The last time I saw the Milky Way throw snowy garlands across the sky was on a moonless night in western Nebraska.

Dark bands ran river-like through streaming starlight, the interstellar dust playing hide-n-seek with stars beyond. The brightest area seen from my Earth-bound perch was  towards Sagittarius, the Great Archer – the one who moves relentlessly across the southern sky.

Standing there, I was reminded of another great archer who once rode under this sky. Given one name at birth, in manhood he took another –  Crazy Horse. While he lived, his name cast a shadow as powerful as the Great Rift running above me. When he died, half a nation let out its collective breath.

I can’t tell you about his death because it’s been chronicled so often it’s reached a point where legend and truth have become inseparable bedmates. What I do know is that on a May day in 1877, the Oglala warrior rode down out of the pine bluffs and surrendered his starving band of nearly three hundred families. Right here, where I stood.

If the stories of the time are true – and I have no reason to doubt historian Stephen Ambrose’s research – Crazy Horse entered the Camp wearing a war bonnet, his pony and body painted for war. He wore a single hawk feather in his hair, a tribute, perhaps, to his Spirit animal. Thousands of already-surrendered Indians lined his route, cheering and singing. One Army officer complained that it was more like a triumphal march than a surrender.

But it was surrender, bringing the great Sioux War to an end.

I wish I could say that the end of the war was the end of hostility, but it wasn’t.

Within months of Crazy Horse’s surrender, jealousies and intrigues led him to a three-foot-by-six-foot cell that would become his cage. Turning to flee, he was brought down by a single bayonet jab through the back.

It’s said that overhead, a passing hawk screamed.

Afterwards, his father and mother wrapped him in a buffalo robe and secreted his body somewhere on the Plains where he once freely roamed.

My memory of this place, the sky and the man, is filled with scattered fragments – a black butterfly, black-and-white magpies, and dark blood dripping from the bite of a black fly.

And the wind that kicks up every afternoon.

And the hawks.

On a summer evening I watched the sky turn from powder to deep blue to blackest black and wondered at the days when Crazy Horse sat astride his pony amongst the Ponderosa pine on the bluffs beyond, watching the buffalo graze in the White River Valley where I now stood.

The hawks still swoop low to the ground here, the blustery wind sweeps the air every afternoon, and the spirit of the warrior-archer flies through this place as surely as the constellations cross the sky.

And the Milky Way. I like to think it’s as brilliant today as it was on that September day in 1877 when the most feared of the Sioux warriors drew his final breath. And maybe, just maybe, the Great Archer, Sagittarius himself, wept.