Crazy Horse: A Noble American History

Crazy Horse
from album art for Americana by Neil Young & Crazy Horse
(Click photo to enlarge)

As we have seen and heard over the weeks since the announcement of Neil Young & Crazy Horse's Americana, the album manages to somehow embody the very "Americana-ness" of the subject itself.

And yet, there just is no end to the ever widening disconnect between Americana fans and The American Dream.

So time for a little history lesson.

From Time to Get Crazy: What We Can Learn from Native American Resistance to Colonists' Greed | | AlterNet by Chris Hedges:

There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse.

He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little BigHorn. “Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was,” Ian Frazier writes in his book “Great Plains,” “because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.” His “dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic,” Frazier writes. “He never met the President” and “never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table.” And “unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter.”

Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man’s cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse’s seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief’s body and said, “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint.

His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.

So how's that Americana Dream working out for you?

Neil Young wearing Geronimo T-shirt - 2004
"Geronimo - My Heroes have always Killed Cowboys"
(Click photo to enlarge)

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