by In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars
After the Civil War, the army reduced his temporary wartime brevet general's rank to colonel and put him in command of Fort Monroe, on the Virginia coast. There he took charge of the most important political prisoner of the War Between the States: Jefferson Davis, formerly president of the Confederacy. Although Davis was ailing and under heavy guard, Miles clapped him in leg irons, winning himself some bad press and the enmity of many southerners. Shortly after his service at Fort Monroe, Miles took command of the Fortieth Infantry Regiment, made up of black enlisted men and white officers. Subsequently, he served on the Freedman's Board, set up by Congress to guide reconstruction in the South, where freed slaves were under attack as former Confederates returned to power. He led efforts to register black voters, educate former slaves, and find employment for them.
Perhaps Miles's work with freed slaves helped him see the perspective of other races. In any event, although the bulk of his career by January 1891 had been spent fighting Indians, Miles did not blame the Indians for the hostilities. He believed that the government's bad faith and mismanagement were at fault. Chief among the problems, in Miles's view, was the corrupt Indian Bureau, whose reservation administrators commonly stole supplies intended for the Indians and sold them for personal profit. Miles wanted to cure this ill by placing the bureau in the War Department so it could be cleaned up under military control. In an 1880 speech before the New England Society, a literary and philanthropic group, Miles said, "With [the military] it is not a question of destroying [the Indians] or being at war with them perpetually, but whether we are competent and able to govern them not only with a strong and firm hand, but also with entire justice."20
While dealing with Wounded Knee and its aftermath, Miles successfully urged Congress to meet its treaty obligations and to give the military control over the reservations. In January 1891 Congress appropriated $465,000 for rations, horses, and education for the Lakota, as outlined in federal treaties, and provided $1.4 million for the Lakota for the next fiscal year as well as $100,000 to compensate "friendly Sioux" for damages incurred during the Wounded Knee period.21 The military also took temporary control of the Lakota reservations as the army's ghost dance campaign ended. Federal costs came to about $2 million. Forty-eight soldiers and one shepherd on Pine Ridge had lost their lives during the conflict, and scores of Lakota had died.22
As peace was restored, Miles turned his attention to Plenty Horses' arrest. The 1868 treaty required the Lakota to turn over for trial under U.S. law any of their people who committed a crime against an American citizen.23 The U.S. government also agreed in the same treaty to bring to court any American citizen who committed a crime against the Lakota. The cases of Plenty Horses and the Culbertsons would test both sides of this agreement. Because prosecuting the Culbertsons was a civilian matter, Miles turned over to the governor of South Dakota the records of the military investigation of the Few Tails shooting. Before returning to his Chicago headquarters in late January, the general told Colonel William Shafter to arrest Plenty Horses as soon as it could be done without inciting any trouble among the Lakota, who were still skittish after the battering at Wounded Knee and during subsequent events.
The Lakota by this time had presumed that the cessation of hostilities had let Plenty Horses off the hook. After all, Casey had been killed in the midst of war. Under those circumstances, how could Plenty Horses be charged with murder? In raising this question, the Lakota anticipated an issue that would haunt the prosecution of the young Indian. Even some army officers thought that if Plenty Horses were guilty of murder, perhaps quite a few soldiers were too, given the events of the past few weeks.24 Certainly, the mounted soldiers who had run down and killed fleeing women and children at Wounded Knee would have been vulnerable to prosecution if Plenty Horses were found guilty, a verdict that would lead to a cascade of other charges, investigations, courts-martial, and trials.
When it became clear that Miles intended to arrest Plenty Horses, the Lakota balked, angry that Few Tails' killers had not been arrested. They also refused to turn over another Lakota, Young Skunk, whom the military wanted for murdering a shepherd named Henry Miller. The Lakota would not give up either man until the cowboys who had ambushed Few Tails were arrested. Young Man Afraid of His Horses, a highly influential progressive chief who had helped talk militant ghost dancers into surrendering, put the issue succinctly: "No, I will not surrender them. But if you will bring the white men who killed Few Tails, I will bring the Indians who killed the white soldier and the herder, and right here in front of your tepee I will have my young men shoot the Indians, and you have your soldiers shoot the white men, and then we will be done with the whole business. They were all bad men."25
When Miles made it clear that he would do all that he could to see Few Tails's killers prosecuted, the Lakota relented. The way was opened for the army to track down and bring in Plenty Horses and Young Skunk.
ABOUT TWO WEEKS AFTER THE slaying of Few Tails a major break arose in the case as victims of the shooting began drifting in to Pine Ridge. The first of these, her clothing stained with her own blood, staggered up to a reservation corral where cattle were kept for slaughter. As she tottered on the verge of collapse, a soldier spotted her. He shouted to the men in a nearby camp, and within minutes about fifty soldiers were gathering around her.
Her name was Clown, and she was Few Tails's widow. Shot twice, she had walked alone almost one hundred miles back to Pine Ridge in the dead of winter. "They got a blanket and took me to a tent," she later told military officials. "I had no blanket and my feet were swelled, and I was about ready to die. After I got to the tent, a doctor came in, a soldier doctor, because he had straps on his shoulders, and washed me and treated me well."26
At midday a Lakota named Knife came for her and took her to the church near the headquarters of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where victims of Wounded Knee had been treated. By late February she had recovered enough to tell her story to military officials, who also interviewed two other survivors of the shoot-out: Red Owl and her husband, One Feather, who arrived at Pine Ridge in Clown's wake.
According to the three survivors, on the morning of January 11, 1891, Few Tails's and One Feather's families were camped at the confluence of the Belle Fourche River and Alkali Creek in western South Dakota.27 During the past two months they had been hunting near Bear Butte, one of the sacred sites of the Lakota, and their two wagons were loaded with about a ton of meat. They had visited with Crow Indians, erstwhile enemies of the Lakota, and received gifts from them. They were now about one hundred miles from Pine Ridge— only a few more days, and they would be home.
The youngest member of the party was only an infant, the daughter of One Feather and Red Owl. Their thirteen-year-old daughter, Otter Skin Robe, also was there, helping that morning to take down the party's four tepees.
The oldest member of the group was Few Tails, who had seen some forty winters and was a close relative of Young Man Afraid of His Horses. Few Tails himself was liked by whites who knew him. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader would report that he was "one of the most reliable and progressive Indians" of Pine Ridge.28 His wife, Clown, rounded out the hunting party.
Despite the shooting of Sitting Bull in mid-December and the events at Wounded Knee two weeks later, Few Tails and his friends had found themselves on good terms with everyone they met during their travels, including whites. Only the night before the ambush, as the Lakota prepared dinner, Sergeant Frank Smith of the Eighth Cavalry had stopped in while on his way to his duty station at the Quinn ranch, about seven miles distant. When he asked the Indians what they were doing off the reservation, Few Tails showed him a pass that had been written by the federal agent at Pine Ridge. A letter of recommendation indicated that Few Tails was a friend of the whites.29 Seeing that they had permission to hunt near Bear Butte and that they had apparently done so, Smith rode on.
Smith wasn't the only visitor that evening. Andrew Culbertson—Pete's brother—rode into the camp and ta
lked awhile, walking into the tepees and nosing around. Clown would later recall him as a short man with a light-colored mustache who rode a yellow horse and wore cowboy garb.30
That night, Andrew Culbertson returned to the family ranch, where it is likely that he told his brothers about the Indians and the various goods in their tepees and wagons. The brothers almost certainly conspired at that time to raid the Indians the next morning, ambushing them outside their camp.31 Although what the brothers discussed that night in regard to Few Tails and his hunting party is speculative, archival records indicate that Andrew Culbertson returned to the Few Tails camp the morning of January 11, 1891, wearing a fur cap and clothing that led Clown to conclude he was a soldier.32 He soon departed.
After packing up their gear and rounding up the eight to ten saddle horses they had used for hunting, the Indians climbed aboard their wagons and moved out, with Few Tails and Clown in the lead. The two families had scarcely left camp when rifle fire blasted them from a sage-covered knoll ahead of them. "My husband had a gun and ammunition, but had no chance to use them," Clown would say with forlorn simplicity in the final words of her testimony.33
Hit in the leg and breast, Clown fell to the ground and feigned death, lying beside the wagon in which her husband already had died. She looked in the direction of the gunfire and saw two men in fur caps riding toward her on black horses. When they passed, she saw four more men coming up behind them. Among the four she recognized Andrew Culbertson. She continued to lie by the wagon while the shooting continued.
At the opening volleys, One Feather had spotted three men on horseback and one on foot shooting at the hunting party from the nearby hill covered with sagebrush.34 When he saw Few Tails shot dead, he instantly turned his own wagon to retreat. His wife, Red Owl, was shot at about that moment. One Feather, with his two daughters cowering under a blanket in the back of the wagon, headed down the Belle Pburche, but three horsemen cut him off, forcing him to retreat back to the site where Few Tails lay dead. There a man on foot fired at him from a stand of trees.
Thinking fast, One Feather drove past Few Tails's wagon, abandoned the road they had been traveling, and cut uphill across the prairie. On the hill he found one of his saddle horses running loose and jumped from the wagon to catch it. He put a rope around the horse's nose and told his injured wife to drive on ahead.
As Red Owl fled, One Feather fired back at the attackers, holding them off and catching up with his wife. One Feather took over the reins and drove as fast as his four horses would go, aiming for a ford on nearby Elk Creek. But just as he reached the crossing;, another gunman opened fire and was soon joined by two others. The firing intensified after the trio dismounted and fired from the ground.
One Feather drove on. When he had put some prairie between his family and the gunmen, he returned the reins to his wife and remounted his pony. Firing at the cowboys, he covered his wife's retreat. In the direction Red Owl was headed, One Feather saw what he thought was a small white house—actually, the Viewfield post office. As the wagon drew near, someone inside shot at Red Owl. One Feather galloped up and saw two men shooting from the post office. Jumping from his horse, he returned fire until his wife was able to withdraw. He then mounted and rode after her as four or five more horsemen came charging toward him.
He had no way of knowing that, in addition to the cowboys who had launched the ambush, he was now fighting U.S. soldiers from the Quinn ranch, who had joined the melee at Andrew Culbertson's request. One of them, Adolph Rundquist, would later report that he had found about five Indians and their wagon at the gunfight. "I tried to head them off and they fired on me and I returned fire, but did not hit any that I know of. I fired 5 or 6 times." Two more soldiers rode up, but the fight was ending, and they returned to Quinn's. Rundquist noticed that some of the cowboys carried. 50-caliber army rifles, given to state officials shortly after Wounded Knee for arming a militia to fight Indians. By the time the soldiers departed, One Feather and his family had been chased, under fire, for at least eighteen miles.
The fight came to an end when One Feather, with his harness horses played out, abandoned his wagon. He caught another saddle horse and put his two daughters on it. He and Red Owl rode double on the other horse, fleeing as fast as the horses would carry them.
Meanwhile, the gunmen closed in on the wagon, firing at the retreating Indians but abandoning pursuit. "That was the last I saw or heard of them," One Feather later testified.
The cowboys lost interest in fighting once they had possession of the two wagons. At some point—records are inexact—at least one of the wagons was taken first to the Timmons ranch, near Viewfield and the post office, and then to the army's Camp Cheyenne, where soldiers and citizens divided up the Indian property among them as trophies of the "Sioux war," including harnesses, ponies, clothing, and even the gifts from the Crows.35
One Feather and his family arrived at Pine Ridge two weeks later. During that period, exposed to freezing cold, shelterless, One Feather and Red Owl's infant daughter died.36
Meanwhile Clown, after pretending to be dead, endured her own agonizing fight for survival. She would later tell military officials, "I got up and saw that one horse was not killed, and I got on him and came to a house on Elk Creek, and I knew the people living there, and they opened the door for me."37
When the door opened, Clown saw inside two men who "got their guns and one of them loaded his gun, and they pointed their guns at me, and the white girl inside said something, I don't know what it was, and they took their guns off me. One man came to me and motioned to me to go away." Her horse balked, however. "I could not get him away," she would later say—perhaps the horse was ready for a barn or corral and some grain. Anyway, in her haste she left the horse.
Dusk was falling as she trudged across the plains. She found a track she recognized as coming from One Feather's wagon. But behind it were the tracks of horsemen, which she took as a warning to stay away. In the evening she came to a store at the mouth of Rapid Creek, where she had traded frequently, but avoided it now. "I was afraid I would cause trouble again," she would report, "so I did not go in the store."
Instead she walked all night across the snow-shrouded landscape, resting now and then. She made it to the foot of the Badlands, and there she heard the rattle of wagons. Too frightened to seek help, she hid as the wagons passed close by. After that, she traveled only at night, resting by day.
While she struggled to reach safety, the Culbertsons and their allies were spreading the word about the shoot-out. Soon, a report was sent east by wire that "the bloody Sioux were devastating the Black Hills country and murdering helpless women and children, etc."38
The killing of Few Tails was big news on the reservations, too, frightening Lakota already on edge in the wake of Wounded Knee and the killing of Sitting Bull. The state of mind of the Lakota is exemplified by a conversation with a Lakota who in late January visited a shop in Sturgis, South Dakota, after peace was restored. A reporter for the Sturgis Weekly Record asked the Indian why the Lakota had not surrendered sooner.39 He replied, "They were afraid they would be treated as were Big Foot's people; disarmed, stood up in a line and killed like so many cattle." With palpable frustration, the paper observed, "So strangely were the Indians impressed with this belief that it was with the utmost difficulty that they could be made to believe otherwise."
CHAPTER 9
The Last Battle
THE ARMY CLOSED IN ON Plenty Horses on February 18, 1891, when Lieutenant S. A. Cloman and a contingent of fifty Indian scouts visited a Lakota encampment on a tributary of White Clay Creek.1 Cloman stopped at the lodge of Corn Man, Plenty Horses' grandfather, and found Plenty Horses with two other young warriors. All refused to come out or even to talk, and Cloman decided to move on discreetly and camp for the night.
The next morning, Cloman returned and found that most of the men in the Indian camp had gone to the agency to pick up their government beef ration. In fact, only about half a dozen La
kota men were there, including the two wanted men. Cloman had arrived at the perfect time to take his prisoners. First, he arrested Young Skunk.2 Then, stationing his troops close to a group of five tepees where he expected to find Plenty Horses, he dismounted and searched the lodgings, accompanied by two other men on foot and four on horseback. They found Plenty Horses in the last tepee, seized him, and took him outside, "telling him that [they] had to arrest him, but that he would not be hurt in any way if he would submit quietly," Cloman would later report.
Cloman left Plenty Horses with two of his men and started to remount his horse. Plenty Horses at that moment broke loose and bolted for his tepee. "We ran after him and caught him as he was going through the door," Cloman wrote. "He was then mounted on a horse belonging to one of the scouts, and brought with us to Pine Ridge Agency, where I turned both men over to the Camp Commander." The army immediately sent off Plenty Horses by train to a jail cell at Fort Meade, near Deadwood, South Dakota, about 125 miles from Pine Ridge. There he would stand at the center of the last confrontation of the Indian wars, a battle fought with law and word on the cloistered fields of justice.
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MANY DAKOTANS IN SPRING 1891 must have thought it remarkable that, after decades of Indians and whites killing one another with abandon, the shooting of a single soldier by a lone Indian had resulted in a burgeoning courtroom drama making headlines across the United States. The idea that the Culbertsons might be put on trial for killing an Indian was doubtless off the sociopolitical charts, the stuff of satire and parody. White men simply were not arrested for killing Indians. Only a few years before, in northern California, Indians literally had been hunted for sport. But in South Dakota, the brothers would be arrested, eventually, and made to stand trial.