This passage on the death of Crazy Horse from Ian Frazier’s book on the Great Plains is just fantastic.
It describes how, after being bayonetted in the back , the great Lakota warrior refused the U.S. Army cot toward which he had been led to die.
Ian Frazier:
“What I return to most often when I think of Crazy Horse is the fact that in the adjutant’s office he refused to lie on the cot. Mortally wounded, frothing at the mouth, grinding his teeth in pain, he chose the floor instead. What a distance there is between that cot and the floor! On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, “ours”: an object of pity, an accident victim, “the noble red man, the last of his race, etc. etc.”
But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still. On the floor, he began to hurt as the morphine wore off. On the floor, he remembered Agent Lee, summoned him, forgave him. On the floor, unable to rise, he was guarded by soldiers even then. On the floor, he said goodbye to his father […]. And on the floor, still as far from white men as the limitless continent they once dreamed of, he died.
With his body, he demonstrated that the floor of an Army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his.”
It’s a soaring passage.
And it’s made more moving by the fact that I listened to it while driving across the American plains as part an eleven-part series on Custer, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse—done masterfully by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
THE LESSON
What I want to focus on is Frazier’s ability to condense the character of a lifetime into a single, pregnant image: the space between the cot and floor.
“On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, ‘ours’.”
“But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still.”
Some might say he reads too much into it. And, of course, there is a danger of imbuing tiny details with an excess of significance.
But I don’t care. I love it.
And there is a lesson here for those, like me, who want to use words well.
Now more than ever, our audience is drowning in a sea of white noise: emails, calendar invites, unbidden incursions of all kinds.
What they need is an arresting image on which to hang the point we want them to remember: “What a distance there is between that cot and the floor!” That’s it. That’s the brilliance of Frazier’s passage.
If we can give them that—in a way that elucidates rather than distorts the truth—then we will breathe life into the cold, dead words that often sit corpse-like and content upon the “cot” of our narration.
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