Crazy Horse (LIVES) - Hardcover

Mcmurtry, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297842803 ISBN 13: 9780297842804

Publisher: W&N, 1999

Synopsis

The life of Crazy Horse encapsulates the tragedy of the native Americans, and the death of the untamed West. Crazy Horse symbolized a proud refusal of the American Indians to bend to the yoke of domestication, and the white man's will to rule. Legend clouds the real man and everyone who has appropriated his powerful myth has tried to use him to further their own agenda. In this vivid, carefully considered biography, Larry McMurtry strips away tall tales to arrive at the essence of this brilliant, ascetic warrior-hero. McMurtry captures the poignant passing of a time and offers a vibrant new understanding of one of America's greatest figures.

About this title

Review:

In writing his superb life of Crazy Horse, Larry McMurtry faced the same obstacle as every previous biographer of the Oglala Sioux icon: a notable paucity of facts. This didn't inhibit such chroniclers as Mari Sandoz or Stephen Ambrose (whose dual portrait Crazy Horse and George Custer featured a certain amount of authorial ventriloquism). In this case, however, the shortage of documentation actually works to the reader's advantage. Unencumbered by reams of scholarly detail, McMurtry's book has the shapeliness and inevitability of a fine novella. The author may describe it as an "exercise in assumption, conjecture, and surmise"--but his phrase does scant justice to this elegant, admirably scrupulous portrait.

As McMurtry recounts, Crazy Horse was born around 1840 in what is now South Dakota. Already the arrival of white settlers--who brought with them such mixed blessings as metal tools, firearms, and smallpox-- had begun to transform the culture of the Plains Indians. But soon a more ominous note crept into the relationship: "The Plains Indians were beginning to be seen as mobile impediments; what they stood in the way of was progress, a concept dear to the American politician." As whites sought to remove these impediments with increasing brutality, Crazy Horse led his people in a sporadic and ultimately doomed resistance, which peaked at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. Within a year the young warrior (and occasional visionary) had surrendered to the United States Army. Four months later he was dead, stabbed in a highly suspicious scuffle with white and Indian policemen, and the Sioux resistance died with its legendary leader.

McMurtry's powers of compression are formidable. In no more than a few rapid paragraphs, he gives a sense of how this "prairie Platonist" divided the world into transient things and eternal, invisible spirits. He also conveys his opinion of Caucasian double-dealing with fine, acerbic efficiency: "In August, Custer emerged and described the beauties of the Black Hills in mouthwatering terms. In another life he would have made a wonderful real-estate developer. In this case he sold one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate in the West to a broke, depressed public who couldn't wait to get into those hills and start scratching up gold." McMurtry's Crazy Horse is the leanest and least rhetorical version yet of this American tragedy--which makes it, oddly enough, among the most moving. --James Marcus

Review:

This is fine writing and suggests once again that history and biography can best be restored by the creative imagination. ("The New York Times Book Review") History, both poetic and relevant, at its best. ("Los Angeles Times")

About this edition

• Publisher: W&N
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0297842803
• ISBN 13: 9780297842804
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128