An Arapaho warrior clubbed me with a stone hatchet, and I fell swiftly into oblivion. If I thought anything as I suffered Death to walk out from its vantage to take my pulse, it was that I would soon be parting with my scalp. But when I shrugged back into consciousness, it wasn’t Death who loomed over me, but Crazy Horse, more fearsome than any Catholic harvester of souls. He was taking the measure of my heart with a gaze that seemed almost to heat my blood — to make it boil up like coffee in a pot left too long on the stove. He was the most extraordinary-looking man I ever laid eye on. I assert it not as an opinion but as a fact impossible to gainsay, because he would not allow his picture to be taken and none ever was, except once by — I almost said “accident,” but I’m not sure that the universe allows accidents. If ever a man — white, red, black, or yellow — had the fat light seeping from his bones, it was Crazy Horse. He rode to battle in nothing but a breechcloth, so his bones were distinguishable underneath the lean and muscled flesh. I ought to have feared him; any other white man would have. But I didn’t, even though he didn’t look kindly at me. He stared at me as a naturalist would at a never-before-seen insect. I didn’t squirm, much less whimper or beg for my life. My courage — it was hardly that, but let the word stand for what my behavior in his presence and during the battle resembled — my courage, then, and my having murdered Custer — they perplexed him.
“Why did you kill the Yellow Hair?” he asked. I suppose I must have been the most extraordinary white man he’d ever laid his two eyes on, in spite of my puniness.
“Because he killed too many to be permitted to live.”
“Too many what?”
“Men. Soldiers. Indians. Women, children, old men. Buffalo. Black Kettle’s nine-hundred ponies by the Washita. His dogs.”
I spoke in the Lakota tongue, or he spoke in English, or we spoke together some sensual language known by animals or else in the mineral one of rocks — for the Indians believe even they are alive. Goddamn it, Jay, I’m not Francis Parkman or even Ned Buntline! What happened to me by the Little Bighorn River was mystical as well as murderous. It’s impossible to understand it in any prosaic way.
“Are you one of those white people who wish to save Indians by bringing them the comforts of your Jesus?”
It was trick question, and I knew it. Instead of answering, I recited a line of Whitman’s: “The red aborigines,/ Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and wind, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names,/Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco,/ Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,/ Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names.”
“Is that written in your Bible?”
“In Leaves of Grass.”
Crazy Horse nodded; he had already glimpsed the future and had seen there the end of his people’s dominion over the Great Plains, at Wounded Knee, which would coincide with the end of Whitman’s great poem.
“I have heard of this book,” he said. He bent forward, lowering his face toward me; and for a moment, I thought he meant to kiss me, as Whitman had done in Camden, sensing in his humiliated body a coming night that might be other than mystical. Our two gazes entangled — Crazy Horse’s with mine and mine with his. I descried intimations of a truth that I couldn’t grasp.
Crazy Horse said, “Remember this moment well.”
“I will,” I said solemnly, like a godfather who has been entrusted with a childhood not his own.
“I’m going to spare your life so that you’ll never be free of me.”
It was then I began to be afraid.
CODA. Crazy Horse
How curious! how real!
Lincoln, Nebraska, 1901
I did three good things in my life: I killed Custer; I rescued a child, although it was too late to save her; and I refused to sell my photograph of Crazy Horse, even when I went bankrupt and lost the studio. I could have named my price. What wouldn’t The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Daily Tribune, Harper’s Weekly, or Whitman’s old paper the Brooklyn Daily Eagle have paid for the only picture of Crazy Horse in existence? It would have made me rich — richer than most of the prospectors who went looking for gold and lost their shirts instead.
The wonder of it was how it came to be. My camera was lying in the tall grass, where I’d left it in my rush to scrabble up the hill and dispatch Yellow Hair to the corner of hell reserved for him since the Washita River campaign. The Indians never saw it, although it wasn’t far from where Crazy Horse and I had searched each other’s hearts or brains or whatever organ is capable of registering the minutest tremors of another’s soul, which must be like the crystal in a radio or the lens of a telescope down which far-flung stars are borne. I’ve never been sure how the trick was accomplished that knotted our two minds together — not for eternity, which is only a fancy of theologians, sentimentalists, and wives, but for the year after Crazy Horse was killed at the Soldiers’ Town on the White River. All during that year — I was going on thirty — I’d wake from sleep with a blinding headache, as if what I’d seen behind my closed eyelids — second sight — temporarily blacked out the daylight. That was in the late summer of 1877, when Crazy Horse ensnared me in his dreams of the future. I think he knew at the Little Bighorn that the summer of ’77 would be his last — the curtain was ringing down forever on the ancient ways of his people, whom he and Sitting Bull had brought together for one final act of resistance by the magnetism of their stupendous wills.
I wore my medal during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I hadn’t put it on since my first meeting with Custer at Fort Lincoln, when I saw his self-satisfied face rising in the round moon of his hand mirror. But before we rode into the Powder River Country, I pinned it to my coat — at the bidding, I’ve always thought, of something that lies beyond the human mind and its weak influence on the world. Crazy Horse could have mistaken the tarnished scrap for a souvenir of the murder of his people and had the honor of cutting my throat. But instead, he looked at it gravely and then surprised me by asking if he could have it. I gave it to him and, in return, he gave me the medicine bundle from around his neck. Did these two talismans harmonize the vibrations of our separate hearts? You’re a medical man, Jay. What do you say?
“What you’re telling me, Stephen, has nothing to do with medicine or science.”
What has it to do with, then?
“The occult — which I don’t give a hang about. I’m surprised at you! I always took you for a sensible man.”
Maybe it’s the blood pressure. It’s elevated. I saw it in your face this morning.
“It’s too high, Stephen. I won’t kid you. You’re headed for another heart attack if you’re not careful. You be sure to take the medicine I left.”
I will, though I don’t think it will do me any good. But you’ve been a good doc and a better friend to me, Jay.
“So tell me about Crazy Horse’s picture.”
After the Little Bighorn, I didn’t return to Fort Lincoln. I was finished with the army, and, believing I had perished with Custer’s battalion, the army was finished with me. I took my camera — left the tent, chemicals, and plates behind in the prairie grass — and walked all the way to Omaha. I stayed with Edward Jackson in the Jackson Brothers’ portrait studio. I didn’t take any pictures then, but I helped him and William’s wife, Mollie, make hundreds of stereo cards of Mesa Verde and the Navaho for William Jackson, who was traveling with the Hayden Survey team in New Mexico at the time.