Stripping away the tall tales to reveal the essence of the brilliant warrior-hero Crazy Horse, the author captures the poignant passing of an era and offers a vibrant new understanding of the mythic man and what he stood for.
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Stripping away the tall tales to reveal the essence of the brilliant warrior-hero Crazy Horse, the author captures the poignant passing of an era and offers a vibrant new understanding of the mythic man and what he stood for.
Read Less
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Several series of short biographies have been published in recent years, including the American Presidents series and the Great Generals series, to give busy readers the opportunity to learn about famous individuals in brief compass. In 1999, Penguin Press initiated its "Penguin Lives" series with this short biography of Crazy Horse by the American novelist, Larry McMurtry. It was an intriguing and appropriate choice. Crazy Horse's life is the stuff of legend. A great deal has been written about Crazy Horse on the basis of what remains a thin historical record. Crazy Horse continues to fascinate many people.
McMurtry uses his gifts as a novelist and his formidable historical knowledge of the American West to give the reader insight into an elusive person. McMurtry's book constitutes an exploration of the literature and legends surrounding Crazy Horse as much as it constitutes a biography of the man. This is unavoidable given the state of the historical record. With McMurtry's attempt to sift through the legends, Crazy Horse still emerges in his account as an extraordinary figure. McMurtry gives a convincing portrayal of an important and difficult man in a book of 140 pages. McMurtry makes as much as he can of a person with a rare way of life whom we do not know. To his own people, Crazy Horse was known as "Our Strange Man".
In McMurtry's account, Crazy Horse (1840 -- 1877) emerges as a loner and a mystic. From his youngest days, Crazy Horse went his own way. He was a visionary, in common with many of the Sioux, but frequently sought his vision in ways outside tribal tradition. McMurtry imaginatively captures a great deal of Crazy Horse in this description of the dreams, wanderings, and spiritual quests which were a feature of his adolescence and adult life:
"It is easy on the plains to imagine things not seen, worlds not known. Crazy Horse, in his wanderings over the summer plains, would have seen many mirages, which perhaps encouraged him in his belief that this world, with its buffalo and horses, is only the shadow of the real world. He was in a way a prairie Platonist, seeing an ideal of which the day's events were only a shadow." (pp. 49-50)
Crazy Horse was a hunter of buffalo and a leader of his people in skirmishes and fights with other Indians. As a young man, he became one of four tribal members honored with the title of "Shirt-Wearer" with the responsibility of looking after the well-being of the people, including the poor. When Crazy Horse ran off briefly with Black Buffalo Woman, the wife of another man, he was almost killed by her jealous husband, No Water, and the Tribe was split apart. The rift was healed by intra-tribal diplomacy, but Crazy Horse lost his title of Shirt-Wearer over the incident.
Crazy Horse is best-known for his role in three battles with the onrushing white settlers, Fetterman's Massacre of 1868, the Battle of Rosebud in 1876, and most famously the Battle of Little Bighorn against Custer on June 25, 1876. These battles established Crazy Horse's fame as a great military leader of his people although his role in each of them, especially Little Big Horn, remains uncertain.
After Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse and a group of 900 Indians, exhausted by cold and pursuit, were forced to turn themselves in at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Four months later, under circumstances that remain difficult to determine, Crazy Horse was tricked into returning to the Fort under a promise of a meeting with the commanding general. Instead, Crazy Horse was to have been exiled to a prison in Florida. A victim of military treachery and of jealousies among his own people, Crazy Horse was assassinated on September 5, 1877.
Crazy Horse, for McMurtry, was a man who was not an administrator or a negotiator. He did not surrender or try to adjust to the inevitability of a new way of life, as did some of his compatriots. He remained faithful to the life of a warrior on the lonely plains, to the hunt, and to the mystic vision to the end. As in many cases, Crazy Horse became a figure of legend because this is what his life merited. Even when we are cognizant of what we do not know, as McMurtry is, a remarkable and enigmatic figure emerges. From the Indian wars and tragedies of the American west, McMurtry offers an account of a person whose life and goals were inextricably tied to a particular people and whose story yet remains universal and timeless.
