Crazy Horse: The Oglala War Leader
The mountain being carved southwest of Rapid City bears his name, and the man behind that name is harder to picture than the granite suggests. No verified photograph of Crazy Horse is known to exist. He is said to have refused to be photographed, and that refusal fits everything else recorded about him. He shunned display, kept apart from the councils where chiefs sought standing, and was remembered by those who knew him as a quiet and serious man whose authority rested on action rather than oratory.
He was born among the Oglala Lakota around the early 1840s, in the years before the plains tribes felt the full weight of American expansion. He grew up in the open buffalo country of the northern plains and came of age as a hunter and warrior in a culture still living largely as it had for generations. Accounts describe him as a man set somewhat apart, given to solitary reflection and visions, and recognized early for bravery in the intertribal warfare that was part of plains life. By the time the United States pressed hard into Lakota country, he had become a leader men chose to follow into a fight.
War for the plains
Crazy Horse came to prominence during the conflicts of the 1860s and 1870s. He took part in the fighting along the Bozeman Trail, the campaign associated with Red Cloud, which closed the trail and forced the United States to terms in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. He was present at the destruction of a detachment of soldiers in that war, an action that showed both his skill and the discipline of the warriors who followed him.
When the treaty failed to hold, and the Custer expedition of 1874 opened the Black Hills to a gold rush in violation of the agreement, Crazy Horse was among those who refused to come into the reservation agencies and surrender the old way of living. The Great Sioux War of 1876 followed, and in that summer he played a central part in two of its defining battles. At the Rosebud in June he led warriors who checked a large army column and turned it back. A week or so later, at the Little Bighorn, the combined Lakota and Cheyenne camps overwhelmed and destroyed George Custer’s immediate command, the worst defeat the Army suffered in the plains wars.
Surrender and death
The victory did not last. The Army pursued the scattered bands relentlessly through the following winter, and pressure, hunger, and the steady erosion of the old life wore the resistance down. In the spring of 1877 Crazy Horse brought his people in and surrendered at an agency in Nebraska, hoping, by most accounts, to be allowed to settle and live in peace.
Peace did not come to him. Within months, amid rumors, mistrust, and the maneuvering of officials and rival leaders, he was arrested. During the attempt to confine him he was fatally wounded, struck by a soldier’s bayonet in a struggle outside a guardhouse, and he died that night in September 1877. He was likely in his mid thirties. His parents took his body away, and the place of his burial was kept secret, so that to this day no one is certain where he lies.
He left behind no surrender of principle and no compromise with the life that had been forced on his people. That, more than any single battle, is why his memory endures. He stood for the old freedom of the plains and for resistance to dispossession, and he was killed not in war but in custody, after he had laid down his arms.
It is a measure of his standing that the Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear chose him, of all the heroes of his people, as the subject of a monument meant to answer the carved presidents nearby. There is a quiet irony in fixing the image of a man who would not be photographed into the face of a mountain. Whether he would have wanted it remains an honest question. What is not in question is the life behind the name, and the loss that life came to represent.