by In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars
Accounts differ on Casey's reaction to Red Cloud's message.22 Plenty Horses would insist that Casey threatened to return with more soldiers and capture the chief. Other witnesses reported that Casey simply said he would come back later. In any event, as Casey prepared to leave, Broken Arm said in Lakota that he wanted to go with Casey to retrieve horses of his that he thought were near the army camp. With Richard as interpreter, Casey agreed. "My horse and the Lieutenant's were facing each other, and we both turned to go," Richard would later report during official questioning.23
Plenty Horses, looking at Casey's retreating figure, shouldered his Springfield rifle, aimed down the heavy muzzle, and fired a bullet that crashed through the back of Casey's skull and exited below his right eye. Casey's horse reared, and Casey fell to the ground, instantly dead. Plenty Horses turned his horse and rode slowly back toward camp. He ignored White Moon, treating Casey's scout as if he weren't there.
White Moon was in fact no threat. Even if he had been a seasoned fighter, he would have seen the odds against him if he shot Plenty Horses in plain sight of a hostile encampment bristling with warriors. He started to ride off, but Pete Richard called him back and told him to take Casey's gear to the army camp. Speaking in signs, White Moon refused, and asked Richard, "Why don't you shoot Plenty Horses?"24
"Why don't you shoot him yourself?" Richard replied. Broken Arm, apparently interested in more practical matters, got off his horse and took Casey's two revolvers, one of which the lieutenant had carried in his boot, and a belt of cartridges. Another Lakota, No Neck, rode up about then, and he and Richard urged White Moon to take everything else belonging to Casey, but White Moon refused. "I told him then to take Lieutenant Casey's horse and we would go home and he did this," Richard later told military authorities.25
And so Casey was left dead on the chill prairie, as Lakota dead had been left at Wounded Knee. The decades of Indians and soldiers killing each other ended with his abandoned corpse.26
WORD OF CASEY'S DEATH TRAVELED quickly. The following day, not fifteen hours after Casey had turned away from the Lakota camp, his oldest brother, Thomas, was preparing to start his day in Washington, D.C. He came downstairs from his bedroom for breakfast and found a military colleague talking solemnly with his wife, Emma. The two turned to Thomas, and, as he would write later that day in his diary, he learned that his "dear brother Edward Wanton has been killed by the Sioux."27
That evening the Washington Star reported Secretary of War Redfield Proctor's reaction to the shooting: "I don't know when I have heard anything that has shocked me more than the news of Lieutenant Casey's death. He was here in the spring, and I grew very fond of him, he seemed so bright and energetic and enthusiastic, and he had such excellent plans and ideas about the Indian troubles. . . . I regarded him as one of the most promising men in the service."28
An officer of the Twenty-second Infantry wrote from Fort Keogh to Thomas Casey the day after Edward's death, "Everyone throughout the service who knew him liked him so thoroughly admired [sic] him as a man and as a soldier while we of the 22nd thought that no one was like him before and now feel as if no one could ever take his place."29
Nettie Atchison, the woman Casey had wanted to marry, was in Paris, France, when she learned that he was dead.30 In a January 9 letter to family friend Mrs. N. W. Mason she described her reaction when she first read of Casey's death in the newspaper: "It seemed at first as though I should go crazy."31 She added that she had recently inherited money and that she and Ned, as she called Casey, were finally going to marry. "I am not afraid to let the whole world know that Ned has had my whole heart all these years," she wrote. She asked if the family would let her have his class ring.
General Nelson Miles labeled the killing a crime and forged ahead with intentions to arrest the warrior responsible. His reaction may have stemmed as much from a sense of personal interest as from a sense of justice. He had known the lieutenant well. Just the previous spring, Miles had reviewed Casey's scouts and had promised that the officer could soon expand his unit from 100 to 200 Indian soldiers. Miles was even familiar with Casey's family. He had served under Casey's father briefly during the Civil War, and he had competed aggressively against Edward's brother Thomas for the position as the army's chief signal officer (the job went to a third man). He would continue to hold Casey respectfully in mind.32 In any event, Miles likely did not stop to think that if he jailed an Indian for shooting Casey, he might at the same time be indicting every soldier who fired on the Lakota at Wounded Knee. However, others would soon make this connection and see its potential effects.
Elsewhere, life and death went on: As Casey was being lowered into his grave, another murder was unfolding on the western prairies that would have profound implications for any attempt to punish Lieutenant Casey's killer.33
CHAPTER 8
Ambush or Self-defense?
ABOUT A WEEK AFTER CASEY'S death, area newspapers began covering another shoot-out between whites and Indians, although from the very beginning reporters expressed doubts about the information they were receiving. The Rapid City, South Dakota, Black Hills Weekly Journal gave readers a front-page story based on information from an allegedly reliable source: an interpreter named Henry Kirkham, who had spent the past five months at Camp Cheyenne, an army outpost at the junction of the Cheyenne and Belle Fourche rivers not far from the site of the shooting.1 Kirkham, whose veracity was vouched for by the camp commander, told Ode Journal that a hunting party of "two bucks and two squaws" had been joined along nearby Alkali Creek the previous Saturday evening, January 10, by about twenty warriors on horseback. The warriors had with them some forty horses, including several belonging to three local ranchers, the Culbertson brothers.
The next morning, according to the newspaper, the Culbertsons and their friends rode up and cut out their horses, whereupon the Indians fired at them. "Two bucks, a squaw and two horses were killed on the ground," One Journal erroneously reported. In fact, only one Lakota, a middle-aged man named Few Tails, had been killed. "A buck and a squaw started north with one of the teams and wagons and five wounded Indians followed," and the Indians "made good their escape." Only one white man was injured: Pete Culberston, the palm of one hand grazed by a bullet.
The anonymous reporter, however, remained skeptical, even though Kirkham said his story came "from the lips of those who participated in it." Perhaps that was why the reporter was skeptical, because the Culbertsons' reputation was less than spotless. At any rate, the story concluded, "It will strike the average reader as somewhat peculiar that Indians bent on horse stealing or on the warpath should be encumbered with wagons, or, supposing the wagon Indians to have had nothing to do with the stolen horses, that the others should, while having the horses in their possession, join them at a place so near the ranches where the stock belonged."
The Journal was not the only paper to express doubt. The Sturgis (South Dakota) Weekly Record reported that a "large number of citizens here seem to think it a cold blooded murder."2 The paper added, "It seems very strange that [the Culbertsons] could not see, that Indians with wagons and women were not on the war path. They camped in a neighborhood where they were certain to be seen, when they could go a few miles further and be quite safe." The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader was less measured in its reaction, calling the shooting of Few Tails "one of the most cold-blooded and unjustifiable murders ever committed on the frontier."3
Immediately after the shoot-out, General Nelson Miles had sent out from Camp Cheyenne a dozen troops and three scouts under Second Lieutenant F. C. Marshall to investigate the battle site. Marshall and his men arrived at around half past eight on the evening of January 12 at the Quinn ranch, where soldiers of the Eighth Cavalry were stationed on courier duty. Soldiers from the ranch had been in on the shooting, and Marshall grilled them for information. One private told Marshall that on Sunday morning, the eleventh, a cowboy—one of the Culbertson brothers—had ridden into the army camp in great alarm and reported that
"Indians were driving off his stock."4 He had said his brothers were shooting it out with the Indians. "I wish you fellows would come and help us," he had pleaded.
The troopers rode out and joined the melee, but only briefly, because the Indians soon escaped on horseback. Sergeant Frank Smith, stationed at the Quinn Ranch, told Marshall that he had gone out later to examine the site of the shoot-out, which lay near the junction of Alkali Creek and the Belle Fourche River, and had found an abandoned wagon with two dead horses lying in front of it, their harness stolen. The wagon seat was occupied by Few Tails's corpse, shot below the right eye and in the chest. As Smith examined the body, he heard hoofbeats and turned to see a lone rider coming toward him, a tough-looking cowboy with long hair and pearl-handled pistols who introduced himself as Pete Culbertson, owner of a ranch only half a mile away. He spoke bluntly, there by the wagon with Few Tails's body. "I have shot one of those damned Government pets," Culbertson said, "and if any more of them want to be fixed, let them come this way."5
Pete Culbertson worked his ranch with his two brothers, Andrew and Nelson, and all were infamous hard cases. One newspaper later would point out, cryptically, that the brothers had been warned "last fall if they did not mend their ways and turn over a new leaf something would be done."6 Two of the brothers had been indicted in Bon Homme County in 1882 for horse stealing but had been acquitted on a technicality. According to local legend, Pete Culbertson, sometimes called Indian Pete, slept with a holstered gun hanging above his bed and had a paranoid sense of hospitality—he designed a contraption that kept a pistol aimed at the head of anyone who knocked at his door. Pete raised spotted horses on his ranch, running some twenty-five or thirty head. He also looked after some 250 horses belonging to a neighboring rancher, James Juelfs.7
Pete told Smith that he had caught the Indians stealing several of his horses and that when he had tried to reclaim the animals he had been met with gunfire. He and his brothers fired back, wounding several of the marauding Indians and killing the one in the wagon. He showed the sergeant where a bullet had grazed his right hand during the fight.
Before daybreak on the thirteenth, Marshall rode out to inspect the abandoned wagon, with Few Tails's corpse—for reasons veiled by history—still in the seat and the horses still lying where they had fallen.8 Marshall had his men fan out to collect evidence while he studied the earth for clues. Wagon and horse tracks indicated that the Indians, traveling toward Pine Ridge, had had about sixteen horses with them, including six for pulling their two wagons. Regardless of Culbertson's claim that the Indians had been driving away his horses, the shape and small size of the hoofprints indicated that all had been made by Indian ponies. "I do not think there was an American horse in the lot," Marshall concluded in the report he later wrote summarizing his investigation.9
Judging from the tracks etched into the prairie, Marshall surmised that on the morning of the shoot-out, the Indians had broken camp and proceeded only about three hundred yards when they were fired upon. The belly of one of the dead horses had been grazed by a bullet shot from the front, but the shots that killed the horses and Few Tails had come from the right, from the direction of the sagebrush-shrouded banks of Alkali Creek. Judging from the trajectories of the bullets, Marshall guessed that the first shot had been made while the wagon was going straight toward men lying in ambush. Few Tails presumably had turned his horses to the left to flee and had then been hit from the right.
Inspecting the creek bank, Marshall and his soldiers found nineteen rifle shells scattered in three spots. Two of the shells were Winchester 45s, and thirteen were Winchester.44s. Four were from what Marshall called a U.S. or American rifle, meaning a firearm of the type recently distributed by the federal government to state officials, who turned them over to citizens for defense in case of an Indian outbreak. "There was no indication that the Indians returned the fire or did anything but attempt to escape," Marshall wrote. "No shells were found, although every part of the ground was carefully searched." He added that tepees, mattresses, and other supplies abandoned in the wake of the second wagon as it bolted across the prairie suggested that the Indians had been taken by surprise and "thoroughly scared."10
Tracks showed where the cowboys chasing the Indians were joined by the soldiers from the Quinn ranch. Marshall and his men also backtracked the gunmen, starting at the ambush site on Alkali Creek, and found that a trail left by three riders led to the Culbertson ranch. That came as no surprise, since Pete Culbertson had admitted killing an Indian. But the rest of his story did not jibe with Marshall's evidence.
The investigators proceeded down the Belle Fourche and for the next couple days interviewed ranchers along the way. No one had any complaints about stolen horses. "On the whole, it was the general opinion of all parties with whom I talked that no depredations had been committed by Indians during the past year in the section visited," Marshall wrote.
According to Marshall, "Pete Culbertson told such contradictory stories of the affair to me, to Sergt. Smith, and to one Franz, a rancher, that I could put no faith in any of them, and am inclined to discredit his statement to me that these Indians were stealing his horses, but to believe that the Indians were fired on in a spirit of purest bravado, with no cause or provocation whatever."11 Nevertheless, Marshall gave the cowboy the benefit of the doubt. "In justice to the Culbertsons it may be said that they have always been most friendly towards the Indians, often feeding them," he reported.12 "On the other hand, they are known as hard characters, one of them recently returned from the penitentiary. Pete, the one whom I talked with, said that he would shoot an Indian on sight, now that they were so stirred up. He regarded it as almost necessary to do so, to protect his property and life."
* * *
WHEN GENERAL NELSON MILES RECEIVED the reports of the Alkali Creek investigation, he readily agreed that the shooting was unprovoked murder and promptly demanded the arrest of the Culbertsons, who fell under civilian jurisdiction because the shooting had occurred off the reservation. But civilian officials waffled, in part because they did not want to arrest a white man for killing an Indian.
The army had put Miles in charge of the Division of the Missouri just the previous summer. After spending years in the West fighting Indians—bringing down Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce in the Pacific Northwest, Geronimo in New Mexico, and Crazy Horse in the northern plains—he had been glad to move with his wife to division headquarters in Chicago. He relished the city nightlife, the plays and music, the exquisite dinners. And now here he was in South Dakota, at the coldest time of year in one of the coldest parts of the country, once again struggling to hammer out peace agreements with armed Indians.13
Miles was furious over what he interpreted as the insubordination of his officers in handling Sitting Bull's arrest and disarming Lakota warriors at Wounded Knee. Sitting Bull's death was being called an assassination by some Indian advocates in the East, and Wounded Knee a mass murder. Outraged that women and children who had fled from the battleground, escaping up ravines and hiding behind shrubs, had been hunted down by soldiers on horseback and slaughtered, Miles set his sights on a court-martial for the officers who had been in command at Wounded Knee.14
On top of all this, Miles now had to deal with Casey's murder and the killing of Few Tails, a well-liked man among the Lakota and also among whites. The Deadwood, South Dakota, newspaper, the Pioneer, would soon refer to Few Tails as "a kindly-hearted and peaceable old man."15 Following the shooting of Few Tails, the Lakota Indians, who had been settling down after Wounded Knee, were once again close to panic, particularly on Pine Ridge. They had begun bringing horses into camp for instant flight at the first hint of an attack.
Miles was determined to see it all through—from Wounded Knee to Plenty Horses to the Culbertsons—and his determination was steeled by a will that balked at nothing.16 He had once spent a full day in battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia, during the Civil War despite a bullet wound he had taken in his throat that morning. His
aggressiveness had been admired by his superior officers, winning him rapid promotion: He ended the Civil War as a brigadier general, though he was only twenty-five years old. In an exchange of letters with General George Meade just prior to Robert E. Lee's surrender in April 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant wrote, "Miles has made a big thing of it and deserves the highest praise for the pertinacity with which he stuck to the enemy until he wrung from them the victory."17 Miles in 1892 would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his Civil War exploits.
Major General Nelson A. Miles, a Civil War hero and self-made military man. He commanded the forces that occupied the Lakota reservations during the ghost dance panic of 1890—91. (Library of Congress)
His gutsy determination materialized during the war in a high body count, and not just for the enemy. He bragged that his own division suffered the highest casualties of any in the Second Corps, which in turn had more men killed and wounded than any other corps in the Army of the Potomac. His men were proud of their fighting reputation, too, but also complained that Miles was a glory seeker who would risk their lives to build his own reputation and win promotions.
Born in 1839, Miles grew up on a Massachusetts farm near Wachusett Mountain, where he hunted, skated, and played military games with other boys.18 One school chum said, "The study in which he seemed to take the most delight was fighting."19 When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Miles was working as a clerk in Boston, first in a fruit market and then in a crockery shop. A Republican strongly opposed to slavery, he formed a military drill club with some friends. After the North lost the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, Miles used one thousand dollars his father gave him and two thousand dollars borrowed from an uncle to organize and outfit an army unit that became Company E of the Twenty-second Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Although his men elected the twenty-two-year-old Miles captain, the governor of Massachusetts turned down his commission because he was too young, making him a first lieutenant instead. By December 1861, however, his bravery had earned him a promotion to lieutenant colonel.