Crazy Horse

My back gets sore commuting to the office and sitting at a desk. 200 hundred years ago, the Lakota hunted bison on horseback and scalped white settlers. 

Crazy Horse – the legendary Lakota warrior cheif – was a hunter and warrior whose story includes the death of his mother, death of his daughter, death of his brother in battle, the love of his life marrying someone else, his mentor’s betrayal, beating US Army in sub-zero conditions, and witnessing his people move from living thousands of years off the land to reservations. 

A “thunder dreamer,” Crazy Horse went his own way and did the opposite of what people expected him to do. He was the most accomplished warrior yet never participated in the post-victory rituals, a cultural tradition where men would retell and embellish their war stories. Crazy Horse was the most savage of them all – but in ceremonies he’d sit away from the fire and listen, not talk. 

Think of the context: your people live a certain way for thousands of years. One day, aliens land in your backyard with superior technology and numbers. They claim your land. They force you out of your neighborhood and if you don’t submit, they attack. After a decade of back and forth fighting, maybe you could coexist? So you sign peace treaties, which work, until they don’t. You thought life was about hunting, raising a family, and becoming an elder in your tribe. Instead it’s fighting aliens, cultural extinction, and moving onto reservations. It ends with getting killed by your own people. 

Joseph Marshall III’s The Journey of Crazy Horse is history from the other side’s perspective. The Battle of Little Bighorn not Custer’s last stand. 

Is it pioneering the American West or extinction? 

The Black Hills were the most sacred of Indian land and a place Crazy Horse would go on solitude missions. It’s where you went for a sweat lodge, to bury your warriors, or spiritual guidance. It was the Lakota’s holiest place.

Today, it’s the site of Mount Rushmore.