One day when many of the men were out on hunts and the women all were engaged in their usual camp duties, cooking the noonday meal and working hides and making beadwork, as they always were when not on the trail, --suddenly volley on volley of musketry came into their tepees killing old men, women and children that were at play all about.

In terror, the women survivors caught up the little ones and clasped their babes to their breasts and ran screaming for safety. They could not tell what was happening or where to go, and the early moments of the attack were ones of terrified confusion. Then the soldiers came in view up stream. The women then ran down the river, only to learn that Custer and his troops had been seen to approach in that direction. They turned to the west and tried to reach the hills in the mad effort to escape the deadly range of the Reno carbines.

Crazy Horse and Flying Hawk happened to be near when the heartless attack was begun. Instantly, they grabbed their guns and mounted ponies with the warcry to their friends to come. As they raced up towards the soldiers the troopers whirled their horses and retreated in complete rout into the timber that lined the stream here on the western border.

The Indians came up to the soldiers as they plunged into the stream, mounted or on foot, in the mad struggle to get across and up the steep bank opposite to where the wagon-train waited on the hill. It was a bloody revenge the red men took at the crossing. Crazy Horse and Flying Hawk were in the thick of the fight; they pulled several soldiers from their horses and knocked them dead with war clubs; they shot them as they tried to crawl up the slippery bank on hands and knees. Several of the wounded were drowned. Those that escaped over the river got up into the hill and dug holes and stayed in them until the fighting was all over and the Indians had left the battlefield.

There were three detachments, (bunches, the chief said) along the ridge where Custer had gone north toward the lower end of the valley where the greater number of villages were, Crazy Horse with Flying Hawk quickly gained a position in the rear of the first body of troops by following a ravine to the ridge where they got within range. Here Crazy Horse dismounted and handed the rein to Flying Hawk, and killed the soldiers as fast as he could work his repeater. The chief indicated the speed with which these troopers fell, by swaying his body from side to side. The few that got away from the deadly aim of Crazy Horse ran on along the ridge to others who were trying to make a stand. Here they were followed by the enraged red men whose wives and children had been so mercilessly slaughtered but a few moments before,--and they received no quarter.

This bunch was nearly all killed before the few stragglers realized they were being annihilated, and ran along the Custer trail looking for relief from him.
But now there was fast and furious activity on the part of the main villages where the wails of the frantic women drove them to frenzy. The occasion was one born of desperation; the sight of dead and maimed,--the agonizing shreiks of wives and loving daughters,--the pallid lips of dead and dying children and the doleful death-songs all about them made of the naturally friendly red men, an army that was invincible.

With Crazy Horse and his friends driving the remnant of the first attackers along the ridge were Two Moon and his men of the celebrated Cheyennes; with Gall and Lame Deer at the front with their respective bands of Sioux aided by the ravines, quickly and silently surrounded the Custer Division on the hill. The death yell sounded and the battle began. The Indians with their hideous war cry raced in a circle with carbines and bows and arrows, and tomahawks, and war clubs and knives made short work of the blue coats.

The din and dust and smoke, the chief said, was terrifying to the troops and they dismounted, their frightened horses running down the ravines, were caught by the squaws.

The whole fight lasted but an hour. As the smoke cleared away a little, a soldier was observed running away toward the east. Quickly Crazy Horse mounted his pony and got him within a half mile of where Custer and more than two hundred of his soldiers lay dead in the hot sun.

The chief said, "We did not mutilate the bodies,--only took their guns, watches, rings and money. We took some of the clothes from them".

With the collection of the arms and other valuables, the Indians returned to their desolated camp and joined in mourning for their dead ones,--and prepared for breaking camp to bury the dead, and once more seek a place where they might be unmolested by the hated government soldiers.

There was no sign of boasting; no resentment. It was merely an incident in his long active life on the frontier,--a life in which he had little relief from pursuit and persecution by the army of the government. To him it was only what he might expect from a people which had violated every promise to him and to his people,--who had robbed and cheated them from the remotest generations.

The old man sighed with relief when he was not pressed to talk more about It.

To the Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic

Address by M.I.McCreight--February 22nd, 1916

       � I come to you as an invited guest, and feel honored to be asked to speak on this occasion. I address you as "Comrades" not that this right belongs to me but because I feel that you are comrades of mine whether I carried a musket in the great war or not. It happened that the war was over before I was born; otherwise I might be one of you.

       � The day, the place, the country, the world itself, compels one to speak of war, for earth today is one great battlefield. Of the billion, six hundred million people on the earth, one half or more of them are engaged in human butchery. Our own great country trembles in the balance and one cannot know whether or not within the month or year we may not be dragged into the shambles and our fair fields be once again stained with blood.

       � Expert testimony shows that any one of several nations could land forces at any one of a hundred separate points on the Atlantic coast between Boston and Norfolk, and hold our country indefinitely. It is shown that a million and a half men could be put in the east and such an invading army could possess itself of our munitions plants, our principal arsenals, our ship yards and most of our finances and industrial wealth, with little opposition.

       � And how could we hope to interpose objection? Russia with her organized army forces of 5,400,000 men would hesitate but a moment at our own organized force of 236,000; Germany and Austria with their nine million equipped soldiers would laugh at the handful of "regular army" we might stand up against them, and little Japan with six times as many soldiers as we now have might think it easy at anytime to land on the west coast where she has already more than fifty thousand little brown men ready for action.

       � President Wilson has stated that we must prepare, and that at once; congress is giving the question the most serious attention and it is growing daily in the minds of all our citizens that preparedness is the paramount issue. War is on all about us, and the modern world is so bound together in a network of finance, commerce and trade that it has become almost beyond hope of those competent to judge, that this country shall be exempt from the present world catastrophy.

       � And what is this seething mass of humans fighting for? What ails Europe that this sudden outbreak should fall upon it? Seemingly no more prosperous and happy people inhabited the world than those who lived in Germany; science, manufacture, invention, literature, music, all had their home in Germany; and the German organization as a people and nation was the best of all there is or was.

       � France was in like condition, and England with her proud record of the past and passing centuries of successful government, and no reason to war; none of these peoples wanted to take up arms against their neighbors; none knew why they did; none know why they continue it, except the animal instinct of wanting to beat in the battle once begun, and the same reason or lack of reason will probably engulf this nation.

       � And these are Christian nations; nations that have professed to follow the teachings of Christ for nearly two thousand years; nations that boast, and justly so, of their civilization and refinement; nations that speak of the rest of the world as heathen, as barbarians or savages.

       � Yet in all the history of the world I am unable to find of record such lack of civilization; such absence of Christian practice; such inhuman action, as have possessed these peoples in this mad struggle of death.

       � Yet we are to believe that God created Man with a soul, and gave him a higher order of intelligence. that he might have dominion over the other creatures belonging to the animal kingdom; he was endowed with reason; yet I make the declaration that Man has always been and is now the worst violator of the Supreme Law; the least susceptible to reason of any of God's creatures (in the long run) and with all his civilization and Christianity professed, is the only barbarian, the only brute.

       � I challenge you to show evidence that any of what we call the brute or animal creation ever went about to kill his kind except for food or in self preservation, but here we find five hundred million people deliberately trying to exterminate another five hundred million people, and they are fairly well succeeding.

       � The Civil War was fought for principle; for purpose plain to see with honor and wholesome manliness; this war is savage butchery.

       � Today I answered two appeals for funds from across the sea, one to help supply bandages for the wounded soldiers. The letter stated that more than nine hundred and fifty cases had been already sent, and that they were sadly lacking still, and that the nurses had neither material or time to make them fast enough. The other was for the suffering Armenians, describing horrible tortures, of hideous braining of children, of outrages on defenseless women and girls and of the atrocious slaughter of hundreds of thousands of helpless, neutral, harmless people.

       � Annihilating a million people who have been slain or deported.

       � When civilized people will in the name of war steal upon a floating palace filled with innocent men, women and little children and destroy a thousand defenseless human lives not in the least concerned with the war, I ask what is civilization?

       � When civilized and Christian soldiers lead forth a helpless woman at 2 A.M. and in the name of war level guns and fire a dozen leaden bullets into her heaving breast, I ask what is civilization? What is Christianity?

       � But this is not war; it is the brute element in the human gone mad; it is Man with the rabies; he is the mad dog at large; he must be treated in the same way, killed at once, or caught and muzzled in order that he may not infect the rest of the species.

       � Are we to go forth in the usual way while these hordes of crazed human beings are at large gnashing their teeth and spitting poisonous venom in all directions, or shall we load up the old six shooter and keep a weather eye on the frothing beasts while we are coming from market with meat?

       � It is time for taking stock; it is time we took a census of America to find how many real Americans there are. We are making millionaires by thousands in sending our bread and our steel and our munitions of war to Europe; we are arming the European nations while we ourselves go unarmed; we are inviting war every day. Testimony at Washington shows that our coast defense guns have ammunition to last less than one hour, but we are too busy getting the other fellow's money to care now. Some fine day we shall be rudely awakened to find that we have all tweath and that those now at war will need that wealth and will have the men and munition to easily take it from us,--and will.

������������������������������������

Father of All, we humbly beg of Thee
To give us power;
We ask Thy aid in this our
Darkest hour.
To send abroad a trumpet call
That will avoid our final fall.
Send forth a message that will bring
From savage barbarism, men who sing
Only of their hate of fellow men,
And who butcher and kill and pen
Their brothers in foul prisons.
We pray Thee to forever turn
The deadly flames that fiercely burn
The very structure Thy own hand--
Once beautiful, serenely grand--
Hadst ages gone created.
Utter Thy proclamation unto King
And Czar and Kaiser that they bring
Back to widows, husbands, sons,
To mothers, babes, to maids, loved ones,
And set again in time and place
The working, by Thy own good grace
The laws of Thy Divinity.

A Red Man's Lincoln

A Talk at Kiwanis Club Dinner "Lincoln Day" February, 1940, by M.I.McCreight, Member by Adoption of the Great Chief's Tribe, The Sioux

Our government murdered him--and erected a monument to him; what a travesty! Had we built a monument to every great Indian we murdered, there would be many, and not just one, at the death-place of Crazy Horse; there would be hundreds of them, and they would stand in every state in the Union! Fifty-five years of remorse prompted the placing of a memorial at Fort Robinson, to the greatest war chief of modern times.

With an unexhaustible supply of men and money, equipped with every facility for communication, travel, camping, arms and ammunition--our armies had followed and fought him for ten long years, with the loss of every battle and hundreds of lives and millions of wasted public money--and then promised the red chief food, clothing and care, for himself and his warriors and their weary families, if he would cease a natural mode of life and adopt the white man's rule. He had a right to, and did, accept these official pledges in good faith; he led his followers to the Agency, and there VOLUNTARILY handed over their arms in token of surrender, and to make good his word; when, almost immediately army officialdom, in malice and fear, invented an excuse for his arrest and imprisonment. The brave and honest Chief, trusting to the good faith of army generals, was led into a trap, caught and held by the arms by troopers in their effort to force him into the cell of the guard-house, and when he attempted to resist the hideous violation of the government's pledge, a trooper ran his bayonet through his kidney from behind his back.

His aged father and mother watched over him, while he suffered untold agony from afternoon to midnight, on the floor of the agency office; when he had breathed his last, they announced that they would take charge of the body so that it might not be further polluted by the touch of any white man. They roped his body to a pony-travois and during the after-night dragged it along while they sang the death song, to hide it where white men and wolves might not discover it; years later, they went to see if it had been disturbed, and found the bones were petrified. An old chief, who was present at this disgraceful affair told the writer that no one knew where they had placed the body as the parents never told.

It was Crazy Horse who, the week before, had met and whipped General Crook's army at the Rosebud and drove him back to Goose Creek, where he stayed in camp, afraid to proceed to a junction with Terry's Division on the Yellowstone, as was planned he would do. After this success, Crazy Horse led his band over the hills to join Sitting Bull at his camp on the Little Big Horn. Hardly had they settled when Custer attacked the camp, when, as the white man's history invariably states--Custer and his troops were MASSACRED by overwhelming numbers of blood-thirsty savages.

Yet, this was Indian country; it was the homeland of the Sioux and the Cheyennes, where they had every right to be. There they had no right to be molested in their domestic pursuits by white men.

Stretched along the valley of this little river lay the picturesque vari-clan villages; at the extreme southern edge were the tipis of Crazy Horse and other Oglala families, which, after noon lunch, were occupied by old men, women and children, because nearly all the men were absent on the daily hunt--food for the families.

Suddenly, and without warning, came volleys of musketry into the defenseless tipis splintering their supporting poles, and killing and wounding everyone in and about them, including sleeping babes in their swinging hammocks and happy little children at play all about the camp grounds. This was the "Massacre of the Little Big Horn"--it was a heartless murder of innocent and helpless women and children, wholly unjust, and cowardly.

Who are we to question the right or doubt the fury of Crazy Horse for war-painting his face with the blood of his family and friends as he uttered the war-cry and led his warriors to the slaughter? With war clubs, bows and arrows, a few carbines and pistols they mounted their ponies and charged the Reno troops to a hasty and chaotic retreat, bent only on escape. Frantic from witnessing the outrage upon the loved ones and spurred by screams of stricken wives and mothers these red fathers and brothers rode down the fleeing soldiers, dragged them from their mounts, knocked them senseless with stone war clubs, shot them from the saddle with bow and arrow and revolver when they struggled to clamber the steeps of the river bank. Those who escaped, made all haste to their supply train on the hill, barricaded and entrenched themselves--and there they stayed. There Reno's battalion, like the Crook's Division, remained unnerved and impotent, almost within sight and hearing of the smoke and battle-din from Custer's "Last Stand."

Reno's forces having been eliminated, Crazy Horse turned to follow Custer, now enroute along the crest of the hill to attack the lower village; Crazy Horse led his artful followers along the slope, out of Custer's view. Crossing a ravine, the chief dismounted, handed his pony's trail rope to Flying Hawk to hold and stand guard while he crept to a position in range of the passing troopers, where he picked off a dozen. Hawk said, as fast as shells could be inserted in breech-loader carbine; the same strategy was carried out along the way, until Custer turned for the final attack in the valley; there he was quickly surrounded by the united bands of Gall, Lame Deer, Two Moon, led by Crazy Horse, in the encircling Grand March of Death, and in a few minutes, all was over.

Flying Hawk was with Crazy Horse from the first to the last shot, and relates, that when the smoke lifted a little from the gory battle ground, a lone trooper was observed trying to make his escape on the hill-side a mile away. Crazy Horse mounted a pony, galloped to within range, raised his gun and got the "last" man. (When the same Flying Hawk, sixty years later, and a noted chief, presented the battle-scarred carbine to the writer, he said he saw it kill the last man, in the hands of Crazy Horse.)

Crazy Horse's father was an Oglala Sioux of Red Cloud's band; his mother, a Minneconjou Sioux of Touch The Cloud's following; he was well trained for the strenuous life which lay before him; as a youth the celebrated chief Hump took him along on the war-party against the Crows; in the Fight which followed, Hump was critically wounded, but by quick and daring action of the boy, his scalp was saved, and both escaped on the boy's pony.

Flying Hawk and Crazy Horse were cousins, raised as neighbors in the same region, and were constant companions until the latter's unholy assassination in 1877. Because of their intimate association Flying Hawk was possessed of much personal knowledge of the great war-chief of which the others were unaware. He told the writer of Crazy Horse's young brother; of this brother, he was very proud. A passing covered wagon train of emigrants on the way west, as such people seemed to feel was their right, shot and killed without excuse or provocation, this young brother of Crazy Horse. This so incensed the elder one that he followed the trail to their place of settlement far to the west of his homeland; there he camped in a forest close to the new settlement. In the course of a few weeks he had nine notches in his rifle butt, then, feeling that he had exacted full penalty for the killing of his brother, he returned home, but made no explanation of where he had been or what he had done.

Another trait of this noted chief was his deep religious faith and his belief in dreams. One of his youthful dreams affected his actions throughout his life; this dream, had while sitting on the bank of a stream, was to the effect that he had become a great chief with eagle quills in his hair; on waking he found a bit of grass in his hair. All through his romantic years thereafter, he refused to wear feather ornament or bead work; he never boasted of his successes, as was a common Indian custom, he did not join in war dances, never took a scalp or made a speech; and never permitted a photograph to be taken.

Crazy Horse was just short of six feet tall; less dark sin and hair than the average, weight about 180 pounds and his figure a perfect one; his word was never violated, as is fully attested by all who knew him, whether red or white, and he detested as a rattlesnake the hypocritical government agents, the sycophancy of government army officials and the perfidy of those of his own race who accepted government pay for acting as spies, in the name of police. Crazy Horse was married and had but one child, a daughter, who at four years, took fever and died when the chief was away on a war campaign. On his return, he first learned of his child's death, seventy miles to the south. Frank Gruard accompanied the chief on the long journey to the place of sepulchre; there he climbed to the raised platform beside the loved one's robe-encased body; there he remained three days and three nights mourning for his departed one, during the whole time not a bite of food or drop of water passed his lips. On the morning of the fourth day he notified Gruard that he was ready to leave, and with a heavy heart, returned, but made no statement of where he had been or why he was so long way. Fair test of the equality of the chief's heart and soul.

Flying Hawk said that Crazy Horse was thirty-three when murdered on September 7, 1877. Some writers say that his age was 36, but in either case, no young man of like age ever held a more important part in modern western history.

To help quiet a guilty conscience, the granite marker was placed on the site of the great chief's couchless death-chamber, a sort of dry crust thrown to the chief's friends and relatives, after most of them had passed away from neglect and starvation--its cost, we suspect might be deducted from the three-quarter billion debt then owed and still owing to the great chief's tribe. Among the great war chiefs, statesmen and orators of the red race, it would have been more appropriate if his statue had been erected in the Hall of Fame.