“We’ll take care of ourselves, Captain. We’re strong enough to hold off anything these red bastards can throw at us.”
4
BLOOD WOULD FILL every boot track the white man made as he fled this sacred hunting ground of the Lakota and Shahiyena.
Crazy Horse lay in wait behind the low hills with the others gathered beneath the dark sky as the moon eased down into the west. And with the rising of the sun, the Horse would lead nineteen others to entice the soldiers from their fort walls, pulling them seductively into the trap set beyond the sand hills where the many others would spring from hiding to swallow the white men like nighthawks swooping down to gobble up moths on the wing.
They had been preparing for this attack for some time—ranging out in small parties and large, probing up and down the Holy Road. Once the Lakota had even lured out the soldiers from Fort Laramie under their soldier chief the Loafers called Moonlight. Instead of turning back with his horsemen when he failed to find any warriors to fight, Moonlight kept on marching west, right to the bank of Wind River—while the Lakota and Shahiyena joyously plundered the road behind the soldiers.
With twenty-four winters behind him now, Crazy Horse remained thin and sinewy, slightly below average height for a white man of the time and hardly 140 pounds in weight. So what was most remarkable about him was not only his lighter skin color, but a hair color much fairer than most Oglalla warriors. Behind his ear now he wore the pebble medicine made for him by a medicine man named Chips. The stone dreamer had made his young warrior friend a charm that had already proved itself potent, protecting the warrior through the many skirmishes of these past spring moons.
Crazy Horse shivered slightly beneath his blanket, wishing now for the warmth just the sight of Black Buffalo Woman gave his loins. The short summer nights in this high, flat country nonetheless grew cold when all heat seemed drawn from the land. Yet he shivered every bit as much from the remembrance of the horror suffered by the two Lakota men whose bodies still hung from chains lashed over a scaffold at the edge of Fort Laramie.
Early in the Moon of Horses Fattening, two minor Oglalla chiefs had purchased a white prisoner the Shahiyena had captured in their winter raids along the Holy Road. Although two of the woman’s older children had been taken from her, she was allowed to keep a suckling infant by her Cheyenne captor. In an attempt to win themselves some presents from the soldiers, the Lakota chiefs named Two Face and Blackfoot bought Mrs. Eubanks and her infant from the Shahiyena, and delivered their white prizes to the acting commander at Fort Laramie.
But instead of rewarding the two Lakota chiefs, the drunken soldier had ordered the pair shackled with heavy ball and chain, then strung up on a scaffold with more chain about their necks.
Even now the Horse winced at the horror—this terrible death for a warrior, chained and strangled, with no way for his spirit to escape through his mouth.
The bodies of the two chiefs had swung in the spring wind, guarded by a soldier with a knife on the end of his rifle, until the weight of the heavy balls pulled a leg from each of the rotting corpses. Legs too heavy for snarling, hungry dogs to drag off into the brush by the river.
With sad eyes, Spotted Tail’s Loafers at the fort related the story to the Oglalla who came and went among them until the army finally determined that no Indians should be camping next to the fort during an Indian war.
“Instead of making wolf-scouts of our warriors,” Spotted Tail had explained to the Oglalla, “the stupid white soldiers decided to send us east to the fort they call Kearney. Early in the Moon of Horses Fattening, the soldiers will make us begin that march.”
It was not long before word of the terrible journey spread among the bands living in freedom. Time and again small parties of Oglalla scouts dogged the trail of those two thousand Brule, guarded by more than one hundred soldiers led by a soldier chief named Fouts. With their own eyes, these scouts saw the soldiers tie up young boys to wagon wheels, where the children would be whipped for disobedience. Other, smaller children were thrown into the spring-swollen Platte River, where they would struggle and thrash in the water to make it back to shore while their parents screamed and cried out, held helpless at gunpoint on the bank.
Crawling near each night’s camp, the young warrior scouts with Crazy Horse could hear the cries and sobbing of young women repeatedly taken from their families and forced into the unspeakable by the arrogant soldiers of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry.
“You must help us,” Spotted Tail had begged at that camp near the mouth of Horse Creek, whispering to Crazy Horse and his warriors, who had crept into the Loafers’ camp after darkness had taken the land whole.
“There are many of us to help you now,” the Horse had replied there beside the Platte. “We are just across the river, on the north bank. Tonight we will mark the crossing place with tall sticks, for the women and children to follow. Make your run for freedom in the morning—leaving lodges and belongings behind.”
“It will be hard to leave everything behind,” Spotted Tail said sadly.
“What if the soldiers attacked our camps—you would leave everything.” Crazy Horse replied. “Better to have your lives and freedom than those lodges and blankets and iron kettles the white man sold you.”
The next morning when the Brule women failed to pack up quickly enough and instead moved slowly away toward a crossing of the Platte in a retreat that was covered by some of their warriors, the soldier chief rode up with a dozen men, cursing and shouting. The soldiers began shoving among the warriors with their knife-guns when Crazy Horse suddenly appeared from behind a lodge, leveled his old cap-and-ball revolver, and shot the soldier chief in the head.
Like snow gone before an August sun, the rest of the soldiers melted into the earth.
The Loafers escaped across the Platte, the last of them pulling up the tall sticks marking the shallow ford as they went. Crazy Horse and He Dog led their warriors in holding back the soldiers, preventing the white men from following the women and children and old ones in their frantic escape. On what old mares and sore-backed travois ponies they had, Spotted Tail’s people would soon swell the ranks of the Lakota bands free-roaming in the north. Yet many times did the women look behind them, wailing and keening in grief that first day of flight. Oily smoke smudged the summer sky. The soldiers were burning everything Spotted Tail’s people had.
Everything but their lives and their freedom.
Now they joined the Oglalla, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, along with the Arapaho and Shahiyena led by the powerful war chiefs Roman Nose and High-Back Wolf. It was a time few could remember: so many lodges, so many songs ringing of war medicine, so many feathers brought out and powerful medicine made for the coming fight along the Holy Road. Runners had even been sent to Sitting Bull far to the north, in hopes the bands could coordinate their attacks with the Hunkpapa’s attacks on Fort Rice beside the Missouri River. Perhaps the Lakota could cut off the soldiers’ far-flung posts and thereby drive the white man back from the western plains.
Now after three long days of march south from the Powder River country, the great warrior bands arrived at the North Platte just below the stockade the soldiers built themselves on the south bank to protect the bridge crossing the river. It was here that the white man’s Holy Road had to cross to the south side because of the crowding from the mountains along the north bank.
Moving off some distance from the fort, slowly so as not to raise a cloud of dust, the warrior bands went into camp as the summer sun set upon the cooling land. While some in that grand council held that night argued to attack the fort in force and overwhelm the soldiers, others argued for burning the bridge and killing soldiers as they came out to repair it.
Yet it was Crazy Horse and Young Man Afraid who gave voice to the battle plan that pleased most the warrior spirit of these fighting men.
“We will strike them in the open! Give these soldiers a chance to fight us like men!” Young Man Afraid had said only hours ago now at that council.
“Draw them out with our decoys and make them fight on open ground!” Crazy Horse had added.
Trader Bent’s half-breed Shahiyena son George would be one of the decoys, joining Crazy Horse and eighteen others who would lure the soldiers across the bridge and into these hills north of the river.
Yet some doubt remained in the Oglalla war chief’s mind if the
