Joseph M. Marshall III (18 page)

Like it or not, the future had arrived for the Lakota and for Light Hair. The whites and their promises were part of Lakota life forever. Even if the Lakota could have guarded their borders and prevented intrusion, and even if they had said no to the conditions of the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, the whites still would have flowed around them like water around an island in a river. By the power of numbers alone, the whites were, and would always be, a force for the Lakota to contend with.

From the Lakota perspective the whites were arrogant and land-hungry. The Lakota weren’t specifically aware that the United States government’s inability to solve serious economic issues in the east was a prime factor in the movement of whites along the Oregon Trail. They could only see, and try to contend with, the reality that the whites were intruding on their lives and their lands and were quite willing to take both at any cost.

The future did come calling during those troubled days after the attack on Conquering Bear’s camp as Light Hair tried to sort out his feelings. His vision was connected to the difficult circumstances of the moment—the same circumstances that drove him to seek the comforting embrace of solitude and silence that would be part of his life’s work, fighting against the threat of unwanted change.

Light Hair was born into a Lakota world that was already feeling the intrusive presence of Euro-Americans. In the late 1720s, a Frenchman, the Sieur de la Verendrye, led a small contingent of belligerent and heavily armed explorers northward along the Great Muddy (Missouri) River through Lakota lands. Lewis and Clark made their incursion through the northern Plains seventy-five years later in 1804 and were regarded as somewhat of a confusing oddity. Owing to the lack of language interpreters, the reason for their journey was never very clear. They were simply a group of nervous, heavily armed white men traveling north on the Great Muddy River. Other whites followed after that, however, and not without dire consequences for the Lakota. In 1837 a steamboat from St. Louis steaming up the Great Muddy unloaded materials and trade goods at the Whetstone landing, near the present site of Fort Randall Dam in southeast South Dakota. Unfortunately it unloaded smallpox as well. Between a thousand and two thousand Lakota died in the summer epidemic (further north, the Mandan people were nearly wiped out).

Trading outposts became military installations, such as Fort Yankton—at present-day Yankton, South Dakota—and Fort Pier (aka Fort Pierre)—at present-day Fort Pierre, South Dakota—thereby asserting Euro-American presence on the fringes of Lakota lands.

So the future came long before Light Hair was born, in a manner of speaking. But it singled him out in the summers of 1854 and 1855. It beckoned most compellingly in the dream wherein a warrior rode toward his enemies against the backdrop of lightning and thunder. As the record shows, the boy answered the call.

Part III

The Warrior Leader

Twelve

Crazy Horse, like so many Oglala, had no desire to go near the Holy Road or Fort Laramie. Since Woman Killer Harney had attacked Little Thunder’s camp on the Blue Water, he had seen no white men, but he understood the concerns of those who warned that the absence of whites in the Powder River country didn’t mean they had gone away. The Holy Road was still crowded each summer. That fact alone was an unsettling indication that there seemed to be an endless supply of them. How many more summers? some wondered.

The old men reminded their sons and grandsons that whites had been part of Lakota life for three and perhaps four generations—since a group of them had come from the south by boat on the Grandfather River and then north up the Great Muddy. They had wintered along the Knife River to the north, it was said, saved from cold and starvation by the People of the Earth Lodges. Years later, others came alone or in small groups. As more and more came, they put up trading posts and forts for soldiers to live in. Whites were not going away, the old men warned. How to make them go away was not the question; rather, they advised every council of old men in every encampment in Lakota country to talk about how to keep them from completely taking over Lakota lands. And when someone thought of the plan that would work, it would then be carried out by every Lakota man, woman, and child. Otherwise, they warned, there would be fighting at our very lodge doors.

“The Snakes, Crows, and Pawnees have been our enemies for longer than anyone can remember,” said a very old man. “So we know them, where they live, how they fight, and how they think. When we meet them on the field of battle, sometimes their medicine is stronger and other times ours is. That’s how things are. The whites don’t understand war. They don’t understand that the power of an enemy is a way to strengthen our fighting men. They are killers. A killer does not respect something or someone he knows he can kill, or must kill. Therefore he does not measure victory by the strength of his medicine. He measures his victories by how many he has killed. If we are to defeat this kind of - people, we must come to know them in every way. It is not a pleasant thought, but it is necessary.”

Crazy Horse decided to see for himself how things were at Fort Laramie. He found the Loafer camp a short way from the fort and stayed with them a few days to hear what they knew. Annuities were late again, they complained, and the longhorn cattle were skinnier every year. They noticed, not without some degree of envy, that while Crazy Horse carried a rifle and a pistol and a farseeing glass, he was not dressed in white man’s clothes, as they were. He reminded them that he was a hunter. Though some took his remark as an insult, others knew that living off the promises of annuities was not really living.

The white man named Bordeaux could speak Lakota very well and he was surprised to see someone from the northern camps among the Loafers. He told Crazy Horse that more soldiers were coming to be posted at Laramie. He knew this because the whites had a way of talking over great distances that was much faster than the letters carried by stagecoaches and the pony riders: they had a tapping language by which they sent messages along a wire faster than even the prairie falcon could fly. Crazy Horse had noticed the tall poles planted in the earth in a long line, with a thin rope that seemed to connect one with the next. A message from Fort Laramie, Bordeaux told him, could be sent at sunrise and cross the Great Muddy River before the sun was halfway in the morning sky. Such a thing was not hard to believe since they had made the farseeing glass and the flint striker that made sparks to start fires.

On the way home, Crazy Horse followed the Shell but stayed well north of the Holy Road. He wanted a look at the settlement around the Reshaw Bridge where the immigrant wagons were said to cross the river on the way west. He happened on another camp of Loafers led by a man named Two Face, an acquaintance of his father before Two Face came to Deer Creek. Two Face was a gracious old man known for his friendliness to the whites. He told Crazy Horse that there was a camp of a few soldiers where Deer Creek emptied into the Shell. So Crazy Horse gave the camp a wide berth after he watched them through his field glass.

The river crossing used by the wagon trains was a half day’s ride west of Deer Creek. Elk Mountain rose suddenly to the south and the Shell meandered below its ridges and then turned east. Crazy Horse stayed to the rough and rolling open hills north of the river, and from a distance he spotted a bridge, though he could see no whites near it through his field glass. He watched for most of an afternoon but saw no activity. Whites were known to bustle about even when they had nothing to do, as at Fort Laramie. A thin column of dust a little further to the west prompted him to have a look before he went north.

He saw over forty soldiers among the assortment of wooden buildings, as well as a few canvas tents inside a sharp bend in the river, as he sat among the tall sagebrush on a ridge to the north. The distance was too great for the field glass to provide a clear image, but the activity in the settlement near yet another bridge was easy to see—activity that was cause for worry. A few wagons were standing in line to cross the bridge, showing the whites as busy as ever. This was a part of the Holy Road not seen by many Lakota. On the Lakota raid into Snake country, they had traveled southwest toward the Sweetwater River and passed far to the west of the end of Elk Mountain, though they could see it in the distance. They had not seen the bridge.

The activity at the bridge and the settlement was annoying. Like Fort Laramie, there was an air of permanence. The presence of soldiers always bothered the old men because soldiers were brought in to protect the other whites against the Lakota, or any other people through whose lands they dared to travel. Soldiers always meant that more whites were not far behind.

With the day growing short, Crazy Horse headed north through the broken and dry hills. Bordeaux had said more soldiers were coming to Laramie. And more soldiers did come. The Loafers sent word to the northern camps that these soldiers were anxious to fight and kill any Lakota that got in their way. Some of the young men like Little Hawk were also anxious to prove to the new soldiers that carrying a big rifle and wearing a blue coat - didn’t make a man skilled as a fighter, or give him a brave heart. But the old men cautioned against going south against them. “If we kill them all, they will only send more the next time,” they said. “They will send a hundred Woman Killer Harneys against us and fill the land with their stink. Wait; we must choose our battles as much as we can.”

Word came from near the Black Hills that made the young men even more eager to go chasing after whites. Some Sicangu were three days out of Fort Laramie when they spotted a group of white hunters with their long shooting rifles. The Sicangu stayed on a hill to watch. The hunters were killing buffalo from a very long distance. The buffalo didn’t run as one after another fell until the entire herd was killed, totaling over a hundred. Then the hunters skinned the dead animals by using horses to pull off the hides with ropes tied to the dead animal’s nose. Fresh hides were then scraped and loaded on several big wagons, each piled very high and the team horses straining to pull the load. No meat was taken, except for what the hunters sliced off to cook and eat as they worked. When the Sicangu rode in after the hide hunters left, the flies, worms, ravens, buzzards, and coyotes were already at work.

Crazy Horse and Little Hawk went with a group of young men to the high meadow country west of the Black Hills, a land of tall grass and blue sage and the white-bellied pronghorn. They found buffalo bones scattered in several places, indicating that large kills had been made. All they could do was turn the skulls to face the east, to make the final sign of respect that the hide hunters knew nothing about. The Hunkpatila had struck their camp and caught up with them, and the old men decided to pitch their lodges north of the Black Hills to hunt and make meat for the winter. Perhaps they would find some white hunters, they thought, but didn’t come across any.

They made much meat again that autumn and wintered within sight of the Black Hills. After the hunts, High Back Bone and Crazy Horse led a small group of warriors north to the edge of Crow lands, mainly to do a little scouting and give a few inexperienced boys the opportunity to know a little of the warrior’s trail. A strange thing happened when they came to a narrow creek in a little valley and saw a like group of Crow approaching from the other side: the two groups stopped to watch each other from a distance, just beyond bowshot but within the range of a rifle. The man riding at the head of the Crow lifted an arrow into the air and it landed a stone’s throw from the Lakota. High Back Bone rode forward to retrieve it and studied it closely. Then he strung his own bow, notched an arrow on its string and sent it - toward the Crow. The Crow leader took the arrow and inspected it. After a wave from their leader the Crow rode away. High Back Bone showed the arrow and said it was from a man known for his reputation as a courageous fighter. On this day, mutual respect was more important than anything. High Back Bone took the arrow back and placed it in his own quiver and later hung it up in his lodge among his warrior accoutrements.