Free Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen Ambrose Page B

were. Without overwhelming numerical superiority they dared not enter Sioux territory. The absence of marching troopers in the Powder River country helped convince the warriors that they had won a decisive victory.
    But Crazy Horse seems to have realized that he had won a battle, not a campaign. White soldiers were still surrounding the Indians’ only remaining hunting grounds, and with so few warriors—Crazy Horse had less than six hundred with him now—he could do nothing about that. Crazy Horse did, however, try to follow up his victory by harassing the white miners in the Black Hills in South Dakota. In early August he moved east from the Bighorns, across the hot, dusty prairie of eastern Wyoming, to attack the intruders in Pa Sapa, still legally Sioux territory. Once on the edge of the Hills, camping near Bear Butte, Crazy Horse led small war parties against the miners’ camps—small because most of the warriors were tired of fighting. Sometimes Crazy Horse went out on his own. Once he led back into the village some captured mules, loaded with goods; another time he brought home two sacks of raisins, which he had not tasted since he was a child living with Old Smoke along the Holy Road. Crazy Horse called the children of his village to him and held the sack open for them as they grabbed handfuls of raisins.
    He Dog strongly opposed Crazy Horse’s lone forays. “My friend,” he admonished, “you are past the foolish years of the wild young warrior; you belong to the people now and must think of them, notgive them such uneasiness.” Still Crazy Horse persisted in his raids.
    The United States Army, meanwhile, had to do something, and in August it tried. Crook, with two thousand men, double the number he had in his battle with Crazy Horse two months before on the Rosebud, marched overland to the headwaters of that river. Terry, with two thousand reinforcements, moved up the Rosebud. The two forces blundered into each other along the river, then decided that even two thousand men apiece was no guarantee of safety while Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were loose, and they joined forces. They then made some half-hearted attempts to follow Crazy Horse’s trail to Bear Butte near the Black Hills but soon gave it up, Terry returning to the Yellowstone. Crook got lost north of the Hills, his men nearly starved, and he was soon engaged in a struggle against the elements for survival. On September 7 he sent Colonel Anson Mills and 150 men and horses (the other horses had been eaten) on an expedition to the town of Deadwood in the northern Black Hills for supplies. At dawn on September 9, 1876, near Slim Buttes, Mills discovered a Sioux camp of thirty-seven lodges, agency Indians who had left the Crazy Horse people the previous day and were making their way back to the reservation in Nebraska. Mills attacked immediately and drove the occupants of the village to the nearby bluffs. As the starving soldiers gorged themselves on buffalo meat, the Brulés sent runners to fetch Crazy Horse. He got to the scene about noon, with two hundred warriors, and attacked Mills. But the soldiers were well armed and held their ground until late afternoon, when Crook came up with 1,850 more men. Crazy Horse withdrew. The next day he kept up a harassing action against Crook’s rear guard, while Crook—after burning the village—made for Deadwood.
    The great Army campaign of 1876 was over. Crook and Custer had been defeated, Terry and Gibbon had yet to see an Indian, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull held the field and thought they had won. But, as Slim Buttes revealed, the future for the Sioux did not look good. The Indian force dwindled steadily while the Army’s columns grew in size; at Slim Buttes the soldiers outnumbered the warriors, as would be the case from that time onward.
    While Crazy Horse was trying to regain Pa Sapa, the United States Government stole the Black Hills. The United States had been unwilling to pay the seller’s price