CRAZY HORSE by Kingsley M Bray

Author:Kingsley M Bray [Bray, Kingsley M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780806183756
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2011-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

20

TO KEEP MY COUNTRY

For three weeks, Crazy Horse disappeared into the bleak hills east of Powder River, straddling the modern Wyoming-Montana boundary. Only one eyewitness account exists from those missing weeks. Soon after his departure, the Black Elk family, hurrying in to surrender, happened upon the family.

We found Crazy Horse all alone on a creek with just his wife. He was a queer man. He had been queer all of this winter. Crazy Horse said to my father: “Uncle, you might have noticed me, how I act, but it is for the good of my people that I am out alone. Out there I am making plans—nothing but good plans—for the good of my people. I don’t care where the people go. They can go where they wish. There are lots of caves and this shows that I cannot be harmed. . . . This country is ours, therefore I am doing this,” said Crazy Horse.1

For days at a time, carrying only pipe and tobacco bag, Crazy Horse left his tipi to seek the vision of guidance. Sheltering in caves and cliff overhangs when late winter storms blasted the plains, he fasted and prayed, wept and begged for the vision that could show him how best to preserve his people’s lands—a vision that eluded him. At the end of endurance, he would return home to take purifying sweat baths, but characteristically, Crazy Horse revealed little. Building on the prophetic vision of 1875, when he saw his homeland despoiled, he could offer only raw convictions. To Sitting Bull he had spoken of “holding our land.” Over the troubled months to come, he would remark of his will “to keep my country.” To Red Cloud, he observed, “makoce kin tewahila, I cherish the land.”2 This bedrock principle of preserving the hunting grounds would animate his remaining months of life. The lonely ordeal of hanbleceya only deepened the commitment.

As the days of solitude lengthened, however, other issues impinged on his meditations. Black Shawl’s health increasingly concerned Crazy Horse, focusing the subliminal energies of the dreamer. By late winter her condition was deteriorating. Army surgeon Valentine T. McGillycuddy attended Black Shawl during the following summer, diagnosing tuberculosis. Fits of bloody coughing recalled the troubled days of courtship; under the extreme privations of the wartime winter, the fits were exacerbated, leaving Black Shawl exhausted, feverish, and bed bound. The interminable weeks before spring continued to weaken her. Concern for her condition contributed to Crazy Horse’s slow realization that surrender was inevitable.3

In this same intense phase of vision questing, Crazy Horse was granted new spiritual power. After appealing through his old guardian spirit the red-tailed hawk, he received aid from the spotted eagle, the bird that flies closest to the powers of the Upper World. Passed down through three or four generations of practitioners on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the origin of Eagle doctoring is still attributed to Crazy Horse. That this is no facile piece of New Age hokum is confirmed by the red hawk

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