After much consideration, the council ruled that Crazy Horse not see Black Buffalo Woman again and that No Water take her back as his wife, a ruling with which she complied since she could no longer have Crazy Horse. No Water was ordered to give his three best ponies to Crazy Horse’s father for the physical harm done to his son. And the worst punishment of all was that Crazy Horse was stripped of his status as a Shirt Wearer.
Crazy Horse recovered from the bullet wound, although permanently scarred across the left side of his face. The burns he had suffered falling into the campfire were superficial and soon healed. He now resumed his standing as an ordinary warrior, but over the ensuing years his deeds of bravery against enemy tribes and white settlers trespassing on Oglala treaty lands brought him wide acclaim among his people.
At some point, Touch-the-Clouds, seeing that his friend and cousin was not a happy man, arranged a marriage between Crazy Horse and a woman named Black Shawl, the sister of one of Crazy Horse’s most devoted followers, Red Feather. Black Shawl, who was young, strong, and beautiful, had rejected numerous offers of marriage because she had long admired Crazy Horse from afar. The opportunity to marry him brought her great joy. Their union was successful to the point of clearly making Crazy Horse a happy man who now had a home tipi of his own, and soon, to his delight, a baby daughter whom he named She-Is-Not-Afraid, and upon whom he doted. Life was now good for Crazy Horse — but it was not to remain so.
The last of the Great Plains tribes had united on the lush grasslands of the Rosebud and Powder Rivers in Montana Territory, determined under Sitting Bull to make one final stand against the incursion of the white man. But before that fateful day, Crazy Horse was to suffer still more personal grief. Returning from a raid on the Crows, who had now become scouts for the blue-coat soldiers, he learned that his beloved daughter, then only three years old, had contracted cholera and died. A cold bitterness came over the bereaved father, who blamed the white settlers and soldiers for the disease. Before they came, the tribes of the Great Plains knew nothing of sicknesses such as measles, smallpox, and the dreaded cholera that flourished in waters that the white man polluted. So Crazy Horse stood more than ready to take his band of followers to join warriors from the Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Sans Arcs, Santees, Arapahoes, Brulés, and Assiniboine, who had gathered under Sitting Bull to face three forces of the U.S. Army under Generals Crook, Gibbon, and Terry.
When the two enemy forces finally met in what would be the last great conflict of what was to be historically designated as the Indian Wars, it was called by the tribes the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and by the whites the Battle of the Little Big Horn. After the battle ended, another name also soon came to be applied. A daring, charismatic, yellow-haired officer under Terry’s command, who had been a brevet brigadier general in the Civil War — brevet meaning temporary, for the duration of a conflict — who was now a lieutenant colonel in command of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment, would glorify himself that day by losing his entire force through brash overconfidence.
That man was George Armstrong Custer, and the epithet he earned for his poor judgment was Custer’s Last Stand. He became a national hero. But the tribes won the battle.
Ultimately, however, they lost the war.
Crazy Horse fought the white settlers and the bluecoats sent to protect them for several more years. With a following of six hundred warriors, in a band that numbered two thousand including women and children, he moved from place to place across the vast Great Plains, along the Powder River, into the mountains, able to strike his lodges and travel miles away to a new camp within hours. But time and weather and illness took their toll on his people. Without the buffalo herds, now being killed for hides by white hunters, the Indians lacked food and warm robes. As the bluecoat net around them tightened, there were fewer places to raid for weapons, ammunition, and fresh horses. And then a dread new disease began to spread among them, a disease the whites called whooping cough.
The time finally came when Crazy Horse had no option but to surrender or watch his people starve. On May 6, 1877, he surrendered his band to Lieutenant William Howard Clark at Camp Robinson in the White River Valley of South Dakota Territory. There were only eight hundred and eighty-nine people left, two hundred warriors out of the original six hundred, and the men had only forty-six rifles among them.
Crazy Horse was now an “agency Indian,” one who had no tipi, no weapon, no pony. He and Black Shawl slept on the ground with the others, and ate what they were fed, like the agency mongrel dogs. Black Shawl had contracted the terrible whooping cough. Touch-the-Clouds persuaded Crazy Horse to put aside his pride and take her to the camp surgeon, Major Valentine McGillycuddy, who gave her medicine. The doctor treated Crazy Horse with respect and told him through a half-breed interpreter that Black Shawl must stop sleeping on the ground out in the night air. Late that night, Crazy Horse and Touch-the-Clouds stole three settler horses and left the camp to set up a hidden tipi in nearby woods for Black Shawl. They made a bed for her out of buffalo robes and saddle blankets stolen from a post trader’s supply stores.
Soon, Lieutenant Clark learned about the absence and activities of the two rogue Indians and offered a two-hundred-dollar reward for their capture. Unable to bring Black Shawl into the camp for regular visits ordered by Dr. McGillycuddy, Crazy Horse sought someone to do it for him, and to look after his wife when he and Touch-the-Clouds were away. He decided on the interpreter who had helped him talk with the white doctor, the daughter of one of the French traders at the post, who was half French, half Southern Cheyenne. She had grown up among the Sioux and was fluent in four languages. Crazy Horse slipped into camp and offered to buy the girl from her father, who was known as Long Joe. The father agreed and Crazy Horse paid him six mustang ponies caught on the prairie, plus two hundred dollars in gold stolen from a Wells Fargo stagecoach he and Touch-the-Clouds held up between Spearfish and Deadwood. Crazy Horse took the young woman to the hidden tipi, where she began to care for Black Shawl.
For a year, Crazy Horse and Touch-the-Clouds made hit-and-run raids on settlers’ homes all across the plains, stealing horses, chickens, hogs, and harvested com. Sometimes they were gone two or three days at a time, but always when they returned with the spoils of their raids, Crazy Horse found Black Shawl well cared for by the woman he had bought. The raids by the renegade cousins were becoming notorious, and the name of Crazy Horse was once again gaining fame, and few at a time other young warriors left the agency and rode out to join him. Lieutenant Clark’s superiors soon lost patience with the failure of his patrols to stop the raiding, and Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Bradley was dispatched from Omaha to take charge of the situation. His aide, Lieutenant Jesse Lee, accompanied him. Bradley learned that one of the older agency Indians, Spotted Tail, was an uncle through marriage to Crazy Horse. Spotted Tail was persuaded to leave the camp and go in search of his nephew to arrange a meeting to discuss ending the private war Crazy Horse was conducting. Spotted Tail did what none of the army patrols had been able to do: Within a day, he had located the hidden tipi.
Crazy Horse agreed to meet with the new commander at the camp and discontinue the raids if certain terms were met: If he surrendered, he must be treated as a chief and have a tipi for his wife, continued medical care for her from Dr. McGillycuddy, his own horse to ride and permission to leave the camp to hunt for his own food, and immunity from punishment for himself, Touch-the-Clouds, and all of the young men who had left the agency, for all of the raids and robberies they had committed. When Spotted Tail returned to the agency and recited Crazy Horse’s terms, Colonel Bradley accepted them at once. He sent Lieutenant Lee with Spotted Tail to meet with Crazy Horse out on the prairie. At the meeting, Lee assured Crazy Horse that he spoke for Colonel Bradley and that all of Crazy Horse’s terms would be met.