Great Plains (14 page)

Later that fall, the Army started moving the Sioux east to the Missouri, and got them partway there the following spring. After a couple of months, the Sioux turned around and came back west without permission. The Spotted Tail people stopped at what is now the Rosebud Reservation, and the Red Cloud people stopped at what is now the Pine Ridge Reservation. Private William Gentles died that following year of asthma. When he was dead, the Army may have found it convenient to name him as the man who stabbed Crazy Horse, in order to draw attention from someone else. Dr. McGillycuddy became Indian Agent at Pine Ridge, and began a long series of feuds with Chief Red Cloud. A man named Crow Dog shot and killed Chief Spotted Tail to advance his own political career, and served four years in jail for the crime. Nellie Larrabee was remarried, to a man named Greasing Hand, who then took the name Crazy Horse. Black Shawl never remarried, and lived until the late 1920s. Sherman turned down several chances to run for President. Lieutenant Clark died suddenly in Washington, D.C., in 1884; he was thirty-nine.

Nine or ten years after Crazy Horse was killed, interpreter William Garnett found out that Woman Dress had lied about Crazy Horse's supposed plan to kill General Crook at the council. Baptiste Pourier found out, too, and he told Woman Dress, “You are a liar and you are the cause of a good man's death.” To this accusation, “Woman Dress said not a word,” according to Garnett. When Garnett ran into Crook in 1889, he passed this along. “I ought to have gone to that council and I should not have listened to Clark,” Crook said. “I never started any place but I got there.”

Wailing, Crazy Horse's parents took his body by travois from the adjutant's office all the way back to the Spotted Tail Agency, the place he had hoped to move to. There they put it on a platform on a hill within sight of the post. They remained beside the grave for three days straight. Agent Lee's wife made up a basket of “good food and a bottle of hot coffee,” and Lee took it up to them. He also brought a carpenter and some posts and rough planks, and built a fence to keep the wolves away. Later, Crazy Horse's body was moved. Some people say he was placed in a crevice in a bluff and buried under a rockslide. The list of his alleged burial sites is long. Because he possibly said that his bones would turn to rocks and his joints to flint, Indian boys used to search the hills for his petrified remains. No one knows for sure where Crazy Horse's bones lie.

*   *   *

In the Black Hills, near the town of Custer, South Dakota, sculptors are carving a statue of Crazy Horse from a six-hundred-foot-high mountain of granite. The rock, called Thunderhead Mountain, is near Mt. Rushmore. The man who began the statue was a Boston-born sculptor named Korczak Ziolkowski, and he became inspired to the work after receiving a letter from Henry Standing Bear, a Sioux chief, in 1939. Standing Bear asked Ziolkowski if he would be interested in carving a memorial to Crazy Horse as a way of honoring heroes of the Indian people. The idea so appealed to Ziolkowski that he decided to make the largest statue in the world: Crazy Horse, on horseback, with his left arm outstretched and pointing. From Crazy Horse's shoulder to the tip of his index finger would be 263 feet. A forty-four-foot stone feather would rise above his head. Ziolkowski worked on the statue from 1947 until his death in 1982. As the project progressed, he added an Indian museum and a university and medical school for Indians to his plans for the grounds around the statue. Since his death, his wife and children have carried on the work.

The Black Hills, sacred to generations of Sioux and Cheyenne, are now filled with T-shirt stores, reptile gardens, talking wood carvings, wax museums, gravity mystery areas (“See and feel
COSMOS
—the only gravity mystery area that is family approved”), etc. Before I went there, I thought the Crazy Horse monument would be just another attraction. But it is wonderful. In all his years of blasting, bulldozing, and chipping, Ziolkowski removed over eight million tons of rock. You can just begin to tell. There is an outline of the planned sculpture on the mountain, and parts of the arm and the rider's head are beginning to emerge. The rest of the figure still waits within Thunderhead Mountain—Ziolkowski's descendants will doubtless be working away in the year 2150. This makes the statue in its present state an unusual attraction, one which draws a million visitors annually: it is a ruin, only in reverse. Instead of looking at it and imagining what it used to be, people stand at the observation deck and say, “Boy, that's really going to be great someday.” The gift shop is extensive and prosperous; buses with “Crazy Horse” in the destination window bring tourists from nearby Rapid City; Indian chants play on speakers in the Indian museum; Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, local residents, and American Indians get in free. The Crazy Horse monument is the one place on the plains where I saw lots of Indians smiling.

Korczak Ziolkowski is not the only person ever to feel strong emotion at the thought of Crazy Horse. Some, both Indian and non-Indian, regard him with a reverence which borders on the holy. Others do not get the point at all. George Hyde, who has written perhaps the best books about the western Sioux, says of the admirers of Crazy Horse, “They depict Crazy Horse as the kind of being never seen on earth: a genius in war, yet a lover of peace; a statesman, who apparently never thought of the interests of any human being outside his own camp; a dreamer, a mystic, and a kind of Sioux Christ, who was betrayed in the end by his own disciples—Little Big Man, Touch the Clouds … and the rest. One is inclined to ask, what is it all about?”

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn't end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on a train, slept in a boardinghouse, ate at a table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as “Red” and Spotted Tail as “Spot,” they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. Crazy Horse was a slim man of medium height with brown hair hanging below his waist and a scar above his lip. Now, in the mind of each person who imagines him, he looks different.

I believe that when Crazy Horse was killed, something more than a man's life was snuffed out. Once, America's size in the imagination was limitless. After Europeans settled and changed it, working from the coasts inland, its size in the imagination shrank. Like the center of a dying fire, the Great Plains held that original vision longest. Just as people finally came to the Great Plains and changed them, so they came to where Crazy Horse lived and killed him. Crazy Horse had the misfortune to live in a place which existed both in reality and in the dreams of people far away; he managed to leave both the real and the imaginary place unbetrayed. What I return to most often when I think of Crazy Horse is the fact that in the adjutant's office he refused to lie on the cot. Mortally wounded, frothing at the mouth, grinding his teeth in pain, he chose the floor instead. What a distance there is between that cot and the floor! On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, “ours”: an object of pity, an accident victim, “the noble red man, the last of his race, etc. etc.” But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still. On the floor, he began to hurt as the morphine wore off. On the floor, he remembered Agent Lee, summoned him, forgave him. On the floor, unable to rise, he was guarded by soldiers even then. On the floor, he said goodbye to his father and Touch the Clouds, the last of the thousands that once followed him. And on the floor, still as far from white men as the limitless continent they once dreamed of, he died. Touch the Clouds pulled the blanket over his face: “That is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” Lying where he chose, Crazy Horse showed the rest of us where we are standing. With his body, he demonstrated that the floor of an Army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his.

Crazy Horse was my gran'father!

7

N
OTES
from a 6,000-mile ramble on the plains:

Stopped to fish on Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Couldn't find lake at first—drove past the turnout. Went back and saw little hand-lettered sign: “Mission Lake.” Long way down dirt road. Wind at my back so strong that my dust trail was actually in front of me. My van full of dust—dust gritting between my back teeth. Parked, set up fly rod, put on waders. Whitecaps on lake. Waded in—whitecaps splashing against me. Hard to cast. Two Indians appeared on bank carrying two shopping bags. They took out Bud tallboys, opened them, took out hand line wrapped around empty beer can, started whipping the line bolo-style, casting into lake. One Indian walked over to where I was, asked, “What're you using?” I said, “Well, right now I've got on a weighted hare's ear nymph in size 12 tied with olive dubbing instead of brown and a little gold ribbing around the body. What're you using?” He said, “Leeches.”

Caught nothing—no strikes. Gave up. Back on the highway, truck in front of me missed gear, stopped suddenly on incline. I hit brakes, said, “Jesus Christ!” Stopped close enough to read his bumper sticker, which said, “We Are One In The Spirit.”

Stayed in the Bell Motel in Glasgow, Montana. Ate at a restaurant called Sam's Supper Club: two cold Rainier beers in bottle, relish tray (hot peppers, celery), prime rib (fatty and excellent), potatoes in a cheddar-cheese sauce with chives, homemade maple-walnut ice cream for dessert. Wind blowing grit into the intersections in waves. Trains behind the motel at night. Horrible yellow “European Bathing Gel” in motel shower.

Next day drove to Fort Union. Ranger leading tourists around the fort site. One woman tourist to another: “I had so many clothes in my closet I broke the closet rods!” Group standing around the ranger half-attentive, dreamy. Gal in peach shorts and a white top raised a baby to her shoulders and held him there, white arms in a classical pose.

Sat in park overlooking Missouri–Yellowstone confluence a long time and thought. Wind whipping across sandbar on opposite shore, sand blowing across water. Pelicans (!) flying in a roller-coaster type of formation over water. Lone deer grazing across the Missouri, very red in setting sun. I clapped hands; a second later, hearing me, he looked up. Ate sandwich. Prairie dog pestering me.

Left after sunset, intending to camp in Teddy Roosevelt Park, since camping at Yellowstone–Mo. not allowed. Crossed bridge over Mo., one-lane railroad bridge with boards for cars to drive on alongside rails. Van's wheels trolleying. Buttes lit up by sun, about the height of a cruise ship, blue sky and mare's-tail clouds above. Soon after bridge, came upon oil-drilling rig in full operation, nine-thirty at night. It was tall and lit with bars of fluorescent light to top. They were pulling pipe from well. Foreman had the kind of whistle that people who can really do it are born with and have been showing off since grade school. Piercing, piercing whistling rasping through teeth, could easily be heard over engine. Two-three guys would hook cable to end of pipe, foreman would whistle, cable would pull pipe up, men disconnect section, whistle, move section, whistle, section deposited with other sections in huge rack on rig. Then pull next section. Men working hard—absorbed, mobile. Clouds of diesel smoke blowing back from engine's stack over all the men in the wind.

Campsite unfindable in dark. Drove up and down same road five times. No light anywhere but my headlights. Finally pulled over, slept. Kept parking lights on. Every half hour or so, a car would go by singing like a sewing machine. Next morning woke and saw campsite across the road.

Bright sun. Cottonwoods just starting yellow in the valley of Beaver River west of Wibaux, Montana. Wibaux once greatest primary shipping point for livestock in West. Population now: 740. Everywhere, wheat fields. Coming over rise on dirt road near Beach, N.D.—all you'd need to paint landscape would be gold for wheat and blue for sky. Strips of summer fallow stencilled on the side of a butte all the way to the caprock. From a car, summer-fallow strips on rolling earth wave like stripes on a flag.

Badlands along Little Missouri River. Land cut vertically as many ways, in as many shapes, as erosion can cut it. North Dakota State Highway 22—a road so straight and empty I set a book on the steering wheel and read. Bear Butte State Park, South Dakota; Crazy Horse born near here. The Black Hills: winding roads, motor homes, smell of gift-shop candles. Eastern Wyoming. Grass long and mussed by wind. Clear water in creeks. Horsehead oil pumps pumping. Storm clouds piling up against Black Hills to east. Searchlight beams of sun coming through holes in clouds. Above the plain, a perfect double rainbow. Sign on bridge: “Beaver Creek.” This is where Crazy Horse wanted his agency to be.