by In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars
Soon I was mixed up in the dust and could see nothing ahead of me. All I could hear was the roar and rattle of the hoofs of the buffalo as they thundered along. My pony shied this way and that, and I had to hold on for dear life. For a time I did not even try to pull an arrow from my quiver, as I had all I could do to take care of myself. I knew if my pony went down and one of those big animals stepped on me, it would be my last day on earth. I then realized how helpless I was there in all that dust and confusion, with those ponderous buffalo all around me. The sound of their hoofs was frightening. My pony ran like the wind, while I just clung to her mane; but presently we came out of the dust. . . . When I looked at those big animals and thought of trying to kill one of them, I realized how small I was. I was really afraid of them. Then I thought about what my stepmother had said about bringing her a kidney and a skin, and the feeling that I was a man, after all, came back to me; so I turned my pony toward the bunch which was running north. There was no dust now, and I knew where I was going.26
Buffalo gave the Lakota more than meat. The Indians tanned hides for tepees, clothing, and carrying bags. Untanned hides, which dried hard like wood, were used for bowls and drumheads. Water and hot stones were put into empty bison stomachs, suspended on tripods, to boil meat. Bones were used for tools. Horns could be made into utensils such as spoons or into weapons such as war clubs.
The buffalo was the basis of life for nomadic Plains Indians, but the Lakota also hunted other animals: elk, deer, pronghorn. "The hide of the elk is very strong, so we used it for wearing apparel, such as moccasins or leggings, but never for tipis," wrote Standing Bear. "Deer hide when tanned is soft and pliable and also durable enough for tipis. Because of its pliability, deer hide was used mostly for women's and children's dresses, being white and soft as a velvet fabric. However, the elk provided teeth for decoration on the clothing. From every elk we saved two teeth and used these on dresses and shirts long before the Elk Clubman used them for a watch-charm. A woman who could afford a dress trimmed with elk teeth was considered very beautifully and expensively dressed."27
The Lakota also were expert in prairie plant life, from roots to berries. The cottonwood, according to Luther Standing Bear, was the most useful of all trees. The Lakota used its bark for fires in which coals were needed and for tanning hides.28 Children chewed the thin, juicy, and sweet layer just under the bark. The Lakota used the wood for ceremonial objects, such as the central tree in a sun dance; for saddle frames, which they covered with bison hide; and for toys, such as dolls and spinning tops. In winter they cut down the trees so ponies could feed on the bark, leaving behind the wood used to warm the tepees. They filled pillows with fleecy cottonwood seeds. Remembering in later years the plants and animals that had so abounded on the plains, Standing Bear wrote, "It seemed that everywhere we went there was food waiting for us. In those days the Indian led a happy life."
If Plenty Horses did experience that happy life, it came suddenly to an end for him, just as it did for Luther Standing Bear. When Plenty Horses was about fourteen years old, and Luther Standing Bear about eleven, they were sent off to live at a federal school for Indians in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Standing Bear in his later years would recall the day he left the reservation: "These are all glad memories that I have told you, but I have one sad memory and that was when I went away to Carlisle School and had to leave my little pony behind. I still remember how sad I was because I could not take him with me. . . . I was only a little boy of eleven and the first part of the journey was fifty miles away from home, where we got the boat that was to take us to the railroad station. I rode my pony for that fifty miles and there had to say good-bye, for I was going East and thought at that time that I would never be back."29
The Carlisle school, which stood in the vanguard of the movement to transform Indian children into farmers and factory workers, was founded by a former military officer, Richard Henry Pratt, in the late 1870s. By then the predominant Indian rights advocates believed that all Indians were doomed unless they learned to live in family units and work at regular jobs. Pratt was a top proponent of this approach, and he bluntly said that the goal of those who wanted to "civilize" the Indian was cultural extinction, or, as he put it, to "kill the Indian [and] save the man."30
The idea that the nomadic, bison-hunting Lakota could be "saved" by forging them into laborers and farmers was officially espoused as early as 1851 by Superintendent of Indian Affairs D. D. Mitchell after he attended treaty talks at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. In his report on the event he wrote: "Humanity calls loudly for some interposition on the part of the American government to save, if possible, some portion of these ill-fated tribes; and this, it is thought, can only be done by furnishing them with the means, and gradually turning their attention to agricultural pursuits. . . . Fifty years it was thought would be time sufficient to give the experiment a fair trial, and solve the great problem whether or not an Indian can be made a civilized man."31
Richard Henry Pratt was in a position to carry out such ideas. In 1875 he was a thirty-five-year-old army lieutenant in Indian Territory assigned to escort a group of seventy-three Cheyenne Indian prisoners by train to Fort Marion, Florida, where they would be jailed for three years for their part in frontier warfare. On the way he was disgusted by local people who peered into carriage windows to gawk at the Indians during station stops. Pratt had worked with Indian scouts of various tribes, including Cherokee who had been educated in tribal schools and whose "intelligence, civilization and common sense was a revelation" to him. Watching how his prisoners were treated, he concluded that somehow "we must get [the Indians] out of the curio class."32
At Fort Marion, he required the Indian men to cut their long hair and wear army uniforms. The warriors opposed these measures, but within a few months they had done a complete turnaround, taking pride in their new look. They adapted to Pratt's ways and by 1876 were making a living by selling polished seashells for the tourist trade. "They have polished 10,000 seabeans for curio dealers," Pratt reported to the War Department. "They have made canes, bows and arrows and painted fans. They have glutted the market."33 Apparently the prisoners were pleased with their new lives: At the end of their sentence they asked to send for their families and live in the East, rather than return to Indian Territory. "We want our wives and children to come," they said, according to Pratt's account. "Then we will go any place and settle down and learn to support ourselves as the white men do."34
The Indian Bureau did not like the plan but in the end agreed to let twenty-two of the younger Cheyenne stay in the East as long as it cost the government nothing. Pratt found a place for seventeen of the former warriors at the Institute for Freedmen (also called the Hampton School) in Hampton, Virginia, created originally to educate African-Americans. The other five men were sent to live in private homes.
The popular press soon latched on to Pratt's story. A scribe of no less stature than Harriet Beecher Stowe—author of Uncle Tom 9s Cabin, the book Abraham Lincoln only half jokingly credited with starting the Civil War— published a magazine article about Pratt and the Cheyenne. Within short order, Indian rights advocates were suggesting that Pratt, too, go to Hampton to teach Indians. Instead, Pratt set out to start his own school, talking with various Washington bureaucrats and political appointees about his plan. General Sherman advised him to open his school out west, but Pratt was determined to locate it in the East, where the students could be isolated from their native land and people. "To civilize the Indian, put him in the midst of civilization," Pratt said. "To keep him civilized, keep him there." Still a military officer, Pratt soon found himself also headmaster of a school housed in an old army barracks in south-central Pennsylvania. He opened the school in October 1879 with eighty-four boys and girls from the Lakota tribes and fifty-two from Indian Territory. Among his first teachers were Cheyenne from Fort Marion. Among his first students was Luther Standing Bear.
Pratt ran his school with military discipline. Students were requi
red to wear uniforms and to cut their hair. Cutting the hair was onerous to the Lakota, for whom short hair was a sign of mourning. Even their names were changed. The first word of a student's name would be combined with his or her father's name to create a new, presumably "whiter," name, since the father's name functioned as a surname. Thus, Plenty Horses became Plenty Living Bear.35
For the Lakota, this loss of name must have cut deeply, because names were not bestowed lightly. In the Carlisle school's weekly newsletter, the Indian Helper, a Lakota girl described the pains the Lakota took in naming their children.
When a child is born it is not immediately named, and when it is, it is named after an ancestor—a grandfather or grandmother or grand aunt or some other relative. If not named as above it is named whatever the father or mother or uncle wants to name it. It is mostly the father or uncle of the child who names it. Whenever a great or good thing has been done or a brave act performed the child is named by the action, the name meaning whatever the deed has been done [sic] by the father or uncle, or grandfather. . . . The child is taken to the sun-dance and dressed very gay and fine in beads and red paint and highly trimmed moccasins, and oftentimes with a buckskin dress with beautiful designs made with beads of different colors. Taken then by the parents the father [sic] of the child brings three or four ponies and rides around the camps. He prepares a feast for the people. The feast consists of meat and bread and soup of some kind. And then the child is taken by the old chief who talks awhile and tells the people the name of the child and why it has been given this name. This is the way the Sioux name their children.36
All students were crippled socially by the ban on speaking their native tongue. The ban was strictly enforced. Pratt would whip infracting students with a leather strap. Carlisle gave Lakota children, whose parents never struck them, their first experience with corporal punishment. Other punishments were applied, too. Boys who got into fights or were caught drinking might be locked in a guardhouse. One boy who tried to sneak food out of the cafeteria was made to stand on a chair in the middle of the room during dinner, and a girl who wet her bed was ordered to carry her mattress wherever she went for a day. Those who could not take this treatment might try to run away—children under the age of ten tried walking cross-country or hopping trains to get home. Two girls attempted to burn down their dormitory and ended up in the Pennsylvania women's prison.37
So many students died of disease while at the school that Lakota parents often believed they would never see their offspring again after sending them away. However, as reservation agents sometimes threatened to withhold rations if a certain number of children were not sent, parents felt compelled to deliver at least portions of their broods.
Carlisle and other boarding schools were not all bad for all students. Girls learned sewing, housekeeping, and laundering, boys farming, carpentry, and printing, among other trades. They also participated in school athletics. Jim Thorpe, from Indian Territory, was a Carlisle athlete who went on to win Olympic medals and to become a top-notch football and baseball player. Charles Eastman attended schools in Wisconsin, where, he wrote in his autobiography, "my eyes were opened intelligently to the greatness of Christian civilization, the ideal civilization, as it unfolded itself before my eyes." He went on to medical school at Dartmouth before going to the Pine Ridge reservation to treat his fellow Indians.38
But Carlisle was not a success for students like Plenty Horses who later went back to the reservation. "Five years I attended Carlisle and was educated in the ways of the white man," he told a reporter. "When I returned to my people, I was an outcast among them. I was no longer an Indian."39
No better-informed voice could have supported Plenty Horses' view than that of Charles Eastman. Speaking to the Congregational Club in Chicago in early 1891, he sympathized with Indians in Plenty Horses' predicament. "If you were to send me back to the reservation, and make me stay there with nothing to do, I think I would go back to the old form of life," he said. "I would take up my blanket like my ancestors. What is wanted for the graduates from the Indian schools is work, not money. If they don't get work they naturally sink back into their old manner of living. The young Indians are taught to make shoes, to do carpenter work and tailoring, and then they are sent back to the reservation, where they have little, if any, chance to put their knowledge into practical use."40
While traveling the West, writer and artist Frederic Remington met graduates of the Carlisle school who recently had completed enlistments as military scouts, and he also agreed with Plenty Horses' assessment: "I talked with some Carlisle school-boys who had lately been discharged from the corps in order to make room for others of the tribe, and they were full of regrets, as they had liked soldiering, and now had nothing to do but draw rations at the agency. They were very bright young fellows, fairly educated, and each had a trade, I believe. There was no possible way for them to earn a living. They were not allowed off the reservation, and so they must sit calmly down and do nothing. Idleness is fully as bad for an Indian as a white man, and is always the godfather of folly and crime."41
Dr. Charles Eastman, a Dakota Indian, attended U.S. schools to become a medical doctor and an advocate for Indian education. He helped collect the dead at Wounded Knee in January 1891. (The Sophia Smith Collection, Women's History Archive, Smith College)
Carlisle officials admitted the problem in the pages of the Indian Helper. The June 18, 1891, issue reported: "Citizens of Norfolk, Nebr., protest against the employment of Indians in the beet fields at that place, on the ground that the Indian is a foreigner. The reports that some of the Indian boys from the school at Genoa were to be employed, was the cause of a meeting in which a set of resolutions were drawn up declaring it detrimental to the interests of the country to give the Indian work."42 With perhaps false bravado, the newsletter writer added: "Carlisle can find employment for a THOUSAND Indian boys immediately in this Eastern country at good wages. The Indians are WANTED here, on account of their true worth."
Plenty Horses, however, went back to a reservation in the West. He had been trained as a farmer, an occupation seen as the most promising for Indian boys. He had arrived at the school on November 14, 1883, as a fourteen-year-old standing five feet tall and weighing only ninety-four pounds.43 He had had no previous schooling, so he was enrolled in the first grade. When released in 1888, he was in the fourth grade but had spent nearly three of his four years at Carlisle in the "outing" program, in which students were sent to work on farms, in print shops, and so on. In 1890, for example, Pratt reported that more than five hundred students served in the outing program, earning an aggregate of fifteen thousand dollars, which apparently they were permitted to keep.44 Plenty Horses was outed to farms in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Although Pratt claimed with pride that few students returned to the old way of life when back on the reservation, Pratt's figures are suspect. He tended to shut his eyes when students did things he did not like. No example of this practice is better than Pratt's response to inquiries about Plenty Horses after the Casey shooting. In the Carlisle school publication, the Red Man, Pratt reported that a Chicago newspaper had suggested that Casey's killer—whom the paper erroneously identified as the son of No Water—had been a Carlisle student. Pratt responded that No Water's son had never attended the school, which was technically correct but evaded the fact that Plenty Horses, though no son of No Water, nevertheless was a Carlisle man.45
WHEN THE PLENTY HORSES TRIAL opened at 9:45 a.m. on Friday, April 24, 1891, the street outside the courthouse thronged with women dressed to the nines in colorful finery and with "rough and hardy frontiersmen, with broad-brimmed slouch hats and revolver belts."46 All wanted into the courtroom, which had, for Sioux Fallsians, become the center of the universe. Few were motivated by interest in justice or in a legal inquiry. The citizenry was incensed against Plenty Horses and eager for revenge. "Everybody is talking about the Casey tragedy and the opinion that the prisoner will be hanged is unanimous," repor
ted the New York World. "The situation, as the poplar [sic] mind views it, is this: 'A white man has been murdered by an Indian. The Indian must be hanged.' "47
Witnesses had been filtering into Sioux Falls for days, and the Indians among them drew particular interest as they paraded down the street, led by a U.S. marshal. Among them was Broken Arm, a broad-faced, middle-aged man who parted his long hair in the middle and highlighted his suit with a kerchief at his throat. He had ridden with Plenty Horses the day of the killing and witnessed Casey's death. Jack Red Cloud, the son of old Red Cloud, was there as well, decked out in a fine suit. Always grasping for acclaim—throughout his life he would long for the mantle of his father, but it would never fall on his shoulders—he had declared at one time that he, too, had seen the lieutenant killed, but in town, the courthouse looming near, he denied this and offered no recorded explanation for either his original statement or his retraction.
While Plenty Horses was languishing in jail—he would grow paler and thinner throughout the course of the trial—his comrades from the reservation stayed in a hotel. One morning they entertained themselves by going to see the seventeen buffalo penned in the park on the edge of town. Broken Arm and another witness, He Dog, climbed into the enclosure with the bison and tried to hug the animals, which warned them off with threatening shakes of their horned heads. The Lakota nevertheless ran around in the enclosure, and the bison watched them warily—"as though dazed at the proceedings," wrote one observer.48
A singular distraught figure caught the town's attention—an older man, "as fine a specimen of the Sioux Indian as one could find," neither tall nor stout but athletic.49 This outstanding individual was Living Bear, Plenty Horses' father. Once he was in town, Plenty Horses' stoic but dour demeanor relaxed a little, and he allowed himself a few rare smiles, according to one observer, even "on occasions when an ordinary person in his position would at least pretend to be serious. This is understood to be the Indian way of expressing entire satisfaction with the proceedings."50 When father and son first met in Sioux Falls, they embraced, and although Plenty Horses, as vaguely described in the New York World, remained as "unmoved as though he were a statute of bronze," his father revealed "that deep affection Indians always show for their offspring." Plenty Horses, according to the newspaper's cryptic account, "partially gave way to his emotions" when his father had to leave him.51
