Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas

Sometimes it was days before visiting warriors saw the man they had come to follow, for often Crazy Horse kept far from the noise and the drumming, perhaps making a fast, hoping for a vision or a dream to tell him what must be done. It seemed if he could make himself more a part of the earth and the sky and the things between that a way would come to save the people. He even tried the medicine things of the Old Ones, and for two days he looked unmoving towards the Black Hills, overrun as by ants digging up the rocks and the cool green valleys and the slopes red with the grass berries so sweet to the tongue. But it was no more than a wind in the gully and n his way back to camp he saw that the buffalo chips were indeed becoming few, the trees no longer rubbed smooth by the backs of the shedding herds.

What a nice coincidence to be able to write this review on the anniversary of the victory of a coalition of Lakota and Cheyenne fighters at the Little Bighorn, or as they call it, the Battle of the Greasy Grass. During that fight, the larger force of Indian fighters utterly destroyed the forces of General George Armstrong Custer, killing Custer and almost every other American soldier. By the time of the battle, the Lakota leader called Crazy Horse was at the peak of his renown, having already distinguished himself as an especially courageous warrior in actions against the American forces, including, ten years earlier, leading a decoy action in the "Fetterman Fight" that led to the greatest losses suffered by American forces--greatest, that is, until Little Bighorn. Just a few years later, Crazy Horse's band of holdouts against reservation life would be drastically reduced, and then, once he himself surrendered to the Red Cloud agency in Nebraska, he himself would be killed by a military guard with a bayonet.

Mari Sandoz, the great Nebraskan writer, depicts Crazy Horse as the "Strange Man of the Lakotas." Crazy Horse was marked as unusual from his birth by his fine blond hair which earned him, long before he took the name of his father, also called Crazy Horse, the name "Curly." But Crazy Horse was also "strange" in the sense that he was aloof and unsociable, and cared little for the scalps and war trophies that dominated the Lakota idea of what it meant to be renowned in battle. Crazy Horse, instead, is driven by an obsessive passion for the survival of the Lakota, rather than personal gain or fame:

Their blankets held out around them, as was customary, they went on as women do, about this Hunkpatila so often in their camp, with hair summer-bleached to the color of an elk's rump. Nor was he a big man, as a Lakota leader should be; instead he stood slender as a young warrior, almost a boy when riding beside the seven-foot Touch the Clouds. He did not sing or dance as a Lakota should, and never made the ordeals of the sundance to give himself fortitude and courage. It was true that he was strong in the fighting, but he brought in no scalps for the women to dance and no stories of coups counted or deeds done. He was indeed a Strange Man.

Sandoz' depiction of Crazy Horse's life is a compelling one, animated by the central drama of the warrior's "strangeness." His early life is dominated by the difficulty of his love for Black Buffalo Woman who marries another man, No Water. In Lakota culture, a woman may divorce her husband freely by moving her things from her husband's lodge to another man's, but when Black Buffalo Woman leaves No Water for Crazy Horse, No Water responds by shooting Crazy Horse in the face; a controversy for which Crazy Horse is "unshirted," losing his authority among the leaders of the Lakota. 

That theme--Crazy Horse's conflict with Lakota leaders--is picked up later as Crazy Horse becomes the avatar of the "hostile" Lakota, who want to pursue resistance against the American forces, as opposed to the "friendlies" who prefer to accommodate the Americans by giving up their freedom of movement in exchange for food and supplies provided by their reservation Indian agencies. This conflict is not, as Vollmann depicts it in The Dying Grass, merely driven by differing perspectives on what is best for the people, but the greed and short-sightedness of Lakota leaders, who benefit from the Americans' authority. Red Cloud comes in for special criticism here, sacrificing the Lakota's autonomy by signing the "peace paper" in exchange for being designated the "paper chief" of all the Lakota, a role which had never existed among the highly decentralized bands. Red Cloud is Crazy Horse's foil in Sandoz' telling, a selfish and greedy man who sacrifices the interests of his people for his own.

What makes Crazy Horse such a compelling tragedy is that, in the end, it's a betrayal story: the Americans could never defeat the Strange Man of the Lakota, but the Lakota could, and in the end it's a constellation of jealous Indians who bring about Crazy Horse's death. These Judases have their own fascinating figures, like Little Big Man, who holds Crazy Horse's arms down for both No Water and, later, the military guard who bayonets Crazy Horse; and Woman's Dress, a childhood rival of Crazy Horse's whose name refers to his flamboyant, over-decorated appearance. I was especially interested in a figure called "the Grabber," a part-Lakota, part-Black scout and translator whose real name was Frank Grouard. It's the Grabber who seals Crazy Horse's fate by badly mistranslating his agreement to assist the whites in their war against Chief Joseph: Crazy Horse promises to fight until not a single Nez Perce is left standing, but the bumbling--or malicious--Grabber translates this as "not a single white is left standing."

I'm not equipped to judge Sandoz' ability to enter into the Lakota perspective and render a faithful rendition of the Lakota leader, but from where I stand, I find the book's wholesale rejection of the colonial white narrative pretty remarkable. Vine Deloria writes in his introduction about being persuaded by the book, despite initial skepticism. One reason the book is so convincing, though, I think, is that it relies on firsthand testimony: Sandoz relies on interviews she made herself in the 1930s with Crazy Horse's friends and associates, like the loyal He Dog, and White Calf, a witness to the great warrior's tragic murder. Though Crazy Horse himself might have found Black Elk Speaks author John Neihardt's description of the book as "the story of a great American" objectionable, it's hard to deny that Sandoz captures a spirit of greatness. After Little Bighorn, a popular myth about Custer sprang up in the USA which depicted him as a valiant man who fought to the last moment in the face of certain doom--but isn't that a better and truer description of Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas?

Dalva by Jim Harrison

What I am trying to do is trade in a dead lover for a live son. I'll throw in a dead father with the dead lover and their souls I have kept in the basement perhaps. The world around me and the world of people looks immense and solid but it is more fragile than lark or pheasant eggs, women eggs, anyone's last heartbeat. I'm a crazy woman. Why didn't I do this long ago? I'm forty-five and there's still a weeping girl in my stomach. I'm still in the arms of dead men--first Father then Duane. I may as well have burned down the goddamned house. Whether I see the son at least he is a living obsession.

Dalva is part-Lakota Sioux, a social worker living in Santa Monica. When she oversteps professional boundaries to protect a young boy from his abusive uncle, she finds herself out of a job and in danger of being targeted by the uncle himself, so she leaves Santa Monica to return to western Nebraska, where she spent her childhood, vowing to finally find the son she put up for adoption when she was only a teenager. Back in Nebraska, she and her current beau Michael--a dipsomaniac historian from Stanford--reconnect with the places and the people of her childhood, and we learn the story of her whirlwind romance with a boy named Duane Stone Horse, who gave her a child, then ran off and committed suicide.

Dalva has a funny three-part structure: the first and third sections are narrated by Dalva herself, but the middle section is narrated by the historian Michael, who has agreed to help Dalva find her son if she will give him access to the papers of her ancestor John Wesley Northridge, a 19th-century pioneer who became a friend to the Lakota and, as a consequence, despised by other white settlers and the U.S. army who took on the task of eradicating the Lakota from the landscape. Michael's narrative quotes heavily from Northridge's journals, which track the pioneer's turn from missionary to apostate, and give an overview of the sad and sorry history of American policy toward Native Americans in the latter half of the 19th century: broken treaties, forced emigration and starvation, bloodshed, etc. These journals contextualize the contemporary lives of characters like Dalva and Duane, who are both part white and part Lakota, though in ways I often found vague. As a narrator, Michael is funny and high-spirited; his scholarly focus is balanced by a wily capacity for ferreting out hidden liquor, and his amorousness gets him into quick trouble in the small Western town.

On the other hand: I read this book bit by bit over a long trip through the part of the country Dalva describes, and the ultimate effect of this structure was to alienate me from Dalva, who is the novel's emotional core. Dalva is a long and rich novel, thick with detail, but perhaps too thick, filled with digressions, literal wanderings to other places: Dalva's uncle's place in the Arizona desert, the Baja peninsula in Mexico, the Florida keys were Duane commits suicide--when all I really wanted was to return to the immediacy and importance of Nebraska. Perhaps this is more about the conditions of my reading than the book itself, but I enjoyed the first section the most, which I read on a long airplane flight and thus could really immerse myself in the thoroughness and vividness of Dalva's life. 

Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

It is hard to follow one great vision of this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those shadows men get lost.

"My friend," said Nicholas Black Elk to the poet and writer John G. Neihardt on his visit to Black Elk's home near Manderson, South Dakota in the 1930's, "I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I should not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story, to be grass upon the hill." And yet, though many Lakota (and Cheyenne and Arapaho) lived alongside Black Elk during the Indian Wars of the late 19th century, few stories in their own words seem to remain. I was struck, actually, reading Neihardt's version of Black Elk's life, that I have never read about these conflicts in the words of those who suffered most in them at all.

There is some controversy, I think, surrounding the question of how much in Black Elk Speaks is Black Elk and how much is Neihardt, and certainly Black Elk's words have been filtered twice over, once through his translator and son Ben Black Elk, and then again through Neihardt's lucid and elegant poetic sensibility. But even taken with a grain of salt, the book is remarkable. Black Elk's life touches upon all the tumultuous events of the Indian Wars, from the skirmishes and assassination of Crazy Horse to the Ghost Dance craze that led ultimately to the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

But I loved hearing, too, about Black Elk's journey to the east and to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, complete with his descriptions of Riker's Island ("This made me feel very sad, because my people too were penned up in islands, and maybe that was the way the Wasichus were going to treat them") and Queen Victoria, whom the Lakota call, amazingly, Grandmother England ("She was little but fat and we liked her, because she was good to us"). And I was moved by the Black Elk's description of the starvation and humiliation the Lakota faced at the hands of the United States, who lied when they told the Lakota they would keep their lands as long as the grass grew long and the water flowed. "You can see that it is not the grass and the water that have forgotten," writes Black Elk.

But the story in Black Elk Speaks is not just the story of a Lakota everyman, but a medicine man and a man beset by visions. Black Elk describes having his first vision at nine years old, a cosmic dream of horses, the Six Grandfathers, and the sacred hoop. It isn't until Black Elk is a teenager that he tells anyone about this vision, and a fellow medicine man tells him that a vision is not real until it is danced for the tribe, which he does, ushering in his new identity as a healer and holy man. Black Elk Speaks, too, struck me as a kind of dancing of Black Elk's visions, a way of bringing them into the world.

But the saddest thing about Black Elk Speaks is that, by his own admission, Black Elk's visions had little effect. Speaking from his house near Manderson--a gray box, and not the tepee, whose circular shape signifies wholeness, he points out--Black Elk bemoans himself as "a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered," and thinks himself to weak for his visions. Like Dee Brown, Black Elk--or perhaps Neihardt--sees the massacre at Wounded Knee as the end of visions:

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.