Free Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry

this fight that Sitting Bull astonished everyone, Sioux and soldier alike: he sat down in a meadow, in range of the riflemen, casually filled a pipe, lit it, and smoked it, while bullets cut the grass all around him. Crazy Horse, perhaps jealous of Sitting Bull’s sangfroid, reportedly made a reckless dash right across the soldiers’ front, and had his horse shot out from under him for his trouble, after which the Sioux called off the battle.
    Throughout the later stages of these conflicts on the plains, up to and including the Custer battle, the Sioux were at a disadvantage because they were so poorly armed. Only a small percentage had guns, and they were usually poor guns at that; even the Sioux who hadreliable firearms seldom had much ammunition. They could never afford to match the white men gun for gun and bullet for bullet. From the first the white authorities had been farsighted enough to deny the Indians guns. Even the bravest warrior, armed with a bow and arrow, could only do so much when up against a well-prepared soldier with a gun.
    Though the financial panic of 1873 slowed the progress of the Northern Pacific somewhat, its surveyors were nonetheless pushing relentlessly west, well protected by a force that in the popular mind was commanded by George Armstrong Custer. In fact the commander was a modest officer named Stanley. It was while this large force proceeded along the Yellowstone, obviously now in what was supposed to be Sioux country, that Crazy Horse encountered Custer for the first time. The Sioux and the Cheyennes caught Custer and his small detachment napping—literally, in the case of Custer himself—but the Sioux initially intended no big fight. They tried to run off the army’s horse herd, and when that plan was thwarted, tried a decoy maneuver similar to the one that had worked with Fetterman. Custer didn’t go for it; but then the Cheyennes noticed Custer’s hair, which was still long, and remembered the massacre on the Washita—perhaps a few of the warriors who had survived that fight were now back visiting their northern cousins. The Cheyennes attacked, but Custer drove them off. Custer then turned back, and the Indians disengaged. There waslittle loss of life. Custer thought Sitting Bull was the leader in this skirmish; what he knew of Crazy Horse, if anything, is unclear. Crazy Horse had never been to a meeting with the whites. He had a big reputation with his own people but had as yet received no mention in the popular press. Back east the severe financial panic had for a time driven mere Indian fights off the front pages anyway: the gilding was suddenly beginning to flake off the Gilded Age; all was confusion, dismay, frustration. There no longer seemed to be enough money; specifically, not enough gold. The conservatives were happy to have the country on a gold standard, as long as there was enough gold for the economy to expand; but in the summer of 1873, there wasn’t enough. Paper money had not yet fully caught on.
    Fortunately for the nation, unfortunately for the Sioux, the Black Hills awaited; there had long been rumors of large gold deposits in the Sioux’s holy hills. Awkwardly, though, for the leaders of the whites, there was the binding and much-publicized treaty of 1868, unequivocally giving those very hills to the Sioux forever, with unusually clear provisions that they, the whites, were to be kept out. The U.S. government had broken many treaties with the Indians; some would say they had broken all of them—the writer Alex Shoumatoff recently reckoned the total at 378—but few of these breakages involved so much squirming and soul searching and public posturing as the treaty of 1868. General Sheridanbegan to mutter unconvincingly about treaty violations on the part of the Sioux, but in fact the Sioux were behaving nicely at the time, as the same general had admitted in another context. There were no grounds for breaching the treaty