Crazy Horse: A Life

A welcome addition to the little history we have on the formidable Crazy Horse. McMurtry has reviewed some of the major sources and written a profile rather than a biography because he also explains how scanty our knowledge of Crazy Horse is and why that is the case.

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.

Several series of short biographies have been published in recent years, including the American Presidents series and the Great Generals series, to give busy readers the opportunity to learn about famous individuals in brief compass. In 1999, Penguin Press initiated its "Penguin Lives" series with this short biography of Crazy Horse by the American novelist, Larry McMurtry. It was an intruiging and appropriate choice. Crazy Horse's life is the stuff of legend. Just a glance at titles here at Amazon shows how much has been written about Crazy Horse on the basis of what remains a thin historical record. Crazy Horse continues to fascinate many people as shown, among other ways, in the many reviews of McMurtry's title here at Amazon and of other books about the great Oglalla Sioux warrior.

McMurtry uses his gifts as a novelist and his formidable historical knowledge of the American West to give the reader insight into an elusive person. McMurtry's book constitutes an exploration of the literature and legends surrounding Crazy Horse as much as it constitutes a biography of the man. This is unavoidable given the state of the historical record. With McMurtry's attempt to sift through the legends, Crazy Horse still emerges in his account as an extraordinary figure. McMurtry gives a convincing portrayal of an important and difficult man in a book of 140 pages. McMurtry makes as much as he can of a person with a rare way of life whom we do not know. To his own people, Crazy Horse was known as "Our Strange Man".

In McMurtry's account, Crazy Horse (1840 -- 1877) emerges as a loner and a mystic. From his youngest days, Crazy Horse went his own way. He was a visionary, in common with many of the Sioux, but frequently sought his vision in ways outside tribal tradition. McMurtry imaginatively captures a great deal of Crazy Horse in this description of the dreams, wanderings, and spiritual quests which were a feature of his adolescence and adult life:

"It is easy on the plains to imagine things not seen, worlds not known. Crazy Horse, in his wanderings over the summer plains, would have seen many mirages, which perhaps encouraged him in his belief that this world, with its buffalo and horses, is only the shadow of the real world. He was in a way a prairie Platonist, seeing an ideal of which the day's events were only a shadow." (pp. 49-50)

Crazy Horse was a hunter of buffalo and a leader of his people in skirmishes and fights with other Indians. As a young man, he became one of four tribal members honored with the title of "Shirt-Wearer" with the responsibility of looking after the well-being of the people, including the poor. When Crazy Horse ran off briefly with Black Buffalo Woman, the wife of another man, he was almost killed by her jealous husband, No Water, and the Tribe was split apart. The rift was healed by intra-tribal diplomacy, but Crazy Horse lost his title of Shirt-Wearer over the incident.

Crazy Horse is best-known for his role in three battles with the onrushing white settlers, Fetterman's Massacre of 1868, the Battle of Rosebud in 1876, and most famously the Battle of Little Bighorn against Custer on June 25, 1876. These battles established Crazy Horse's fame as a great military leader of his people although his role in each of them, especially Little Big Horn, remains uncertain.

After Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse and a group of 900 Indians, exhausted by cold and pursuit, were forced to turn themselves in at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Four months later, under circumstances that remain difficult to determine, Crazy Horse was tricked into returning to the Fort under a promise of a meeting with the commanding general. Instead, Crazy Horse was to have been exiled to a prison in Florida. A victim of military treachery and of jealousies among his own people, Crazy Horse was assassinated on September 5, 1877.

Crazy Horse, for McMurtry, was a man who was not an administrator or a negotiator. He did not surrender or try to adjust to the inevitability of a new way of life, as did some of his compatriots. He remained faithful to the life of a warrior on the lonely plains, to the hunt, and to the mystic vision to the end. As in many cases, Crazy Horse became a figure of legend because this is what his life merited. Even when we are cognizant of what we do not know, as McMurtry is, a remarkable and enigmatic figure emerges. From the Indian wars and tragedies of the American west, McMurtry offers an account of a person whose life and goals were inextricably tied to a particular people and whose story yet remains universal and timeless.

Robin Friedman

Many biographers, when faced with a dearth of reliable information, make up enough to fill the required pages. Mr. McMurtry does not. Writing about Crazy Horse is no easy assignment. He spent little time with whites and with his fellow tribesmen as well. It was almost as if this mystic intended to thwart anyone who tried to pin him like some specimen.

He may or may not have led the Sioux who obliterated Custer's 7th Cavalry. It is not even absolutely certain that Crazy Horse was at the battle of the Little Bighorn. Perhaps the most documented event is the death of Crazy Horse, which was witnessed by many whites and Indians, and yet there are wildly conflicting versions. To add to it all, even his burial site is unknown.

McMurtry well descibes the problems in telling of the subject's life and death. It is easy to see why some readers would be disappointed, because Crazy Horse never quite emerges in this small biography. He remains more myth than man, as perhaps he preferred. That much is clear.

Today a version of this ghostly figure emerges slowly from the mountain near Custer, South Dakota. There are fatter books about the man, but nothing that will compare to the statue, to be the largest in the world. And we don't even have a single photograph of him.

Great read by someone that was on the scene

I liked this thin little honest book.
It is honest because McMurtry acknowledges what many authors who have written of Crazy Horse or events he was (or is thought to have been) engaged in don't. That there are very few accounts of the Sioux warrior's life and great uncertainty about his participation in some events. Granting this, McMurtry has put together an interesting and serviceable book that describes what is known about Crazy Horse's life and discusses where there is scant evidence or lack of certainty about what the subject was doing and or why (such as the warrior's movements and intentions at the Battle of Little Big Horn). He augments the book with accounts of events and personalities who figured in the Crazy Horse life story either directly or through shaping the momentous events that forever changed life on the Plains.
What we do have is a life portrait of a nomadic called to influence by his devotion and charity to his people and who was ferocious in battle with whites. Yet also of a man who preferred solitude to active tribal leadership. Crazy Horse led by example and inspiration. It is altogether fitting that as McMurtry describes, this Sioux is the subject of the monument being rendered in the Black Hills (though having just visited this month, McMurtry's time table needs to be updated. This privately funded family effort will take another sixty years to complete. Still worth the trip as the head is complete and the story is fascinating.)
The book is well written and includes good tidbits that make it a very enjoyable read. Don't be put off by its slender size; given what little is known about the subject, the book is a very good and even thorough telling.

Apparently it is Larry McMurtry’s goal in life to avoid writing everything I don’t like.

Crazy Horse is a gem: crisp, appealing, well-informed, in McMurtry’s signature style—crafted words, no nonsense, literate. This is a candid assessment of the life and times of Ta-Shunka-Witco (“His horse is crazy”) (c1840-1877).

If there had been no relentless assault against the American Indians by white America and its government, Crazy Horse might have been an anonymous, eccentric figure among the Oglala Sioux. His compatriots probably understood him about as well as we do—that is, not much.

From several points of view, in the middle of the 19th century and now, Crazy Horse was a lone eagle. McMurtry does a commendable job of trying to see the world as Crazy Horse saw it. The world as Crazy Horse wanted it to be was shriveling around him during his entire life.

It’s too bad that Crazy Horse wasn’t born in an earlier, less contentious, more agreeable time. It’s too bad that he couldn’t simply have made his home where the buffalo roam.
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Loved it!

Have not yet finished reading this book but I have read several books by McMurtry and like his style very much.

McMurtry fills in gaps and offers good information. Easy read. Recommend.