On March 17, 1876, a cavalry force led by Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds attacked a village along the Powder River. Reynolds reportedly believed it was the village of Crazy Horse, but it turned out to be the Cheyenne camp of Two Moons. The villagers lost their horse herd but regained it, and most of them were able to escape to a small camp nearby–the camp of Crazy Horse. Next, they all pushed north, traveling another 60 miles to the larger camp of Sitting Bull. Reynolds’ attack made the free-living bands more determined than ever to resist. When the Army sent three columns from three directions to converge in the Powder River Country as part of a spring-summer campaign to force their compliance, the Lakotas and their allies were ready for them–physically and spiritually. It helped that in early June, Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers falling upside down from the sky.

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A few weeks later, in the Battle of the Rosebud, Crazy Horse and other Lakotas fought Brig. Gen. George Crook’s invading force to a standstill–but that was not the great victory Sitting Bull had envisioned. The Indians’ greatest triumph came just over a week after the Rosebud Creek fight when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer attacked Sitting Bull’s extensive village on the Little Bighorn River (known to the Lakotas as the Greasy Grass) in Montana Territory. Custer and all the soldiers in his immediate command did not exactly fall from the sky, but fall they did–never to rise again, except in a million books and a billion imaginations. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25-26, 1876, was of course the crowning triumph for the warlike Lakotas, even if Sitting Bull did not take part in the actual fighting and even if Crazy Horse, as brave as he was, did not make a legendary charge over Custer Hill.

Custer’s Last Stand, as everyone on this side of Custer Hill (and the other side, too) knows, was almost the last stand for the Lakotas. They had won the battle, but could not be expected to win this war. In the aftermath of a fight that totally overshadowed the Fetterman and Grattan massacres (and every other Indian engagement, too), the U.S. Army pursued the hostiles. On September 9, 1876, Crook’s troops found the Lakota village of American Horse at Slim Buttes (in what today is northwestern South Dakota). They eventually torched it, but not before Crazy Horse, who had arrived with a band of warriors during the battle, gave them a scare or two.

That winter, Colonel Nelson Miles tenaciously tracked down Crazy Horse’s village near the Tongue River in Montana Territory, and on January 8, 1877, with about 3 feet of snow on the ground, the two sides clashed in what would become known as the Battle of Wolf Mountain. Blizzard conditions cut the fighting short, and casualties were light, but Crazy Horse had suffered a mighty blow. His people could run, but they could not hide. The war ended in 1877, not because Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were defeated in battle but because the hungry Lakotas were unable to hunt or gather food. In early May, Crazy Horse rode into the Red Cloud Agency to surrender, about the same time that Miles struck Minneconjou Sioux Lame Deer’s band on Muddy Creek, a small tributary of Rosebud Creek, in Montana Territory. Lame Deer was among the casualties in that May 7, 1877, clash, and the Battle of Lame Deer (or Muddy Creek) was the last significant engagement of the Great Sioux War.

Four months later, Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death by a guardhouse sentry at Camp Robinson. Sitting Bull, insisting that he did not want to become an agency Indian, sought sanctuary in Canada and found it for a while. But he, too, surrendered–at Fort Buford, in Dakota Territory, on July 19, 1881. By then the buffalo had all but disappeared from the homestead-infested Great Plains, and there was little choice but to forsake the nomad way of life for the reservation.

Sitting Bull lived long enough on the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas to see the late Crazy Horse’s cousin Kicking Bear kick up his heels in the first Sioux-style Ghost Dance, a frenzied performance that frightened the Indian agent down at Pine Ridge no end. But the great Hunkpapa spiritual leader was shot down by Indian police while ‘resisting arrest’ on December 15, 1890, two weeks before soldiers from Custer’s old regiment, the 7th Cavalry, opened up on Big Foot’s band along Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. That shocking bloodbath, in which the old Minneconjou leader and at least 150 other Lakota men, women and children were killed, has come to be known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.

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