Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (4 page)

As was typical of Plains Indians, the Old Smoke band moved frequently while Parkman was living in the village. The Indians moved at least once a week, usually twice, during the summer months (in winter they hunkered down in a cottonwood valley and stayed put). Parkman was amazed at how quickly Old Smoke’s people could be on the road. He awoke one morning to find that the encampment was disappearing: “Some of the lodges were reduced to nothing but bare skeletons of poles; the leather covering of others was flapping in the wind as the squaws pulled it off.” Looking around, he noted that “where the great circle of the village had been only a few moments before, nothing now remained but a ring of horses and Indians, crowded in confusion together.” The camp grounds looked like a garbage dump, with kettles, stone mallets, ladles of horn, buffalo robes, dried meat, and other items scattered everywhere. But before the sun had dried the dew, everything was securely packed and the village was on the move.

Parkman rode to the top of a bluff to observe: “Here were the heavy-laden pack-horses, some wretched old women leading them, and two or three children clinging to their backs. Here were mules or ponies covered from head to tail with gaudy trappings, and mounted by some gay young squaw, grinning bashfulness and pleasure. … Boys with miniature bows and arrows wandered over the plains, little naked children ran along on foot, and numberless dogs scampered among the feet of the horses. The young braves, gaudy
with paint and feathers, rode in groups among the crowd, often galloping, two or three at once along the line, to try the speed of their horses.” With the rough prairie and broken hills for background, Parkman found the restless scene “striking and picturesque beyond description.”

The elders walked at the head of the column. “These were the dignitaries of the village, the old men … to whose age and experience that wandering democracy yielded a silent deference.”
³⁰

When the moving village crossed a stream, utter confusion reigned, in marked contrast to the emigrant trains. The horses and dogs plunged right in, their travois floating along behind. Little children, clinging to a horse or an adult, screamed constantly, while the dogs barked and howled in chorus and the old women shrieked. Stray horses and colts dashed back and forth. “Buxom young squaws, blooming in all the charms of vermilion, stood here and there on the bank, holding aloft their master’s lance, as a signal to collect the scattered portions of his household. In a few moments the crowd melted away; each family, with its horses and equipage, filing off to the plain; here, in the space of half an hour, arose sixty or seventy of their tapering lodges,” and the camp quickly settled into lethargy, the old men sitting and talking in front of their lodges, the children playing.
³¹

After many more moves and a successful buffalo hunt, the village started for the Black Hills to obtain poles for the winter lodges. Again Parkman was struck by the practices of that wandering democracy. “Amid the general abundance which … prevailed, there were no instances of individual privation; for although the hide and the tongue of the buffalo belong by exclusive right to the hunter who has killed it, yet any one else is equally entitled to help himself from the rest of the carcass. Thus the weak, the aged, and even the indolent come in for a share of the spoils, and many a helpless old woman, who would otherwise perish from starvation, is sustained in abundance.”
³²

Parkman’s over-all impression of the Oglalas was that they were a happy people, an impression shared by most whites who saw the Indians before the final struggle between the red man and the white man for control of the Plains began. They were well-fed, beautifully clothed, and nicely sheltered in a home that could be taken down and put up again in less than an hour. They had excellent personal relations. Their life was simple, their implements few, their plans for the future non-existent (beyond assuring an adequate meat supply
for the winter). They had not the faintest idea of progress, which left them free to please themselves, which they did.

Nothing pleased them more than riding horseback across the prairie. As Frank Roe puts it, “The Indian set himself to
discover
the combined potentialities of horse and rider. The
act
of riding was a joy to him, as it is to most people whose fortune it has been to ride in conditions of untrammeled freedom such as the Indian’s Plains environment bestowed. In this field of achievement (and for very practical ends) the Indians may be said to have begun where the circus trainer (for money) left off.”
³³

But despite their conservatism, order, stability, and self-sufficiency, the Sioux at the time of Crazy Horse’s birth were in a state of flux. Although they would not exert themselves enough to satisfy fur traders, they were tempted by the white man’s goods, as signified by Old Smoke’s journey to the Oregon Trail for coffee. They were caught in a dilemma. Having no desire to change their way of life, they nevertheless wanted the whiskey, coffee, metal, and guns of the whites, none of which they could have without changing their habits. Contact with the whites, although beneficial to the Indians, created a tension among them. Some bands located more or less permanently along the Oregon Trail, where they made pests of themselves as they begged the emigrants for this or that item of white culture, or they settled down beside the forts of the American Fur Company, especially Laramie, sold their women to the traders, and worked on a trap line during the day in order to have a little whiskey at night. Other villages stayed far away from the Oregon Trail and scornfully referred to their brothers as “Hang-Around-the-Forts” or “Laramie Loafers.”

The Indian response to white intrusion, in short, was divided. Some became friends of the whites, while others turned hostile, a division that grew ever more pronounced and was crucial to the white man’s eventual victory.

When Crazy Horse was still a small boy, the not-yet-famous Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Sioux, urged his people to leave the Oregon Trail and withdraw to the ways of their ancestors. “I don’t want to have anything to do with people who make one carry water on the shoulders and haul manure,” Sitting Bull declared. “The whites may get me at last, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hardtack, and a little sugar and coffee.”
³⁴

But half or more of the Sioux did not see things the way Sitting Bull did. They thought they could obtain what the white man offered
without having to give up anything of their own. Thus the Sioux nation was split.

Crazy Horse was born into this tension and lived his whole life with it; in the end the divided Indian response to the challenge of the white man was directly responsible for his early death.

* I will hereafter refer to places according to the modern state boundaries, on the grounds that it might help the reader’s orientation.

CHAPTER TWO

The Setting and the People: Ohio

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.”  Alexis de Tocqueville

In 1839, the year of George Armstrong Custer’s birth, the United States was a country of striking diversity in its physical features, its economy, and its people. There were immigrants from all over Europe and Africa, speaking a variety of languages and carrying on equally varied cultural traditions. There were scores of religions, and although nearly all were within the Christian framework, wide differences marked the various rituals. Within the two basic types of economy, slave labor south of the Ohio River and wage labor to the north, there were hundreds of ways a man could make a living. Frontiersmen, filling up the empty land east of the Mississippi River, worked from dawn to dusk to become self-sufficient. Their tools and work habits were hardly more sophisticated than those of the Indians whom they had only recently replaced. On the East Coast, meanwhile, a complex culture had arisen; American merchants, lawyers, doctors, politicians, and sometimes even manufacturers could match the best Europe had to offer. In the South, despite its political domination by the planters and the slave economy, great opportunities existed for the artisan, the merchant, the small farmer, and even the ironmaker.

The land itself encouraged diversity. With the single exception of Russia, no other country had such a wide pattern of different land forms, soil types, and climate.

Yet there was a unity to the United States, a unity born of many factors, of which possibly the most important was the political genius of the Founding Fathers, who in writing the Constitution had managed to achieve a unique balance between national and local interests and governmental power. If there were few national
institutions, there were national feelings and traditions. Americans had unbounded respect for republican government, a deep loathing of monarchy, and a common conviction that their country was without peer. They embraced the idea of political equality, as demonstrated by the position of the Northwest Territories, which—unlike any previous colonies—enjoyed full participation in the central government.

Nearly every white American believed in the future, in the doctrine that things were getting better all the time, for individuals and for the country as a whole. Faith and ambition helped draw Americans together; so did their mobility. Although they were by no means nomads, Americans moved longer distances, and more often, than Europeans had ever dreamed possible. In the process, Americans came to know men of widely separate backgrounds and heritages, giving to most Americans a breadth of experience unknown elsewhere.

No region of the country was typical, just as no man could be said to be a typical American, but there was one state in the United States that pulled together most of the traits usually associated with Americans and produced a blend that could at least be called representative. That state was Ohio. Its population came from both sides of the Ohio River and included people from every part of Europe and most of Africa. In 1850, out of a state-wide population of almost 2 million, 62 per cent had been born in Ohio, 27 per cent elsewhere in America, and 11 per cent in Europe. Ohio’s location, fertility, and opportunities made it equally attractive to Yankees and Southerners; New York State contributed 86,000 emigrants to Ohio’s total, while Virginia also had sent 86,000 settlers to the state. There were 36,000 residents of Ohio who had been born in Great Britain, 51,000 born in Ireland, and 112,000 in Germany.
¹
Africa contributed 25,000 free blacks to the population, half born in Ohio, half in the slave states.
²
Taken together, Ohio had a wonderful mixture of peoples.

In the first decade of Custer’s life, Ohio enjoyed an economic boom. Population increased from 1.5 million to 2 million. Most of the growth was non-agricultural, which meant that Ohio was becoming more complex, specialized, and richer. While there were still settlers trying to scratch out a living on newly cleared land, there were thousands of solid, well-established commercial farmers, artisans of all kinds, lawyers, ministers, doctors and other professional men, and industrialists. In 1840, 272,000 Ohio men were involved in farming; by 1850 that number had dropped to 270,000.
The number of men engaged in commerce, trade, manufacturing, or the mechanical arts had grown from 76,000 in 1840 to more than 140,000 in 1850. The number of professional men had grown from 5,600 to 9,000.
³
Almost everyone worked. The “whole number of Paupers supported in whole or part,” as the census taker put it in 1850, was 1,250.
⁴

It was a young population. In 1850 only 16 per cent of Ohio’s people were over forty years of age; another 11 per cent was between thirty and forty years old; 73 per cent were under thirty.
⁵
Ohio’s people were even more diverse in their religion than they were in origin or employment; fifty-one distinct religious denominations sponsored nearly four thousand churches in Ohio.
⁶

Ohio was wealthy. The sources of that wealth were the labor of the people—just plain hard work, with lots of sweat, from dawn to dusk—the influx of speculative capital from Europe and the eastern states, and a furious assault on the state’s natural resources, designed to change the environment to one more suitable—i.e., one more immediately productive. All three elements were crucial. Without the back-breaking labor nothing could have been done. But the workers needed tools, and the settlers needed money to purchase their land and equipment, and the towns needed money to build and grow. The risk capital could only come from the East. All the work and money in the world, however, by themselves could not have turned Ohio into the “Garden of the World,” as her residents liked to call the state. Fertile land, virgin to the plow, and minerals within easy reach beneath the earth were also necessary to success.