Roger Di Silvestro

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

  Although friends said that Sterling showed no evidence of desiring political power, he was an unabashed booster for the Republican Party. In a campaign speech during the 1888 presidential election, he drove home his high regard for the GOP: Between i860 and 1885, "that grand party of noblemen had, by the sacrifice of precious lives, crushed out the greatest rebellion the world has ever known; and had preserved inviolate for you, for me and for countless generations unborn, the blessing of liberty enjoyed under the freest, most philanthropic and most beneficent Government, the world has ever known. . . . Its foreign and domestic policies were so wise that they caused an era of prosperity to thrill the Nation's pulse with health and vigor. Its policy concerning the public lands, was so just and liberal that hundreds and thousands flocked from the overcrowded cities, towns and farms of the East, to the broad and fertile acres of these Western prairies."46

  Sterling's support for all things Republican caught the attention of politicians in Washington, D.C., and before 1889 came to a close, the newly elected president, Benjamin Harrison, named Sterling U.S. district attorney for South Dakota, making the twenty-six-year-old lawyer the youngest man ever appointed to a U.S. district attorney office up to that period. At about the same time, the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company named him their attorney for the entire state.47

  On January 7, 1891, the day Plenty Horses pulled the trigger on Lieutenant Edward Wanton Casey, Sterling was just short of his twenty-eighth birthday. Despite his busy schedule, he had found time in June 1890 to marry a woman who had been his childhood playmate: Olive Snow Underwood of Dixon, Illinois. The coupled lived in Huron near his family. He traveled frequently on business throughout the state—especially to the district courts in Pierre, Deadwood, and Sioux Falls. He had accumulated some debts, but his career was meteoric, and everyone expected him to reach the loftiest heights of politics and business.

  Sterling must have believed that convicting Plenty Horses would be an easy matter. The young Lakota had spent five years in a government school, then had returned to the reservation, grown his hair long, painted his face, and fought U.S. soldiers. A white jury would see him as backward and hopeless. He shot Casey in the back of the head rather than face-to-face, assassinating a well-intentioned officer who for weeks had kept his own Indian troops from fighting the Lakota, who had gone to Plenty Horses' camp in peace. Sterling thought the shooting was inexcusable and cowardly.48

  The same sentiment had been expressed by illustrator Frederic Remington in his eulogy of the dead officer, "Casey's Last Scout," in the January 31,1891, issue of Harper's Weekly.49"A nasty little Brulé Sioux had made his coup" Remington wrote, "and shot away the life of a man who would have gained his stars in modern war as naturally as most of his fellows would their eagles. He had shot away the life of an accomplished man; the best friend the Indians had; a man who did not know 'fear;' a young man beloved by his comrades, respected by his generals and by the Secretary of War. The squaws of another race will sing the death-song of their benefactor, and woe to the Sioux if the Northern Cheyennes get a chance to coupl"

  CHAPTER 10

  A Fractured Life

  FOR MANY OF THE TOWNSPEOPLE of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the Plenty Horses trial was a welcome distraction from the grind of frontier life. A practical farming town developed by businessmen expressly to make money, Sioux Falls had not produced much in the way of local diversions—"In the West, a man's goal was to get rich, not to exploit latent artistic abilities, to entertain or to seek intellectual stimulation," wrote Sioux Falls historian Wayne Fanebust.1 Despite those shortcomings, the capitalist urge had created a town that had grown from 2,500 residents in 1880 to more than 10,000 in 1890.2 Around the time of the Plenty Horses trial, Senator Richard Pettigrew was promoting plans to create an industrial complex on the southern end of town, an area already being called South Sioux Falls in anticipation of the great boom that would accompany the opening of such businesses as an axle-grease plant and an oatmeal factory.3 Town leaders also looked forward to other new industries proposed by eastern investors who had bought 350 acres in South Sioux Falls, doubtless with Pettigrew's urging.4 As prices for land exploded, speculators were laying out subdivisions on paper. Pettigrew, who had run the town's horse-drawn streetcar line in the 1880s, opened an electric line in 1890, reaching out to the east side of town, which land speculators expected to grow quickly. The leading local newspaper, the Argus-Leader, predicted the town would boast 100,000 residents in no time at all.5

  The town indeed was booming. The newspaper reported that county farmers were raising more than $100 million in crops.6 Local granite quarries were providing paving stones and building blocks for cities all over the nation.7 The town's thirty-two saloons were producing twenty thousand dollars yearly in tax revenue. About a dozen Sioux Falls businessmen were making solid profits from the Mint, the biggest and most opulent of the town's twenty or so gambling halls. Winning gamblers could retreat for the evening to Willowdale Mansion, a prosperous brothel just west of town.

  Sioux Falls also was mopping up money in another arena: quickie divorces. When South Dakota law set residency requirements for divorce proceedings at only ninety days, Sioux Falls became a mecca for the divorce trade, attracting clients from all over the world and supporting not only lawyers but hotels, restaurants, and housing rentals. More than four hundred marriages came to an end there between 1890 and September 1892 alone.

  Despite some businesses of ill repute, Sioux Falls struggled to maintain an image of decorousness. Consequently, the town required homeless transients— called tramps and widely disdained and abused in late-nineteenth-century America—to register with the city clerk and pay a dollar for an identification tag to be worn around the neck. Failure to do so landed tramps in jail.

  A crackdown on transients came on July 1, 1890, with enactment of an ordinance that defined a tramp as anyone ten years or older without a "calling or business to maintain himself."8 For this crime of unemployment, even a ten-year-old could be sentenced to five days' solitary confinement and ten days' hard labor. And the city meant business: If the sheriff or a jailor took pity on a poor vagrant, letting him have tobacco, cards, newspapers, or other privileges allowed to most prisoners, the lawman could be fined $125.

  On the other hand, the townspeople could see the positive side of an alleged murderer like Plenty Horses. With an eye always on community interests, the Argus-Leader did not fail to notice that his case as well as other court activities produced revenue. "The United States court is worth more to Sioux Falls than the capital is to Pierre," an unnamed official declared to one reporter. "Every clay the court is in session, Uncle Sam pays out over $500 in witness and juror fees. So far during this session over $3,000 has been paid out to witnesses alone. Practically all of this money is spent here. A witness gets $2 per day for attendance and over three fourths of this is spent for board and incidentals. . . . Not only this but the court will grow more valuable as time goes on. The business will constantly grow and the sessions will be longer and longer. I want to commend the foresight of your Sioux Falls rustlers who slipped off with the United States court while the rest of the towns were fighting for the capital."9

  In a town where entertainment was limited to drinking, gambling, and visiting the local zoo to see animals that had been captured on nearby prairies, a murder trial offered not just profits but also entertainment. "Everyone turned his attention to the act, the accused and his fate—particularly his fate," Fane-bust wrote of trials held in prairie communities.

  Crime, especially homicide, ignited community curiosity instantaneous with the discovery of the victim. Interest was heightened by apprehension of the accused. His arrest and incarceration were cheered. His trial was watched in the newspapers and in the courtroom, the later [sic] often became a circus of clamoring, curious onlookers. Trials frequently became spectacles, great sport for the common man.

  All of this was but a prelude to the big event, an appetizer for the main c
ourse: the punishment. It was the climax, the fulfillment of public expectations, or sometimes the subject of deep disappointment. If the penalty was death, the impending execution attracted the attention of everyone as nothing else could. . . . People looked forward to the day of death and then turned out in droves to commemorate the destruction of a fellow human being and watch the hangman do his duty.

  Sometimes the hanging came replete with food vendors, as at a carnival. The hangman's rope might even be cut up into small pieces to be sold as souvenirs.10

  Crime certainly won its share of space in the newspapers covering Plenty Horses' trial. The New York World reported on a Jack-the-Ripper imitator who mangled a woman he killed in New York, an attempt by an army officer's wife while at a ball to stab a woman she thought was a rival for her husband's affections, a shoot-out and stabbing involving two jealous men in love with the same woman, a tragedy in which the wife of a destitute and unemployed man apparently burned herself and her three children to death in a suicide-murder, an abused wife killed when her drunken husband hit her on the head with a thrown brick ("Drink Made Him a Murderer" read the headline), and a soldier who apparently did not know what to do with himself when he was honorably discharged after twenty years of service and so overdosed on morphine, leaving a note that read, "Bury me where you please; nobody cares, I least of all." The Argus-Leader even reported lightly that three or four pairs of trousers belonging to the Sioux Falls chief of police had been stolen from his clothesline one night and that "the whole force [was] quietly working on the case."11

  BY THE TIME THE OPPOSING parties were gathering in Sioux Falls to battle over Plenty Horses' fate, he was the talk of the town, although most of the talk concerned how soon he would be hung. He was also a topic of discussion elsewhere. Before the trial, he received more than 150 letters of support, mostly from the East.12 His trial, reported the New York World,

  promises to be the most sensational case in the annals of border history. Among the Indians at Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Fort Keogh, the feeling over the matter has reached a fever heat, while the whites all over the West are even more deeply interested. The Winter lethargy was shaken off in this region as soon as the importance of the trial dawned on the little town. The dullness of a week ago is forgotten and an electrical change has come over the old sleepy condition of affairs. Every man interested in the town feels pleased to point to the Masonic block, where court is in session, and then explain with unfeigned pride that two United States District Judges, Edgerton and Shiras, were deemed necessary to sit at the trial of the Indian who killed the daring Casey.13

  In response to the insatiable curiosity, a crayon portrait of Plenty Horses appeared in the window of Lowry's drugstore.14 But a much wider audience than could be mustered on the streets of Sioux Falls longed for the Plenty Horses story. The New York World, established in i860 and owned since 1883 by Joseph Pulitzer, sought both to meet and to inflame that interest, sending reporter J. J. McDonough to Sioux Falls.15 When on April 24, 1891, McDonough became the first journalist to interview Plenty Horses after his arrest, the Lakota was "confined in the rather humble brick annex to the imposing county building, where he has fared much better than he would at any of the agencies, although cornmeal mush is here the chief article on the bill of fare."16 McDonough found that "though he evidently regards all white men as his natural enemies, it required very little persuasion to get him to talk for THE WORLD." Plenty Horses spoke to him in halting English, as if afraid that he might make a serious error in his speech, and sometimes used an interpreter.

  McDonough described Plenty Horses as lost and pensive. "He stood back from the iron door in the little cell and reflected fully five minutes before uttering a word, presenting a picture simple, silent, sad—for he was alone in a strange country, without a friend to cheer him or any one [sic] to whom he could speak in confidence; a barbarian still in spite of a little education, the only one of his band ever brought before a tribunal on a charge so serious. There was something pathetic in the spectacle.

  "He looked out of the tiny window that lets in an occasional ray of sunlight, folded his arms low under the faded blue blanket, standing so still that the silence was oppressive. He gave no sign that he was anxious about his fate; he spoke no word that he was being persecuted; made no plea that it was the act of another."

  In depicting Plenty Horses, McDonough mixed that strange brew of admiration and condescension that marks the reporting of many journalists of the time when covering Indian activities. The young Brulé was athletic, about five feet ten inches tall in his moccasins, "with broad shoulders and deep chest," McDonough told his readers. "His face bears the stamp of a higher intelligence than one ordinarily sees among the Sioux, and when it lights up with a smile there is something of winning melancholy in the expression. . . . He is a very bright Indian, although there is in every word and action that peculiar desire of all Sioux to impress one with the idea that they find it difficult to comprehend your meaning."

  Condemning Casey as a spy, Plenty Horses described how he had shot the officer. He added that the killing was justified and his arrest an injustice. "We were at war," he told McDonough, "and the Indian style of fighting to the bitter end is just as fair as the white man's. Besides, we were only fighting for our rights." But now he was in jail for doing what others had done in that brutal winter at Pine Ridge.

  He took pains to explain to McDonough that the Lakota were brave warriors: "No man can say we are not fair fighters. The Sioux never laid in ambush to slaughter soldiers, but met them in open day and battled man to man." He blamed the fighting, and by implication his imprisonment, on the whites. "The white man came and we were his friend," he said, "until the time arrived when our people could no longer stand his treacherous ways of treating with them. I know all these things, for my forefathers have told the story in council and by the fireside. They report our people as fighters and it is true, for we have been driven to it."

  HOWEVER INTERESTED PEOPLE BECAME IN Plenty Horses, much about him would remain unknown. Although no written record of his childhood exists, much about the accused man's younger days can be understood through the autobiographical writings of Luther Standing Bear, a Brulé born about the same time as Plenty Horses.17

  Standing Bear remembered his childhood as idyllic. The Lakota, he recalled, lived in a "beautiful country. In the springtime and early summer, the plains, as far as the eye could see, were covered with velvety green grass. Even the rolling hills were green, and here and there was a pretty stream. Over the hills roamed the buffalo and in the woods that bordered the streams were luscious fruits that were ours for the picking. . . . Life was full of happiness and contentment for my people."18

  The Lakota lived directly off the wild species of a wild land. A basic knowledge for doing so was shared by all Lakota, from Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to Luther Standing Bear and Plenty Horses, as were the tools of the trade. Among the first gifts Standing Bear remembered receiving from his father were a bow and some arrows, all painted red to signify that his father had been wounded in battle.19 In those days of hunting and almost constant warfare, a boy grew up learning the importance of making good bows and arrows. The short bow—never more than five feet long, making it efficient for stalking through tall grass and for shooting from horseback—"was the one weapon that preserved us from starvation and defeat, so it would have been unpardonable for a Sioux boy to grow up without knowledge of this useful article," wrote Standing Bear.20 "It was with him at all hours, even at night. At the slightest noise his hand was on the bow and arrow that lay by his side."21 The importance of the bow was so ingrained in the Lakota mind that when he was in his sixties in the 1930s, Luther Standing Bear wrote, "Even today I like once in a while to make a nice bow and to feather some pretty arrows." Like Standing Bear, Plenty Horses would have learned that the branches of cherry trees made the best arrows, the wood of ash trees the best bows, and turkey feathers the best fletching.22

  Equally import
ant was knowledge of horses, critical to the dangerous work of war and hunting. "To ride side by side with the best hunters of the tribe, to hear the terrible noise of the great herds as they ran, and then to help bring home the kill was the most thrilling day of any Indian boy's life," wrote Standing Bear.23

  Living Bear likely gave a pony to Plenty Horses as a youngster, just as Luther Standing Bear's father matched him with a young horse before the boy was big enough to mount on his own. From then on, Standing Bear trained constantly, he and the horse growing up together. By his teens, Standing Bear could charge into battle pressed against the side of the horse, firing arrows under its neck. If a horse fell while running at full tilt, Standing Bear, even if thrown clear, was supposed to remount by the time the horse was back on its feet. "Even if we were injured, it was part of our training never to stay down," wrote Standing Bear.24 "It was not with the idea of doing 'fancy' riding, but the thought of safety first was always in our mind. There could be no more dangerous place for a hunter than to lose his horse in the midst of a buffalo herd."

  The horse, too, received an education. "We trained our pony to walk or run right up to anything we wanted him to," recalled Standing Bear.25 "We picked out a good-size bush, shrub, or trunk of a tree. Our pony was trained to run up as close as he could to the object without dodging. Our pony must learn to go wherever he was told. Even if there was shooting, yelling, and great noise and much confusion, a well-trained pony would go anywhere he was told to go by his rider. So boy and pony trained together for warfare."

  Standing Bear was only eight years old when he plunged for the first time into a herd of bison, one of the most important trials of his life. He left behind an eloquent account of his earliest buffalo hunt.