| Crazy Horse—The Man I. |
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Much has been written about the man that came to be known as Crazy Horse. To this day his life and accomplishments are clouded in a fog of reality, and of myth.
It is generally believed that Crazy Horse was born along Rapid Creek near present-day Rapid City, South Dakota, in the sacred Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. It has also been reported that he was born in what is now southwestern Nebraska. This is only the first of the unanswered questions surrounding this remarkable man.
He was born the son of an Oglala medicine man of the same name and his Brule wife, the sister of Chief Spotted Tail, in approximately 1842. His childhood name was Curly. His mother died when he was young; his father took her sister as a wife, and she helped to raise Crazy Horse. He spent time in both Oglala and Brule camps. Before he was 12, Curly had killed a buffalo and received his own horse.
In August of 1854, he was in the Brule camp of Conquering Bear in northern Wyoming when the Brule leader was killed in the Grattan Fight with the U.S. cavalry. Although he was away from camp during the Battle of Ash Hollow the following year, he witnessed the destruction of Sioux tepees and possessions by the soldiers during General William S. Harney’s expedition through Sioux territory along the Oregon Trail. These experiences would help to shape his attitude toward whites.
After the Grattan Fight, Curly underwent a Vision Quest in which he had a vivid dream of a rider in a storm on horseback, with long unbraided hair, a small stone in his ear, zigzag lightning decorating his cheek, and hail dotting his body. Although a warrior, he bore no scalps. People clutched at the rider, but could not hold him. The storm faded and a red-backed hawk flew over the rider’s head. When Curly later related the dream to his father, the medicine man interpreted it as a sign of his son’s future greatness in battle.
At about the age of 16, now bearing his father’s name (Tashunka Witco, Tashunca-Uitco, "his horse is crazy"), Crazy Horse rode for the first time as an adult warrior in a raid on Crows. Like the rider in his dream, he wore his hair free, a stone earring, and a headdress with a red hawk feather in it. His face was painted with a lightning bolt and his body with hail-like dots. The raid was successful, but Crazy Horse received a wound in the leg, because, his father interpreted, unlike the rider in the vision, he had taken two scalps. For the remainder of his career as a warrior, it is said that Crazy Horse never again took a scalp.
Crazy Horse became further known to many of the Sioux bands for his courage in the War for the Bozeman Trail of 1866-68 under the Oglala Chief Red Cloud, when the army began building a road in the Powder River country from the Oregon Trail to the goldfields of Montana. He was one of the young chiefs, along with the Miniconjou Hump and the Hunkpapas Gall and Rain-In-The-Face, who used decoy tactics against the soldiers. Near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming Territory, Crazy Horse participated in the Indian victories known as the Fetterman Fight of December 21, 1866, and the Wagon Box Fight of August 2, 1867.
With the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, in which the army agreed to abandon the posts along the Bozeman Trail, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail settled on reservation lands surrounding the Black Hills. Crazy Horse became a war chief of the Oglalas, with some Brule followers as well. Moreover, he made friends and followers among the Northern Cheyenne through his first marriage to a Cheyenne woman. (He later married an Oglala woman.)
Crazy Horse again waged war in the early 1870s, leading his warriors in raids on Northern Pacific Railway surveyors in what is now Montana and western North Dakota. In 1874, the Black Hills gold rush increased tensions in the area. When the nomadic hunting bands ignored the order to report to their reservations by January 31, 1876, the military organized a campaign against them.
(For Part II. of Crazy Horse, click here)
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