Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry Page A

Reno’s vast relief, the great gathering broke up, the Indians melting away into the sheltering vastness of the plains.

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    W HAT DID THE S IOUX and Cheyenne leaders think at this point? What did they feel? Several commentators have suggested that once the jubilation of victory subsided, a mood of foreboding returned. Perhaps the tribes recognized that they were likely never to be so unified again—and they were not. Probably the leaders knew that they were likely never to have such a one-sided military victory again, either—a victory that was thrown them because of the vaingloriousness of one white officer.
    Or perhaps they didn’t think in these terms at all—not yet. With the great rally over, the great battle won, they broke up and got on with their hunting. Perhaps a few did reckon that something was over now, but it is doubtful that many experienced the sense of climax and decline as poetically as Old Lodge Skins in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man : “Yes, my son,” he says,
it is finished now, because what more can you do to an enemy than beat him? Were we fighting red man againstred man—they way we used to, because that is a man’s profession, and besides it is enjoyable—it would now be the turn of the other side to whip us. We would fight as hard as ever and perhaps would win again, but they would definitely start with an advantage, because that is the right way. There is no permanent winning or losing when things move, as they should, in a circle. . . .
    But the white men, who live in straight lines and squares, do not believe as I do . . . With them it is everything or nothing, Washita or Greasy Grass . . . Winning is all they care about, and if they can do that by scratching a pen across a paper or saying something into the wind, they are much happier. . . .
    Old Lodge Skins was right about the army wanting to win. Crook’s defeat at the Rosebud had embarrassed the army, and the debacle at the Little Bighorn shamed it. The nation, of course, was outraged. By August of 1876 Crook and Terry were lumbering around with a reassuring force of some four thousand soldiers. Naturally they found few Indians. Crazy Horse was somewhere near Bear Butte, harrying the miners in the Black Hills pretty much as the mood struck him. There was a minor engagement or two, of little note. The Indians were not suicidal—they left the massive force alone. Crook and Terry were such respecters now that they were bogged down by their own might.
    In the fall of that year the whites, having failed to buy the Black Hills, simply took them. There was a travesty ofa treaty council at which the theme of farming was again accented. Young Man Afraid, after hearing a great deal about farming, sarcastically ventured the view that it might take him one hundred years to learn how to do such work—he wanted to make sure that the government meant to take care of his people well during this learning period. With this disgraceful treaty the Indians lost not only the Black Hills but the Powder River, the Yellowstone, the Bighorns. There was even talk of moving the settled Sioux at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies to a reservation on the Missouri River, a move they all bitterly resisted. Crook, at this point, wanted to depose Red Cloud, insisting that he had not been forceful enough when it came to bringing in the hostiles. He wanted to promote Spotted Tail, not because he was better about the hostiles but because he was somewhat easier to deal with than the argumentative Bad Face.
    From this point in 1876 on, the bitter factionalism of agency politics—in the Sioux’s case, the factionalism of the defeated—has a place in the story. Everyone was getting more than a little tired of Red Cloud, but he was both tenacious and smart. He was to be one of the very few Plains Indian leaders of this period who survived everything, dying of old age in