Tashunca-uitco was a Lakota warrior. He never bragged about his exploits, but his people knew him to be a brave and fearless fighter, and – unusual for one so young and from that culture – a thoughtful and brilliant tactician. When the Whites started to arrive in droves, stealing land, killing buffalo for sport, and spreading their diseases (Tashunca-uitco’s young daughter died from smallpox), he quickly realized that he and his people would have to fight them in a different way. This was not a raiding party for ponies or a simple territorial dispute; their whole way of life was being threatened.

He was a chief, an honor that he earned by his example as a fighter and protector of the people. Translation of his name from Lakota to English can be tricky. His English name conjures up in people who don’t know any better, a wild and fierce person, totally reckless; the exact opposite of the quiet man he really was when he wasn’t in battle. He was known as “His Horse is Crazy”, or – “Crazy Horse.”

There have been many books written about him. The best is Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Oglalas by Marie Sandoz. In 1955, it was made into a movie - well, sort of.

The movie starts out promisingly enough. Two riders – cowboys – come riding up a ridge in the Black Hills. The young cowboy says, “I haven’t been back here to the Black Hills in years.”

The older one says, “I hope you weren’t planning to hunt; there’s not much game around here, anymore.”

The young man then starts reminiscing to himself about his old friend, Crazy Horse. This cowboy is a fictional character. Crazy Horse, with good reason, didn’t like or trust white men and his story could have been told without this invented pal. Most likely, since most of the potential movie-going crowd was Anglo-American, this character was probably put in to create audience identification.

Victor Mature, a better actor than he gave himself credit for, plays Crazy Horse. At least, with his dark eyes, dark hair and massive frame, he could pass for Native American. Not so the actor playing Conquering Bear. At Conquering Bear’s death scene, the camera zoomed in to for a close-up, to reveal that the Lakota chief – on celluloid at least – had blue eyes.

The whole movie is like that. It can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be an out and out Western, or a sincere attempt at biography. Custer’s Last Stand, for example, is portrayed as a “trap set by Crazy Horse.” In actuality, Custer fell into his own trap.

The battle itself is portrayed off-screen. A troop of California beach boys on horseback goes riding by. They certainly don’t look as if they’ve spent the last month in the dust and wilds of the Great Plains and the Bighorn Mountains looking for renegade Indians. Fresh off the racks in the wardrobe department, their uniforms are as neatly pressed and tailored as a pack of Cub Scouts’. They ride off screen, as the sound of gunfire, bugler calls, and yipping warriors fills the sound track. The camera pans upward, into the blue sky; the happy hunting ground for Custer's troops.

The movie ends with Crazy Horse’s death at the hands of a fellow Lakota; an Indian Policeman. There’s no mention of broken treaties or land grabbing. If Crazy Horse seems ill-served by Hollywood, he’s in good company. Geronimo, Cochise, Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, and even Custer himself have been misrepresented by the folks in Tinsel Town. The feeling then was that historical accuracy isn’t as much fun as entertainment.

There have been other biographies. Stephen Ambrose, in Crazy Horse and Custer , calls Tashunca-uitco a great American. Nonsense, writes Joseph M. Marshall - himself a Lakota - in his own biography, The Journey of Crazy Horse . He likens it to calling Joe McCarthy a “great communist’. Therein lays just one of the many problems between Indian and White communities. If translation from Lakota to English can be tricky, so can intentions and meanings from English to Lakota.

To Ambrose, "American" is anyone who has played an important part in the history of the United States, and certainly anyone born on American soil. So, in this respect, yes Crazy Horse is a great American freedom fighter.

To the Indians, however, an "American" was anyone who panned for gold in the sacred Black Hills, or indiscriminately shot buffalo, or spread disease. Especially "American" were the soldiers who would swoop down into an encampment and slaughter old men, women, and children, as they did at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, to name but two.

What did Tashunca-uitco look like? No photograph has ever been verified, and it's most unlikely that he ever posed for one. He didn't want his shadow stolen. The state of the art of photography in the mid-1800's precluded taking snapshots. When people posed for the camera, they had to stay stock-still for minutes on end.

There's a nine-story image of the man's face at Crazy Horse Mountain, in the Black Hills, that's been in the process of being carved for the past half-century, but no one knows how accurate it is. One of the items on my own to-do list is to research what he looked like and then paint a portrait - but there's no way now that one can ever know now what he looked like; people who knew him are long gone. His legend remains, like a wisp of cloud in the blue skies over the Black Hills.

And why is it so important to know what he looked like? We already know as much as we are ever going to know about his life and the way he thought and felt. If we can "see" what he looked like, the final piece of the puzzle will fall into place. We'll have a glimpse – although a very quick one - of this hero's shadow.