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Cloud’s nieces. It was because of his great, irrepressible passion for Black Buffalo Woman that he was later to fail in his grave responsibility to the tribe, once he had been given the high honor of being made a Shirt-wearer, a story we will get to in good time.
    This parley at Bear Butte in the end changed nothing. There was general agreement that the tribes needed to take a sterner line with the whites, before their hunting grounds were completely destroyed; but how exactly they were to do that, with each band moving along with the game and looking essentially to their own needs, was hard to say. The whites had a great advantage: they wereone nation (though soon to be split, temporarily); the native peoples of the plains were many nations.
    The bitter lesson all the Plains Indians had to begin to absorb in the late 1850s was how very quickly nature’s abundance—that is, game—could become scarcity. The hunting along the Platte was already much diminished; the great masses of buffalo upon which all the tribes were dependent had by then been split into a northern and a southern herd. The hard fighting between Brulé Sioux and Pawnee, which so occupied Spotted Tail, was intensified by the fact that the two peoples were competing for a dwindling supply of game.
    For the Oglalas, the same need to stay where the game was abundant forced them west and north and brought increased conflict with the tribes already there, namely, the Arapahos, the Shoshones, and the Crows.
    It was on a raid against the Arapahos, probably in the summer of 1858, that Crazy Horse—he would have then been about sixteen—finally earned his name. He charged straight at a party of enemy warriors, untouched by either arrows or bullets; his bravery was so exceptional that the Sioux began to sing in his honor. When two Arapaho warriors rode out to challenge him, he killed both of them and took their scalps, forgetting in the heat of battle that his dream had told him never to keep anything for himself. While he was taking the scalps, he was hit in the leg by an arrow. He threw the scalps away and his friend Hump removed the arrow and treated the wound. Whenthe Oglalas returned to their camp, old Crazy Horse, the father, made a fine ceremony and transferred the name to his son. Thereafter the old man was called Worm and Crazy Horse took the name by which history knows him.
    These were not his first kills. Sometime earlier, in a skirmish with some Omahas, he shot at what he thought was a warrior, crouched in some bushes, and discovered that he had killed a woman. He did not take this scalp.
    In the main the Oglala effort to edge into the game-rich Powder River country was successful.
    The years of Crazy Horse’s early manhood were years of relative prosperity for the Sioux; one reason for this was that the whites were soon fighting a terrible civil war, a war so destructive that, by contrast, their conflicts with the Plains Indians seemed almost like frolics. From 1861 to 1865 the army had all it could handle elsewhere; the best officers, naturally, wanted to fight in that fight, leaving the western forts ill manned, usually by officers who resented the fact that they weren’t fighting the Rebs. Some very ugly incidents—for one, the great Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862—took place during the Civil War; but farther west, where Crazy Horse was, the fighting during these years was mainly Indian against Indian. It was in these years that Crazy Horse earned the high reputation among his fellow Indians that he would carry all the way to the Little Bighorn.

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    I T IS PERHAPS appropriate to pause during this nominal lull in the plains warfare—nominal because there was never a total cessation of hostilities—to say a word about the plains themselves: this great American steppe was Crazy Horse’s home during his whole life. His attachment to these plains never weakened; he was born to those great skies and