Good Friday on the Rez

by David Hugh Bunnell

  Thinking it would be fun to give Yellow Thunder a little surprise, he crept up to the passenger door, flung it open, and hollered, “Wake up, old man!”

  Yellow Thunder didn’t jump up as expected. He stirred slowly; it looked like someone had beaten him pretty bad. He had two black eyes, a fat lip, scratches, a big bruise on his forehead, blood on his shirt.

  “Hey, Uncle, what happened to you?”

  “Four white guys beat me, but I just need sleep.”

  Satisfied that his uncle would be fine, George Ghost Dog went on to his job at the bank. He would be the last person to see Raymond Yellow Thunder alive.

  When Yellow Thunder failed to show at the Rucker Ranch Monday morning, Harold Rucker was worried. He knew about Raymond’s drinking, but somehow he always pulled himself together, always turned up, got the job done. Figuring Raymond might have gone back to Kyle to see his sisters, he called Annie Eagle Fox. “Have you seen Raymond? He didn’t come to work today.” Annie called her sister Amelia Comes Last and brother-in-law Albert Crazy Bear in Porcupine. They had no idea where Raymond was, so she called Arlene Lamont in Gordon. “Did Raymond come over to your place this weekend?”

  Alarmed, knowing that Yellow Thunder was sometimes busted for public drunkenness, Arlene went to the police station and found out that Raymond had slept there Saturday night but left Sunday morning. The cop on duty, Officer John Paul, should have known that Yellow Thunder needed medical attention, but he just saw him as another drunk Indian. The cuts and bruises, the unsteadiness, meant nothing to him.

  Officer Paul knew that intoxicated Indians often slept in old vehicles behind Borman Chevrolet, but he said nothing about this to Arlene. He only said, “Haven’t seen him since he left Sunday morning.” Shockingly, Officer Paul knew one more thing—he knew that Yellow Thunder had been the brunt of a horrible prank—but even this wasn’t worth mentioning. Arlene would find out in due course. Perhaps she would have the good sense to let sleeping dogs lie.

  Five days later, some white kids playing touch football in the street in front of Borman Chevrolet’s back lot discovered Yellow Thunder’s body in an old panel truck.

  * * *

  Unobstructed light from a trillion stars and a nearly full moon lights up the sky as I drive south from Gordon through Mirage Flats on the north edge of the Sandhills, where Jules Sandoz, a Swiss doctor seeking happiness and freedom in the new world, parked his ox-drawn wagon, built a dugout starter house, and began to establish his little empire that no one would remember if his oldest child hadn’t grown up to be one of Nebraska’s greatest writers. Even though it’s past seven p.m., I can see that the Sandhills look very much as Mari Sandoz once described them in her book Old Jules: “A storm-tossed sea, caught and held forever in naked, wind-pocked knobs.”

  When Arlene Lamont heard that Raymond Yellow Thunder was dead and learned the circumstances of his death, she was furious. What kind of person or persons would strip a man half naked on a freezing cold night and push him into the Legion Hall? Arlene’s father, Albert Crazy Bear, who worked as a mechanic at Borman Chevrolet, was a full-blood Lakota. She knew that nudity is taboo to Lakota men; they don’t even like undressing in front of their doctors. Arlene could not imagine the humiliation Raymond must have felt. One of the few accomplished Native Americans in town, Arlene had graduated from Gordon High School, attended Chadron State College, and become a Head Start teacher; she had recently been appointed director of the Head Start program. One of her white friends, Michael Smith, sat on the Head Start board of directors, and he happened to be the Sheridan County attorney.

  Arlene hopped in her car, sped over to Smith’s Main Street office, barged past his secretary into his private office, and demanded he investigate the murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder. Arlene was persuasive. And unlike in most of the cases where Indians were found dead in Gordon, there were plenty of witnesses and plenty of reasons not to like the Hare brothers.

  As there was no professional coroner in Gordon, Smith asked the coroner from Scottsbluff to perform the autopsy. And because he had little faith in the Gordon cops, he turned to Max Ibach, the tough-minded lead detective from the Nebraska State Patrol, to head the investigation. The coroner found that Yellow Thunder had died from a subdural hematoma (brain hemorrhage) caused by a heavy blow to his head. The cause of death, he ruled, was murder. Following the coroner’s report, it took Ibach all of twenty-four hours to determine who the perpetrators were. On the morning of February 25, 1972, just four days after Raymond’s body was discovered, County Attorney Smith signed warrants for the arrest of Les Hare, Pat Hare, Butch Lutter, and Toby Bayliss.

  * * *

  As I casually drive along these dark, windy Sandhills roads outside Gordon, it strikes me that while change normally unfolds slowly, sometimes events happen very fast. Bang, bang, bang. At six a.m. the day after County Attorney Smith signed the warrants, Russell Means was rudely awakened from a deep sleep in his motel room in Omaha, Nebraska, where the American Indian Movement was holding a conference. Standing at his door was a large Lakota man wearing wire-rim glasses and a heavily stained white cowboy hat. Means recognized him as Severt Young Bear, an old acquaintance from Porcupine, his home village on Pine Ridge. Young Bear had driven seven straight hours in the night to deliver a message to Means from two of Porcupine’s most respected elders, Young Bear’s aunties Annie Eagle Fox and Amelia Comes Last. White racist cowboys in Gordon had killed their brother Raymond Yellow Thunder, and they wanted AIM’s help to prevent the killers from going free. Impulsively, Young Bear jumped into his unlicensed rez car, borrowed gas money from a friend, and gunned it for Omaha.

  Means invited Young Bear into his room, listened intently to his account, and then left the room to wake up fellow AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Vernon Bellecourt. He said to them, “A defenseless Lakota man has been mutilated and killed in the racist border town called Gordon. We must immediately go to the Pine Ridge. His killers are walking free! We must go. The elders have asked for our help.”

  Many natives criticized AIM, which was based in Minneapolis, for being an urban Indian movement with few roots on the reservations. Here was an opportunity to change that perception.

  By seven a.m. Young Bear was down in the lobby getting a cup of coffee at the café that had just opened, while the three AIM leaders hurriedly walked about the motel waking up the others, about fifty total. Before Young Bear could finish his coffee, they were standing around him, ready to leave. Bellecourt took the wheel of Young Bear’s car so he could sleep in the backseat. There were two other AIM members in the car; the trunk was loaded up with shotguns, rifles, and ammunition.

  By seven thirty a.m., a caravan of crazed, radical Indians was on the road, headed for Pine Ridge. They took a circuitous route: 82 miles north on Route 77 to the Omaha Reservation, 20 more miles to the Winnebago Reservation, 87 miles west on Highway 20 to the Santee Reservation, up Highway 18 270 miles to the Rosebud Reservation, then on to Pine Ridge—480 miles total. At each stop, they recruited more followers until there were well over fifty cars and pickups, each with three or more passengers. They arrived in Pine Ridge in plenty of time for a raucous emergency meeting at seven thirty that very night at Billy Mills Hall. Two days later, fifteen hundred Indians from many different tribes marched on Gordon, Nebraska.

  I laugh so hard thinking how the terrified citizens of Gordon must have visualized themselves in Lakota cooking pots, I nearly run off the road, and decide to pull over for a few minutes to catch my breath. Turning off the lights, I get out of the car, look up at the glorious sky. A meteorite streaks across the far horizon. I can see the constellation Orion, low in the western sky; I mentally draw a straight line from the three stars making up the Great Hunter’s belt through the Hyades star cluster onto the small Pleiades cluster, seven stars commonly referred to as the Seven Sisters. Vernell’s grandmother taught him how to navigate home to Yellow Bear Canyon by first determining the position of Pleiades. He could have used this to run a
way from the boarding school, but he didn’t, and I imagine he was afraid they would only send him back. Just a young boy, Vernell had been taught to be obedient, wasn’t about to defy his parents or grandparents. Defiance doesn’t come easy for many natives, I think. Perhaps it took the white man to make them defiant.

  For sure, the good white folk in Gordon weren’t used to rebellious Indians. Much like black people in the Jim Crow South, Gordon’s Indians were expected to keep their heads down—do what they were told, never talk back. But when AIM came to town with fifteen hundred friends and fellow warriors, suddenly it was the white people who were subservient. AIM wanted food to feed the protesters. Gordon provided it. AIM wanted all fourteen Indians currently in Gordon’s city jail released. They were released. AIM wanted the use of the Neighborhood Center to hold what they called a red-feather grand jury. It was made available. Fueled by rumors that Raymond Yellow Thunder had been tortured and castrated, AIM demanded a second autopsy by a coroner of their choosing. A few days later, Raymond Yellow Thunder’s body was dug up from his unmarked grave near Porcupine and transported to Rapid City for the autopsy. This second autopsy witnessed by AIM representatives found no signs of mutilation and confirmed the original findings.

  The day he arrived in the town, Russell Means said, “We came today to put Gordon on the map. If our demands are not met, we will come back to take Gordon off the map.”

  AMONG THE DOG EATERS

  RACISTS CONVICTING RACISTS

  Among the Dog Eaters

  My kola from Pejuta Haka* called

  two weeks ago tuned tightly and fired up.

  “It’s the same on most reservations,” he said.

  “These white men come in

  and steal our women …

  They become Indians by insertion! Instant

  experts on redskin culture. Once they dip their wicks

  they start speaking of Indians as … us!

  When Indian men spit on these squawmen,

  the squawmen lick the spit and get stiff dicks.

  The result is novels by white poets who label

  themselves Native Americans, anthropological

  monographs by liberal assholes,

  and more breeds like you.”

  —Adrian C. Louis

  Starving, eager for real food, since I’ve eaten only a few nuts and dried apricots since lunch with Suzy and Vernell, I urgently drive on. It’s lonely at night in the Sandhills on old Highway 27, the Mari Sandoz Trail. I must be in the middle of the magnificent Spade Ranch; at a half million acres with sixty thousand head of cattle, it was once the biggest ranch in America.

  Founded by Bartlett Richards, the son of a Congregational Church pastor, the Spade Ranch owes its existence to the Homestead Act, and the discovery that cattle can not only survive but thrive during Sandhill winters. To build up his holdings, Richards took full advantage of the federal government’s open range policy, which allowed ranchers to run cattle on land not claimed by homesteaders. To further protect his land from these very settlers, Richards paid Civil War veterans, or their widows, to make land claims, and then transfer the leases to the ranch—hundreds did so, but not enough to meet his ever-growing need for additional grassland. Rationalizing that the Sandhills were unsuitable for farming (most homesteaders abandoned their claims after a year or two), Richards fenced off huge chunks of unclaimed federal land, and like the railroad and mining monopolies in the east, he created a Spade Ranch company town, Ellsworth, Nebraska. Here, Richards built a private railhead for shipping cattle to the big packing plants in Kansas City and Denver. A three-story building, rare in these parts, served as ranch headquarters. There was a Spade hotel and large brick houses for the ranch foreman, business partners, and the Richards family, who also had homes in Chicago and Coronado, California. Ellsworth had a blacksmith’s shop, a post office, and a general store stocked with groceries, Western clothing, saddles, fishing gear, and hunting rifles. Richards created his own Ranch Telephone Company, strung up phone lines from Ellsworth to Gordon, Rushville, and Chadron.

  Life was opulent for Richards and his family and close associates. During the winter months, they went on shopping sprees to Omaha and Denver. Opera companies, dance troupes, and other entertainers traveled from the four corners of the world to Ellsworth in luxurious, private Spade railcars. If there had been a Forbes magazine in those days, Bartlett Richards would have been on their annual list of richest Americans. But in 1905, Richards’ world began to unravel when, spurred on by Jules Sandoz and other indigent homesteaders, federal prosecutors filed felony charges against him and his business partner, William Comstock, for illegally fencing 212,000 acres of federal land. Initially, the men received a ridiculously light sentence—six hours’ jail time and a three-hundred-dollar fine—but the government wasn’t finished. The United States Secret Service spent the next thirteen months investigating and compiling more evidence, taking affidavits from 600 interested parties, issuing 165 subpoenas, and calling up 132 witnesses for a new trial beginning November 12, 1906. This time, the charges were grave: conspiracy to defraud the government of the title and use of public lands, subornation of perjury, and conspiracy to suborn perjury. This time, in spite of their immense resources and team of top lawyers, the partners were found guilty on thirty-five of thirty-eight counts and sentenced to eight months in a not very pleasant jail in Hastings, Nebraska; six months later, Richards was excused from confinement in Hastings to go to the Mayo Clinic, where he died two days later from complications following gallstone surgery. Remarkable as it may seem, the day after his death, President William Taft commuted Comstock’s sentence so he could attend Richards’ funeral in San Diego.

  Much smaller today, the Spade Ranch still exists. There still is an Ellsworth, a few buildings and houses, the vacated railhead, and the general store. In fact, I’m approaching it now. Lights on the veranda are just bright enough that I can see a life-sized ceramic horse pulling an old buggy wagon; and I can read the sign: OLD SPADE RANCH STORE, ESTABLISHED 1898.

  Richards’ empire fell into the hands of crafty New York bankers Ed Brass and Ed Meyers, the “two Eds,” who wisely hired Richards’ former foreman, Lawrence Bixby, to manage what was left: forty square miles—sizable, but much smaller than the two thousand square miles it once occupied. Over the next twenty years, Bixby bought or was awarded chunks of the ranch here and there until he became the de facto new owner. Bixby turned out to be one of Nebraska’s outstanding entrepreneurs—to protect the land from wind erosion and enhance its beauty, he planted fifty thousand trees; he built a ranch airstrip and hangar for his planes, restored the grand Richards family house, and was always adding buildings: corrals, horse barns, calving barns, bunkhouses, cookhouses, feed storage facilities, feedlots, industrial livestock scales, cattle dipping vats. He converted the Spade herd from Herefords to Black Angus and built up a reputation for producing the best beef in Nebraska.

  Bixby admired his old boss man Bartlett Richards. The homesteaders, he claimed, would have starved to death if Richards hadn’t loaned them milk cows and horses, let them charge stuff at his ranch store. He thought Richards had gotten a raw deal from the Feds, who didn’t relate to the vicissitudes of life in the Sandhills. Richards had only fenced federal land to keep his cows from eating themselves to death in the cornfields and wheat fields of adjacent tableland. In 1939, Bixby’s lobbying efforts got Bartlett Richards inducted, posthumously, into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

  As I come to the end of Highway 27, I recall that it was Lawrence Bixby himself who donated the money to have this very highway paved. Otherwise, there simply are not enough people living here to justify such a project. I turn right on Highway 2, a publicly funded road, and head west for Alliance, now just thirty miles away.

  * * *

  Oddly enough, the last chapter of the Raymond Yellow Thunder story unfolded in Alliance, where the Hare brothers were put on trial for false imprisonment and manslaughter. In his eighties, the lawyer d
efending them, Charles Fisher, was an old-fashioned, brilliant impresario of an attorney; you might say he was the wannabe Melvin Belli of western Nebraska. His white hair long and flowing, he wore rumpled suits with white socks and had an unquenchable thirst for lawyering, good bourbon, and beautiful women. Plus, he was willing to represent the most despicable defendants.

  At the first hearing, Fisher motioned for a change of venue. “Les and Pat can’t get a fair trial in Gordon,” he argued. “Too many people here are afraid of Indians. They imagine the most unmentionable things, and they are afraid if my clients aren’t convicted, the Indians, especially outside agitators from AIM, will burn down their town.”

  Knowing it would be hard to find unbiased jurors in Gordon, Sheridan County Attorney Michael Smith didn’t object; he figured the jury pool in Alliance was at least bigger. The presiding judge, Robert Moran, lived in Alliance and wasn’t too keen on traveling back and forth to Gordon, so it was a no-brainer; he granted the motion.

  Alliance’s most prominent Indian, Mark Monroe, who was to play an important role in the events that followed, wasn’t so sure it was possible to obtain a conviction in his hometown.

  Because of his last name, people thought Mark was only part Indian, but his mother was full-blooded Oglala, and his father full-blooded Cheyenne. Like Vernell White Thunder and Raymond Yellow Thunder, he was born on the Pine Ridge reservation in a log house. His great-grandfather Sleeps Long Time traveled across Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 1880s and grew tired of being teased about his name; thus he took the name Monroe after the fifth U.S. president. Curious choice, but he probably did not realize that President Monroe had waged war against the Seminoles in Spanish Florida—that he was no friend of Native Americans.

  In 1968, fully recovered from years of alcoholism, Monroe found himself living a normal if mundane life with his wife, Emma, and their five children, all of whom were in school, determined to graduate and build successful lives for themselves. Tragedy struck, however, when an older white man kidnapped and raped his sixteen-year-old daughter, who was on her way home from school. Monroe was furious. He reported the crime, insisted the police knew who committed it, but feared they cared little about crimes committed against Indians. A few weeks earlier, an underage boy had run over an Indian pedestrian while driving his inebriated parents home late one night from the Elks Club. The victim was a Chippewa from Wisconsin named Fred Pahlow who was in Alliance visiting relatives. Profusely bleeding from head wounds, Pahlow was in obvious need of medical attention, but the Alliance cops determined he was drunk, arrested him, threw his ass in jail, and escorted the nice white family home. Following brain surgery, Pahlow died a few days later in a Denver hospital. The boy was never charged.