Brave Warrior (16 page)

Everyone was standing just as they had left them.

Maisie ran right up to Crazy Horse. She held the feather out to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

But she would never know if he heard her.

The last thing she and Felix saw was Crazy Horse tucking the red-tailed hawk feather into his long hair.

Then they began to tumble through time.

Every other time they had time traveled, they’d returned with a sense of relief and excitement. But when Felix and Maisie landed back in The Treasure Chest, they were both sad. Not sad to be home. For that they were grateful. Although they didn’t know what Crazy Horse would go on to do in his lifetime, they both knew the fate of the Lakota, and all of the Native Americans, and knowing that filled them with deep sadness.

Together, they left The Treasure Chest, their hearts heavy.

They climbed down the secret staircase and through the door hidden in the wall.

And walked smack into Great-Uncle Thorne.

He was wearing a tuxedo with a deep purple cummerbund and matching bow tie. His bushy white eyebrows were knitted into an enormous frown.

“Aha!” he roared. “You rapscallions! I knew you’d be up there.”

“So what?” Maisie said.

“So what?” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “You’ve just taken your last trip to The Treasure Chest.”

With that, he lifted a heavy lock hanging from an even heavier chain.

“You’re locking The Treasure Chest?” Felix asked in disbelief.

“Not only am I locking it,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, “tomorrow I have a man coming to seal this door.”

Felix and Maisie watched as Great-Uncle Thorne began to ascend the secret staircase.

When he reached the top, he peered down at them from beneath his substantial eyebrows.

“I’m in love!” he announced.
“Amore!”

“With Penelope Merriweather?” Maisie asked, surprised that someone as handsome and youthful seeming as Great-Uncle Thorne could fall in love with someone as ancient as Penelope Merriweather.

“That’s right,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, hoisting the lock and chain upward. “And I have to catch up with my beloved’s age. The more you two time travel, the longer that will take.”

“But—” Felix began.

“Silence!” Great-Uncle Thorne shouted.

Felix and Maisie climbed the secret staircase, too. But before they reached even halfway, Great-Uncle Thorne had attached the lock to the door and fastened it and the chain shut with an ominous click.

“The Treasure Chest,” he said gleefully, “is locked permanently.”

N
o one is certain when Crazy Horse was born, because the Lakota, like most Native Americans, did not keep many written records. However, he was born during a time when the Lakota captured a number of horses from the Shoshone, which likely was in 1841. Historians believe that he was born near Bear Butte, an area in present-day South Dakota, into a Lakota tribe. Little is known about his mother, Rattling Blanket Woman, but his father was a shaman or medicine man. The family did not have any special rank or role in their tribe and lived humbly as ordinary people.

Crazy Horse’s light skin and wavy hair led him to be called Light-Skinned Boy and Curly. Even as a young boy he liked to do things his own way. The Lakota were a tolerant people who believed that individuals could follow their own paths. Crazy Horse never participated in ceremonies like the sun ceremony. He also did not participate in the purification rites that most young Lakota men performed. He was a loner, and it is said that he always had a special touch with horses and could break wild horses easily.

When Crazy Horse was born, white settlers had already begun to travel west on the Oregon Trail, which was called the Holy Road by Native Americans. Though
there were once millions of buffalo along the trail, by the time Crazy Horse died, almost none were left. He grew up with trepidation of, and then later anger at the white settlers who were taking land, killing buffalo, and attacking villages.

In 1854, a stray cow wandered into a Lakota camp and was killed. That seemingly minor incident is considered a pivotal moment in the tensions between the whites and the Lakota. The cow’s owner filed a complaint against the Lakota at Fort Laramie. Lieutenant John Lawrence Grattan, accompanied by thirty-one soldiers, went to the village. Although they were greeted peacefully, the argument escalated, and Grattan ordered that shots be fired. A shot killed Conquering Bear, a Lakota leader. The Lakota retaliated and killed Grattan and all thirty-one soldiers. A year later, six hundred soldiers under General W. S. Harney retaliated by attacking Little Thunder’s village, killing eighty-six Native Americans and taking many others captive.

Shortly after the fight with Harney and his men, Crazy Horse went on a vision quest and dreamed of a magical horseman. The horseman told him that he should never adorn himself with war paint. He said that Crazy Horse should wear a single feather instead of a
warbonnet, that he should throw dirt on his horse and rub it on himself before battle, and that he should wear a single stone behind his ear. He also said that Crazy Horse should never keep anything for himself. The horseman told him that all Native Americans would sing his praises. Crazy Horse almost always followed these instructions.

After a raid on the Arapaho in which he proved especially brave, his father renamed him Crazy Horse. His reputation as a warrior grew quickly.

The battles that made him famous include what is called Fetterman’s Massacre in 1866, which was, at the time, the army’s biggest defeat on the Great Plains. In 1876, Crazy Horse led approximately 1,500 warriors in an attack against General George Crook and his 1,000 soldiers. A week later, General George Custer attacked Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota warriors on the Little Bighorn River. That attack marked the beginning of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which is known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass to the Native Americans. It is also called Custer’s Last Stand. The battle was between a combined force of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, and the Seventh Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The most famous battle of the Great
Sioux War of 1876, it was an overwhelming victory for the Native Americans and a severe defeat for the US Seventh Cavalry, resulting in Custer’s death and the loss of hundreds of soldiers. Although Crazy Horse’s role in the battle is not clear, everyone agrees that he played a major part. Some historians believe he was the leader of the assault that killed General Custer.

During a brutally cold winter in 1877, Crazy Horse fought his last major battle at Wolf Mountain in Montana Territory. By then, he realized that his time as a free man was coming to an end. His warriors were cold and hungry, and Crazy Horse decided to surrender. He turned himself in to the Red Cloud Agency at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. Until then, he had not understood what a hero he had become. General Crook, worried about Crazy Horse’s popularity, ordered him to be arrested. But when they showed up to take him away, Crazy Horse had already fled.

On September 5, 1877, Crazy Horse agreed to return. He believed that during his time at the Red Cloud Agency he had behaved well, and he did not think there were any reasons for him to be arrested. But when he arrived, soldiers were waiting for him and placed him under arrest. Crazy Horse attempted to flee and was
fatally stabbed by a bayonet. His body was returned to his father, but his final burial place has never been made public.

Crazy Horse’s bravery and dedication to his people and their land made him legendary. In 1948, a sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, was commissioned by a Lakota chief named Henry Standing Bear to carve the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota, near Mount Rushmore where the faces of four US presidents are carved into the mountains. Standing Bear’s mission was to honor Crazy Horse and the culture, traditions, and heritage of all Native Americans. The sculpture is still not completed, though work continues on it today.

I do so much research for each book in The Treasure Chest series and discover so many cool facts that I can’t fit into every book. Here are some of my favorites from my research for
The Treasure Chest: #5 Crazy Horse: Brave Warrior
. Enjoy!

The world during Crazy Horse’s lifetime:

In 1831, about ten years before Crazy Horse was born, President Andrew Jackson began the forced relocation of the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Choctaw—from their southeastern homelands to what is now Oklahoma. En route to their destinations, many Native Americans died from exposure, disease, and starvation. The Choctaw were the first to be relocated. Between 2,500 and 6,000 of 17,000 Choctaws died, leading many to name this event the Trail of Tears.

While Native Americans were being driven off their land, black slaves were fighting for their rights, too.

In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery and
joined the Underground Railroad, a secret network of routes and safe houses that helped escaped slaves get to free states.

But just eight years later, the Supreme Court announced the Dred Scott Decision, which asserts that a slave is not a citizen.

One year before Harriet Tubman escaped, suffragettes met in Seneca Falls, New York to debate whether of not women should have the right to vote. This Women’s Rights Convention was led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Frederick Douglas, a former slave who became an abolitionist and orator, spoke at the convention in favor of women’s right to vote. However, they did not win this right in Crazy Horse’s lifetime. The first country to give women that right was New Zealand, in 1893.

The Civil War began in 1861.

During Crazy Horse’s lifetime, the world saw the invention of the sewing machine by Elias Howe in 1846; dynamite by Alfred Nobel in 1867; and the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Thomas Edison invented the electric lightbulb two years after Crazy Horse died.

After the Civil War, a series of wars against Native
Americans continued into the 1890s. The same year Crazy Horse died, the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph was forced to surrender. In 1886, the same year the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York, the famous Apache chief Geronimo was also forced to surrender. Police arrested and killed the Sioux chief Sitting Bull on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890. Two weeks later, US troops killed over two hundred Sioux at the Battle of Wounded Knee. Native Americans were granted US citizenship in 1924.

When Maisie and Felix meet Crazy Horse:

The US flag had thirty-one stars for thirty-one states: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and California.

James Buchanan was elected as the fifteenth president of the United States. That same year, the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, was born.

In Crazy Horse’s lifetime, seven more states received statehood: Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska, and Colorado.