An American Passion
Being an Account of the Killing of Crazy Horse, War Chief of the Oglala Lakota Sioux
by
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(from Book III, "Black Shawl’s Recollection")
. . . Crazy Horse now looked into the fire as if he had been chastised, but he said nothing. "You have suffered many great losses "during the moons of the past two winters, Crazy Horse," He Dog now spoke quietly. "First, it was the death of your kola, Hump, he who had been by your side from the days you were a boy, who helped you become a great warrior and skilled hunter. Then, it was the woman you wanted as if she were life itself. And then," he added quickly, as if he understood mention of Black Buffalo Woman might open up a wound not yet healed and injure others in the lodge, as well, "it was Little Hawk, your younger and only brother, he whom you had seen grow into a warrior skilled as yourself, who followed you always with devotion and bravery. These are heavy "losses for any man, but no man, especially not one like you, upon whom the welfare of so many depends, should let sorrow and anger consume him, eating his heart, poisoning his mind, drowning his spirit." He Dog paused for a moment here, and I think we all heard the great silence in the lodge. Only a dog curled up in the back of the tipi made a sound, whimpering, and my mother threw the bitch a scrap of meat from the pot. Then He Dog continued. "Instead, he should seek to find new life, new meaning in the life he still has. This is how he will do the will of Wakan Tanka.
Not by going off by himself looking for vengeance in such a way he might "die helping no one, not the living nor the dead he mourns." Now He Dog ceased speaking, and Crazy Horse looked up from the fire into which he had been staring to gaze at his friend. "I thank you for your wise words, He Dog, "but words are still just words. They are easily spoken. It is what I must do that is hard. If I knew what Wakan Tanka would have me do, that I would do. But all I know to do is to fight our enemies, to fight those who would take our freedom and our lives from us!" "It is good to fight the enemy," Red Feather now spoke, "but even a warrior needs a warm, comfortable lodge in which to sleep. Even a warrior should eat food "such as that we have eaten tonight." Again I felt something like the rabbit or the pheasant must feel as the hunter stalking it approaches to suddenly flush it from hiding, but I resisted the urge I felt to glance aside into the fire this time. Instead, I stared at my brother, wondering at the meaning of his words. "Even a man like you, Crazy Horse, benefits from good conversation and companionship. Crazy Horse," he declared, his voice rising and becoming almost shrill in tone, "He Dog and I think you should take a wife! You should marry!" My mother seemed as startled as I at her son's words. I might have risen and left the tipi if doing so would not have been an insult to my brother and his guests. So I sat still, feeling stunned, and heard Crazy Horse say, "Who might I marry, Red Feather? At my late age, after my having risked all, including the welfare of the people, for another, what woman who is worthy would find me worthy?" "I think there is such a woman sitting with us tonight!" He Dog exclaimed. I think he almost laughed, and I remember feeling anger rising in me, thinking how lightly he considered the state of a woman's heart. How could I endure public rejection by Crazy Horse?
He Dog and my brother had no right to offer me in this way, as a sacrifice to the welfare of the people, simply to be humiliated, shamed! These were the thoughts and feelings which filled me like a thunderstorm may the prairie in spring and autumn, and it was as if I heard Crazy Horse speak through the noise of thunder and pouring rain and flashes of lightning. "Black Shawl would make a good man a good wife, but I do not know that I am that man." I had been staring angrily at He Dog when, hearing Crazy Horse speak as if I were dreaming, I suddenly turned my gaze back on the tipi fire.
Feeling all eyes upon me now, I wanted to disappear, be consumed perhaps, the way the wood and the buffalo dung used for fuel are by that which they fuel. Then I heard my brother speaking, and his words brought me back into the life of the lodge this night. "I think that is for Black Shawl to say! What do you say, my sister? Is Crazy Horse a good man?" I was suddenly as calm as I had just a moment earlier been in turmoil. Looking up at my brother, I turned to face Crazy Horse before I spoke. I found him looking at me as I had never seen him look before. If the eyes of the others were upon me at that moment, I did not feel them. "I know of no man more worthy," I said quietly, my voice surprising me by its calm steadiness. I continued to hold Crazy Horse's gaze as the others in the tipi broke into loud, joyous shouts. Even my mother, old lady that she was, began trilling, joining in the jubilation. (from Book IV, "He Dog’s Account") . . Never before had we had such a victory against the wasichus. Fetterman and all his bluecoats were killed. I saw myself how the man who had boasted he could destroy our nation with a force of eighty, when he saw the end was near, that he was not going to be able to climb the hill with his cavalry and escape the slaughter by fleeing over the ridge, ordered one of his men to shoot him while he himself shot the bluecoat shooting him. I was not the only warrior wanting to be the one to strike Fetterman dead. There were many angered by the Captain's action, not just myself, but I admitted it was a brave thing he had done, and I had no heart for the mutilation of the bodies of the bluecoats which came after the screaming of the horses had ceased and the smoke of the rifle fire had floated up into the blue sky, high above the valley.
Just as we had never had before a victory against the bluecoats as the one this day, so also had I never seen our braves so eager to cut and rend the bodies of a fallen enemy. The Cheyenne were especially vengeful, memories of Sand Creek, when a bluecoat cut off the private parts of the chief White Antelope and rode around with them hanging from his saddle, as if they were a pouch for tobacco, being still much on their minds, heavy in their hearts, but the Oglala also cut out eyes, sliced muscles out of legs, ripped open chests, and chopped off hands. On this day, it was not enough to plunder the goods of the bluecoats and take scalps!
Book IV: He Dog's Account
Too many years of too many broken promises, of surprise attacks and the massacre of our women and children by lying, drunken soldiers, had passed without any real chance for revenge. Now, with the massacre of Fetterman and his company, we had a chance to do onto our enemy what had been done onto us! Still, as I have said, I watched my fellow warriors with a troubled heart. The grandfathers would not have smiled on the actions of our braves this day. They would have wondered whether the white invasion was changing us, making us something we would never have been left to ourselves, whether there were other ways to conquer a people than with guns and bullets. It was thoughts like this passed through my mind after that battle in Peno Valley. They made my heart heavy, as if we had had no great victory, and I remember I looked around for Crazy Horse, one with whom I knew I could talk of what I was feeling. But I could not find him. Later, I would learn that Crazy Horse was himself lost in grief. He had discovered his friend Lone Bear lying wounded in some scrub brush, and though he had cleansed and covered Lone Bear's wounds, stopping the bleeding, his friend had died in his arms. As the sun was beginning to set, I saw Crazy Horse r
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About the Book
An historical narrative of epic scope, An American Passion is a story of adventure, political intrigue, war, and romance set on the Northern Plains during the last several decades of the Nineteenth Century. While faithfully adhering to the sketchy and often contradictory historical record, the epic offers a vivid, imaginatively realized account of the life of the mysterious Crazy Horse, legendary war chief of the Lakota Sioux. A man who typically let his actions do his speaking for him and who died young, assassinated at the hands of the U.S. Government in his mid-thirties, Crazy Horse’s story is related by five different narrators. An American Passion opens with a prologue spoken by the Missouri River, the mighty river of the Great Plains. With the historical context established, Crazy Horse’s life, from his birth to his death little more than a year following his great victory over George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn, is related retrospectively by his grieving father Worm, a notable medicine man of the tribe. The net major section of the epic is narrated by the woman for whom Crazy Horse risked his life and the welfare of his people. Black Buffalo Woman’s tale is a tragedy in the vein of Romeo and Juliet’s. Unlike the story of Shakespeare’s fallen lovers, however, the love story of Crazy Horse and Black Buffalo Woman has never been related in its full, gripping complexity as it is in An American Passion. Amazingly, after his nearly fatal attempt to take Black Buffalo Woman as his wife Crazy Horse went on to marry, and the third major narration of An American Passion is that of Black Shawl, his fiercely loyal and devoted widow and the mother of his only known child. Telling her story at about the time Sitting Bull was returning to the reservation after having been released from prison by the U.S. Government, a bitter but not a hopeless woman, Black Shawl focuses on the early death of her daughter by Crazy Horse and on her final days in captivity with Crazy Horse. The epic concludes with the account of He Dog, a loyal friend of Crazy Horse, having fought beside him throughout his days as the greatest warrior among the Sioux. He Dog lived to be nearly a hundred years old and served as a respected judge in the Indian courts on the reservation. Told from the vantage point of 1910, some 33 years after the killing of Crazy Horse, He Dog’s narration is largely a tribute to his friend, a consideration of the differences in character and temperament between himself and Crazy Horse, and an elegy to what might have been and, perhaps, may some day yet be. In the depth and breadth of its portrayal of major figures in Crazy Horse’s life who are little more than footnotes in the historical record, and in the insight it offers into the heart and mind of a great and complicated man, a man who lived and died, ultimately, as an enigma even to the people who revered (and revere) him, An American Passion is a unique, emotionally engaging account of the final days of the resistance of the Native Americans of the Northern Plains to that juggernaut of forces which, having achieved its objective, destroyed a culture, though not a people.
About the Author
Len Blanchard’s poetry has been published widely in literary magazines and journals throughout the United States and in Canada since 1991. In 1996 and 1998, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, honoring the best poetry published annually by small presses in the United States. His epic poem on the life and killing of Crazy Horse, An American Passion, first appeared in the pages of Bellowing Ark, where it was published in serial format from 1998 – 2001. Dr. Blanchard earned a B.A. degree in English from Washington and Lee University in 1969 and a Ph.D. in English from Emory University in 1975. He taught English in North Carolina and Dallas before becoming employed for several years as a corporate trainer and, later, as a business and financial writer in Dallas and Little Rock. It wasn’t long after his relocation to Florida in 1990 that the desire to write an epic on Crazy Horse began to consume him. However, he traces the germ of his interest in the enigmatic, mystical Sioux war chief all the way back to his sixth-grade school days in New Britain, Connecticut, when he happened to read Mari Sandoz’s Strange Man of the Ogala. Crazy Horse, it seems, has been a presence in his life ever since. The father of two grown children, Sarah and Henry, Dr. Blanchard now resides in Bradenton, Florida, where he is an adjunct instructor in English at Manatee Community College, teaching composition and literature when he is not writing.