Crazy Horse Read Free Page A

were a tolerant, noncompulsive people. Individuals were allowed to follow their own bent; that different people had differing abilities was recognized and accepted. Worm’s counsel was valued—he did not have to be a warrior to earn the tribe’s respect.
    Crazy Horse, from the first, was indifferent to tribalnorms. He had no interest, early or late, in the annual sundance rite, and didn’t bother with any of the ordeals of purification that many young Sioux men underwent, rituals that have been well recorded by George Catlin and others. Crazy Horse took his manhood as a given, and proved it in battle from an early age. His people may have thought him strange, but nonetheless he was let alone, allowed to walk in his own way.
    His prominence today, as a symbol of Sioux resistance, owes much to his character, of course, but it also is in part a matter of historical timing. He fought his best in the last great battles—the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn—and then died young, in the last moments when the Sioux could think of themselves as free. By an accident of fate, the man and the way of life died together: little wonder that he came to be a symbol of Sioux freedom, Sioux courage, and Sioux dignity.
    Though Crazy Horse was able to live many months and sometimes even years in the traditional Sioux way, raiding and hunting in turn, the way of life to which he had been born was dying even while he was a boy. By the time of his birth the whites were already moving in considerable numbers along the Holy Road (what we call the Oregon Trail); at first the pressure of white intrusion may have been subtle and slight, but it was present, and would be present throughout his entire life. The buffalo were there in their millions when he was born but were mostly gone by the time he died. Crazy Horse wouldhave been a boy of five or six when Francis Parkman camped in a Sioux village whose leader was Old Smoke; it’s possible that young Curly—Crazy Horse’s nickname while a boy—was even living in the village when Parkman passed through. We don’t know that, but we do know that Francis Parkman was well aware that the way of life he was witnessing that summer—vividly described in The Oregon Trail —was a way of life that would soon be changing; indeed, would soon end.
    As a lad Curly probably had no inkling of this, nor did most of his people, although the presence of whites in increasing numbers along the Holy Road was already an irritant. With such an abundance of game both north and south of the Platte River, it may be thought that tribal life could have gone on with little change. But the lives of hunting people are never that secure. There was, to be sure, a lot of game; but it didn’t meekly present itself to those who hunted it. The game still had to be found and killed—then as now, animals were quick to shift away from places where they were heavily hunted. From the standpoint of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Pawnee hunters who lived by what they killed, the white invasion was almost immediately destructive.
    Very early too, even from the time of the first fur traders, an unfortunate symbiosis began to develop between tribes and traders. The whites had goods that the Indians wanted—goods on which they soon became dependent. Lord Raglan, the sharp-spoken Englishanthropologist and myth theorist, has commented acutely on the fragility of hunting cultures in a book called How Came Civilization? He points out that peoples who had been adept for generations at making bone fishhooks lose this skill very quickly once they are supplied with metal fishhooks. The Plains Indians soon came to like needles and other small tools that could be had in quantity from traders who frequented the forts and gathering places along the Holy Road.
    Sitting Bull, the very tough-minded Hunkpapa, perhaps had the clearest vision of the ultimate destructiveness of trade with the white man; he saw very early