Crazy Horse Read Free Page B

that it would soon destroy Sioux independence, and he was right. He always counseled his people to have nothing to do with the whites and to stay as far away from them as possible. But, unfortunately, the westward course of empire (a fine phrase that covered over much brutality) left the Sioux little choice. In time, and not much time, the whites were everywhere.
    As soon as the first forts were established along the Holy Road, and certainly after the great Laramie council of 1851, there were what came to be called ration Indians, of coffee coolers, those who lived by the forts and let go the strenuous, uncertain life of the hunt; in giving up the life of the warrior Sioux, they soon forfeited much of the respect of those tribesmen who still hunted and fought.
    By 1850 all the Plains Indians had to reckon with thefact that though the whites were going through, they weren’t going away. They brought many things that the Indians could use, but they also brought something that no tribe wanted: smallpox. The terrible epidemic that struck the Missouri River tribes in 1837, just a few years before Crazy Horse was born, nearly wiped out the Mandans and drastically weakened the Blackfeet.
    The whites came, their disease came, and the game left—not all of it, of course, but even a slight diminution was enough to affect the lives of hunting peoples. Friction steadily increased along the Holy Road; immigrant trains were attacked, the occasional immigrant killed. There was no full-scale warfare yet, just an ominous, continuous rumbling. From the Santa Fe Trail in the south to Fort Union in the north there were clashes, disturbances, apprehension. The Indians, who had at first been friendly with the whites, soon found their patience beginning to fray; the whites, for their part, had never had much patience with the Indians. The Plains Indians were beginning to be seen as mobile impediments; what they stood in the way of was progress, a concept dear to the American politician.
    It was to explain this crucial concept—progress—and, by so doing, smooth the way for manifest destiny by speeding the emigrants safely on through to Oregon or California, that the government thought best to convene the great council that was held at Fort Laramie in the summer of 1851. If Crazy Horse was there, which islikely, he was a boy just short of adolescence and was probably drinking in the sights.
    There was an abundance of sights to drink in, too. The Fort Laramie council probably drew the greatest assembling of native peoples—or at least, of Plains peoples—prior to the massing at the Little Bighorn a quarter of a century later. I have read many descriptions of the Fort Laramie council, a conclave at which many traditional enemies sat together, but the passage that best suggests the splendor and the wildness of the tribes as they then were is Afric rather than American. Here is Wilfred Thesiger’s account of a similar gathering in Addis Ababa in 1916, when his father was British ambassador there:
Each feudal lord was surrounded by levys from the province where he ruled. The simple fighting men were dressed in white but the chiefs wore their full panoply, lion’s mane headdresses, brilliant velvet cloaks stiff with silver and golden ornament, long silk robes in many colors and great curved swords. All carried shields, some embossed with silver and gilt, and many carried rifles. The Zulu impis parading before Chaka, or the dervishes drawn up to do battle in front of Omdurman, could have appeared no more barbaric than this frenzied tide of men which surged past the royal pavilion throughout the day, to the thunder of the war drums and the blare of the war horns. This was no ceremonial review. These men had just returned from fighting for their lives, and they were still wild with the excitementof those frantic hours. The blood on the clothes which they had stripped from the dead and draped over their horses was barely dry.