Clay Jenkinson is Theodore Roosevelt Center scholar at Dickinson State University, Distinguished Scholar of the Humanities at Bismarck State College and a Thomas Jefferson historian.
He writes a Sunday column in the Bismarck Tribune:
The Lakota warrior and absolutist Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko — 1840-Sept. 6, 1877) has fascinated me all of my adult life, ever since I heard a Methodist minister in Alliance, Neb., draw careful parallels between Crazy Horse and Jesus back in 1985. After the debacle of the Little Bighorn, the United States determined (in the white heat of national humiliation) to break the spirit of resistance of the Lakota and Cheyenne people once and for all, and force them to decide between life on reservations or actual extermination. The Crazy Horse procession from the bluffs above Camp Robinson on May 6, 1877, was more than a mile long. The great Lakota freedom fighter rode in with dignity, head up, proud, undefeated —nothing like the "vanishing Indian" of the famous painting. As he looked on in amazement, one of the Army observers that day quipped, "This isn't a surrender; it's like a Roman triumph." [Jenkinson, On the road in search of Crazy Horse]
The
Thomas Jefferson Hour can be heard Sundays on Radio Colorado College at noon.
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