The Killing of Crazy Horse, page 58
“Old Crazy Horse said, in sobbing tones,” Lee remembered, “ ‘Ottah (Father) you and the other white men are my friends in this great sorrow.’ ” 18
Soon after the death of Crazy Horse, his father took back the name he had given his son and ceased to be known as Waglula. The fact that Lee called him “old Crazy Horse” may mean he had already taken back the name by the time Lee built the fence.
A few days later Lieutenant Henry Lemly paid a visit to Lee at the Spotted Tail Agency, where the singing and drumming still continued at night in the camps. Like most other whites, Lemly found the loud, prolonged grief of the Indians disturbing. He described what he saw in the New York Sun:
The grave was left in charge of the chief mourners … without food or drink, naked, and hideously blackened, eight figures lie around the corpse and howl. Night and day they do nothing but howl, and every Sioux, be it a buck or a squaw, who passes near, howls, too.
Lemly somehow felt safer using the word “howl” to describe the cries of grief. But he did not feel safe enough to visit the burial site of the chief himself. A civilian photographer who had been staying at the Spotted Tail Agency, James Hamilton, was braver; he mounted the hill above the agency and took two stereoviews of the burial site.19
Gradually, as Army officers and agency officials kept assuring their bosses, things quieted down. For about five weeks the body of Crazy Horse remained on the hill overlooking the agency. During this period, Red Feather remembered, “a war-eagle came to walk about on the coffin every night. It did nothing, only just walked about.”20 It seems likely that during this period Crazy Horse the father began the extended ceremony known as ghost keeping. The anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who made a seven-week journey across the plains with a party of Oglala a few years later, described in a paper for Harvard’s Peabody Museum the difficult duties of a father keeping the ghost of a child:
During this interval [of six months to a year] he cannot eat dog meat or any flesh scraped from the skin or hide of an animal. He cannot cut open the head of any animal to get the brains, strike or break any ribs or do any butchering. He cannot take a gun, pistol, arrows or any weapon in his hand. He cannot run, go in swimming, make any violent movement, shake a blanket, his clothing, or in any way disturb the air. No one must pass before him or touch him, and to prevent this disaster a coal of fire is always kept about two feet in front of him as he sits in his tent. Although he remains with his family he must live apart from his wife, and on no account take a child in his arms, for if he should so forget himself the child would surely die.
The ceremony of ghost keeping had several purposes. One was to soften the shock and pain of separation for the soul of the dead person as well as for those who survived. It was thought that the soul of the deceased would linger about a lock of hair kept in the proper way. At the end of the ceremony in six months or a year a grand feast and giveaway would be held and the lock of hair would be taken from its special wrapping and buried or preserved by the mother. In either case, the soul of the dead child would then be free to depart. Another goal of the ceremony was to calm anger and reconcile enemies.
If at any time during the period of keeping the lodge the father should by any accident hear of any violent words or deeds, he must at once perform certain rites which will avert the evil consequences to him or his family. He must take a few coals of fire, and lay on them a bunch of sweet grass, or sprays of cedar. As the smoke rises he must crouch over the coals bringing his blanket close about his body, drawing it over his head and face so as completely to shut him in with the smoke … while the aromatic fumes circle his entire person … The keeping of a ghost lodge is a signal of peace and cancels all grudges between parties. The father may not smoke with any one lest he should consort with a man who was at enmity with some other person. The Indians in explanation pointed out that it was for the purpose of enforcing peace in a man’s actions and thoughts that he was forbidden to take weapons in his hand; and the coal of fire placed before him while sitting in his tent was indicative of his setting himself apart for this religious duty, “the coal being like a partition between the father and all the world.”
During the period of ghost keeping, the lock of hair in its wrapping would be added to other objects in a special bundle prepared by the mother and sisters or other close female relatives of the dead child. In addition to the lock of hair the bundle would contain the pipe smoked at the outset by the wicasa wakan and the father of the dead child. The parents might enclose other items as well—things sacred to the deceased, or merely small items of comfort, anything they thought appropriate. All were rolled into a bundle about six inches thick and two feet long. A male relative would cut three crotched sticks and the ghost bundle would be hung from this tripod in the ghost lodge, a small, separate dwelling used for this purpose alone. The lodge and the bundle on its tripod would travel with the family wherever it might go for the next six months or a year. Setting up the tripod would be a first order of business on arriving at a new camping place.
To travel with the tripod was customary, but to bring the actual body of the dead child was unusual. It is likely that Crazy Horse the father decided to do so because the whole tribe was making a permanent move and no one could be sure of his ability to return. In the last week of October 1877, Crazy Horse the father started out with the northern Indians, Miniconjou under Touch the Clouds and the remnants of Crazy Horse’s Hunkpatila band. They were camped at the confluence of Beaver Creek and the White River in the first days of November when Clark and Red Cloud’s Oglala joined them. It was there Clark learned that Crazy Horse’s body was being “hauled along,” a fact commonly known by the Indians. When the journey east was resumed Crazy Horse the father brought along the travois bearing the body of his son, now apparently placed in its wrapping inside a raised, cage-like wicker frame attached to the drag poles of the travois. In the family group were the wife of Crazy Horse the father; his full sister, Rattling Stone Woman (Tunkanawin), and Tasina Sapawin, widow of the dead Crazy Horse. A granddaughter of Rattling Stone Woman, eleven years old at the time of the removal, said the group traveled in the rear of the procession, which meant that they would be the last to leave camp in the morning and the last to arrive in the evening. In late November, they ended their journey with Red Cloud’s Oglala at the forks of the White River, where they spent the winter and following spring. All returned at the end of the summer of 1878 when both agencies moved back away from the Missouri to new sites just across the line in South Dakota. Crazy Horse the father and his wife settled on the Rosebud Reservation with a band known as the Salt Users. With them on arrival, according to Kills Plenty, was the travois with its wicker cage which the people believed to contain the body of Crazy Horse. But something was now different. “They did not build up a tripod at this time,” remembered Kills Plenty, referring to an important part of the ceremony of ghost keeping.
One day we heard that the parents had opened this bundle which was supposed to contain the body of their son, and there was nothing but rags inside! What had they done with the body and where was it buried? Nobody could tell. It was a secret of Crazy Horse’s family.21
Over the following years, stories gradually emerged about the secret burial of Crazy Horse. It seems that his father when he fell behind one day early in the journey took the body and hid it in a crevice among the white clay buttes lining the route to the White River. The granddaughter of Rattling Stone Woman, a first cousin of Crazy Horse once removed, told several people that the body was initially hidden on the way north at a site between the later reservation communities of Wounded Knee and Porcupine. In the following year, the father secretly moved the body to a new location, telling no one, not even Tasina Sapawin. “They were afraid [she] would marry again and reveal the burial place,” said the cousin. But Tasina Sapawin never married again. Her brother Red Feather confirmed this story. “His father hid his body so not even my sister knew where it was buried,” he said.
But Jennie Fast Thunder said that was not so. She knew Tasina Sapawin before she died in the 1920s in the Porcupine district of the Pine Ridge Reservation. In the summer of 1932 she told Kills Plenty, now known as Luther Standing Bear, “Whenever anyone asked her about the grave of her husband she always replied, ‘I shall never tell anyone where he is. It was your jealousy that killed him.’ ”
Horn Chips in the early 1900s claimed that he had been present at every burial and reburial of Crazy Horse and knew where the body was. He told Walter Camp the chief’s bones were buried for the last time in 1883 in a rawhide sack. According to Billy Garnett, Horn Chips offered to sell the secret but found no takers. Woman Dress told his friend James Cook in 1911 that “just one man know where the place he was buried. But I don’t see that man.” The sister of Crazy Horse who was married to Red Sack told Cook that “she helped bury him at a secret place in the Pine Ridge hills,” but she refused to name the place. As recently as 1999 Woodrow Respects Nothing, then in his seventies, grandson of Jacob Respects Nothing and Sophie White Cow Tribe, told a white friend that his grandparents had helped move the body to a site along the clay buttes between Wounded Knee and Manderson. “But it was never told where his body was buried,” Respects Nothing added.22
Crazy Horse the father often talked about his son in the years after his death. He said things might have turned out differently if his son had prayed and prepared his medicine properly on the fatal day. He told Red Feather that he thought Doctor McGillycuddy might have poisoned his son. He saw the doctor fill his syringe and inject some stuff into his son’s body. “He died awful quick after that,” said Crazy Horse the father.
The chief of the Sans Arcs who went north to Canada, Red Bear, explained to his son why the old man kept Crazy Horse’s burial site a secret. “He did not want any white or any one of the jealous Indian chiefs who had helped the white soldiers by betraying Crazy Horse to touch Crazy Horse’s body.”23
But Crazy Horse the father managed to put aside bitter feelings, and in August 1879 he found an opportunity to extend the hand of friendship to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz. It is not likely that Crazy Horse the father had been told of Schurz’s role in the cascading events which resulted in the death of his son. But Schurz was the highest government official Crazy Horse the father ever met, and it was to Schurz he made his gesture. In the last days of August, the secretary came west with a party of friends to visit the Spotted Tail Agency before continuing on to Wyoming where General Crook planned to take him hunting. Traveling with Schurz were a New York Times reporter, John M. Carson; Count Donhoff, the secretary of the German legation in Washington; and Webb Hayes, son of the president and godson of Crook. The previous year, when it had become safe at last for whites to travel in the old Sioux hunting grounds, Hayes, Crook, and the Fort Laramie trader John S. Collins made the first of twelve annual fall hunts in the mountains around Laramie.
Schurz’s party arrived at the agency on August 28, after a fourteen-hour, eighty-seven-mile wagon journey from the Rosebud landing on the Missouri. On Saturday, about twelve hundred Indians gathered to meet Schurz, who was sitting with his companions on a raised platform built for the occasion by the agent, Major Cicero Newell. In a grand circle on the ground in front of the platform were the chiefs and leading men of the new agency, and between the chiefs and the platform, sitting in a chair, was Spotted Tail. “He was dressed in plain blue, without ornament of any kind,” Carson wrote the following day. The gathering formed a scene of “barbaric splendor” which both impressed and disgusted Carson. The Indians were all dressed in their finery and mounted on “their best ponies,” but Carson was evidently a fastidious man. “Some of the warriors were dressed and painted with taste,” he wrote, as if a critic at the opera, “but the large portion of them were hideous with paint and repulsive in dirty garments.”24
Schurz made some general opening remarks, followed by Spotted Tail, who spoke of Indian aspirations to become civilized. Then other chiefs rose to speak in the customary way. The turn arrived of Crazy Horse the father. In his hands he held a gift for Secretary Schurz: a war club which Crazy Horse the father, having completed the ceremony of ghost keeping, was now permitted to hold. John Carson, the Times reporter, made inquiry about the father. “He still mourns the loss of his son,” he wrote, “and moves about in an aimless way, descanting upon the qualities of the dead Crazy Horse.” A member of Schurz’s party summarized the father’s remarks:
Old chief Crazy Horse made a speech to him [Secretary Schurz], presenting the tomahawk he had carried all his life and which he had received from his father. He said that as he had no son who could inherit it, and he was at peace with the White Father and had no further use for the weapon, he presented it in token of friendship.25
Crazy Horse the father died about 1880. His wife had died the previous year.26
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“When I tell these things I have a pain in my heart.”
DURING A STAY AT the new Red Cloud Agency a few days later, Secretary Schurz and his party one afternoon rode a dozen miles out into the country to visit the camps of Young Man Afraid of His Horses and Little Big Man. From the latter, John M. Carson wrote, “a few trinkets and curiosities were purchased.” Webb Hayes was the buyer of a large painting on muslin ten feet long and six feet wide on which Little Big Man had depicted some episodes from his life. The price was four dollars. Drawn in India ink and painted in red and yellow were several images of horses and men, some of them fighting. One of the men had two lines rising from his head to separate images: one of a man, the other of a bear. These were probably intended as name glyphs for the artist’s two names, Wicasa Tanka Ciqala (Little Big Man) and Matowakuwa (Chasing Bear). Later, after young Hayes brought the painting back to his father’s house in Fremont, Ohio, an explanatory note was attached saying, “Sketch of the life of Little Big Man, who killed Crazy Horse in 1877 and thus became a renegade Indian.”1
The word “renegade” suggests that Little Big Man found some lingering difficulty in explaining himself to the Oglala. With the help of Alfred Riggs, a missionary fluent in Lakota, he wrote to President Hayes in August 1878 seeking permission to travel to Canada to bring back his friend Big Road, who had gone north with the rest of the Hunkpatila band the year before. “In what I did in obedience to the President in regard to Crazy Horse,” Little Big Man said, “I did what was difficult.”2
But he was not ashamed of what he did. A white schoolteacher at Pine Ridge, Edith Sickels, opened “quite a friendship” with Little Big Man during the 1880s while teaching his daughter, Oohoola (Bones), also known by the Christian name of Maud. “He always took great satisfaction,” Sickels said, “in displaying his silver medal, on which was inscribed, ‘Given to Little Big Man for valiant services at the death of Crazy Horse.’ ” The medal had been given to Little Big Man in Washington by President Hayes.3
In a letter to Walter Camp in 1919, General Hugh Scott mentioned Little Big Man’s silver medal “received for service in the death of Crazy Horse … He was a nervy, earnest little devil that would take hold of your hand and would squeeze the blood out of it when he shook hands with you.”4
Little Big Man is thought to have died about 1887.
The great northern herd of buffalo did not last long after the Indians were confined to reservations. In the spring of 1881, Luther North, commander of the Pawnee scouts in 1876 with his brother Frank, came across a small herd of thirty-three buffalo while trailing a cow in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. That country had been criss-crossed for years by cowboys and hunters. “No one dreamed of seeing any buffalo there,” North wrote. But suddenly in the distance ahead of him he saw a herd lying down, including five new calves. “I almost fell off my horse with astonishment.” North quickly fetched his brother and a niece and nephew, staying at a friend’s ranch. “Ed had never seen a wild buffalo before,” he wrote of the nephew, “and of course wanted to kill one.” This he managed, but the rest of the herd escaped. North learned later that all had been killed by some Indians from the Spotted Tail Agency. “I think they were the last buffalo ever seen on the north side of the Platte River in Nebraska,” he wrote.5
At that time there were still plenty of buffalo in the north, but the hunting pressure was relentless. Seeking meat and robes over the winter of 1881–82, Baptiste Pourier rode up into the Black Hills “and hunted, just hunted,” he said many years later while giving a deposition to a lawyer.
And at that time every hill and every little place where you could put up a tent, there was two or three hunters there and just as soon as it would be light enough [the witness here clapped his hands several times] that is all you would hear all day until sundown. If the moon would shine, they would shoot all night. And they kept that up.6
What Lieutenant Hugh Scott found astonishing was the speed with which the great northern herds vanished.7 Lieutenant Richard Irving Dodge had seen the destruction of the herds south of the Platte. Passing through a favorite hunting ground one fall he found only the carcasses of dead animals. “The air was foul with sickening stench,” he wrote, “and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”8
Now the smell of rotting buffalo carcasses moved to the northern plains. “There were about three thousand men on the range killing buffalo for their hides,” Scott wrote of the summer of 1883. That September, with a fellow officer, Scott rode five hundred miles looking for buffalo without finding so much as a fresh track. On the journey they met “an old Sioux Indian” who had been doing the same thing with better luck. He had killed one old scabby bull.
