Crazy Horse: The Death at Fort Robinson, September 5, 1877

Crazy Horse, the Oglala Lakota war leader who had never signed a treaty, surrendered to the United States Army at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, on May sixth, eighteen seventy-seven. He was approximately thirty-six or thirty-seven years old. He had held out through two winters of military campaign that starved and froze his band, and when he finally came in he brought eight hundred people with him.

Four months later, on September fifth, he was brought back to Fort Robinson under the terms of what he was told was a military conference. It was not. When he arrived, he was escorted toward the guardhouse. A Lakota warrior was not put in a cage. He understood what was happening and he struggled to resist. In the confrontation at the guardhouse door, Private William Gentles stabbed him twice with a bayonet.

He died that night. Among the last words attributed to him was this: they have stabbed me in the back. His father and mother came in the night and removed his body before sunrise. Where he was buried has never been publicly established.

The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, which has been carving the mountainside memorial in the Black Hills since nineteen forty-eight, states explicitly that his burial location is unknown and declines to speculate. That silence is deliberate. The private details of his death and burial are the last things that remain entirely his.

Fort Robinson State Park sits here at Crawford, Nebraska. The guardhouse is still standing.