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else, at this time. The carnage at the Bluewater was the closest thing to it. Spotted Tail, who saw that carnage close up, from then on believed that the whites could wipe out the Sioux whenever they chose to.
    Throughout Crazy Horse’s life, he, like all the other Plains Indians, would have to grapple with a too-rapid pace of change. The Sioux and the Cheyennes and the other tribes still hunted buffalo, in the main, with bows and arrows. In their warfare they had bows, lances, clubs, tomahawks, etc. They knew about guns, of course, but only a few had firearms at this time. That the whites could use guns so effectively as to kill ninety Sioux in a few minutes was a new thing. Crazy Horse, whether he saw the destruction at the Bluewater or merely heardabout it, spent the rest of his life either avoiding whites or fighting them.
    He would have preferred, I imagine, simply to avoid them and go on living a traditional Sioux life, raiding, hunting, dreaming; but the option of avoidance was not available to him for very long. The whites were too many, and they weren’t satisfied with the Holy Road. They weren’t satisfied with any one place or one road; they wanted everything. So he fought: on the Bozeman, on the Powder River, on the Yellowstone, in the Black Hills, on the Tongue and the Rosebud, at the Little Bighorn. He was a participant and possibly a catalyst at three of the Indians’ greatest victories: Fetterman, the Rosebud, the Little Bighorn. He didn’t win the war. What is hard to judge is how long he really expected to, if he ever expected to. Despite much urging, and unlike Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull, he never went east, never saw the whites in their seats of power; had he done so, he might have drawn the same conclusion they drew. But he went his own way, traveled his own road, until it dead-ended at Fort Robinson in September of 1877. Looked back on from the perspective of one hundred and twenty years, his doom seems Sophoclean, inevitable; but perhaps all dooms do, once the roads taken and not taken deliver the character to his fate.

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    B Y MOST ACCOUNTS , Crazy Horse spent the winter of 1856–57 with Yellow Woman’s people, in Kansas. Young Man Afraid, son of the much-respected Old Man Afraid, was with him; the son would one day be much respected too. It may have been about this time that a Cheyenne medicine man convinced the young warriors that he had a medicine so strong that it would turn away bullets, a belief that has surfaced frequently among native peoples. The Comanche prophet Isatai convinced Quanah Parker and others that bullets would not harm them, whereupon they attacked some buffalo hunters who were securely forted up in the old trading post called Adobe Walls. Alas, the bullets proved easily able to penetrate both the medicine and the Comanches, perhaps because a warrior spoiled it by riding a mule rather than a horse. The dervishes believed themselves to be bulletproof when they lined up to be slaughtered at Omdurman; and the belief has cropped up again in Africa within recent decades.
    But the young Sioux and Cheyennes in Kansas in thesummer of 1857 never got to put this strong magic to a test. They ran into a party of soldiers and prepared to attack, but the soldiers, indifferent to whether the Sioux were bulletproof or not, charged them with drawn sabers. The Sioux may have thought themselves bulletproof, but they knew they weren’t saberproof, so they fled—an embarrassing rout.
    Later that summer several thousand Indians gathered at Bear Butte to parley—ineffectively, as it proved—about the whites. Crazy Horse was probably there, with his friend Hump; it may have been at this gathering that he met Touch-the-Clouds, the seven-foot Minniconjou warrior who attended him in his last hour.
    Also, it may have been at this large conclave that Crazy Horse met the woman who was to be the love of his life: Black Buffalo Woman, one of Red