September 5, 1877: The Execution of Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse was never photographed, due to

a Native superstition that photography captured the subject's soul.

A Mormon missionary made this sketch after interviewing

Crazy Horse's sister, and she claimed the depiction was accurate.

September 5, 1877: The Lakota warrior Crazy Horse is executed -- martyred -- at Fort Robinson, Nebraska.

It's not clear how old he was, but, based on the sources available at the time, the likeliest year of his birth was 1840, making him 36 or 37 at the time of his death. He was born to the Lakota branch of the Sioux tribe of Native Americans, near Rapid Creek, in what is now South Dakota. He was born with the name Čháŋ Óhaŋ, meaning ''Among the Trees," indicating that he was "one with nature." Eventually, he was given the same name as his father: Tȟašúŋke Witkó, meaning ''His Horse Is Crazy.'' 

A cousin, Black Elk, described him in the 1932 book Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux:

He was a queer man and would go about the village without noticing people or saying anything. In his own teepee he would joke, and when he was on the warpath with a small party, he would joke to make his warriors feel good. But around the village, he hardly ever noticed anybody, except little children. All the Lakotas like to dance and sing, but he never joined a dance, and they say nobody ever heard him sing. But everybody liked him, and they would do anything he wanted or go anywhere he said.

(In this case, "queer" meant "strange," not "homosexual." Crazy Horse is known to have married at least once, and fathered at least one child, a daughter. And a story dating to before his marriage reports that a tribesman once caught Crazy Horse with his wife.)

In 1864, after the Third Colorado Cavalry decimated Cheyenne and Arapaho tribesmen in the Sand Creek Massacre, Oglala and Minneconjou bands allied with them against the U.S. military. Crazy Horse was present at the Battle of Platte Bridge (near present-day Casper, Wyoming) and the Battle of Red Buttes (on the North Platte River in Nebraska) in July 1865. Both were Native victories.

On December 21, 1866, he led a group of 10 men who killed 81 men at Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, in what became known as the Fetterman Massacre. His reputation grew from there, peaking on June 25, 1876, when his troops crushed the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry, killing 268 of them, including their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana.

The U.S. government's reaction was to put an end to the threat by any means necessary. They cut off supply lines, separating the Lakota from the buffalo, their main sources of food and clothing, for the Winter. The idea was to starve and freeze them into surrendering. It worked: Crazy Horse took his men to the Red Cloud Agency, located near Fort Robinson, Nebraska, on May 5, 1877.

On September 5, the Agency received orders that Crazy Horse was to be arrested and taken under the cover of darkness to Division Headquarters. Once there, Crazy Horse struggled with the guard, made up entirely of Natives. He was stabbed with a bayonet by one of the members of the guard. He died that night. His remains were turned over to his elderly parents. His final resting place is not known to the white man.

Historian Ian Frazier wrote of him:

Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was, because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because [though] he may have surrendered... he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured. His dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic. Unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter.

In response to the carving of Mount Rushmore, near Rapid City, South Dakota, which Natives consider a desecration of one of their holy lands, Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on it, designed the Crazy Horse Memorial. He died in 1982, early in the moument's construction. When the head was completed in 1998, it was 87 feet high, compared to the 60-foot-high faces on Rushmore, 17 miles away. 

The Memorial in 2020

When finished, if it ever is, the Memorial will show Crazy Horse on a horse, pointing with his left arm. At last check, the hand, arm, shoulder, hairline, and top of the horse's head were anticipated to be finished by 2037.

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September 5, 1877 was a  Wednesday. At the time, the only professional sports league in North America was baseball's National League. And no games were played that day.