by In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars
Throughout the trial, at the end of each session, Living Bear, head bowed and eyes lowered, would follow his son and two escorting deputies back to jail. When the door closed behind Plenty Horses at the jail steps, Living Bear would stand and gaze at the spot where he had last seen his son, then walk to his hotel. In the morning or after the lunch break, the first thing the deputies saw when they stepped outside was Living Bear, waiting for them, "and thus he goes on day in and day out, without a murmur of discontent, solemn, silent, sad."52
Chief among the frontiersmen who drew the public's attention was Philip Wells, a scout and interpreter from Pine Ridge who had been in the thick of the opening fire at Wounded Knee. He wore his hair cut close and his mustache waxed to hold it straight out, extending past his jawline. In hand-to-hand combat at Wounded Knee, a Lakota warrior had slashed Wells's nose, cutting it from the bridge to his lip and leaving it hanging by the skin. After shooting and killing the warrior, Wells left the battle hastily, found a doctor, had his nose plastered into place, and returned to the fight. The next day he joined the fray at the Drexel Mission battle, in which Plenty Horses also had taken up arms. By the time of the trial, Wells's nose had healed but was scarred. He was to serve the court as a witness and as a translator for Lakota participants. Another translator would handle the Cheyenne witnesses, such as Casey's scout White Moon, who spoke little or no English.
The trial was staged in a room warmed by the prairie spring and by a sweltering horde of humanity eager to see the goings-on. For them, the trial may have served as entertainment, but for Plenty Horses' as-yet-unpaid attorneys, George Nock and David Edward Powers, it was a fight to save the Brulé's life. As the Argus-Leader put it: "There is no such think [sic] as life imprisonment for murder, under the United States statutes. The jury can only acquit, convict for murder, and hang the defendant, or convict of manslaughter."
Those with an opinion about the trial and about Plenty Horses' innocence or guilt divided into two uneven camps.53 The larger one held that Plenty Horses was an assassin who had shaken Casey's hand, talked with him as a friend, and then shot him from behind. This group believed Plenty Horses should hang. The other side, which at the outset of the trial was probably a tiny minority, believed Plenty Horses was a troubled young man driven to distraction by the ghost dance and by events surrounding and including Wounded Knee, where, according to newspaper accounts, he had lost a cousin. Casey, they believed, had threatened verbally to attack the camp in which Plenty Horses was living, and the young man had done what any soldier would do to a threatening enemy. This argument, however, was weak because only Plenty Horses had heard the alleged threat.
The pro—Plenty Horses camp nevertheless did have a couple of things working in its favor. One was the defendant's demeanor, the controlled calm of a man facing death with courage, a stoicism that the press portrayed with open admiration. He may not have killed bravely, but apparently he knew how to die bravely. Another was the pathetic look of the young Indian, dressed in his cheap shirt and pants and wrapped up in the weathered blue blanket he had been wearing when he shot Casey. Pitifully, he made an effort to conceal his left hand, from which he was missing fingers. In every photo taken of Plenty Horses at the time of the trial, his left hand is hidden, as if he were determined to conceal his flaws. The New York World reported that Plenty Horses in court "looked rather lonesome there, and, though he pretended that it was all satisfactory, it did look severe to see the semi-savage on trial before a court which he did not understand and under laws the nature of which he was not able to comprehend. He knew not whether the defense was properly conducted, or even whether it was conducted at all, but contentedly he bowed to the governing power and made a show of satisfaction."54
Plenty Horses' conduct in court may have turned a few heads, but it provided no legal defense. For that, his lawyers had only a single arrow in their quiver: They had to prove that on the day Plenty Horses shot Lieutenant Casey, the Lakota nation was at war with the United States and, therefore, the killing of Casey was not murder but just another wartime slaying. Given the battle of Wounded Knee and the subsequent fights, as well as the huge military buildup on the reservations, the idea that the reservations were at war seems a given, and yet opinions differed sharply on this point.
It almost goes without saying that Plenty Horses believed that what he had done was a guiltless act of war. After the ghost dancers had surrendered, neither he nor any other Lakota had thought he would be arrested for murder. In an interview with the New York World reporter, published also in the Argus-Leader, he said of the shooting: "I do not deny that Lieutenant Casey came to his death at my hands, and whatever the fate the court decrees I am ready and willing to suffer. He was killed, yes; but not murdered, and I shall go to my grave in that opinion."55 He also made the point that would be central to the defense strategy. "We were at war with the whites. If we had sent a spy into their camp with the expressed intention of getting points to use against them for an attack, they would not have hesitated to kill him if captured."56
It is not surprising that among those who agreed with Plenty Horses' position was Red Cloud, who said that though the killing was an unfortunate act of war, it was not murder. But Plenty Horses also had an unexpected ally: General Nelson Miles. Richard Henry Pratt wrote in the February-March 1891 issue of the Red Man that "General Miles is reported to have said that if any of the ghost dancers had come as near to the military camps as Lieut. Casey went to the ghost dancers' camps, they would have been justifiably shot."57
Plenty Horses alluded to another issue in the subtext of his trial. "If they are going to punish every man who shot another when not engaged in actual fighting, then why not arrest the soldiers who killed poor old Big Foot? He was lying before his tepee dying of fever, unable to raise his hand, and yet a dozen bullets were fired into his body. And look at the six Indians found long after the battle—one man and the rest women and children, all shot down within eight miles of Pine Ridge by scouts or soldiers! Why not investigate that? I suppose they say it can't be done, but it can. There are many similar cases to mine. We were at war."
Here, Plenty Horses introduced a theme that would crop up in subsequent newspaper coverage of his trial. Why not arrest the soldiers? And if Plenty Horses were convicted, would the soldiers, or at least the officers in charge, be arrested for murder? Or at least investigated as potential murderers? Especially vulnerable on these charges, as Plenty Horses pointed out, were the soldiers who on horseback had ridden down fleeing women and children and killed them even miles from the battle.
BY APRIL 1891 GENERAL MILES had in fact already investigated the events at Wounded Knee.58 He wanted to hold Colonel James Forsyth responsible for botching the disarming of Sitanka's warriors and particularly for disobeying Miles's order that the colonel avoid mixing soldiers with the Indians during any action. This disobedience, Miles believed, reflected badly on himself.59
Miles also contended that Forsyth's deployment of troops among the Indians would have disgraced even a second lieutenant fresh out of officer's training. The colonel had had 500 troops against the Lakota's 100 warriors, who were encumbered with about 250 women and children. He should have been in complete control if he possessed any measure of military competence.
After removing Forsyth from command, Miles put Captain Frank Baldwin—for many years a Miles ally—and Inspector General Jacob Ford Kent of the Missouri Division in charge of an investigation into the Forsyth case. Their report would move up official channels to Washington, D.C., making recommendations for Forsyth's punishment. In Washington, the military took a mere measured view of Wounded Knee. The retired but still influential Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, to whose niece Mary General Miles was wed, told Miles via a letter written to Mary on January 7, "If Forsyth was relieved because some squaw was killed, somebody has made a mistake, for squaws have been killed in every Indian war." To Miles directly he said in regard to Wounded Knee, "Say little and write less."60
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Baldwin and Kent examined the troop deployments that so rankled Miles, but Forsyth's junior officers offered only measured criticism of their colonel's actions, contending that if none, of them had foreseen a fight, they could not hold their commander accountable for failing to do so. When Baldwin and Kent investigated the killing of women and children, the junior officers maintained that smoke and confusion had led to the unfortunate deaths. The two investigators on January 13, 1891, gave Forsyth only a slap on the wrist, censuring him for his troop deployments and dropping all other charges. Kent called the situation at Wounded Knee "unavoidable and unfortunate," but nothing more.
Miles, outraged, three days later ordered the case reopened. The investigators were assigned specifically to determine whether Forsyth had disobeyed Miles's order about mingling. Kent still sided with Forsyth, reporting, "It seems impossible to me that he could then calculate that the Indians would deliberately plan their own destruction."61 In effect, he was blaming the Indians for being slaughtered.
This time Baldwin harshly concluded that Forsyth had "entirely disregarded" Miles's order about keeping the troops separate from the Indians. Miles heartily agreed with the tougher judgment, writing in his endorsement that Forsyth had left Miles's order "unheeded and disregarded" and concluding, "It is in fact difficult to conceive how a worse disposition of troops could have been made." He also wrote of Forsyth to the adjutant general, "I have no hesitation in saying, that I would not jeopardize the lives of officers and men in the hands of such an officer."
But Miles's superiors, including the secretary of war, wanted Wounded Knee to vanish into the past and be forgotten. They put Forsyth back in command, ignoring Miles's recommendation for a court-martial. At the time of Plenty Horses' trial, however, Miles was still not willing to drop the issue of Wounded Knee and Forsyth's culpability, although his interest was primarily in Forsyth's failure to follow an order rather than in punishing mortal crimes.
The killing of fleeing women and children at Wounded Knee had more in common with the charges against Plenty Horses than did the exchange of fire between soldiers and warriors, and Miles did not neglect this issue. During the Wounded Knee inquiry, Miles had Baldwin investigate the shooting of a Lakota woman, two Lakota girls (ages seven and eight), and one boy (about ten years old) whose bodies had been found together about three miles west of the Wounded Knee battle site on the day of the battle. The Seventh Cavalry officer who had tracked down these Indians testified at the Forsyth hearings that his men had fired on the group when they were hidden in shrubs, fearing they were warriors, and had hit them randomly but fatally. Baldwin, however, examined the bodies and reported that "each person had been shot once, the character of which was necessarily fatal in each case. . . . The shooting was done at so close a range that the person or clothing of each person was powder burned."62 If any outright murder occurred because of Wounded Knee, this killing of four people was it. But this issue, too, was swept under the rug, and no punishment was meted out. Perhaps the case would be reopened in a future investigation, if Miles were able to initiate one, but if Plenty Horses were found innocent, justice for these four dead, as well as others, would be impossible to achieve.
Miles's effectiveness in reopening the investigation could have been enhanced by the Plenty Horses trial. If Casey's killer were found guilty of murder, Indian rights groups certainly would raise the issue of murder at Wounded Knee. Miles could use the groups' outcry as a wedge for pressing further charges. On the other hand, he might see murder charges at Wounded Knee as a blemish on his record and seek instead to clear the soldiers of any guilt. It is doubtful anyone feared that either the army as a whole or individual soldiers would face prosecution, but everyone also knew that if Plenty Horses were held accountable for killing Casey, his guilty verdict would raise the specter of culpability for the army.
In addition to establishing that the reservations had been at war during the shooting, Plenty Horses' attorneys had one other potential means for winning acquittal. If they could show that Plenty Horses' motive in killing Casey was self-defense—or, an even larger cause, the defense of the Indian camp with its women and children—then the jury might let him go home unharmed. Unfortunately, although Plenty Horses did tell the grand jury in Deadwood that he had shot Casey to protect the camp, he also added another rationale: "I shot the lieutenant so I might make a place for myself among my people. I am now one of them." He knew the whites would make him pay, but he did not care. "I shall be hung," he had said, "and the Indians will bury me as a warrior. They will be proud of me. I am satisfied."63
IF SHOOTING HIS ENEMY IN the back of the head, instead of bravely charging him head-on, was a far cry from Lakota concepts of warfare and bravely, the killing itself was not. In fact, winning prestige through homicide was a well-traveled road in Lakota culture. Leaders among the Lakota gained status in part—and it was a large part—by fighting and killing enemies, actions that demonstrated bravery and fortitude, not to mention skill in the art of death, a form of prowess highly regarded by the Lakota and necessary to their survival. All the great chiefs took lives. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail won their status in part by taking more than one hundred lives apiece. Red Cloud could be ruthless in battle. He once led an attack on peaceful Arapaho, killing all the men but letting the women and children go. In another fight he charged into a river to capture an enemy on the verge of drowning. He dragged his opponent out of the water by the hair and scalped him as soon as they reached shore.64
Sitting Bull, one of the greatest Lakota chiefs of the nineteenth century, first won acclaim when, at fourteen, he chased down a mounted Crow Indian and struck him with a war club, knocking him from his horse.65 Soon his renown in battle was so great that enemies could be thrown off their game when he simply shouted out to them, eeTatanka Iyotanka he miye, " which means "I am Sitting Bull."66 His horse was famous too, so fast that it generally carried him ahead of all others into battle. Crazy Horse, whom the Lakota considered their finest warrior-chief of the mid-1800s, also aimed always to be in the lead when attacking enemies.67 He was only sixteen when he faced two Arapaho in battle and killed them both, launching his career as a great warrior. 68 Killing breathed prestige into a man's life.
Killing in the name of status was not always reserved for warfare. Red Cloud won prestige early among the Oglala after he helped kill an arrogant and troublesome chief named Bull Bear.69 Within Lakota society, Plenty Horses' assassination of Lieutenant Casey, although without valor, was still not a criminal act. It fell within the acceptable bounds of taking enemy life.70
However, killing by itself was not a point of pride. The real issue was bravery, a cardinal virtue among the Lakota, who relished courageous deeds and were constantly looking for new ways to exhibit their boldness. For example, during a battle with the army in the 1870s a younger warrior mocked Sitting Bull, then nearing his forties, for keeping back from enemy fire. Sitting Bull promptly awed his war party by sitting down on a hillside in full view of enemy soldiers and calmly smoking a pipe—twice—while bullets slapped the ground around him, a demonstration that one of his fellow Lakota called "the bravest deed possible."71
A warrior did not even have to kill to gain status in war. Counting coup, which involved performing specific acts of bravery, such as touching the enemy, alive or dead, rather than shooting him from a distance, was among the more respected acts of bravery and honor. Lakota warriors exhibited their coups by displays of ornamentation, like U.S. soldiers wearing medals. In battle, the first warrior to touch an enemy—with his hand, a bow, lance, whip, rattle, or other item—won the right to wear a golden eagle feather upright on the back of his head.72 The second to count coup wore an eagle feather tilted to the right. The third wore the feather horizontally, and the fourth wore a vulture feather vertically.
Coups could be won in other ways, too. Killing an enemy in hand-to-hand combat was coup-worthy, winning the warrior the right to paint a red hand on his clothing and on his horse. "S
aving a friend in battle entitled a man to paint a cross on his clothing, and if the benefactor rode his friend to safety on the back of his horse, he might wear a double cross," anthropologist Royal Hass-rick reported in his 1964 book, The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society, perhaps the best description of traditional Lakota culture during its peak years, from 1830 to 1870.73
"Coups might be indicated by painting vertical stripes on leggings; red stripes indicated that the wearer had been wounded," wrote Hassrick. "Coup feathers dyed red also signified wounds; notched feathers showed the owner's horse to have been wounded. Scouts successful in sighting an enemy were awarded coups. A black feather ripped down the center with the tip remaining was their badge."74
Warriors won coup points for stealing horses, an act of bravery that also brought material wealth. A warrior showed how many horses he had taken by painting hoofprints on a coup feather or on his leggings or even on his horse, with the color of the print matching the color of the stolen horse. If a man captured ten horses, he was entitled to wear a miniature rope and moccasin on his belt. If less than ten, just the rope.75
With coups came bragging rights, which the Lakota warrior was quick to claim, taking every opportunity to boast about his own exploits and to mock the less successful or less aggressive. Boasting was a sign of success. "Humility for the Sioux was an indication of stupidity, evidence of a deficiency of personal conviction," Hassrick observed.76
