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.

June 25, 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn

June 25, 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn is fought in the Montana Territory. The 7th Cavalry of the U.S. Army fights several tribes of Native Americans. The tribes win.

The main group of Natives was the Lakota Sioux, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The Cavalry was led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. He had graduated 35th and last in his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1861. Because the Civil War was raging, he rose fast, and had the brevet (temporary) rank of Major General. After the war, his questionable actions led the Army to drop him back down to Lieutenant Colonel.

Custer had managed some victories against Natives in the intervening 11 years, and began to believe he was invincible. But on the Little Bighorn River, he found out otherwise. The legend that there were no U.S. Army survivors isn't even close to being true, but of the 700 men under Custer's command, 274, including Custer himself, a 36-year-old Ohioan, died. The Natives lost about half that many, out of around 2,500.

Reports of the battle began to reach the Eastern United States on Centennial Day, July 4, 1876. The anger of "the white man" toward "the red man" was stronger than ever. A year later, Crazy Horse was captured and executed. Sitting Bull, too, would eventually face what the white man would call "justice," in 1890, at Standing Rock, South Dakota, not long before the last major battle with the Natives, called Wounded Knee.

The most familiar photograph of Sitting Bull.

There is no known photograph of Crazy Horse,

due to a Native superstition about a camera "capturing the soul."

The battle was nicknamed Custer's Last Stand, and Custer was seen as a hero. In truth, he was an unearned egomaniac, and deserves to be ridiculed by history.

The site of the battle is now part of the Crow Indian Reservation, in the southeastern part of the State of Montana. The closest city is Billings, 60 miles to the northwest. The closest major league city is Denver, nearly 500 miles south -- unless you consider the Canadian Football League to be a "major league," in which case the closest is Regina, home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, 460 miles northeast.

In 1960, novelty singer Larry Verne had a Number 1 hit with "Mr. Custer." Even by the standards of that time, in which Westerns dominated television and were still big in movies, it was racist as hell toward Natives. It also perpetuated the myth of the cavalry charge order, "Forward, ho!" No such order has ever existed in the U.S. Army.

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June 25, 1876 was a Sunday. As a result, even though this was the 1st season of baseball's National League, there were no games, because the NL forbid Sunday ball until 1892. Football was in its infancy, hockey was a newborn sport even at the most mildly organized level, and basketball wouldn't be invented for another 15 years. So there were no scores on this historic day.