Post by Diane Merkel on Oct 14, 2010 9:06:59 GMT -5
About the Book . . .
The Killing of Crazy Horse pieces together the many sources of fear and misunderstanding that resulted in an official killing hard to distinguish from a crime. A rich cast of characters, whites and Indians alike, passes through this story, including Red Cloud, the chief who dominated Oglala history for fifty years but saw in Crazy Horse a dangerous rival; No Water and Woman Dress, both of whom hated Crazy Horse and schemed against him; the young interpreter Billy Garnett, son of a fifteen-year-old Oglala woman and a Confederate general killed at Gettysburg; General George Crook, who bitterly resented newspaper reports that he had been whipped by Crazy Horse in battle; Little Big Man, who betrayed Crazy Horse; Lieutenant William Philo Clark, the smart West Point graduate who thought he could “work” Indians to do the Army’s bidding; and Fast Thunder, who called Crazy Horse cousin, held him the moment he was stabbed, and then told his grandson thirty years later, “They tricked me! They tricked me!”
I am very excited about this book because I am familiar with some of the author's previous works. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, his research is impeccable, and he is a masterful storyteller.
Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book:
The half-Sioux interpreter William Garnett, who died a dozen years before I was born, first set me to wondering why Crazy Horse was killed. I read Garnett’s account of the killing in a motel at Crow Agency, Montana, not two miles from the spot where Crazy Horse in 1876 led a charge up over the back of a ridge, splitting in two the command of General George Armstrong Custer. Within a very few minutes, Custer and two hundred cavalry soldiers were dead on a hillside overlooking the Little Bighorn River. It was the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States Army by Plains Indians. A year later Crazy Horse himself was dead of a bayonet wound, stabbed in the small of the back by soldiers trying to place him under arrest. Dead Indians are a common feature of American history but the killing of Crazy Horse retains its power to shock. Garnett, twenty-two years old at the time, was not only present on the fatal day but was deeply involved in the unfolding of events. In 1920 he told a retired Army general what happened. A transcript of the conversation was eventually published, and that’s what I read lying on my back on a bed in Crow Agency’s only motel.
For more about the book, including some previously unpublished documents, see www.thekillingofcrazyhorse.com/.