Read Online The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick - Free Book Online

in the knee-deep water, and once he’d struggled to his feet and started back to shore he saw a man on horseback rise out of the lake. “He told Crazy Horse,” the interpreter Billy Garnett recalled, “not to wear a war bonnet; not to tie up his horse’s tail.” Traditionally a Lakota warrior tied up his pony’s tail in a knot. The man from the lake insisted that a horse needed his tail for balance when jumping streams and for swatting flies. “So Crazy Horse never tied his horse’s tail,” Garnett continued, “never wore a war bonnet.” The man from the lake also told him not to paint his face like other warriors but to rub himself with dirt from a gopher hole and to knit blades of grass into his hair. He also said that Crazy Horse could not be killed by a bullet. Instead, the man from the lake predicted, “his death would come by being held and stabbed; as it actually was.”
    The vision in the shallows of the lake transformed Crazy Horse into his tribe’s greatest warrior. “[W]hen I came out,” he told his cousin Flying Hawk, “I was born by my mother . ”
     
    C entral to Lakota identity was the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman and her gift of the sacred calf pipe. In ancient times, the buffalo had been ferocious creatures at war with the ancestors of the Lakota. With the intercession of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, who’d been sent by the Buffalo People, the Lakota came into symbiotic harmony with their former enemies, who provided them with food and the means to grow as a people.
    The White Buffalo Calf Woman first appeared to two young hunters, who were on a hill searching for game when they saw a young woman dressed in white buckskins with a bundle on her back. She began to approach them, and as she drew near, they saw that she was very beautiful. Her beauty was as unworldly as it was wonderful (what the Lakota described as wakan ), and one of the hunters became consumed with lust. When he told his companion of his desire, his friend chastised him, saying, “[S]urely this is a wakan woman.” Soon the White Buffalo Calf Woman was very near them. She laid down her bundle and invited the hunter with the lustful thoughts to approach. A cloud suddenly enveloped the two of them, and when it lifted, the only thing left of the young hunter was a pile of whitened bones.
    “Behold what you see!” admonished the woman. “I am coming to your people and wish to talk with your chief.” She told the hunter how she wanted the villagers to prepare for her arrival. They were to create a large council lodge, where all the people were to assemble. There she would tell them something of “great importance.”
    The chief and his people did as she instructed and were waiting when she was seen approaching in the distance. Her movements were strange and magical, and suddenly she was inside the lodge and standing before the chief. She took the bundle from her back and held it in both hands. “Within this bundle there is a sacred pipe,” she said. “With this you will, during the winters to come, send your voices to Wakan Tanka. All the things of the universe are joined to you who smoke the pipe—all send their voices to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and with everything.”
    The pipe had a bowl made of red stone and a wooden stem. The White Buffalo Calf Woman turned to leave, then stopped to say, “Always remember how sacred this pipe is, for it will take you to the end. I am leaving now, but I shall look back upon your people in every age, and at the end I shall return.”
    She stepped out of the lodge, but after walking just a short distance, she looked back toward the chief and his people and sat down. When she next stood again, she had turned into a red and brown buffalo calf. The calf walked a little ways, lay down, and with her eyes on the villagers, rolled on the ground. When she stood up once again, she was a white buffalo. She walked a little farther,