Read Crazy Horse for Free Online Page B

those long horizons, and he kept to them as long as he could. When Nelson A. Miles attacked him and his people in their winter camp on the Tongue River in January of 1877, Crazy Horse knew that the terms of the conflict had changed. For the Sioux, warfare was mainly a summer sport. In the hard northern winters they had enough to do just to keep their old and their young warm and well fed. It is true that they wiped out Fetterman on a cold day in December, accomplishing that task just before a blizzard struck, but, in the main, winter warfare was not something they enjoyed. Fighting was a great deal more pleasant in warm weather.
    Bearcoat Miles came anyway, and kept coming,forcing Crazy Horse to make an awkward and painful retreat. Then the winter stopped even General Miles; and Crazy Horse, in the breather it allowed him, had the opportunity to do what Chief Joseph had hoped to do and what Sitting Bull did do: escape into Canada. Neither Miles nor Crook could have followed him there; the Canadian government would not have tolerated it, although, almost a decade later, Crook found the Mexican government far more pliant when he went in after Geronimo.
    Crazy Horse refused to go to Canada. It was even colder in Canada, and the game was uncertain; but it may be that he didn’t go because he refused to be chased from his home country. The range that he traveled in his life was spacious, but it wasn’t infinite. He went south a few times into Kansas, west as far as the Bighorn Mountains, north and east to the Missouri country; but the land where he roamed and fought mainly was plains country: Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, eastern Montana. Rarely if ever was he east of the 100th meridian, that important line on the map that told the whites where the Great American Desert began.
    It wasn’t desert, of course—Geronimo lived in a desert. Crazy Horse lived near the center of the great grassland steppe that stretched from Texas well into Canada. Then and now, the central plains were the least populated part of the United States. To those not attuned to their subtleties the plains are merely monotonous emptiness. But to those who love them, the plains areendlessly fascinating, a place where the constant interplay of land and sky is always dramatic; gloomy sometimes, but more often uplifting. Despite their unpopularity with the general public, many writers have penned rhapsodies to the plains, and the eyes of many artists—from Catlin and Bodmer on—have been challenged by them.
    The American plains, like all the world’s great steppes, are the natural home for grazing animals and nomadic peoples, and are particularly ideal for certain large ruminants such as the buffalo. The plains have never welcomed either the plow or the fence. The balance of the grasses, the wildlife, and the climate is delicate, easily disturbed. Not merely Crazy Horse but all the Plains Indians recognized with dismay that the whites were indifferent to this balance and likely to destroy it.
    Nomads, of course, can be wanton too; like most humans they are inclined to the binge. But, in the main, they held a sacramental attitude toward the earth and its creatures, whereas the white attitude from the first was essentially commercial.
    Nomadic lifestyles are often vulnerable to the technologies of settled people; and yet the appeal of what appears to be freedom—the freedom of the nomad, whether Sioux Indian or lone cowboy—remains very potent. It may be that one reason writers from the American west have had such a hard time getting their words taken seriously is that they have been competing from the first with one of the most powerful visual images of all: the image of horsesrunning. The Indian and the horse have been together in movies for as long as there have been movies: I now own a tape of a fragmentary silent film called Old Texas , made in 1913, in which the great cattleman Charles Goodnight appears briefly at a picnic