Crazy Horse was a contemporary of Chief Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota holy man who led his people as a tribal chief during years of resistance to United States government policies. Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw the defeat of General Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn. Sitting Bull's leadership inspired his people to the victory. Hunted by the U.S. military, he fled to what is now Saskatchewan until 1881, when he and most of his band returned and surrendered to the military. After working as a performer with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, Sitting Bull returned to the Standing Rock Agency in South Dakota. However, because of fears that he would use his influence to support the Native American Ghost Dance movement (wrongly interpreted as hostile and potentially fomenting of continued Indian warfare), he was arrested. During an ensuing struggle between Sitting Bull's followers and the agency police, Sitting Bull was shot and died December 15, 1890.
The murder of Sitting Bull provoked anguish, fear and hatred among those Native Americans who were living in an uneasy relationship with the U.S. Government in the Dakota Territory. The Hunkpapa people, now leaderless due to Sitting Bull's death, fled to the Minneconjou camp of Chief Big Foot, who in turn led them toward Pine Ridge, South Dakota and the camp of Chief Red Cloud. On the morning of December 29, 1890, two weeks after Sitting Bull's death, U.S. military had surrounded the band of Native Americans, forced their surrender and, as the Indians were laying down their arms, opened fire en masse. It is uncertain whether the killing was deliberate or an over-reaction to an accidental shot from one Native American's rifle. In any event, by the time the shooting was over, more than 200 men, women, and children of the Lakota had been killed and 51 were wounded (4 men, 47 women and children, some of whom died later); some estimates placed the number of dead at 300.
There is no doubt that the murder of many women and children was deliberate. Louise Weasel Bear said, "We tried to run, but they shot us like we were buffalo." Yellow Bird’s son, just 4 years old at the time, saw his father shot through the head: "My father ran and fell down and the blood came out of his mouth." Those who fled the camp were chased down by soldiers. Rough Feathers’ wife remembered: "I saw some of the other Indians running up the coulee so I ran with them, but the soldiers kept shooting at us and the bullets flew all around us. My father, my grandfather, my older brother and my younger brother were all killed. My son who was two years old was shot in the mouth that later caused his death." Black Elk added: "Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed them along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there."
It is hard to imagine the immense anger, sorrow and helplessness that the Wounded Knee Massacre invoked in Native Americans of all tribes. It is said that Crazy Horse's family buried his heart and bones somewhere along the creek that was the site of Wounded Knee. The emotions these events produced, even in the hearts of white Americans at the time, were searing. The poet and author Stephen Vincent Benet, who was born in 1889, wrote in 1927:
I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
- from Stephen Vincent Benet's poem, "American Names"
This passage in turn inspired the title of the history, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West," by Dee Brown, published in 1970. The book expresses a Native American perspective on the actions of the US government which are described as a series of injustices and betrayals. Brown describes Native Americans' displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government. The government's dealings are portrayed as a continuing effort to destroy the culture, religion, and way of life of Native American peoples. HBO Films produced a television film adaptation of the book, focusing on the narrative of the Lakota tribes leading up to the death of Sitting Bull and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. The film received 17 Emmy nominations and six awards, including the category of Outstanding Made For Television Movie. It also won nominations for three Golden Globe Awards, two Satellite Awards, and one Screen Actors Guild Award.
For all these reasons, we wanted to see the Crazy Horse Memorial, which is located, fittingly enough, in Crazy Horse, South Dakota, just a short drive from Mount Rushmore. Here was our first view of the memorial as we drove up to it:
The monument is still under construction and is located on privately held land in the Black Hills, in Custer County, South Dakota. It depicts Crazy Horse riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, and was sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski. Ziolkowski assisted Gutzon Borglum in the carving of the Mt. Rushmore Memorial during 1939 and then, in that same year, won first prize at the New York World's Fair for his marble sculpture of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. As a result of this prize, Chief Standing Bear wrote Ziolkowski a letter inviting him to discuss a memorial to Crazy Horse. The rest, they say, is history.
Ziolkowski started the project entirely with his own funds. He acquired land adjoining the present-day memorial and, through ingenuity and perserverence, made profits from the land that funded his initial work on the monument. Beginning in 1948, he worked on the sculpture with just a hammer and a chisel. Eventually, he attracted notoriety and donors, who helped fund a larger effort.
Soon after the project became serious, Ziolkowski was foresightful enough to put the project into a tax-exempt foundation, Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, a private non-profit organization, which is presently managed by an independent board but still involves a number of his children and grandchildren who are active in the project. The Foundation expanded its purposes to include not only the monument, but also the Indian University of North America, now operating in conjunction with the University of South Dakota, the Indian Museum of North America, and the Native American Cultural Center. The monument is being carved out of Thunderhead Mountain on land considered sacred by some Oglala Lakota. The sculpture's final dimensions are planned to be 641 feet wide and 563 feet high. The head of Crazy Horse will be 87 feet. By comparison, the heads of the four U.S. Presidents at Mount Rushmore are each 60 feet high.
The monument is far from completion, but is the world's largest sculpture. Revenues from visitors and donors are sufficient to fund continued sculpting efforts and the ongoing and expanding operations of the Indian Museum, the Cultural Center and the University.
The Museum is filled with Indian-related artifacts. The photo below will give you an idea:
There is a sculptor's studio that contains some of the notable possessions of Ziolkowski, some portraits of him, as well as various pieces of sculpture cast from his models that can be purchased:
The Museum also holds items that are interesting because of their relationship to the monument. Because there are no known photos of Crazy Horse, Ziolkowski contacted several survivors of the Little Big Horn battle to produce a working sketch and then model of what they recalled Crazy Horse looked like. The resulting working model is in the Museum:
There is also a marble scultpure representing the entire monument when it is completed. In the photo below, the model sits in front of the monument. According to the Museum, when asked where his lands were, now that so many Lakota Sioux were dead and their lands taken, Crazy Horse reputedly said, "My lands are where my dead lie buried." The sculpture said that this is the reason the memorial shows Crazy Horse pointing. He is supposed to be pointing to where his dead lie buried:
We were so fascinated with the monument that we took advantage of a tour to the top! Here is a photo of Kathy with our tour guide, Bob, who we discovered is also a full-time RV'er. He splits his time between working at the Crazy Horse Monument in the summer and an RV park in Arizona durig the winter:
As our van wound its way toward the monument, we were able to glimpse views of it from different directions:
We also stumbled upon some mountain goats that range through Custer State Park and other areas in the Black Hills and unaccountably have grown fond of the Crazy Horse Memorial grounds:
Our van drove to the top of the sculpture, where Crazy Horse's arm stretches horizontally. On the top of the arm is the base for much of the current construction, so there were large cranes, drills and construction vehicles, as well as a few displays for our benefit. Here, Bob is showing us examples of how rock is blasted away with dynamite on a precision basis (note our hard hats, which were required):
To give you an idea of the scale of the monument, Bob was kind enough to take our photo standing next to Crazy Horse's face, looking in along his arm from where his hand and finger point outward. Hopefully this photo reveals how human (because imperfect) the face is. In it, we felt a real spirit or presence, which was powerful and spooky:
It is important to know that, while the monument was "sponsored" by Chief Standing Bear, the project did not receive the blessing from Crazy Horse's descendants, which would be considered necessary from the perspective of many Native Americans. There are a substantial number of Native Americans who are opposed to the project, on as many as five different grounds: the sculptors are white, not Native American; no real permission was sought; perhaps it isn't right to portray the image of a man who, through his entire life, refused to have his portrait made, photograph taken, or any other image made; the project creates profits for individuals (even though, in this case, it is in the form of a charitable foundation); and, last but not least, it is against Indian beliefs to take a sacred, natural mountain and blast away parts of it for man's purposes. These objections are very troubling to us because our own instinctive reaction is to appreciate the spirit of the great Native American leader and to take the time to learn more about the atrocities that were committed by the White Man in the name of Manifest Destiny.
HISTORY OF WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE
Though he died years before the Wounded Knee Massacre, Crazy Horse and his life are inextricably bound to the events that followed. In appreciating what he stood for and the things that he and his peoples suffered, it is important to understand the ultimate event in the relationship between the U.S. Government and the original inhabitants of our continent.
The following description of the Massacre at Wounded Knee is an excerpt from Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the America West," as quoted on the blog site, Neogriot, authored by Kalamu ya Salaam:
In December 1890, more than 140 Lakota men, women and children were killed during the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota. Below is an excerpt from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown. First published in 1970, the book has sold more than 5 million copies and is credited for challenging the mythology that surrounds “Manifest Destiny” and the American West:
There was no hope on earth, and God seemed to have forgotten us. Some said they saw the Son of God; others did not see Him. If He had come, He would do some great things as He had done before. We doubted it because we had seen neither Him nor His works.
The people did not know; they did not care. They snatched at the hope. They screamed like crazy men to Him for mercy. They caught at the promise they heard He had made.
The white men were frightened and called for soldiers. We had begged for life, and the white men thought we wanted theirs. We heard that soldiers were coming. We did not fear. We hoped that we could tell them our troubles and get help. A white man said the soldiers meant to kill us. We did not believe it, but some were frightened and ran away to the Badlands.
- Red Cloud
Had it not been for the sustaining force of the Ghost Dance religion, the Sioux in their grief and anger over the assassination of Sitting Bull might have risen up against the guns of the soldiers. So prevalent was their belief that the white men would soon disappear and that with the next greening of the grass their dead relatives and friends would return, they made no retaliations. By the hundreds, however, the leaderless Hunkpapas fled from Standing Rock, seeking refuge in one of the Ghost Dance camps or with the last of the great chiefs, Red Cloud, at Pine Ridge. In the Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns (December 17) about a hundred of these fleeing Hunkpapas reached Big Foots Minneconjou camp near Cherry Creek. That same day the War Department issued orders for the arrest and imprisonment of Big Foot. He was on the list of “fomenters of disturbances.”
As soon as Big Foot learned that Sitting Bull had been killed, he started his people toward Pine Ridge, hoping that Red Cloud could protect them from the soldiers. En route, he fell ill of pneumonia, and when hemorrhaging began, he had to travel in a wagon. On December 28, as they neared Porcupine Creek, the Minneconjous sighted four troops of cavalry approaching. Big Foot immediately ordered a white flag run up over his wagon. About two o’clock in the afternoon he raised up from his blankets to greet Major Samuel Whiteside, Seventh U.S. Cavalry. Big Foot’s blankets were stained with blood from his lungs, and as he talked in a hoarse whisper with Whiteside, red drops fell from his nose and froze in the bitter cold.
Whiteside told Big Foot that he had orders to take him to a cavalry camp on Wounded Knee Creek. The Minneconjou chief replied that he was going in that direction; he was taking his people to Pine Ridge for safety.
Turning to his half-breed scout, John Shangreau, Major Whitside ordered him to begin disarming Big Foot’s band.
“Look here, Major,” Shangreau replied, “if you do that, there is liable to be a fight here; and if there is, you will kill all of those women and children and the men will get away from you.”
Whitside insisted that his orders were to capture Big Foot’s Indians and disarm and dismount them.
“We’d better take them to camp and then take their horses from them and their guns,” Shangreau declared.
“All right,” Whitside agreed. “You tell Big Foot to move down to camp at Wounded Knee.”
The major glanced at the ailing chief, and then gave an order for his Army ambulance to be brought forward. The ambulance would be warmer and would give Big Foot an easier ride than the jolting springless wagon. After the chief was transferred to the ambulance, Whitside formed a column for the march to Wounded Knee Creek. Two troops of cavalry took the lead, the ambulance and wagons following, the Indians herded into a compact group behind them, with the other two cavalry troops and a battery of two Hotchkiss guns bringing up the rear.
At the cavalry tent camp on Wounded Knee Creek, the Indians were halted and children counted. There were 120 men and 230 women and children. Because of the gathering darkness, Major Whitside decided to wait until morning before disarming his prisoners. He assigned them a camping area immediately to the south of the military camp, issued them rations, and as there was a shortage of tepee covers, he furnished them several tents. Whitside ordered a stove placed in Big Foot’s tent and sent a regimental surgeon to administer to the sick chief. To make certain that none of his prisoners escaped, the major stationed two troops of cavalry as sentinels around the Sioux tepees, and then posted his two Hotchkiss guns on top of a rise overlooking the camp. The barrels of these rifled guns, which could hurl explosive charges for more than two miles, were positioned to rake the length of the Indian lodges.
Later in the darkness of that December night the remainder of the Seventh Regiment marched in from the east and quietly bivouacked north of Major Whitside’s troops. Colonel James W. Forsyth, commanding Custer’s former regiment, now took charge of operations. He informed Whiteside that he had received orders to take Big Foot’s band to the Union Pacific Railroad for shipment to a military prison in Omaha.
After placing two more Hotchkiss guns on the slope beside the others, Forsyth and his officers settled down for the evening with a keg of whiskey to celebrate the capture of Big Foot.
The chief lay in his tent, too ill to sleep, barely able to breathe. Even with their protective Ghost Shirts and their belief in the prophecies of the new Messiah, his people were fearful of the pony soldiers camped all around them.
Fourteen years before, on the Little Bighorn, some of these warriors had helped defeat some of these soldier chiefs – Moylan, Varnum, Wallace, Godfrey, Edgerly—and the Indians wondered if revenge could still be in their hearts.
“The following morning there was a bugle call,” said Wasumaza, one of Big Foot’s warriors who years afterward was to change his name to Dewey Beard. “Then I saw the soldiers mounting their horses and surrounding us. It was announced that all men should come to the center for a talk and that after the talk they were to move on to Pine Ridge agency. Big Foot was brought out of his tepee and sat in front of his tent and the olderr men were gathered around him and sitting right near him in the center.”
After issuing hardtack for breakfast rations, Colonel Forsyth informed the Indians that they were now to be disarmed. “They called us for guns and arms,” White Lance said,” so all of us gave the guns and they were stacked in the center.” The soldier chiefs were not satisfied with the number of weapons surrendered, and so they sent details of troopers to search the tepees. “They would go right into the tents and come out with bundles and tear them open,” Dog Chief said. “They brought our axes, knives, and tent stakes and piled them near the guns.”
Still not satisfied, the soldier chiefs ordered the warriors to remove their blankets and submit to searches for weapons. The Indians’ faces showed their anger, but only the medicine man, Yellow Bird, made any overt protest. He danced a few Ghost Dance steps, and chanted one of the holy songs, assuring the warriors that the soldiers’ bullets could not penetrate their sacred garments. “The bullets will not go toward you,” he chanted in Sioux. “The prairie is large and the bullets will not go toward you.”
The troopers found only two rifles, one of them a new Winchester belong to a young Minneconjou named Black Coyote. Black Coyote raised the Winchester above his head, shouting that he paid much money for the rifle and that it belonged to him. Some years afterward Dewey Beard recalled that Black Coyote was deaf. “If they had left him alone he was going to put his gun down where he should. They grabbed him and spinned him in the east direction. He was still unconcerned even then. He hadn’t his gun pointed at anyone. His intention was to put that gun down. They came on and grabbed the gun that he was going to put down. Right after they spun him around there was the report of a gun, was quite loud. I couldn’t say that anyone was shot, but following that was a crash.”
“It sounded much like the sound of tearing canvas, that was the crash,” Rough Feather said. Afraid-of-the-Enemy described it as a “lightning crash.”
Turning Hawk said that Black Coyote “was a crazy man, a young man of very bad influence and in fact a nobody.” He said that Black Coyote fired his gun and that “immediately the soldiers returned fire and indiscriminate killing followed.”
In the first seconds of violence, the firing of carbines was deafening, filling the air with powder smoke. Among the dying who lay sprawled on the frozen ground was Big Foot. Then there was a brief lull in the rattle of arms, with small groups of Indians and soldiers grappling at close quarters, using knives, clubs, and pistols. As few of the Indians had arms, they soon had to flee, and then the big Hotchkiss guns on the hill opened upon them, firing almost a shell a second, raking the Indian camp, shredding the tepees with flying shrapnel, killing men, women and children.
“We tried to run,” Louise Weasel Bear said, “but they shot us like we were buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children.”
“I was running away from the place and followed those who were running away,” said Hakiktawin, another of the young women. “My grandfather and grandmother and brother were killed as we crossed the ravine, and then I was shot on the right hip clear through and on my right wrist where I did not go any further as I was not able to walk, and after the soldier picked me up where a little girl came to me and crawled into the blanket.”
When the madness ended, Big Foot and more than half of his people were dead or seriously wounded; 153 were known dead, but many of the wounded crawled away to die afterward. One estimate placed the final total of dead at very nearly three hundred of the original 350 men, women and children. The soldiers lost twenty-five dead and thirty-nine wounded, most of them struck by their own bullets or shrapnel.
After the wounded cavalrymen were started for the agency at Pine Ridge, a detail of soldiers went over the Wounded Knee battlefield, gathering up Indians who were still alive and loading them into wagons. As it was apparent by the end of the day that a blizzard was approaching, the dead Indians were left lying where they had fallen. (After the blizzard, when a burial party returned to Wounded Knee, they found the bodies, including Big Foot’s, frozen into grotesque shapes).
The wagonloads of wounded Sioux (four men and forty-seven women and children) reached Pine Ridge after dark. Because all available barracks were filled with soldiers, they were left lying in the open wagons in the bitter cold while an inept Army officer searched for shelter. Finally the Episcopal mission was opened, the benches taken out, and hay scattered over the rough flooring.
It was the fourth day after Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 1890. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church, those who were conscious could see the Christmas greenery hanging above the open rafters. Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.
“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”
- Black Elk
WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE SITE AND MUSEUM
These events tug at one's heart. Having learned and understood about the events as we visited the Crazy Horse Monument, we decided to visit the Wounded Knee Museum in Wall, South Dakota as we made our trip through the Badlands.
The Museum is now housed in a beautiful brick building which is notable for its low key design, in contrast to the other, blatantly tacky tourist sites in Wall:
We wish we could have visited the actual site at Wounded Knee. It contains a memorial and gravesites. However, it was too far from us and we didn't have enough time to visit it. Nevertheless, here is a photo of the site taken from the Internet:
The exhibits in the Museum are powerful. Be warned that there are many historical photographs of the dead or wounded, and graphic testimony of the events, at Wounded Knee. We left the Museum fighting back tears for the atrocity and the human loss.
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