Crazy Horse

Once you get use to Sandoz s writing style, which I think is probably written in a native American English speaking style, the book paints a perfect picture in your mind of exactly how life really was for Crazy Horse and his people. You begin to understand their way of thinking and why they reacted the way that they did to the white people who were intruding on their way of life. I read this book out of my local library and I loved it so much that I am buying a copy for myself.

Difficult to read but well worth it as Sandoz allows you to enter into a world few have had the privilege to view dispelling myths and even bringing a good deal of controversy regarding long held beliefs about our Native American heros. She gives the reader the opportunity to see the beginning of the end of our first inhabitants as they learn from the white man about greed, deception and dependancy. Even though written through the 40's Sandoz depicts a world of policies and politics that parrallels that of our own world today. We should learn from our mistakes!

What can you say about a shy, slender, half-blind woman, about five feet in height, who slept on the open prairie, lived with Indians on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, interviewed the likes of Black Elk, He Dog, Short Bull, Red Feather and others who personally knew Crazy Horse, who had already struggled for years as a writer before penning the ultimate biography of America's first authentic hero? From page one of "Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas" there is a sense that something spectacular is being recorded for posterity, never again to be witnessed by a living being. We are fortunate that Mari Sandoz lived during a time when the legend of Crazy Horse was still able to be told by those who knew and lived with him, but even more fortunate is that this amazing biography was written by an artist of the highest order. The story of the great Lakota warrior who refused to let his heritage be destroyed by the white man, will make you weep and wish you could have ridden with him on that open prairie.

In his foreword to the 50th anniversary edition, Stephen Oates, himself an historian and biographer of note, describes how Sandoz came to write the life of Crazy Horse and states,"Mari Sandoz and Crazy Horse may be the most potent pairing of author and subject in the history of modern biography." He praises Sandoz for writing "with a creative and lyrical brilliance that makes Crazy Horse a tour de force of language and style" and calls the book "...an almost perfect work of biographical art." I could not agree more with Oates. I have read the entire book two times and portions of it many more times. Readers are often faced with the dilemma of deciding to read further after the first few chapters of a book in the hope they'll "get into it" or to close it and turn it into a dust-catcher. Not so with Sandoz's Crazy Horse. The reader is immediately drawn into it. I was hooked by the lyricism of the first few words of the book which told me that this was going to be no ordinary biography. They read as follows: "The drowsy heat of middle August lay heavy as a furred robe on the upper country of the Shell River, the North Platte of the white man. Almost every noon the thunders built themselves a dark cloud to ride the far crown of Laramie Peak. But down along the river no rain came to lay the dust of the emigrant road, and no cloud shaded the gleaming 'dobe walls and bastions of Fort Laramie, the soldier town that was only a little island of whites in a great sea of Indian country two thousand miles wide." This story is told, not in the voice of a distant historian, but in the voice of an eyewitness. The vividness of her narrative would convince you, if you did not know otherwise, that Sandoz walked with Crazy Horse and his people. But even though she did not walk with them, she knew them well. This is an extraordinary work of creative nonfiction that makes you love being a reader.

I read this book some days ago, and I am deeply impressed on both the life of Crazy Horse and the way Ms. Sandoz told it to the reader. Since long I have been reading books about Plains Indians and their wars and had a special interest in the person of Crazy Horse. But I had not expected that this strange man, hardly to be understood by his own people, would have become so vivid to me. Ms. Sandoz book is by far better than that of Stephen E. Ambrose who often quoted her, because unlike him she was able to tell it from the Indian point of view and did not always evaluate what she wrote about. Crazy Horse was an Indian hero as out of a Greek tragedy alway doing the best for his people but condemned to be beaten by unmeasureably stronger forces than those of his people. I think he will keep in my heart and brain.