Crazy Horse and the End of Lakota Freedom

In the last week of May 1866, a train of sixty or seventy wagons came grinding north out of the Platte bottomlands onto the new Bozeman Road, bound for the Montana gold camps, while Lakota men lay flat in the grass on the ridges above and counted them. The road cut straight through the Powder River country, the best buffalo range left on the northern Plains. That same spring Colonel Henry Carrington marched west with some seven hundred men and orders to build forts along it without provoking a war.

Before the year was out, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho fighters had destroyed Captain William Fetterman's command outside Fort Phil Kearny, and among the decoys who drew him out, by most accounts, was a young Oglala named Crazy Horse. By 1868 the United States had abandoned the road.

His path ran on through the treaty signed that year, the gold Custer's column found in the Black Hills in 1874, the Greasy Grass in June 1876, which the Army called the Little Bighorn, and a hard winter on the run, to his surrender at Camp Robinson in May 1877 and the soldier's bayonet that killed him there that September.

His death did not settle the question of the Black Hills. That February, while his people were still in their winter camps, Congress had passed an act taking them. The Lakota never agreed to give them up, and the book stays with the hills long after he was gone.