Ian Frazier: Crazy Horse

I’ve just finished reading Ian Frazier’s review of Thomas Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse (“The Magic of Crazy Horse,” The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011), and I have a question. Why wasn’t this article published in The New Yorker? It’s a significant critical piece, not only because it describes and analyzes a book about one of the pivotal incidents in American history, but also because it is, as far as I know, one of the few book reviews that Frazier has ever written. (It may be the only one he’s ever written!) Frazier is The New Yorker’s top writer. And he’s very knowledgeable about Crazy Horse (see his exciting, powerful account of Crazy Horse’s death in “Great Plains – II,” The New Yorker, February 27, 1989; included in his classic 1989 book Great Plains). 

Frazier's review is terrific. Darkness is its theme, established brilliantly in the first paragraph, when he talks about being on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota back in the 1990s and, as a result of various weird circumstances, “a powerful sense of darkness shivered into my bones like ague.” He then moves to an examination of Powers’ book, calling its subject “the darkest episode ever to happen in that part of the world.” My favorite part of the review is where he shows Powers' ability to relate to and describe the spirit world that the Indian warriors invoke with medicine objects they carry into battle. He says, 

Before turning to the Battle of the Rosebud, he spends five pages describing the war charms and paint important to Crazy Horse and others (golden eagle feathers tied in the war pony’s tail, the small “spirit rocks” Crazy Horse wore under his left arm and behind his left ear, dried wild aster seeds mixed with dried eagle heart and brains, etc.). 

Did Crazy Horse paint his face blue with white hailstones, as per Le War Lance’s claim in Great Plains? There’s no mention of it in Frazier’s review. I noticed a couple of differences between Frazier’s Great Plains account of Crazy Horse’s death and the account he gives of it in “The Magic of Crazy Horse,” based on Powers’ book. In Great Plains, Frazier says that Crazy Horse was stabbed “twice through the abdomen.” Whereas, in “The Magic of Crazy Horse,” he says that Crazy Horse was “bayonetted twice in the back.” And there’s a discrepancy between Frazier’s statement in Great Plains that “no photograph or painting or sketch” of Crazy Horse exists, and the existence of the drawings of Crazy Horse by Amos Bad Heart Bull, two of which are used to illustrate “The Magic of Crazy Horse.” Both discrepancies (if that’s what they are) are likely the result of new information coming to light since the publication of Great Plains twenty-two years ago. 

Frazier, in his review, quotes several passages from Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse, including this Cormac McCarthy-like beauty: 

That is what rode south toward the Rosebud on the night of June 16-17, 1876: thunder dreamers, storm splitters, men who could turn aside bullets, men on horses that flew like hawks or darted like dragon-flies. They came with power as real as a whirlwind, as if the whole natural world – the bears and the buffalo, the storm clouds and the lightning – were moving in tandem with the Indians, protecting them and making them strong. 

If you enjoy writing like that, as much as I do, you may want to read Thomas Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse. See also Powers’ excellent “The Indians' Own Story” (The New York Review of Books, August 7, 2005). 

Credit: The above drawing of Crazy Horse's last moments is by Amos Bad Heart Bull; it appears in The New York Review of Books (February 24, 2011), as an illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Magic of Crazy Horse."