About this item
He was the greatest Indian warrior of the nineteenth century. His victory over General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 was the worst defeat inflicted on the frontier Army. And the death of Crazy Horse in federal custody has remained a controversy for more than a century. The Killing of Crazy Horse pieces together the many sources of fear and misunderstanding that resulted in an official killing hard to distinguish from a crime. A rich cast of characters, whites and Indians alike, passes through this story, including Red Cloud, the chief who dominated Oglala history for fifty years but saw in Crazy Horse a dangerous rival; No Water and Woman Dress, both of whom hated Crazy Horse and schemed against him; the young interpreter Billy Garnett, son of a fifteen-year-old Oglala woman and a Confederate general killed at Gettysburg; General George Crook, who bitterly resented newspaper reports that he had been whipped by Crazy Horse in battle; Little Big Man, who betrayed Crazy Horse; Lieutenant William Philo Clark, the smart West Point graduate who thought he could "work" Indians to do the Army's bidding; and Fast Thunder, who called Crazy Horse cousin, held him the moment he was stabbed, and then told his grandson thirty years later, "They tricked me! They tricked me!"At the center of the story is Crazy Horse himself, the warrior of few words whom the Crow said they knew best among the Sioux, because he always came closest to them in battle.
About the Author
THOMAS POWERS is a Putlitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of nine books. The most recent book is The Killing of Crazy Horse, published by Alfred Knopf in November 2010. Previous books include, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al Qaeda (2004) a collection of essays written over the previous 25 years which originally appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. Other books by Powers are Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (Knopf, 1993) ; The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Knopf, 1979) , and a novel The Confirmation (Knopf, 2000) . Heisenberg's War was published simultaneously in four countries - the United States, Germany, France and Britain, where it was widely reviewed and sparked a continuing controversy. More recently, Heisenberg's War inspired British playwright Michael Frayn to write Copenhagen about the 1941 visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr, which opened in London in 1998 and on Broadway in 2000, where it won a Tony Award as the year's best play. Powers won a Pulitzer Prize in National reporting in 1971 for a series of articles later turned into his first book Diana: the Making of a Terrorist (Houghton Mifflin, 1973) . He has been a contributing editor of The Atlantic and of The Los Angles Times Opinion Section, and has also published articles and reviews in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. Other books by Powers are Thinking About the Next War (Knopf, 1982) , and The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People (Viking, 1973) . Powers has been a freelance writer since 1970. He is graduate of Yale University (1964) and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Vermont where he is one of the four founding partners and editors of Steerforth Press, a literary trade publishing house.
