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'WE BELONG TO THE NORTH': THE FLIGHTS OF THE NORTHERN INDIANS FROM THE WHITE RIVER AGENCIES, 1877-1878
Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Summer 2005 by Bray, Kingsley M
On November 7 agency butcher Ben Tibbitts made his beef issue in conditions chaotic even by Red Cloud Agency's standards. Hard rains driven by high winds slashed through the three-mile-long tipi camp. The last of the Northern breakaways from Spotted Tail charged in, adding their clamor to the demand for dwindling supplies. One party, too small to be registered, took advantage of weather and uproar to slip past scout and akicita cordons. Worm quietly detached his family and struck across the low hills running southeast.32
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Obsession with identifying the burial site of Crazy Horse has obscured the central fact of Worm's departure: he intended to rejoin Spotted Tail. Accounts indicate that Worm's march angled southeastward to the head of Wounded Knee Creek. The itinerary related by Spotted Tail interpreter Louis Bordeaux establishes that the Brulés laid over on upper Wounded Knee from the evening of November l through November 4 before striking eastward for the south fork of the White River, which they descended November 6 through 15.33
Crossing the divide between White clay and Wounded Knee Creeks, the family paused somewhere along the pine ridge that fed these tributaries of the White River. Worm and Horn Chips, a younger holy man who had acted since youth as Crazy Horse's spiritual mentor, shaped a rude wooden coffin and dug a shallow hole for the burial. Already Worm had clipped a lock of his son's hair to preserve his nagila, or spiritual essence, for the Ghost-Owning ceremony. Then the party hurried to overtake the Spotted Tail column.34
Historians, concentrating on the mystic-warrior dimension of Crazy Horse's life, have missed the more pragmatic symbolism of the burial. Overlooking the Wounded Knee Valley, the interment asserted the Lakotas' right to occupy the district. Significantly, it validated Spotted Tail's own selection of Wounded Knee as the permanent home of his people. It was a clear rejection of the claim to a separate reservation in the hunting grounds. Worm saw his future with his brother-in-law's people, the Brulés.
Meanwhile, the Red Cloud column continued down the burnt-over White River Valley, its northern margin hemmed in by a wall of arid badlands. The Northern village dragged the pace, making scarcely fourteen miles to the mouth of Wounded Knee Creek on November 9, slowing to less than six miles on the tenth. The mood was turning sour: "Indians some of them dissatisfied," noted Fanny McGillycuddy, the wife of the agency surgeon, after a layover on the eleventh for "some reason of Mr. Clark[']s," hinting at contentious politicking by the chief of scouts. Although she was resuscitated by Surgeon McGillycuddy, the attempted suicide of a Lakota woman did nothing to alleviate the mood.35
Red Bear's breakout faction made no secret that they were preserving their horses for flight. Every night a few people slipped away into the badlands. Sixty miles to the north, these early departures established a staging camp in the breaks near the forks of the Cheyenne River. Although sporadically monitored by Lakota army scouts operating out of Standing Rock Agency, the camp continued to be used for over two months, transmitting intelligence between the agencies and Canada. Among the first to desert was Wears Earring, a Sans Arc. His family was the very last to surrender at the White River agencies, being enrolled at Spotted Tail on September 20. Departing alone, Wears Earring approached the Belle Fourche Valley in mid-November, only to run into a Standing Rock patrol. Confiscating his gun, the scouts told him "to go back to where he came from." Others, though, got through, for by late November some sixty lodges of travel-gaunt people-including the Fast Bull party-had dragged across the Canadian line into Sitting Bull's village, bringing word of Crazy Horse's death.36
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