Crazy Horse

Waning Gibbous Moon

I will read anything by Larry McMurtry. In fact, I thought that I had read everything he has published until I ran into Crazy Horse: A Life (1999). It was tucked back on a shelf in the American Indian research section of the San Benito County Free Library and I grabbed it as soon as I saw it.

This is a short Penguin book written in McMurtry's factual, but richly descriptive style. He takes you into this biography only as far as he can go without making stuff up. The brief  life story of Crazy Horse, most of which is just plain unknown, is terse and brutally realistic in that McMurtry refuses to dramatize or glorify beyond what can be claimed as true. And, as he repeatedly reminds the reader, it ain't that much. You want to know more, but Crazy Horse just didn't give it up. A lot of this book is dedicated to debunking previous accounts as fairy tales.

Crazy Horse only lived about thirty-five years. Much of what we know about him stems from a vision he had after fasting for a couple of days. He saw a horseman floating above ground. He was told not to decorate himself or to keep anything for himself. In battle, he was to wear a small stone behind his ear and a single feather at most atop his head. He would die when people he knew were holding his arms back in a fight.

He kept to himself almost all the time, but was known, in keeping with his vision, as a man of great charity to those he stayed with on the occasions when he was in camp. He was quite taken with a woman of his tribe (Oglala), but she married another man, someone much more of a homebody. Crazy Horse eventually took a wife who bore his children, but continued his roaming, singular mystic life most of the time.

His early death was as predicted. Always reluctant to compromise or concede to the white man, he was persuaded to come to Fort Robinson in northwest Nebraska for talks. Held back by Little Big Man (the real Little Big Man, not the fictional character), he was pierced through the kidneys with a bayonet by William Gentle and died. His reputation as a giving person who was fiercely independent and strongly opposed to surrendering to United States forces earned Crazy Horse a special place in the history of the Oglala Sioux. In memoriam, his likeness is in the process of being carved into stone in the Black Hills of South Dakota by the Ziolkowski family.

Peace, Love, and Independence,

Jim