Free Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry Page A

of 1868 except the grounds the whites finally always used: The United States wanted the Black Hills and all the gold that might be there. A big first step toward the taking of them was the expedition that brought General Custer back to the west and produced the famous photograph of a seemingly endless line of wagons proceeding through a valley in the Black Hills. This expedition soon fulfilled its main, though unstated, purpose, which was to find gold in sufficient quantities to quench the thirst of the starving markets.
    In Custer’s excited imagination the gold his geologists located at French Creek was so abundant and so easy to get that he could kick it up with the toe of his boot. In reality it was not quite that easy to get, but the gold was there, and, as time has proven, there in quantity. The trail Custer blazed into the Black Hills on that occasion became known to the Indians by a name he despised: the Sioux called it the Thieves’ Road.
    Many of Custer’s scouts refused to go into the hills with him, fearing the Sioux, but he went anyway; as soon as traces of gold were detected, he sent the famous white scout Lonesome Charley Reynolds through dangerous country to Fort Laramie to announce this great find to the world. Lonesome Charley made it through and sentthe telegram. In August, Custer emerged and described the beauties of the Black Hills in mouthwatering terms. In another life he would have made a wonderful real-estate developer. In this case he sold one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate in the west to a broke, depressed public who couldn’t wait to get into those hills and start scratching up gold.
    The Sioux did not oppose this expedition; Custer saw few Indians on his trip. Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapas were to the north and west; and Crazy Horse, about this time, was grieving for his little daughter They-Are-Afraid-of-Her, who had died, probably of cholera. When he returned to his camp and found that she had died, he located her burial scaffold and stayed with her several days. He did not get to raise the light-skinned daughter of Black Buffalo Woman, and his parentage of that child is conjectural anyway. But They-Are-Afraid-of-Her was his child, and he loved her deeply. Her loss took some of the fight out of him, for a while.
    Again, though, I would enter the caveat that for much of his life only Crazy Horse’s immediate companions knew where he was or what he did. In the early 1870s personal losses began to pile up: Hump, Lone Bear, Little Hawk, They-Are-Afraid-of-Her. Many commentators, Erik Erikson among them, have spoken of the Sioux’s profound devotion to their children—the loss of this child would have been a terribly severe blow.
    The historians who have concerned themselves mostclosely with Crazy Horse perhaps naturally slip into a Crazy Horse–centric view of Plains Indian life; they put too much weight on the memories of a few old Sioux and begin to believe that if there was a battle that Crazy Horse might have been in, he was in it. In a curious way the historians’ approaches to Red Cloud and Crazy Horse are opposite: they tend to take Red Cloud out of battles he may well have been in and put Crazy Horse in battles he may well have missed. Of course it is true that Crazy Horse got noticed in most of the battles he fought in because of his extreme daring. He would usually have been the Indian the soldiers shot at first. How much of a tactical sense he developed from all this fighting is not easy to know. Since fighting was a big part of his life, we may safely assume that he observed and learned; how much of what he learned was merely common sense we don’t know. He Dog says Crazy Horse was the only Indian he knew who always dismounted to shoot, which certainly shows good sense; and he did not want to fight the Shoshones the day Hump was killed for the excellent commonsense reasons that the ground was slippery and the Shoshones had better