The Killing of Crazy Horse

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xx, 568, [2] pages. Methods. Sources. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations (some with color). Maps. Minor DJ wear noted. Thomas Powers (New York City, December 12, 1940) is an American author and intelligence expert. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 together with Lucinda Franks for his articles on Weatherman member Diana Oughton (1942-1970). He was also the recipient of the Olive Branch award in 1984 for a cover story on the Cold War that appeared in The Atlantic, a 2007 Berlin Prize, and for his 2010 book on Crazy Horse the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. After working as a journalist, in 1970 he became a freelance writer. His The Man who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA is "widely regarded as one of the best books ever written on the subject of intelligence." The death of Crazy Horse in federal custody has remained a controversy for more than a century. 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. At the center of the story is Crazy Horse himself, the warrior of few words whom the Crow said they knew best among the Sioux, because he always came closest to them in battle. The death of Crazy Horse was a traumatic event not only in Sioux but also in American history. With the Great Sioux War as background and context, drawing on many new materials as well as documents in libraries and archives, Thomas Powers recounts the final months and days of Crazy Horse s life not to lay blame but to establish what happened. Derived from a Kirkus review: Central to this narrative of concealment are two notorious events: the 1876 massacre of Gen. Custer's command at the Little Bighorn, engineered by the fearsome Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, and Crazy Horse's slaying a year later at a Nebraska military barracks where he'd surrendered himself voluntarily. With a scholar's attention to detail, the author reconstructs the entire milieu of the northern Plains in the 1870s, when the Sioux and other tribes were finding that the whites had no intention of honoring earlier treaties, particularly after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills. Powers takes an evenhanded approach to discerning how attempts at coexistence floundered. The soldiers and bureaucrats charged with managing Indian affairs were blinkered by the racist attitudes of the day—yet were often fascinated by Indian society and magnetic individuals like Crazy Horse—while the rigidity and confused negotiating style of chiefs like Sitting Bull made violent conflict inevitable. Gen. George Crook, the Civil War hero tasked with pacifying the northern tribes, respected Indians as fighters and wilderness experts, yet took their intransigence personally. Following the Little Bighorn, even Crazy Horse realized that annihilation or acceptance of life on an agency, or reservation, were their only choices, and he surrendered his band to the Army in May 1877. Yet Powers assembles evidence that by September, Crook and rival Sioux chiefs were plotting his demise, for reasons which remain muddy to this day. The narrative is always lucid, controlled and compulsively readable.