Forever a loner

CRAZY HORSE By Larry McMurtry, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £ 12.99

Who was Crazy Horse? He was a nati- ve American warrior who has become a legend. Very little is known of his life; no one knows where he is buried. The date of his death, however, is known: he died on September 6, 1877, on the floor of the adjutant’s office in Fort Robinson, Nebraska. But how he died isn’t a question that can be answered with any degree of definiteness. There are too many versions of the incident.

Larry McMurtry in this outstanding evocation of Crazy Horse is continuously haunted by the shadow of ambiguity that looms over nearly all aspects of Crazy Horse’s life. The word evocation is used advisedly since this is by no means a conventional biography. The scarcity of materials renders impossible the writing of a genuine biography of some one like Crazy Horse.

So brutal was the white man’s elimination of the Native American that there are no relics, not even memory. With the disappearance of the Native American from the great plains of the American west, a way of life vanished for good. It is difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve that original past of the United States of America. McMurtry does not deny the impossibility, and instead of attempting a factual/historical reconstruction of Crazy Horse and his times, he tries to capture the ambience of a lost era.

Crazy Horse cannot be understood without refe-rence to his habitat and terrain, the great American plains that rolled across Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota and eastern Montana. He never ventured east beyond the 100th meridian, that dividing line of the white man between his “civilization” and the terrain of his barbaric other. The American plains, like all the world’s great steppes, are the natural home of grazing animals and nomadic peoples. People like Crazy Horse lived under those great skies and hunted the buffalo. Crazy Horse looked into the unending horizon and turned inwards. He was a loner who loved to go off on his own into the open spaces where land and sky met. His love for the plains never weakened. He refused to leave them either for Canada, which was an option, or for the various Agencies that the whites established to house and contain the Native Americans.

Despite his solitary nature, Crazy Horse was a warrior belonging to the Oglalas, a subset of the Sioux. He played a critical role in the defeat of Custer in the battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. This was the last great gathering of the Indians. They won the battle, but many of them knew that the war could not be won. Crazy Horse probably realized this, but at heart he was a resister. He also knew that there were men, women and children dependent on him. The winter of 1876-77 was harsh. Crazy Horse was the most unselfish of human beings: he put aside his loner instincts for the sake of the tribe and brought them into Red Cloud’s agency at Fort Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. He was fated to die here four months after he came in, probably stabbed by a white soldier.