Crazy Horse

“A PEOPLE without a history,” says an old Sioux, “is like the wind over the dry buffalo grass.” To all intents and purposes, in spite of the distinguished writings of people like Stanley Vestal, the Lakota or Sioux people are just that to most Americans. Yet it is only a freak of history that the deeds of the Trojan Hector are known to a third of the world, and those of Crazy Horse are almost completely forgotten. Thanks to Miss Sandoz, Crazy Horse is more likely to be remembered now.

Crazy Horse is technically a biography of the greatest of the Lakotas, a chief worthy to rank with Tecumseh and Chief Joseph and Logan among great Indians; it is also a history of the decline and fall of a powerful nation robbed and plundered and betrayed; and beyond that it is a story with the inevitable movement and the dignity of great tragedy.

There are the very smell and color of the traditional life of the horse-lndians in this book, the texture of their thinking, the impressive and devout patterns of their ceremonies; and in the actions of the best of the Sioux — the hostiles under Crazy Horse — there is a heroism that goes beyond mere physical courage. The Sioux were undoubtedly, as warriors, what Stanley Vestal has called them: the finest cavalry the world has ever seen. But the weight of historical inevitability lay over them, and in spite of the leadership of the slight, pale Indian they called Our Strange Man, who whipped both Crook and Custer in a space of eight days, they went down. The best tales are always the tales of lost causes.

Miss Sandoz has now, with Old Jules and Crazy Horse, written two of the great stories of the West, and written them in the spirit of the sagas, with a scrupulous regard to truth and history.