Crazy Horse fights his last battle

Today this happened in the past

January 8, 1877

Crazy Horse fights his last battle

(the following was taken and condensed from History.com)

It was six months earlier at Battle of Little Bighorn, that Crazy Horse along with Chief Sitting Bull, were victorious in battle over Lieutenant Colonel George Custer. In what was to become known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” the public wanted revenge. As a result, the U.S. Army launched a winter campaign in 1876-77, led by General Nelson Miles, against the remaining hostile Indians on the Northern Plains.

Crazy Horse (Tashunca-uitco)

Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotanka)

 On January 8, 1877, General Miles found Crazy Horse’s camp along Montana’s Tongue River. U.S. soldiers opened fire with their big wagon-mounted guns, driving the Indians from their warm tents out into a raging blizzard. Crazy Horse and his warriors managed to regroup on a ridge and return fire, but most of their ammunition was gone, and they were reduced to fighting with bows and arrows. They managed to hold off the soldiers long enough for the women and children to escape under cover of the blinding blizzard before they turned to follow them.

Though he had escaped decisive defeat, Crazy Horse realized that Miles and his well-equipped cavalry troops would eventually hunt down and destroy his cold, hungry followers. On May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse led approximately 1,100 Indians to the Red Cloud reservation near Nebraska’s Fort Robinson and surrendered. Five months later, a guard fatally stabbed him after he allegedly resisted imprisonment by Indian policemen.

In 1948, American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began work on the Crazy Horse Memorial, a massive monument carved into a mountain in South Dakota. Still a work in progress, the monument will stand 641 feet high and 563 feet long when completed.

Crazy Horse Biography Part 1