Crazy Horse (1841–1877)

The Lakota warrior Tashunka Witco, or Crazy Horse, is one of the most revered American Indian leaders in recorded history. A lifetime protector of his people's way of life, he is best known for having defeated the [Page 402]U.S. Army in one of the most decisive Indian victories of the 19th century.

Crazy Horse, who was likely born in the winter of 1841–1842, was the son of an Oglala Lakota medicine man and nephew of the Brule chief Spotted Tail. Crazy Horse, too, was gifted mystically. As a young man, he had a dream in which a man marked by blue hailstones and lightning rode a horse safely through a hail of bullets and arrows, only to be pulled down by his own people. The lightning and hail were both strongly associated with the Thunders, powerful beings that called anyone dreaming of them to be a sacred clown, to do the opposite of what was expected. The rider also wore a smooth stone behind his ear and a feather of a red hawk in his unbraided hair, talismans that Crazy Horse adopted throughout his life.

Crazy Horse's opinion of the white people was formed at an early age, when he witnessed the Grattan Incident, in which the U.S. Army, over a stolen cow, opened fire on Conquering Bear's camp. The following year, Crazy Horse happened upon the mutilated bodies of Little Thunder's camp following an army attack. These experiences led him to believe that the whites were a dishonorable race that could not live among the Lakota.

Crazy Horse was a fearsome warrior and leader on the battlefield, and although he participated in all the major battles fought by the Lakota to protect the sacred Black Hills from white intrusion, he was never wounded in battle. He fought in Red Cloud's War and the Fetterman Massacre and led many successful raids against surveying parties for the railroad with the Lakota ally, the Cheyenne. When Red Cloud retired to the reservation, Crazy Horse became war chief of the Oglalas.

In 1876, in response to a campaign to force the rebellious Indians onto the reservation, the Lakota and Cheyenne came together under the leadership of Sitting Bull to mount a resistance. Crazy Horse acted as the military leader. On June 17, he led his warriors to defeat General George Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud and, on June 25, to annihilate General George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the most famous battle of the Indian Wars.

When the tribes divided after the battle, Crazy Horse was relentlessly pursued by troops under General Nelson Miles. After a long, hard winter, Crazy Horse and 1,000 Indians surrendered on May 6, 1877, during a battle in which they were out-gunned. Bored by life on the reservation, he became a scout, but enmity among his own people, of which he had once dreamed, forced him to flee. Although he later submitted to the army peaceably, he was taken to a stockade where he tried to break away. In the melee that followed, he was stabbed by a bayonet and died on September 7, 1877.

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