In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse

After the school year ends, Jimmy and Grandpa Nyles set off on their trip. Their first destination is Bear Butte, a mountain near Rapid City in Western South Dakota. Bear Butte is a sacred site to the Lakota and provides Jimmy and Grandpa Nyles with a spectacular view of the Great Plains. Pointing down from Bear Butte toward Rapid Creek, Grandpa Nyles explains that Crazy Horse was born somewhere in the area. Jimmy asks if Crazy Horse ever stood up on the Butte where they are. Nyles says he is sure Crazy Horse did.

Leaving Bear Butte, Jimmy and Grandpa Nyles drive for a few hours until they cross the border into Nebraska. As they drive, Grandpa Nyles tells Jimmy stories about the animals they see out the window. Nyles says that animals and people used to understand one another’s languages, until people started to think they were better than other animals.

Jimmy and Grandpa Nyles make camp on land owned by one of Nyles’s friends. They set up a tent and Grandpa Nyles cooks food for them on a small fire. Jimmy loves being in the wilderness with his grandfather. Grandpa Nyles says that Crazy Horse was here around 1855, when he was a boy about Jimmy’s age. Nyles begins telling Jimmy a story about “the way it was” (16) when Crazy Horse came to this place.

In Grandpa Nyles’s story, Crazy Horse visits Lakota relatives who live in the area. As a boy, he is called Light Hair; he will only be called Crazy Horse after he grows up. One day, Light Hair and some companions return from a hunt to see smoke hanging over the village where they had been staying. They race their horses closer and discover that most of the village is on fire. The buffalo-hide lodges are burning and many villagers, including children, are dead. They soon learn that white soldiers—whom the Lakota call Long Knives—started the fire. The Long Knives have a reputation for attacking Lakota mercilessly. Light Hair views them as “mean people—if they were people at all” (21).

Looking for survivors, Light Hair finds a young woman named Yellow Woman. She tells Light Hair that the Long Knives shot many of the villagers and started the fire. They killed Yellow Woman’s husband and baby. With the village totally destroyed, Light Hair takes Yellow Woman with him on his horse. They head out to seek other villagers who managed to escape the violence. Light Hair keeps them fed for two days by hunting and sharing food with Yellow Woman. Eventually they find the rest of the survivors, many of whom are injured. Light Hair stays with the group until Yellow Woman no longer cries herself to sleep at night. As he departs to head back to his own family, Yellow Woman tells him that she will never forget what he did for her.

As Grandpa Nyles’s story concludes, he reminds Jimmy that Crazy Horse was only a year or two older than Jimmy when those events took place. Jimmy asks why the Long Knives attacked the Lakota village, but Grandpa Nyles says that he will have to wait until later in their journey to understand.

The next day, Jimmy and Grandpa Nyles drive into Wyoming. They stop along the highway and climb a hill, from which Grandpa Nyles points out some deep ruts in the ground. He explains that those ruts were made by thousands of wagons over 150 years ago. The wagon trail marks are part of the Oregon Trail, which the Lakota used to call the Shell River Road, and even before that, it was used by animals like buffalo. Jimmy has trouble picturing the many thousand wagons that must have once used the trail. Grandpa Nyles begins telling a story about when Crazy Horse first saw those wagons, back in 1852.

In Nyles’s story, Crazy Horse—still known as Light Hair at the time—joins his uncle as they secretly watch hundreds of wagons making their way along the trail. Light Hair’s uncle explains that the white people in the wagons are “not like us” (31). Light Hair is scared by the vast number of wagons and white people. His uncle says he hopes the white people will keep going and not stop on the Lakota land. He says that the wagon wheels “scar the land” (31). Grandpa Nyles tells Jimmy that some of the white people did decide to stay and that there were battles between them and the Lakota.

Continuing their journey, Jimmy and Grandpa Nyles come to Fort Laramie. Grandpa Nyles explains the history of the Council on Horse Creek, in which the white peace talkers signed an agreement with many Indigenous tribes so that they wouldn’t bother the wagons on the Oregon Trail. Grandpa Nyles then tells Jimmy about a misunderstanding between the Long Knives and the Indigenous people that led to violence.

In Grandpa Nyles’s story, a cow that belongs to the white people wanders into a Lakota village where Light Hair is staying. When the cow causes a ruckus, one of the Lakota kills the cow, butchers it, and distributes the meat to the other villagers. Afterwards, the cow’s owner arrives and demands the cow’s return. The Lakota try to offer mules in exchange for the dead cow, but the white man refuses. He returns with Long Knives from Fort Laramie, who demand to arrest the man who killed the cow. When the Lakota refuse to give up the cow’s killer, the Long Knives attack the Lakota, mortally wounding Conquering Bear—the village’s headman. The Lakota retaliate, killing all but one of the Long Knives.

Light Hair is furious at Conquering Bear’s death, viewing white people as angry and violent. He rides off by himself, spending two days in the wilderness without food. During that time, he has a strange dream in which he rides his horse across the lake with a red-tailed hawk flying above him. Bullets and arrows fly at him, but all miss. Eventually, he is pulled down from the hose by other men who look like him. Grandpa Nyles tells Jimmy that Light Hair’s dream had a “very strong meaning” (44) and that he will explain that meaning to Jimmy later in their journey. Grandpa Nyles also says that the incident caused by the cow was the reason that the Long Knives attacked and burned Yellow Woman’s village.