The Killing of Crazy Horse

From Barnes & Noble

Almost every history buff of the Great American West knows that Crazy Horse (c.1840-1877) vanquished General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, but how many of them are aware that the great Oglala Lakota warrior survived barely a year after his great victory or that he died violently while in captivity. This book by Thomas Powers (Intelligence Wars; The Man Who Kept the Secrets) unknots the complicated story of Crazy Horse's life and suspicious demise in a U.S. Army camp in Nebraska. The Killing of Crazy Horse is the culmination of years of research by Pulitzer Prize winning-journalist Thomas Powers.

David Treuer

What is unique about Thomas Powers's approach to Crazy Horse is the dramatic staging of his meticulously researched and gripping account…More than the story of Crazy Horse or the battles between two implacable foes, Powers gives us a portrait of a place—a portrait done in the blood of the heartland, a heart still beating after all these years. Powers has given us a great book, a great painting of that still-beating heart.
—The Washington Post

Evan Thomas

…[a] richly textured account of clashing civilizations on the Great Plains during the late 19th century…Powers tells us much that is revealing and often moving about the Sioux in their last days as free warriors.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Powers (The Man Who Kept the Secrets) details the rise and untimely fall of the Lakota's most famous warrior in this richly detailed, sensitive, and evenhanded portrayal. Little known before his stunning surprise victory over Custer's 7th Infantry at Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse (ca. 1840–1877) became the strongest opponent of white incursion on Indian land in the Black Hills, revered for his strategic brilliance and bravery. Opposed to any concessions that would remove his people from their land, Crazy Horse terrified the American military as well as those Indian leaders who considered cooperating with the U.S. government's demands. Drawing on firsthand accounts by soldiers and officers, settlers and Lakota, the author assembles a savvy analysis of the conflicting interests and worldviews at play, highlighting the cultural and political misunderstandings that led to the (most likely) accidental slaying of the Lakota leader as he surrendered to U.S. forces at Camp Robinson. Numerous conflicting versions of what happened in Crazy Horse's final minutes are handled with aplomb by the author, as is the warrior's shifting legacy in the decades after his death. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

"Powers tells us much that is revealing and often moving about the Sioux in their last days as free warriors." —-The New York Times

Library Journal

The search for motive in the killing of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse in 1877, just a year after his victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, helps to distinguish this title from previous Crazy Horse biographies such as Kingsley M. Bray's Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Powers (Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda) makes detailed use of the Crazy Horse historic literature, including interviews and statements from Lakota Sioux such as He Dog and the interpreter William Garnett, to provide an artfully written study. Powers gives credence to the story that Gen. George Crook had seriously entertained a plan to have Crazy Horse assassinated just days before he was actually killed during his surprise arrest at Fort Robinson, but, considering the panicked confusion of those final events, Powers makes no direct accusation. VERDICT Recommended for general readers with interest in Native American, U.S. military, or western American history, and all collections in those areas.—Nathan E. Bender, Laramie, WY

Kirkus Reviews

Sprawling account of the grim conclusion of the Indian Wars.

Historian Powers (Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda, 2002, etc.) notes that by adolescence, he'd learned that "the treatment of Indians was something people did not like to describe plainly." Central to this narrative of concealment are two notorious events: the 1876 massacre of Gen. Custer's command at the Little Bighorn, engineered by the fearsome Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, and Crazy Horse's slaying a year later at a Nebraska military barracks where he'd surrendered himself voluntarily. With a scholar-obsessive's attention to detail, the author reconstructs the entire milieu of the northern Plains in the 1870s, when the Sioux and other tribes were finding that the whites had no intention of honoring earlier treaties, particularly after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills (in present-day South Dakota). Powers takes an evenhanded approach to discerning how attempts at coexistence floundered. The soldiers and bureaucrats charged with managing Indian affairs were blinkered by the racist attitudes of the day—yet were often fascinated by Indian society and magnetic individuals like Crazy Horse—while the rigidity and confused negotiating style of chiefs like Sitting Bull made violent conflict inevitable. Gen. George Crook, the Civil War hero tasked with pacifying the northern tribes, respected Indians as fighters and wilderness experts, yet took their intransigence personally, especially following his unit's defeat in a battle prior to Custer's massacre and his miscalculation in pursuing Crazy Horse's band without adequate supplies (his embittered men resorted to eating their horses). Following the Little Bighorn, even Crazy Horse realized that annihilation or acceptance of life on an agency, or reservation, were their only choices, and he surrendered his band to the Army in May 1877. Yet Powers assembles evidence that by September, Crook and rival Sioux chiefs were plotting his demise, for reasons which remain muddy to this day. The narrative is dense but always lucid, controlled and compulsively readable, raising thorny questions about the myth of Manifest Destiny.

A skillful synthesis of historical research and contested narrative, resonant with enduring loss.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Making narrative out of a life like that of Crazy Horse presents the biographer with a daunting set of challenges. Shrouded in the mythology of the West and the mystery of his indomitability, Crazy Horse is a shadowy figure, whose exploits took place almost entirely on the inaccessible side of the Sioux Wars' bloody line through history. It's for these reasons, and the Wild West timbre of his name to twentieth-century ears, that he became a kind of brand, a nineteenth-century Che Guevara of the North American plains. And yet among the Sioux, his presence is keenly felt: there are still a few alive old enough to remember seeing and speaking with those old enough to have laid eyes on Crazy Horse.

The Killing of Crazy Horse takes on the mythology and the history of the man and his age. Thomas Powers -- whose work as a journalist peering into the shadows of the intelligence world has served as surprisingly apt preparation -- nimbly traces the mixture of legend, tacit knowledge, and hearsay that represents the canon of Crazy Horse studies. The Sioux wars of the 1860s and '70s comprised a world with a social structure all its own. Even for the Sioux, the plains were a relatively new domain. They had not made their home there until they embraced the coming of the horse to the Americas in the late eighteenth century. Like the Comanche in Texas and Mexico, the Sioux would ride the horse to hegemony, creating what the historian Pekka Hamalainen has called an "equestrian empire" -- co-opting some tribes, like the Cheyenne, while beleaguering others, earning the enmity of the Pawnee to the west and bringing the Mandan -- a peaceable tribe who welcomed Lewis and Clark and who figure heavily in the art of Karl Bodmer -- to the brink of extinction. It was their power, burgeoning and resented by their neighbors, that brought them into conflict with the white pretenders to the plains.

Despite the differences that separated them, by the 1860s the worlds of whites and the plains tribes were intimately intertwined. An entire generation of "half-breeds" had emerged, the offspring of white trappers and traders and Indian women, whom the Sioux incorporated into their already-fluid notions of family. One of the most colorful of these figures, Frank Grouard, had no Sioux blood. Born near Tahiti, he was the son of a white missionary and a Polynesian woman. As a young man, Grouard made his way to North America, found himself living among the Assiniboine, who were enemies of the Sioux. Captured by Hunkpapa warriors, he was delivered into the hands of none other than Sitting Bull -- who adopted him and taught him the Lakota language. Grouard moved fluidly between Indian and white worlds, even taking an active part in hostilities on both sides of the Sioux wars. Another of these men, Billy Garnett, would serve as an interpreter for General Crook and other U.S. authorities throughout the Sioux wars. But having witnessed the killing of Crazy Horse, Garnett would choose the Sioux world when the tribes were forcibly relocated east of the Missouri River; today, his descendants live near the Pine Ridge Reservation, where they still speak Lakota.

The tapestry of the Sioux world in the 1860s and '70s was varied and paradoxical: many bands lived full-time at agencies established by the U.S. government, where life was a bizarre pageant and a simulacrum of older ways; soldiers would release beef cattle one at a time for the Sioux to ride down -- as if the domestic brutes were wild buffalo. But some bands and families still left seasonally to hunt and live on the open plains. Still other bands, the so-called Northern tribes led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall, refused to come to the agencies and relinquish the beloved, forbidding Black Hills, where rumors of gold would set in motion the chain of events that led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and, ultimately, the dispossession of the peoples of the plains.

By the mid-1860s, when Crazy Horse's exploits as a warrior were first gaining him notoriety among his own people, the Sioux position as the power of the plains was under assault from white settlers. Open hostilities broke out upon establishment of the Bozeman Road, which ran through tribal hunting territories on its way to the gold fields of Montana. Under the leadership of Red Cloud, Sioux bands went to war against the whites; on the solstice in 1866, Crazy Horse, then in his mid-twenties, personally lured a force of eighty soldiers into a massacre behind a ridge near Fort Phil Kearny.

To his peers as well as to later generations, Crazy Horse was an enigma. "Most Sioux scalped enemies," Powers writes. "But Crazy Horse did not take scalps, nor did he tie up his tail before battle with fur, feathers, or colored cloth as other warriors did." Despite his many war honors, he never wore more than a couple of feathers. And his plainness in ornament was matched by plainness in speech. Oratory was a prized skill among prominent Sioux men, but in council, Crazy Horse usually had friends speak for him.

His nemesis on the plains, General George Crook, was the mirror image of Crazy Horse. Like the Sioux chief, Crook was a talented hunter and a taciturn leader. But unlike Crazy Horse, Crook's quiet manner hid a resentment born of thwarted ambition. Crook led and fought valiantly throughout the Civil War, yet credit for his successes repeatedly fell to his friend and West Point classmate, General Phil Sheridan, who now commanded him in the West. To Crook, the quiet charisma of Crazy Horse was more than an irritation; it was almost a taunt. The serially-thwarted general privately stewed as his superiors judged him and the press skewered him; Crazy Horse remained equally silent, and his stature only grew.

Crazy Horse and his allies fought Crook to a stunning draw at the Rosebud; in barely a week, on the eve of the U.S. centennial, many of the same warriors would rub out George Armstrong Custer and his men near a creek the Sioux called the Greasy Grass. Powers's expository history of the campaign leading up to the fight at Little Big Horn is fluid and authoritative, although he indulges in a bit of the unavoidable armchair trivia-chopping students of the battle long have practiced. But in its telling of the final day of Crazy Horse's life, Powers's account approaches the austere hopelessness of Greek tragedy, as the chief finds himself resented, friendless, and mistrusted, caught between the aspirations of his peers and the impatient fear of the white soldiers into whose hands he had fallen. His end, shocking and implacable, was spelled out in Crook's imperiousness, Frank Grouard's duplicity, and the incomprehension of soldiers and officers in charge of him.

Throughout this magisterial work, Powers captures the complexity and contradiction of the world of the Sioux Wars, and its terrible beauty as well. After a chapter spent describing the war magic of Sioux fighting men on the eve of battle, Powers concludes:

[This] is what rode south toward the Rosebud on the night of June 16-17, 1876: thunder dreamers, storm splitters, men who could turn aside bullets, men on horses that flew like hawks or darted like dragonflies. They came with power as real as a whirlwind, as if the whole natural world -- the bears and the buffalo, the storm clouds and the lightning -- were moving in tandem with the Indians, protecting them and making them strong.

The Killing of Crazy Horse should stand alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for the authority and art with which it recounts this moment in a people's shattered history.

--Matthew Battles