The Killing of Crazy Horse, page 13
In the Black Hills in 1874, Stabber, an old man half naked (as the whites saw it) in his shirt and breechcloth, did his best to placate Custer, proceeding through the litany of assurances often cited by Indians upon meeting whites in force.
[I]f you want me to send one of my young men today I can do it, I can show you the way clear up this creek here; and then you can go yourselves. I do not want to have any trouble with the white man; I have always been with the white man; I never stayed with the hostiles … When I meet a big chief like you I always tell him the best I can. My children were all much scared today because the Rees came; they would not have been afraid of the whites.17
Later that day the Oglala men all came to Custer’s camp, where they were given sugar, coffee, bacon, and hardtack. But midway through the visit Slow Bull slipped away and did not return. Custer wanted the Oglala as scouts and announced he would send a detail of a dozen men back with the others “to protect their camp.”18 But Stabber and the Oglala named Long Bear19 mounted and started off before the guard detail was ready to move. Custer immediately dispatched Goose and one of the Santee, a man named Red Bird, to overtake the three men and bring them back. On reaching the Oglala, Red Bird grabbed the bridle of Long Bear’s horse, insisting he return to Custer’s camp. The Oglala seized the Santee’s gun, saying, “I may as well be killed today as tomorrow.”20
They wrestled for the gun; the Santee fell or jumped to the ground and the young Oglala took off at a run. The Santee had time for one shot, but Long Bear disappeared into the trees.
Stabber was not so quick and was forcibly returned to the soldiers’ camp, where Custer was now angry. He accused Stabber of being a liar after learning that the rest of the Oglala broke camp and disappeared while the chief and his men were eating hardtack and drinking coffee with Custer. All pretense of peace was now abandoned and Bloody Knife was sent off with a body of scouts to find the fleeing Indians. Five hours later they were heard returning, howling with anger and disappointment at coming back empty-handed, with neither men nor scalps.
Wrote Barrows,
The next day our scouts while out hunting discovered the saddle, blankets, and equipments of the Indian at whom our Santee had shot. He had evidently thrown them off to lighten his pony. The saddle and blanket were covered with blood … The ball had probably entered the man’s thigh and passed out in front of the saddle, inflicting possibly only a flesh wound.21
It was possible, but not likely. The heavy lead bullet of the 1873 caliber Springfield trapdoor carbine which the scouts carried was flattish on the nose and big enough to leave a wound you could plug with a corn cob. Chances are that Long Bear was lucky to live. But he did; two years later he was drawing pay as a scout for the U.S. Army.
The fleeing Oglala hurried south to the agencies with alarmed reports of their encounter with Custer’s expedition in the Black Hills. During the first week of August word reached Fort Laramie from the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies that “large numbers of Indians coming in from the north … say that Stabber … and several others were killed by Custer’s men.”22 The reports were wrong. It appears that no one was killed. Stabber was held prisoner for three days to serve as guide, then released by Custer’s order to rejoin his people. What really hurt and lingered was not the casualty count, but the sense of violation. Whites, accustomed to putting a price on things, never understood the intensity of Sioux feeling for the Black Hills. Lieutenant G. K. Warren had been right in 1857: the Sioux would fight before they would give up the Black Hills.
The prospect of a big fight with the Sioux did not trouble Custer. On the way back across the plains to Fort Abraham Lincoln, when the expedition reached the Little Missouri River, they discovered “the abandoned camp of an immense village of Indians,” according to Luther North, who rode most days alongside the young Yale student George Bird Grinnell. North had shown up Custer once or twice in shooting matches with Grinnell as witness. “I don’t think he liked it very well,” North wrote later. The night they reached the Little Missouri a small group was conversing in front of the general’s tent. “It was perhaps just as well that they [the Indians] were gone before we got there,” said North to the company—“there were a lot of them.”
Custer dismissed the remark. “I could whip all the Indians in the northwest with the Seventh Cavalry,” he said.23
——
Custer was irritated by his unsatisfactory encounter with the Sioux, and naturally insisted it wasn’t his fault: “[T]he Indians have their own bad faith as the sole ground for the collision,” he wrote in his official report.24 The expedition pressed on. The going was not easy. In later years Goose described the trek to a young mixed-blood woman, Josephine Waggoner:
The road was very difficult to travel over … As I talked with Goose about this trip, he told me that many times the expedition had to stop to make a road up and down impassable gulches, ditches and river banks, sometimes letting the wagons down steep banks with chains hitched to mules … The scouts had to do a lot of hard riding, back and forth to pick out the best places for the wagons to follow … but Goose had been in the hills before and he knew where the travois trails led into the heart of the hills.25
What was the goal of all this effort? The young paleontologist George Grinnell was looking for fossils, the geologist N. H. Winchell was looking for interesting rock formations, the engineer and topologist Captain William H. Ludlow was making the map of which Custer spoke so frequently, the botanist Aris B. Donaldson was cataloging plants (fifty-two along Cold Spring Creek alone), the correspondents were hoping for a story, and everybody was seeking game, which abounded. What gave this extended ride in the park a place in American history was the desire for gold, subject of speculation and rumors for years.
“I was talking to an old miner the other day about the probabilities of finding gold here,” Curtis wrote wistfully in the Inter-Ocean in late July, “and he thinks they are small.”
All knew it was a possibility; all felt it was fading away. Custer, some said at his own expense, had recruited two miners to accompany the expedition, old hands named Horatio Ross and William McKay. Both men, Curtis wrote, “have been worth fortunes as many times as they have toes.” They got lucky again on the morning of August 2 when they washed out traces of gold in the gravel bed of French Creek.
Goose was a witness. He had watched the whites shrug off the mysteries of the spirit hole. That bored them. Now he saw the reaction of the whites to the discovery of gold—a few yellow specks at the bottom of a pan of water and gravel:
One very hot day a lot of the soldiers went in the creek to cool off. Goose said he was repicketing his horse. Just then, the soldiers started yelling. Some of them threw up their hats. Some laughed. Some were crying. Others were running in circles. Others were jumping up and down. There was the greatest confusion he ever saw. One man had something in his hand. As fast as this man showed what he had to the others they went just as crazy as the others. Goose could not understand for a long time that these men had discovered gold.26
Curtis soon added details about the first strike:
[T]he two persevering men … came into camp with a little yellow dust wrapped carefully up in the leaf of an old account book. It was examined with the microscope; was tried with all the tests that the imagination of fifteen hundred excited campaigners could suggest, and it stood every one. It was washed with acid, mixed with mercury, cut, chewed and tasted, till everybody was convinced and went to bed dreaming of the wealth of Croesus. At daybreak there was a crowd around the “diggins” … And those were few who didn’t get a “showing”—a few yellow particles clinging to a globule of mercury.27
Reports varied as to the richness of the find; some said it was ten cents to the pan, some fifteen, some even more. But it was Curtis who coined the phrase that swept the country when it appeared under a one-word headline—GOLD!—in the Inter-Ocean on August 27: “From the grass roots down,” he wrote, “it was ‘pay dirt.’ ”
An aide-de-camp sent on the expedition by General Sheridan was also struck by the phrase; Ross and McKay must have used it. From Bear Butte on Saturday, August 15, Major George Forsyth wrote Sheridan, “The two miners we have with us tell me … that, in their opinion, when the eastern hills are rightly prospected, gold will be found there in abundance. I am inclined to think so, for the very roots of the grass would pan 5 cents to the pan in our camp near Harney’s Peak.”28
Times were hard in the United States; the Panic of 1873 had triggered a depression which lingered. “Gold from the grass roots down”—wealth to be picked up as easily as a coin in the street—a way out for desperate men: it was clear where this was going. Before year’s end prospectors, speculators, dreamers, and the merely out-of-work were hurrying their way in thousands to Fort Pierre east of the Black Hills on the Missouri River; to Sidney, Nebraska, directly south of the hills on the Union Pacific Railroad line; and to Cheyenne, Wyoming, called by its boosters “the magic city,” which was the most direct jumping-off place for the new goldfields.
One awkward fact stood in the way of a full-scale gold rush. The Fort Laramie treaty had given the Black Hills to the Sioux in perpetuity, and all whites were barred from entry. For a year after Custer’s expedition the military tried, vigorously at first, to block whites from the hills or to expel those who had slipped through. But then a different approach was conceived: to buy the hills from the Sioux, or, failing that, to rewrite the Treaty of 1868, compelling the Indians to sign whether they wanted to or not. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were summoned to Washington in May 1875 to hear the president’s views. The Cheyenne Daily Leader, which expected boom times as soon as the hills were opened to whites, stated the matter plainly:
If they decide in conformance with the suggestions of the president, all will be well. They will be voted good Indians and will be voted appropriations to buy food and clothing for years to come … But there is no more foolishness to be tolerated in red men. They might as well … agree to sell out and go south. If they will not do this, then look out for lively times with the Indians … Of the result all may feel sanguine. The Indians will have to accept the president’s terms.29
“I do not like General Custer and all his men going into the Black Hills,” Red Cloud said within days of the first newspaper headlines. He was a careful, thoughtful kind of man. The invasion of the Black Hills remained on his mind all that fall. He did not like or trust the Oglala agent, J. J. Saville, so he told the commander at Fort Laramie privately that he wanted to visit Washington to talk about the hills. The commander was already finding difficulty in keeping whites out of the area. He passed on Red Cloud’s request with his endorsement, and Washington, with its own agenda taking form, soon responded with an invitation. When Saville gave Washington’s invitation to Red Cloud it was Billy Garnett, about to turn twenty, who did the interpreting.30
Red Cloud, always conscious of the danger of getting out in front of his people, now told Saville he wanted a big group of chiefs to go, perhaps as many as fifty, and urged that even Black Twin (Holy Bald Eagle) and Crazy Horse be included. General Sheridan in Chicago had never heard the name of either man. Red Cloud sent couriers to the north and Saville soon wrote Washington that both chiefs were promising to come, although neither one, he believed, had ever been to an agency or attended a council with whites. As spring approached Crazy Horse and Black Twin did not say no, but they did not show up, either, and the delegation left in May without them. With the chiefs went a large contingent of interpreters—not just the men working for the agents, Billy Garnett, Leon Palladay, and Louis Bordeaux, but also several men whom Red Cloud and Spotted Tail wanted as interpreters, Louis Richard, Nick Janis, and Todd Randall.
The problem facing President Grant’s administration was brutally simple at the core: how to extinguish, in the preferred word of officials, Sioux title to the Black Hills before white miners simply flooded into the gold country, treaty be damned, and sparked a general Indian war. But the government had a political flank it needed to watch. An alert audience in the east of clerics, “friends of the Indian,” and former abolitionists, ready to take up a new cause, closely scrutinized the Indian Department. The government tried at first to buy or lease the hills, but from whom? This was never quite thought through. The 1868 treaty granted possession of the hills to “the Sioux,” but that included the northern bands who had never signed the treaty, never lived at an agency, never took government rations or annuities. These northerners insisted nobody else had the right to sell their claim to the hills. And what about the price? The Indians all understood why the whites were eager to buy the hills—gold had been found there. Those willing to sell wanted to get a lot for the hills, without really knowing what “a lot” might be.
But the difficulty with the deepest roots was Washington’s ambivalence about the true nature of a sale or a lease. An owner, if he is really the owner, is free to say no, or to ask a price no buyer will meet. This freedom the government was not actually willing to concede to the Sioux. Grant was not sentimental about Indian rights. He did not recognize any Sioux right to hold on to the Black Hills. He had made up his mind, and to the Indians he made his views plain. As soon as they reached Washington they were informed that the government wished to remove them to Indian territory. The southern Cheyenne had already been forced to settle there, and the Sioux understood this would mean complete loss of freedom and their hunting way of life. It was Grant, personally, who uttered the fatal “or else” looming behind the government’s offer to buy the hills. In the White House on May 26 he told the Indians that Washington had not promised to feed them forever. If the Indians refused to sell the hills, if white gold seekers poured into the area, if fighting followed, then inevitably the government would stop delivering beef to the agencies. Grant and the chiefs both knew that meant the Indians would starve. The threat in his words was unmistakable: sell the hills or starve.
“I want you to think of what I have said,” Grant concluded. “I don’t want you to say anything today. I want you to talk among yourselves … This is all I want to say to you.”31
But the Indians refused to be bullied into signing a treaty. The chiefs dug in their heels and would not even discuss selling the Black Hills until they had a chance to talk to the people left at home. Back they went in mid-June. Congress, meanwhile, created a commission to press for sale of the hills and appointed Iowa Senator William Allison to run it.32 A legal sale would require agreement by three-quarters of Sioux men, including those who lived in the north. Hoping to strike a deal within the rules, the Allison commission in the summer of 1875 sent out a delegation to invite the northern Indians to a grand council on the White River in September. Led by Young Man Afraid of His Horses, the delegation of about seventy-five Oglala and Brulé men left the agencies in July, following the well-established road north to the Buffalo Gap and through the hills to the hunting grounds along the Powder and Tongue rivers. With the delegation went two interpreters, evidently as official observers in order to report after their return to the Allison commission. One of the two was the mixed-blood son of old John Richard, Louis Richard, a man called nephew by Red Cloud. With him was a man new to the whites but well known to the northern Indians—the long-haired, dark-skinned, Sioux-speaking, still-buckskin-clad, just-arrived-from-nowhere Sandwich Islander, Frank Grouard.
7
“We don’t want any white men here.”
IT WAS ALONG THE Tongue River that Louis Richard and Frank Grouard encountered the big camp of the Indians whom the military, depending on the mood of the day, had begun to cite interchangeably as “Northern Indians,” “non-agency Indians,” or “hostiles.”1 The military thought that gathered in one place they might number as many as five hundred warriors, not more. A better guess in midsummer 1875, as Richard and Grouard reported in August, would have been nineteen hundred lodges with eight or nine thousand people and two thousand fighting men.2 A big midsummer village like this one would not maintain the same population for two days running; some of the people might linger in a favored spot for weeks, all might depart in a day. Half at least would expect to spend the winter at an agency. It was the task of Young Man Afraid of His Horses to persuade some of them—with luck all—to follow him back down the travois road to the Red Cloud Agency, where the Allison commission hoped to convince three of every four adult males to touch the pen and agree to sell the Black Hills.
The leading men of the northern bands were all in the camp on the Tongue River—Sitting Bull and Black Moon of the Hunkpapas, Lone Horn of the Miniconjou, Crazy Horse and Black Twin of the Oglala, and a great many others besides. They had come together for the annual sun dance, held when the sage was in bloom. When Young Man Afraid and his delegation arrived the northern Indians were preparing a war expedition. Chances are good they were planning a raid on the Ute, who had stolen many Sioux horses that winter, or on the Crow, who were under constant pressure by the Sioux in those years. No year passed without Sioux war parties going out in midsummer to fight the Crow.
As gifts, Young Man Afraid’s delegation brought fifty Indian ponies and tobacco, the traditional gesture of peaceful intent, but they found the northern Indians in an angry mood. Some evidently resented the invitation from the wasicu and wanted to send Young Man Afraid’s delegation back south with a good soldiering or worse. Years later, Grouard told his biographer that he had gone directly to the lodge of Crazy Horse to tell him the whites wanted to talk to him down along the White River. The chief told Grouard tersely, “I don’t want to go.” He said he would rather fight than make a treaty. But he added that others were free to go if they liked; he would not try to stop them. Next Grouard went to see Sitting Bull, who volunteered little while he tried to get Grouard to say much. The two men had not met since their angry break the previous year, and Sitting Bull now felt betrayed anew by Grouard’s arrival bearing messages from the white soldiers. While Grouard was making his rounds, Waglula, the father of Crazy Horse, went out through the camp to cry the news, urging people to listen to what the visitors had come to say.3
