Crazy Horse (c. 1840–1877), warrior‐chieftain of the Oglala band of the Lakota (Western) Sioux.Born along the east slope of the Black Hills, Crazy Horse took his father's name after displaying bravery in wars with the Crow, Shoshoni, and other tribes. Increasingly suspicious of white encroachment as he witnessed the growing conflict on the plains between Indians and white settlers, Crazy Horse built a reputation as a great warrior against the whites. He served briefly as one of the four shirt‐wearers of the Oglalas, an important honor.
Resistant to change, Crazy Horse preferred the traditional life of hunting and war. By the mid‐1870s, the U.S. government recognized him as a head of the nontreaty element of the Lakotas. He joined the Hunkpapa Lakota leader
Sitting Bull, and together their camps, in the Powder River country in northern Wyoming, became a mecca for Sioux tribesmen opposed to government control. Crazy Horse was an important leader in the Great Sioux War (1876–1877) and a key figure in the Indian victory at the Battle of the
Little Bighorn (1876). A target of subsequent army campaigns, he was forced to surrender his band at Red Cloud Agency, Nebraska, in May 1877. That September, when military authorities feared he would lead an outbreak, he was fatally stabbed while resisting arrest on 5 September. A modest, generous, spiritual man of a somewhat morose nature, and much esteemed by his followers, Crazy Horse symbolizes the resistance of nineteenth‐century Plains Indians to domination by white culture.
See also
Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900;
Indian Wars.
Bibliography
Eleanor H. Hinman, ed., Oglala Sources on the Life of Crazy Horse, Nebraska History 57 (Spring 1976): 1–51.
Richard G. Hardorff , The Oglala Lakota Crazy Horse, 1985.
Thomas R. Buecker
