The Arrest
Colonel Bradley believed that the military should be involved in the arrest, and General Crook apparently acquiesced to his request. On the morning of September 4, after Crook had left to catch a train on his way to try capturing Chief Joseph, Bradley sent out a force of about 400 Indians and 8 companies of the Third Cavalry. Clarke led the Indian scouts, and Major Julius Mason commanded the cavalry.
Crazy Horse, informed of the threat by Red Feather and perhaps others, gathered his horses. With Black Shawl and two of his most loyal supporters, Kicking Bear and Shell Boy, he started toward Spotted Tail Agency. In the middle of the afternoon, they reached a small Oglala village near the agency, where Black Shawl’s widowed mother and uncle lived. There Crazy Horse left
His wife and continued. Increasing numbers of men joined the party, both supporters and opponents of Crazy Horse—a highly volatile mix that could lead to Crazy Horse’s death at any moment. Afraid for the safety of his friend, Touch the Clouds hurried out from Spotted Tail Agency to ride beside him.
Camp Sheridan commander Captain Daniel Burke and Spotted Tail’s military agent, Lieutenant Jesse Lee, asked Crazy Horse to go to Camp Sheridan with them. At the camp, Crazy Horse explained that he had left Red Cloud Agency to avoid trouble and expressed his wish to remain at Spotted Tail Agency. He also said that he had been willing to fight with the military against the Nez Perce despite his wish to live at peace.
A dispatch from Colonel Bradley then arrived ordering the arrest of Crazy Horse and his return to Camp Robinson. Burke and Lee, better understanding the tinderbox that could so easily be lit and perhaps sympathizing with Crazy Horse’s position, tried to finesse the order by persuading Crazy Horse to return voluntarily to Camp Robinson. With promises to support his move to Spotted Tail and assurances that Agent Lee would accompany him to Camp Robinson, Crazy Horse agreed to make the journey the following morning. That night, perhaps sensing that his life was closing, Crazy Horse talked much of death with Touch the Clouds.
Early the following morning, September 5, another dispatch from Colonel Bradley arrived, again complicating matters. It required that Crazy Horse be brought in as a prisoner. Again Burke tried to balance obedience with prudence while attempting to keep his word to Crazy Horse. Burke responded that Crazy Horse would arrive in an ambulance with three scout sergeants: Swift Bear, High Bear, and Touch the Clouds.
As the party prepared to leave, Crazy Horse asked to ride a horse, as traveling in the ambulance would make him ill. Lee agreed, taking a considerable personal risk in deviating even more from Bradley’s orders. The group also included the interpreter Bordeaux, supporters of Crazy Horse, and varying numbers of scouts to ensure Crazy Horse’s compliance. According to Lee, Crazy Horse finally realized he was truly a prisoner when after lunch he went to relieve himself and discovered a scout following him.
At one point, Lee fell asleep, and on wakening discovered that Crazy Horse was gone. He sent scouts to catch up with him. In fact, Crazy Horse was just a short distance ahead watering his horse and talking with another group of Lakotas, from whom he probably received the revolver that he displayed later while resisting being jailed.
"It Is Good; He Has Looked for Death, and It Has Come."
Crazy Horse expected to meet with Colonel Bradley upon arriving at Camp Robinson, but that was not to be. Bradley ordered Officer of the Day Captain James Kennington to secure Crazy Horse in the guardhouse, with Lieutenant Henry Lemly’s Company E assigned to guard the building. Then Bradley and Lieutenant Clark inexplicably retired to their own quarters.
Crazy Horse was escorted to the guardhouse with Little Big Man holding onto his sleeve. At that point, the war leader did not seem to know the sort of building that awaited him. Agent Lee tried hard to press the case for allowing Crazy Horse to speak with Bradley. Lee solicited permission from the adjutant, Lieutenant Fred Calhoun, to meet with Bradley, but Bradley refused Lee’s petition.
Trying to put the best face on the situation and avoid a confrontation, Lee told Crazy Horse that it was too late in the evening for the meeting. He then relayed Bradley’s promise that Crazy Horse would not be hurt if he went with Kennington. Kennington led Crazy Horse toward the guardhouse by his right hand with Little Big Man holding the prisoner’s left arm. Around the guardhouse swarmed hundreds of Indians, both supporters of Crazy Horse and opponents.
Crazy Horse was expecting a building in which he could spend the night in reasonable comfort, but once inside the first room he could see the door leading into the jail area. Turning Bear, who just a moment before had offered to spend the night with Crazy Horse, now also realized the true nature of the building and raced outside yelling that it was a jail. Crazy Horse pulled his arms free and reached for his revolver. A scout, Plenty Wolves, grabbed the gun, at which point Crazy Horse pulled out a knife. He also snatched a knife from Little Big Man and raced for the door.
Little Big Man grabbed onto Crazy Horse from behind, receiving a cut on his left hand and another in his arm. Crazy Horse reached the outside running, with American Horse calling out to shoot him. Kennington also yelled out for the bystanders to kill Crazy Horse. Little Big Man again managed to take hold of Crazy Horse, but he broke free.
Accounts of what happened next differ. Some sources claim that Crazy Horse cut himself with his own knife, but it is now widely accepted based on first-hand accounts that a sentry twice struck Crazy Horse in the back with his bayonet. The sentry is usually identified as Private William Gentles. The severity of the first thrust may have been exacerbated by a sudden movement backward by Crazy Horse. The second thrust punctured his right lung.
As Crazy Horse lay on the ground mortally wounded, Touch the Clouds knelt beside him and tried to raise his head. He Dog covered Crazy Horse with a blanket, and Dr. McGillycuddy examined him, realizing that his condition was dire. Kennington, however, sought to carry out his original orders and have Crazy Horse carried into the guardhouse. His directive to that effect brought instant outcries from the surrounding Indians, who demanded that as an honored leader he not be imprisoned. Bat Pourier pleaded with Kennington to take Crazy Horse into the adjutant’s office instead. After two trips by McGillycuddy to Bradley’s quarters, the commander finally relented and permitted the dying Crazy Horse to be moved to the adjutant’s office.
Throughout the following hours, Crazy Horse lay on blankets on the floor. Touch the Clouds, Bat Pourier, Louis Bordeaux, McGillycuddy, another surgeon named Charles Munn, Crazy Horse’s father, Agent Lee, and a few other
Indians waited with him during part or all of the time that he lay dying. McGillycuddy administered morphine to reduce the pain, and Worm spoke about his son’s greatness, blaming Red Cloud’s and Spotted Tail’s jealousy for what had befallen Crazy Horse.
At approximately 11:40 p. m., Crazy Horse, one of the greatest of Indian warriors, died. Touch the Clouds, looking down on his longtime friend, offered his own eulogy: “It is good; he has looked for death, and it has come.”22
The Burial
The disposition of Crazy Horse’s remains has been described in a multitude of ways, so that it is impossible to be certain of all the details. The body initially was transported to Worm’s tipi so that he could perform the Ghost Owning ceremony, which included anointing Crazy Horse with red paint, cutting a lock of hair from his head (the lock was believed to contain a person’s spirit), purifying the lock in smoke from burning sweet grass, and placing the hair within a Spirit Bundle. Some of Crazy Horse’s supporters were distraught that in the turmoil of their leader’s death, they had forgotten his admonition that if he were killed they should paint his body red and submerge him in water, which would bring him back to life. If they failed to do so, he had said, his bones would turn to stone.
What happened next has been variously reported. The most likely chain of events is that Worm then took his son to a site near Camp Sheridan where his remains, wrapped in a red blanket, were placed on a scaffold. As Lee records in his diary, after a few days, Worm expressed concern that cows might disturb his son’s resting place, so the agent and a carpenter constructed a fence around the scaffold. According to Red Feather, an eagle visited the coffin each night, demonstrating that Crazy Horse’s spiritual power remained with him in death. A less spiritual reason for the visit could be offered, of course: Eagles have long been associated with visiting fields of battle to eat the dead. A funeral reportedly was held on September 13, during which Crazy Horse was placed inside a coffin with a number of items, including a pipe, bow and arrows, guns, and foodstuffs. The coffin was placed on the scaffold, and a prized horse of Crazy Horse’s was killed.
Other accounts have Worm performing the Ghost Owning ceremony with the body, which was then placed overnight on a platform in the branches of a “burial tree.” Worm then supposedly took his son and buried him in a crack in a bluff, engineering a rock slide to hide the grave from view.
Alternative narratives have Worm taking Crazy Horse’s remains with him on a travois when the agency Indians were forced to start their trek northward that would lead to permanent homes at pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations. That journey began for some of the agency Indians as early as October 25, although Worm apparently started his trek several days later. During the journey, by some accounts along Wounded Knee Creek (where a later, tragic battle effectively ended Lakota military action against the U. S. government), Worm may have given Crazy Horse his final burial.
Still other accounts posit multiple burials. Horn Chips claimed to have investigated the state of Crazy Horse’s body and, having found it disturbed, reburied the body. In an interview in 1907, he told Ricker that he was the only person who knew where the Oglala leader was buried. Three years later, Horn Chips told Walter Mason Camp (a Chicago researcher on the Indian wars) that he participated in three burials of Crazy Horse. In contrast, Henry Standing Bear, son of Standing Bear and a maternal cousin of Crazy Horse, told Camp around 1910 that Worm buried his son by himself at night and told no one of the location of the grave.
Henry Standing Bear also offered what remains the most likely final word on whether Crazy Horse ever had his photograph taken, as some photographs allegedly of Crazy Horse have surfaced over the years. Henry Standing Bear asserted that Crazy Horse refused to have his “shadow” captured in photographs, an explanation reiterated by many others. The historical consensus remains that we have no visual image, photographic or otherwise, portraying the great war leader.
The Crazy Horse Memorial
One depiction of Crazy Horse continues to emerge out of a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota—the most impressive visual commemoration of any American Indian leader. Credit for this memorial belongs first of all to Henry Standing Bear, who as a Brule chief welcomed the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to the Black Hills in 1940 to make the case for carving out a sculpture of Crazy Horse. At the time, Mount Rushmore was being adorned with the faces of several prominent figures in American history, and Henry Standing Bear and other Lakota leaders believed that there should be a memorial reminding people that American history also has included great Indian heroes.
Ziolkowski was seriously interested in the project and began to study the life of Crazy Horse in earnest. World War II interrupted his plans to create the memorial, however, as Ziolkowski volunteered and joined the military. He was wounded at Normandy in 1944. After the war, he turned down a request by the U. S. government to create war memorials in Europe and accepted the Crazy Horse project.
In 1946, Henry Standing Bear and Ziolkowski selected the 600-foot-high monolith that would become Crazy Horse’s image, which the sculptor named Thunderhead Mountain. Ziolkowski purchased land nearby and created a model of the sculpture with Crazy Horse astride his horse and his left hand outstretched. Over the next few years, he continued his preparations for the massive project, which included building roads, erecting a studio home, constructing a 741-step staircase to the top of the mountain (6,740 feet above sea level), and establishing certain guiding principles (including rejection of both government funding and a personal salary).
The first blast occurred in 1948, and extensive work began the following year. Over the decades, the work progressed with Crazy Horse’s visage slowly
Emerging from the stone. Ziolkowski died in 1982 at the age of 74, but his family continued, and still continues, his work and the great dream that he shared with generations of Lakotas, whose reverence for Crazy Horse’s courage and leadership has endured.
Today visitors to the Black Hills can see the ongoing work on the Crazy Horse Memorial, visit the Indian Museum of North America and the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, and, if they wish, share in realizing the goals of Henry Standing Bear and Korczak Ziolkowski. Those goals include honoring the courage, generosity, leadership, and spirit of Crazy Horse; honoring the culture and heritage of North American Indians; and providing educational and cultural programs to improve harmony among all people.
A common question concerns the reason for Crazy Horse’s outstretched arm, finger pointing forward over the horse’s head. After Crazy Horse’s surrender, a Euro-American is reputed to have mockingly inquired of the war leader, who tried so hard to protect his people’s ancestral lands (especially the Black Hills), where his lands were now. Crazy Horse’s response: “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” According to Ziolkowski, the sculpture of Crazy Horse is pointing to those lands.23
World History
