"To be or not to be"

Crazy Horse never went anywhere he didn't want to, except once, and then he didn't return. He was, even to his people, as much a symbol as a human being. The quintessential warrior, he could and would disappear for days, simply be gone, almost as completely as his nemesis, General George Crook. Crazy Horse was odd, strange--queer, he said himself. He told others that was true because he had to be out by himself determining the best course for his people.

Today, his image being carved with dynamite from a mountain in the Black Hills. It's not Red Cloud or Spotted Tail or even Sitting Bull--it's Crazy Horse, someone as much a spirit as a human being, a hero at Little Big Horn, where his immense courage established him as the greatest Lakota warrior of them all.

In a page-long testimony in his book Great Plains, Ian Frazier celebrates the life of Crazy Horse in an almost unending string of dependent clauses:

. . .because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he k new exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, bur he was never defeated in battle; because, although was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured;. . .because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the counter. . .

The list goes on another half a page.

But in the winter of 1876, Custer's massacre behind him just months behind him, his people--the hostiles--were suffering, being chased by a far more hostile U.S. Calvary itching to settle up with the savages--Lakota and Northern Cheyenne--who refused the reservation system because they were sure it would be, for all of them, as much a death as that which would come at the hands of the Army, just slower.

For several months, often alone, Crazy Horse didn't know what to do. Everything in him said fight, die if need be, but don't resign into becoming a ward of the whites and a way of life as much a prison as if it were behind bars.

On the other hand, their Cheyenne friends had lost everything they had twice, their villages burned, their provisions, mid-winter, gone. They were defeated in the worst sense, in what their eyes clearly showed. His own people were hungry, starving. They were sick of death and dying. Everything he was himself--that for which he was loved--drew him toward going down fighting. He was camped for the winter along the tributaries of the Tongue River, along with his friends, Minneconjous, Lame Deer and Spotted Elk.

But a certain inevitability ran powerfully in an opposite direction. His people, all of them, had had more than enough of death.

"To be or not to be." Montana Indian country was forever away from Renaissance England, but while their motivations were different, their quandary was the same. Crazy Horse--we have no photographs of him--and Hamlet both worried themselves into a mental sadness. "He did not know what to do," Thomas Powers says in The Killing of Crazy Horse, "and this indecision, which he described to a friend as a kind of weakness of spirit, would deepen over the course of many months. . ."

I spent years teaching Hamlet, as most English teachers must, somewhere along the line. I used to ask students what the most famous lines in all of English dramatic literature meant, a line--"To be or not to be"--most of them knew even if they hadn't read Hamlet or Shakespeare for that matter. 

"What's it really about?--tell me that." Sometimes I'd ask it on a test, hoping they'd come up with something more than just what happens to a madcap Danish prince. 

I wish I'd have known about an infamous Lakota warrior, the one emerging, as we speak, from a mountain, who, trembling, must have asked himself, all alone in the hills, the very same question.