Detail of the Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. There were no known photographs of Crazy Horse.

The Betrayal of Crazy Horse

By Dale L. Walker

He was born in about 1841 near present-day
Sturgis, S.D., his father a holy man of the Oglala people, one of the seven council fires of the Teton Dakota tribe, commonly called the Sioux. As a boy he was called Curly, for his wavy, sand-colored hair, but by the time he was 18, after fights against the Gros Ventres and Arapahos, the name Crazy Horse was bestowed on him for his fierce courage in battle.

When he died on the floor of the adjutant’s office at Fort Robinson, Neb., on the night of Sept. 7, 1877, the physician who attended him said, “The lights went out, and the last sleep came. It was an Indian epic.”

All of Crazy Horse’s brief life was an epic, and all of his life is a mystery.

The region of Crazy Horse’s life and death was bordered on the north by the Yellowstone River, on the west by the Bighorn Mountains, on the east by the sacred hunting grounds that were the Black Hills, and on the south by the North Platte and Oregon Trail. In this small arena lay such important places in his story as Forts Laramie, Phil Kearny, and Robinson.

He was about 13 when for the first time he witnessed the work of white men. This was in August 1854, near Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, when he saw a Brulé Sioux chief killed by soldiers. Twelve years later he had a role in the “Fetterman Massacre” near Fort Phil Kearny. This fight, in December 1866, in which Capt. William J. Fetterman and his command of 80 men were killed by Sioux warriors, was considered the worst army debacle west of the Mississippi before the Custer battle a decade later.

The 1868 treaty signed at Fort Laramie gave the Oglalas most of what they sought from the white man: “the country north of the North Platte and east of the summits of the Bighorn Mountains,” the abandonment of the army forts along the Bozeman Trail, and the setting aside of a huge tract of land for a reservation. But the paper proved worthless in 1875 when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, bringing a rush of prospectors to the treaty lands.

When delegates were sent from Washington to try to convince the Sioux tribes to sell the Paha Sapa (the Black Hills), Sitting Bull, the great Hunkpapa medicine man, told the commissioners, “I do not want to sell any land to the government.” He picked up a pinch of dust and added, “Not even as much as this.”

Crazy Horse was not a party to the Fort Laramie treaty and had no intention of being exiled to the Missouri River reservation. He also was opposed to any sale of the Black Hills, where he had gone many times to seek inspiration.

In June 1876, during Gen. Philip Sheridan’s sum-mer campaign against the Plains tribes, Crazy Horse fought his last two battles. The first occurred on the 17th at Rosebud Creek, 30 miles east of the Little Big-horn River, when Brig. Gen. George Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, camped on the headwaters of the Rosebud Creek with 1,300 men. A surprise attack by Crazy Horse and over a thousand warriors split Crook’s command and, after a day-long battle, the general retreated to await reinforcements.

Eight days later, the world learned the names Crazy Horse, and Gall, and many others, when Lt. Col. Custer and his command met them and 2,000 war-riors along the Little Bighorn.
The battle had been won but the war lost and by the spring of 1877, with his followers starving in the bitter winter, Crazy Horse was persuaded to surrender at Fort Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. Trailing behind him for over two miles were 217 warriors; 889 women, children, and elderly; and 1,700 horses. He and his followers were assigned a campsite alongside a creek and there they set up their lodges.

If there was a plot to kill Crazy Horse, or the creation of an atmosphere in which he could be killed, it began soon after his surrender that spring and gained momentum by summer. There were instances in which his words were either deliberately or mistakenly mistranslated; when reports circulat-ed that he was plotting with his companions to kill Gen. Crook; he was planning to lead a mass escape. His charms and talismans, his closeness to Wakan Tanka, the Father-Creator of his people, and his reclusive life were the subjects of jealousy by Indian allies and suspicion by white soldiers.

Early on Sept. 7, 1877, Crazy Horse began his last journey, riding under escort to Fort Robinson, where he was told he would have the opportunity to talk to the post commander and put on the record whatever complaints he had—among them the promise made to him when he first led his band to the fort, that he would have his own agency and not be confined to a reservation.

But the post commander refused to meet with Crazy Horse, and the Oglala was escorted out. He had no idea where he was being taken until his armed escort reached the adjutant’s office. There a sentry, bayoneted rifle on his shoulder, walked a path in front of the small building, and when Crazy Horse was led across the threshold he saw bars on the windows and men with chains on their legs.

He jumped back and from his buckskin shirt drew a hidden knife. There was a warning shout, a scramble, and his arms were suddenly pinned behind him by one of his escorts. He flailed and struggled for an instant, and broke loose until some Indians in the crowd grabbed him and held him down as the adjutant rushed forward—too late. The sentry, a red-bearded, heavy-set Irish-born private ironically named William Gentles, lunged with his bayonet, driv-ing it deep into Crazy Horse’s body, pulling it free and stabbing again.

The post surgeon, Valentine McGillycuddy, made his way through the throng and knelt beside the mortally wounded Oglala and said later that he “found Crazy Horse on his back, grinding his teeth and frothing at the mouth...the pulse weak and missing beats. I saw that he was done for.”
Crazy Horse was carried into the adjutant’s office, a room barely big enough for a desk and cot. The stricken warrior refused the bed and so was placed on the board floor, a red blanket covering him.
His pain was quieted by morphine, but at 20 min-utes to midnight, Sept. 7, 1877, he settled back, eyes open, and died, the victim, his friends said, of the fear, jealousy, and betrayal of both his white captors and some of his own brethren.

His body was taken by mule-drawn wagon to a point beyond the fort, where his father took cus-tody of it, wrapping it in deer skins, then in a buffalo robe snugged tightly with rawhide thongs.
Crazy Horse’s burial place is unknown but some Oglalas believe his body was taken by his father and mother to the north, where they determined to escape into Canada and join Sitting Bull. It is said they buried their son somewhere in southwest South Dakota near Chanke Opi Wakpala, a place where a final battle between the whites and Sioux would take place 13 years later: the creek called Wounded Knee.

Dale L. Walker of El Paso, Texas, past president of Western Writers of America and author of many books on the Old West, has a new book, The Calamity Papers, appearing in December.