The American military version, which became the standard official account, described Crazy Horse as drawing a knife and struggling with those trying to restrain him, and said that Little Big Man grabbed his arms and that Private William Gentles bayoneted him in the confusion.

This account portrayed Crazy Horse as the aggressor.

Little Big Man, in later testimony to Captain John Bourke at an 1881 Sun Dance, offered his own version: he said Crazy Horse had drawn a knife, and that in the struggle to deflect it, the knife entered Crazy Horse’s own side.

Other Lakota accounts disputed that Crazy Horse had drawn a knife at all.

George Kills in Sight, interviewed by Joseph Cash of the University of South Dakota in 1967 when he was in his seventies, offered a different account of the events — one shaped by the memory of an elderly man who had been there, remembering something that had happened ninety years earlier.