A “Normal” Day as Crazy Horse on The American Frontier

On May 5th, 1877, Crazy Horse and a group of his fellow warriors rode into the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson, Nebraska, weary from years of battling the colonizers’ military across the Midwestern Plains. They had come to surrender. Crazy Horse had become one of the most legendary warriors in Sioux history, but not even he could stop the westward push by the colonizers that resulted in thousands of his people either losing their lives or being forced onto reservations. However, the story of Crazy Horse wouldn’t end with his surrender; there was one more chapter left in the life of the mysterious and fearless warrior who put his life on the line in battle after battle in the wild fight for the West.

Welcome back to Nutty History! Today, we’re exploring the wild and controversial story of Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior who took on the mighty U.S. government.

Crazy Horse, the warrior, would paint his face with a yellow lightning bolt and conduct himself with modesty. His reputation as a skilled fighter grew during the late 1850s and early 1860s when he fought against traditional enemies of the Lakota, like the Crow, Shoshone, and Pawnee. However, in 1864, he set his sights on the invading colonizer army. The Third Colorado Cavalry had just wiped out over 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, two-thirds of whom were non-combatants, in a village in Southeastern Oklahoma Territory. In the aftermath, the Lakota decided to team up with the Cheyenne and Arapaho to fight the white invaders across the Great Plains.

Crazy Horse and his companions began organizing raids along the Oregon Trail, targeting both soldiers and non-combatants alike, acquiring weapons, livestock, and other resources from the covered wagons rumbling westward. The commanding officer of Fort Laramie, Colonel Thomas Moonlight, decided to fight back but ended up being an inept commander. He was accused of being drunk and letting the Native American raiding party steal most of his horses one night, forcing him and his men to walk back to Fort Laramie on foot. On several occasions, he pursued the enemy in the opposite direction of where they actually were.

Moonlight then decided to hang two Oglala men in front of Fort Laramie for everyone to see, where they stayed suspended in the air for months. He also decided that the 1,500 or so Lakota and Arapaho living near the fort needed to be moved to Nebraska, territory controlled by the Pawnee, fierce enemies of the Lakota and Arapaho. During their protest, the Native Americans and 140 U.S. soldiers accompanying them set off for Kearney, 300 miles east in Nebraska. Two days later, on June 13, 1865, a young Crazy Horse snuck into the traveling camp and convinced his people to fight back, overpowering the soldiers accompanying them and turning around, ending four colonizers in the process.

Crazy Horse did his best to unite opposing Plains tribes against the colonizing army. Oftentimes, the Native American warriors were more focused on winning individual honors rather than collective victories. One historian described their resistance efforts as being “unable to turn a battle into a campaign.” Still, they won small victories shortly after the Battle of Platte Bridge and another a year later in the Fetterman fight along the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming, where Crazy Horse and nine other warriors lured an unsuspecting enemy detachment into a fatal ambush that left 80 colonizer soldiers dead.

The year 1866 brought with it the discovery of gold along the Bozeman Trail in the Black Hills region, and under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman, forts began popping up throughout Sioux territory. In 1876, Crazy Horse, with the help of Sitting Bull, another legendary figure of the Native American resistance, had amassed a sizable group of warriors in a camp of between 7,000 to 10,000 Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho along the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana. Many of these individuals had fled the reservations they were being forced onto by the new government. It was this encampment that Colonel George Custer and his men mistakenly attacked, leading to the Battle of Little Bighorn, which became known as Custer’s Last Stand and one of the worst defeats for the colonizer military during the series of battles with the Plains Indians. Crazy Horse was said to have led a flanking charge that contributed to the demise of Custer and all of his men during the battle.

Crazy Horse, or Tashunka Witko in Lakota, which translates to “his horse is crazy,” was born in the Black Hills of South Dakota around 1840 to an Oglala Sioux father and a Miniconjou Sioux mother. He wasn’t always named Crazy Horse; in Lakota Sioux tradition, boys were usually not named until they had an important experience that earned them one, and that name could change again if another powerful experience warranted it. For much of his childhood, Crazy Horse was called Curly due to his curly hair and lighter complexion than most Lakota Sioux. His unusual looks made him feel like an outsider among his own people. He was described as aloof and quiet as a child and often played by his own rules, diverging from Lakota traditions in many ways.

There are varying accounts of how Curly became Crazy Horse. One version of the story goes that as a teenager, Curly was out hunting when he saw a Shoshone warrior attacking a Lakota woman. He took out the warrior with his club and fled to the hills to evade the rest of the Shoshone raiding party, where he hid until nightfall. When Curly made it home, his father was so proud that he gave up his own name to his son and took a new name, Waglu, which means “worm.”

Another account relates how Crazy Horse got his name after a particularly intense vision quest in the Black Hills. This quest was spurred by the violence he witnessed in his village as a teenager, which directly led to over 30 years of fighting between Plains tribes and the colonizers’ army. Crazy Horse, or Curly as he was likely still called then, had witnessed the death of the village chief, Conquering Bear, in what became known as the Gratton fight of 1854. After this event, Crazy Horse began experiencing visions. Vision quests were important rites of passage in many Native American cultures, including the Lakota Sioux. Curly didn’t go through many of the traditional preparations before his quest; he simply wandered out into the Black Hills.

In the hills, he had a vision of a warrior on horseback who appeared from a lake, dancing and floating in the air. A thunderstorm billowed above the warrior, and a bolt of lightning struck him in the face, leaving him with a lightning bolt scar. The warrior told him that if he dressed modestly, didn’t touch any of his tribesmen, and didn’t scalp his enemies, he would be untouched in battle and become a great protector of his people. A red-tailed hawk screeched and soared off in the distance at the end of the vision, seemingly confirming the prophecy. Later, Black Elk, Crazy Horse’s cousin, would relate what he knew about Crazy Horse’s vision to the American historian John G. Neihardt in an interview/book, “Black Elk Speaks,” one of the most illuminating texts about Lakota Sioux culture.

Shortly after his victories, however, the new government cracked down hard. By May of 1877, Crazy Horse had surrendered to the U.S. at the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson in Nebraska. He lived in a nearby village for a couple of months, during which time he was celebrated in what has become known as the last Sundance of 1877. By September, a couple of Lakota chiefs became jealous of the preferential treatment Crazy Horse was receiving from the colonizer army at the Red Cloud Agency. The two chiefs, Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, had come to accept certain white ways and began to eat with forks. Crazy Horse started to adopt some of these ways as well, believing that doing so would help ensure peace.

Rumors, perhaps started by Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, began to spread that Crazy Horse wanted to flee and return to his roots. To test his loyalty, the colonizer army asked him to join their fight against the Nez Perce, a tribe causing trouble in Montana. At first, Crazy Horse declined, but when he eventually agreed, his words were mistranslated. His statement that he would fight “until all the Nez Perce were eliminated” somehow turned into “he would go north and fight till not a white man was left.” This clumsy, obviously intentional mistranslation landed him in jail a day later. While being escorted by guards at Fort Robinson, where he had voluntarily turned himself in, he was mortally wounded in the back with a bayonet by one of the guards. It was never revealed which guard it was.

Crazy Horse was buried by his parents somewhere near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, though the exact location remains unknown to this day. Like much of his life, this great Sioux warrior’s final resting place has faded into mystery and legend.

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