Roger Di Silvestro

by In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars

The Indian Rights Association could trace its beginnings to May 17, 1882, the day Herbert Welsh and another well-dressed Philadelphia gentleman, his friend Henry Pancoast, stepped from a train at Chamberlain, a small town in southeastern Dakota Territory.21 The duo looked out approvingly on the broad, green stretch of Dakota prairies rushing off to all horizons. An aspiring artist who had studied painting for a year in Paris, Welsh was about thirty, lean, mustached, with piercing eyes and a resolved set to his jaw. He looked like a man accustomed to wealth and authority, and in fact Herbert Welsh was on his way to becoming a leader of Philadelphia society. He and Pancoast had come to the West at the urging of another Philadelphian, Bishop William Hobart Hare, who was leading an effort to establish missions among the Lakota. Deeply religious and active in the Episcopalian church, Welsh believed that it was the responsibility of "good men" to determine what needed to be done to reform the world and then to do it.22 He wanted to investigate the status of the Indians and what might be done to help them.

  Welsh liked the vast prairie, but he thought the little pioneer towns that punctuated the plains were blots on the landscape. He and Pancoast also disdained the pioneers they found eking out a living on the frontier, personifying these "border whites" as gamblers, convicts, and emigrants and describing them as the "scum of many nations, complacently taking claims on land wrested" from the Indians.23

  The two Philadelphians toured eastern Dakota Territory and crossed the Missouri River into northeastern Nebraska. As they traveled, they encountered the more traditional Indians, who immediately struck in them a romantic chord. Pancoast described them "on ponies, dashing and wheeling over the hills with a peculiarly Indian recklessness and grace."24 The Indians' "brilliant costumes and strange ornaments sparkled in the sun," dazzling both men, who also remarked on the Lakotas' marked dignity of bearing, "the faces of many showing great character and intelligence."

  But these straitlaced eastern gents had traveled to Dakota Territory not to praise the Indians but to save them. As Welsh said, he and Pancoast were not "sentimentalists" but practical men trying to plan a future for the Native American in the United States. They were convinced that the new nation had no place for traditional Indians, however picturesque they might be. The traditional way of life was over. A buffalo-hunting culture, or a hunting culture of any kind, would not survive the onslaught of towns, ranches, and farms. The Indians would be wiped out unless . . .

  That unless was the void which Welsh hoped to explore and map.

  Much as Welsh liked the look of the traditional Indians, he disapproved of their traditions. He particularly despised the sun dance, the central celebration in Lakota religious life. Held in June, sun dances were a chance for bands of Lakota to gather, socialize, and reinforce their religious beliefs. Anyone could dance, but only male dancers engaged in ritual sacrifice of their own flesh and blood to the sun, the most powerful force of God, in return for God's goodwill for all Lakota. The dancer's skin on chest and back would be pierced with skewers, and he would be tethered to a pole or to bison skulls, blood streaming from his wounds as he danced until he tore himself free. His skin might not tear loose for many hours. Sometimes, bits of flesh were cut from a dancer's body as a sacrifice. The dancer might collapse from exhaustion or become entranced and experience visions. Just days before Custer's famous last stand, Sitting Bull during a sun dance saw a vision of myriad soldiers cut down in a great battle.

  More accustomed to the symbolic blood sacrifices of Christianity, Welsh thought the dance was barbarous and that the giving away of gifts that played an important part in the ceremony was a waste of material wealth on people less fortunate or lazier than the giver. He wanted to ban the whole ritual, to "discourage a baneful generosity on the part of those whose labors had won success, and entirely prohibit the degrading spectacle of self-torture."25 A practicing philanthropist of inherited wealth, he failed somehow to understand a culture in which status was conferred by giving and in which the sharing of food and other goods with the old, disabled, or incapable was a vital underpinning of society. Generosity was one of the virtues most admired by the Lakota.

  On the Santee Reservation in northeastern Nebraska, Welsh found the kind of Indians for which he was looking, the type who provided hope for his concept of Indian survival.26 They wore "citizen's dress," as European-style clothing was called when donned by Indians. They lived in wooden houses instead of tepees. They did not dab paint on their faces or practice traditional dances and other Indian rituals. These people were models for all Indians— farming, getting jobs, merging, blending in, disappearing as a separate culture.

  After four weeks in the West, Welsh and Pancoast returned to Philadelphia, full of ideas for improving the lot of the Indian. Without doubt Welsh talked over his plans with John Welsh, his father and a former ambassador to England who was highly regarded in Philadelphia for public service and for donating to good causes. More to the point, he would have sought the advice of his uncle William Welsh and his aunt Mary.27 William was involved deeply in Indian matters. President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869 had appointed him the first chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners, a body of philanthropists assigned to monitor the purchase of supplies for Indian reservations. Mary had founded a group for Episcopal women, the Indian Hope Association, to support the church's missionary work. She also had encouraged Herbert Welsh to help the Indian cause.

  Welsh had the time and energy to devote to this cause, as well as to several others, as he emerged as a civic leader. Wealthy merchants and businessmen, his father and his maternal grandfather had bestowed on him enough money that he could spend his life as a gentleman philanthropist without ever having to work to support himself, his wife, and their four children.28

  Convinced that he knew what the Indians needed, Welsh outlined his ideas in a pamphlet he wrote and published, called Four Weeks Among Some of the Sioux Tribes. In a nutshell, Welsh wanted to turn the Indians into white people and thus save them from being hunted down by the military and shot into extinction, even if his plan meant wiping them out as a culture. He thought of this as a vast improvement for everyone concerned.

  These ideas were nothing new. They had been bandied about by various other Indian rights groups and by government officials for years. Because they were popular among the eastern social and political establishment, Welsh found a ready audience for his message as he laid out several specific goals.29 First, he wanted to turn the reservation system inside out. In 1882 Indian tribes held their reservation lands as a group. He wanted the land to be allotted to the Indians in severalty, meaning that individual Indians would be given ownership of land allotments, preferably in the form of farms that could be self-supporting. He saw "in severalty" become a byword of the Indian allotment movement that burgeoned in the 1880s and that came to fruition in 1889 despite the opposition of Sitting Bull and other conservatives.

  Welsh hoped that allotting the land in severalty would destroy the tribal system, leading to his second goal: development of new laws to keep order among the Indians as they adjusted to the new pattern of life, work, and property. To help with that legal development, the reservations would need better agents, and getting better agents for the reservations was in fact his third goal. In the 1880s agents were political appointees. As such, some were good agents, while others were just good Republicans or Democrats who knew nothing about Indians but plenty about currying favor with politicians. Welsh wanted the appointments based on qualifications measured by civil service testing.

  Fourth, he wanted Indian children to be educated, preferably in Christian boarding schools that would keep the students away from traditional cultural influences, such as their parents. Finally, he wanted to end the ration system, in which the federal government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, distributed food and clothing periodically to reservation Indians. He contended that the ration system undermined Indian self-sufficiency and made the challenge of turning Indians into farmer
s even more difficult by forcing the Indians to settle near government distribution points rather than on the best farmlands. Moreover, Indians who did settle farther out on the plains spent most of their time traveling to and from the distribution points rather than tending to crops.

  Welsh spoke widely, mostly to church groups, and promoted his ideas in the press. He and his allies, he would later say, "determined to do all in our power to make the situation known to the public, especially to the Christian public which is at all times anxious to carry out the ideals of Christianity into public as well as private life."30 On at least one issue he achieved quick results. Shortly after Welsh distributed his pamphlet, the secretary of the Interior initiated plans to establish Courts of Indian Offenses on most reservations to punish Indians who practiced traditional rituals, such as the sun dance.

  Before 1882 came to a close, Welsh determined to call together the cream of Philadelphia society to create an organization that would pursue his Indian agenda. He lacked the social clout to attract the prestigious people he sought, but his father, John, had all the stature necessary. John issued invitations to a December meeting at his house.31 Those who attended included ministers of leading churches, the publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, a railroad and oil baron, and the dual president of the Midvale Steel Company and the Edge-moor Iron Company.

  Developments at the meeting moved with a speed which suggests that every step had been orchestrated in advance. Pancoast and Welsh both spoke, describing their experiences in the West and charting plans for the Indians. When the roster of speakers came to an end, Welsh, Pancoast, and N. Dubois Miller, an attorney and friend of Welsh, produced a constitution for their proposed organization, the Indian Rights Association. The meeting adopted the constitution and appointed a committee to choose officers and set up the organization. Three of the five committee members were Welsh, Pancoast, and Miller.

  Within two weeks the committee selected a panel of officers, and Welsh became the functional leader of the group. By 1891, when Welsh was being dunned with letters about Plenty Horses' need for money, the association had about 1,200 members and was raising about eleven thousand dollars yearly from such donors as John Jacob Astor, a social leader in New York City, and J. Pierpont Morgan, one of the leading capitalists of the day.

  Helping Plenty Horses should have been a minor-league activity for the Indian Rights Association, something done at the flick of a pen across a check. But the association was not sure that it could or even should spend money on Plenty Horses' defense. Instead of offering funds, Welsh urged the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help out, arguing that as a ward of the government, Plenty Horses should be provided with an attorney. But the Department of Justice, to whom Welsh also appealed, declared that it was not clear that the government legally could provide defense attorneys for accused Indians and, in any event, could not do so without a congressional appropriation.32

  Eventually, Welsh adopted a halfway measure. He pledged $325 to help cover Plenty Horses' legal expenses but not his lawyer's fees. Before the trial ended, however, Welsh would amend his decision, allowing the attorneys to keep any money left over after expenses.

  ATTORNEY JOHN BURNS DROPPED OUT of the picture as the case moved to Sioux Falls, where two local attorneys came to Plenty Horses' aid.33 One was thirty-three-year-old David Edward Powers, who grew up on a farm outside Oneida, New York, studied at Niagara University, and was admitted to the New York bar at twenty-three. In 1889 he formed a partnership with an attorney in Rome, New York—which, ironically, was the hometown of Judge Alonzo Edgerton, who had moved west years before.

  A lean man with high forehead, bushy mustache, and steely eyes, his hair parted in the middle in keeping with the latest fashion, Powers had moved to South Dakota only the previous December, arriving in the midst of the troubles on the Lakota reservation. After that baptism in the ways of the Old West, he was now at the center of a trial that could have happened nowhere else.

  He was partnered with George P. Nock, an older lawyer with a reputation as a brilliant defender in criminal cases. Shorter than the lean Powers, he was round-cheeked and double-chinned—almost cherubic—with hair slicked back and mustache worn in the popular walrus style. He had begun practicing in South Dakota at least ten years earlier.

  Of the lawyers involved in the case, the man who had the most at stake in winning was William B. Sterling, the U.S. attorney for South Dakota. Affable, clean shaven in an era in which most men sported heavy mustaches, with a receding chin and large nose, Sterling was cut from the same cloth as the businessmen that Carruth described in Rushville, one of those suit-wearing pioneers given to long, Prince Albert coats. He would serve as a fulcrum in the trials of Plenty Horses and the Culbertsons, because he would prosecute both cases.

  Sterling was both typical of the professional on the plains at the end of the frontier and an exception whose life shows how quickly success could come to young men who went west to find fortune and fame.34 Although scarcely twenty-eight years old in 1891, he was already a well-known figure throughout South Dakota. The state had about four hundred thousand residents then, and he was one of the most prominent.

  Sterling was a product of the restlessness and ambition that drove nineteenth-century Americans from hearth and home, friends and family in the hope that greater prosperity lay just beyond the western horizon. "Hope, indeed, was the sum totum of our wealth—bounding, buoyant hope—and health!" wrote a friend of Sterling about those early years in Dakota Territory, before South Dakota was even a state. "Not much else did we possess."35

  When Sterling moved with his parents, two brothers, and two sisters in 1881 from Dixon, Illinois, to the territory, the region was home to about one hundred thousand residents. He was only eighteen years old, but—a high school graduate at sixteen—he had already studied law and taught school in Dixon, where his grandfather had settled in the 1830s. Like Herbert Welsh, he was overwhelmed by his first sight of the limitless Dakota prairie—the waving, green flow of untrammeled land stretching to all horizons. He also was eager to lay claim to his family's share of it, to put it to plow and seed. It was soon done when the Sterlings settled on a farm near Huron, in the east-central part of what would be South Dakota. At that time Huron was only a collection of "weather beaten square-fronted stores, tar-paper covered shacks with one way roofs, sod houses, tents, wagon camps, saloons galore, no churches or schools, and streets hub deep in mud most of the time," according to a record left by an anonymous settler.36

  People who knew Sterling during his first years in Dakota Territory recalled an amiable young man, with a constant smile, who was frequently seen around town with a group of friends. He spent the summer of 1881 working the family farm—a profession he would remember with pride in later years, saying, "There is no more useful or honorable calling among men."37 But the hardship of that life is apparent between the lines of a speech he gave commemorating Dakota pioneers: "It is easy enough for the sanguine to say in their letters home, that our Beadle County soil was so rich that it needed but to be tickled with the hoe to laugh with an abundant harvest; but I will venture the assertion that the pioneers of Grant Township, found this tickling process anything but a holiday pastime."38

  The difficulties of farm life may have contributed to his decision in September 1881 to take a job as a clerk in a Huron clothing store, earning thirty-five dollars a month. During the next year, he resumed studying law, this time with a local attorney. He also saved enough money to enroll in law school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The law program was supposed to take two years, but Sterling could afford only one. So he asked permission to crowd two years' work into twelve months. Although his professors thought it impossible that he could succeed, within the year he had finished with high honors. He then entered private practice in Huron, working with William T. Love, an attorney for the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company.

  Working for the railroad—which Sterling called "the greatest invention and bles
sing of modern times"39 —gave the young attorney a place in one of the most powerful commercial interests of his time. In 1890 railroads were the nation's principal employer, with 749,000 workers,40 and had created a vast new market for other industries, shaping U.S. commerce. Railways needed iron and steel for locomotives, cars, rails, bridges, and other equipment. They needed coal and wood for power. They changed the nature of agriculture, creating railheads to which cattlemen drove herds of livestock for shipment east and to which farmers brought crops. Towns and cities grew up around rail lines. The rail companies were also a bottomless source of jobs as they insatiably ate up manual laborers. Sterling was in a position to build a successful career at only twenty-one years old.

  Love, a busy man with many businesses to attend to, turned over many of his practice's important assignments to Sterling. Working on a large share of Chicago & Northwestern's business affairs in territorial courts required Sterling to travel widely around the state, enlarging his circle of friends and contacts.

  People found him easy to like. H. S. Mouser, an attorney who first met Sterling when the latter was a law student, said, "There are some people whose friendship, although they desire to be friendly with you, results in stirring up your nerves, but his friendship was restful as the touch of an infinite calm."41Another old friend said that knowing Sterling somehow gave his friends more respect for themselves.42 He won a reputation for being loyal and generous, always willing to help out.

  Sterling's skill at building social and professional contacts paid off while he was still young. In 1886 the Republican Party nominated him as a candidate for Beadle County district attorney, and he won. He was only twenty-three. Two years later he was reelected. Huron was the county seat for the district, so the number of cases passing through, including criminal cases, was large, giving the young lawyer wide experience.43 He prepared for cases meticulously and usually covered his courtroom table with stacks of references to related cases.44 He seldom lost a case, even though, as one colleague put it, he was "frequently pitted against the ablest and brightest attorneys of the territory."45