The departure of Spotted Tail’s Brule band from the area — they left their camp and moved away from Fort Robinson in protest — reflected the depth of the reaction.

For the subsequent months and years, the question of what had happened to Crazy Horse — how he had died, who was responsible, and what it meant — was processed within the community through the mechanisms of community memory: oral tradition, ceremony, the gradual integration of a traumatic event into the larger narrative of what the Lakota had endured.

The burial, in this context, was an act of community mourning and protection occurring in the immediate aftermath of a community trauma.

The Army’s Attitude Toward His Body