The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers

(Knopf, 592 pages, $30)

Thomas Powers’ terrific new book is far more than a historical murder mystery, said David Treuer in The Washington Post. The great Sioux war chief Crazy Horse was bayoneted in the back in 1877 while being led to a U.S. Army jail cell, but the work of laying out the suspects and their motives allows the Pulitzer-winning historian to create a “gripping” portrait of a remarkably violent place and time. Crazy Horse himself is hard to know. He comes across on Powers’ pages “as he must have to those who wanted his head: as a mystery, a rumor, someone sighted from a distance.” At the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, his fearlessness and tactical prowess ensured Gen. George Custer’s defeat and death. But Crazy Horse was as doomed as the Sioux’s warring culture, and Powers has made the warrior’s demise feel like “the end of an age.”

By the time of his death, Crazy Horse was surrounded by enemies, said Robert M. Utley in The Wall Street Journal. One of Powers’ villains is Gen. George Crook, who had been bested repeatedly on the battlefield by Crazy Horse and who clearly wanted the feared warrior “out of the way.” But so did several rival chiefs, including Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, who felt threatened by Crazy Horse’s prowess and reputation. Interestingly, Powers seems less interested in pinning Crazy Horse’s assassination on any one enemy than in showing how many had both the motive and the means. A “careful reader might conclude that everybody was guilty.”

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Powers overloads his account with detail, said Evan Thomas in The New York Times. “He is a bit like a reporter who feels the need” to “tell the reader everything he knows, whether or not the reader wants to know it.” That decision “diminishes the urgency of his story.” But Powers is also “a great journalistic anthropologist,” and meticulous research has allowed him to produce “a richly textured account” of an epic cultural clash. The 1870s were the Sioux’s “last days as free warriors,” and Powers has created a vivid, sometimes harrowing, and “often moving” elegy to their now very unfamiliar way of life.