Thomas Powers, _The Killing of Crazy Horse_ (1)

YEARS AGO I read another excellent book on the Sioux Wars, Custer, et al.--Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, which I would still recommend, a gracefully written and impressively unsentimental book--and I thought that would suffice for me for this lifetime, actually. But in May, B. and I visited Fort Robinson in northwestern Nebraska, the very spot Crazy Horse was killed, and saw the monument erected to his memory there in the 1930s. I remembered that back in 2010 when this book was published, I had purchased it, shelved it, then forgotten about it (a sequence e of events all too common in my book-buying patterns). Well, never too late for a great book, right? So I found it and sat down with it. Sat down with it several times, actually; at 467 pages, with another 100 pages of notes and index, it's not a swift read.

Powers is an expert on the CIA, on the development of nuclear weapons, and a variety of related Cold War phenomenon, not an established historian of the American West. This book, he tells us, is the late flowering of a "childhood passion for Indians," which had been reawakened by a 1994 visit to the spot where the Battle of the Little Bighorn took place, then by a visit to Fort Robinson: "The killing of Crazy Horse is not abstract at Fort Robinson," he notes (I know what he means), and he decided to find out all he could about  how that death occurred.

His examination involves a lot of context--the society and way of life of the native peoples of the plains, the finding of gold in the Black Hills, the wiping out of Custer and his men, the U. S. government's protracted and almost invariably bad-faith negotiations with the Sioux over several generations. True to the book's title, though, at the focal point of his microscope are the circumstances of Crazy Horse's death, in almost hour-by-hour, then second-by-second detail.

(When I mentioned I was reading this, several folks thought it was another of those Bill O'Reilly books. Couldn't be further from that sort of thing.)

Powers is particularly interested in the native perspective on this event (and on the whole period, in fact). For historiographical purposes, the documentation of the U. S. perspective is a lot more regular, consistent, and available; the documentation for the native perspective, which mainly takes the form of interviews and family memories, is not at all regular, not at all consistent, and sometimes long removed in time from the events themselves. Accordingly, a lot of traditional historians just dismissed it. Not Powers. He has gone to some lengths to track it down (e.g., interviewing the descendants of some of the Sioux who knew Crazy Horse), combed through it meticulously, evaluated it judiciously, and presented it lucidly.

As Powers presents it, the killing of Crazy Horse was not an execution, not an assassination, in some ways not even exactly deliberate, but the kind of murky death-in-custody that we associate with classic instances of the corruption of police power.

To be continued.