray in Centennial Campaign, 23ff.
9. “This whole business was exceedingly distasteful to me.”
1. “a misunderstanding with”: The words are from John F. Finerty of the Chicago Times, who got to know Grouard well on General Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in the summer of 1876. His account of Grouard’s life is correct in the main, doubtful in some details, but generally in an interesting way. War–Path and Bivouac, 64.
2. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 86–87. Grouard’s marriage to Sally is reported in a John Colhoff letter to Helen Blish, 7 April 1929, “From Eleanor’s notebook,” Mari Sandoz Papers. Details of the killing by Rowland may be found in a voucher issued by the agent, J. J. Saville, to Billy Garnett, for feeding eighty-five Sioux hired to protect the agency, M234/R720; and in a memorandum of 27 November 1875, signed by Cheyenne chiefs who agreed to settle it, Rowland, Saville, and two others; Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720. See also Frank Goings letter to James Cook, 18 August 1934, James C. Cook Papers; and George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 214. For the month of December 1875 Grouard was paid $75.25 as a “laborer,” Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720.
3. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 209.
4. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 88.
5. George Colhoff told Eli Ricker in 1906 that both scouts told him the same thing. Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 215.
6. Martin F. Schmitt, General George Crook, 87. Crook died before he finished telling the story of his life; the surviving manuscript, discovered by its editor in 1942, stops on 18 June 1876, the day after Crook’s fight against Crazy Horse at the Rosebud in Montana.
7. Ibid., 84ff.
8. James Greer to Lieutenant L. W. V. Kennon, Crook’s aide-de-camp in the 1880s. Kennon kept a diary in which he recorded many of Crook’s anecdotes and opinions; if Crook had been a better-known figure Kennon’s lively diary would have long since gone into print. The letter is quoted by Martin Schmitt in his introduction to Crook’s autobiography, ibid., xxii. The diary can be found among Crook’s papers at the Carlisle Barracks.
9. Schenk was interviewed by a reporter for the Washington Chronicle in 1883 and is quoted in ibid.
10. Azor Nickerson, “Major General George Crook and the Indians,” 32, copy in the Walter S. Schuyler Papers.
11. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 5.
12. Ibid., 23–24.
13. The diagnosis was erysipelas, a bacterial infection of the skin and subcutaneous fat. Crook became addicted to the morphine he took for pain. “It was some time before I could sleep well without it.” Ibid., 32.
14. Ibid., 70–71.
15. Alfred Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Dover, 1976), 73–74. Kroeber spells the God’s name as Wohpekumeu. Crook’s account of Indian beliefs and stories is found in Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 68ff.
16. Ibid., 40–41. Rattlesnake venom attacks the blood or the brain, and sometimes both. What Crook suffered was an infection, not the equivalent of a rattlesnake bite.
17. Ibid., 47.
18. Ibid., 52.
19. Ibid., 68. An account of the military careers of the Garnett cousins can be found in Matthew W. Burton, The River of Blood. While Crook was pursuing the Yakima Indians Garnett’s wife and child both died suddenly of a fever at Fort Simcoe; Garnett took their bodies east for burial in Brooklyn, New York’s Greenwood Cemetery, and never returned to California. He resigned his commission at the outset of the Civil War, joined the Confederate Army, and was killed at Corrick’s Ford in 1861.
20. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 62.
21. Ibid., 64.
22. Ibid., 87.
23. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 207.
24. These quotes may be found in ibid., 213, 177, 176.
25. Diary entry for 13 March 1876, ibid., 243.
26. Ibid., 248.
10. “I knew this village by the horses.”
1. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 155ff.
2. These events, sadly typical of the violent life of the plains, are unusual only in being fully recorded. The account given here comes from ibid., 164ff.; Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 396–98; and the Colhoff winter count entry for the year 1875. Colhoff says the dead Loafers included Last Elk, Owl Hoop, and Kills in Timber. Amos Bad Heart Bull recorded their names as Not Afraid of the Enemy (Toka Kapi Pesni), Black Moccasin (Tahanpe Sapa), Takes the Gun Away (Maza Wakan Wicaki; note the word for gun—maza wakan, mysterious or powerful iron); Bear Hoop (Mato Cankleska); Kills in Timber (Canowica Kte); High Eagle (Wanbli Wakatinya); and Last Dog (Sunka Chakela). Colhoff reports that Young Iron lived into old age on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Crow version of this story has been recorded in great detail by Mike Cowdrey, who included a copy in a letter to the author, 2 October 2009. Cowdrey identifies the dismembered Crow as Plain Magpie.
3. Crook’s Powder River expedition of March 1876 is recorded in several places, including Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1; John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 256ff.; Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 88ff.; J. W. Vaughn, The Reynolds Campaign on Powder River (University of Oklahoma, 1961); and Robert Strahorn, dispatches for the Denver Rocky Mountain News and other newspapers, reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 200ff. A standard account of the 1876 campaigns may also be found in Paul Hedren, Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War (University of Oklahoma, 1998).
4. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 231–32; DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 89–90.
5. The Bourke and Grouard accounts are in frequent conflict about the names of creeks and the camping spots of Crook’s column. A close study of both with frequent reference to DeLorme’s Montana Atlas and Gazetteer, which maps the terrain at four miles to the inch, suggests that Grouard was right when he remembered that he followed Hanging Woman Creek up to the headwaters of Otter, not Pumpkin Creek, as claimed by Bourke, which joins the Tongue much further down and runs north-south, not east-west.
6. Strahorn, Rocky Mountain News, 7 April 1876, dispatch datelined 18 March in camp on the Powder River, reprinted in Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 216.
7. Colonel J. J. Reynolds, 3rd Cavalry, to Headquarters, Department of the Platte, 24 February 1877. After the battle Reynolds was formally charged by General Crook for numerous failures, leading to a full-scale court-martial. Copy provided to the author by Jack McDermott. Reynolds was convicted but soon pardoned and allowed to resign by President Grant, who had been his classmate at West Point. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 95ff.
8. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 97.
11. “He is no good and should be killed.”
1. “The soldiers are right here!”: Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 164.
2. According to He Dog: Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 391–92.
3. “It is spring”: Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 25. Bourke in his diary confirms that two lodges of Indians “from Red Cloud Agency … had come in that morning to trade.” Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 255.
4. “Two Moons had”: Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 164ff.
5. only one Indian: The dead Cheyenne was identified by George Bent in a letter to George Hyde, 18 April 1914, Beinecke Library, Yale University, cited in J. J. Vaughn, The Reynolds Campaign on Powder River (University of Oklahoma, 1961), 129. The Cheyenne Black Eagle told George Bird Grinnell that during the fight he was told two Indians had been killed—a Cheyenne and a Sioux. Amos Bad Heart Bull, a nephew of He Dog, drew a large picture of the battle in which he located the body of only one dead Indian—the one whose body was found on the shoulder overlooking the camp. Wooden Leg reports that two Indians were wounded in the fighting as well. Grinnell, Notebook 347, Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, cited in Jerome A. Greene, Lakota and Cheyenne, 10. Lieutenant William Philo Clark recorded that “one Sioux and one squaw” were killed in the fight; it is possible that she had died by the time he began to question Indians at the Red Cloud Agency in the summer of 1877; Clark, “Sioux War Report,” 14 September 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received.
6. “I can never”: Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 172.
7. White Bull, Box 105, Notebooks 5 and 8, Walter S. Campbell Collection, University of Oklahoma, quoted in Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 130. Grouard’s presence at the fight was the news of the plains, and several Indians reported his shouting at the outset of a fight. For the belief of some whites that Grouard was warning, not challenging or taunting, the Indians, see George Boyd, Bismarck Tribune, 8 November 1876, quoted in John S. Gray, “Frank Grouard: Kanaka Scout or Mulatto Renegade?” Westerners Brand Book (October 1959).
8. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 254.
9. Ibid.; in transferring his diary entry into his book, On the Border with Crook, John G. Bourke says the victim was “cut limb from limb,” 279.
10. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 104.
11. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 278.
12. Strahorn, Rocky Mountain News, 7 April 1876, reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 217ff.
13. Caroline Frey Winne to Samuel Ludlow Frey, 16 April 1876, Frey Family Papers.
14. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 257.
15. P. H. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 166.
16. Ibid., 177, 180.
17. Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 2.
18. Shelby Foote, The Civil War (Random House, 1974), vol. 3, p. 244.
19. Rutherford B. Hayes, Diary and Letters Web site of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, vol. 5, pp. 463–64, posted on the Internet by the Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio.
20. Martin F. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 82.
21. Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 554.
22. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 28–29. Something of Sheridan’s character is revealed here too; in his memoirs he reports writing to Grant “the dispatch announcing we had sent Early’s army whirling up the valley.” In fact he was borrowing the phrase from his chief of staff, who got into all the newspapers at the time with his report, “We have just sent them whirling through Winchester.” Sheridan’s words at the time were more prosaic, saying that “after a most stubborn and sanguinary engagement … [we] completely defeated him.” Civil War generals were mainly proud as peacocks, Sheridan as openly as any, Crook silently within. See Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 554.
23. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 127.
24. Ibid., 131.
25. Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 557.
26. Ibid., 540.
27. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 133.
28. Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 570.
29. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 134.
30. An account of the origin of Read’s poem can be found in John Fleischman, “The Object at Hand,” Smithsonian (November 1996). The poem itself has been often reprinted, and can be found on the Internet.
31. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 35. “In consequence of the enemy’s being so well protected from a direct assault, I resolved … to use again a turning column against his left, as had been done on the 19th at Opequon [Winchester].” Well, yes, maybe; Sheridan was in command; it was his decision that determined what was done. But all the men who had been present on the night in question understood that putting things this way was Sheridan’s way of grabbing the credit for himself—for both battles. The memoirs were not published until 1888, so the full flower of Crook’s anger waited until then. But from the beginning he knew he was being pushed into the background.
12. “Crook was bristling for a fight.”
1. John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 6. Finerty was the only correspondent to write a book about the campaign.
2. Ibid., 69–70.
3. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 288.
4. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, 272ff.
5. Martin F. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 189ff.
6. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 296.
7. Hastings letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Q. Smith, 24 January 1876, Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720.
8. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews.
9. Jordan letter to General Luther Bradley at Fort Laramie, 24 April 1876, Secretary of the Interior, Indian Division, Letters Received, M825/R10.
10. Cutting of rations and the hunger that followed was a principal cause of the so-called ghost dance outbreak of 1890–91. Once the buffalo were gone, hunger on the reservations sometimes ended in outright starvation; deaths especially among the elderly in remote cabins at Pine Ridge were reported regularly through the 1930s.
11. Hastings letter to CIA, 5 June 1876, Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720.
12. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 171; Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews. Jack Red Cloud’s Sioux name is found in the Charging Girl narrative, James H. Cook Papers.
13. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 290. See also Paul L. Hedren, Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War, 100, and DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 170.
14. “Expedition Excerpts,” Robert Strahorn writing as Alter Ego, Cheyenne Daily Leader, 9 April 1876. This passage ended a paragraph on Grouard lifted verbatim by John F. Finerty for use in War-Path and Bivouac, 64.
15. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 109.
16. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 68. Bourke in his diary suggests that the speech maker was Good Heart.
17. “Major General George Crook and the Indians,” Azor Nickerson, copy in the Walter S. Schuyler Papers, 24. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 315.
18. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 274, 365. Some observers thought a rawhide shield held at the right angle could even deflect a lead musket ball, especially if some thrifty opponent had reduced the charge to save powder.
19. Ibid., 294–95. Bourke gives a compressed version of the visit in On the Border with Crook, 292.
20. Richard Nines interview with Woman Dress, 16 February 1912, American Museum of Natural History, quoted in slightly different form in Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 95. See also Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 52–53.
21. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 53. Later Yellow Grass changed his name to Long Hair, claiming to be in spiritual communion with the spirit of Custer. Several reports of this man were received by the officer commanding at the Cheyenne River Agency on the Missouri. Fool Bear and Important Man to Colonel W. H. Wood, 11th Infantry, at the Cheyenne River Agency, Intelligence Report, 24 January 1877; Eagle Shield to Colonel W. H. Wood, 11th Infantry, at the Cheyenne River Agency, Intelligence Report, 16 February 1877, both Sioux War files.
