by In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars
The trials were the product of a nation experimenting with and expanding the boundaries of its way of life. In New Orleans Charles Buddy Bolden's band was pioneering a new American music that would be called "jazz." Not long before Plenty Horses' trial, Emily Dickinson's first book of poems rolled off the press, setting the stage for spare, twentieth-century poetry. While the trial was in progress, a physical education instructor at a Massachusetts college was inventing a new ball game that would soon sweep the nation. He was calling it "basketball." During summer 1891 Thomas Edison patented the motion-picture camera and, on the first anniversary of Wounded Knee, the wireless telegraph.
Change was barreling down on South Dakota, too. Farmers busted virgin sod for crops, producing around 30 million bushels of corn and 40 million of wheat yearly as well as oats, barley, flax, and various vegetables. Where wild grasses did still grow, they no longer nourished vast numbers of bison but increasing numbers of domestic cattle.
The changes coming to the West were personified in the residents of Rushville, Nebraska, a typical prairie town just south of the Dakota border. F. H. Carruth, a man of uncertain identity who left for posterity his account of a visit to Rushville in 1886, recalled that the town's one thousand inhabitants were "at the time a queer combination of Eastern and Western civilization."3 Founded on a Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley railroad line, Rushville was only a year old when Carruth visited.4 Farmers plowing the rolling, outlying country had settled in only recently, but cattle ranchers had been working the area for several years. Both groups were seasoned westerners, carving a living out of the wild prairie. Local businessmen, on the other hand, were newcomers from the East.
The streets of Rushville chimed when cowboys rode in. "Every man from outside the town—and they made up probably three-quarters of those on the streets—wore big, jingling Mexican spurs," Carruth wrote. "Indeed, it is part of the religion of every man connected with a Western stock ranch to never remove his spurs on any occasion whatever, with the possible exception of going to bed . . . Besides their spurs the men also wore big felt, or buckskin hats, with the wide leather bands which are also peculiar to stockmen, and many of them leather or goatskin chaparejos, or leggings. The businessmen wore the ordinary attire observed in any American city; but it was considered among them that some concession should be made to their newly-made Western friends and patrons in the matter of dress, so they hit upon the happy plan of wearing the wide, heavy leather bands on their ordinary stiff or soft Eastern hats. To see a promising young physician start out on his professional rounds wearing a derby hat of the latest New York shape, with a thick, embossed leather band two inches wide, is a sight only occasionally afforded to mortals."
The southern boundary of the Pine Ridge reservation lay only a few miles from Rushville, so the town also attracted a few Lakota. "Most of them were genuine wild Indians," Carruth wrote with palpable relish, "slightly tamed by the use of cigarettes, and with the murderous eyes and cruel mouths of full-fledged cut-throats. . . . They lounged about all over town, and lent a picturesqueness [sic] to the scene. They went a step further than the businessmen in their costume, and combined elements of the savage, the cowboy, the United States soldier, and the man of fashion. Some of them had succeeded in giving up everything of the savage except the buckskin moccasins, with elk-hide soles and bright porcupine quill-work on the insteps and toes." Carruth also noted—though with what factual liberties is hard to tell—that the Indian of Rushville invariably had "one thing about his make-up in the cleanest and best possible condition—namely, his Winchester, fifteen-shot, forty-five caliber rifle."
The town hustled with a businesslike atmosphere, Carruth wrote, although "it was hard to tell exactly what kind of business was going on. Judging from appearances only any one [sic] would have said that the leading industry was the buying and shipping of buffalo bones. Across the railroad tracks there are great heaps of buffalo, deer, elk and antelope bones, which had been gathered in the surrounding country and brought to town and sold to dealers, who shipped them to fertilizer factories to be ground up. A half-dozen freight cars were being loaded with them." Nothing better symbolized the changing West than those railcars carrying away the bones of vanished plains creatures so they could be turned into fertilizer for crops planted on newly plowed prairies.
In a world of such amalgams—and hardly a town sprouting on the plains of South Dakota would have been any different—authorities stalled on taking any action against the Culbertsons and their allies in the ambush. Consequently, the Plenty Horses case led the way: Plenty Horses was indicted for murder in federal court in Deadwood, South Dakota, on March 3, 1891.5
Deadwood was a drab little town in the Black Hills, established during the gold rush of the 1870s. Its main attractions were its many saloons and the grave of celebrity gunman Wild Bill Hickok, who on August 2,1876, had been shot in the back of the head in Deadwood while playing cards in Saloon Number Ten.6 J. W. Buel, in his 1886 book Heroes of the Plains, described Deadwood with memorable piquance: "Deadwood, like every other big mining town that has yet been located in the West, was full of rough characters, cutthroats, gamblers and the devil's agents generally. Night and day the wild orgies of depraved humanity continued; a fiddler was an important personage, provided he would hire out to saw all night in a saloon, and the concert singer was a bonanza, especially if the voice were clothed in petticoats. The arbiter of all disputes was either a knife or a pistol, and the graveyard soon started with a steady run of victims. Sodom and Gomorrah were both dull, stupid towns compared with Deadwood, for in a square contest for the honors of moral depravity the Black Hills' capital could give the people of the Dead Sea cities three points in the game and then skunk them both."7
Participants in the Plenty Horses case presumed that after the grand jury indictment, the trial would begin immediately. But U.S. judge Alonzo Edger-ton had other ideas. An attorney and politician in his midsixties who had earned a reputation in South Dakota for honesty and erudition, Edgerton feared that the prejudice against Indians that permeated the Black Hills would weigh against a fair trial for Plenty Horses in Deadwood. Consequently, he changed the venue to the federal court in Sioux Falls. "This announcement came like a thunderclap on both the United States officials, the litigants, witnesses and jurors," reported a local newspaper, adding that all had expected to spend the next three weeks in Deadwood for the trial.8 Now they would have the additional expense of traveling to Sioux Falls. They were, the paper said, "much surprised at the sudden freak of Judge Edgerton." Edgerton set the trial date for April, with himself and Judge Oliver Shiras presiding.
But in early March a fundamental matter about the trial had yet to be settled. The federal prosecuting attorney, William B. Sterling, still had not taken legal control of Plenty Horses, and there the case stalled. Sterling had issued a warrant for the Brulé's arrest by U.S. marshals, but General Nelson Miles, who had been holding Plenty Horses as a prisoner of war at Fort Meade under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Summer, refused to give up the young Lakota until Few Tails's alleged killers were arrested.9 As early as March 7 Sterling began a series of letters to the U.S. attorney general in Washington, D.C., W. H. H. Miller, complaining about the refusal to give up Plenty Horses. On March 16 Sterling still had not succeeded in bringing Plenty Horses under civilian control and wrote to Miller asking him to obtain from the War Department orders for Miles to give up the prisoner.
Miles was not alone in pushing for arrests in the Few Tails case. On February 23, 1891, Colonel William Shafter, who at Miles's orders had overseen Cloman's arrest of Plenty Horses, wrote to Miles with gentle sarcasm: "So long as Indians are being arrested and held for killing armed men under conditions of war, it seems to me that the white murderers of a part of a band of peaceful Indians should not be permitted to escape punishment."10 Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy—a much-respected former agent of the Pine Ridge reservation—agreed. As foreman of the grand jury that had indicted Plenty Horses,
he persuaded the other jury members to support Miles in a letter to Edgerton, urging the federal government to "spare no expense" in prosecuting the men who had ambushed Few Tails. An ex-Army surgeon with a massive handlebar mustache and the hard, level gaze of a remorseless gunfighter, McGillycuddy also wanted the Department of Justice to assign Sterling to assist in the prosecution.11
McGillycuddy had been pushing for prosecution of Few Tails's killers almost since the day of the shooting. On the letterhead of the Lakota Banking and Investment Company, of which he was president, McGillycuddy in a January 24 letter had provided the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs a list of the suspects in the killing: the three Culbertsons and three other cowboys or ranchers. "Affairs like the killing of Few Tails, who was always as I knew him a peaceable Indian, do not tend to make good feeling between settlers and Indians," McGillycuddy wrote. "The citizens generally of this region desire a thorough and searching investigation, and if the parties as charged are guilty, they should be punished."12
Plenty Horses under arrest at Fort Meade, South Dakota, in spring 1891. He is wearing the blanket he wore when he killed Casey and which he continued to wear through the trial. (Library of Congress)
McGillycuddy saw the Few Tails case as a matter for federal action. Sterling, however, took a different view. Concluding that Few Tails's killers should be tried under state law—because Few Tails and his friends were not on the federal reservation when attacked—Sterling turned the case over to the authorities of Meade County, site of the killing. Meade County officials were in no hurry to get involved, complaining that the case was just too expensive. Alex McCall, the state attorney for Meade County, wrote a letter on March 18 to the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs in which he referred to the Lakota as "simi-barbarous [sic] offenders against the peace and dignity of the nation" and said that Meade County officials were "strongly opposed, considering all the circumstances, to burden our County with all the costs of so expensive a trial as this one in all probability will be, if determinedly prosecuted."13
McCall went on to blame the killing more on the agent who gave Few Tails permission to leave the reservation than on the gunmen who shot him. "Permit me to say in all earnestness that in giving these Indians passes to leave the Reservation and go out on a hunting expedition, at such a time of great public danger, and consequent fear and excitement amongst the settlers, cannot be characterized in a term so mild as to merely style it a blunder."
McGillycuddy backed McCall's claim about the expense in a March 19 letter to Morgan, writing that the county "is financially in bad shape, and for that reason I fear that it will be difficult to procure an indictment before the county grand jury."14 He suggested that the federal government cover some expenses.
His idea apparently was a good one, or at least acceptable. In late March the U.S. attorney general ordered Sterling to assist McCall with the prosecution, and the Indian Bureau agreed to pay travel expenses for Indian witnesses. At the same time, even though the Culbertsons had not been arrested, the secretary of war ordered Sumner to turn over Plenty Horses to civilian authorities.15
U.S. Deputy Marshal Chris Mattheison, a powerful-looking man with an open, clean-shaven face, took Plenty Horses from the Fort Meade guardhouse and clapped him into shackles for the train ride to Sioux Falls—a portentous name for a town in which a Sioux would be tried for a capital crime. Once in Sioux Falls, Mattheison had a blacksmith remove the shackles, then locked Plenty Horses away in the county jail. In a small, dingy cell with a single, tiny window, Plenty Horses waited for the court to deal with him. He presumed he would hang, and although he showed no emotion while imprisoned— observers remarked on his stoicism—he did sink into a noticeable depression. One of his key preoccupations was finding legal aid. He was poor in a way only Indians could be poor: bereft of their hunting lands, locked away on reservations, unable to fend for themselves, lacking jobs, forced to farm in a region too arid for crops, and fed and supplied by meager government handouts. He had nothing, and a lawyer would cost hundreds of dollars.
PLENTY HORSES SOUGHT HELP FROM John Burns, an attorney and well-known Indian sympathizer who lived in Deadwood, the town that Judge Edgerton believed too prejudiced to give the Brulé a fair trial. From his cell in the Fort Meade guardhouse, Plenty Horses wrote pleading letters to Burns almost every day. Plenty Horses' father, Living Bear—who had met Burns in January when the lawyer had visited the Stronghold to talk peace—also sent several letters begging Burns to serve as his son's defense attorney. Burns answered Living Bear in a March 27 letter addressed to Pine Ridge military authorities. He warned Living Bear that although he was "anxious to befriend" Plenty Horses, the case would be expensive, in part because the trial required travel across the state to Sioux Falls.16 He told his "Red brothers" that as "a poor man" he would need five hundred dollars in cash to mount a defense, with a three-hundred-dollar down payment.
The day he wrote to Living Bear, Burns visited Plenty Horses at Fort Meade. He thought the young Brulé was "a handsome fellow."17 Plenty Horses must have taken heart when Burns showed up, but when they discussed the attorney's fees, Plenty Horses' face fell. Five hundred dollars. Burns might as well have said a million dollars or one hundred thousand ponies. By the time Burns left, Plenty Horses had become so transparently despondent that Burns feared he might try to kill himself. Speaking softly and carefully, Burns made him promise to "bear his fate whatever it may be, like a brave Indian."
Although Living Bear, nearly sixty years old, was a headman among the Brulé and had many ponies—newspapers referred to him as a rancher—he had no cash. Recognizing this, Burns wondered if perhaps they could get the money from Herbert Welsh, a wealthy Philadelphian who had helped fund reservation schools and who fronted the Indian Rights Association.
Welsh had traveled widely in the 1880s on behalf of the Indians, visiting reservations from Dakota Territory to the Southwest as well as Indians at military prisons in Florida.18 He helped shape federal Indian policy by meeting personally with incumbent presidents. He penned so many letters in support of his cause that he sometimes lost the use of his writing hand. In 1889 his doctor urged him to take a two-week vacation to recover from exhaustion, but even on vacation he wrote letters, editorials, and other correspondence.
The Indian Rights Association, which in January 1891 had helped raise $1,200 for the victims of Wounded Knee, could easily have solved Plenty Horses' financial woes. But because Burns did not know Welsh personally, he worried that his appeal for help would fall flat. However, Burns did know Valentine T. McGillycuddy, whom Welsh greatly admired for the way he had worked with the Lakota as agent at Pine Ridge. McGillycuddy gave Burns a letter of introduction to Welsh. The attorney then wrote to Welsh, outlining cryptically but with emotion his interest in defending Plenty Horses: "[The Lakota] seem somehow to think that because I have stood by them, or up for them, in the past, they have only to call upon me, overlooking entirely the question of compensation. This would be under the present circumstances, a question of absolutely no weight if I was financially so situated that I could spare the time and means. The case of the defendant appeals strongly to me, as his father was one of the chiefs present at the council in the bad lands [sic], which I held with them, and so I may say that to some extent at least I owe my life to him."19
Burns explained that he had interviewed army officers he knew as friends, all of whom agreed that Casey was a war casualty, not a murder victim. Whoever defended Plenty Horses, Burns contended, would have to persuade a white jury to accept that view. Recognizing that the outcome of the Plenty Horses trial could affect or be affected by the Culbertson case, Burns also assured Welsh, "I am doing everything in my power to induce the Meade Co. authorities to proceed against the men who killed Few Tails, but so far without results."
Burns asked Welsh if the Indian Rights Association could pay Plenty Horses' legal fees. Living in an era in which an attorney might be castigated for trying to drum up business, Burns added, "These
miserable people are so utterly helpless, that I think it my duty to write this." As Plenty Horses would soon be taken from Fort Meade by civilian authorities, Burns ended by urging Welsh to cable his response quickly.
Welsh was becoming the focal point for those who sympathized with Plenty Horses' plight. Lieutenant Colonel Edwin "Bull" Sumner, the Civil War veteran who commanded Fort Meade and who had played a leading role in tracking down Sitanka prior to Wounded Knee, also wrote to Herbert Welsh about Plenty Horses. His letter probably arrived only a day or so after Burns's. "The trial commences early in April and this poor d 1 has no one to defend him," Sumner wrote, "and although his deed was horrible I still feel that something should be done in his behalf for the sake of justice if for no other reason." 20 Reminding Welsh that the two of them had met a few years earlier, when Sumner commanded Fort Robinson in Nebraska, Sumner concluded, "Knowing of your kindly feeling for the helpless I now ask that some steps be taken to help this man 'Plenty Horses.'" The pressure on Welsh to do something for Plenty Horses was steadily mounting. The Indian Rights Association held Plenty Horses' fate in its hands.
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UNFORTUNATELY, THE ASSOCIATION AND GROUPS like it, though composed of well-intentioned people distressed by the treatment of the Indians, could be as deadly as cannon fire to the survival of Indian culture.