Remains had been collected.

In the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., skulls and bones of Native Americans killed in conflict were being studied as part of the pseudoscientific enterprise of craniology, which claimed to derive racial intelligence hierarchies from the measurement of skulls.

This was the world in which Crazy Horse’s family made their decision about where to bury him and whether to disclose that location.

The decision to keep the location secret was not paranoia.