On May 5th, 1877, Crazy Horse and a group of his fellow warriors rode into the Red Cloud Agency
near Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Weary from years of battling the colonizers' military across the
midwestern Plains, they had come to surrender. Crazy Horse had become one of the most legendary
warriors in Sioux history, but not even he could stop the westward push by the colonizers that
resulted in thousands of his people either losing their lives or being forced onto reservations.
But the story of Crazy Horse wouldn’t end with his surrender. There was one more chapter left in the
life of the mysterious and fearless warrior who put his life on the line in battle after battle
in the wild fight for the west. Welcome back to Nutty History. Today, we’re exploring the wild,
controversial story of Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior who took on the mighty U.S. government.
Crazy Horse the warrior would paint his face with a yellow lightning bolt and conduct himself
with modesty. His reputation as a skilled fighter grew during the late 1850s and early 60s, when he
fought against traditional enemies of the Lakota, like the Crow, Shoshone, and Pawnee. But in 1864,
he set his sights on the invading colonizer army. The Third Colorado Cavalry had just wiped
out over 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho people – two thirds of them non-combatants– in a village in
southeastern Colorado Territory. In the aftermath, the Lakota decided to team up with the Cheyenne
and the Arapaho to fight the white invaders across the Great Plains. Crazy Horse and company began
organizing raids along the Oregon trail, taking out both soldiers and non-combatants alike,
acquiring weapons, livestock, and other resources from the covered wagons rumbling westward.
The commanding officer at Fort Laramie, the western post in Wyoming, didn’t like all the
raiding. Colonel Thomas Moonlight decided to fight back, but ended up being a pretty inept
commander. He was accused of being drunk and letting a Native American raiding party steal
most of his horses one night, forcing him and his men to walk back to Fort Laramie on foot,
and on a few different occasions pursued the enemy in the opposite direction of where they actually
were. Moonlight then decided to dangle in mid-air, two Oglala Sioux men in front of Fort Laramie for
everyone to see, where they stayed suspended in air for months. Then, he decided that the 1,500 or
so Lakota and Arapaho living near the fort needed to be moved…to Nebraska, to territory controlled
by the Pawnee, fierce enemies of the Lakota and Arapaho. Despite their protests, the Native
Americans and 140 U.S. soldiers “accompanying” them, set off for Fort Kearny, 300 miles east in
Nebraska. Two days later, on June 13th 1865, a young Crazy Horse snuck into the traveling
camp and convinced his people to fight back, and they overpowered the soldiers “accompanying” them,
and turned around, ending four colonizers in the process. Crazy Horse did his best to unite
opposing plains tribes against the colonizing army. Oftentimes the Native American warriors
were more focused on winning individual honors rather than collective victories, and one
historian described their resistance efforts as being “unable to turn a battle into a campaign.
Still, they won a small victory shortly after at the Battle of Platte Bridge, and another a year
later in the Fetterman Fight along the Bozeman trail in Wyoming, where Crazy Horse and nine other
warriors lured an unsuspecting enemy detachment into a fatal ambush that left 80 colonizer
soldiers dead. 1866 brought with it the discovery of gold along the Bozeman trail in the Black Hills
region, and under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman, fort after fort was popping up
throughout Sioux territory. Tensions increased. A series of battles over the next decade would pit
the Sioux, the Arapaho, and the Cheyenne against the colonizer army, the Pawnee, and Crow. Crazy
Horse was at the center of it all. He had become a Shirt Wearer, or battle hardened leader. By 1876,
Crazy Horse, with the help of Sitting Bull, another legendary figure in the Native American
resistance to the invading army, had amassed a pretty sizeable group of warriors in a camp of
between 7,000 to 10,000 Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho along the banks of the Little Bighorn
River in Montana, many of whom had fled the reservations they were being forced onto by
their new government. It was this encampment that Colonel George Custer and his men made the mistake
of attacking. The Battle of Little Bighorn, and Custer’s Last Stand, went down as one of the
worst defeats of the colonizer military during the series of battles with the Plains Indians.
Crazy Horse was said to have led a flanking charge that ended up leading to the demise of Custer and
all of his men. During the battle, Crazy Horse was said to have moved dangerously close to the front
lines, screaming wildly and creating a diversion for his men in what’s called a “brave run”.
Crazy Horse, or in the Lakota language, Thasunke Witko, which translates directly
as “His-Horse-Is-Crazy”, was born in the Black Hills of South Dakota sometime around 1840 to an
Oglala Sioux father and Miniconjou Sioux mother. He wasn’t always named Crazy Horse, though. In
Lakota Sioux tradition, boys were usually not named until they had some kind of important
experience that earned them one. And that name could change again if another powerful enough
experience warranted it. So, for a good part of his childhood, Crazy Horse was called Curly.
He had curly hair and a lighter complexion than most Lakota Sioux, and his unusual looks made him
feel like an outsider amongst his own people. He was described as being aloof and quiet as a kid,
and as we’ll see, often played by his own rules, and split with Lakota traditions in many
ways. To this day, there are no known photographs of the great Sioux warrior, just this drawing that
his sister confirmed to bear his resemblance. There are varying accounts of how Curly ended
up becoming Crazy Horse. We do know that his father was also named Crazy Horse. One version
of the story goes that as a teenager, Curly was out hunting one day when he saw a Shoshone warrior
attacking a Lakota woman. He took out the warrior with his club, and then fled to the hills to evade
the rest of the Shoshone raiding party, where he hid until nightfall. When Curly made it home,
his father was so proud that he gave up his own name to his son and took a new name, Waglula,
which means “Worm.” Not sure what would compel someone to give themselves a name that seems
more fitting for the gross sidekick of some evil character in a movie, but hey, worms are good for
the soil. Another version relates how Crazy Horse got his name after a particularly intense vision
quest in the Black Hills. His quest was spurred by the violence he saw in his village while he
was still a teenager, violence that directly led to over 30 years of fighting between plains tribes
and the colonizers army. Crazy Horse, or Curly as he was probably still called then, had witnessed
the death of the village chief, Conquering Bear, in what became known as the Grattan Fight
of 1854. The fight started when a cow owned by a Mormon traveling nearby wandered into the village
and was shot by a Lakota man named High Forehead. The Mormon took issue with the untimely death
of his cow, and reported it to the commanding officer at nearby Fort Laramie. After a series
of unsuccessful negotiations that weren’t helped by bad translators and communication breakdowns
between the Lakota and the U.S. soldiers, one soldier apparently fired on a group of villagers,
mortally wounding Conquering Bear. The Lakota responded by wiping out 29 of the colonizer
soldiers without losing a single man after their Chief was fired on, reportedly in the back. After
the event, Crazy Horse-slash-Curly started getting trance-type visions. Vision quests
were important rites of passage in many Native American cultures,
including the Lakota Sioux. Normally, there were specific preparations that were made before a
young man journeyed out into the wilderness to find whatever truth or insight might be waiting
for them. A medicine man was consulted, there was a sweat lodge ceremony to cleanse the vision
seeker, a peace pipe stuffed with tobacco was ceremoniously smoked. The vision quests could
last as long as four days – four days without food, water, or sleep, a combination that could
for sure induce visions without the help of any hallucinogenic plants. Curly didn’t go through
many of the traditional preparations before his quest. He just up and wandered out into the Black
Hills. Out in the hills, he had a vision of a warrior on horseback who appeared from a lake,
he and his horse dancing and floating in the air – a vision that would lead Curly’s father to pass
on his name to his son. A thunderstorm billowed up above the warrior, and a bolt of lightning struck
him in the face, leaving him with a lightning bolt scar on his face like a more rad Harry
Potter. The warrior told him that if he dressed modestly, didn’t touch any of his tribesmen,
and didn’t scalp his enemies, then he would be untouched in battle and would become a great
protector of his people. A red-tailed hawk screeched and soared off in the distance at
the end of the vision, seemingly confirming the prophecy. Later, Black Elk, Crazy Horse’s cousin,
would relate what he knew about Crazy Horse’s vision to the American historian John G. Neihardt
in the interview-slash-book “Black Elk Speaks”, one of the most illuminating texts about Lakota
Sioux culture: “Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits
of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is
something like a shadow from that world. He was on his horse in that world, and the horse and
himself on it and the trees and the grass and the stones and everything were made of spirit,
and nothing was hard, and everything seemed to float. His horse was standing still there,
and yet it danced around like a horse made only of shadow, and that is how he got his name”. It was a
short-lived victory for Crazy Horse and his people, though. The new government cracked down,
and cracked down hard. By May of 1877, Crazy Horse had surrendered to the U.S. at Red
Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson in Nebraska. He lived in a village nearby for a couple months,
during which time he was celebrated in what has become known as the Last Sun Dance of
1877. It was a celebration of the one-year anniversary of the victory at Little Bighorn,
and a celebration of Crazy Horse’s contribution to it. There was a mock battle, where actual battle
was drawn, and several white officers looked on in horror and confusion as young male warriors
sacrificed bits of their body and danced while pierced through the chest with pointed bones.
Crazy Horse, aloof and reserved as ever, simply looked on and didn’t participate. By September,
a couple Lakota chiefs had become jealous at the preferential treatment Crazy Horse was being given
by the colonizer army at the Red Cloud Agency. The two chiefs, Spotted Tail and Red Cloud,
the Lakota leader after whom the agency was named, had come to accept certain white ways,
and “ate with forks”. Crazy Horse started to as well. He wanted peace, and to him, it seemed that
adopting the ways of the enemy was the best way to ensure it. Rumors, perhaps started by Red Cloud
and Spotted Tail, began to spread that Crazy Horse wanted to flee and return to his roots. To test
his loyalty, the colonizer army asked him to join their fight against the Nez Perce, a tribe that
was causing trouble up in Montana. At first, Crazy Horse declined. But when he eventually agreed,
his words were mistranslated. His statement that he would fight “until all the Nez Perce
were eliminated” somehow turned into “he would go north and fight til not a white man was left”.
The clumsy, obviously intentional mistranslation landed him in jail. A day later, while being
escorted by guards at Fort Robinson where he had voluntarily turned himself in, he was mortally
wounded in the back with a bayonet by one of the guards. It was never revealed which guard it was.
Crazy Horse was buried by his parents somewhere near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, though the exact
location remains unknown to this day. Like much of his life, this great Sioux warrior’s final
resting place has faded into mystery and legend. Who was your favorite Native American warrior?
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