Chapter 4 - Nebraska: 'Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Oglalas"

We followed the ancient animal trails past the churches of Lusk Wyoming and made a
right into Nebraska, going the opposite direction Philbert had steered the war pony those
same years, in these years, away from the forts that had served as bridgeheads for the
advancing railroads, which had served as bridgeheads for the churches to break the
solemn Treaty Covenant like they were God. In the 1970s we were learning of these
mercantile perfidies as the satanic-spiritual betrayals they were, but which the better
heathens of our nature had not quite grasped in the 1870s; for they had gone through
Mas'r Lincoln's perfidy of civil war in the 60s just as we had, and just as unjustly that
railroad lawyer from Illinois had proclaimed Amerika's half-assed territories open to all
but niggers, savages, spics, and cunts:

The free economy and the slave society had coexisted, more or
less peacefully, since the founding of the republic, but now they
were increasingly in competition and conflict. Like most Republicans,
Lincoln believed that slavery had to expand or die; the exhaustion
of the soil and the natural increase of the slave population meant
that slaveholders were forced to move into new lands. But free society
had also the imperative to expand. The basic impulse to improve
one's condition, an "inherent right given to mankind by the Maker,"
required room. The national territories were "god-given for that
purpose", and he had long believed that their best use was "for
the homes of free white people." But if Stephen Douglas and the
Southern Democrats had their way, free laborers who moved to
the territories would be in competition with the unpaid slaves.
Consequently, Lincoln exhorted his audiences, "it is due to yourselves
as voters, as owners of the new territories, that you shall keep those
territories free, in the best condition for all such of your gallant sons
as may choose to go there."
- 'Lincoln', by D.H. Donald (17)

The 'Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854' blithely ignored the Treaty signed only 3 years
before by everybody, opening the same lands to the good old pioneers, and which is still
herein blithely ignored today by this Pulitzer Prize-winning history from Harvard
University. And even though there were plenty of forts ahead of us, as well as behind us,
we knew that not even all the guns to come in Stonewall Jackson's and Sitting Bull's great
armies could overcome human hypocrisy unless we rode upon it all over again with at
least the same passion and conviction. For Stonewall and the Bull had not failed us in the
Spirit World. They had not ridden as champions of slavery and savagery. At Fort
Robinson we stopped again, to ponder the overpowering human impulses for survival,
and to hear the father of Crazy Horse articulate the next phase of the extranational
apotheosis in a work of history that assumes extrahistorical prominence as literature,
Mari Sandoz's epochal 'Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Oglalas':
 Crazy Horse and his son went out from the butte in a direction
that had no trail. They rode alone, each leading a pack horse, and
several times the father stopped to smoke and consider, the son
quiet beside him. Finally he picked a high point and when they
climbed to the top it was as he had wished: a place that looked
far over a country stretching away in the sun like the shadow-marked
flank of a buckskin horse, while just below them lay a sheltered
little valley, with trees and a stream. Here the Lakota father sat
and made a long smoke. And as he smoked he remembered
many things of this place, and many things of his young Brule
wife who bore him two sons before she died, sons that seemed
like no others among the Oglalas, particularly this first-born beside
him, whose eyes and whose way had long seemed chosen for
sacred things, not only to him as the father but also to him as
a holy man. He had waited several years for this son to speak
of what was within him and now, because it seemed that he
must make the words soon or lose his power, the father had
brought him up here, for as the tree that does not leaf in its time,
so it is with the man who does not use the power that rises in
his youth.
- Mari Sandoz (18)

It's the single biggest condemnation of amerika that its greatest men and women were
its enemies. Stonewall and the Horse started out as its finest citizens, good-hearted boys
from solid families brought up with discipline and devotion, character, and intelligence.
But they were men of spirit instead of ambition, and Lincoln murdered both of them. He
brought apocalypse upon the world. In 1862 in Minnesota he ordered 38 Santee Sioux to
be hung in a public execution, at the same time Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson
was whipping large Union armies all over Virginia. His dispatches could have been a
strategic blueprint for the Indian armies in the West already forming behind Crazy Horse,
the sons who had become men:

"Crossing the Upper Potomac, occupying Baltimore, and taking

possession of Maryland, we could cut off the communications of
Washington, force the Federal Government to abandon the capital,
beat McClellan's army if it came out against us in the open country,
destroy industrial establishments wherever we found them, break
up the lines of interior commercial intercourse, close the coal mines,
seize and, if necessary, destroy the manufactories and commerce
of Philadelphia, and of other large cities within our reach; take and
hold the narrow neck of country between Pittsburg and Lake Erie;
subsist mainly on the country we traverse, and making unrelenting
war amidst their homes, force the people of the North to understand
what it will cost them to hold the South in the Union at the bayonet's
point."
- Stonewall Jackson (20)
 - - - - - - - [PIX and MAPS of:
John Neihardt and Mari Sandoz
MAP of Territorial Expansion and Slavery, 1854
a typical house on the reservation
photo of Stonewall Jackson ] - - - - - - - - -

We pulled up to the log cabin by a lonely green lawn in the lush cottonwood oasis
where Tashunke Witko had been assassinated in 1877 by the same kind of conspiracy
that took down Stonewall at Chancellorsville in 1863, and even Lincoln himself in 1865,
whose usefulness was served after the surrender of decency at Appamattox. We sat and
prayed at a holy Shrine crudely erected there, at Fort Robinson, of a few rocks and a
plaque. It held a holy power there, in a lovely glen beneath the astonishing white cliffs of
the Black Hills, just as Stonewall's grave in the Shenandoah Valley held out incalculable
hope for the millions of pilgrims who make their way there every year.
Mari Sandoz also inspired Karen and Maria, for she was a solitary woman who never
married, daring to write the truth of a holy man like it was a love story. How dare she
grow up strong and straight on a remote homestead dirt-poor in the cruel home of a brutal
pioneer, her father 'Old Jules' that became her first published book when she was already
40 years old? She wrote a dozen masterpieces but never won a Pulitzer Prize or made any
of the lists of great American Writers.
We crawled out of Fort Robinson to the pathetic farming towns of Crawford and
Chadron, not far from Mari's own wasteland in the sandhills.

- - - - - - - - [MAP in Sandoz's own hand of western Nebraska ] - - - - - - -

"Democracy my ass," Buddy swore as we passed a sign in front of a store advertising

democracy.
"Some Freedom," the women swore as we passed women shopping on Main Street.
"You're free only if you get a paycheck on Friday."
"Nothing else is free. Karl Marx was right."
"No, Crazy Horse was right. He never said he was a worker. He wasn't a proletariat.
He said once, 'I don't work, I hunt.'"
"Wow. I don't understand?"
"Work? What is that?"
"I'll get out my dictionary: 'physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the
production or accomplishment of something'."
"That could be hunting, too."
"Okay. That's what we're doing."
"What are we producing?"
"Freedom."
"And those slobs out there on the sidewalk aren't?"
"No. They're slaves."
"And they think we're bums because we don't have jobs. They'd say we're not
workers."
"There's a fine line between working and slavery."
 "Defined by money."
"I dunno ... "
"Here's the definition of freedom: 'Political independence. Possession of civil rights;
immunity from arbitrary exercise of authority'."
"That's Indians. We're not free. We can't have our own political government of Elders
Councils like we had for thousands of years, with unanimous rule. Democracy is unfair,
with a majority telling a minority what to do. Bullshit. They forced these lousy tribal
councils on us in 1934 with Roosevelt's fucking liberal 'Indian Reorganization Act'. It's a
joke. It doesn't work."
"It's a violation of the treaty. There's nothing in there about what kind of government
you have to have."
"Damn right."
"15% vote in tribal elections, that's a fact. We don't want it. It breaks the law. And we
don't have civil rights. The Feds, the FBI, are the law enforcement on reservations, under
federal instead of state jurisdiction."
"What kind of bullshit is that?"
"They can bust us for anything. What was the other one?"
"'Immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority'."
"Okay, I got one. We got a car. And a few bucks for gas money and baloney
sandwiches. The proles out there would say we're free, leeches on the workers. Whadda
ya say to that?"
"I say --- a car? Detroit factories, workers, unions. Marx was right!"
"Oh Jesus."
"Groucho Marx."
"No no no. Gas money? Let's fuck up the Arabs. Roads? Are you kidding me? The
roads brought all the sleezeball merchants in the first place, and cement factories, lawyers
in their wake like whore camp-followers. The whole lousy economy is based on this
goddamn car!"
"You like riding in it."
"Fuck you. I like cupcakes, but that doesn't make Crazy Horse wrong."
"Now you're getting into Nietzsche."
"All I know is, I don't feel good about being in this country."
"That's where it gets into spirituality, and that's where Crazy Horse leaves Marx
behind."
"And where armed insurrection leaves non-violent civil rights marches and anti-war
Peaceniks."
We were silent at that, and I drove for a while carefully, careful not to speed over the
55 limit out of town north toward the boundary between war and peace, between rolling
hills heavily wooded now with pine forests and more water, more deer and magpies and
flowers - and more cops. There was a new and undefinable feeling of a tension or a
presence of tension on the road where Jack Kerouac might have driven, in the side roads
of gravel into the trees where poorer, older houses of tar paper and rusty trailers,
wheelless cars up on cinderblocks, and hostile "No Trespassing" signs were nailed on
fences and over rotting wooden gates with metal cattleguards on the road, on the ground,
threatening any wandering livestock or strangers. Democracy was those common people
out there, all right, and they didn't like us. They didn't like women without lipstick or
bras. There may have been some tolerance of individual liberties as long as they didn't
threaten their livelihoods or private property, but not when it came to what non-white
people would call a principle of social equality. Democracy stopped at the fence.
Nebraska stopped at South Dakota.