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Read Crazy Horse: A Life (2005)

Crazy Horse: A Life (2005)

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3.66 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0143034804 (ISBN13: 9780143034803)
Language
English
Publisher
penguin

Crazy Horse: A Life (2005) - Plot & Excerpts

Thoughtful and brief biography of Crazy Horse, the legendary Sioux warrior who has become a contemporary icon of resistance. McMurtry is a careful, fair-minded guide into a somewhat murky history: primary sources are rare, contradictory, and unreliable, and some earlier historians apparently supplemented the record with their own imaginings. What I most appreciate is that McMurtry brings clarity to familiar historic individuals through well-chosen details and anecdotes, for example: Everyone was getting more than a little tired of Red Cloud, but he was both tenacious and smart. He was to be one of the very few Plains Indian leaders of this period who survived everything, dying of old age in 1909.McMurtry also provides helpful contextual information about the social life and values of the Plains tribes. Something that comes up repeatedly is the chronic misunderstanding of Indian leadership by the whites. This became particularly problematic during critical negotiations with the U.S. government over land and restitution. Sadly, and shamefully, these hard-won treaties and agreements were easily and often broken by the United States, leaving the Indians in increasingly limited conditions and unable to feed themselves in traditional ways. This book is only 148 pages long and is meant for the interested reader, not the specialist. McMurtry kindly provides an annotated bibliography at the end. Read this for a meticulous presentation of the known facts, with respectful attention to all who deserve it. Look elsewhere for tragic tales; Crazy Horse was a warrior whose end came in part because he remained true to the vision he received as a young man. "Among a broken people an unbroken man can rarely be tolerated--he becomes a too-painful reminder of what the people as a whole had once been." This--his integrity and unbroken spirit--is why we remember Crazy Horse today. He is, simply, an American hero.

Crazy Horse is a very recognizable historical figure, and I was very surprised to find out that there is almost no historical record of his life until near the end. He avoided white people most of his life and only in the last few months did he interact much with them, resulting in them writing about him. Most of the rest of the information about him is from interviews with Sioux many years after Crazy Horse was killed, which may or may not be accurate. However, a great deal of writing has been done about Crazy Horse, with little regard for historical accuracy. Had he not been killed by a U.S. soldier when he was in his mid-late thirties, we may not know anything about him.Though McMurtry has not written a scholarly account of Crazy Horse's life, I think he's been more careful about sticking to the facts (or at least the historical record) than his predecessors seem to have been. Though citations are not always made in the text, he often describes his sources and points out when he is conjecturing. All in all, Crazy Horse's life was very interesting and even heartbreaking. It's always hard to read about the U.S. government's treatment of the Native Americans. In the end Crazy Horse was killed despite the fact that he was turning himself in with the promise of a meeting with the commanding officer at Fort Robinson, which came on the heels of the whites defying yet another treaty and taking the Sioux land simply because they wanted it. Most of his life had been about avoidance and taking care of his people (who revered him for his charity) and in the end, there was no escape.

What do You think about Crazy Horse: A Life (2005)?

McMurtry paints a stark but engaging (like the Great Plains themselves) portrait of Crazy Horse and the time and place in which he lived. He allows both the real man and the legend to share the stage, giving us a impression of who Crazy Horse might have been (because we'll never know the truth) and who people thought he was. The story of Native Americans during the 19th century is definitely one of incredible sadness, misunderstanding, greed, power politics and bigotry, skating along the line of genocide. The life and death of Crazy Horse is a tragedy in the highest, saddest sense. McMurtry says his last days, hours and minutes could have been written by the Greek or Shakespeare, which is definitely true; his romantic relationships could have been written by Danielle Steele. McMurtry is a powerful wordsmith, fully worth of writing a biography of someone who should be considered a American tragic hero.
—Shawn Thrasher

In the early 90s my family visited the statue that is being carved into a South Dakota mountain in his image and the National Park on the location of the Little Big Horn Battle in Montana, in which Crazy Horse alongside a coalition of tribes were victorious against the US Cavalry, otherwise known as "Custer's Last Stand." Afterwards, I wondered what about this particular man warranted all of the mythology that has surrounded him in the last two centuries. McMurty's book offers few answers, and in fairness, it seems like anything more definitive would be historical fiction. What he does offer is an explanation for the fanfare surrounding Crazy Horse. By all accounts he was a man who had no interest in following the conventions of others: to some extent he didn't fully conform to some of the propriety demanded of his own people, who were on the whole much more willing to accept nonconformity than the European Americans of the 19th century. McMurty observes that his iconoclast nature makes him the ideal hero for a people whose other great warriors (ie. Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, et al) were subdued on reservations; Crazy Horse, on the other hand, died resisting arrest and refused to relinquish his way of life. While I think McMurty treats his subject objectively, I can't give this biography a 5th star because I was perplexed by the comparisons to native struggles against other colonizing powers (ie. comparisons and quotes from individuals in India and New Guinea resisting their colonizers) -- something about writing that a particular Native American tribe's tactics or objections to Americans invading their territory is just like this other minority group's problems seems reductionist.
—Michelle

This is a short book (140 pages, with shorter pages than normal), but it took me a long time to read. I have loved every McMurtry novel that I have read, but this history was a bit dull. It's not all McMurtry's fault; Crazy Horse is a difficult topic. The problem is that little can be said conclusively about the famous Oglala warrior. His companions didn't keep records, so most of the recorded history about Crazy Horse comes from his encounters with whites and interviews with his friends, but this presents problems. A) he avoided whites and B) most of the interviews of his friends took place many years after his death, and they were highly inconsistent. So this book gets bogged down describing things that might have happened, places where Crazy Horse might have been, things he might have said, and events that Crazy Horse did not participate in but were somehow related to him.Although little is really known about him, Crazy Horse is significant, mostly as a legendary hero, as a symbol of the end of the Native American way of life. The big things we know are:-he was charitable-he never compromised with whites-he kicked butt at Little Big Horn, and other smaller battles-he had a tragic death, betrayed by his own peopleI don't particularly recommend this book. Wikipedia will probably suffice.
—Chris

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