Crazy Horse

Around 1840, near Rapid Creek in the Black Hills region of present-day South Dakota, Crazy Horse was born into an Oglala Lakota family shaped by horse culture, warfare, and seasonal movement. He gained stature as a young warrior during the conflicts that followed expanding U.S. military and settler pressure on the northern plains. By the time of Red Cloud's War, Lakota resistance had become the formative political world of his adulthood.

Crazy Horse fought in the Fetterman Fight of 1866, helped defend Lakota and Cheyenne power after the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, and played a major role in the defeat of George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. The United States answered that victory with an intensified campaign during the Great Sioux War, forcing many bands toward surrender. Crazy Horse gave himself up at Fort Robinson in 1877 and died there on September 5, 1877, after a struggle with soldiers.

His leadership remained central to later memory of the Black Hills seizure and to legal struggles over the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty. Twentieth-century claims culminating in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians kept the question of land, treaty obligation, and military conquest tied to the world Crazy Horse fought to defend.