The Killing of Crazy Horse, page 49
“Why, they had interpreters over there,” said a surprised Touch the Clouds. “What do they say?”
But the officers pressed their request, and Touch the Clouds did as he was asked, explaining how the meeting with Clark came about, and what was said. There had been talk of sending the Indian scouts out to fight the Nez Percé but the Sioux did not want to go. Clark called a meeting to press his case, and Touch the Clouds, speaking for himself and the others, told Clark at length why they said no:
We washed the blood from our faces and came in and surrendered and wanted peace. My heart is on the ground but now there is dust in the air and trouble is threatening. You ask us to put blood on our faces again, but I do not want to do this, neither does Crazy Horse. You enlisted us for peace. Then you gave up the buffalo hunt, to our disappointment, and you put a bit in our mouth and turned us around and proposed to go to Washington, but we did not want to go. This latest plan of yours is hard medicine, but we will go north and the soldiers must go with us. We will surround the Nez Perces and whip them and there will be peace all around.8
These were the words put into English by Louis Bordeaux. They had a very different meaning from the words reported by Clark and Grouard. After listening with growing agitation for several moments, Grouard interrupted Bordeaux and “called [him] down, saying he was not correctly interpreting Touch the Clouds.”
“Louis, you do not understand the dialect of those Northern Indians,” Grouard said.
Bordeaux was furious. He thought Grouard “a very ignorant man in the use of English,” and his command of Lakota was worse—“very broken,” Bordeaux called it. “Frank,” he said, “you cannot teach me my mother tongue.”
Now followed “quite a wordy dispute as to the interpretation of what Touch the Clouds said.” Touch the Clouds grew angry. “You lie!” he said to Grouard. “You lie! You are the cause of all this trouble.”
Touch the Clouds “told Grouard he had misinterpreted him.” Grouard protested that Touch the Clouds was saying something different now; he had changed his words. At this point Burke interrupted, saying all the English-Lakota speakers at the agency trusted Bordeaux; all thought him a “brave interpreter”—he reported what a man said, not what others wanted to hear. “Bordeaux could not be impeached,” said Burke.9
At that Grouard backed off. He would not admit that Bordeaux was right, but when asked if he thought Touch the Clouds planned to go north to fight the whites now, Grouard replied, “I don’t believe he intends doing so now.”10
By this time Burke and Lee were satisfied that Touch the Clouds was telling the truth; the chief was angry and disappointed but he had no intention of going to war, and he insisted that Crazy Horse felt the same way. Knowing that additional companies of troops from Fort Laramie were already on their way to Red Cloud, and convinced that a roundup of Crazy Horse’s band could result in a needless killing, Lee told Burke he would go to Camp Robinson to convince Clark and Bradley that a terrible mistake was about to be made. With his wife Lucy and ten-year-old daughter Maude, Lee set out from Camp Sheridan in an Army ambulance early the following morning, the second day of September.
The Oglala He Dog had been a lifelong friend of Crazy Horse, born in the same year and the same season of the year. They had played together as children, courted the girls together, and went to war together as young men. He Dog’s half brother Short Bull said the men in their band “did so much fooling around with girls” that the other bands had begun to call them the Ite Sica—the Bad Faces. He Dog was a nephew of Red Cloud, and the older man was instrumental in having He Dog appointed a chief, one of the Shirt Wearers of the Ite Sica. The Ongloge On—the Shirt Wearers—were called the “owners of the tribe”; they made important decisions collectively. He Dog and Crazy Horse were both Shirt Wearers when they turned thirty in 1868, the year the Fort Laramie treaty was signed, but they did not touch the pen. Both remained in the north when Red Cloud, American Horse, and other chiefs led their bands to the agencies. Over the following years, He Dog and Crazy Horse remained war comrades in the north and fought beside each other in the big battles, and in May 1877 they rode south together to surrender at the Red Cloud Agency. A week later both men enlisted as scouts. It was the soldier known as White Hat, Lieutenant Clark, who showed He Dog where to make his mark. In return, He Dog was given a military tunic and a revolver.11
He Dog had hated whites since his brother Only Man had been killed ten years earlier during the Bozeman War, and like Crazy Horse he had never stayed at an agency. But at the moment of He Dog’s signing it appears that Lieutenant Clark opened a continuing conversation with him. This was a remarkable achievement. Clark worked men with words, listening to what they said, patiently explaining his own views. The Oglala were proud men; Clark seems to have won their allegiance by taking them seriously. The change in He Dog was unmistakable by mid-August, when Clark wrote General Crook to say that he had managed to separate Crazy Horse from some of the leading men who had surrendered with him in May. “There is no trouble,” he wrote, “with Little Big Man, Jumping Shield [also known as Iron Crow] and Big Road.” Clark added, “He Dog, also a strong man, has joined Red Cloud.” Over the next two weeks Clark managed to widen this gap, leaving Crazy Horse increasingly isolated as he rejected the urging of the other chiefs to do as White Hat wished and go to Washington.12
The stream of visitors to Crazy Horse’s lodge was constant. They would come, sit, perhaps smoke a pipe, and tell the chief all the reasons why he should do as White Hat wished and go to Washington. “After awhile,” He Dog said, “Crazy Horse became so he did not want to go anywhere or talk to anyone.” Clark recruited many others to press his case, but did not go himself. “One day,” He Dog said later, “I was called in to see White Hat and asked to bring Crazy Horse in for a talk because I was such a friend of his.”
He Dog went to see his friend in his lodge, then on Little Cottonwood Creek. He delivered White Hat’s invitation, but it was no use. “He would not come,” said He Dog. “This made me feel bad, so I moved my people from where Crazy Horse was camping and camped over near the Red Cloud band.”
“There was no quarrel,” He Dog added. “We just separated.”
This is not quite convincing. To feel bad, to have a bad heart, was to admit deep disaffection, and to move his people was a big thing. The people were He Dog’s immediate tiyospaye, a kind of extended family including his many brothers and a few others, nine separate lodges of fifty or more people. Someone in the group had once owned a gray horse famous for its fast running and endurance. Indians never named horses in the sense that whites do; they called them by some identifying characteristic, referring to the Sorrell, or the Horse with the White Stockings. When the fast gray developed a kidney sore or saddle gall they called it Cankahuhan (Soreback), and eventually He Dog’s immediate band was called by that name, too—Cankahuhan, the Sorebacks. Everyone in He Dog’s band was related to Red Cloud, and He Dog was his nephew; to move close to Red Cloud might be called a natural thing, but all knew it signaled a break with Crazy Horse. From that moment He Dog was on the side of Red Cloud, on the side of White Hat, on the side of General Crook.13
The night after the meeting between Crazy Horse and White Hat, while Crook was heading west on the Union Pacific Railroad, Red Cloud and some of the other chiefs went to the agency for a talk with the agent, James Irwin, who had asked them to come. Irwin was thoroughly stirred up by the talk of the camps; in a letter to Washington he described Crazy Horse’s mood as “silent, sullen, lordly and dictatorial,” called him “impudent and defiant,” said he objected to everything, and warned the commissioner of Indian affairs that the chief’s intransigence “had disturbed and excited the Indians.”
In his office Irwin told the chiefs he had “heard some bad talk” and wanted to know if he could help. The chiefs appointed American Horse to respond. He said the leading men had all been meeting daily for more than a week and had “done all we could to quiet Crazy Horse and bring him into a better state of feeling.” But Crazy Horse refused to meet with the other chiefs. “We can do nothing with him,” American Horse said. The chiefs present—Red Cloud, Little Wound, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and American Horse—then collectively made Irwin an oddly worded promise “that they would see that Crazy Horse did nothing about the agency that would hurt my feelings.”14
What did Irwin mean—the Indians would see that Crazy Horse did not hurt his feelings? What did Irwin think that the chiefs were promising to do?
In Irwin’s two, back-to-back letters to Washington, written on the last day of August and the first day of September, it is clear only that Irwin, like Clark, had now turned decisively against Crazy Horse. Where things were headed can be glimpsed in two remarks made by an officer at Crook’s headquarters in Omaha. One was uttered in an interview with a reporter for the Omaha Herald, and a second was scribbled onto Bradley’s telegram of August 31 before it was filed—the telegram reporting Crazy Horse’s threat to go north. General Robert Williams, Crook’s adjutant general, often briefed the newspapers on what to expect in the Department of the Platte. On the day of Bradley’s telegram he told the Herald’s reporter that Crazy Horse had taken on the role of “a sort of general ‘objector’ … it was feared he would make them trouble yet … he had been moody and ill-natured since his return to Red Cloud, and showed that he was not to be trusted.”
That same day Williams penciled a note onto Bradley’s telegram. He had not been to Red Cloud himself. What he scribbled must have been the gist of what he had been told by someone else. “Crazy Horse is … objecting to everything,” he recorded. “General Crook alone can influence him. It is doubtful if Crazy Horse will go to Washington.”
But Williams was satisfied that the rest of the chiefs at Red Cloud could be trusted. If Crazy Horse tried to break away to join Sitting Bull and resume the war, he wrote, “the present indications are that other chiefs would endeavor to kill him.”15
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“I can have him whenever I want him.”
DURING HIS DAYLONG RIDE north to Camp Robinson, Crook had plenty of time to think about the trouble brewing with Crazy Horse. Colonel Bradley thought Crook could still talk the chief around and it is likely that Crook thought so, too. But Crook was not sentimental about such matters; once he determined that a chief could not be worked around to a compliant way of thinking, the general hardened his heart against the man and acted vigorously to get him out of the way. Crook had hoped to make use of Crazy Horse by setting him against the other chiefs, and bringing them down a peg or two. But he did not make the mistake of thinking Crazy Horse harmless, or a man who could be pushed around. Crook paid his adversaries the respect of considering them dangerous. One such had been the Apache chief Eskiminzin, leader of a “saucy, impudent lot of cut-throats … [who] would walk through our camp in that defiant, impudent manner, as much as to say, ‘I would like to kill you just for the fun of it, just to see you kick.’ ”
Crook called him Skimmy, kept clear of his men, and wrote in his Autobiography, “I must confess I was afraid of them.”1
Skimmy only looked daggers, but another Apache chief named Ochocama devised an elaborate plan to murder Crook at a council in September 1872. A Hualapai Indian scout delivered timely warning of the plot. As Crook and the chief exchanged greetings in the first moments, Ochocama would begin to roll a cigarette. Then he would light it. His first puff would be signal for another Indian to shoot and kill Crook.
Despite this warning, Crook went ahead with the meeting anyway, perhaps thinking it too good a chance to arrest the Indians he wanted. He made sure the Indians at the meeting were outnumbered by soldiers and mule skinners but he noted that even so a nervous Ochocama started to roll his cigarette. Then events parted from the script. An Indian stabbed a soldier, a shot was fired, and Ochocama’s confederate swung his rifle on Crook. The shot that might have killed him went wild when a lieutenant kicked the Indian’s rifle aside. A furious hand-to-hand fight ensued; several Indians were killed or wounded while the rest, including Ochocama, succeeded in escaping to the mountains, leaving Crook with a deepened respect for the difficulty of laying hands on a wild Indian. He did not forget this episode. We might liken the effect to what occurs in the mind of a man who has once stepped over a log onto a rattlesnake. He will think twice about every log for the rest of his life.2
Another problem chief who could not be tamed with words was the Tonto Apache known as Deltchay,3 who promised peace in April 1873 but ran off to the mountains with his fighting men a month later. As this pattern was repeated over the next several years Crook developed an especially intense dislike for Deltchay. In frequent letters the general directed his young lieutenant, Walter Schuyler, in his efforts first to manage Deltchay, then to chase him down and capture him, and finally, when all patience had been exhausted, to kill him and prove it with the delivery of Deltchay’s head. Little of this extended campaign is recorded in Crook’s autobiography or preserved among his official papers. Crook sometimes instructed Schuyler to burn his letters after reading them, but for whatever reason (perhaps pride) Schuyler held on to the Deltchay letters. In these letters we may observe Crook’s mind at work.4
Crook’s care in planning is evident in the letter he wrote to Schuyler at Camp Verde, Arizona, in September 1873. Deltchay had come in promising peace yet again but made so much trouble that Schuyler sought permission to arrest him. Crook supported the lieutenant’s plan and suggested he might begin with a raid on some of Deltchay’s confederates still hiding in the nearby mountains. “Killing a few of them,” Crook wrote, “will go to weaken Delche’s influence and make his capture more easy, as doubtless this insubordination in the main originates with him.” For the arrest itself he urged caution, careful planning, swift action, and the use of overwhelming force.
Get sufficient men from the post so as to prevent a collision and do your utmost to prevent one, but should one unavoidably occur, have your men so posted that they can kill all the ring leaders who support Delche in his opposition. As soon as you make the arrest tell Delche that if his people make any attempt to rescue him that he will be the first one you will kill … Don’t attempt to make the arrest unless you are sure of success as a failure will lead to bad consequences … make your disposition in such a manner that you will have the Indians completely in your power … As soon as you make the arrest I wish you would advise me by messenger … I shall feel very anxious about you until I hear from you again. I have confidence in your doing the best under the circumstances.5
But things did not go as planned. Deltchay was one jump ahead of the young lieutenant. When Schuyler told the chief he was under arrest, Deltchay laughed. Schuyler then discovered that his Winchester rifle had been emptied of cartridges, and Deltchay’s comrades all pulled rifles and pistols from beneath their clothes or blankets. Schuyler would have died where he stood if his Mojave scouts had not intervened. Deltchay and the other chiefs fled for the mountains. Soon some of the runaways came back, telling Crook they were sorry and begging the general to let them stay. At first he refused, saying he preferred to “drive them all back into the mountains, where I could kill them all.” The Apache pleaded. “I finally compromised by letting them stay,” Crook wrote, “provided they would bring in the heads of certain of the chiefs who were ringleaders.”6
Deltchay’s was among the heads Crook desired, and he was not speaking figuratively. He wanted the heads and he promised to pay for them. Schuyler meanwhile led a small group into the mountains after Deltchay. “I have only 15 men but they are picked shots and with two scouts we can make it lively for this chief if I can catch him,” Schuyler wrote his father in December 1873. “His death will settle the business as he is the king thief of them all.”
But Deltchay eluded Schuyler’s small party. The following June, Schuyler went after him again, urged on by Crook, who wrote, “Start out your killers as soon as possible after the heads of Delche and Co. The more prompt these heads are brought in, the less liable other Indians, in the future, will be to jeopardize their heads.” In mid-July 1874, Crook wrote yet again: “If you think you can make sure of Delchae you can make a scout against him.” A week later some Tonto Apache brought Deltchay’s head to Verde, and claimed the bounty. Soon thereafter another group delivered Deltchay’s head to officers at the San Carlos Reservation. They also claimed the bounty.
In October, Crook wrote Schuyler to say he had solved the mystery. An Apache woman said the gossip on the San Carlos Reservation was that the first head belonged to Deltchay’s son. But Crook was not put out by the deception, and he never complained about the request for double payment. “Being satisfied that both parties were earnest in their beliefs,” he wrote, “and [since] the bringing in of an extra head was not amiss, I paid both bounties.”7
Crook’s approach was entirely practical. He did not share the attitude of western newspaper editors, who blamed every conflict on the Indians and called openly for their extermination. Crook believed that white avarice—“the almighty dollar”—caused most of the trouble. “The fact is there is too much money in this Indian business,” he wrote to his friend Rutherford B. Hayes in November 1871. But in Crook’s view there was no profit in arguing the justice of every clash till kingdom come. The fighting had to stop. Indians who resisted had to be got out of the way. By the time Crook’s ambulance pulled up before Colonel Bradley’s office at Camp Robinson on the morning of the second day of September, Crook had made up his mind that Crazy Horse had to be got out of the way. His plan was to place the chief under arrest and have him transported under military escort to a federal prison in Florida. Crook entrusted the job to his chief of scouts, Lieutenant William Philo Clark.
