Crazy Horse Read Online Free PDF

been a battle in thevision, a battle in which the horseman had his arms held by one of his own people. But neither bullets nor arrows touched him. The horseman told Crazy Horse never to keep anything for himself.
    Shortly after the dream ended, his father found him. His friend Hump had also come looking for him. They had been worried about him because both Crows and Pawnees were known to have been in the area. His father, a shaman after all, was outraged that his son had simply gone riding off on a vision quest, without making the proper preparation, endangering himself in the process. He let his son know that he had committed a serious violation of custom. Crazy Horse probably kept quiet about his rather low-rent vision for a while, until his father was over his pique; but eventually Worm did find out about the dream and did interpret it. Dreaming, dream reporting, and dream interpretation were an important part of Sioux life. The Sioux sought guidance from dreams as intently as did the patients of Dr. Freud, though of course through different methods and with different results.
    According to most reports, about two years passed before Crazy Horse revealed his dream to his father. This time the two went off together, fasted, built a sweat lodge, did it right. His father listened and confirmed the horseman’s instructions: Crazy Horse was to dress simply, put a small stone behind his ear, and, most important, he was not to keep anything for himself. Instead, he was tobe a man of charity, doing his best to feed the poor and helpless members of the tribe.
    His duty to the poor was a duty that Crazy Horse took seriously all his life—it may have been because he doubted his ability to feed the many hungry people who were following him that he decided to bring the band into Fort Robinson in 1877.
    The other element in the dream that has acquired the force of legend is that Crazy Horse could be injured only if one of his own people held his arms. On one crucial occasion (perhaps two) a member of his own people did hold his arms; on another occasion he forgot his instructions and kept something for himself—specifically, two Arapaho scalps—and was promptly injured in the leg.
    If we have received this dream accurately across one hundred and forty-five years, it would seem that Crazy Horse followed its precepts as best he could, although, being human, he slipped in a couple of instances, as we shall see. But he always dressed plainly; he threw dust on himself and his horse before going into battle; he wore a single feather and put a small stone behind his ear. When he painted at all, it was only with a zigzag representing lightning and perhaps a few white spots representing hail or snow. Many commentators who saw him in his years of battle mention the simplicity of his dress. When he brought his band into the fort in 1877, He Dog and the other warriors were in full panoply—one soldier said it didn’t look like a surrender, it looked like atriumphal march—but Crazy Horse dressed as simply as ever. Through all the difficulties of his life he seems to have remained true to the conditions laid down in his dream, although he had considered it a poor dream at the time.

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    T HE U.S. GOVERNMENT , meanwhile, during the most intense years of warfare with the Plains Indians, pursued a carrot-and-stick policy that was consistent only in its inconsistency. The army almost always underestimated Indian ability, and then, when they were whipped through some foolish action of their own—as with Grattan—they just as invariably overreacted. Every white military defeat from Grattan to the Custer battle came because some white commander arrogantly supposed that he could whip any number of Indians, on any field at any time. When this stupid assumption was disproven, the army, or in some cases, such irregulars as could be pulled together, reacted by punishing whatever Indians they could catch, whether they had taken