Written by Sam Mackenzie
You sit atop your horse, resting your arms on the pommel of your saddle.
Cold wind blows against your face as you close your eyes. Winter is coming, soon the winds would not just be cold, but biting. The snows will come, the rivers will freeze, and all the trees will stand naked, and bear witness over the land.
Your band is ragged now, many of them women and children, and your braves are not up for more fighting with the bluecoats. You think back to the blood on the snow at Wolf Mountain, how you had driven up the hill in the snow, into hails of bullets as thick as the blizzard.
You cannot make them do it again. You do not doubt that they would follow you if you asked them to, begged them to flee for the hills once again, to make a run for the Grandmother’s Land, or to try and find the last refuges of the buffalo. But that time has passed.
Smoke rises from the fires of the white man’s fort. Many bluecoats sit within its walls, men like The Long Hair had led. Custer had been a cruel white man, riding down Indians who had said they were the friend of the white man, like old Black Kettle huddled round his flag. Custer had not found your own band so friendly, nor so willing to huddle in fear.
That seems so long ago now, though only a year had passed since the great victory over Long Hair Custer.
You breathe a deep sigh as you sit up in the saddle, and wheel your horse round. You were not born a reservation Indian; you did not wish to be one, nor did many of your band. But they need food, and if freedom is the cost, so be it.
You are Crazy Horse, and you lead your band to its final surrender at Fort Robinson.
Crazy Horse, and the pursuit of freedom.
What is freedom? Some say it is the ability to have self-determination, the ability to do what you wish, to go where you wish, when you wish it. But that is an individualistic view. What is a people’s freedom? For many they are perhaps the same thing, the ability for a people to act in its own interest, to act according to their own laws and customs, uncompelled by outside forces. The word ‘freedom’ may conjure images in your mind of wide, open spaces, free from the blight of man’s constructions and untouched by man’s wars. The peoples who roamed these open landscapes in nomadic fashion were, in my mind, the freest people on earth.
History is full of stories of such peoples being crushed, enslaved, subjugated, ‘brought to heel’ and in the case of our story today, being ‘civilised’. Several names immediately spring to mind when considering the Native American tribes of the American West: Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, George. A. Custer, Buffalo Bill, and even William. T. Sherman, but none I think encapsulate the idea of freedom quite as well as one particular name and life story, which serve as a symbol to all people of the many forms that freedom can take.
Tȟašúŋke Witkó, more commonly known as ‘Crazy Horse’ was a Native American of the Oglala Sioux tribe, who lived during the ‘Indian Wars’ of the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, fought primarily against the roaming tribes of the Western Plains. He is perhaps most famous for his role at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly remembered and popularised through ‘Custer’s Last Stand’. In this event, the 7th Cavalry, under the leadership of George Armstrong Custer, were massacred after a botched attack on the camp of Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake). Crazy Horse played a prominent role in this most notable battle, leading the tribes from the front against the ‘Bluecoats’, which is likely what has led to much speculation that Crazy Horse was actually the one to take the scalp of General ‘Long Hair’ Custer.
But I believe the image, or rather lack thereof, of Crazy Horse, serves a greater symbolic purpose than many other examples of great military leaders brought down by circumstance, or than the representatives of the many cultures through history who have found themselves downtrodden, oppressed and persecuted. Crazy Horse is a symbol plainly for resistance itself, about the pure desire within every person for freedom. Be it spiritual, physical or social freedom, each of us, consciously or otherwise, hold a desire for these core parts of our beings within ourselves.
The subjugation of the Native American tribes by the government of the United States of America, is an extremely broad and nuanced topic, which unfortunately a full-length book would struggle to cover in the necessary detail. The tribes of the West, particularly those of the Sioux, have come to be the popular depiction of what older generations would think of as ‘Red Indians’ or just ‘Indians’. Old movies of ‘Cowboys versus Indians’ and images of Natives as rabid savages dominated popular culture depictions of the tribes for decades, serving to cover the atrocities that were really committed against these people, in such a fashion that many call it genocide. More recent scholarship has instead attempted to paint the Native peoples of this time in a different light, that of a persecuted people, and their fight for their land, their rights and their freedom.
Crazy Horse is a key part of this story, both of the literal oppression of his people as he was a key figure at the time, as well as in popular history in the following century. Partly, this was due to the noble story about the Little Bighorn and ‘Custer’s Last Stand’. It is a romantic trope that ticks all the boxes of a Hollywood film. The noble General, standing with his men as they are whittled down brutally by the savage Indians. It would bring a tear to the eye, if you didn’t know that Custer’s plan for the engagement was literally to charge a force of cavalry through an encampment of mainly women and children…
But that is not a good look for the hero of the story.
Crazy Horse is a fascinating figure from this period both as a case study and symbol, not least because we have no clear, undisputed idea of what he actually looked like. He believed that a camera would “shorten my life by taking from me my shadow”. The impact of this statement in a world of social media could be an entire article in itself, but think of it in the context of the day.
Crazy Horse was one of the most prominent figures within the Native American community for his strong leadership, good medicine and he was a capable military commander as well as an all-round thorn in the government’s side. His simple refusal to be photographed is a powerful rejection of much more than just the man with the camera, it is an action which shows a powerful desire for personal determination, and for the desire to be free.
Crazy Horse rejected everything that defined the white man for most of his life, he refused to be photographed, refused to give up fighting for Native American territories, refused time and again to be placed upon a reservation, refused to go to Washington to negotiate with the ‘Great Father’ (the President) and even refused to go to Canada, ‘the Grandmother’s [Queen Victoria’s] land’ with Sitting Bull, instead he preferred to stand and fight against the full might of an enraged American Army, rather than leave his home.
Many quotes from Native Leaders at the time give me pause whenever I read them, and those of Crazy Horse confirm that he was a man who simply wished to be free, and to have that freedom for his people. Perhaps the best of his quotes to represent him is his statement: “We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone.”
Crazy Horse is a symbol for everything that it is to be free. To be free to live where you wish, love who you choose, go where you please, and to be willing to fight for those freedoms for yourself and for your children when they are threatened.
Perhaps slightly ironically, it is the death of Crazy Horse which I find to be most striking in solidifying, at least my view of him, as a powerful symbol for all people who fight and hunger for freedom.
A few months after his surrender at Fort Robinson and following a translation error, where it is misinterpreted that Crazy Horse vows to wage war upon the white man once again, where in fact he offers to fight for the US Government, Crazy Horse is arrested and brought toward a cell. He struggles, refusing to be confined as a white man’s captive, and in some reports pulled a hidden knife. At this, one of the officers cries, “STAB THE SON OF A BITCH, STAB THE SON OF A BITCH.” And one of the men in the hall thrusts his bayonet deep into Crazy Horse’s back.
Crazy Horse was brought to the surgeon and there was nothing to be done. But, in a moment of unfathomable personal strength, Crazy Horse refused to lie on the cot within the surgeon’s office. Refusing to die on the “White man’s deathbed”. I
By choosing to remain on the floor, gritting his teeth in pain as he bled to death, Crazy Horse did what he had done all his life to the white man: he refused. This was ‘Crazy Horse’s Last Stand’. He chose to lie where he lived, the land his forefathers had roamed, the land he had fought so hard for, and now the land that would take him back again.
Crazy Horse immortalises himself, as a living, and now dying, embodiment of warrior spirit, of a desire for freedom, and of his people. Here, with the single decision to lie on the floor instead of the cot, Crazy Horse chose not to ‘Pass Away’ into history, or ‘Fade as his people surely must’ he chose to die. To die there, on the floor, spitting refusal to his very last. As Frazier writes – “With his body, he demonstrated that the floor of an Army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his.”
Crazy Horse’s body was taken and buried somewhere near the creek called Wounded Knee. Thirteen years later, this would be the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, the end of the roaming tribes of the American West.
“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.” – Tȟašúŋke Witkó, Crazy Horse.
Bibliography
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee : An Indian History of the American West. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1971.
Cozzens, Peter. 2018. EARTH IS WEEPING : The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
Ambrose, Stephen E. Crazy Horse and Custer : The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1975.
Frazier, Ian. Great Plains. London: Granta, 2006.
National Park Service Website – https://www.nps.gov/index.htm
Black Hills Visitor – https://blackhillsvisitor.com/learn/lakota-or-sioux/
featured image credit: https://blackhillsvisitor.com/learn/lakota-or-sioux/
Retrospect Journal 