Crazy Horse: Little Bighorn to Fort Robinson

On December 21, 1866, Crazy Horse led a decoy party that lured Captain William J. Fetterman and his command of eighty-one soldiers out of Fort Phil Kearny, an army post in what is now northeastern Wyoming on the Bozeman Trail. The ambush that followed was total: all eighty-one soldiers and civilians were killed. The fort and the nearby battle sites became a National Historic Landmark in 1960.

Location precision: The pin marks Fort Phil Kearny; the ambush happened on the ridges nearby.

Visitor guidance: The fort and the Fetterman battle site are managed together as a state historic site in Wyoming.

On June 17, 1876, Crazy Horse was among the Lakota and Cheyenne leaders who struck General George Crook's column of more than 1,000 troops along Rosebud Creek. The fight lasted six hours, a scatter of charges and counter-charges across a front three miles wide. Eight days later the same warriors faced Custer. Today the battlefield is preserved as Rosebud Battlefield State Park in Big Horn County, Montana.

Location precision: The fighting spread over a front three miles wide; the pin marks the state park.

Visitor guidance: The battlefield is a state park in Montana.

On June 25, 1876, Custer's 7th Cavalry attacked a massive Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment along the Little Bighorn River, and was wiped out. Crazy Horse's precise tactical role remains contested, though his participation and personal courage are well attested in Native eyewitness accounts. The site was first preserved in 1879 as a U.S. National Cemetery for the fallen troopers; it is now Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

Location precision: The village and the fighting covered a wide stretch of the river valley; the pin marks the national monument.

Visitor guidance: The national monument near Crow Agency, Montana, preserves the battlefield.

Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson, Nebraska on May 6, 1877. On September 5 that year he was killed there while resisting imprisonment: Private William Gentles ran forward and bayoneted him. Fort Robinson later closed as an army post and became a state park, established in 1956, with a museum on the grounds.

Visitor guidance: Fort Robinson State Park, near Crawford, Nebraska, includes a museum.

After his death, Crazy Horse's parents buried him at an undisclosed location. Legend places the site near Wounded Knee Creek, though his final resting place remains unknown. The pin marks that legend, not a known grave, so there is no tomb to visit and the story ends in uncertainty, like the monument that follows.

Location precision: A legend places the burial near Wounded Knee Creek, but the grave remains unknown.

The sculpture was begun in 1948 by Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziółkowski on Thunderhead Mountain, roughly 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. The face of Crazy Horse, completed in 1998, is 87 feet 6 inches high. Many Lakota oppose the monument as a desecration of Thunderhead Mountain, so it is as much a debate as a landmark.

Visitor guidance: The memorial is open to visitors in South Dakota.