Crazy Horse

Larry McMurtry (Telegraph Days, Lonesome Dove) brings his clean and concise writing style to this brief but illuminating life of Crazy Horse. This compact little biography is one of the Penguin Lives series that features what Penguin Books web site describes as an "innovative series of biographies pairing celebrated writers with famous individuals who have shaped our thinking." The series is worth looking into for its other biographies of Churchill by John Keegan, Buddha by Karen Armstrong, and Saint Augustine by Garry Wills among others. In the case of Crazy Horse not a heck of lot is really known about the man. As McMurtry points out, most of what we know about Crazy Horse and most Indians derives from their contact with whites and Crazy Horse generally avoided whites to the fullest extent possible. He was a brave warrior, a leader of his people at times, but not truly a chief, a loner, an iconoclast within a tribe of iconoclasts. Crazy Horse is an iconic figure who captures the imagination. His life of some 35 or so years spanned the rapid transformation of the West from the free days of the nomadic Plains tribes and limitless buffalo herds to the confinement of those peoples on poor reservations and the destruction of the herds. Crazy Horse never really yielded to the whites unlike nearly all other Indian leaders, not that it mattered much in the grand scheme of things because no strategy was going to change the ultimate outcome. Crazy Horse declined to go to Washington, resisted any restraints, refused to attend the parleys with the whites. He did ultimately sacrifice his own freedom when he brought his 900 or so followers after the brutal winter of 1876-1877 - just months after the twin victories over Crook at Rosebud and Custer at Little Bighorn. Crazy Horse was killed, probably by the bayonet of a white soldier as he resisted his final arrest. His death was a blessing as the whites planned to ship him to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, a tiny prison atoll in Florida. Unlike other popular authors, notably Stephen Ambrose, McMurtry resists the temptation to let his imagination roam too freely and sticks mostly to the known facts and reasonable deductions to be drawn from them. Those facts however immutably established Crazy Horse as perhaps the single most romantic and heroic figure of the great American Western epic. He lived free, defeated Custer, the great white romantic figure, and then died young "in the last moments when the Sioux could think of themselves as free. By an accident of fate, the man and the way of life died together...he came to be the symbol of Sioux freedom, Sioux courage, and Sioux dignity." (Page 17, hardcover edition) Highly recommended for any reader with an interest in the American West.

Crazy Horse has been one of my American heroes ever since I read about him in "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West" by Dee Brown back in the 1970's. When I discovered that Larry McMurtry, a favorite author of mine, had written a biography of Crazy Horse, the book immediately made the top of my TBR list! And glad I am that I did immerse myself in this brief but rich biography. As usual, McMurtry does not disappoint - nor does his subject. Despite extensive writings about the great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, there is actually a dearth of hard facts about his life. The man was born around 1840, at a time when the nomadic way of life of the Plains Indians was dying....or to be more accurate, at a time when the traditional way of life was stomped out though the US government's broken promises, lies, ineptitude, and the sheer number of US soldiers with rifles and their seemingly never-ending supply of ammunition. Manifest Destiny was very much a reality and it could not be fulfilled while nomadic tribes roamed the Great Plains hunting buffalo, "impeding progress," the westward march of settlers, the building of the railroads. What kind of written historical record would there be of a man who lived the life of a Sioux warrior, "raiding and hunting on the central plains?" He rarely had contact with whites until the end of his life. And what translations exist are appalling. Worm, his father was an Oglala healer; his mother was thought to be the sister of Spotted Tail, the Brule leader. From the first, Crazy Horse, called Curly as a boy, marched to the beat of his own drum. He was a loner and although he lived in the traditional way, he was not interested in the usual rituals of purification, like the sundance rite. "He took his manhood as a given and proved it in battle at an early age." He went on a journey as a young man, to seek a vision. Never orthodox in his beliefs or behavior, Curly did not purify himself in the ancient ways nor did he speak with a holy man, such as his own father, before making the trip. The vision or dream he achieved on this quest, and the interpretation, were to prove very significant throughout his life. There are enough consistent reports about this episode to prove its authenticity. The author takes the known facts about the period, as well as material garnered from documented interviews with Native Americans and whites who knew Crazy Horse, and recreates here a vivid portrait of the warrior, the human being who cared first and foremost for his people - for the very young, the sick and elderly - the man of such moral authority that he sparked deadly jealousy amongst some of his own men. "Among a broken people an unbroken man can only rarely be tolerated." Crazy Horse "became a too-painful reminder of what the people as a whole had once been." McMurtry, also paints a clear and accurate picture of the place, the times, the large Native American councils, of the Ghost Dance, the battl

I read this slender volume on a whim after spotting it at a friend's beach house on a rainy day. Who hasn't heard of Crazy Horse? But who knows the first thing about him? Like some other reviewers, I am struck by the paucity of facts at McMurtry's disposal, yet I found that McMurtry readily acknolwleged this shortcoming while creating a deeply moving narrative that brought home to me the "greek" tragedy in a larger story - the annihilation of Native American cultures - that is normally either glossed over or deeply fetishized by observers who describe people like the Lakota in hyper-idealistic terms. The military and technological superiority of the Americans probably doomed the Lakota from the start. The reaction of Crazy Horse, while in many ways admirable, was futile in the face of it. The tragedy and the crime in the story was that appeasement did not prevent an old culture from having everything it knew and believed and practiced swept away before most of the participants had any appreciation for what was happening.

Why write hundreds of pages about a man who died young and shunned the public? Should one spend time to digest one author's guesswork, maybe comparing it to another author's? McMurty did us all a favor by cutting out everything not known as fact. So little is known about Crazy Horse that it can easily contained in this small volume. We are given a concise portrait of the man, his life and his aspirations. We are also given an almost poetic feel of his surroundings and the struggle to hold on to it. If you want to learn about Crazy Horse, this book will not lead you astray. If you want bells and whistles, look somewhere else.

A lean and powerful book very well written. Lean because the author wrote only what is actually know about Crazy Horse but places this information in the context of the places and events surrounding him. For the reader who wants to read more about those events and the speculations about Crazy Horse's participation in them as well as his character, a bibliography is included. I am a great fan of McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" trilogy and am certainly able to discriminate between fiction and the unadorned truth of "Crazy Horse". I recommend this book without reservation.