Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry Read Free Book Online Page A

Woman bore No Water three children, a reasonable decorum was observed.
    Around 1865, just as the long Civil War between the whites was ending, the Oglala Sioux revived the old custom of the Shirt-wearers. The Oglala society of elders, sometimes called the Big Bellies and sometimes called other names, sat down and chose four young men of proven courage and good moral character and honored them by making them Shirt-wearers. Their duty, from then on, was to put selfish interests aside and think always of the welfare of the tribe. Those duties were asmuch moral as practical; they were, in our terms, to be role models, to set examples of how Sioux men should behave. The Big Bellies themselves had not been formally elected; they were just there to advise and counsel, to plan hunts, to decide when to move their camp, and so on.
    Crazy Horse, as has been noted, was not from one of the great families of the Sioux. His father was a poor man, a healer, a reader of dreams.
    Young Man Afraid was of such a great family. His father, Old Man Afraid, was, in a way, the tribe’s senior diplomat. When the Shirt-wearer ceremony was revived, Young Man Afraid was chosen first, and then American Horse, Sword, and Crazy Horse. This was a very great honor, one that put Crazy Horse in a position of grave responsibility. He was chosen both for his courage and for his charity, his concern for the weak ones. He was expected to keep little for himself, which was no problem; since the time of his dream he had never kept much for himself. The problem was that he was a single man: he hadn’t married.
    Though the Civil War had drawn off much of the force of the white military, there was no agreed-upon peace on the prairies. The Santee Sioux rose up in Minnesota, and the Sioux along the Missouri River harried the soldiers when there were any to harry. The Shoshones still made things difficult for immigrants along the Holy Road. In Texas the Comanches and the Kiowas reboundedsomewhat and kept pressure on the settlers’ frontier; in Kansas the Cheyennes fought white soldiers when they met them, and so on. It was mainly the Teton Sioux who could, during this period, enjoy good hunting in relative peace. This was largely because of where they were, west of Fort Laramie and south of the Yellowstone River, an area full of game and almost empty of whites. This period of relative ease they owed in part to the wisdom of Old Man Afraid, who believed, with Sitting Bull, that it was best to stay away from the whites as long as it was possible to do so. Still, even then, the rush of immigrants along the Holy Road was constant, and the game, in consequence, harder to find and kill. This irritant was powerful enough that the northern and southern Sioux and some Cheyennes made plans to act in concert; the big offensive they planned to mount would start in the north, with Sitting Bull attacking Fort Rice.
    To the extent that this was ever a fully planned offensive, it fizzled for the usual reasons. The older men, the tacticians, could never get the young warriors to wait. The force Crazy Horse may have been with, perhaps as many as one thousand warriors, chose to hit the spot where the Oregon Trail crosses the North Platte River, at what is called the Platte River Bridge. The huge party of Sioux should have been able to surprise and overwhelm the troopers guarding the bridge at the time, but they couldn’t and went home disappointed, having killed only a few whites. This battle (July 25, 1864) had oneespecially sad death. A young lieutenant named Caspar Collins, who was very friendly with the Sioux and had camped with them on several occasions, was killed late in the fight, possibly because his horse bolted and carried him straight into a group of Cheyennes, who immediately did him in. Had Caspar Collins lived, he might have been able to tell us something of Crazy Horse—it is believed the two knew one another. But either because of an uncontrollable horse,