On this date in 1877, Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse (TÈašúÅke WitkóâHis Horse is Crazy) is fatally bayoneted by a U.S. soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson, Nebraska.
A year earlier, Crazy Horse was among the Sioux leaders who defeated George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana Territory. The battle, in which 265 members of the Seventh Cavalry, including Custer, were killed, was the worst defeat of the U.S. Army in its long history of warfare with the Native Americans.
After the victory at Little Bighorn, U.S. Army forces led by Colonel Nelson Miles pursued Crazy Horse and his followers. His tribe suffered from cold and starvation, and on 6 May 1877, Crazy Horse surrendered to General George Crook at the Red Cloud Indian Agency in Nebraska. He was sent to Fort Robinson, where he was killed in a scuffle with soldiers who were trying to imprison him in a cell. Crazy Horse was 37 years old.
Crazy Horse’s participation in several famous battles of the Black Hills War on the northern Great Plains, among them the Fetterman Fight in 1866 in which he acted as a decoy and the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, earned him great respect from both his enemies and his own people. He ranks among the most notable and iconic of Native American warriors and was honoured by the U.S. Postal Service in 1982 with a 13¢ Great Americans series postage stamp.
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Text: History, Wikipedia.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
