100 Voices from the Little Bighorn by Bruce Brown Deluxe CD-ROM Bundle Edition

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100 Voices: Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Crow, Arikara and American Eye-witness accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn

100 Voices: Full List * Crow/Arikara * Sioux/Cheyenne * American * Rosebud

Guided Tours: Crazy Horse at the Little Bighorn * Crazy Horse at the Rosebud

Features: Who Killed Custer? * Who Killed Custer? Audio Book
Features: Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger * Winter Count of Crazy Horse's Life
Features: Bogus Crazy Horse Photos * Unsung 7th Cavalry Scouts Saga
Features: Indian Battlefield Tactics * Woman Warriors
* Little Bighorn Maps
Features: U.S. Medal of Honor Winners * U.S. Atrocities * Indian Atrocities
Features:
Little Bighorn Mysteries * Virtual Museum

This is a FREE EXCERPT from
Bruce Brown's 100 Voices...

Red Feather's Description
of Crazy Horse
A Brule Sioux's recollections of his brother-in-law

Interview at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, July 8, 1930; Mrs. Annie Rowland, interpreter.

Note

Brule Sioux warrior Red Feather in 1902RED FEATHER'S ACCOUNT

Crazy Horse was a nice-looking man, with brown, not black, hair, a sharp nose, and a narrow face. Nobody on the reservation nowadays looks like him. His nose was straight and thin. His hair was very long, straight, and fine in texture. I knew him well, knew everything about him, but not his age or where he was born or where he was buried. His own people buried him, and not even his wife, who was my sister, knew what they did with him.

Crazy Horse married my sister six years before he was killed. He had only one child, a little girl who looked like him. She died when about three years old. Black Shawl was my sister's name. She died near here only a few years ago in the year when so many Indians had influenza. She must have been about eighty-four years old. She never took another husband.

Crazy Horse was a big chief over all his land. His father [the elder Crazy Horse, later known as Worm] hid his body so not even my sister knew where it was buried. Before he was buried a war eagle came to walk about on the coffin every night. It did nothing, only just walked about.


The Nebraska Indian Wars Reader edited by R. Eli Paul, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE 1998, p 199 - 200

NOTE:
Red Feather was Black Shawl Woman's brother, and thus Crazy Horse's brother-in-law (Standing Bear family photo from Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life by Kingsley M. Bray).

Personally, I have doubts about the authenticity of this photo for a couple reasons. First, Black Shawl Woman died shortly after Crazy Horse in 1877, while the building behind this woman looks too substantial to have existed at Ft. Robinson in 1877. Secondly, the woman in this photo does not have the emaciated, sunken look of a consumptive near death.

Here is Red Feather's account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Crazy Horse's wife, Black Shawl Woman, in a Standing Bear family photo.



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