Was Crazy Horse Told to Kill a Woman?

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Today, something a little different.

I have long been fascinated with Crazy Horse. I’ve carried a lot of admiration for him, based on traits described in various histories I’ve read: he was introverted, humble, thoughtful, generous, gave away what he’d hunted, intuitively understood the concept of biomimicry, was understated in terms of dress and clothing for battle, didn’t take scalps, and most of all, he had an early sense of community, culture, and tradition. This led, of course, to him rejecting accommodation for, and bargains with, white colonists. This not only put him at odds with American expansion and “manifest destiny,” but also many of his own people, who were, for one example, interested in adopting agriculture and personal land ownership over hunting.

Image by Amos Bad Heart Bull

I don’t automatically admire all people who resist change or want to tightly guard traditional ways of doing things, no matter the cost. For me, these decisions, and the admiration, are contextual. In the case of Crazy Horse, who was eventually murdered for his resistance, things line up for me. I understand and sympathize with his position, especially after the Sand Creek massacre in 1864.

That being said, I am reading my fourth history of Crazy Horse, by Kinglsey Bray, and he hypothesizes something that no other book I’ve read mentions: that Crazy Horse was told, by an elder, to kill a woman to complete his journey to becoming a “thunder dreamer.” Bray then states that Crazy Horse went north to spend time with the Brule, and that he was said to have killed a Winnebago woman and was forced to return. This is seemingly confirmed in Eleanor Hinman’s original interviews with Lakota tribal members who knew Crazy Horse, including He Dog, who is quoted as saying:

Crazy Horse went to the Rosebud band of Indians and stayed with them for about a year. Then he came home. After he had been back for a while, I made inquiries about why he had left the Rosebud band. I was told he had to come back because he had killed a Winnebago woman. (Oglala Sources of the Life of Crazy Horse, pg. 9)

One of the books I’ve read about Crazy Horse is Mari Sandoz’s widely known Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. In Sandoz’s book, as well as The Journey of Crazy Horse by Joseph Marshall III, Crazy Horse’s first kill in battle was indeed a woman, an “accidental coup” in an 1855 Omaha battle. I believe Thomas Powers references this in The Killing of Crazy Horse, but I need to dig back into that text, which takes a non-chronological approach.

I know that women were sometimes killed in battles between various tribes, but Bray’s hypothesis is completely different. After Crazy Horse had returned from the isolation of his legendary vision quest, it was subject to much interpretation and discussion, and even additional tasks. Bray writes:

If the reconstruction of the heyoka pledges that he warily, reluctantly undertook are accurate, [Crazy Horse] had been ordered by the holy man who interpreted his vision to kill, under pain of Thunder’s punishment, a woman. (Emphasis mine.)

My first question would be “why this task?” What narrative would arrive at that conclusion?

Still, “If…accurate” is doing a lot of work there, and Bray himself admits that much of this is “unknowable.” But what’s clear is that Crazy Horse was deeply invested in these visions, his elders, and his connection to tradition—his own father, later named “Worm,” himself studied to become such an interpreter or seer in the tribe. I find Bray’s language on this matter strange: first, he states that this might not be accurate, but attributes feelings of “wariness” and “reluctance” with a confidence that feels more like mind reading.

But here’s the kicker: Bray, in his footnotes, takes a real run at Sandoz. I’m an English professor, so maybe I am missing that this is just common beef among historians, but he writes of Sandoz:

Sandoz, although present at the interview with He Dog, and following up with questioning of the old man a year afterward, gleaned no more details. Her presentation of the killing as an accidental coup in the 1855 Omaha battle is therefore a fictionalized attempt to gloss over what looked disturbingly like a blot on her hero’s reputation. (Emphasis mine.)

Strong words, especially when Bray, who wasn’t present at the interviews, has stated that the truth is largely unknowable. Maybe he is criticizing her for simply asserting a truth at all (which makes sense), but Bray relies heavily on oral tradition, just as most Crazy Horse historians, even attributing quotes to Crazy Horse that often read like dialogue in a novel.

Still, this new idea—that Crazy Horse was ordered, not by his vision, but by another tribal member (the holy man) to deliberately kill a woman to officially earn his place as a Thunder Dreamer stuns me. I can’t stop thinking about this or what has led to these multiple narratives of how it is that Crazy Horse, in his first kill as a warrior and/or adult, came to kill a woman. If there is anything consistent, it is the idea that, indeed, killing a woman is part of Crazy Horse’s history and one that he was not apparently comfortable with, as he is said to have carried deep wounds related to women for his entire life, including his mother’s suicide when he was only four.

I live in Wisconsin, and I believe the Winnebago people are also known as Ho-Chunk, which have Wisconsin roots. (I can drive to lake Winnebago is 40 mins.) Maybe there is some oral history here that I can investigate. The sources in the texts I’ve read are all Lakota. But what about Winnebago people and sources? Is there a way to move beyond this general description of “a Winnebago woman”? If this did happen, who was she? What was her name?