Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

Eventually the shaman appeared from his lodge, stopping in front of Crazy Horse to hold out his hands. Then he slowly opened his fingers, and out poured the shiny brass shells.

“Use these to kill soldiers!” the shaman bellowed as proud as a prairie cock. “Kill all wasicu soldiers who march against us with Three Stars or with Bear Coat!”

That morning Crazy Horse distributed the bullets. And for the next seven mornings. Then on the eighth day Long Hair did not appear. Within two more days the camp learned the shaman had made fools of them. Not only had they the winter and the soldiers to fight, the cold and the hunger to battle … but the Crazy Horse people now had despair to fend off as well.

Once more they became like panting rabbits run to the end of their strength by the coyotes, forced to seek shelter in some tiny hollow, hiding with eyes wide, watching, waiting until the coyote eventually found them. These—the people who had reveled that bright summer day on the Onjinjintka Wakpa or Red Flower Creek^* against Three Stars, again at the Greasy Grass against Long Hair’s many, many dead! To rise to such greatness with Wicokannanji, the Midsummer Moon.

Now to collapse to such ruin with the arrival of winter.

As much as he tried to keep the thought from his mind, Crazy Horse himself had begun to fear that soon there would be no more buffalo. Only soldiers.

Crazy Horse returned to the hills. He had to flee the village—the empty eyes, the shrunken cheeks.

All around him the children coughed. And some of those would not last out this winter. There simply was not enough buffalo to feed and shelter all who needed that meat and those robes. There were simply too many soldiers. They kept coming and coming.

And coming.

So the doubt first planted itself in his heart.

Could it be true, he began to fear: no more were the Titunwan Lakota a mighty people. Had they already lived their finest days? Were those summers of greatness gone the way of breathsmoke on a sharp winter wind? Without counting the boys and old men, Crazy Horse had no more than six hundred warriors he could count on to fight. He knew that six-times-ten-times-ten was not near enough to hold back the wasicu forever.

Would Sitting Bull stay to fight beside the Crazy Horse people? Or would the Hunkpapa medicine man flee with his warriors to the Land of the Grandmother, leaving Crazy Horse to fight on alone?

And in the meantime, how many of these children and women and old ones would die needlessly? How many of these blank-eyed people who looked to him for help would not live to see spring because he himself clung to a warrior’s pride and vowed to fight on?

Looking down at the village from the snowy hillside where the wind swept past him, Crazy Horse fully realized how those people had put their lives in his hands. They trusted that he would do right by them to save the Oglalla from the white man’s devastation. To save them from starvation … and soldier bullets.

Why must things be so hard? he brooded. It had not always been this way—not always difficult to decide what was best for his Hunkpatila. It had all begun with the Little Chief Grattan coming after a sickly Mormon cow and continued with the boasts of Little Chief Fetterman crossing Lodge Trail Ridge. No longer could the Lakota just try to stay out of the way of those wasicu passing through.

No, the white man had to own everything he saw, everything he touched, even that which could never be his.

Yet now the enemy was everywhere. Try as they did, the Lakota and the Shahiyela had not been able to hold back the mighty tide. Now the buffalo were disappearing from the hillsides.

With a sigh Crazy Horse resigned himself to listening … at least listening. Just the day before, two powerful Miniconjou chiefs had reached the village, come here on a long journey all the way from the agency at Cheyenne River. Important Man and Foolish Bear brought gifts of tobacco so they could talk of peace between the Crazy Horse people and the government.

“Your people and Morning Star’s Shahiyela must surrender before all your warriors are killed,” Important Man had told Crazy Horse last night.

“Before all your people starve,” Foolish Bear had added.

They had said the Hunkpatila would have to do as Red Cloud had done: turn over their ponies and their weapons too. In return the wasicu soldiers would not punish them for killing the Long Hair at the Greasy Grass in the Midsummer Moon.

He hadn’t slept for so many nights now. The weariness had seeped all the way to his bones. Why should this happen to him? He was nothing more than a warrior. They called him a Strange Man, but he was no more than a man who had begun to wonder, to despair for his people, and finally to doubt.

Perhaps, as the others claimed … perhaps the day had come to see what terms of surrender he could wrest from the Bear Coat. True was it that Three Stars was retreating from Indian country. He would not be back until grass grew green. But the offer made by the soldier chief at the mouth of Buffalo Tongue River for a reservation of their own in the Shifting Sands River country was beginning to sound like something his people would have to live with.

Crazy Horse bowed his head there in the wind scudding along the side of the hill above the upper Buffalo Tongue where Otter Creek joined the icy flow. He thought of nothing but the hollow eyes and the sunken cheeks of his hungry people. Not today—he could not bring himself to limp back to the village like a wounded man today. So maybe tomorrow … he would gather the chiefs and they would talk … about going to see the Bear Coat.

Go to the mouth of the Buffalo Tongue to make the best peace they could before they all died of empty bellies, or soldier bullets.

Or broken hearts.

^*Near present-day Ashland, Montana.

^†Blood Song, vol. 8, The Plainsmen Series.

^*As many as thirty-five hundred people.

^†The Seven Council Fires of the Teton, or Prairie Dwelling, Lakota bands.

^#Trumpet on the Land, vol. 10, The Plainsmen Series.

^@The Powder River.

^?Battle of Cedar Creek, A Cold Day in Hell, vol. 11.

^*Who would one day change his name to Big Fool and in December of 1890 lead his band of Miniconjou to its fale at Wounded Knee Creek.

^† July 11, 1865—Cry of the Hawk, the Jonah Hook Trilogy.

^# Red Cloud Agency.

^*Camp police.

^*The Black Hills settlements of Deadwood, Whitewood, Custer, and Crook City.

^*Rosebud Creek.

Chapter 13

Big Freezing Moon 1876

BY TELEGRAPH

The Mississippi Closed by Ice at St. Louis

ST. LOUIS, December 9.—The river at St. Louis is blocked solidly opposite the city and for six miles below. Pedestrians crossed yesterday, and if the cold weather continues teams will cross to-day or Wednesday.

At long last, eleven suns after fleeing Three Finger Kenzie’s pony soldiers—soldiers guided to the