NOTES

Introduction

1. Robert A. Clark, ed., The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse, 75–100.

2. The name of Woman Dress is usually given in a possessive form as Woman’s Dress, but I have elected to use the shorter version for the following reasons: he is referred to as Woman Dress in verbatim transcripts of interviews with Billy Garnett, his numerous letters to his friend James H. Cook of Nebraska are all signed Woman Dress, and his name appears as Woman Dress in pension records and on his grave marker in St. Paul’s Cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

3. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 178, 184.

4. Dewey Beard described his experience at Wounded Knee in a meeting with the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington, 11 February 1891, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1891, vol. 1, pp. 179–81.

5. The numerous names, words, and remarks presented in the Lakota language in this book are almost all reproduced as found in various printed sources and documents without benefit of diacritical marks or scholarly correction. For syntax and pronunciation, interested readers should consult the two authoritative books by Eugene Buechel, S.J.; A Grammar of Lakota (Rosebud Education Society, 1939) and Lakota Dictionary (Red Cloud Indian School, 1983). S and C followed by a vowel are usually soft, as in akicita(ah-kee-chee-ta—soldier), Tunkasila (Tunk-ah-shee-la—grandfather) or Unci (Oon-chee—grandmother).

1. “When we were young, all we thought about was going to war.”

1. “Sioux” is a term derived by early French trappers from a Chippewa word. President Thomas Jefferson used the term in his instructions to Lewis and Clark, and it has been standard ever since. “Teton Lakota” was the term used by the western Sioux for themselves. They were comprised of seven bands, or “council fires”: the Oglala, Hunkpapas, Miniconjou, Sans Arcs (No Bows), Brulé or Sicanju (“Burnt Thighs”), Miniconjou Sihasapa or Blackfeet, and Two Kettles. A standard work on the Teton Lakota is Royal B. Hassrick, The Sioux.

2. “There is a treaty”: Dee Brown, Fort Phil Kearny, 34. The officer was Colonel Henry B. Carrington, soon to be commander of Fort Phil Kearny.

3. Crazy Horse was identified as the leader of the decoys by the Cheyenne Two Moons (George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 146), and by Charles A. Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 43. Sword’s presence is reported by George Colhoff, a trader who married an Oglala woman in the 1860s; Eli Ricker interview with George Colhoff, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 215. American Horse told Eli Ricker he was one of the decoys, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 280.

4. Several boyhood exploits are described by Eastman, ibid., 38ff. Eastman was a Santee Sioux who graduated from Dartmouth College and earned a medical degree, later serving as a doctor on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1890s. Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 14 February 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 273. The suicide of Rattle Blanket Woman is recorded by Victoria Conroy in a letter to James McGregor, 18 December 1934, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 265ff. Crazy Horse’s friend White Rabbit reported that the elder man’s second wife was a sister of Rattle Blanket Woman; Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 181. See also He Dog interview with Eleanor Hinman, 7 July 1930, Oglala Sources. The war expedition led by the elder Crazy Horse is recorded in the Cloud Shield winter count for 1844–45, and he is cited again in reference to the burial of his brother, who was probably He Crow; Garrick Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians,” 463.

5. He Dog interview with Eleanor Hinman, 7 July 1930. Eagle Elk interview with John Neihardt, 27 November 1944, John Neihardt Papers, no. 3716. Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews. See also Thunder Tail’s narrative in Eugene Buechel, Lakota Tales and Texts, 628.

6. He Dog interview with Eleanor Hinman, 7 July 1930.

7. The year spent with the Brulé may have included the Battle of Blue Water Creek in September 1855, and this may be why some writers—especially Mari Sandoz—have suggested that Crazy Horse witnessed or took part in the battle.

8. fight with Arapahos: He Dog is explicit in identifying the enemy as Arapahos. He Dog interview with Eleanor Hinman, 7 July 1930, 9. Red Cloud in R. Eli Paul, ed., Autobiography of Red Cloud, 138, describes the annihilation of a village of fifty Arapaho lodges, encountered on their way to visit the Gros Ventres. Red Cloud was angry over a defeat at the hands of the Gros Ventres the previous summer. Flying Hawk, the brother of Kicking Bear, describes a fight with the Gros Ventres in which Crazy Horse at sixteen rescued Hump; it is possible all three accounts refer to the same fight. M. I. McCreight, Firewater and Forked Tongues, 133.

9. He Dog interview with Eleanor Hinman, 7 July 1930. See also Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 112.

10. Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians,” 722.

11. Paul, ed., Autobiography of Red Cloud, 36ff. Other sources for the early life of Red Cloud include the Colhoff winter count, which reports the return of Cloud Shield with news of Red Cloud’s death; Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk; and a William Garnett letter to Doane Robinson, 5 December 1923, Don Russell Papers. A standard biography is James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem.

12. Charles P. Jordan Papers, quoted in Paul, ed., Autobiography of Red Cloud, 11. Jordan was married to Julia Walks First, who was a niece of Red Cloud and a cousin of Spotted Tail; information inscribed on the back of a cabinet photo of Julia Walks First, author’s possession.

13. Paul, ed., Autobiography of Red Cloud, 75; undated note by James Cook, James C. Cook Papers, Box 92.

14. One of eleven songs performed by Red Cloud’s grandson Jim and two of his sons-in-law, Kills Above and Kills Chief. Translated by Joe Sierro for James Cook at his ranch in Agate Springs, Nebraska, in 1931. Three-page typescript in the James C. Cook Papers.

15. having a large family: Francis Parkman noted in 1846, “A Sioux of mean family can seldom become a chief—a chief generally arises out of large families, where the number of relatives who can back him in a quarrel and support him by their influence, gives him weight and authority.” Francis Parkman, The Journals of Francis Parkman, 441.

16. Ibid., 446. Miller’s remark about Bull Bear’s “imperious will” may be found in Marvin C. Ross, The West of Alfred Jacob Miller (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 45. The German doctor was Frederik A. Wislizenus (1810–1889); he recorded his impression in A Journey to the Rocky Mountains in 1839 (Missouri Historical Society, 1912), 58, 138. Sources for the story of Bull Bear include the Cloud Shield winter count; Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians,” 603; Rufus Sage, Rocky Mountain Life (Wentworth, 1846), 121; William Garnett letter to V. T. McGillycuddy, 6 March 1922, Elmo Scott Watson Papers, Box 30, Colhoff winter count for the year 1910; Lawrence Bull Bear and Charles Turning Hawk, interviews with Scudder Mekeel, 10 September 1931, Silas Afraid-of-Enemy, Peter Bull Bear, interpreters, Scudder Mekeel, Field Notes; Scudder Mekeel letter to George Hyde, 11 September 1931, author’s possession; and Parkman, The Journals of Francis Parkman, vol. 2, passim.

17. Charles W. Allen, From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee, 55. See Sage, Rocky Mountain Life, passim, for numerous examples of Indians under the influence of whiskey.

18. Paul, ed., Autobiography of Red Cloud, 67ff. Other sources not already cited are the Cloud Shield winter count, and the Charles Turning Hawk interview with Scudder Mekeel, 10 September 1931. Among others killed were Blue Bird, Blue Horse, White Hawk, and Red Cloud’s brother (or brother-in-law) Yellow Lodge.

19. He was referring to the society of chiefs. At varying times the Short Hairs (Naca Omniciye) were also known as the Pehin Pteptecela (because they braided short, curly buffalo hair into their own), or Hanskaska—the Tall Ones. In very early times the chiefs were known as Tatanka Wapahun—Wearers of the Buffalo Headdress. It was said that long ago a medicine man had a dream that showed him how to make the headdress wakan by attaching to it a small bag containing sacred things. Over time the buffalo headdress was slowly replaced by the eagle-feather headdress, and the name for the chiefs’ society changed as well.

20. Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 8, 36ff.

21. Helen Blish interview notes, 23 July 1929, quoted in Hinman, introduction to Oglala Sources, p. 47.

22. The Sioux were as conflicted about winktes as whites. A good account can be found in Hassrick, The Sioux, 133–35. An extensive treatment can also be found in the unpublished manuscript account of sign language prepared by General Hugh B. Scott, preserved in his papers at the Library of Congress.

23. This version of the story of the winkte was told to George Bird Grinnell in 1914 by the Cheyenne White Elk, who took part in the Fetterman fight when he was about seventeen years old. It can be found in George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 237–38.

24. Stanley Vestal, Warpath, 65.

25. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 281.

26. Colonel Carrington’s official report implied that Fetterman and a fellow officer shot each other to avoid capture. His wife Margaret Carrington, in a memoir, said the temples of both men were “so scorched with powder as to leave no doubt” they had shot each other. But it appears that American Horse with his knife did the job. The Army surgeon who examined the bodies after the battle wrote, “Colonel Fetterman’s body showed his thorax to have been cut crosswise with a knife, deep into the viscera; his throat and entire neck were cut to the cervical spine, all around. I believe that mutilation caused his death.” Margaret Carrington, Absaraka: Home of the Crow (Lakeside Press, 1950), 237. Report of Dr. Samuel D. Horton, Fort Phil Kearny files.

27. Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 243.

28. This rare circumstance would not be repeated for another 133 years, in 1999. Because the earth is closer to the sun by several million miles on the shortest day of the year, and because the full moon on December 21, 1866, coincided with perigee (the point at which the moon in its orbit passes closest to the earth), the amount of reflected light from the moon striking the earth was dramatically greater than usual. Information courtesy of Brad Mehlinger.

29. Colhoff winter count.

2. “I have always kept the oaths I made then, but Crazy Horse did not.”

1. Allyne (Jane) Garnett Pearce, You Must Give Something Back (H. V. Chapman and Sons, 2000), 37ff.

2. In The Great Platte River Road, 480–521, Merrill J. Mattes devotes two chapters to Fort Laramie, where the ascent began toward the continental divide. These journal excerpts are quoted on 225 and 516.

3. Walter Camp interview with William Garnett, 1907, Walter Camp Papers, Box 2. Garnett translated his mother’s name, Akitapiwin, as Looks at Him; other sources give the English as Looking Woman. The fullest treatment of the Boye, Boyer, or Bouyer family is to be found in John S. Gray, Custer’s Last Campaign. See also V. T. McGillycuddy letter to Elmo Scott Watson, 10 February 1922, Elmo Scott Watson Papers.

4. The woman with the frank gaze has been identified as the wife of an Oglala named Grey Eyes. See Allen Chronister, “1868 Sioux at Fort Laramie,” Whispering Wind (2008) 38, no. 1. A nearly complete set of the Gardner photos is in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution.

5. John S. Collins, My Experiences in the West (Lakeside Press, 1970), 21ff.

6. For the Sand Creek massacre see Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier (New Mexico, 1984), 86ff. John D. McDermott, Circle of Fire, passim and 60ff. There is substantial doubt whether any of the executed were guilty as charged. See also Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 84, 164; Walter Camp interview with William Garnett, 1907, Walker Camp Papers; and Rocky Mountain News, 27 June 1865. Big Crow’s accuser is described in the Daily Times of Leavenworth, Kansas, 14 March 1865.

7. Bettelyoun and Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 91.

8. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 102

9. Gli Naziwin: Garnett translates his grandmother’s name as Comes and Stands. Walter Camp interview with William Garnett, 1907. It might also be translated as Woman Who Returns and Stands.

10. “Billy was then”: John Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 121. Memory had corrupted the name to “Garner,” but it is clear Bratt means Garnett; he refers both to his father and his later employment as interpreter on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

11. Eli Ricker interview with W. R. Jones, 23 January 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 174ff.

12. Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 128.

13. “John was cross-eyed”: Ibid., 119.

14. “Mean to his mother”: Ibid., 121.

15. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 4.

16. Thompson killed Hunter: Thompson was himself later killed in a quarrel over horses by John Portuguese Phillips and some soldiers. Eli Ricker interview with W. R. Jones, 23 January 1907. See also John Hunter, Fort Laramie name files.

17. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 40.

18. James Walker, notes, c. 1900, American Museum of Natural History; Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 7.

19. This account of the making of the Shirt Wearers is based on Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 10 January 1907. Eleanor Hinman interview with He Dog, 7 July 1930, Oglala Sources, 11–12; Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 7, 36, 39–40; and “History of Crazy Horse,” eleven-page typescript narrative based on testimony of He Dog, Josephine Waggoner Papers. This last document can also be found in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 132ff. It was prepared by Joseph Eagle Hawk, a son of He Dog, and was apparently intended to accompany a collection of twenty-one ledger drawings, now lost.

20. Calico was an informant about 1907 of the photographer Edward S. Curtis, who recorded details of his life in The North American Indian (University Press, 1908), vol. 3, pp. 16, 183.

3. “It is better to die young.”

1. the Light Haired Boy: Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 14 February 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 273ff.; “When we first”: James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 105; others spoke for him: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1877, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 1ff. Red Cloud was a tireless and effective talker, and his collected words would fill a stout tome. “He was a very quiet man”: He Dog interview, 7 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 12–13.

2. “A man on horseback”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 117. The lake in question was probably Lake DeSmet. White Buffalo Shaking Off the Dust, the father of Wooden Leg, also had a mysterious encounter at Lake DeSmet, where he killed a deer that had been grazing underwater, only to have it pull itself back together and run off after he had cut the animal up and packed it into camp. Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 145–46.

3. shell necklace: Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 39; “thirty-seven people”: Angeline Johnson letter, 7 September 1877, Nebraska History (summer 1996); slough grass: Iron Horse to Luther Standing Bear, summer 1932, reported in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, 22 January 1933.

4. W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 183.

5. M. I. McCreight, Chief Flying Hawk’s Tales and Firewater and Forked Tongues, 139. A sister-in-law of Crazy Horse also reported that Crazy Horse wore only a blade of grass in his hair and “offered to go right down in the White River valley and find some of the type of red blade of grass that he wore.” Will G. Robinson letter to Elmo Scott Watson, 29 November 1948, Wi-iyohi, monthly bulletin of the South Dakota Historical Society, vol. 1, no. 6, 1 September 1947, Elmo Scott Watson Papers.

6. Joseph No Water, interview with Scudder Mekeel, September 1931, Scudder Mekeel, Field Notes.

7. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail Journal, 450.

8. He Dog interview, 13 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 15–16. Bad Heart Bull was the father of the famous Oglala ledger artist Amos Bad Heart Bull.

9. He Dog says left nostril, Horn Chips says right nostril. But all other accounts report a scar on the left side of his face. He Dog interview, 13 July 1930; Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 14 February 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews; “It took some months”: Eagle Elk interview, 27 November 1944, John Neihardt Papers.

10. Scudder Mekeel, The Economy of a Modern Teton Dakota Community, 5.

11. Dee Brown, Fort Phil Kearny, 76. Of course, the Cheyenne and their Sioux allies would not have been content with half.

12. Clark Wissler, Field Notes.

13. There were two classes of powerful or sacred persons called “medicine men” by whites: wicasa wakan (mysterious or sacred men), who were spiritual advisers, makers of powerful charms for love or war, interveners with Wakan Tanka; and wicasa pejuta(“medicine men”), who healed with the use of herbs and other natural remedies—doctors in the American sense.

14. Benson Lanford note in Christie’s sale catalog, 12 January 2006. See also J. Owen Dorsey, Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 436.

15. Wissler, Field Notes, 96.

16. The Lakota name for Scott’s Bluff (Ma E-ya Paha) comes from an undated note by James Cook, James C. Cook Papers, Box 92. Frank Kicking Bear (1889–1965), son of the Kicking Bear who was a war comrade of Crazy Horse and later a leader of the ghost dance movement, identified Scott’s Bluff as the site for Crazy Horse’s vision. Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 116.

17. “the odor of their flow”: Wissler, Field Notes. Headdresses, shields, and lances were never brought inside the lodge, Wissler notes, “for fear they would be contaminated by the presence of women,” 37.

18. Royal B. Hassrick, The Sioux, 335. See also Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 273.

19. Information from John Blunt Horn in Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 44.

20. “that species of desperation”: Francis Parkman, The Journals of Francis Parkman, vol. 2, p. 444.

21. “looking for death”: Colhoff winter count, 1870.

22. Brief accounts of this event are given by Flying Hawk and He Dog’s brother Short Bull. McCreight, Chief Flying Hawk’s Tales and Firewater and Forked Tongues, 138–39. Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, Hinman Oglala Sources, 32.

23. McCreight quotes Flying Hawk as saying the killing occurred when “his younger brother was on a campaign in the country about which is Utah.” To me this sounds like a garbled translation of a report that he was fighting Utes or in the Ute country. McCreight, Chief Flying Hawk’s Tales. Eagle Elk interview, 27 November 1944, John Neihardt Papers, no. 3716.

24. George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the … North American Indians (Dover, 1973), vol. 1, p. 221. Catlin spells the chief’s name as Ha-wan-je-tah; Red Horse Owner’s winter count dates the event to 1835: “He Wanji Ca tatanka wankici kicizaca”—“He Wanji Ca fought with a buffalo.” The independent scholar Mike Cowdrey thinks Lone Horn’s fight with a buffalo never occurred.

25. Letter from Post Chaplain Alpha Wright, Fort Laramie, 19 April 1870, to the editor, “Our Wyoming Letter” (Plattsmouth) Nebraska Herald, 5 May 1870, 2.

26. He Dog interview with Eleanor Hinman, 13 July 1930, Oglala Sources.

27. Accounts of the battle in which High Backbone was killed can be found in Eleanor Hinman’s interviews with He Dog and Red Feather, Oglala Sources, and the Colhoff winter count for the years 1870, 1927, and 1940.

28. “a smooth rock face”: The best known of these picture-covered rock faces was called Painted Cliffs, also known as Deer Medicine Rocks. Black Elk said there were four ways a man might predict the future: in a trance during the sun dance; in a dream or vision; by correctly reading the petroglyphs at Deer Medicine Rocks; and in the final moments before dying. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 181.

29. Wissler, Field Notes, 128.

30. W. C. Brown letter to Hugh Scott, 14 April 1919, Hugh Scott Papers.

31. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 181.

4. “Crazy Horse was as fine an Indian as he ever knew.”

1. John Colhoff letter to George Hyde, 30 May 1949, author’s possession.

2. Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 271.

3. Brian Jones, “Those Wild Reshaw Boys,” English Westerners’ Society: Sidelights of the Sioux Wars (1867), 45, n. 126. The fullest account of this episode is to be found in Eli Ricker’s interview with Billy Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 104ff. Much information on the Richard family may also be found, in John D. McDermott, Frontier Crossroads: the History of Fort Caspar and the Upper Platte Crossing (City of Caspar, Wyoming, 1997).

4. Captain Henry W. Patterson letter to General George D. Ruggles, 14 September 1869, NA/RG 393, Fort Fetterman, Letters Sent, quoted in Brian Jones, “John Richard Jr. and the Killing at Fetterman,” Annals of Wyoming (fall 1971), 243.

5. Chase in Winter pension file, National Archives. Chase in Winter had many wives before marrying Her Many Horses in 1876; she had previously been married for five years (1867–1872) to Yellow Bear, the chief murdered by John Richard while Billy Garnett watched in 1872.

In his affidavit, Chase in Winter remarked, “The interpreter [when he enlisted as a scout at Camp Robinson in October 1876] would not put down my correct name and gave me the name of Red Man. I also have a name, an Indian name that is not permitted to be used.” Included in his pension file was a sealed envelope marked, “To be Opened by the Chief of the S.E.D. [Special Examination Division], providing said reviewer is not a woman.” In the envelope was a note from the examiner explaining that Chase in Winter’s Indian name was White Inside of a Cunt. Such names were not uncommon among the Oglala. Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul, eds., The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger, 158ff., includes many, such as Pisses in the Horn, Shits in His Hand, Tanned Nuts, Snatch Stealer, and Soft Prick. I have wondered if the last-named might have been the Oglala warrior alluded to by Francis Parkman in his journal thirty years earlier (June 1846): “A young Indian with an extraordinary name, importing that his propensities were the reverse of amorous, came with his squaw and child to camp, on his way to the fort, where he means to leave his squaw in charge of [Joseph] Bissonnette, while he goes to war.” Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail Journal, 448–49.

Such names reflected a natural frankness and directness in language. Parkman in July 1846 described a typical evening of conversation in an Oglala lodge in which their host, “an old man … kept up a constant stream of raillery—especially about the women, declaring in their presence that he had lain with them, at which they laughed, without the slightest inclination to blush. [Antoine] Reynal says, and indeed it is very observable, that anything may be said without making a girl blush; but that liberties cannot be taken with a young girl’s person without exciting her shame.” Ibid., 451.

6. Fast Thunder and Tall Man pension files, National Archives. In the 1890s Cane Woman changed her name to Wounded Horse and was called Jennie; she died in the 1930s. Short Bull’s marriage to Good Enemy Woman took place in 1880 in Canada, where they had fled following the killing of Crazy Horse. After leaving Short Bull she married Tall Man and remained with him until his death on the Pine Ridge reservation in 1912. In 1881 all three returned to the United States and surrendered to military authorities.

7. Relatives of Baptiste Pourier later suggested that bad blood between John Richard Jr. and Yellow Bear had existed for some time, and that the chief’s people said there was a price on Richard’s head: “Whoever kills Wasicun Tamaheca will have tongue to eat”—tongue being one of the choice parts of the buffalo. Hila Gilbert, Big Bat Pourier (The Mills Company, 1968), 17–18.

8. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 108.

9. Leander P. Richardson, “A Trip to the Black Hills,” Scribner’s (April 1877).

10. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews.

11. Notes by Colonel C. G. Coutant, c. 1886, Annals of Wyoming (winter 1942), quoted in John C. Thompson, “In Old Wyoming,” Wyoming State Tribune, 12 December 1941. See also the Wyoming Tribune, 23 March 1872, copy in the Fort Laramie NHS library.

A few days after the killing of Powell a single-trail, antelope-horn headdress of eagle feathers was left on the battlefield after a brief skirmish. Powell’s nephew was given the headdress and it descended through the family to my friend Jim Schley, who has been working on a book about the headdress, trying to establish who owned it originally, and who ought to have it now. Family legend says that Indians tried to negotiate the return of the headdress in 1872, and that the man who sought it was Little Big Man. Experts say the headdress is of Cheyenne origin and belonged to a member of a warrior society.

12. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett. Harry Young, Hard Knocks, 117. Charging Girl narrative, James C. Cook Papers.

13. Thomas R. Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American West, 4.

14. Young, Hard Knocks, 149ff. Other accounts can be found in Eli Ricker’s interview with William Garnett, and in the Charging Girl narrative, which quotes the messenger. A good overall account is in Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American West. Harry Young gets the date and several other details wrong but is otherwise amply supported by Garnett. Kicking Bear was identified as the actual or probable shooter by Garnett, by Black Elk in Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 154, and in the Colhoff winter count for the year 1873.

15. J. W. Dear letter of 12 February 1874 to O. N. Unthank, Western Union telegrapher at Fort Laramie, Nebraska History (January–March 1924).

5. “A Sandwich Islander appears to exercise great control in the Indian councils.”

1. Donald F. Danker, ed., Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882 (University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 321. Frank Grouard is often mentioned in diaries, letters, memoirs, and official documents of the Indian wars period, but the principal sources for his life are Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard; John S. Gray, “Frank Grouard: Kanacka Scout or Mulatto Renegade?” Westerners Brand Book (October 1959); and the Eli Ricker interviews published in two volumes by the University of Nebraska Press in 2005.

2. A full issue of the Museum of the Fur Trade Quarterly (fall/winter 2009) is devoted to the fight at Crow Butte. When Frank Grouard arrived at the Red Cloud Agency in northwest Nebraska he entered the orbit of the military post at Camp (after 1878 Fort) Robinson. An authoritave account of the post’s role in the Indian wars may be found in Thomas R. Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American West (Nebraska State Historical Society, 1999).

3. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 20.

4. John S. Gray depends heavily on a lengthy article by George Boyd in the Bismarck Tribune, 8 November 1876.

5. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 13, 1877.

6. John Colhoff letter to Helen Blish, 7 April 1929, Mari Sandoz Papers; DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 30ff.

7. D. S. Stanley to CIA, 7 April 1872, M234/R127, quoted in David Eckroth and Harold Hagen, Baker’s Battle on the Yellowstone (Frontier Heritage Alliance, 2004), 27. Edward S. Curtis says Spotted Eagle was born in 1842; the White Bull winter count gives his birth year as 1834.

8. Transcript of He Dog interview, 24 July 1931, Hugh Scott Papers.

9. Major Eugene Baker, well known on the frontier as the commander of the troops who had massacred a band of Blackfeet on the Marias River in 1870, led one of the two surveying parties along the Yellowstone that summer—a detachment of five hundred men making its way east from Fort Ellis. A second group was proceeding west under General Stanley. Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull, 131. The handsoff policy was described to Vestal, pen name of Walter S. Campbell, by elderly Hunkpapas in the 1930s.

10. U.S. Special Agent Simmons letter of 8 December 1872 from Fort Peck, Montana Territory, Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, NA/RG 75, quoted in Eckroth and Hagen, Baker’s Battle on the Yellowstone, 67.

11. Vestal, Sitting Bull, 128.

12. “one young warrior”: E. S. Topping, Chronicles of the Yellowstone (1883; Ross and Haines, 1968), 92. The most succinct overall account of the Baker expedition and the fight at Arrow Creek can be found in M. John Lubetkin, “No Fighting to Be Apprehended,” Montana (summer 2006), in which Lubetkin argues that from the acorn of this small encounter a mighty oak did grow. The fight halted the surveying effort, Lubetkin shows, creating a delay which weakened Jay Cooke’s Northern Pacific Railroad Company and indirectly led to its bankruptcy a year later. That, in turn, helped precipitate the Panic of 1873, followed by six years of nationwide depression, which provided a major incentive for the Sioux War of 1876 in order to open up the goldfields in the Black Hills. Of this chain of events the Sioux of course had no clear idea. An extremely thorough account of the fight can also be found in Eckroth and Hagen, Baker’s Battle on the Yellowstone.

The Indian version of events may be found in Vestal’s two books, Warpath, 137ff., and Sitting Bull, 125ff.; and in Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 106ff.

13. Captain Carlile Boyd letter of 6 September 1872, Letters Received, Military Division of the Missouri, NA/RG 393, quoted in Eckroth and Hagen, Baker’s Battle on the Yellowstone, 67.

14. “That was the first fight”: DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 52.

15. Ibid.

16. Gray, “Frank Grouard: Kanacka Scout or Mulatto Renegade?”

17. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 54.

18. He Dog’s family is variously identified in the pension files of Little Shield and Grant Short Bull, two of his brothers; in Scudder Mekeel’s interviews with He Dog’s son Joseph Eagle Hawk and his brother Grant Short Bull; and in the Colhoff winter count.

19. The splitting and resplitting of the northern Oglala is described in Eleanor Hinman’s interview with He Dog, 7 July 1930, Oglala Sources, and in the Colhoff winter count.

20. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 181–82. Other references to Crazy Horse’s daughter may be found in Richard G. Hardorff, The Oglala Lakota Crazy Horse; and the remarks of John Colhoff and Red Feather; Hinman, Oglala Sources, 9, 29, 32.

21. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 207.

22. The correspondent, John F. Finerty, accompanied General Crook for the Chicago Times. The boy was killed in the fight at the Rosebud. John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 95. There are numerous accounts of Sioux grieving for the dead. Full descriptions may be found in Clark Wissler, Field Notes; Alice Fletcher, “Ghost-Keeping”; and Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian (University Press, 1908), vol. 3, pp. 99ff. For a serious modern treatment see Stephen Huffstetter, Lakota Grieving (St. Joseph’s Indian School, 1998).

23. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 181–82. Many stories told of Crazy Horse by Grouard are confirmed by other sources, suggesting that one way or another he had learned a lot about the chief, who was the constant subject of gossip and rumor in the Indian camps. It is likely that Grouard passed these stories on to DeBarthe, who then placed Grouard himself at the scene of action as a way of lending drama to the story of the scout’s life.

24. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 3 April 1875.

25. DeCost Smith, Red Indian Experiences, 42.

26. Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 118ff.

27. New York Herald, 29 May 1875, quoted in James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 178.

28. Billy Garnett to Eli Ricker, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 2. Garnett was married seriatim to two of Nick Janis’s daughters—Zuzella and Fillie—and he often came to the aid of his father-in-law.

29. Garnett ran away from his first school after a day or two, and his early enlistment papers in the 1870s were all signed with an X by his name. Exactly when he learned to read is unknown, but a number of letters survive from the 1910s and ’20s in which Garnett writes fluently of the Indian wars period.

30. Eli Ricker interview with W. R. Jones, 23 January 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Settler and Soldier Interviews, 178.

6. “Gold from the grass roots down.”

1. “so many inevitable causes”: Lieutenant G. K. Warren, Preliminary Report of Explorations in Nebraska and Dakota in the Years 1855–56–57 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1875), 19ff, 52–53.

2. the first Lakota: American Horse winter count, Garrick Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians,” 383.

3. “a short little man”: Testimony of Stella Swift Bird, granddaughter of Fast Thunder, speaking on 5 May 1969, Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 145ff.

4. Army officers who stayed on after the Civil War generally reverted to previous ranks; Custer in 1874 was a lieutenant colonel, but as a courtesy he, like other officers, was addressed by his highest Civil War rank. In Custer’s case that was major general.

5. “a Yanktonai known as Goose”: William E. Curtis, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 15 August 1874, Herbert Krause and Gary D. Olson, Prelude to Glory.

6. The story of Goose and the wind cave can be found in Aris B. Donaldson, St. Paul Daily Pioneer, 29 July 1874, and William E. Curtis, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 30 July 1874; William E. Curtis writing as “C” in the New York World, 2 August 1874, all reprinted in Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory, 51–52, 110, 160, 162.

7. Newspaper correspondents with Custer spelled it “wassum” or “washsum.” Buechel’s standard Lakota-English dictionary defines wasun as, “The den or hole of small animals, of snakes and bugs; any hole in the ground.”

8. The surgeons: are identified in Lawrence A. Frost, ed., With Custer in 74: James Calhoun’s Diary of the Black Hill Expedition (Brigham Young University Press, 1979). A full account can also be found in John M. Carroll and Lawrence A. Frost, eds., Private Theodore Ewert’s Diary of the Black Hills Expedition of 1874 (Consultant Resources, Inc., 1976).

9. Bloody Knife and Bear’s Ears: Ben Innis, Bloody Knife: Custer’s Favorite Scout (Smoky Water Press, 1994), passim. Bear’s Ears’ story can be found in Samuel Barrows, New York Tribune, 24 June 1874, and in William E. Curtis, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 29 July 1874, both included in Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory.

10. Innis, Bloody Knife, p. 115, and William E. Curtis, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 18 August 1874.

11. “Do not dare to fire”: James Power, St. Paul Daily Press, 16 August 1874.

12. Slow Bull: Curtis, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 18 August 1874, says One Stab was married to a daughter of Red Cloud, but Samuel Barrows, writing in the New York Tribune, 18 August 1874, says Slow Bull was Red Cloud’s son-in-law. Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory, 122, 214. James Power in the St. Paul Daily Press, 16 August 1874, agrees with Barrows that it was Slow Bull who had married a daughter of Red Cloud; Aris B. Donaldson in the St. Paul Daily Pioneer adds that they had four children, “one at the breast.” Adding to the confusion are other references to a certain Slow Bear, also married to a daughter of Red Cloud; Carrie Slow Bear was interviewed by Eleanor Hinman in 1930. Despite these similarities it does not seem likely that Slow Bull and Slow Bear were the same person.

13. “A not uncomely squaw”: Barrows, New York Tribune, 18 August 1874, Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory, 214.

14. Stabber’s father: American Horse winter count; Garrick Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians,” 605.

    Cloud Shield winter count dates his death to 1783–1784. Lewis and Clark identified him as chief of the Shiyo (Sharp-Tailed Grouse) band of the Oglala, and records his name as War-char-par (On His Guard); the historian George Hyde believes this was probably a corruption of Wachape (Stabber). George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 30. Buechel gives the spelling as wacape—“to stab.” Were these two men named Stabber the father and grandfather of the chief met by Custer? There is no definitive evidence, but the inheritance of names was common among the Sioux, chiefs commonly inherited their status, and no Oglala would be surprised to learn that an Oglala chief named Stabber in 1874 had descended from an Oglala chief named Stabber in 1804.

15. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail Journal, 470.

16. “Send word to the Great Father”: Report of a meeting with Dr. H. W. Mathews, reprinted in George P. Belden, The White Chief (C. F. Yent, 1872), 390ff.

17. “afraid of the whites”: Barrows, New York Tribune, 18 August 1874, Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory, 214.

18. Custer announced: Ibid.

19. Long Bear: This man is variously identified by newspaper correspondents on the expedition as Slim Bear or Long Bear. The Lakota is not given; I am guessing that it is hanska, a word meaning tall, long, or slim often used in Lakota names, where it is usually translated as “long.” In my index of several thousand Oglala names eighteen are prefaced by the word “Long,” none by the word “Slim.” There are several other references to Long Bear as an active figure among the Oglala in the 1870s and after.

20. “I may as well”: Ibid. The names of the respective Indians are given by Curtis.

21. Barrows, New York Tribune, 18 August 1874, Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory, 212ff.

22. Colonel Thaddeus Stanton brought the news from the agencies to Colonel John E. Smith, commanding at Fort Laramie. On 4 August 1874 he passed on the news to the headquarters of General Sheridan and the Division of the Missouri in St. Paul. Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory, 124.

23. “I could whip”: Luther Heddon North, Man of the Plains, 187–88.

24. “their own bad faith”: Custer report to the Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, 2 August 1874, reprinted in the New York World, 16 August 1874.

25. “the heart of the hills”: “Life of Goose,” Josephine Waggoner Papers.

26. Ibid.

27. William E. Curtis, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 27 August 1874, Krause and Olson, Prelude to Glory, 126–27.

28. Forsyth’s report, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, 27 August 1874.

29. “accept the president’s terms”: Cheyenne Daily Leader, 28 May 1875.

30. “I do not like General Custer”: New York Herald, 27 August 1874. The Fort Laramie commander was Lieutenant Colonel Luther P. Bradley, who would be commander at Camp Robinson when Crazy Horse was killed three years later. See also James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 173ff.; and Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, The Indian Interviews, 82ff.

31. “I want you to think”: Associated Press dispatch, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1875. Grant’s use of the direct form has been restored to the text.

32. The origins of the Allison commission are described in Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 177ff.

7. “We don’t want any white men here.”

1. “Northern Indians”: More recently scholars have begun to call them “non-treaty Indians.”

2. nineteen hundred lodges: James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 203. Grouard’s biographer, Joe DeBarthe, later quoted Grouard as saying that about a thousand northern Indians attended a council with Young Man Afraid. The site of the village was near the present Dayton, Wyoming, about a dozen miles west of Sheridan.

3. “I don’t want to go”: Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 84ff., also 97; Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull, 133.

4. George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 82; G. K. Warren, “Explorations in Nebraska,” Report of the Secretary of War, 1858.

5. “They didn’t seem to take”: Caroline Frey Winne in a letter to her brother from the Sidney Barracks, 27 February 1875, Frey Family Papers. Other accounts of pipe etiquette can be found in W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 295, 302; Walter S. Schuyler, “Notes on Indians,” quoting Frank Grouard, 20 December 1876, Walter S. Schuyler Papers; and Royal B. Hassrick, The Sioux, passim. An excellent account of pipe etiquette and custom can be found in the August 1931 Field Notes of Scudder Mekeel. There are scores of accounts of Indians smoking in council, and Indians formally posing for photographs were often depicted holding a long pipe or pipe bag, with its distinctive panel of beadwork and long, quill-wrapped fringes. But so far as I know there is only a single photograph of an Indian in council actually smoking—one taken by Alexander Gardner at Fort Laramie in 1868, showing Old Man Afraid of His Horses surrounded by Indians and soldiers, drawing a puff on a pipe.

6. “Don’t do things hastily”: Hila Gilbert, Big Bat Pourier (The Mills Company, 1968), 43; DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 86.

7. According to Short Bull: Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 34. The following March an Oglala named Crawler was sent out from the Red Cloud Agency to remind the northern Indians of their promise, saying, “It is spring, we are waiting for you.”

8. “fight me, too”: DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 86.

9. “We don’t want”: John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 245. For their hardships and dangers run—“their lives were constantly in danger”—Louis Richard and Young Man Afraid and the men they led north were promised one hundred American horses. Chicago Tribune, 17 September 1875.

10. “When the tribe first”: Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations; Wissler’s text is a slight rewording of Richard Nines, Notes on the Dakota Indians, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, American Museum of Natural History.

11. “so dreadfully dirty”: Carolyn Frey Winne is typical of white women on the frontier in two ways: initial dislike of Indians, followed by a slow deepening of understanding, tolerance, curiosity, and eventually even respect. Winne’s letters, rich and numerous, are found in the Frey Family Papers. A fine general treatment is in Glenda Riley, Women and Indians on the Frontier (University of New Mexico Press, 1984). White male attitudes are the subject of Sherry Smith, The View from Officers’ Row (University of Arizona Press, 1990).

12. “no better than the others”: Caroline Frey Winne letters, Frey Family Papers. For Red Fly’s trip to Washington see Edward B. Tuttle, Three Years on the Plains, 102; for Two Lance’s feat see Alfred T. Andreas’s History of the State of Nebraska (The Western Historical Company, 1882), part 4: Lincoln County; Luther Heddon North, Man of the Plains, 125.

13. gophers were dangerous animals: James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, 169.

14. Arapaho women: Lieutenant Henry R. Lemly, “Among the Arapahoes,” Harper’s Magazine (March 1880), 500. “A peculiar and disagreeable odor pervades everything that belongs to them,” Lemly wrote. The origins of the smell included “the tanning and drying of beef or buffalo, cooking, etc.” Lemly was the officer who accompanied the Arapaho from the Red Cloud Agency to the Wind River Reservation in western Wyoming in October 1877.

15. “nauseous-smelling savages”: Francis M. A. Roe, Army Letters from an Officer’s Wife (D. Appleton and Co., 1909), 10.

16. “muskrat and polecat”: St. George Stanley, “Recollections of the Bozeman Trail,” Colorado Miner, 1 June 1878, reprinted in Marc H. Abrams, ed., Crying for Scalps (Abrams Publications, 2007), 31.

17. “I can describe it”: William Hooker, The Bullwhacker: Adventures of a Frontier Freighter (World Book, 1924), 26.

18. “smoke and grease”: Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 183.

19. “at a long distance”: J. Lee Humfreville, Twenty Years Among Our Savage Indians, 80.

20. “It still carries”: The Crazy Horse gift ledger was donated to the Denver Art Museum in 1987. The museum’s acquisition notes include several letters by the grandson and other descendants of Wallihan, who died in 1922. During the Great Sioux War Wallihan was writing for the Cheyenne Ledger under the pen name of “Rapherty.” We shall encounter him again in the latter chapters of this book.

21. “live on such stuff”: Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 59. When he went to the Carlisle Indian school, Ota Kte was assigned “Luther” as his Christian name, and took his father’s name for his last.

22. “Her face was swollen”: John Bratt, Trails of Yesterday, 117ff. Bratt reports that the girl was “a trading squaw”—that is, one of the Indian women regularly sold to passing whites.

23. “yield to the seducer”: John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 70.

24. “a pup to a blanket”: Chicago Tribune, 21 September 1875.

25. “was a pander”: Lemly, “Among the Arapahoes,” p. 494. According to Edward B. Tuttle, it was Father Pierre DeSmet who found Friday as a boy and sent him to be schooled in St. Louis. Three Years on the Plains, 45. Other references to the life of Friday, named for the day of the week on which he was found, are Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 122, and Henry W. Daly, American Legion Monthly (April 1927), reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 250ff.

26. Even General Sheridan: Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 10.

27. “The best-looking women”: Josephine Waggoner, “Life of Spotted Tail,” Josephine Waggoner Papers. “Statement of Carl Iron Shell, 13 May 1969,” quoted in Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 79.

28. “to destroy their villages”: Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 63.

29. Mo-nah-se-tah: Custer and his wife both described this girl at length in memoirs published twenty years apart. See General George Armstrong Custer, My Life on the Plains, 415ff.; and Elizabeth Custer, Following the Guidon (University of Oklahoma, 1966), 90ff.

30. “I will never harm”: Peter J. Powell, Sweet Medicine, vol. 1, p. 120, citing testimony of John Stands in Timber and other Cheyenne.

31. George Bent letter to George Hyde, September 1905, Colorado Historical Society. See also George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 62. The Oglala George Sword notes, “A man may smoke alone but if he is doing so as a ceremony he should smoke the pipe until its contents are all consumed and then he should empty the ashes into the fire so that all may be consumed. This is because if the contents of a pipe that is smoked as a ceremony are emptied on the ground someone may step on them, or spit on them, and this would make Wakan Tanka angry.” Medicine Arrow was missing no bets. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, 76.

32. “From another buckskin”: Custer, My Life on the Plains, 554ff.

33. “If you are acting”: George Bent to George Hyde, September 1905.

34. Other accounts can be found in the testimony of Kate Bighead, She Watched Custer’s Last Battle (Published by the author, 1927), Thomas B. Marquis; “made the peace pipe”: Charles J. Brill, Custer, Black Kettle and the Fight on the Washita (University of Oklahoma, 2001), especially 225ff.; and Vestal, Warpath and Council Fire. George Bird Grinnell says that the Cheyenne knew Medicine Arrow as Rock Forehead (Ho ho ne vi uhk tan uh), The Fighting Cheyennes, 307. Father Powell translates the name as Stone Forehead. In the 1920s Magpie was active in the effort to regain the Black Hills. He was interviewed by Charles J. Brill in 1930.

35. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 600.

36. “the beauty of youth”: Elizabeth Custer, Following the Guidon, 95.

37. “an exceedingly comely”: Custer, My Life on the Plains, 415.

38. “We have knocked”: Myles Keogh letter to Tom Keogh, 9 May 1869, MS 3885, National Library, Dublin, Ireland, quoted in Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 389.

39. “They were accused”: “Life of Turning Bear,” Josephine Waggoner Papers.

40. Letter to President Grant of 8 March 1876, signed by seventeen Brulé chiefs, Spotted Tail Agency files, M234/R841.

41. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report to the Secretary of the Interior, 1863.

42. “Sitting Bull said”: Nelson A. Miles, “Rounding Up the Red Men,” Cosmopolitan (June 1911), quoted in Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 434.

43. “Look at me”: Charles Larpenteur, Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri (University of Nebraska, 1989), 360.

8. “The wild devils of the north.”

1. Dispatch dated 29 September 1875, Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1875.

2. Edgar Beecher Bronson, Reminiscences of a Ranchman (University of Nebraska, 1962), 239.

3. “Digest of Indian Commissioner Reports,” South Dakota Historical Collections 29 (1958), 328. Daniels misleadingly identifies the culprits as the “Bad Face band of the Oglalas.”

4. Little Big Man’s parents and sister are identified in Scissons family genealogy, and in Adeline S. Gnirk, The Saga of Ponca Land (Gregory Times Advocate, 1979). See also undated news clip and handwritten letter by Black Horse, son of Sioux Jim and nephew of Little Big Man, 26 June 1935, both mistakenly placed in the pension file of Navajo Black Horse, C. 2307680. Black Horse was well known during the early reservation period and at various times met General Hugh Scott, Captain Charles King, and Walter Camp. The Colhoff winter count for 1908 gives Sioux Jim’s name as Fishgut. “The younger son [Black Horse] became one of the famous Indian scouts, that went north in the autumn [of 1876] … and took part in the battle against the Cheyennes November 25, where … he fought against his two older brothers.” Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews.

5. Eli Ricker interviews with Charles Turning Hawk, a son of Bad Wound, 19 February 1907, and with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews. For Red Dog’s personal history and the names of his warrior sons see John Colhoff letter to George Hyde, 2 May 1949, author’s possession; and agents’ letters, Elmo Scott Watson Papers, Box 39.

6. Eli Ricker interview with Charles Turning Hawk.

7. Chicago Tribune, 3 September 1875.

8. Ibid.

9. Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 9, 39.

10. Ulysses Grant, Personal Memoirs (Library of America, 1990), 27. Anson Mills, My Story, 32.

11. Some close associates: Red Cloud chose Red Dog and Young Man Afraid; Spotted Tail picked Two Strike and Swift Bear. The understanding of Sioux tribal politics begins with lists of names like this one; in almost every major controversy confronted by Red Cloud we find Red Dog and Young Man Afraid playing a part; the same is true of Spotted Tail, Two Strike, and Swift Bear. Over the decades of the protracted Sioux war between 1854 and 1891 the lists of chiefs and their associates for the most part change only with death; once allied, always allied. The only exception occurs in the last few months of the life of Crazy Horse, who, almost unique among Sioux chiefs, was deserted by many of his friends.

12. Chicago Tribune, 21 September 1875.

13. Ibid., 20 September 1875.

14. In his memoirs the freighter Harry Young remarked, “Another prominent and very bad Indian [at the Red Cloud Agency in 1873] was Red Dog. He always wore a hunting jacket made entirely of scalps that he himself had taken … In the back of this jacket was a woman’s scalp. She in life was a white woman and a blonde. I suppose he killed and scalped her in the Minnesota massacre … as he took a very active part in that affair. I could have purchased that jacket at one time for about five dollars’ worth of powder and lead, and wished in later days that I had done so, as today [1915] it would be worth a large sum of money.” It is possible that this was the jacket which disgusted James Howard of the Chicago Tribune; at the same time it is unlikely Red Dog took any blond scalps in the Minnesota massacre of 1862, in which the Hunkpapas played no part. Harry Young, Hard Knocks, 116.

15. Chicago Tribune, 25 September 1875.

16. James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 207.

17. Dispatch of 27 September, Chicago Tribune, 29 September 1875.

18. Red Cloud’s son was known among whites as Jack Red Cloud; his sister Charging Girl provides his Sioux name. Charging Girl narrative, James H. Cook Papers.

19. Raymond J. Demallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 172.

20. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 209.

21. Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1875.

22. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 9 October 1875, reprinted from the New York Herald, 2 October 1875.

23. Bull Eagle was dragged from the battlefield to safety by White Bull, a fellow Miniconjou. Stanley Vestal, Warpath, 62.

24. William Welsh letter to Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior, 8 July 1872. Copy in author’s possession.

25. Chicago Tribune, 1 October 1875.

26. Although unannounced, President Grant’s policy is clear. It is best described by John S. Gray in Centennial Campaign, 23ff.

9. “This whole business was exceedingly distasteful to me.”

1. “a misunderstanding with”: The words are from John F. Finerty of the Chicago Times, who got to know Grouard well on General Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in the summer of 1876. His account of Grouard’s life is correct in the main, doubtful in some details, but generally in an interesting way. War–Path and Bivouac, 64.

2. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 86–87. Grouard’s marriage to Sally is reported in a John Colhoff letter to Helen Blish, 7 April 1929, “From Eleanor’s notebook,” Mari Sandoz Papers. Details of the killing by Rowland may be found in a voucher issued by the agent, J. J. Saville, to Billy Garnett, for feeding eighty-five Sioux hired to protect the agency, M234/R720; and in a memorandum of 27 November 1875, signed by Cheyenne chiefs who agreed to settle it, Rowland, Saville, and two others; Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720. See also Frank Goings letter to James Cook, 18 August 1934, James C. Cook Papers; and George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 214. For the month of December 1875 Grouard was paid $75.25 as a “laborer,” Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720.

3. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 209.

4. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 88.

5. George Colhoff told Eli Ricker in 1906 that both scouts told him the same thing. Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 215.

6. Martin F. Schmitt, General George Crook, 87. Crook died before he finished telling the story of his life; the surviving manuscript, discovered by its editor in 1942, stops on 18 June 1876, the day after Crook’s fight against Crazy Horse at the Rosebud in Montana.

7. Ibid., 84ff.

8. James Greer to Lieutenant L. W. V. Kennon, Crook’s aide-de-camp in the 1880s. Kennon kept a diary in which he recorded many of Crook’s anecdotes and opinions; if Crook had been a better-known figure Kennon’s lively diary would have long since gone into print. The letter is quoted by Martin Schmitt in his introduction to Crook’s autobiography, ibid., xxii. The diary can be found among Crook’s papers at the Carlisle Barracks.

9. Schenk was interviewed by a reporter for the Washington Chronicle in 1883 and is quoted in ibid.

10. Azor Nickerson, “Major General George Crook and the Indians,” 32, copy in the Walter S. Schuyler Papers.

11. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 5.

12. Ibid., 23–24.

13. The diagnosis was erysipelas, a bacterial infection of the skin and subcutaneous fat. Crook became addicted to the morphine he took for pain. “It was some time before I could sleep well without it.” Ibid., 32.

14. Ibid., 70–71.

15. Alfred Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Dover, 1976), 73–74. Kroeber spells the God’s name as Wohpekumeu. Crook’s account of Indian beliefs and stories is found in Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 68ff.

16. Ibid., 40–41. Rattlesnake venom attacks the blood or the brain, and sometimes both. What Crook suffered was an infection, not the equivalent of a rattlesnake bite.

17. Ibid., 47.

18. Ibid., 52.

19. Ibid., 68. An account of the military careers of the Garnett cousins can be found in Matthew W. Burton, The River of Blood. While Crook was pursuing the Yakima Indians Garnett’s wife and child both died suddenly of a fever at Fort Simcoe; Garnett took their bodies east for burial in Brooklyn, New York’s Greenwood Cemetery, and never returned to California. He resigned his commission at the outset of the Civil War, joined the Confederate Army, and was killed at Corrick’s Ford in 1861.

20. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 62.

21. Ibid., 64.

22. Ibid., 87.

23. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 207.

24. These quotes may be found in ibid., 213, 177, 176.

25. Diary entry for 13 March 1876, ibid., 243.

26. Ibid., 248.

10. “I knew this village by the horses.”

1. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 155ff.

2. These events, sadly typical of the violent life of the plains, are unusual only in being fully recorded. The account given here comes from ibid., 164ff.; Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 396–98; and the Colhoff winter count entry for the year 1875. Colhoff says the dead Loafers included Last Elk, Owl Hoop, and Kills in Timber. Amos Bad Heart Bull recorded their names as Not Afraid of the Enemy (Toka Kapi Pesni), Black Moccasin (Tahanpe Sapa), Takes the Gun Away (Maza Wakan Wicaki; note the word for gun—maza wakan, mysterious or powerful iron); Bear Hoop (Mato Cankleska); Kills in Timber (Canowica Kte); High Eagle (Wanbli Wakatinya); and Last Dog (Sunka Chakela). Colhoff reports that Young Iron lived into old age on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Crow version of this story has been recorded in great detail by Mike Cowdrey, who included a copy in a letter to the author, 2 October 2009. Cowdrey identifies the dismembered Crow as Plain Magpie.

3. Crook’s Powder River expedition of March 1876 is recorded in several places, including Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1; John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 256ff.; Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 88ff.; J. W. Vaughn, The Reynolds Campaign on Powder River (University of Oklahoma, 1961); and Robert Strahorn, dispatches for the Denver Rocky Mountain News and other newspapers, reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 200ff. A standard account of the 1876 campaigns may also be found in Paul Hedren, Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War (University of Oklahoma, 1998).

4. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 231–32; DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 89–90.

5. The Bourke and Grouard accounts are in frequent conflict about the names of creeks and the camping spots of Crook’s column. A close study of both with frequent reference to DeLorme’s Montana Atlas and Gazetteer, which maps the terrain at four miles to the inch, suggests that Grouard was right when he remembered that he followed Hanging Woman Creek up to the headwaters of Otter, not Pumpkin Creek, as claimed by Bourke, which joins the Tongue much further down and runs north-south, not east-west.

6. Strahorn, Rocky Mountain News, 7 April 1876, dispatch datelined 18 March in camp on the Powder River, reprinted in Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 216.

7. Colonel J. J. Reynolds, 3rd Cavalry, to Headquarters, Department of the Platte, 24 February 1877. After the battle Reynolds was formally charged by General Crook for numerous failures, leading to a full-scale court-martial. Copy provided to the author by Jack McDermott. Reynolds was convicted but soon pardoned and allowed to resign by President Grant, who had been his classmate at West Point. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 95ff.

8. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 97.

11. “He is no good and should be killed.”

1. “The soldiers are right here!”: Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 164.

2. According to He Dog: Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 391–92.

3. “It is spring”: Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 25. Bourke in his diary confirms that two lodges of Indians “from Red Cloud Agency … had come in that morning to trade.” Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 255.

4. “Two Moons had”: Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 164ff.

5. only one Indian: The dead Cheyenne was identified by George Bent in a letter to George Hyde, 18 April 1914, Beinecke Library, Yale University, cited in J. J. Vaughn, The Reynolds Campaign on Powder River (University of Oklahoma, 1961), 129. The Cheyenne Black Eagle told George Bird Grinnell that during the fight he was told two Indians had been killed—a Cheyenne and a Sioux. Amos Bad Heart Bull, a nephew of He Dog, drew a large picture of the battle in which he located the body of only one dead Indian—the one whose body was found on the shoulder overlooking the camp. Wooden Leg reports that two Indians were wounded in the fighting as well. Grinnell, Notebook 347, Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, cited in Jerome A. Greene, Lakota and Cheyenne, 10. Lieutenant William Philo Clark recorded that “one Sioux and one squaw” were killed in the fight; it is possible that she had died by the time he began to question Indians at the Red Cloud Agency in the summer of 1877; Clark, “Sioux War Report,” 14 September 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received.

6. “I can never”: Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 172.

7. White Bull, Box 105, Notebooks 5 and 8, Walter S. Campbell Collection, University of Oklahoma, quoted in Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 130. Grouard’s presence at the fight was the news of the plains, and several Indians reported his shouting at the outset of a fight. For the belief of some whites that Grouard was warning, not challenging or taunting, the Indians, see George Boyd, Bismarck Tribune, 8 November 1876, quoted in John S. Gray, “Frank Grouard: Kanaka Scout or Mulatto Renegade?” Westerners Brand Book (October 1959).

8. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 254.

9. Ibid.; in transferring his diary entry into his book, On the Border with Crook, John G. Bourke says the victim was “cut limb from limb,” 279.

10. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 104.

11. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 278.

12. Strahorn, Rocky Mountain News, 7 April 1876, reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 217ff.

13. Caroline Frey Winne to Samuel Ludlow Frey, 16 April 1876, Frey Family Papers.

14. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 257.

15. P. H. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 166.

16. Ibid., 177, 180.

17. Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 2.

18. Shelby Foote, The Civil War (Random House, 1974), vol. 3, p. 244.

19. Rutherford B. Hayes, Diary and Letters Web site of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, vol. 5, pp. 463–64, posted on the Internet by the Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio.

20. Martin F. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 82.

21. Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 554.

22. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 28–29. Something of Sheridan’s character is revealed here too; in his memoirs he reports writing to Grant “the dispatch announcing we had sent Early’s army whirling up the valley.” In fact he was borrowing the phrase from his chief of staff, who got into all the newspapers at the time with his report, “We have just sent them whirling through Winchester.” Sheridan’s words at the time were more prosaic, saying that “after a most stubborn and sanguinary engagement … [we] completely defeated him.” Civil War generals were mainly proud as peacocks, Sheridan as openly as any, Crook silently within. See Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 554.

23. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 127.

24. Ibid., 131.

25. Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 557.

26. Ibid., 540.

27. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 133.

28. Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 570.

29. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 134.

30. An account of the origin of Read’s poem can be found in John Fleischman, “The Object at Hand,” Smithsonian (November 1996). The poem itself has been often reprinted, and can be found on the Internet.

31. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 35. “In consequence of the enemy’s being so well protected from a direct assault, I resolved … to use again a turning column against his left, as had been done on the 19th at Opequon [Winchester].” Well, yes, maybe; Sheridan was in command; it was his decision that determined what was done. But all the men who had been present on the night in question understood that putting things this way was Sheridan’s way of grabbing the credit for himself—for both battles. The memoirs were not published until 1888, so the full flower of Crook’s anger waited until then. But from the beginning he knew he was being pushed into the background.

12. “Crook was bristling for a fight.”

1. John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 6. Finerty was the only correspondent to write a book about the campaign.

2. Ibid., 69–70.

3. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 288.

4. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, 272ff.

5. Martin F. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 189ff.

6. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 296.

7. Hastings letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Q. Smith, 24 January 1876, Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720.

8. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews.

9. Jordan letter to General Luther Bradley at Fort Laramie, 24 April 1876, Secretary of the Interior, Indian Division, Letters Received, M825/R10.

10. Cutting of rations and the hunger that followed was a principal cause of the so-called ghost dance outbreak of 1890–91. Once the buffalo were gone, hunger on the reservations sometimes ended in outright starvation; deaths especially among the elderly in remote cabins at Pine Ridge were reported regularly through the 1930s.

11. Hastings letter to CIA, 5 June 1876, Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Red Cloud Agency, M234/R720.

12. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 171; Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews. Jack Red Cloud’s Sioux name is found in the Charging Girl narrative, James H. Cook Papers.

13. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 290. See also Paul L. Hedren, Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War, 100, and DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 170.

14. “Expedition Excerpts,” Robert Strahorn writing as Alter Ego, Cheyenne Daily Leader, 9 April 1876. This passage ended a paragraph on Grouard lifted verbatim by John F. Finerty for use in War-Path and Bivouac, 64.

15. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 109.

16. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 68. Bourke in his diary suggests that the speech maker was Good Heart.

17. “Major General George Crook and the Indians,” Azor Nickerson, copy in the Walter S. Schuyler Papers, 24. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 315.

18. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 274, 365. Some observers thought a rawhide shield held at the right angle could even deflect a lead musket ball, especially if some thrifty opponent had reduced the charge to save powder.

19. Ibid., 294–95. Bourke gives a compressed version of the visit in On the Border with Crook, 292.

20. Richard Nines interview with Woman Dress, 16 February 1912, American Museum of Natural History, quoted in slightly different form in Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 95. See also Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 52–53.

21. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 53. Later Yellow Grass changed his name to Long Hair, claiming to be in spiritual communion with the spirit of Custer. Several reports of this man were received by the officer commanding at the Cheyenne River Agency on the Missouri. Fool Bear and Important Man to Colonel W. H. Wood, 11th Infantry, at the Cheyenne River Agency, Intelligence Report, 24 January 1877; Eagle Shield to Colonel W. H. Wood, 11th Infantry, at the Cheyenne River Agency, Intelligence Report, 16 February 1877, both Sioux War files.

22. Beginning in the early 1870s the noted Yale paleontologist O. C. Marsh enlisted the help of Red Cloud on bone-hunting expeditions in Nebraska. See Mark Jaffe, The Gilded Dinosaur (Crown, 2000).

23. Walter S. Schuyler, “Notes on Indians,” 20 December 1876, Walter S. Schuyler Papers.

13. “I give you these because they have no ears.”

1. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 296; Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 305. Little Hawk (born c. 1848) gave an account to George Bird Grinnell in 1908; it is found among the Grinnell Papers and also in Jerome A. Greene, Lakota and Cheyenne, 21ff.

2. One Bull, a nephew of Sitting Bull, described the meeting of the chiefs and Sitting Bull’s dream to Walter Campbell (Stanley Vestal) about 1930; the latter’s notes can be found in the Walter S. Campbell Papers and are summarized in Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull, 148, and Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 136.

3. Information from White Bull and One Bull to Walter Campbell, Walter S. Campbell Papers, summarized in Vestal, Sitting Bull, 149–51, and in Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 137–38.

4. Little Hawk account, Greene, Lakota and Cheyenne, 21ff.

5. Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 198. See also Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 140, and Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 172ff.

6. The numbers of fighting men given here can be found in John S. Gray, Centennial Campaign, 120, Charles A. Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 43, and Stanley Vestal, Warpath, 187.

7. Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, 39. Discussion of the dances can be found in Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 82ff.

8. The first translation is from G. H. Pond, the second from Alice Fletcher. Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music, 205–06.

9. The literature on the subject of Sioux religious thinking is truly large, but a good place to begin is the work of James Walker, a medical doctor who spent two decades on the Pine Ridge Reservation beginning in the 1890s. The major work published in his lifetime is The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, published in 1917. Also important are Walker’s posthumous collection of materials edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine Jahner, Lakota Belief and Ritual; Sioux Indian Religion (University of Nebraska, 1980), edited by DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks; two books by Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), and Animals of the Soul: Sacred Animals of the Oglala Sioux (Element, 1992), and Frances Densmore’s Teton Sioux Music.

10. A detailed drawing of White Bull in battle on the Rosebud, complete with wotawe, can be found in Joseph White Bull, Lakota Warrior (University of Nebraska, 1968), translated and edited by James H. Howard, plate 13 and pp. 48–49. In the drawing he shows himself carrying a carbine; further details are recorded in Vestal, Warpath, 186. In this account White Bull says he was armed with a seventeen-shot repeating rifle, probably a Henry, but his own drawing clearly depicts a carbine.

11. William K. Powers reports that another name for Chips was Tahunska (His Leggins), Yuwipi, 90. Chips told Eli Ricker that he was also known as Encouraging Bear.

12. Robert H. Ruby, The Oglala Sioux: Warriors in Transition (Vantage Press, 1955), 52. Ruby was the agency doctor at Pine Ridge in the early 1950s, when the name and influence of Horn Chips were still strong. Medicine men of that period considered him to have been the founder of yuwipi medicine, and they told Ruby that it was Horn Chips who had first used the procedure for a vision quest—hanbleceya—which became standard. William Powers, who was often at Pine Ridge and knew many of the old-time medicine men during the same period, thinks Ruby’s informant was George Plenty Wolf.

A full account of a vision quest supervised by Horn Chips may be found in Royal B. Hassrick, The Sioux, 272ff. The event is undated but presumably occurred during the reservation period (after 1878) as Horn Chips directed the supplicant, Black Horse, to the top of Eagle Nest Butte, a frequent fasting site a few miles south of Wanblee on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

13. He Dog describes the whistle, the feather, and the rock worn under Crazy Horse’s left arm. Red Feather confirms the stone, adding the detail that it was white. Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 12–13. There is an extensive discussion of sacred stones and the songs associated with them in Densmore, Teton Sioux Music, 205ff.

14. Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 208.

15. Not to be confused with He Dog’s brother of the same name. The Brulé Short Bull was a leading figure in the ghost dance episode which ended with the fight at Wounded Knee in 1890. Walker arrived at Pine Ridge in 1896. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, xiii, 47–48.

16. Peter Bordeaux was a nephew of Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and of Louis Bordeaux, one of the interpreters who were deeply involved in events leading up to the death of Crazy Horse and were present the night he was killed. Charles Fire Thunder (1890–1974) was the son of a leading Oglala who had taken part in the Horse Creek fight and the Bozeman War and was later an important figure in the early reservation period. The elder Fire Thunder (1849–1937) was a member of Big Road’s Oyukhpe band, and was a friend of Crazy Horse. Much of what these and other informants of their generation had to say about Crazy Horse is confirmed by contemporary accounts, which argues that their other claims also should be considered seriously. Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill An Eagle, 79, 89.

17. Walter Camp interview with Horn Chips, c. 11 July 1910, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 89. Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 14 February 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 273ff.

18. Eagle Elk interview, 27 November 1944, John Neihardt Papers, no. 3716.

19. Clark Wissler, Field Notes, 197. The same summer Thunder Bear told Wissler he also had the power to split storms. In 1974 the writer and artist Thomas E. Mails said he was a witness when the medicine man and thunder dreamer Fools Crow split a storm threatening the success of a fair on the Rosebud reservation. Mails, Fools Crow, 2–3. See also Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual (University of Nebraska, 1980), 153–54.

14. “I found it a more serious engagement than I thought.”

1. John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 55. The best modern account of the battle of the Rosebud was for many years J. W. Vaughn, With Crook at the Rosebud (Stackpole Books, 1956). Much additional information may be found in John D. McDermott, General George Crook’s 1876 Campaigns: A Report Prepared for the American Battlefield Protection Program (Frontier Heritage Alliance, 2000).

2. Lieutenant James E. H. Foster, 3rd Cavalry, Chicago Tribune, 5 July 1876, reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 265ff. According to Bourke, Foster was also an artist and hoped to sell his sketches to Harper’s Weekly. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 308.

3. Wayne R. Kime, ed., The Powder River Expedition Journals of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).

4. Luther Heddon North, Man of the Plains, 207.

5. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 80. See also John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 310.

6. Anson Mills relates that Crook was playing cards; Bourke reports that he was with him near the spring when the first shots were heard. Anson Mills, My Story, 405. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 314.

7. Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 117.

8. Official Report of Captain A. S. Burt, 9th Infantry, 20 June 1876, reprinted in Vaughn, With Crook at the Rosebud, 225.

9. Henry thought he owed his life to the seventeen-year-old son of Washakie, who was taking part in his first battle. Harper’s Weekly, 7 July 1895.

10. Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 200.

11. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 85.

12. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 326.

13. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 86–87; Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 326–27.

14. Vaughn, With Crook at the Rosebud, 63.

15. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 90–91.

16. He meant, of course, that he was sure he was near the village—he almost had it, he was about to have it. But there was no village there. Anson Mills, My Story, 408.

17. Ibid., 409.

18. Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 267. Crook confirms Pourier’s story with two brief remarks in his official report of 20 June 1876, saying he had been convinced the hostiles had the canyon “well covered. Our Indians refusing to go into it saying it would be certain death … to go down the canyon to the supposed location of the village.” Quoted in Vaughn, With Crook at the Rosebud, 216. Pourier told Ricker that Crook was also persuaded to drop his plan because his men had run short of ammunition, a claim supported by Grouard. The latter’s account of Mills’s venture down the canyon is confusing; it seems evident that DeBarthe did not grasp the sequence of events. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 116–22.

19. Mills, My Story, 408.

20. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 328.

21. Mills, My Story, 409.

22. Daniel Pearson, “Military Notes, 1876,” U.S. Cavalry Journal (September 1899), quoted in Vaughn, With Crook at the Rosebud, 81–82.

23. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 96. Bourke quotation from Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 330.

24. Arnold’s story of the campaign can be found in Josephine Waggoner, “Rekindling Campfires,” an account in pencil of the life of Ben Arnold, South Dakota Historical Society, Pierre, South Dakota. Waggoner’s manuscript was the basis, inadequately acknowledged, for Lewis Crawford’s book of the same title, first published in 1926. It has been reissued with a foreword by Paul Hedren as The Exploits of Ben Arnold (University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

25. Crook to Sheridan, 19 June 1876, quoted in Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 335.

15. “I am in constant dread of an attack.”

1. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, 339ff.

2. John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 107–11.

3. Crook’s reaction is found in ibid., 129. Finerty misdates the arrival of Sheridan’s message as having come with news of the Custer fight on 10 July. Bourke’s diary makes clear that it was awaiting Crook in camp on 4 July. The text of Sheridan’s message comes from Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 354.

4. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 356.

5. Josephine Waggoner, “Rekindling Campfires,” South Dakota Historical Society, Pierre, South Dakota.

6. Thomas Tobey, handwritten diary, Box 3, Folder 98, WAMSS S-1354, Beinecke Library, Yale University; Calhoun’s Appointment, Commissions, and Personal File, 569 ACP 1875, National Archives.

7. Tobey diary. Bourke’s diary positively identifies Arnold as one of those who brought the news.

8. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 360ff.

9. Ibid., 361. The numbers cited by Bourke are wrong but the account of the fight—Custer wiped out, Reno battered but alive—is roughly correct.

10. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 334.

11. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 368.

12. Davenport’s dispatch in the New York Herald of 6 July 1876 has been reprinted in Jerome A. Greene, Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 26ff. See also Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 381–82.

13. Josephine Waggoner, “Rekindling Campfires.” Crook was explaining to Arnold why he didn’t send out a detachment to find the Indians who had killed a teamster near Laramie that spring.

14. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 381–82.

15. Charles King, Campaigning with Crook (Harper and Brothers, 1890), 158.

16. Ibid., 58.

17. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 46, 75.

18. Ibid., 52.

19. Ibid., 83. Bourke does not include this remark in his later book, On the Border with Crook.

20. King, Campaigning with Crook, 87.

21. Robinson, ed., vol. 2, p. 72; King, Campaigning with Crook, 121. I am indebted to Mark Nelson for copies of contemporary newspaper articles and other materials he has collected for a projected biography of Clark.

22. Robinson, ed., vol. 2, p. 84; Thomas Burrowes, Appointments, Commissions, and Personal File, 681 ACP 1872, National Archives.

23. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 89.

24. Ibid., 57.

25. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 182–83.

16. “General Crook ought to be hung.”

1. Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 184.

2. The Lakota name for the Moreau River in South Dakota. Lakota names for natural features can be found in Eugene Buechel’s Lakota-English dictionary and in Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, The Dakota’s Heritage (Brevet Press, 1973), an invaluable compendium of place-names.

3. Stanley Vestal, Warpath, 206ff. It is possible that Dog Goes is an alternate name or a variant translation for some better-known Oglala.

4. Charles M. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 93.

5. Interviews with Eagle Shield, Swollen Face (Ite Po), and Red Horse, Colonel W. H. Wood letters to AAG, Department of Dakota, 19, 21, and 27 February 1877, Sioux War files. Colonel Wood, in command of the Cheyenne River Agency on the Missouri, filed a number of detailed intelligence reports based on conversations with surrendered hostiles during the months following the Custer fight. Together these dispatches offer one of the best accounts of Indian thinking in the last phase of the Sioux War.

6. Oliver C. C. Pollock, “With the Third Cavalry in 1876,” reprinted in Jerome A. Greene, Indian War Veterans: Memories of Army Life and Campaigns in the West, 1864–1898 (Savas Beatie, 2007), 103ff.

7. Walter S. Schuyler letter to his father, 1 November 1876, Walter S. Schuyler Papers.

8. David Mears, “Campaigning Against Crazy Horse,” NSHS Proceedings No. 15 (1907), reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 465.

9. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 86ff. See also John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 362ff., and John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 182ff. The best overall account of this episode is Jerome Greene, Slim Buttes, An Episode of the Great Sioux War (University of Oklahoma, 1982).

10. Letter of Samuel Sumner to King, 4 September 1918, James H. Cook Papers.

11. John S. Gray, Centennial Campaign, 245; Charles M. Robinson III, General Crook and the Western Frontier, 194.

12. “Mills on Slim Buttes,” Walter Camp, 24 January 1914, in the Robert Willison Collection, Denver Public Library. Quoted in Greene, Slim Buttes, 54.

13. Ibid., 54. See also Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 153.

14. James H. Cook, undated note in James H. Cook papers, Box 92.

15. “Proceedings of an Army Retiring Board … 25 April 1887,” James Kennington personal file, 242 ACP 1871, National Archives.

16. James H. Cook, undated note in James C. Cook Papers.

17. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 157. All accounts of the fight at Slim Buttes make mention of this incident. See also Greene, Slim Buttes, 75; Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 109ff.; Charles King, Campaigning with Crook (Harper and Brothers, 1890), 111ff.

18. In 1927, the year before he died, Pourier was asked by a newspaper reporter at his home near Manderson, South Dakota, if he had ever killed and scalped an Indian in combat: “ ‘Only once,’ he said, ‘and I do thank god for it. I killed that red devil and I skelped him, too, right on the spot.’ Turning to his son he added: ‘Pete, that Injun was some kin to your ma, second cousin or something.’ ” L. A. Lincoln, “Pourier Tells,” Rocky Mountain News, 13 November 1927, copy in John Hunton Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. According to William Garnett, the Indian killed by Pourier was Iron Shield. William Garnett letter to Valentine McGillycuddy, 21 April 1926.

19. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 110.

20. Jesse Brown and A. M. Willard, The Black Hills Trails (Rapid City Journal Company, 1924), 234, cited in Greene, Slim Buttes, 168.

21. It seems likely that this man was the American Horse who was a son of old Smoke, brother of Charging Bear, who was captured at Slim Buttes and soon enlisted as a scout with Crook’s command. Wallace Amiotte, letter to George Hyde, 1 March 1951, author’s collection.

22. King, Campaigning with Crook, 131.

23. Captain Andrew S. Burt, Cincinnati Commercial, 17 September 1876, quoted in Greene, Slim Buttes, 72.

24. Greene, Slim Buttes, 70ff. and footnotes.

25. The text of both passes was printed in the New York Tribune, 18 September 1876, and is quoted in ibid., 73.

26. King, Campaigning with Crook, 126.

27. General Hugh Scott letter, National Archives, quoted by J. W. Vaughn, With Crook at the Rosebud (Stackpole Books, 1956), p. 40.

28. Edward S. Curtis, North American Indian (University Press, 1908), vol. 3, p. 21.

29. King, Campaigning with Crook, 104; Walter S. Schuyler letter to his father, 1 November 1876, Walter S. Schuyler Papers.

30. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 191.

31. King, Campaigning with Crook, 108.

32. Captain Andrew Burt, Cincinnati Commercial, 17 September 1876, quoted in Greene, Slim Buttes, 172.

33. Private Alfred McMackin, Ellis County Star, 12 October 1876, quoted in Robinson, General Crook and the Western Frontier, 195.

34. Daniel C. Pearson, “Military Notes,” U.S. Cavalry Association Journal (September 1899), reprinted in Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 236ff

35. King, Campaigning with Crook, 159. A fuller version of the song can be found in Robinson, General Crook and the Western Frontier, 195.

36. Sheridan to Crook, 11 September 1876, Office of the Adjutant General, Letters Received, M666/R271.

37. New York Times, 11 October 1876.

38. Dispatch from Custer City in the Black Hills, dated 22 September and published in the New York Times, 12 October 1876, quoted in Greene, Slim Buttes, 112.

39. Caroline Frey Winne letter, 29 October 1876, Frey Family Papers.

17. “You won’t get anything to eat! You won’t get anything to eat!”

1. Leander P. Richardson, “A Trip to the Black Hills,” Scribner’s Monthly (April 1877).

2. Garnett was married twice again: to Emma Mills in 1877 and to Filla (known as Fillie), a second daughter of Nick Janis and his Oglala wife, Martha He Bear, in 1884. William Garnett pension file, NA.

3. Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, 67.

4. Henry Benjamin Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate (Macmillan, 1899), chap. 25.

5. Daily State Journal (Nebraska), dispatch datelined Red Cloud Agency, Nebraska, 20 September; issue of 23 September 1876.

6. Charles A. Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains. For Sioux Jim’s Lakota name see Helen Blish notes of interview with Short Bull, 23 July 1929, Mari Sandoz Papers; Colhoff winter count for 1908; and John Colhoff interview with Scudder Mekeel, September 1931, AMNH. Short Man pension file, National Archives. Sioux Jim’s son Black Horse, who said he was a nephew of Little Big Man, signed on as a scout that fall and remained a well-known figure among the Pine Ridge Oglala into the 1920s. Several sources identify Sioux Jim as in fact half Cheyenne, as was Little Big Man. Undated news clip and handwritten letter by Black Horse, son of Sioux Jim, 26 June 1935, both mistakenly placed in pension file of Navajo Black Horse, C. 2307680, National Archives. See also Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 96–97.

7. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, 88.

8. Others were American Horse, Afraid of Bear, Red Dog, Little Wound, Fire Thunder, Swift Bear, Red Leaf, and Three Bears. Daily State Journal(Nebraska), dispatch from Red Cloud Agency.

9. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 1907, 87–89.

10. Whipple, Lights and Shadows, chap. 25.

11. Statement of Mrs. James Redwing, granddaughter of Big Bat Pourier, Don Russell Papers.

12. George H. Holliday, On the Plains in ’65 (n.p. 1883), 90–91, quoted in John D. McDermott, Circle of Fire, 154; George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 282.

13. George Crook letter to General O. O. Howard, 20 February 1883, George Crook letter book 1, no. 30, Rutherford B. Hayes Memorial Library, Fremont, Ohio.

14. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 9ff.

15. Luther North, Man of the Plains, 202ff.

16. Unsigned report, Sydney Telegraph, 27 October 1876, Elmo Scott Watson Papers, Box 42.

17. Lieutenant H. R. Lemly calls Swift Bear “a very eloquent Indian, who was chiefly responsible in having Spotted Tail declared chief.” Lemly, writing in the New York Sun, 14 September 1877, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 238ff.

18. Paper prepared by George Sword and Clarence Three Stars, James R. Walker, Lakota Society, 87. Sword took his brother’s name in 1877; before that he was known as Hunts the Enemy. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 45.

19. Red Cloud testimony in depredation claim of John Richard Jr., 17 July 1896, RG 123, Claim 3373. See also R. Eli Paul, ed., Autobiography of Red Cloud, 34ff.; Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, 36; and Edward S. Curtis, North American Indian (University Press, 1908), vol. 3, p. 187. Edward B. Tuttle, Three Years on the Plains, 199. On a passenger train the chief was asked how many white men he had killed. To the interpreter traveling with him, Charles P. Jordan, who had married his niece, Red Cloud said, “Tell your friend I have been in 80 battles.” Charles P. Jordan Papers, quoted in Autobiography of Red Cloud, 11.

20. Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 61.

21. A large glass plate negative of Morrow’s photo, broken cleanly in two, can be found in the Elmo Scott Watson Papers. See generally Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews.

18. “When spring comes, we are going to kill them like dogs.”

1. Colonel Mackenzie was so angry at Howard that he asked Lieutenant Frank L. Shoemaker to take a formal affidavit from Garnett; Letters Received, Secretary of the Interior, Indian Division, M825/R10. Bourke lists fifty-four names of Sioux scouts who served on the Powder River expedition. See John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 391. See also Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, and Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 166.

2. Affidavit of Lieutenant Henry W. Lawton, Camp Robinson. Document included in Garnett’s pension file, National Archives.

3. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, The Indian Interviews, 25. See also Richard Irving Dodge, Powder River Journals, 81; and Short Man pension file, National Archives.

4. W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, published in 1885. This is one of the two or three best accounts of Plains Indian life and culture, and its numerous anecdotes are the closest Clark ever came to writing a memoir. It should be read as a book, from start to finish, and not simply consulted. It is evident that Clark kept a diary, but it seems to have been lost at the time of his death; only one brief section, describing his trip down the Yellowstone to join Crook in August 1876, can be found in the Montana Historical Society. Garnett identifies Rowland as Clark’s tutor in sign talk.

5. In September 1878, only two years out of West Point, Lieutenant Hugh Scott lived for three days with Red Cloud in his lodge. Like Clark, Scott was an enthusiastic student of plains sign language and remarked that he had never known another man to sign in such a tight circle. An extensive dictionary of signs may be found in Scott’s papers at the Library of Congress. Hugh L. Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier, 96–97.

6. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, The Indian Interviews, 45ff.

7. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 405.

8. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 164ff. Grouard said he had lost his voice, but does not identify his illness further. Baptiste Pourier said the Sandwich Islander was often laid low during the summer campaign by a case of syphilis.

9. Luther North, Man of the Plains, 207.

10. “Garnett says Clark had the most gratifying reputation all around, among white men and Indians, of any officer he ever knew. He was a brave, generous and noble man and officer.” Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, The Indian Interviews, 38. Garnett’s view was confirmed by Lieutenant Jesse Lee, later the acting agent at the Spotted Tail Agency, who wrote, “Lieutenant Clark possessed in high degree a personal magnetism and pleasing manner that charmed everyone … He was successful in almost every move.” Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1914), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 530. Bourke provides the full text of Special Order No. 1; Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, 152–53.

11. Historians have long assumed that the Plains Indians acquired horses about 1730–1750; the independent scholar Mike Cowdrey argues that the Brulé obtained horses in the 1690s, and that Pawnee on horses attacked the Oto in Iowa in the same decade. I accept Cowdrey’s date.

12. North, Man of the Plains, 209.

13. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, 167.

14. Ibid., 170–71.

15. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 15–16. It is instructive to read Bourke’s diary entry for 19 November 1876 beside Garnett’s memory of what was said in 1907; the interpreter included every point recorded by Bourke at the time, as well as a number of others.

16. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, 173. On the way north to join Crook’s expedition Li-heris-oo-la-shar, also known under his American name, Frank White, had been serving as sergeant of scouts. One day the detachment of Pawnee scouts passed Shell Creek, site of a long-ago Pawnee victory over the Ponca which was the subject of a song that Luther North particularly liked. North called on the scouts to sing this famous song and was baffled when all talking ceased and no one sang. North was about to repeat his call when Li-heris-oo-la-shar quietly explained: “Ah-ti-us[Father], we have a Ponca with us. It would make him feel badly if we sang that song.” Robert Bruce, The Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts (Nebraska State Historical Society, 1932), 42; North, Man of the Plains, 200.

17. Wayne R. Kime, ed., The Powder River Expedition Journals of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, 74–75. See also Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, 33 Years Among Our Wild Indians (Archer House, 1959), 200, 368ff.

18. There are several books about Pickett’s charge, but no account captures it more dramatically than Shelby Foote’s in The Civil War (Random House, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 531ff. The life of Richard B. Garnett and of his cousin Robert, also a Confederate general and also killed in the war, are the subject of Matthew W. Burton, The River of Blood.

19. He later changed his name to Red Horse after the death of his father of that name. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, The Indian Interviews, 26.

20. Ibid., 24. See also Robinson, ed., The Diaries, 176; Kime, ed., The Powder River Journals, 78.

21. Kime, ed., The Powder River Journals, 82.

22. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 26. Bourke does not mention the Sioux role in planning the fight. In his report later to Sheridan, Crook said Sitting Bear “gave information which determined me to carry out my original plan (operating against the Cheyennes first).” It is hard not to conclude that Crook shaded his report to conceal his debt to an Indian strategist. See also Robinson, ed., The Diaries, 194.

23. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 28. A full treatment of this fight may be found in Jerome Greene, Morning Star Dawn (University of Oklahoma), 2003).

24. Ibid., 29.

25. Ibid., 31.

26. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 82. “Thenceforward the two were very much together,” Clark wrote, “and became brothers by adoption.” This ceremony was known as hunka.

27. It is probable that these two men were the keeper of the sacred buffalo hat and a helper carrying a banner fringed with buffalo tails called nimhoyoh (the turner), which had the power to ward off danger. Mike Cowdrey identified these two figures for me. Coal Bear was the keeper of the hat; George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 370. For a general discussion of the sacred arrows and buffalo hat of the Cheyenne see Peter J. Powell, Sweet Medicine.

28. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 14ff.; DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 168; Jerry Roche, New York Herald, 11 December 1876, quoted in Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 385.

29. Bourke says three of Dull Knife’s sons were killed in the fight; Garnett says two, and since he knew both I trust his number. J. G. Bourke, “Mackenzie’s Last Fight with the Cheyennes,” Journal of the Military Service Institution 11 (1890).

30. Bourke later gave the necklace, previously owned by High Wolf, to the Smithsonian. These discoveries are recorded in Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 196; Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 403; Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett; and Jerry Roche, New York Herald, 11 December 1876, 428.

31. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 35–36. See also Eddie Herman letter to George Hyde, 1 March 1951, and John Colhoff letter to George Hyde, 30 May 1949, author’s collection.

32. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 38.

33. Ibid., 43.

34. Garnett says it was the Indians who proposed to talk in the hostiles; Bourke credits General Crook, but Crook’s dispatches to Sheridan tell the story: before the meeting with the scouts on 20 or 21 December he was planning to press on after the hostiles. Afterward he planned to give talk a chance. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 222.

35. Crook’s handwritten text was preserved by Bourke in his diary, ibid., 224–26.

19. “All the people here are in rags.”

1. A good summary of the Cheyenne’s condition can be found in Jerome A. Greene, Morning Star Dawn (University of Oklahoma, 2003), 160ff. Luther North later wrote: “Those poor Cheyennes were out in that weather with nothing to eat, and no shelter (we had burned their village) and hardly any clothing. It was said that many children died. It makes me sort of sick to think of it.” Luther Heddon North, Man of the Plains, 217. A few days after the fight Lieutenant Bourke was visited in his tent “one dismally cold night” by Three Bears. The scout’s “eyes were moist, and he shook his head mournfully as he said, ‘Cheyenne papoose heap hung’y.’ ” John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 407. Other details may be found in Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1877, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews; Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3; George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 381–82; John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty, Cheyenne Memories, 218. Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 37. The Cheyenne Wooden Leg was fulsome in his praise of the Oglala’s generosity; Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 287.

2. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3.

3. Colonel W. H. Wood letter from Cheyenne Agency, 24 January 1877, to AAG, Department of Dakota, Sioux War files. See also Harry Anderson, “Sioux Pictorial Account,” North Dakota History (July 1955); and William Garnett letter to V. T. McGillycuddy, 21 April 1926, copy in Fort Robinson Museum.

4. Colonel W. H. Wood report to the Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Missouri, 28 December 1876, from the Cheyenne River Agency. A son of the Miniconjou chief White Robe, recently arrived at the Cheyenne River Agency, told Wood that some of the chiefs “want to quit fighting and come in.”

5. Spotted Elk interview, Colonel W. H. Wood letter to the AAG, Department of Dakota, 1 March 1877, Sioux War files. Further accounts of this episode can be found in Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 199–200; Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 37; and John F. Finerty, War–Path and Bivouac, 262.

6. Gets Fat with Beef, Red Skirt, Hollow Horn, and Bull Eagle are the names provided by Black Elk; DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 199–200. Colonel W. H. Wood, quoting the Miniconjou Fool Bear and Important Man, gives the names of the peace talkers as Sitting Bull the Good from the Red Cloud Agency, and the Yearling, Fat Hide, and Bad Leg, all from the Cheyenne River Agency of the Miniconjou.

7. The core of the story is related by Black Elk, DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 199–200. A good summary of the sources for this episode can be found in Jerome A. Greene, Yellowstone Command (University of Nebraska, 1991), 277–78; and Kingsley Bray, Crazy Horse, 447–48. See also Thomas B. Marquis, Memoirs of a White Crow Indian (University of Nebraska, 1974), 270; and Mari Sandoz, Hostiles and Friendlies(University of Nebraska, 1959), 87ff.

8. Colonel W. H. Wood report from Cheyenne River Agency to the AAG, Department of the Missouri, 24 January 1877, Sioux War files.

9. Ibid. See also the account of this man given by Frank Grouard to Lieutenant Bourke, 8 August 1876, Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 52ff.; and Eagle Shield to Colonel W. H. Wood, Cheyenne River Agency, Intelligence Report, 16 February 1877, Sioux War files.

10. Colonel W. H. Wood report to the AAG, Department of the Missouri, 24 January 1877, from Cheyenne River Agency, Sioux War files.

11. Red Horse and White Eagle interviews, Colonel W. H. Wood letter to the AAG, Department of Dakota, 27 February 1877, Sioux War files.

12. The capture of the women is described in Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 384; Luther S. Kelly, Yellowstone Kelly (University of Nebraska, 1973), 169; and Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 290. The whole episode, culminating in the fight at Wolf Mountain on 7 January 1877, is related in Greene, Yellowstone Command, 160ff.

13. Report of Colonel W. H. Wood, 26 February 1877, Sioux War files; Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, 3.

14. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 202.

15. Rocky Mountain News, 15 February 1877.

16. Sheridan to Crook, 5 February 1877, telegrams from the field, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 48.

17. George Crook letter on behalf of Lieutenant Jesse Lee, 27 July 1888, 2141 ACP 1878, National Archives.

18. Sword’s autobiography names himself, Crow Fire, Running Hawk, Black Mountain Goat, Iron Shell, High Bear, Long Whirlwind, Inside the Curtain, He Touches Thick Blood, Tail Less [Few Tails], Good Rump, Bear’s Nostrils, Hopa, Two Faces, and Tall Man, with one or two others whose names Sword had forgotten. “Sword’s Acts Related,” translated by Ella Deloria, Colorado Historical Society. Short Bull named two of the Indians with Sword as Crow Hawk and Running Fire, but Running Hawk and Crow Fire seem to be correct. Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, 37.

Ella Deloria, who never met Sword, translates his penultimate name as “Enemy Bait,” but Billy Garnett remembered it as Hunts the Enemy. I have elected to trust Garnett because Garnett was the interpreter who helped Lieutenant Clark reenlist Hunts the Enemy as a scout in March 1877; because Army enlistment records carry his name as Hunts the Enemy; because Garnett is our source for dating a change of name from Hunts the Enemy to Sword in 1877; because Garnett knew Sword from the 1860s until his death in 1910; and because Garnett in effect gave hundreds of Oglala their permanent white names by translating them into English for white officials. In quoting from Ella Deloria’s translation of Sword’s autobiography I have therefore silently replaced “Enemy Bait” with “Hunts the Enemy,” for reasons of clarity and consistency.

19. Major Horace Neide letter to J. G. Bourke, 10 February 1877, Sioux War files, M1495/R4.

20. “Sword’s Acts Related.”

21. Eli Ricker interview with George Sword, 29 April 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 327ff. Statement of George Sword, 5 September 1896, Bruce Means, interpreter, James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, 74.

22. Ella Deloria translates the words of Sword as “The Indians’ president” but it is clear that he meant the customary “Great Father.” “Sword’s Acts Related.”

23. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1877, 59.

24. At the Little Bighorn Iron Hawk suffered a wound typical for a man on horseback shot by an enemy on the ground—the bullet had entered under his ribs and ripped up through his body before it lodged somewhere in his trunk. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 45.

25. Eli Ricker interview with Iron Hawk, 12 May 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 314ff. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 175, 192. Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources 25. “Sword’s Acts Related.”

26. “Sword’s Acts Related.”

27. Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, 25.

28. Walter Camp interview with William Garnett, 1907, Walter Camp Papers, Box 2.

29. W. P. Clark to John G. Bourke, 24 February 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 48.

30. Ibid.

31. Lieutenant Jesse Lee to Lieutenant Bourke, 10 March 1877, Sioux War files, M1495/R4.

32. Lieutenant F. Schwatka autograph letter to his father, 5 February 1877, Gilder Lehrman Document No. GLC06913. World Wide Web

33. F. C. Boucher letter, 25 March 1877, forwarded to Department of the Platte by Captain Anson Mills, Letters Received, Box 49, Sioux War files, M1495/R4.

34. Lieutenant Jesse Lee letter to Captain Anson Mills, 5 April 1877, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 102.

35. The word hou—not “how,” as depicted in so many western novels and movies—was an expostulation of acceptance and agreement, and it was a common response to things said in any large gathering. Jesse Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1914), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 529.

36. Fanny McGillycuddy diary, copy in the Fort Robinson Museum.

37. He Dog interview, 13 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 19.

38. Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, 25; W. P. Clark to J. G. Bourke, 3 March 1877, quoted in Hardorff, The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 160.

39. Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 14 February 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews. George Wallihan, writing as “Rapherty,” reports the planting of the stake. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 28 May 1877.

40. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 202.

20. “I want this peace to last forever.”

1. Caroline Frey Winne to her brother Lud, 25 February 1877, New-York Historical Society.

2. Robert H. Steinbach, A Long March: The Lives of Frank and Alice Baldwin (University of Texas, 1989), 119–20. Long quote: Alice Baldwin to her husband Frank from Sioux City, 31 March 1877, Baldwin Papers, Huntington Library. See also Alice Blackwood Baldwin, An Army Wife on the Frontier, 1867–1877 (University of Utah Library, 1975).

3. Tom Buecker, “Frederic S. Calhoun,” Greasy Grass 10 (May 1994).

4. Frederic S. Calhoun letter to Charles Turner, 27 April 1877, 569 ACP 1875, National Archives. Turner forwarded the letter with a note to the president’s son, Webb Hayes, but nothing came of it.

5. Sherman’s remark was technically an “endorsement”—an officer’s comment on a document being passed forward. Copies of the relevant documents can be found in Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 50; and Secretary of the Interior, Indian Division, Letters Received, M825/R10. See also Thomas R. Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American West, 104.

6. Mackenzie’s report is summarized in a covering document dated 18 April 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 49. Chicago Times, 26 May 1877.

7. Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912, Walter Camp papers.

8. Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 49.

9. Rocky Mountain News, 6 May 1877.

10. Rosenquest joined the Army in 1871 as an enlisted man at the age of sixteen, was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1876, and was second in command of Company F, 4th Cavalry, during the attack on the Cheyenne that November. A year later he deserted from the Army, an act he blamed on the influence of a “fast set” in St. Louis who had introduced him to liquor. Later in New York City he was manager of the Fourteenth Street Theater. He recounts much of this personal history in a letter to President McKinley in 1898, asking permission to rejoin the Army to fight in the Spanish-American War. Rosenquest ACP file 4527–1876, National Archives.

11. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1877, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews. He Dog said the leading men with Crazy Horse in May 1877 included his own brother Little Shield, now recovered from a gunshot wound in the arm he had received at the Little Bighorn, and Kicking Bear (brother of Little Shield’s wife), Black Fox, Looking Horse, Charging (another name of Little Big Man), Two Lance, Good Weasel, Hard to Hit, Iron White Man, Magpie, Thunder Iron, and Kills Alone. Iron Hawk, Big Road, and Little Hawk, the uncle of Crazy Horse, were also part of the inner group. See He Dog account, eleven-page typescript, Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska; Little Shield pension file, National Archives; and Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 63.

12. Little Killer was the brother of Club Man, who was married to Crazy Horse’s older sister. Little Killer interview, 12 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 6, 39.

13. James Cook, undated memo quoting a statement to him by Lieutenant Clark at the old Red Cloud Agency, James H. Cook Papers. For names and numbers of those who surrendered see Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul, eds., The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger.

14. These accounts include He Dog account in the Colhoff winter count for the year 1936, Elmo Scott Watson Papers, 1936. He Dog account, eleven-page typescript. He Dog, Red Feather, and Whirling interview with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 73ff. Undated Walter Camp interview with Thomas Disputed (A Kinichaki), Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 121ff. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907; William Garnett interview with General Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, SDSHS; Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 63ff. Little Killer interview, 12 July 1930, and Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 38. W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 296. Walter Camp interview with Horn Chips, c. 11 July 1910, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 89. New York Herald, 7 May 1877.

15. He Dog account, eleven-page typescript.

16. He Dog, Red Feather, and Whirling interview with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920.

17. He Dog account, eleven-page typescript.

18. Walter Camp interview with Horn Chips, c. 11 July 1910, 89.

19. Interviews with Little Killer and Short Bull, 12–13 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 38.

20. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 66.

21. “From a Military Correspondent at Red Cloud,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, 9 May 1877.

22. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 413.

23. The names of these men, and the numbers of women and children who accompanied them, can be found in Buecker and Paul, eds., The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger, 157–64. Bourke says 117 guns were found. Lieutenant C. A. Johnson, in a letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs written the same day, says the number of guns and pistols was 109. Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721.

24. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1877, 49.

21. “I cannot decide these things for myself.”

1. William Philo Clark shared the Indian view of dog: “The meat combines the flavors of bear and pork, and is wonderfully nutritious; one can undergo a great deal of hard work, especially hard riding, after a hearty meal of dog.” W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 154. Strahorn’s stories appeared in the Denver Daily Tribune, 18 May 1877, and in the Rocky Mountain News, 18 and 20 May 1877. John W. Ford’s presence for the Chicago Times is reported by George Wallihan, Cheyenne Daily Leader, 27 May 1877; he is identified in Paul L. Hedren, Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War, 44, 58, 124, 200.

2. There is no readily available account of the career of Wallihan. This one has been assembled from the columns of the Cheyenne Leader; an 1880 miner’s diary kept by his brother Allen, who later became a noted wildlife photographer (ms. no. 654, Colorado Historical Society); a letter of 25 June 1877 from Samuel Wallihan, MD, to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz (Carl Schurz Papers); and articles in the Rocky Mountain News in April 1873. The acquisition notes of the Denver Art Museum for a ledger book attributed to Crazy Horse include a brief memoir written by Wallihan in 1915. It appears that George Wallihan was also the author in 1917 of a John Philip Sousa piece called “The Love That Lives Forever.” Wallihan worked for the Denver Post for many years and died in 1922.

3. Accounts of Wallihan’s trip to the Black Hills can be found in Cheyenne Leader, 23 April 1876, 7 July 1876, and 28 April 1877. On 4 April 1877 the Leader reported, “Died, in Footville, Wis., 29 March 1877, of hemorrhage of the lungs, Mrs. Lucy L. Wallihan, mother of the city editor of The Leader.” Wallihan’s parents had returned to Wisconsin the previous year. A full account of the rush may be found in John D. McDermott, Gold Rush: The Black Hills Story (South Dakota State Historical Society, 2001).

4. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 8 and 10 May 1877. The Black Hills were in the Dakota Territory.

5. The dime’s worth of gold is reported in Watson Parker, Gold in the Black Hills (University of Oklahoma, 1966), 25. “Life of Goose,” Josephine Waggoner Papers.

6. New York Sun, 23 May 1877; probably written by Lieutenant H. R. Lemly.

7. Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 29. Denver Daily Tribune, 18 May 1877, writer unknown, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 209ff.

8. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 16 May 1877.

9. Ibid., 23 and 27 May 1877.

10. Ibid., 23 May 1877.

11. The story of the pipe was published in the Rocky Mountain News, 12 January 1879. Ella is not named in the story, but the dating and details of the occasion closely match Wallihan’s visit of 18 May 1877. For further details see Nancy and Edwin Bathke, “A. G. Wallihan: Colorado’s Pioneer Nature Photographer,” Denver Brand Book, 1995, 345ff, and Allen Wallihan’s diary in the Colorado Historical Society.

12. George Wallihan, two-page manuscript typed in Pomona, California, in 1915, Denver Art Museum acquisition notes. Two of the drawings are reproduced in Janet Catherine Berlo, Plains Indian Drawing (Harry N. Abrams, 1996). One of these drawings from the Crazy Horse gift ledger depicts the same event, drawn by the same artist, as a drawing in the Louis Bordeaux/Deadwood ledger book (“Shooting Cat Killing Two Pawnee Squaws”) sold by the Skinner Auction Gallery in September 2009. The independent scholar Mike Cowdrey believes the killings depicted in the Bordeaux/Deadwood ledger book drawings, many of “Pawnee squaws,” represent incidents from the 1873 massacre.

13. Wallihan writing as “Rapherty,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, 30 May 1877.

14. Among the chiefs were Little Wound, Red Dog, No Water, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, Little Hawk, Touch the Clouds, Red Bear, Spotted Tail, Two Bears, Hunts the Enemy, High Bear, Iron Hawk, Little Crow, He Dog, and many others.

15. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 28 May and 6 September 1877. Bradley did not witness the kneel personally; he probably heard about it after arriving to assume command of the post the following day. Bradley letter to his mother, 8 September 1877, Lot no. 576, HCA Auction site, February 2004. See also John W. Ford, Chicago Times, 26 May 1877. The writer Ian Frazier, who has written more passionately about Crazy Horse than anyone else, found the whole idea of Crazy Horse kneeling in front of Crook insupportable. Frazier refused to record it as a fact. I don’t much like writing it down myself. See Ian Frazier, The Great Plains (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

16. Walter S. Schuyler to General Robert Williams, Adjutant General, Department of the Platte, 26 May 1877; Letters Received, Box 50. Chicago Times, 26 May 1877. Wallihan reported very similar language in the Cheyenne Daily Leader, 28 May 1877.

17. The first part of this quotation was remembered later by Garnett; the second part was reported at the time by John W. Ford. See Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 51ff., and Chicago Times, 26 May 1877.

18. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 54. Schuyler to General Robert Williams, Adjutant General, 26 May 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 50.

19. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 298–300.

20. Story datelined Camp Sheridan, 15 July, from the New York Daily Tribune, 7 September 1877. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 59.

21. Story datelined Camp Sheridan, 15 July, from the New York Daily Tribune, 7 September 1877.

22. Bradley to Ione, 26 May 1877, Luther Bradley Papers.

23. Lieutenant Clark telegram to Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler, 13 June 1877, reports that “the application to go out hunting was renewed” by Crazy Horse at a meeting with the chief in his camp. For reports that Crazy Horse was to be made head chief see Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 117, and Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 179.

24. He Dog and Short Bull interviews, 13 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 24.

25. Planting trees: Colonel Bradley letter to Ione, 11 July 1877. Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 108–09.

26. Report of Lieutenant Schwatka, 9 July 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 51. Lieutenant Jesse Lee letter to CIA, 30 June 1877, Spotted Tail Agency, M234/R841. Further details of the killing can be found in Mardi Anderson, “Gilbert C. Fosdick II, Stagecoach Driver,” Buffalo County Historical Society 25, no. 3 (May–June, 2002).

22. “It made his heart heavy and sad to think of these things.”

1. James R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala, 61. Walker’s account is the most complete, and is based on his conversations with Little Wound, American Horse, Bad Wound, Short Bull, No Flesh, Ringing Shield, Thomas Tyon, and George Sword. Other sources used here include Left Heron (aka Breast, Makula), born 1850, interview with Scudder Mekeel, 18 September 1931, John Colhoff, interpreter, AMNH; Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music; Martha Beckwith, “Mythology of the Oglala,” Journal of American Folklore (October–December 1930); W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 361ff.; and Eli Ricker interview with Billy Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 54ff.

2. Kill Eagle was named in the Cheyenne Daily Leader, 20 July 1877. Fool or Foolish Heart was identified as sun dance chief by Dana Long Wolf, letter of W. O. Roberts, superintendant of the Pine Ridge Agency, to Professor E. P. Wilson at Chadron State College, 13 June 1940, cited in Kingsley Bray, Crazy Horse, 310, 456. Bray identifies Fool Heart as a Sans Arc. The only two Fool Hearts of whom I know are a Yanktonai signer of the 1868 treaty and a son of the Miniconjou Lame Deer who surrendered at Camp Sheridan on 10 September 1877. They must be ruled out. See letters of J. M. Lee to Colonel L. P. Bradley, 10 and 12 September 1877, Luther Bradley Papers. The five dancers are identified by James Chase in Morning and Alfred Ribman in Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 41. Walking Eagle is identified in Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul, eds., The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger. The brother of the elder Chase in Morning who died of wounds received at the Little Bighorn was Black Whiteman; Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 194, 198.

Also present on 29 June was Colonel Bradley, the new commander of Camp Robinson, who described the dance at unaccustomed length in his diary. Luther Bradley Papers. Accounts of the Crazy Horse sun dance are further confused by Garnett’s recollection that there were two sun dances on the White River that summer: the Crazy Horse dance that climaxed on 29 June, and a second dance that climaxed about 8 or 9 July 1877 held by Spotted Tail and Red Cloud. According to Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, who described his experience in “The Sun Dance of the Sioux,” Century Magazine (December 1890), the dance he attended “was in June.” Lieutenant Jesse Lee at the Spotted Tail Agency wrote the commissioner of Indian affairs on 30 June to report, “The barbaric Sun Dance is now in full operation and all the Indians, almost without exception are enthusiastic on it.” Lee to CIA, 30 June 1877, Spotted Tail Agency, M234/R841.

Clark, Bradley, and Garnett all state explicitly that they witnessed the dance of Crazy Horse’s people, and that is the one described here, so far as the evidence permits.

3. Left Heron (aka Breast, Makula), born 1850, interview with Scudder Mekeel. It is worth noting that this remark by Left Heron posits important elements of Sioux tribal chronology. Using Left Heron’s numbers suggests that White Buffalo Woman instructed the Sioux in the use of the sacred pipe about 1695, and the first sun dance was performed about 1765. The third significant date in Sioux history marks the tribe’s first acquisition of horses; this date was recently adjusted back a generation to c. 1700 by Mike Cowdrey in Plains Indian Horse Masks.

4. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 55; and Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 362.

5. One who stayed home was Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy, contract surgeon at the post. Fanny McGillycuddy diary, 29 June 1877, SDSHS.

6. The conversation with White Bull can be found in Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 104. The second remark, which I believe was also made by White Bull, is on 116. Most of the Cheyenne were led south to the Indian Territory by Lieutenant Henry W. Lawton at the end of May.

23. “They were killed like wolves.”

1. As noted previously, in time his name would be shortened to Sword, and preceded by the Christian name George. George Sword would become chief of police and a leading figure on the Pine Ridge Agency until his death in 1910. Other scouts on the excursion were Red Shirt, Little Battle, No Neck, Horned Horse (also known as Little Bull), Sorrel Horse, and Joe Bush, also known as Big Belly Sorrel Horse and as Fast Bull. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 54.

2. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 323ff. See also the Colhoff winter count.

3. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 329.

4. Celia was an Ohio girl; she married Ford in 1870 in Nebraska. A daughter, Edith, was born the following year, and a son, Hugh, in 1876. Ford himself had been born in New York City in 1842. For an account of his time at Fort Laramie see Ford’s handwritten notes, dated Christmas 1917, on the endpapers of a copy of Elizabeth Custer’s memoir, Boots and Saddles, sold by Heritage Auction Galleries in Texas on 8 June 2008. The book was purchased with a single bid for $3,500.

5. Ford’s story appeared in the Chicago Times, 26 May 1877. Ford is identified as the Times’s correspondent by Bourke in The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 255; and his return as a Times correspondent to the Red Cloud Agency on 23 May 1877 with General Crook is reported by George Wallihan writing as “Rapherty,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, 27 May 1877. Bourke praises Ford’s appearance on the Fort Laramie stage in The Diaries, vol. 1, p. 208. There are also passing references to Ford in Paul L. Hedren, Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War, 44, 58, 124, 200.

6. Chicago Times, 26 May 1877.

7. Ford lists the camps with their chiefs from south to north as follows: Hunkpapas (Sitting Bull), Oglala (Crazy Horse), Miniconjou (Fast Bull), Sans Arcs (Red Bear), Cheyenne (Ice Bear), Santee and Yanktonai (Red Point, also known as Inkpaduta), and Blackfeet (Scabby Head). This order of the camps has been tweaked and adjusted numerous times over the years, but the most important revision is the placement of the Cheyenne, which all authorities now agree was the northernmost camp on the morning of 25 June. Getting the order right is important because Indian accounts of the battle often orient descriptions of the fight by reference to the different camps; things get badly confused, for example, if you don’t think the Cheyenne were northernmost, and were camped directly opposite the wide ford at the mouth of Muskrat Creek and Medicine Tail Coulee. Chicago Times, 26 May 1877.

8. This simple description of the action established an Indian version of what happened which never altered thereafter, but was supported and elaborated upon by dozens of other Indian accounts collected over the next three decades. The literature on the Custer fight dwarfs the record of almost every other battle in American history, not excepting Gettysburg and Normandy, and the writers are often contentious. A good introduction to the argument can be found in Robert Utley, Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend (1962; University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Those determined to devote a decade to following up the story may work their way through Utley’s bibliography. A compendium of basic documents is in W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth.

In 2003 I toured the battlefield with my friend T. D. Hobart, our godson Robert A. Wells, now a lieutenant in the Marines, and Jack McDermott, a retired National Park Service historian who has written numerous books on the Plains Indian wars and knows the Custer fight well.

The problem for the historian of the battle may be summed up as follows: Custer’s men were found dead in clumps, clusters, and lonely spots, spread widely over the field. Bodies and relics of the fighting were found along a ridge leading to the rise known as Custer Hill. Some of the officers were found dead with their commands, some not. The colonel himself and a big group were found just below the brow of the hill. Indian accounts and the evidence of the field showed that many men had gone down—or possibly up; maybe both—the ravine known as Medicine Tail Coulee, which ran from the bluffs on the east bank down to the river across from the Indian camp. A second ravine known as Deep Coulee runs up away from the Medicine Tail ford toward Custer Hill at an angle that might have been made by a bank shot in billiards. More bodies were found in a line running down and away from Custer Hill back toward the river. The battle was fluid over the whole field. The fighting seems to have unfolded in a whirlpool action, but in which direction? How did experienced officers, Custer chief among them, lose command cohesion and end up with their men dead all over the place?

The Indians, for their part, were often puzzled by what the soldiers did, but their account of the unfolding action is straightforward enough, and it suggests that Crazy Horse played a central role in breaking the organized resistance of Custer’s command. Their version of what happened, picked up by Lieutenant Clark and others in conversation with the Indians, helps to explain the growing respect of the military for the chief and his ability as a war leader.

9. John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 93.

10. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 336ff.

11. Wheeler lost his hooves while chasing the Nez Percé Indians later that fall; Bourke had his pair manufactured into inkstands and later gave one to a Philadelphia museum. Colonel Homer W. Wheeler, Buffalo Days (Bobbs Merrill, 1923), 184. There was much talk in later years of the sorrel with three white forelegs, reported to be in the possession of one Indian or another.

12. Bourke thought these were the graves of Boston and Tom Custer, brothers of the general. One was actually his nephew, “Autie” Reed.

13. The indispensable Richard Hardorff has devoted a book to identifying them. After collating all Indian casualty counts he concluded that about forty Indians were killed at the Little Bighorn. Hokahey!, 130.

14. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 341. Spotted Horn Bull, Red Hawk, Foolish Elk, Turtle Rib, Iron Hawk, Flying Hawk, Red Feather, and He Dog all tell closely similar versions of this story.

15. Sheridan letter to Sherman, 23 August 1876, Sheridan Papers, LOC, quoted in Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 329.

16. Clark to Crook, 18 August 1877, recorded by Bourke in vol. 26 of his diaries, transcribed by the author. This document was dropped from the published version of the diaries.

17. William Philo Clark, Report to Adjutant General, Department of the Platte, 14 September 1877, edited by Thomas Buecker, reprinted in Greasy Grass (May 1991). This report is also reprinted at the end of vol. 2 of Bourke’s diaries. See also Thomas R. Buecker, Fort Robinson and the American West, 90.

24. “The soldiers could not go any further, and they knew that they had to die.”

1. Black Elk’s account of the Little Bighorn can be found in Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 180ff. The history of Black Elk’s father is discussed in Eli Ricker’s interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1877, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 59. Good White Buffalo Woman’s story can be found in James McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian (Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 162ff. McLaughlin translates her name as Beautiful White Cow. Gregory Michno translates it as Pretty White Buffalo. I choose “good” because the Lakota word waste describes seven kinds of virtue, only one of which is conveyed by “pretty.”

One source of the enduring fascination of the Custer fight is watching the slow success of the relentless effort by historians to establish what happened; with the exception of the assassination of John F. Kennedy no other event in human history, I believe, has been the object of such focused curiosity, or of such intent to establish a comprehensive knowledge of the battle. To cite only one among numerous examples I direct readers to archaeological studies, which have mapped successive firing positions of both Indians and whites over the field through recovery of bullets and cartridge casings. The use of at least fifteen surviving firearms by Indians or whites has been positively confirmed through matching the distinctive firing pin signature of gun and cartridge. In some cases the gun can be tracked through the battle from one cartridge to the next. How far down this road can researchers hope to go? Trust me when I say that the Custer fight fraternity wants to go all the way. See Douglas D. Scott, “Archeological Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Big Horn,” in Charles E. Rankin, ed., Legacy: New Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Montana Historical Society, 1996); and Richard Allen Fox, Archaeology, History and Custer’s Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined (University of Oklahoma, 1993).

A recent subject of intense scrutiny has been Indian accounts, the first of which were collected within a week or two of the fight. Among the last survivors, voluble until the end, were Eagle Elk, interviewed by John Neihardt in 1944, and Iron Hail, also known as Dewey Beard, who died ten years later. But not even that marked the end. Sitting around kitchens and telling stories over coffee is a communal pastime of the Lakota, and relatives of battle survivors continue to tell stories down to the present day. In the first forty or fifty years after the battle these Indian accounts were avidly sought by a handful of passionate amateurs, but for more than a century historians of the battle have for the most part dismissed the Indian accounts as too erratic, confusing, and, above all, personal to be useful. Colonel W. A. Graham, who published the first substantial collection of Indian accounts, said that he nevertheless gave up any attempt to fit them into white versions of the battle. “The Indian accounts contradicted each other to such an extent that I found them irreconcilable,” he wrote. He advised a reader “to do with them as all who have studied them have done, and reconcile them if and as he can.” The Custer Myth, 3–4.

No serious student would argue that now. The best summation of Indian accounts of the day of battle is Gregory F. Michno, Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer’s Defeat (Mountain Press Publishing, 1993), which quotes from fifty-eight separate Indian interviews to retell the unfolding of the battle in fifteen-minute segments. This is a belated but brave start to telling the Indian side of the story. Who says something is often as important as what is said. The necessary next step, in my view, is to integrate the recorded accounts with substantial biographies of the tellers. The ultimate goal of the exercise is to establish the deep texture of the event as it was experienced at the moment when the Indians of the plains were forced to give up their life as roaming hunters of buffalo.

2. White Bull’s estimate was three hundred Hunkpapa lodges, four to five hundred for the Oglala, 2,300 lodges in all. Richard G. Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 152.

3. He Dog interview, 24 July 1931, Hugh Scott Papers. The size of the village, immense in early white accountings, tended to diminish with later, more careful estimates. In four separate articles and books published over thirty-five years the respected western historian Robert Utley at first thought Custer had confronted three thousand warriors; by the time he published his biography of Sitting Bull, The Lance and the Shield, in 1993, he had settled on a number of eighteen hundred as more likely. Gregory Michno, who parses this question with characteristic rigor in Lakota Noon (4–20), hazards no firm number of his own, but seems open to the sober guess of Charles Eastman, the Santee Sioux medical doctor who practiced on the Pine Ridge Reservation at the time of the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890). Eastman was, of course, fluent in Lakota, knew many of the leading men of the Sioux, and thought Custer was defeated by as few as a thousand warriors. Eastman, “The Sioux Narrative,” Chatauquan (1900), partially reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 96–97.

In the confusion there are several firm numbers, beginning with the size of the band which surrendered with Crazy Horse—899 people in all, of whom 217 were men with families, and another 186 were boys. Between 24 February and 10 May 1877 there arrived at the Red Cloud Agency in separate groups 558 Cheyenne with 113 men and 132 boys; and an additional 154 Lakota men, all from the north and most of them Oglala. Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul, ed., The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger, 101–20. Similar groups of Miniconjous and a few Brulé came in to surrender at the Spotted Tail Agency in April 1877, 917 persons in all, according to Lieutenant Jesse Lee, including 208 men and 211 boys. Spotted Tail Agency, M234/R841. Hostiles surrendering at both White River agencies therefore total at least 692 men. We may assume that all or almost all had been in the fight at the Little Bighorn. In addition to these, about three hundred northern Indians surrendered to General Miles on the Tongue River, and a band estimated at about 165 lodges (seven to eight hundred people) crossed into Canada with Sitting Bull. Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 181–82. Throughout this period still other groups were surrendering at the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River agencies on the Missouri, and at all agencies uncounted Sioux slipped into camp whose absence had never been noticed or recorded. But counting carefully, it’s still hard to push the total of Sioux fighting men at the Little Bighorn past two thousand.

4. White Bull interview with Walter S. Campbell in 1932, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 149ff.

5. Among them were Owl Bull, Medicine Bird, Kills Enemy in Winter, Dirt Kettle, and Knife, the only one of the group to bring his wife.

6. For the purpose of this account I am relying on the careful chronology established by John S. Gray in Custer’s Last Campaign. Gray argues convincingly that Custer’s men were traveling on St. Paul time, the location of General Terry’s headquarters; that they synchronized their watches; and that they noted the time often enough during the day to allow a tight and accurate chronology of events. Some Indian accounts agree roughly with Gray’s chronology; others differ wildly. But Gray says the shooting started with the beginning of Reno’s charge on the Hunkpapa camp at three minutes past three o’clock on the afternoon of 25 June; Sitting Bull, whose lodge was in the Hunkpapa camp, said the attack came “some two hours past the time when the sun is in the center of the sky.” I interpret that as rough agreement. Interview with Sitting Bull dated 17 October 1877 from Fort Walsh, Northwest Territory, New York Herald, 16 November 1877, reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 65.

7. Black Bear interview with Walter Camp, 18 July 1911, with Philip Wells as interpreter, reprinted in Kenneth Hammer, ed., Custer in ’76, 203ff. He Dog also discussed this episode with Walter Camp, 13 July 1910, with William Berger as interpreter, reprinted in Hammer, ed., Custer in ’76(University of Oklahoma, 1976), 205ff. Black Bear told Camp his group had gone on to the agency “as we were not hostiles.” It was He Dog’s understanding, probably from Black Bear himself, that the problem was Custer’s rapid travel—Black Bear could never hope to overtake him. In fact, Custer halted about a half hour later on Davis Creek. I do not intend to reconstruct the whole of the battle with this level of detail, only to show how I have gone about it and to suggest the extent of the materials available.

8. Interview with Kill Eagle, 18 September 1876, New York Herald, 6 October 1876; reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 48.

9. Interview in 1909 with Runs the Enemy by Joseph K. Dixon, The Vanishing Race (Bonanza, n.d.), 171. Runs the Enemy was listed in the Red Cloud census of the Oglala in the early 1880s, Garrick Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians,” 579.

10. Ash Creek is now called Reno Creek.

11. Walter S. Campbell interview with White Bull, 1932, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 149ff. See also Richard G. Hardorff, Hokahey!, 134.

12. “Thunder Bear’s Version of Custer’s Fight,” given to Edward Curtis, 1907, Collection 1143, Box 3, Folder 3.8, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 87ff. Report of the woman killed comes from White Bull, Brave Wolf, and Hump, collected by Lieutenant Oscar F. Long during a tour of the Custer battlefield with General Miles, June 1878; Report of 27 June 1878, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 43ff.

13. He Dog interview with Walter Camp, 13 July 1910, with William Berger as interpreter, reprinted in Hammer, ed., Custer in ’76 (University of Oklahoma, 1976), pp. 205ff.

14. For readers encountering the battle for the first time it should be clarified here that the battle included two separate fights: an attack by Custer’s second in command, Major Marcus Reno, on the Hunkpapa village at the southern end of the big Indian camp; and a separate, slightly later fight which developed downriver between the Indians and Custer’s immediate command, of whom there were no survivors. Some Indian accounts distinguish between these two fights by reference to the first group of soldiers (Reno) and the second group of soldiers (Custer). I have adopted this approach in the hope that it will help to portray the whole of the battle in the way that the Indians experienced and remembered it.

15. Mary Crawler interview with Frank Zahn, 1931, Little Soldier interview by Joseph G. Masters, Box 2, Folder 15, Kansas State Historical Society, both reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 173ff., 92ff.

16. He Dog interview with General Hugh Scott, 24 July 1931, Hugh Scott Papers.

17. Red Feather interview with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, copy in the Hugh Scott Papers, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 81ff.

18. Brave Bear account in George Bent letter to George Hyde, 8 March 1906, MSS SC 860, Brigham Young University, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 80ff.

19. Accounts given to Tim McCoy and first published in Graham, The Custer Myth, 109.

20. Walter Camp interview with Henry Standing Bear, 12 July 1910, reprinted in Hammer, ed., Custer in ’76, 214ff. The elder Standing Bear (1837–1898) later added the Christian name George; his daughter, identified by her brother Luther as Wanbli Koyaki Win, later took the name Emily, and it was her son, Robert Dillon, who recorded her memories of the Custer fight, which are included in Pute Tiyospaye (Lip’s Camp, Crazy Horse School, 1978), 43. For the Standing Bear family generally see Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux.

21. Joseph G. Masters, quoting Mark Spider from an interview in 1936, Shadows Fall on the Little Horn (University of Wyoming Library, 1951), 41–42. Peter Bordeaux, born in 1879, later reported that the items in Crazy Horse’s medicine bag consisted “of dried heart and brain of an eagle, mixed with dry, wild aster seed compound to make a bullet proof medicine.” Bordeaux statement of 11 June 1969, Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 89. White Bull reported Crazy Horse’s method of painting himself, cited in a Walter S. Campbell letter of 16 July 1948, Walter S. Campbell Papers, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 260ff.

22. Shoots Walking statement to Walter S. Campbell, c. 1935, Box 111, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 166ff.

23. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 183, 190.

24. Red Feather interview with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 81ff. Nick Rouleau interview with Eli Ricker, 20 November 1906, conveying information from Austin Red Hawk, Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 37ff. “Thunder Bear’s Version of Custer’s Fight.”

25. Information from Flying Hawk, M. I. McCreight, Firewater and Forked Tongues, 49–55.

26. Hamlin Garland, “General Custer’s Last Fight as Seen by Two Moon,” McClure’s Magazine (September 1908), reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 101. Report by Red Horse, Colonel W. H. Wood, Commanding Post, Cheyenne Agency, 27 February 1877, reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 56.

27. Brave Bear account in George Bent letter to George Hyde.

28. Walter S. Campbell interview with White Cow Walking, White Eagle’s brother, who recovered the body that night, 2 September 1929, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 133ff.

29. Nick Rouleau interview with Eli Ricker, conveying information from Austin Red Hawk, Shot in the Face, Big Road, and Iron Bull, 20 November 1906, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews.

30. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 183.

31. Public remarks by Gall, 25 June 1886, D. F. Barry’s Notes on the Custer Battle. See also Gall’s account as reported in the St. Paul Daily Globe, 27 June 1886, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 18 July 1886, reprinted in Richard Upton, ed., The Battle of the Little Big Horn and Custer’s Last Fight (Upton and Sons, 2006).

32. The Indians almost certainly did not know during the battle, and probably did not generally learn until it was well over, that the commander of the soldiers was Custer, or that the first attack on the Hunkpapa village had been led by Major Reno. Most accounts of the battle use the common historians’ shorthand of referring to groups by their leaders—Custer did this, Reno did that, etc. I have tried to avoid this, identifying Reno’s force as the first group of soldiers, and Custer’s immediate command as the second group.

33. Thomas L. Riggs, “Sunset to Sunset,” South Dakota Historical Collections 29 (1958), 187.

34. He Dog interview with Walter Camp, 13 July 1910.

35. The chronology given here comes from Gray, Custer’s Last Campaign. The sightings of Custer on the bluffs were all recorded by men in Reno’s detachment, but anything they saw from the flat south of the Hunkpapa camp was of course visible to the Indians as well. The three cheers were described by White Bull, Brave Wolf, and Hump to Lieutenant Oscar F. Long during a tour of the Custer battlefield with General Miles, June 1878, Report of 27 June 1878, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 43ff.

36. Undated Walter Camp interview with Thomas Disputed (A Kinichaki), Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 121ff.

37. Garland, “General Custer’s Last Fight as Seen by Two Moon.” Gall walked over the battlefield and described its course at a commemoration of its tenth anniversary; St. Paul Pioneer Press, 18 July 1886, reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 89. Feather Earring interview with Hugh Scott, 9 September 1919, reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 97.

38. Iron Hawk interview with Eli Ricker, 13 May 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 314. Also reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 49ff. Feather Earring interview with Hugh Scott, 9 September 1919. He Dog interview with Walter Camp, 13 July 1910.

39. There is much controversy about Custer’s route after he diverged from Reno’s command at about 2:45 on the afternoon of 25 June. Lieutenant Godfrey thought he swung far to the right and never approached the river at all. Other writers suggest he raced far downstream, then doubled back. And so on. What follows here is what the Indians themselves appear to say. In my view it has the twin virtues of simplicity and of representing the testimony of witnesses.

40. He Dog interview with Walter Camp, 13 July 1910.

41. Flying Hawk interview with Eli Ricker, 8 March 1907, near Big Bat’s on Pine Ridge, Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 49ff.

42. Red Horse account, Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians.”

43. The chronology here is Gray’s in Custer’s Last Campaign.

44. Leavenworth Weekly Times, 18 August 1881, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 63; and in Graham, The Custer Myth, 74.

45. See generally Richard Allan Fox, Jr., Archaeology, History and Custer’s Last Battle (University of Oklahoma, 1993) for a careful reading of artifact finds as evidence how the battle went. One of Fox’s principal arguments is that an orderly defense was managed only at the very outset on Calhoun Ridge, where the pattern of shells and Indian bullets suggests a regulation skirmish line. Elsewhere the men were piled all close in one on another in a classic sign of panic on the battlefield, or were killed in chaotic dispersion hither and yon over the field. Interview with Yellow Nose, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 24 March 1912, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 97ff.

46. Thomas L. Riggs, “Sunset to Sunset.”

47. Interview with Low Dog [1847–1894] at Fort Yates, 30 July 1881, Leavenworth Times, 14 August 1881, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 63ff.

48. Brave Bear account in George Bent letter to George Hyde, 8 March 1906. John Neihardt interview with Eagle Elk, 1944, partially reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 104–05. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 185. Thomas B. Marquis, trans., Wooden Leg, 234.

49. Account by the Arapaho Waterman given to Tim McCoy; first published in Graham, The Custer Myth, 109. See also Peter J. Powell, Sweet Medicine, 119; and Hardorff, Hokahey!, 65–67.

50. Nick Rouleau interview with Eli Ricker, conveying information from Austin Red Hawk, Shot in the Face, Big Road, and Iron Bull.

51. Information from Flying Hawk, McCreight, Firewater and Forked Tongues, 49–55. Public remarks by Gall, 25 June 1886, D. F. Barry’s Notes on the Custer Battle.

52. Account by the Arapaho Waterman given to Tim McCoy.

53. He Dog interview with Walter Camp, 13 July 1910. He Dog, Red Feather, and Whirling interview with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 73ff.

54. Foolish Elk interview with Walter Camp, 22 September 1908, Louis Roubideaux and A. G. Shaw, interpreters, reprinted in Hammer, ed., Custer in ’76, 197ff.

55. White Bull interview with Walter S. Campbell, 1932. Garland, “General Custer’s Last Fight as Seen by Two Moon.” Foolish Elk interview with Walter Camp. Where the bodies lay is marked by gravestones erected in 1890 on the sites of earlier markers; unfortunately the Army captain who performed the work had about 236 stones—too many for the 210 men who actually died with Custer. He seems to have doubled up the stones at some of the sites along the arc of the battle, preserving the pattern but confusing the precision of the actual lie. For that reason the number of dead cited here for each site is approximate.

56. Unidentified news clipping from Pine Ridge, dated 25 September 1936, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 149ff. Brave Bear account in George Bent letter to George Hyde, 8 March 1906. Report of Captain R. E. Johnston, Standing Rock Agency, 18 September 1876, published in the New York Herald, 6 October 1876, reprinted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 48.

57. Leavenworth Times, 18 August 1881. Red Horse account, Garrick Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians.” DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 186.

58. Black Elk in DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 193.

59. Standing Bear interview with Eli Ricker, 12 March 1907, Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 57ff. Hamlin Garland, “General Custer’s Last Fight as Seen by Two Moon.” Eli Ricker interview with Respects Nothing, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 25ff. The man in buckskins has been convincingly identified as the mixed-blood scout Mitch Bouyer.

60. Red Horse account, Garrick Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians.” All of these extraordinary drawings have been reproduced in Herman J. Viola, The Little Big Horn Remembered (Times Books, 1999). “Thunder Bear’s Version of Custer’s Fight.”

61. Respects Nothing and Eagle Ring interview with Eli Ricker, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight, 25ff. Unidentified news clipping from Pine Ridge, dated 25 September 1936. Account by the Arapaho Waterman given to Tim McCoy. Powell, Sweet Medicine, 117; John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty, Cheyenne Memories, 121.

62. Interview with Little Killer by Chicago researcher Julia Abrahamson in 1937. Typewritten note by George Hyde with three photographs, papers in the author’s possession.

63. W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 155.

64. Thomas Marquis interview with Kate Bighead, 1927, “She Watched Custer’s Last Battle,” reprinted in Marquis, Custer on the Little Big Horn. Peter Powell also heard this story from Little Face, Mary Little Bear Inkanish, and John Stands in Timber. His retelling can be found in Powell, Sweet Medicine, 119ff.

65. Short Bull interview, 13 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 36.

66. The words are those of John Stands in Timber, who heard this story from Charles Whistling Elk (b. 1876), who was repeating the words of his father, Braided Locks (1840–1936), who later adopted the Christian name of Arthur Brady. See Cheyenne Memories, 105, and mentions of “Brady Locks”; Powell, Sweet Medicine, 366; and references to Braided Locks in George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes. For the identity of Braided Locks-Arthur Brady see “Notice to Repatriate Cultural Items in the Possession of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY”; Federal Register 61, no. 74 (1996), 16644–16645. The cultural items were sun dance rattles previously owned by Braided Locks.

In 1963, at a Wyoming State Historical Convention, John Stands in Timber described the petroglyph to Glenn Sween of Sheridan, Wyoming, who made an acrylic cast in 1969. The drawing has since been removed or destroyed by looters or vandals. The Sheridan Press, 27 August 1993.

25. “It is impossible to work him through reasoning or kindness.”

1. Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, Greencastle, Indiana, 27 October 1912, Walter Camp Papers.

2. ADG, Division of the Missouri to Crook, 18 April 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 49.

3. Bradley to Crook, 16 July 1877, Adjutant General’s Office, Letters Received, Division of the Missouri, M666/R282.

4. Luther Bradley Papers. Included are diaries, numerous letters to Ione, occasional letters from fellow officers, and notebooks filled with odd jottings in which Bradley recorded his travels, what he learned about plainscraft, the names and fates of his horses, a detailed record of his military service, the warrior strength of various Sioux bands in 1867, and a great deal else.

5. V. T. McGillycuddy letter to Elmo Scott Watson, 7 September 1923, Elmo Scott Watson Papers. Much information on Provost’s brief life is to be found in the pension file of Jennie Shot Close, Provost’s wife, IWC 1,605,272, National Archives.

6. Bradley describes the old man and his stick in a letter to Ione of 30 May 1877. There is a substantial literature about Sioux winter counts, of which scores survive. An excellent introduction would be Candace S. Green and Russell Thornton, The Year the Stars Fell (Smithsonian, 2007), which reproduces a number of winter counts from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. The best documented winter count was compiled by George Colhoff for the years 1759–1945, exceptional for the span of years covered and the identity of Colhoff’s informants. About half of it was published by William K. Powers, who received it from Colhoff’s son John in the mid-1940s, and the rest can be found in the Elmo Scott Watson Papers, Box 39, Folder 589. The names of the years match those of many other counts, but Colhoff added substantial information about the events from his eight elderly Sioux informants: Chasing Raven, Chase in Winter, He Dog, Little Shield, Kills a Hundred, Little Killer, Short Bull, and Whirlwind Man. It’s a good bet that the old man’s history stick had much in common with the Colhoff winter count.

7. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 277; Fannie McGillycuddy diary, Nebraska State Historical Society; V. T. McGillycuddy letter to E. A. Brininstool, 21 April 1926, James C. Cook papers.

8. Some sources say her first name was Helen, but pension and agency records refer to her as Ellen, which is presumably what she told officials. Ellen’s last name is spelled in almost as many different ways as there are sources, including Larvie, Laravie, Laravere, Larrabie, Larrabbee and Larrabee. The last is perhaps the most common of all and is used here because that is the spelling used to record Joe Larrabee’s presence among the Cheyenne in Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul, eds., The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger, 58. The marriages of the Larrabee girls can be found in James M. Robinson, West from Fort Pierre: The Wild World of James (Scotty) Philip (Westernlore Press, 1974), 51. Pourier’s version of events was given to Eli Ricker, in an interview with Baptiste Pourier, 6 March 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 271. Many of the relatives of Crazy Horse have been established by Richard G. Hardorff in his The Oglala Lakota Crazy Horse. Indians seeking pensions frequently referred to Lieutenant Clark as White Hat, and the Lakota for his name comes from the Blue Horse pension file. Details of Ellen Larrabee’s family were provided by Tom Larvie and Mrs. Clown to William J. Bordeaux, son of Louis Bordeaux and grandson of James Bordeaux, who records them in The Man Who Conquered Custer (Privately published, 1944), 70–71, 94–95.

9. Tom’s version was told to William J. Bordeaux in Norris, South Dakota, in 1944; The Man Who Conquered Custer, 94–95. Victoria Conroy, eleven years old at the time of Crazy Horse’s death, was a relative by marriage on his mother’s side. In a letter to James MacGregor, superintendent at Pine Ridge, 18 December 1934, she remarked, “He only had Miss Laravere a month or so when he was killed.” Conroy letter, Burnside Papers, Iowa Historical Department, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 265. A correspondent for the New York Tribune visited the agencies in the first week of June and remarked that “[Spotted Tail] does not, like Crazy Horse, limit himself to one wife.” Story datelined Camp Sheridan, 15 July, from the New York Daily Tribune, 7 September 1877.

10. Ghost Bear affidavit, 5 June 1928; Sioux Bob/Zuzella Little Bear pension file, IWO 15177. The Sioux Bob/Ellen Larrabee connection is found in Kingsley M. Bray, Crazy Horse, 318. For Ellen’s marriage to Kills a Hundred see Susie Kills One Hundred pension file, XC-2,624,082. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 58–59.

11. Clark to Crook, 1 August 1877, Letters Received, War AGO, Division of the Missouri, M666/R282. Clark to Crook, 18 August 1877, Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, p. 513. Clark’s horse is identified by Red Feather, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 27.

12. Garnett identifies Lone Bear and Little Wolf as brothers, and Eleanor Hinman says that Lone Bear was also a brother of Woman Dress. See Hinman, Oglala Sources, 48, n. 34.

13. Richard Nines interview with Woman Dress, 16 February 1912, AMNH; quoted in slightly different form in Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 95.

14. It goes like this: Walks As She Thinks, the mother of Red Cloud, was a sister of both Smoke and White Thunder Woman, two of whose daughters became the mothers in their turn of Josephine Richard and Gray Cow, who respectively married Baptiste Pourier and Woman Dress. Brushing aside the fine detail Red Feather simply said, “Woman Dress was Red Cloud’s first cousin and always stayed with him.” Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 29. See also Hila Gilbert, Big Bat Pourier (The Mills Company, 1968); Wallace Amiotte letter to George Hyde, 10 November 1959, author’s possession; and Pourier’s pension file. In a letter of 7 November 1939 [author’s possession] to George Hyde, Philip F. Wells writes, “[A]bout Black Twin or Bad Face. I know nothing about the man himself, but his son Woman Dress, I was very well acquainted with.” The society memberships of Woman Dress are cited in Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 95–99.

15. Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 483ff. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 418.

16. Mrs. Carrie Slow Bear interview, 12 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 40. Lieutenant Jesse Lee letter to Walter Camp, 6 November 1912, reports on the favoritism, Walter Camp Papers. Little Killer interview, 12 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 42; Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 181.

17. Crazy Horse family connections are difficult to pin down. The chief’s sister is variously reported as the wife of Club Man (by Little Killer) and Clown (by William J. Bordeaux). Further complicating matters is the report of James H. Cook that he had been given a whetstone once owned by Crazy Horse by the chief’s sister, the wife of Red Sack. If Crazy Horse had but one sister, as He Dog claimed, then Club Man and Clown may have been alternate names for the same person, or Crazy Horse’s sister may have been married to different men at different times.

18. Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 108–09; Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907. Mrs. Carrie Slow Bear interview, 12 July 1930.

19. The chief’s reluctance to believe the worst is found in Eli Ricker interview with Charles Eastman, 20 August 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 286.

20. Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1859, abstracted in South Dakota Historical Collections 27 (1954), 193. Hugh L. Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier, 49ff.

21. Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier, 52. At just about the same moment—July 1877—the North brothers went to Ogallala, Nebraska, to buy cattle for a new ranching enterprise. Looking out over the vast pens of cattle driven up from Texas, Luther asked his brother Frank how the numbers of cattle compared with the buffalo herds they’d seen on a hunting trip in 1870 with Buffalo Bill Cody. “He replied, ‘I think there were ten times as many buffalo in sight then as there are cattle.’ ” On inquiry they were told the Ogallala corrals held forty thousand cattle. The buffalo were gone from Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, but they remained in Montana. Luther Heddon North, Man of the Plains, 238.

22. Lieutenant W. P. Clark to Lieutenant W. S. Schuyler, 13 June 1877, Sioux War files, M1495/R4.

23. For the record, the Red Cloud Agency census in early 1877 reports sixty-four lodges and 441 people in the band of Young Man Afraid of His Horses, fifty-six lodges and 356 people in Yellow Bear’s Melt Band, 135 lodges and 964 people in Little Wound’s Cut-off band, 145 lodges and 899 people in Crazy Horse’s Hunkpatila band, sixty-four lodges and 446 people in American Horse’s Loafer band, seventy-three lodges and 468 people in Red Cloud’s Bad Face band, seventy-six lodges and 474 people in Red Leaf’s Wahjahjah band, and fifty-seven lodges and 339 people of northern Cheyenne. Buecker and Paul, eds., The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger, passim.

24. The council at the Red Cloud Agency is described by Benjamin Shopp, letter to CIA, 15 August 1877, Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 168ff. Clark to Crook, 1 August 1877, Letters Received, War AGO, Division of the Missouri, M666/R282. Crook to AAG, Military Division of the Missouri, 1 August 1877, cited in Charles M. Robinson III, General Crook and the Western Frontier, 215. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 7 August 1877.

25. Bradley to Crook, 16 July 1877, AGO, Letters Received, Division of the Missouri.

26. Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1941), reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 531. Bradley to ADG, 15 August 1877, Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3. Clark letter to Crook, 18 August 1877, Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, reprinted in Hardorff, The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 171ff.

26. “If you go to Washington they are going to kill you.”

1. Little Killer interview, 12 July 1930, and He Dog interview, 13 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 23, 42.

2. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 415.

3. H. R. Lemly letter to E. A. Brininstool, 17 June 1925, Hunter-Trapper-Trader (May 1933), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 542–48. Walter Camp interview with Horn Chips, c. 11 July 1910, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 85. William F. Kelly, Grant Shumway, ed., History of Western Nebraska (The Western Publishing Company, 1921), vol. 2, pp. 544ff.

4. William Philo Clark letters to W. S. Schuyler, 10 and 11 June 1877, Sioux War files, M1495/R4. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 25 July 1877. James Irwin letter to CIA, 13 July 1877, Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721.

5. W. R. Felton, writing as “California Bill,” in the Cheyenne Ledger, 10 July 1877. For a thorough account of Calhoun see Tom Buecker, Greasy Grass (May 1994); also Cheyenne Ledger, 13 July 1877, for Indians going north, and 4 August 1877, which describes the officers’ burial at Fort Leavenworth. Benjamin Shopp reports four horses as the price of a rifle, letter to CIA, 15 August 1877, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 168ff.

6. Shopp to CIA, 15 August 1877.

7. Ibid.

8. He Dog interview, 13 July 1930, 24. He Dog account, eleven-page typescript, Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska.

9. Colhoff winter count for the year 1877.

10. The winter count on deerskin: Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 80. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 2, p. 298, and vol. 3, p. 68.

11. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 100, 182. See Bordeaux interviews with Eli Ricker, 31 August 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 280, and Walter Camp, 6 and 7 July 1910, Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 137ff.

12. See Bordeaux interviews with Eli Ricker, 31 August 1907, and Walter Camp, 6 and 7 July 1910.

13. Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1941), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 531.

14. Reference to Black Fox and the movement of northern Indians to join Crazy Horse can be found in the affidavit of Charging First, son of Touch the Clouds, 3 October 1921, SDHS, Clark’s letter to Crook, 18 August 1877, Lieutenant Jesse Lee letter to CIA, 2 August 1877, M234/R841, and Daniel Burke letter to General Luther P. Bradley, 16 August 1877, USMHI, Carlisle Barracks.

15. Lieutenant G. A. Dodd interview with Billy Hunter, requested by J. G. Bourke; Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 65ff. Bradley letter to his mother, 8 September 1877, text and facsimile published as Lot no. 576, HCA Auction site, 17 February 2004. The image of the letter confirms the hand as unmistakably Bradley’s. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain.”

16. Clark letter to Crook, 18 August 1877.

17. W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 155. DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 182.

27. “We washed the blood from our faces.”

1. Bradley’s letter to Colonel Robert Williams, Adjutant General of the Department of the Platte, 31 August 1877, is reprinted in Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, p. 12. The original can be found in the National Archives, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 52. Colonel Williams’s cable to Crook on the westbound train, Crook’s reply to Bradley on 1 September, and Sheridan’s cable to Crook on the same day, are all found in The Diaries, vol. 3, p. 504. Sheridan’s cable to Washington explaining the change in orders is in the Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721.

2. Sheridan’s order approving additional scouts is included in Office of the Adjutant General, Letters Received, M266/R259. See also Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States(May–June 1914).

3. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 60.

4. Clark’s letter to Burke is quoted in Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 532.

5. Jesse Lee, Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877, Spotted Tail Agency, Letters Sent. Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912, Walter Camp Papers.

6. V. T. McGillycuddy letter to William Garnett, 24 June 1927, Robert A. Clark, ed., The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse, 123. McGillycuddy’s account of these events in this letter is garbled in a complex way, but he seems to have identified correctly the most important of the misinterpretations of Touch the Clouds’s speech at the meeting on 31 August 1877.

7. For details of Bordeaux’s life see his sister’s memoir, Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes; Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 31 August 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 290; and the roster of employees at the Spotted Tail Agency, 30 September 1877, M234/R841.

8. Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912.

9. Louis Bordeaux interviews with Walter Camp in July 1912 (Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 121ff.) and with Eli Ricker, 31 August 1907. See also Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912.

10. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” 533.

11. In the enlistment records He Dog is recorded as He Wolf, an error which prevented him from receiving a pension in later life. Details of He Dog’s life can be found in the pension files of his brothers Short Bull and Little Shield, and in his interviews with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, and 24 July 1931, Hugh Scott Papers; Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, and Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, nos. 346, 348, pp. 315–80. See also the interviews with Joseph Eagle Hawk, He Dog, and others conducted in the summers of 1930 and 1931 by Scudder Mekeel, American Museum of Natural History.

12. He Dog reported the killing of his brother in the Wagon Box fight to Hugh Scott, 24 July 1931, Hugh Scott Papers. Clark letter to Crook, 18 August 1877. He Dog interview, 7 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 19.

13. The Sorebacks and the origin of the name are found in Scudder Mekeel’s interview with Joseph Eagle Hawk, American Museum of Natural History, where the word is spelled Tcankauhan; and in the Colhoff winter count for the year of He Dog’s death, 1936, where the word is spelled Cankahuhan.

14. Irwin described the situation in back-to-back letters to the commissioner of Indian affairs, 31 August and 1 September 1877, Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721.

15. L. P. Bradley to R. Williams, 31 August 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 52.

28. “I can have him whenever I want him.”

1. Martin F. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 170–71, 184.

2. John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 169; Charles M. Robinson III, General Crook and the Western Frontier, 125–26.

3. In his autobiography, and in letters to Lieutenant Walter S. Schuyler in the 1870s, Crook variously spells the chief’s name as Deltchay, Delche, Deltche, Delchay, DelChay, and Delchae.

4. The Deltchay letters are preserved among a substantial collection of the lieutenant’s papers which were later donated by his family to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California.

5. Crook to Walter S. Schuyler, 15 September 1873, Walter S. Schuyler Papers.

6. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 182. See also “Major General George Crook and the Indians,” Azor Nickerson, copy in the Walter S. Schuyler Papers.

7. Crook letters to Schuyler of 13 July, 8 August, and 30 October 1874, Schuyler papers.

8. Lucy Lee report to the Greencastle [Indiana] Star, n.d., datelined Camp Sheridan, Nebraska, 18 September 1877, reprinted in E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 62ff.

9. Lee is our only source for this argument. His version of events can be found in three letters to Walter Camp, of 13 and 24 May 1910, and 6 November 1912; in his official report of 30 September 1877, and in his long account in the Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1914), reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 528ff. Other relevant documents by and about Lee can be found in the papers of Luther Bradley and in Lee’s ACP file in the National Archives.

10. Bradley diary, 2 September 1877, Luther Bradley Papers, Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, p. 73.

11. He Dog’s accounts of these conversations were made on 7 and 13 July 1930 with Eleanor Hinman; they are found in Oglala Sources, 18–24.

12. The child died at birth. For details of Garnett’s wives and children see William Garnett pension file, NA, XC 2–643–650.

13. Garnett provided three accounts of the events surrounding the killing of Crazy Horse: one to Lieutenant George Dodd for the use of Lieutenant Bourke in 1878, now published in The Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 513ff.; one to Eli Ricker in 1907, now published in Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 60ff.; and one to General Hugh Scott in August 1920, a copy of which can be found in the South Dakota State Historical Society. The first departs from the other versions on several sensitive points and must be treated with care; the second is full and rich without apparent bias but is in effect retold by Ricker; the third is essentially a six-thousand-word transcript of Garnett’s testimony as he delivered it. Numerous other documents provide ancillary detail about the meeting of Crook and Woman Dress.

14. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 420.

15. Garnett’s long account was given to General Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920.

16. The nine others were Yellow Bear (son of the chief Garnett had seen killed), Red Dog, No Flesh, High Wolf, Black Bear, Dog (a member of Yellow Bear’s Melt band), Slow Bull, Blue Horse, and Three Bears, the man closest to Lieutenant Clark.

17. William Garnett account to General Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920.

18. Eli Ricker interview with Charles Eastman, 20 August 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 286–87. See also Charles A. Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 46–47, and the Eleanor Hinman interview with Red Feather, 8 July 1930, Oglala Sources, 26–27. Crazy Horse’s companions in flight are identified in Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews.

19. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 62. The rest of Garnett’s account quoted here comes from his later interview with General Scott in August 1920.

20. Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912, Walter Camp Papers. Jesse Lee, Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877. Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain.”

29. “I am Crazy Horse! Don’t touch me!”

1. According to Lemly there were one hundred lodges in Crazy Horse’s village at the end of August. Bourke in his diary reports that on the night of 3 September the number had fallen to seventy-three. Lieutenant H. R. Lemly, writing in the New York Sun, 14 September 1877, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 238ff. Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3. He Dog identifies Bull Head as an uncle of Crazy Horse, and reports his presence with the scouts. He Dog interview with Eleanor Hinman, 13 July 1930, Oglala Sources; and He Dog account, eleven-page typescript, Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska.

2. Luke Voorhees letter in the Cheyenne Daily Leader, 7 September 1877.

3. Lemly, New York Sun, 14 September 1877. Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877 in the Greencastle (Indiana) Star, n.d., reprinted in E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 62ff. The files of the Greencastle Star have largely been lost.

4. Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 27.

5. The meeting with Looking Horse is described by Garnett in his interview with Hugh Scott and to Judge Eli Ricker, and by He Dog to his nephew Eagle Hawk. The Chicago Times, 5 September 1877, reported that Looking Horse was shot. Colonel Bradley in a letter to his mother said two people died in the Crazy Horse affair: the chief, and another man, unnamed—but not Looking Horse, who survived into the early 1900s.

6. Bull Head and Buffalo Head are cited in the Battiste Good and High Hawk winter counts under both variant names as having commemorated the dead in the Custer fight.

7. The encounter with Looking Horse is described by Garnett in his interview with Hugh Scott, and by He Dog in his account given to his nephew, Joseph Eagle Hawk.

8. Black Fox’s status as a Shirt Wearer was reported by Black Moccasin, interview on 11 September 1931 with Scudder Mekeel, Silas Afraid of Enemy, interpreter; American Museum of Natural History. Robert Strahorn reported that Black Fox was a “brother-in-law of Crazy Horse.” Cheyenne Daily Leader, 18 September 1877.

9. Black Fox’s words are recorded by Garnett in slightly differing form in his interviews with Hugh Scott and Eli Ricker.

10. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 64. “The biting of the knife”: Royal B. Hassrick, The Sioux, 39.

11. Chicago Times, 26 May 1877.

12. Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1941), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 536. Horn Chips told Eli Ricker that Crazy Horse came to his lodge on Beaver Creek, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 276.

30. “He feels too weak to die today.”

1. Statements of Mary Pacer and Jessie Romero Eagle Heart, both granddaughters of Fast Thunder; Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 2, 21.

2. Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1941), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 535–36.

3. Lee often described these events, most notably in his Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877; in an interview with Walter Camp, 27 October 1912, Walter Camp Papers; Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain.” In a letter to Walter Camp of 13 May 1910 Lee wrote, “I never saw Crazy Horse till he came with his wife to Spotted Tail Agency.” Walter Camp Papers. See also Charging First affidavit, 3 October 1921, South Dakota Historical Society.

4. Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 30 August 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 290ff. Lee’s impressions come from the sources already cited.

5. Ibid.

6. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” 535–36.

7. This episode is described by two witnesses: Louis Bordeaux and Jesse Lee, and by Lee’s wife, Lucy. See Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 30 August 1907; Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” 536; and Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877 in the Greencastle (Indiana) Star, n.d., reprinted in E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 62ff.

8. The early life of Horn Chips is described by Robert H. Ruby, The Oglala Sioux: Warriors in Transition (Vantage, 1955), 52. William K. Powers, Yuwipi (University of Nebraska, 1982), 94, thinks Ruby heard this story from George Plenty Wolf in the early 1950s. Reference to Horn Chips’s stone medicine is found in Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 208. See also He Dog and Red Feather interviews with Eleanor Hinman, Oglala Sources, and Mari Sandoz, 30 June 1931, quoted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 120. The experience of Horned Horse is related by John W. Ford in the Chicago Times, 26 May 1877, and by John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, 137.

9. Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 294.

10. Lieutenant Jesse Lee, Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877. Louis Bordeaux interview with Walter Camp, 6 and 7 July 1910, Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 137ff.

11. Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux.

12. Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877. Lee, Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877.

13. Good Voice was promoted for his investigation of the murder of a mail courier in June 1877. Fast Thunder and High Bear also took part. See reports of Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, 8 and 9 July 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 51.

14. Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877.

31. “I heard him using the brave word.”

1. For Crazy Horse’s medicine see the drawings of Amos Bad Heart Bull, in Helen H. Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, nos. 219 and 272, pp. 315–80; Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 209, and “One Indian the White Man Never Conquered,” Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1933; statements of Joseph Black Elk, Peter Bordeaux, and James Chase in Morning, Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle; Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 14 February 1907; and Mark Spider interview in 1936, Joseph G. Masters, Shadows Fall on the Little Horn, 41–42.

2. Crazy Horse’s dress on the fatal day was reported by White Calf in an interview with Eleanor Hinman, 11 July 1930, Oglala Sources, 41. His clothes are depicted by Standing Bear in a painting on muslin sold by Sotheby’s; the red medicine bag is clearly shown; see note 24. The knife is described by Jesse Lee in a letter to Walter Camp, 24 May 1910, Walter Camp Papers; and by H. R. Lemly, Military Service Institution of the United States, reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 542–48. The whetstone and case were given by Crazy Horse’s sister to James H. Cook; identification card handwritten by Harold J. Cook, son of James Cook, James H. Cook Papers.

3. Lee’s version of the day’s events are mainly recorded in his Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877; his interview with Walter Camp, 27 October 1910; and his article, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1914), reprinted in Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 537.

4. Little Bull was a son of Horned Horse, and after the latter’s death took his father’s name. Crazy Horse’s refusal to dismount is recorded in Little Bull’s pension file, National Archives, Pension Certificate 2615707. See also Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” and Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877 in the Greencastle (Indiana) Star.

5. Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 30 August 1907, Richard E. Jensen, The Indian Interviews, 290ff.

6. Waglula was a brother of the wife’s mother. Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 84; “advised him not to fear”: Remarks of Henry Standing Bear prepared for unveiling of the Crazy Horse Monument at Fort Robinson, 5 September 1934, copy in Fort Robinson Museum files. Henry was the elder brother of Luther.

7. Henry Standing Bear interview with Walter Camp, July 1910, Indiana University, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 114. A brief biography of Turning Bear is found in the Josephine Waggoner Papers. He Dog reports that Yellow Horse was in the group, He Dog account, eleven-page typescript, Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska.

8. Much information about the Fast Thunder family can be found in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle; Mathew King and Harvey Arden, ed., Noble Red Man (Beyond Words, 1994); the interview of Jennie Fast Thunder by Luther Standing Bear, included in Land of the Spotted Eagle;and in the pension file for Jennie Fast Thunder, National Archives.

9. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain.” The Oglala following in the wake of the friendly Brulé are identified by William Garnett and Lieutenant H. R. Lemly, writing in the New York Sun, 14 September 1877.

10. Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877; Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain.”

11. Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 182. The first version, differing only in punctuation and the choice of a few words, appeared in the Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1933. Standing Bear said Jennie was “a distant relative,” and that he spoke to her outside her log house near Wounded Knee Creek in the summer of 1932. She died two years later, on 2 January 1934.

12. E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 30. The message loses the greeting and salutation in the text printed in Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 538.

13. The camp criers are described in the Chicago Tribune, 11 September 1877, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 248. James Irwin to J. Q. Smith, Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721. Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 14 February 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 273–77. Affidavit of Charging First, 3 October 1921; copy at South Dakota Historical Society, Pierre, South Dakota.

14. He Dog’s fullest account of this day is found in interviews with Eleanor Hinman, 7 July 1930, Oglala Sources; and with Joseph Eagle Hawk, He Dog account, eleven-page typescript.

15. McGillycuddy quoted by Elmo Scott Watson, Crawford Tribune, 7 September 1934.

16. Louis Bordeaux interview with Walter Camp, 6 and 7 July 1910, Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 137ff.

17. Lee’s version of this event is recorded in three places, as cited earlier. The memory of Charging First is recorded in his affidavit of 3 October 1921 and his pension file.

18. “Within about fifteen minutes”: Jesse Lee letter to Walter Camp, 13 May 1910, copy in the Swan Library, Little Bighorn National Historic Site; “less than a minute”: Lee, Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877.

19. Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 70; He Dog interview, 7 July 1930.

20. “persuaded to halt”: Captain Charles King to retired General William Carey Brown, 17 October 1921, William Carey Brown Papers, University of Colorado, Boulder. Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources. White Calf mentions the presence of Iron Hawk and Long Bear. Little Big Man asked Long Bear to take charge of his band during a proposed trip to Canada; James O’Beirne to CIA E. A. Hayt, 27 August 1878, Red Cloud Agency, Letters Received, M234.

21. Red Feather and Charging First describe this moment. Turning Bear is identified by many sources, including the Colhoff winter count, Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun, and He Dog.

22. “When the inner door was opened”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews; “Don’t do that”: Yellow Horse, quoted in Colhoff winter count; Eli Ricker interview with Standing Soldier, 20 November 1906, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews; “the uncle of Crazy Horse”: this may have been Little Hawk, but it is Garnett who identified him as reported to be an uncle, and Garnett ought to have recognized Little Hawk without difficulty.

23. “The two whirled”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907; “Crazy Horse made a grunt”: Eli Ricker interview with Horn Chips, 273ff; “It sounds like a growl”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907; “the brave word”: Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 182.

24. “Don’t shoot”: William Garnett interview with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, SDHS; Standing Bear held by Thunder Hawk, Little Big Man shirtless: Painting on muslin by George Standing Bear, Sotheby’s catalog, sale 2 December 1998, with notes by Mike Cowdrey; Christie’s catalog, sale 29 June 2006; “Stab the sonofabitch!”: Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 30 August 1907.

32. “He has looked for death, and it has come.”

1. He Dog interviews with Eleanor Hinman, 7 and 13 July 1930, Oglala Sources.

2. The four hardships and the four virtues: Black Elk, Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 362, and Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 113; H. Scudder Mckeel, The Economy of a Modern Teton Dakota Community, 3; Clark Wissler, Field Notes, 101; “Better to die young”: Clark Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations, 40, and W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 1273; “hengh”: Eli Ricker interview with Baptiste Pourier, 6 March 1907, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Soldier and Settler Interviews, 264.

3. a guard had stabbed him: Affidavit of Charging First, 3 October 1921; copy in South Dakota Historical Society, Pierre, South Dakota; “Brother-in-law, I am finished”: Remarks of Henry Standing Bear prepared for unveiling of the Crazy Horse Monument at Fort Robinson, 5 September 1934, copy in Fort Robinson Museum files.

4. “doubled-up”: Lieutenant Henry R. Lemly writing anonymously in the New York Sun, 14 September 1877, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 238ff; “Father, I want to see you”: James H. Cook letter to John Neihardt, 3 March 1920, John Neihardt Papers; “You fooled me”: Affidavit of Charging First, 3 October 1921.

5. “Cousin, you killed me”: Jesse Means Romero Eagle Heart, statement in Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 100.

6. “Might be possuming”: Lemly, writing in the New York Sun, 14 September 1877; “only a small stab”: William Garnett affidavit for Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, South Dakota Historical Society; “right above the hip bone”: Affidavit of Charging First, 3 October 1921.

7. V. T. McGillycuddy letter to Elmo Scott Watson, 13 April 1922, Elmo Scott Watson Papers. McGillycuddy has left a number of accounts of the killing, of which the most complete is a letter to William Garnett of 24 June 1927, reprinted in Robert A. Clark, ed., The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse, 121ff. Lemly and Garnett both say that McGillycuddy did not appear on the scene until after Crazy Horse had been removed to the adjutant’s office, but the correspondent writing as “Philander” in the Chicago Tribune, 11 September 1877, confirms that McGillycuddy was with Captain Kennington during the standoff in front of the guardhouse. It was McGillycuddy’s nature to place himself at the center of every story; in this instance he credits himself with preventing a bloodbath by persuading Colonel Bradley to reverse his order to place the wounded chief in the guardhouse. No one else makes mention of the doctor’s role in this regard, but it may have happened as he tells it.

8. “You are always in the way”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 71; “I was terribly frightened”: Luther Standing Bear interview with Jennie Fast Thunder, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 182–83.

9. “For God’s sake, Captain”: H. R. Lemly, Military Service Institution of the United States, quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 542–48.

10. “Let’s get out of here”: Louis Bordeaux interview with Walter Camp, July 1912, Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 121ff.

11. “For a few minutes”: Angeline Johnson letter to her sister, 7 September 1877, reprinted in Nebraska History (summer 1996); “Two friendly Indians”: Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877 in the Greencastle (Indiana) Star, n.d., reprinted in E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 62ff.

12. “from around the corner,” “The old chap hated”: V. McGillycuddy letter to William Garnett, 24 June 1927, Clark, ed., The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse, 125–26.

13. “Maybe the man is badly hurt”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 72.

14. Lemly, Military Service Institution of the United States.

15. “See where I am hurt”: He Dog interview, 7 July 1930, 20–21.

16. “Blood flowed”: Charging Girl narrative, notes taken by James Cook, 8 June 1937, James C. Cook Papers.

17. “He was restless”: Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 30 August 1907, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 300; “His case was hopeless”: McGillycuddy quoted by Elmo Scott Watson, Crawford Tribune, 7 September 1934. Standard dose from John Biddle, Materia Medica (1865), courtesy of Ian Isherwood, an authority on medicine in the Civil War.

18. “I am trying to persuade”: The text of the telegrams was transcribed by John Gregory Bourke and can be found in Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, p. 509.

19. “They feared an attempt”: Angie Johnson letter to her sister, 7 September 1877. Tall Man pension file, IWO 16355 Ctf 11113, National Archives; “You better stay there”: He Dog account, eleven-page typescript, Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska. He Dog’s meeting with Waglula is from the Joseph Eagle Hawk document, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, University of Wyoming, Laramie.

20. “No one came”: V. T. McGillycuddy letter to William Garnett, 24 June 1927; “I have trusted thousands”: Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912, Walter Camp Papers; see also Jesse M. Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1941), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 539; “stabbed up through”: Charging First affidavit.

21. “He wanted to go in”: William Garnett affidavit for Hugh Scott; “Son, I am here”: Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 300; “How is it with you”: Louis Bordeaux interview with Walter Camp, 6 and 7 July 1910, Liddic and Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 137ff.; “I am hurt bad”: Statement of Connie Utterback, South Dakota Historical Review (October 1935), cited in James M. Robinson, West from Fort Pierre: The Wild World of James (Scotty) Philip (Westernlore Press, 1974), 51; “I am going to die”: Louis Bordeaux interview with Walter Camp; “Tell the people”: Statement of Connie Utterback.

22. “asserted that he had”: “Philander,” Chicago Tribune, 11 September 1877; “Doctor McGillycuddy showed”: Lemly, writing in the New York Sun.

23. “And said ‘Wash-ta’ ”: Angeline Johnson letter, 7 September 1877; “No white man is to blame”: Eli Ricker interview with Louis Bordeaux, 30 August 1907; “But he got away”: Louis Bordeaux interview with Walter Camp, 6 and 7 July 1910.

24. “He may never come back”: Lucy Lee letters of 1928–1929 to E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 71ff.; “If I had listened to you”: Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912.

25. Waglula’s talk was recorded by Lieutenant Lemly, writing in the New York Sun; “Philander,” Chicago Tribune, 11 September 1877; and V. T. McGillycuddy letter to Elmo Scott Watson, 13 April 1922.

26. The two best sources on Lakota religious practice and belief, from which the quotes used here were taken, are Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music, and James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual.

27. “heart was giving out”: V. T. McGillycuddy letter to William Garnett, 10 May 1926; “He seemed to relish”: Lemly, writing in the New York Sun.

28. McGillycuddy letters to James H. Cook, 25 July 1934, and Eleanor Hinman, 6 May 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources.

29. “Bat was the first”: Eli Ricker interview with Baptiste Pourier, 6 March 1907, 264.

30. “My son is dead”: Ibid.; “Finally they became quieter”: Lemly, writing in the New York Sun.

31. “it has come”: L. P. Bradley, Report to the Adjutant General, Department of the Platte, 7 September 1877, Sioux War files, M1495/R4, reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 183.

33. “He still mourns the loss of his son.”

1. Bordeaux described this moment on three occasions: to Eli Ricker on 30 August 1907; and to Walter Camp in July 1910 and July 1912. See Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 300–01; Bruce R. Liddic and Paul Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 121ff., 137ff.

2. Clark telegram to Crook, 6 September 1877, Charles M. Robinson III, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, p. 510. Chicago Times, 7 September 1877.

3. E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 38–39. Brininstool obtained a few pages from Lee’s diary from his widow in the 1920s or from his daughter about 1949. The diary has now been lost.

4. Lee to Bradley, 21 April 1878, Luther Bradley Papers.

5. Captain Fred R. Brown, History of the Ninth U.S. Infantry (R. R. Donnelley, 1990), 119.

6. Charles King to retired General William Carey Brown, 17 October 1921, William Carey Brown Papers, University of Colorado, Boulder.

7. killed thirty-eight whites: Clark letter to CIA, 10 September 1877, Department of the Platte, Letters Received, Box 53; also M234/R841; reprinted in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 186; “intended to talk”: Omaha Bee, 13 September 1877, reprinted in Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 260.

8. “The Missouri River”: Chicago Tribune, 28 September 1877.

9. “It is too late”: Ibid., 2 October 1877.

10. Crook to Sheridan, 15 October 1877, Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721.

11. “moved slowly”: Lawson to AG Platte, 4 December 1877, Secretary of the Interior, Indian Division, Letters Received, M825/R10; they blamed the condition: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 76; “these people are wild”: Clark to Schurz, 7 November 1877, Spotted Tail Agency, M234/R841.

12. “northern fire eaters”: Irwin letter to E. A. Hayt, CIA, 5 November 1877, Red Cloud Agency files, M234/R721; “possuming,” “They dared not”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 74. See also Clark to Carl Schurz, 7 November 1877, Letters Received, Spotted Tail Agency, M234/R841.

13. “thrown into the greatest fever of excitement”: W. J. Cleveland letter to Bishop William Hobart Hare, 7 September 1877, Center for Western Studies, Augustana College; “intense excitement”: Louis Bordeaux affidavit, 9 October 1914, South Dakota State Historical Society; “wild rumors”: Lieutenant Jesse Lee, Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 30 September 1877; “Fast Thunder … was shocked”: Statement of Mathew King, 14 April 1970, Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 125–26. Also see Mathew King and Harvey Arden, eds., Noble Red Man (Beyond Words, 1994), 38–39; “Turning Bear tried”: Note on Turning Bear, Josephine Waggoner Papers; “Start nothing”: He Dog account, eleven-page typescript, Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska; “Indians have been making presents”: W. P. Clark to J. G. Bourke, 9 September 1877, Robinson, ed., The Diaries, vol. 3, p. 512; “Now everything is again”: Lucy Lee letter dated 18 September 1877 in the Greencastle (Indiana) Star, n.d., reprinted in Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 62ff.

14. “Nephew, get up”: William Garnett interview with Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920. See also Lieutenant H. R. Lemly, writing in the New York Sun, 14 September 1877; H. R. Lemly letter to E. A. Brininstool, 17 June 1925, Hunter-Trapper-Trader (May 1933), quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 542–48; Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 73; “Then the mother”: Angeline Johnson letter, 7 September 1877; this was the uncle of Crazy Horse: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, 15 January 1907, 73; Daniel Burke letter to General Luther P. Bradley, 7 September 1877, Luther Bradley Papers.

15. Red Feather’s presence: Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Eleanor H. Hinman, Oglala Sources, 29; White Woman One Butte’s presence: Statement of Julia Hollow Horn Bear, 4 January 1963, Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 109. The customary rites or preparation of a favored child for burial were recorded in 1882 by Alice Fletcher, “The Shadow or Ghost Lodge: A ceremony of the Oglala Sioux,” Peabody Museum Papers 3, 296–307.

16. “just before noon”: “Philander,” Chicago Tribune, 11 September 1877; “Crazy Horse’s father rode”: Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 204; “Died in victory”: He Dog account, eleven-page typescript.

17. “They were preparing”: Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 87. See also Address of Charles C. Hamilton, Sioux City, Iowa, 27 November 1928, Annals of Iowa, 3rd ser., vol. 42, no. 3 (1972), 809–34, and the various accounts of Jesse Lee. Hamilton was the son of a photographer who was operating a studio at the agency at the time Crazy Horse was killed; he describes the alarm of the soldiers and of his father at the news that Crazy Horse’s body was on its way. If a photograph of Crazy Horse was ever taken it is likely that James Hamilton was the man who did it.

18. Sources for the manner of the burial of Crazy Horse include Lucy Lee letters to Brininstool dated November 1928 and February 1929; Walter Camp interview with Jesse Lee, 27 October 1912, Walter Camp Papers; Jesse Lee, diary entry, 8 September 1877, reprinted in Brininstool, Crazy Horse, 39; Jesse Lee, “The Capture and Death of an Indian Chieftain,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (May–June 1914), reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 528ff., and address of Charles C. Hamilton. Louis Bordeaux interview with Walter Camp, 6 and 7 July 1910, Liddic and Harbaugh, Custer & Company, 137ff.

19. Lemly, writing in the New York Sun.

20. Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930, Hinman, Oglala Sources, 29.

21. Letter from the granddaughter of Rattling Stone Woman, Mrs. Victoria Conroy of Hot Springs, South Dakota, to James H. McGregor, Pine Ridge Superintendent, dictated to Josephine Waggoner, 18 December 1934, Raymond A. Burnside Papers, Iowa State Historical Department, quoted in Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 265ff. Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 100.

22. “They were afraid”: Victoria Conroy letter; “His father hid his body”: Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930; “Whenever anyone asked her”: Remark of Jennie Fast Thunder, quoted in Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 183; Buffalo Chips and William Garnett: Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews; told Walter Camp: Walter Camp interview with Horn Chips, c. July 1910, quoted in Hardorff, ed., The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse, 88; “just one man know”: Woman Dress letter to James Cook, 7 January 1911, James H. Cook Papers; “She helped bury him”: Acquisition note on whetstone given to James Cook by the wife of Red Sack, identified as Crazy Horse’s sister, James H. Cook Papers; “But it was never told”: Woodrow Respects Nothing to Cleve Walstrom, author, Search for the Lost Trail of Crazy Horse (Dageforde Publishing, n.d.), 117–19.

23. “He died awful quick”: Red Feather interview, 8 July 1930; “He did not want any white”: Statement of Howard Red Bear (1871–1968), son of Philip Red Bear, 13 August 1966, quoted in Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 133. By the late 1870s, the Sioux understood that whites were in the habit of routinely looting burial sites.

24. New York Times, 15 September 1879. Carson is identified in the diary of Webb Hayes found at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio. See also John Collins, My Experiences in the West (Lakeside Press, 1970), 167–78, which relates Schurz’s visit in September 1879.

25. “He still mourns”: New York Times, 22 September 1877. Typed notes deposited with Schurz’s papers in the Library of Congress.

26. Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes, 110.

34. “When I tell these things I have a pain in my heart.”

1. The painting was probably intended as a tipi liner. The acquisition notes and Webb Hayes’s diary of the trip are found in the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio.

2. “In what I did”: Little Big Man to President Hayes, 1 August 1878, Letters Received, Office of Indian Affairs, M234/R234, copy in the Fort Robinson Museum files.

3. “He always took”: Sickels to W. Fletcher Johnson, Life of Sitting Bull and History of the Indian War of 1890–91 (Edgewood Publishing, 1891), 113. The actual text reads, “A Token of regard for gallant services rendered to the whites at the death of Crazy Horse.” It is dated 29 September 1877, and is presented to “Mahtia-Cowa,” an eccentric rendering of the Lakota for Chasing Bear, an alternate name of Little Big Man. Riggs spelled the name “Matowakuwa.” The medal was later acquired by the Union Pacific Railroad, which lent it to the Museum of Nebraska History in Lincoln, where it is on display. It was first identified by Paul L. Hedren, “The Crazy Horse Medal: An Enigma from the Great Sioux War,” Nebraska History, summer 1994 and summer 1996.

4. Scott to Walter Camp, 19 April 1919, Walter Camp Papers, Box 2, Folder 4.

5. Luther Heddon North, Man of the Plains, 278–79.

6. Testimony of Baptiste Pourier, 21 September 1923, Ralph H. Case, Black Hills Depositions, 621ff., copy provided by Ephraim Dickson. See Ralph Case papers, I. D. Weeks Library, University of South Dakota.

7. Hugh L. Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier (Century Company, 1928), 110, 123–24.

8. Richard Irving Dodge, The Plains of the Great West (Archer House, 1959), 133.

9. Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier, 123.

10. Clark Wissler, Red Man Reservations (Collier Books, 1971), 62.

11. W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 130.

12. “Their sisters,” “are strong and usually healthy,”: Clark, The Indian Sign Language, 208, 279.

13. Obituaries appeared in the Army and Navy Journal, 27 September 1884, the Carthage Republican, 14 October 1884, and by A. E. Bates in the proceedings of The Sixteenth Annual Reunion of the Association of the Graduates of the United States Military Academy, 12 June 1885, 43–48.

14. counting the dead: Eli Ricker interview with W. A. Birdsall, 22 December 1906, Richard E. Jensen, ed., The Settler and Soldier Interviews, 45; reunited with his father: Sheridan Post, 20 April 1893; died of alcoholism: Typed note dated 1953, Charles D. Humberd, MD, of Barnard, Missouri, tipped into a copy of DeBarthe’s book listed for sale on the Internet, March 2006.

15. “What are you going to do”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 77. The interpreter’s job fell open when the incumbent, John Provost, killed a man because his heart was bad. He later died in prison. See Julia B. McGillycuddy, Blood on the Moon(University of Nebraska, 1990), 114ff.

16. “I’ve lived all of my life”: Interviews with James Garnett and his sister Joanne Cuny, Sturgis, South Dakota, 3 September 2001. The 1885 meeting with members of the Garnett family is recounted by the widow of General Pickett, southern commander on the occasion when General Richard Garnett was killed at Gettysburg, Cosmopolitan, March and April 1914.

17. Raleigh Barker, Tales from a Reservation Storekeeper (American Studies Press, 1979), 22–23. See also Robert H. Ruby, The Oglala Sioux (Vantage, 1955), 33.

18. “I killed Crazy Horse?”: Eli Ricker interview with William Garnett, Jensen, ed., The Indian Interviews, 66ff. All other quotes in this section come from Garnett’s affidavit for Hugh Scott, 19 August 1920, South Dakota Historical Society.

19. Lieutenant Lyman V. Kennon, 21 March 1887, Diary 1886–1890, George Crook Papers; “fitted very snugly”: New York World, quoted in Phil Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 370; “The adulations heaped”: quoted in Martin F. Schmitt, ed., General George Crook, 134.

20. James H. Cook papers.

21. Charging Girl narrative, James C. Cook Papers.

35. “I’m not telling anyone what I know about the killing of Crazy Horse.”

1. Rochester Union, quoted in Cheyenne Daily Leader, 2 September 1877. See also Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America (Knopf, 2005), 192ff.; Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage (University of New Mexico, 2008), 101ff.

2. “I wear the uniform”: V. T. McGillycuddy letter to Elmo Scott Watson, 19 July 1927, Elmo Scott Watson Papers.

3. Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music, 412.

4. Walker’s introduction to Lakota religion can be found in James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, passim. See especially Walker’s autobiographical statement, 45–50, and the statement of George Sword, 5 September 1896, Bruce Means, translator, 74–75.

5. Principal sources for the history of the Fast Thunder family include Mathew King and Harvey Arden, ed., Noble Red Man (Beyond Words, 1994); Edward and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle (1981); Barbara Means Adams, Prayers of Smoke (Celestial Arts, 1990); Fast Thunder’s pension file in the National Archives; and interviews with Barbara Adams and Pete Swift Bird.

6. “he was the first Indian”: Statement of Paul Red Star, 7 February 1964, Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 142; “to put this ghost dance aside”: Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, 269; fifty-six cattle: Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, 139, n. 38.

7. “How can I be free”: King and Arden, eds., Noble Red Man, 38–39.

8. “Cousin, you killed me”: Statement of Jesse Romero Eagle Heart, 5 November 1962, Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 100.

9. King and Arden, eds., Noble Red Man, 40.

10. Fast Thunder’s date of death and estate are from his pension file, National Archives. Jennie Wounded Horse’s date of death is from statement of Jessie Romero Eagle Heart, born 1906, speaking on 5 November 1962, Kadlecek and Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle, 2.

11. Eleanor Hinman, introduction to Oglala Sources, 7.

12. Ibid., 3.

13. “You said nothing”: “History of Chief Crazy Horse,” by Rev. Joseph Eagle Hawk, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, University of Wyoming, Laramie. This document is a variant of the eleven-page typescript in the Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska, and of the He Dog statement concerning the death of Crazy Horse, Box 4, Folder 3, Don Russell Papers, Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

14. “I am an old man”: Hinman, Oglala Sources, 9.

15. “It used to be a disgrace”: Hugh Scott interview with He Dog and Red Feather, 24 July 1931, Hugh Scott Papers; “but when he got ‘there’ ”: Scudder Mekeel, Field Notes, summer 1931, 2 August 1931.

16. General Hugh Scott letter, National Archives, quoted by J. W. Vaughn, With Crook at the Rosebud (Stackpole Books, 1956), 40.

Afterword

1. Henry W. Daly, American Legion Monthly (April 1927), reprinted in Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains, 250ff.

2. Bourke correspondence about Crazy Horse photo, October 1890, John Gregory Bourke Papers; likeness to the “spirit”: Ziólkowski statement of purpose, 29 May 1949, Story Telling in Stone (pamphlet, 1983); “Poor old Crazy Horse”: John Colhoff letter to George Hyde, 2 May 1949, author’s possession.

3. Mathew King and Harvey Arden, eds., Noble Red Man (Beyond Words, 1994), 39–40.

4. Black Elk’s teachings can be found in John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, Ray DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, and Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe (University of Oklahoma, 1953).

5. Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian (World Wisdom, 2007), 108, 115. See also Brown, The Sacred Pipe.

6. The story of the Fast Thunder family comes from the Fast Thunder pension file; Edward Kadlecek and Mabell Kadlecek, To Kill an Eagle; Barbara Adams, Prayers of Smoke (Celestial Arts, 1990); and interviews with Barbara Adams, 7 September 2001 and 26 April 2004; with Barbara’s mother, Margaret Black Weasel, 24 May 2004; and with Pete Swift Bird by telephone, 13 January and 8 February 2006; in Porcupine, South Dakota, 23 and 24 September 2007, and in Pine Ridge, 26 April 2009. Barney Wickard told me of life in Minatare since the 1930s in interviews on 28 April 2004 and 28 April 2009.

7. Barbara Adams died on 10 August 2005 in the Rapid City, South Dakota, Regional Hospital. Her mother, Margaret Black Weasel, died there a few months later.