Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 331-33.
Abstract
Our finest living novelist of the American West, Larry McMurtry, portrays one of the West's most notable historic figures in Crazy Horse. Two commemorations frame this readable survey biography: one, the Korczak Ziolkowski mountain sculpture of Crazy Horse; the other, a medallion struck by the government rewarding Little Big Man's apparent complicity in killing him. Who was this "American Sphinx, the loner who inspired the largest sculpture on Planet Earth?" McMurtry further asks what Crazy Horse meant "to his people in his lifetime, and also what he has come to mean to generations of Sioux in our own century and even in our own time."
Basing his book on the extant Crazy Horse historiography, McMurtry, sharing a realization that strikes all scholars of Crazy Horse, admits "that any study of Crazy Horse will be, of necessity, an exercise in assumption, conjecture and surmise" because of conflicting opinions arising from a dearth of information about facets of his life and sharp debate over the details that are known. Crazy Horse had a mother, but who was she and what was her Lakota tribal affiliation? He had a father, but was Crazy Horse Senior a middling sort of Oglala or the scion of a prestigious Oglala family who married the daughter of an eminent Miniconjou family, making young Crazy Horse a Miniconjou on his mother's side and wellborn on both family lines? Was Touch-the-Clouds merely a friend or a blood uncle ("Indian way," as contemporary Lakota would say) to Crazy Horse? Today some Lakota insist that Crazy Horse never married because he sacrificed his personal life to focus entirely on the needs of his people, but other evidence suggests that Crazy Horse had two wives between 1871 and 1877, possibly a wife among the Northern Cheyenne during his sojourn among them in the late 1850s, and a love affair with a married woman that nearly cost him his life in 1870.
It is unsporting to expect McMurtry to answer these and others questions unresolved in the extant biographies and historiography. In 1942 Mari Sandoz published her compelling and influential Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglala, and most subsequent books about its protagonist have been derivative of this work. McMurtry knows that Sandoz was criticized for not citing her sources, for novelizing dialogue, and for relying upon "Indian myth." Prominent among her critics was Omaha historian George Hyde who distrusted what he regarded as "Indian myth" in the oral histories that Eli S. Ricker, Mari Sandoz, John G. Neihardt, Stanley Vestal, and others collected in interviews with Lakota contemporaries of Crazy Horse.
Tilting toward Hyde in this debate, McMurtry expresses his own uneasiness about the soundness of the memories of the very old Oglalas who talked to various interviewers. Despite his concerns, McMurtry's Crazy Horse is consistent with Mari Sandoz's because Crazy Horse historiography owes much to her. Thus McMurtry's book reflects the merits and drawbacks of Sandoz's work. She was a formidable researcher in the documents and in the field. She went beyond the archives to interview Oglala contemporaries of Crazy Horse. She recognized the value of Judge Eli Ricker's 1906-07 oral interviews with the Lakota which she mined for her book. Furthermore, in the early 1930s Mari Sandoz, Helen Blish, Eleanor Hinman, and their Lakota interpreter and collaborator John Colhoff conducted their own interviews with Oglala contemporaries of Crazy Horse.
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln