I can consciously remember hearing his name for the first time the summer I was six years old. My grandfather Albert and a man I knew as Grandpa Isaac and I had just crossed the Little White River and stopped to rest. As they both fashioned their roll-your-own cigarettes, one of them compared the slow-moving Little White to the Greasy Grass River. I learned later that the Greasy Grass was in south-central Montana and was also known as the Little Bighorn. In the shade of a thick grove of sandbar willow, the two old men spoke about a battle, and names that I had never heard before—or at least that I couldn’t remember hearing before—rolled off their tongues that day along the river.
Pizi, Tatanka Iyotake, Inkpa Duta,
and
Tasunke Witko
and
Pehin Hanska.
Of course, they were talking about Gall, Sitting Bull, Red Butte, and Crazy Horse and Custer.
Pehin Hanska
meant Long Hair, the name many Lakota had for George Custer.
The battle they spoke of was fought seventy-five years prior, ten or so years before either of them was born. They talked, however, as if it had happened only the day before. They could because they had heard of the battle from their fathers and uncles and from a generation who had been alive in 1876, and from some who had been there in the great encampment along the Greasy Grass.
Long Hair and his soldiers had been decisively defeated, as far as I could tell. The
Sahiyela,
the Northern Cheyenne, were there with the Lakota. The soldiers had attacked the south end of the encampment along the Greasy Grass River, then the north end. Those from the south were stopped and routed completely, chased across the river to the top of a hill where they dug shallow pits in the earth to hide. Those who tried to attack from the north were stopped at the river and chased up a long slope. They were forced to fight a running battle, falling and dying as they fled until only a small knot of them were cut off at the end of a long ridge and were killed.
One name was repeated more often than others in the story of that battle:
Tasunke Witko,
or “His Crazy Horse.” He was a leader of fighting men and his mere appearance on the battlefield was apparently enough to inspire others to fight.
Tasunke Witko
had led a charge of warriors against the soldiers in the second engagement of that battle. A Sahiyela leader commented on that particular action when recounting the battle years later by saying, “I have never seen anything so brave.”
By the age of six I had already listened to many stories from these two grandfathers. I was well aware that being a fighting man was one way of being a man in the Lakota ways of old. I knew that men were often injured or wounded in battle and sometimes killed. And I knew that in battle a man could prove himself. For one man to obviously evoke such reverence and respect from the two grandfathers who told the story of the 1876 Greasy Grass Fight—the Battle of the Little Big Horn—was of some consequence. In my six-year-old world I could think of only two or three other old men in the same category as these two grandfathers, so when
they
respected someone it was no small thing. That day by the Little White River,
Tasunke Witko
became part of my life.
Like any Lakota boy that heard of Crazy Horse’s exploits on the battlefield, I was awestruck, and immediately made him larger than life, thus setting him apart from reality. I can’t recall the exact moment I realized that the essence of Crazy Horse had something to do with more than his physical appearance and attributes or his accomplishments as a fighting man and a leader of fighting men. But the realization came because the stories from my grandfather and other elders took on a more realistic tone as they added details to correlate with my intellectual and emotional growth. Crazy Horse became more defined and I began to paint him with the brush of reality rather than the distortion of legend.
In that reality every Lakota boy of the time grew up on a horse and Crazy Horse was no exception. As an adult he was described as a skilled horseman. Many who rode with him into battle remembered that he used two horses for a combat, a bay and a sorrel. He favored the bay, a gelding. Later he had a favorite riding horse, a yellow paint. He preferred geldings because they had more endurance than mares and stallions. The bay was not only fast but had unusual endurance. It was the horse he rode in many encounters with both native and white enemies. Crazy Horse liked to rest and refresh his horse by riding him to the top of a hill to catch a breeze or stand in the wind.
Like every Lakota male, he was probably highly skilled with his bow because of the type of instruction and training he was given. In his day it was not unusual for teenage boys to hit grasshoppers on the fly with an arrow. Surprisingly, my boyhood image of him as a warrior was not too far from the truth. As a full-fledged fighting man he did prefer a stone-headed war club for close combat, and it was said he was highly skilled with it, especially mounted and in a running fight. Out of necessity, however, he did a acquire a single-shot muzzle loader and later a repeating rifle.
Crazy Horse was certainly not the tallest or the strongest among the Lakota fighting men of his day. He was probably somewhere between five feet six inches and five feet ten inches tall. But courage and daring are not dependent on size or ability. In another way, however, he was not the prototypical Lakota fighting man in that he didn’t participate in a ritual called the
waktoglakapi
or “to tell of one’s victories.” It was a simple ritual in which fighting men were expected to recount their exploits on the battlefield. As a matter of fact, Crazy Horse barely talked about his exploits to his immediate family.
Sometimes, however, Crazy Horse does seem to tower over me. He is intense and his eyes flash. These moments happen, I suspect, to remind me that there is a legacy that is larger than life, an aspect to Crazy Horse that sets him apart from others who have gone before us. In a real sense it has to do with something beyond his exploits, something that traditional Lakota know and understand, something often misunderstood by the non-Lakota world.
My grandfather liked to watch the clouds building to the west on late summer afternoons, the kind of clouds that are folded and gray-blue, with quiet thunder rolling in their bowels uttering a promise of lightning and rain. One summer evening as we watched storm clouds approaching and listened to that distant, quiet thunder, he made a soft comment.
Wakinyan ihanble ske.
They say he dreamed of the Thunders. He was speaking of Crazy Horse. So among other things he was a Thunder Dreamer.
Anyone who dreamed of the Thunder Beings, the
Wakinyan,
was called upon to walk the path of the
Heyoka
(heh-yo’-kah), also known as
wakan witkotkoka,
which is roughly translated as “crazy in a sacred way.” A Heyoka was a walking contradiction, acting silly or even crazy sometimes, but generally expected to live and act contrary to accepted rules of behavior. In doing so a Thunder Dreamer sacrificed reputation and ego for the sake of the people. Throughout his adult life and with his last breath, this is exactly what Crazy Horse did.
He has left us a legacy that is both a trail to follow and a challenge to follow it.
Much later, when I was an adult, I realized that my research into the life of Crazy Horse had begun that day by the Little White River in the summer of 1951, nearly seventy-four years after his death at Camp Robinson, Nebraska. That research happened in the most natural way possible for me as a Lakota child.
Home for me is the northern Plains because I was born there and shaped by the influence of the land as much as the people who were closest to it. I was privileged to grow up in and around the communities of Horse Creek and Swift Bear on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, where I had access to the friends and relatives of my maternal grandparents, Albert and Annie (Good Voice Eagle) Two Hawk. I also spent a few years in the Lakota community in and around Kyle, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where my paternal grandfather, Charles J. Marshall, served as an Episcopal deacon. There, too, were many elderly Lakota who were friends and relatives. All of these elders were born in the 1890-1910 era. Their parents were born in the 1860-1890 era.
All of the Lakota elders I had contact with were unselfish in sharing their knowledge, opinions, and stories. To a child, of course, stories are simply stories. But as I grew older I began to gradually realize that I was hearing essential historical and cultural information. Those elders were the best of authorities regarding the cultural values, traditions, customs, and historical events—well known and not so well known—that existed in the time of Crazy Horse. As a matter of fact, it was intriguing to listen to discussions and debates about what he might have felt and thought at a particular moment. Those elders not only provided my first glimpses into the life of Crazy Horse, but they were an almost never-ending source of information about him and about Lakota life of the past.
I was related to most of them from Horse Creek and Swift Bear (see list on pages 295-98) through both of my maternal grandparents. Those from the Pine Ridge Reservation were acquaintances of my paternal grandparents. They were all great storytellers and never passed up an opportunity to tell stories to an eager youngster. On many occasions it was simply a matter of mood meeting opportunity and someone would launch into a story. On just as many occasions, especially as I grew older, I sought them out with questions to seek clarification or to revisit a story. Of course, the one most accessible to me was my maternal grandfather, Albert Two Hawk. He was a man of many talents. To me he was the best possible example of a hardworking, humble, unselfish, and deeply spiritual person. He exemplified all the things he told about in his stories, as did my grandmother Annie.
A grandfather, Isaac Knife, was cut in the same mold. A big man with a gentle manner, he worked for many years for the railroad. His sister Eunice was a strong woman. She married a man named Black Wolf and was widowed young. One of her sons was killed in a shooting. Another from her second husband, named Running Horse, was killed in an accident while in the army. She had to be strong to survive that kind of tragedy and hardship. But she was always quick to smile and pat my face with her strong hands.
Wilson Janis from Kyle, South Dakota, was blind with snow-white hair. His wife Alice was a small, slender woman, also with strong hands. It seemed somehow a contradiction that many of my aunts and grandmothers with gentle souls and eyes to match had such strong hands.
The last of them to finish their earthly journey was one of my paternal grandmothers, Katie Roubideaux Blue Thunder, my father’s aunt. She, too, was small. She was born in June of 1890 (thirteen years after the death of Crazy Horse) and died in 1991, a month short of her one hundred and first birthday. She liked to watch the dances and tell stories of them and of how midwives were considered special people in the old days.
The list goes on and so do the memories. All of them, each of them, gave me information and insight I likely would never have gained on my own without them. This is more their work than mine.
None of the elders who told me stories of Crazy Horse had ever claimed to have seen him, of course, because they had been born too late. But they were the children and grandchildren of - people who lived in the time of Crazy Horse, some who had managed to at least catch glimpses of him or hear firsthand accounts from those who had actually seen him. So their stories and descriptions were always preceded by the Lakota word
ske,
meaning “it was said.” So it was said that Crazy Horse was slender and had wavy, dark brown hair, and his complexion was not as dark as that of most Lakota. His eyes were dark, however, and he had a narrow face with a typically long, straight Lakota nose, and a wide mouth. This manner of passing on information was, of course, part of the process and mechanism of the Lakota oral tradition that had existed for hundreds of generations.
We Lakota did not invent the oral tradition, however. It has been an integral part of human societies for longer than anyone can remember or document. Simply defined, it is the passing down of information from one generation to the next solely or primarily with the spoken word. Within the parameters of “information” is family, community, tribal, and national history, as well as practical knowledge that insures physical survival, provides for philosophical development, teaches societal roles, social behavior, norms, and values, and insures preservation of spiritual beliefs. Though the written word has supplanted the spoken word as the primary conveyance of information, every human culture and society has used oral tradition at some point in their societal evolution. We Lakota today are a culture that still uses the oral tradition and our sole use of it is only three generations past. It is still a viable mechanism for us.
Although the non-Lakota world has created myths and legends around and about Crazy Horse, he is a genuine hero to Lakota people who have a sense of what he was really about. Documentation does exist on the non-Indian side of history regarding Crazy Horse, but the thought that such documentation is the only credible source limits our access and view of that history. There are many sides to any story, history especially, and all sides can provide depth and substance when we incorporate them all as part of the story. A wealth of cultural information and historical knowledge has not been made available to non-Indians because of a basic suspicion on the part of many Lakota (and other indigenous peoples). The suspicion exists because too many non-Indian noses are turned up at the thought that oral tradition should be considered credible. I suspect that this is a political and ethnocentric debate that will continue indefinitely, and as long as it is not resolved we all lose. At least for the parameters of this work, I have chosen to listen to both sides.
In my opinion, history is something owned collectively by all of us, although there has been a monopoly on the reporting and interpretation of it on the part of those who perceive themselves to be the “winners” or “conquerors of the West” or “tamers of the land.” In spite of the self-serving labels and posturing, we are entitled to hear all viewpoints on our history and all the voices that have something to tell. Indeed, we must insist on it.