Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Crazy Horse, a Sioux warrior dead more than one
hundred and twenty years, buried no one knows where,
is rising again over Pa Sapa, the Black Hills of South
Dakota, holy to the Sioux. Today, as in life, his horse is
with him. Fifty years of effort on the part of the sculptor
Korczak Ziolkowski and his wife and children have just
begun to nudge the man and his horse out of what was
once Thunderhead Mountain. In the half-century that the
Ziolkowski family has worked, millions of tons of rock
have been moved, as they attempt to create what will be
the world's largest sculpture; but the man that is emerging
from stone and dirt is as yet only a suggestion, a
shape, which those who journey to Custer, South Dakota,
to see must complete in their own imaginations.
It is a nice irony that the little town Crazy Horse has
come to brood over is named for his old adversary
George Armstrong Custer--Long Hair, whose hair, however,
had been cut short on the day of his last battle, so
that it is not certain that the Sioux or Cheyenne who
killed him really recognized him until after he was dead.
Crazy Horse had one good look at Custer, in a skirmish
on the Yellowstone River in 1873, but Custer probably
never saw Crazy Horse clearly enough to have identified
him, either on the Yellowstone or at the Little Bighorn,
three years later. The thousands who come to the Crazy
Horse Monument each year see him as yet only vaguely;
but that, too, will change. One day his arm will stretch
out almost the length of a football field; statistics will accumulate
around his mountain just as legends, rumors, true
tales and tall tales, accumulated around the living man.
What should be stressed at the outset is that Crazy
Horse was loved and valued by his people as much for
his charity as for his courage, Ian Frazier, in his fine book
Great Plains, reports correctly that the Crazy Horse Monument
is one of the few places on the Great Plains where
one will see a lot of Indians smiling. The knowledge of
his charity is still a balm to his people, the Sioux people,
most of whom are poor and all of whom are oppressed.
Peter Matthiessen was right to call his bitterly trenchant
report on the troubles the Pine Ridge Sioux had with the
U.S. government in the 1970s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
because the spirit of Crazy Horse was a spirit unbroken,
though it was certainly raked raw by the difficulties of his
last few months.
George E. Hyde, the great (if cranky) historian of the
Oglala and the Brule Sioux, a man not easily swept off his
feet by even the most potent myth, confessed his puzzlement
with the Crazy Horse legend in words that are neither
unfair nor inaccurate: "They depict Crazy Horse as a
kind of being never seen on earth: a genius at war yet a
lover of peace; a statesman who apparently never thought
of the interest of any human being outside his own camp;
a dreamer, a mystic, and a kind of Sioux Christ, who was
betrayed in the end by his own disciples--Little Big Man,
Touch-the-Clouds and the rest. One is inclined to ask,
what is it all about?"
A Sioux Christ? That touches on his charity and on
his betrayal, but he was a determined warrior too, one
of the great Resisters, men who do not compromise, do
not negotiate, do not administer, who exist in a realm
beyond the give-and-take of conventional politics and
who stumble and are defeated only when hard circumstances
force them to live in that realm.
I saw the Crazy Horse Monument one day while traveling
north to visit the grave of that sad, boastful woman
Martha Jane Canary (Calamity Jane), who lies in the
Deadwood cemetery next to James Butler Hickok (Wild
Bill), a proximity he could not protest, since Calamity
outlived him by a quarter of a century. I was easing
through the Black Hills buffalo herd--many of the buffalo
stood in the road, dull and incurious, as indifferent to the
traffic as they had been to the buffalo hunters who
slaughtered some fifty million of them in a short space of
time in the last century--when I slowly became aware of
something: something large. I looked up and saw the Crazy
Horse mountain, just to the northeast. Great hundred-yard
swirls of white paint streaked the mountain, representing
his hair; below him more swirls of the same white
paint formed a Picassoesque horse head.
Like most travelers who come unexpectedly onto the
monument, I was stunned, too stunned even to go up to
the gift shop. I stopped the car, sat on the hood, and
looked, as buffalo ambled by. What loomed above me,
framed by the blue Dakota sky, was an American Sphinx.
He was there, but as a force, an indefiniteness, a form
made more powerful by his very abstractness.
I suppose, someday, the Ziolkowski family will finish
this statue. It may take another generation or two, and
when it's finished, if I'm alive, I'd like to see it. But I'm
glad that I saw the mountain in the years when Crazy
Horse was still only a form and a mystery. Now that I've
read what there is to read about him, I think this indefiniteness
was also an aspect of the man. His own people
experienced him as a mystery while he was alive: they
called him Our Strange Man. In his life he would have
three names: Curly, His Horses Looking, Crazy Horse
(Ta-Shunka-Witco). We know him as Crazy Horse, but
in life few knew him well; in truth it is only in a certain
limited way that we who are living now can know him
at all. George Hyde, who resisted his legend, knew
that in spite of what he himself wrote, time had already
separated the myth from the man, obliterating fact. Fair
or not, that is the way with heroes: Geronimo, Crazy
Horse, Sitting Bull, Billy the Kid, Custer. For all such
men, fact withers in the heat of myth. George Hyde felt
the frustrations all historians feel when they find a
legend blocking their route to what had once only been
a man.
Crazy Horse's legend grew in the main from a broken
people's need to remember and believe in unbroken
heroes, those who remained true to the precepts of their
fathers and to the ways of the culture and the traditions
which bred them.
Certainly the whites who fought Crazy Horse helped
build his legend, too. Agent Jesse Lee, who brought
Crazy Horse back from the Spotted Tail agency to Fort
Robinson, only to see him killed before he could be
given the hearing that had been promised him, confessed
that he was tortured by his involvement in such a dark
deed. Even the stern General Crook, who, had he caught
him alive, would have sent Crazy Horse off to a prison in
the Dry Tortugas--all on the basis of a lie--later expressed
regret that he had failed to sit in council with him on the
last occasion that presented itself. "I ought to have gone
to that council," Crook said. "I never start any place but
that I get there."
This short book is an attempt to look back across
more than one hundred and twenty years at the life and
death of the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, the man who
is coming out of a mountain in the Black Hills, the
American Sphinx, the loner who has inspired the largest
sculpture on planet Earth. It will be an attempt to answer
George Hyde's pointed question: What was it all about?
