By permission of Kurz and Allison.
DEATH OF SITTING BULL.
Late in December of 1876, Miles started after this gallant fighter, who was supposed to be in the valley of the Tongue River, south of the Yellowstone. He found his village not far from the place where Crook had battled on the Rosebud. There were between eight and nine hundred warriors posted on the cliffs surrounding a valley of the Wolf Mountains,—a spur of the Big Horn Range. The position was a good one, because the soldiers had to scale some bristling heights to get at the savages, but they were equal to the emergency.
"You have had your last breakfast," shouted the red warriors as the soldiers began to climb up to their position. "You will not eat again." But they did not know with whom they were dealing. Undaunted by the superior position of the red men, and unfrightened by their jeers, the soldiers crept up the face of the cliffs, as the shells from their artillery exploded among the followers of the gallant Crazy Horse. The bluffs were icy and snow-covered. It was rough work to scale them; it was only accomplished after slow, dogged, determined crawling, with a halt every moment or so to fire at some Indian above. The plunging shots of the savages did little damage, for their aim was unsteady. The red men clung to their post tenaciously, but they were routed—driven off—and forced back upon the plateau in the rear. Snow was now falling, and the combatants fired at each other in a blinding blizzard.
This was the last stand of Crazy Horse and his band, for their ammunition was about gone, and, not possessing the knowledge necessary to manufacture more, they were unable to prolong their resistance. Their confederates were nearly all captured. Sitting Bull was miles away and could not be reached. The Brulé Sioux and Unkpapas had surrendered. Their supplies were in the hands of General Miles and his men. Their fate was sealed.
In the early spring Crazy Horse surrendered, with the remnant of his once formidable band of frontier fighters. He was placed in a reservation of the Brulé Sioux at the Red Cloud Agency. "He did not surrender with the humility of a defeated, broken-spirited chief," Major-General Jesse W. Lee has written me. "He was an unsubdued warrior; a great soldier chief; and had come in to make such terms as would bring peace and rest to his people, who had scarcely known defeat under his valiant leadership. To his mind there was no unconditional surrender about it. He was willing, for a time, to give up the uncertain buffalo for the certain Agency beef; to exchange the old, worn-out skin lodges for new and handsome army duck."
But Crazy Horse chafed under the restraints of the agency. He was restless, uneasy and unsatisfied with the tame conditions which he found. He was watched by detectives and was closely guarded, but one day escaped and came to Spotted Tail: another rendezvous of the Sioux, forty miles away. Trouble was feared from him, and what subsequently occurred is best told in the language of General Lee, who was there at the time, in charge of the Brulé Sioux at Spotted Tail Agency in Northwestern Nebraska. He says:
"We soon called the chiefs together and told them that probably some trouble might occur at Red Cloud, but it must not affect them, and for all to remain perfectly quiet and have no fear. We then had only to wait! Imagine, if you please, being compelled to sit down over a powder magazine, with sparks flying around, and wondering how long it would be until the blow-up comes. We felt certain an explosion would occur, but uncertain as to the hurt it might do. Well, we had not long to wait! About 4 P.M. an Indian courier arrived in the Northern camp—not to us!—his quivering horse all white with foam,—with the startling news that their friends were fighting at Red Cloud, and that the troops were coming to Spotted Tail Agency.