Roger Di Silvestro

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

  All listened spellbound as to a revelation from heaven to these words out of the night and the vast empty spaces. Presently the men prepared a vapor bath (which had for them a religious as well as a hygienic meaning), and I fell asleep once more to the soothing, monotonous beat of ritual songs—never dreaming of the strange and cruel events destined to grow out of Chasing Crane's fantastic story.

  39 Wrote E. W. Forester, the agent at South Dakota's Yankton agency, to T. J. Morgan, commissioner of Indian affairs, on November 25, 1890: "Most of our Indians treat these revelations with derision and ridicule; yet there is, 1 observe, in the heart of the old Indian a sort of hope, and perhaps belief, that it is true. These old fellows, who are half fed and half starved, dream with delight of the old days when the buffalo bounded on these plains, and to them such a doctrine is as savory as was the advent of Christ to the old Jews who longed for the old days of Solomon and all this glory to be repeated." National Archives microfilm 983, roll 2, p. 2,040.

  40 Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 85.

  41 Ibid., p. 62; the following text on Short Bull also comes from this source.

  42 Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 14.

  43 For background on L. Frank Baum and racism, see Katharine M. Rogers, L. Frank Baum:Creator of 0{ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002). The quote here is from www.bluecorncomics.com/baum.htm.

  44 McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian, p. 185, with minor changes to punctuation.

  45 Ubid., p. 15.

  46 Weldon is a mysterious figure from the ghost dance period, arriving seemingly out of nowhere and then vanishing from the historical record. Newspapers reported her activities but were often so inaccurate that they did not even get her name right, although with apparent relish they called her Sitting Bull's white squaw. Weldon blamed the Standing Rock agent James McLaughlin for these stories, believing that he planted them to discredit her; see Stanley Vestal, New Sources of Indian History, 1850—1891: The Ghost Dance, the Prairie Sioux: A Miscellany (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934), pp. 92-98. The text here is based on material in Utley, The Lance and the Shield, pp. 282—86, as well as Vestal, New Sources of Indian History, pp. 97—115, in which several of her letters appear, providing some tangible sense of her personality. Robert Utley, in a personal communication, told me he calls her the "crazy lady." Her letters do indeed suggest that she was emotionally intense, but then she was dealing with intensely emotional issues.

  47 See the preceding note for sources on Weldon's thoughts and concerns.

  48 William S. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), P-73-

  49 Quoted in Vestal, New Sources of Indian History, p. 101.

  50 She was not alone in fearing for his life. Sitting Bull—who believed he could understand the language of birds—had told her that meadowlarks were warning him that his own people would kill him.

  51 Vestal, New Sources of Indian History, p. 104.

  52 Utley, The Lance and the Shield, p. 292.

  53 Mooney, Ghost Dance Religion, p. 892. Not all local journalists agreed with the scare tactics of their brethren. However, their more-reasoned concerns were based on self-interest, not fairness to the Indians. Bad press—which included stories about hostile Indians, drought, and other forms of bad weather—was likely to discourage new settlers and investors. And as every editor worth his newsprint well knew, one of the primary purposes of the many small-town prairie newspapers was to promote local interests and attract eastern investors and settlers. The Chadron Democrat on November 27, 1890, lodged a protest to the sensationalized stories of other papers. "On Monday some of our citizens circulated for signature a protest to the Omaha Bee [sic] and World Herald [sic], asking them to discontinue the publication of sensational reports of the Indian troubles which have filled the columns of the Omaha papers for the past few weeks. Although the protest will probably not do any good, it is no doubt a move in the right direction, as the wholesale publication of outlandish and improbable falsehoods as have appeared in the state papers cannot but prove detrimental to this part of the country, and will be the means of retarding settlement for years to come. Let it be stopped at once." Quoted in Don Huls, The Winter of 1890 (What Happened at Wounded Knee) (Chadron, NE: Don Huls, 1988), p. 15.

  A week later, the Chadron Democrat revisited the issue, declaring, "The Indian excitement is accounting for one thing at least, that of having produced a crop of fine, large sensational mongers and liars of the first water, chief among which stand C.H.C., special correspondent of the Omaha Bee [sic], and W.F.K., of the State Journal [sic]. From the very beginning of the present trouble they have shown a marked proclivity to enlarge upon every trivial incident and distort the truth far beyond the bounds of reason, besides having at times manufactured stories of blood and rapine in order to pander to the depraved tastes of the lovers of the marvelous and create a sale for the papers which they represent." Quoted in Huls, The Winter of 1890, pp. 21—22.

  54 Charles Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civiliiation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977; reprint of 1936 edition published by Little, Brown), pp. 93-98.

  55 Quoted in Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 111.

  56 Ibid., p. 114.

  CHAPTER 5. DEATH COMES FOR SITTING BULL

  1 Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 118.

  2 Ibid., pp. 120-42, 191-92, 232-35, 251.

  3 Quoted in ibid., p. 141.

  4 Crow Dog had achieved a form of fame about a decade earlier when he killed Spotted Tail. See note 7 for chapter 3, p. 215.

  5 Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, drew upon several firsthand sources and military records to put together his more detailed description of the Stronghold peace missions. See pp. 140—42 of his book for his sources. One of his key sources was Thomas S. Bland, A Brief History of the Late Military Invasion of the Home of the Sioux (Washington, DC: National Indian Defense Association, 1891). Bland interviewed many of the Lakota who were involved in these affairs.

  6 Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 145.

  7 Quoted in Flora Warren Seymour, Indian Agents of the Old Frontier (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), p. 300.

  8 Quoted in ibid., p. 305. McLaughlin could be quite the autocrat. In his autobiography, My Friend the Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989; reprint of 1910 edition published by Houghton Mifflin), he described how he, like some other agents, would perform marriages among the Indians even though he lacked the authority for doing so. He felt that any ceremony would help to give the Lakota "a sense of the importance of government." He performed so many faux marriages that "a facetious army officer at Fort Yates, in speaking with some eastern tourists of the religious denominations on the reservation, said that there were Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and McLaughlinites" (p. 67).

  9 Letter from William J. Cleveland at Standing Rock to Herbert Welsh, January 12, 1891, at the Philadelphia Historical Society, Indian Rights Association correspondence, series 1, reel 6.

  10 For details see Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt), and John M. Carroll, The Arrest and Killing of Sitting Bull (Matti-tuck, NY: Amereon House, 1986). Both draw on eyewitness accounts of the arrest and the events leading up to it.

  11 An army lieutenant stopped another Indian from cutting up a portrait of Sitting Bull that Catherine Weldon had painted. He later bought it from Sitting Bull's wives for two dollars.

  12 Quoted in Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 167.

  13 Philadelphia Historical Society, Indian Rights Association correspondence, series 1, reel 6.

  14 The quote is from www.bluecorncomics.com/baum.htm.

  CHAPTER 6. GUNFIRE AT WOUNDED KNEE

  1 For accounts of the pursuit of Sitanka and the fight at Wounded Knee, see William Coleman's Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2000); Robert Utley's The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); Tom Streissguth's Wounded Knee 1890: The End of the Plains Indian Wars (New York: Facts on File, 1998); Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civiliiation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977; reprint of 1936 edition published by Little, Brown); Elaine Goodale Eastman's memoir, Sister to the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978); and Forrest W. Seymour's detailed Sitanka, The Full Story of Wounded Knee (West Hanover, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1981).

  2 One story says that the creek was named in memory of a man who was wounded in the knee with an arrow on the bank of the stream. The literal translation is "shot in the knee." Streissguth, Wounded Knee, p. 78.

  3 The number of dead and wounded on each side is still hard to determine. Various sources say 34 dead troops, or 39; 350 dead Lakota, or 153, as well as other numbers. See Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, pp. 354-56, for a useful discussion of numbers, as well as Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 228; Streissguth, Wounded Knee, p. 95; and especially James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (New York: Dover, 1973; reprint of 1896 edition of The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 published by the Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.), pp. 871-72.

  4 Elaine Goodale Eastman, Sister to the Sioux, p. 162.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Charles Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilisation, pp. 108—9.

  7 Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 251.

  8 Robert Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 186.

  9 Charles Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilisation, p.108-9.

  10 Ibid., p. 114.

  11 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 276.

  12 Archive of the Indian Rights Association (IRA), at the Philadelphia Historical Society, series I, reel 6, IRA correspondence.

  13 Quoted in Don Huls, The Winter of 1890 (What Happened at Wounded Knee) (Chadron, NE: Don Huls, 1988), p. 34.

  14 Political enemies in the East began telling newspaper reporters in November that Miles was using the reservation troubles to boost himself as a potential presidential candidate in 1892 (Wooster, Nelson A. Miles, pp. 181—82, 250—51). The Washington Evening Star published comments from an unnamed "prominent army officer" stationed in Washington, who said: "Miles is predicting a general Indian war and virtually asks that the command of the entire army be turned over to him. He wants to create a scare and pose as the savior of the country. I have no doubt in the world that he is honest in his candidacy. He has shrewdly enlisted the favor of nearly every newspaper man in California, and has by his agreeable manners and the expenditure of his means managed to make himself very popular in a certain way in the west. He is one [of] the most ambitious men in the army and he is pulling the wires shrewdly."

  Miles in 1888 had supported unsuccessfully his father-in-law, John Sherman, the brother of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, for the Republican presidential nomination and would support him again in 1892. In 1902 Miles himself would jump to the Democratic Party to seek its nomination for a run against Theodore Roosevelt. It is not likely, nor entirely unlikely, that he had presidential aspirations in 1891. Regardless, he was angered by the nameless "prominent officer" and wanted the matter investigated.

  CHAPTER 7. CASEY'S LAST RIDE

  1 Frederic Remington, The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, ed. Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels (n.p.: Castle, 1986), p. 74.

  2 Ibid., p. 73.

  3 Ibid., p. 74.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid., p. 76.

  6 Letter from Lieutenant Robert Getty to assistant adjutant general, April 13, 1891, National Archives, microfilm 983, roll 1, p. 838.

  7 Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 256-57.

  8 Letter from Lieutenant Robert Getty to assistant adjutant general, April 13, 1891, National Archives, microfilm 983, roll 1, p. 838; see also Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, p. 257.

  9 Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 411-12.

  10 Coincidentally, both Casey and Gatewood were lieutenants under General Nelson Miles's command. Also, there was the matter of the nose: The Apache had dubbed Gatewood "Big Nose Captain," and the Cheyennes called Casey "Big Red Nose."

  11 Casey might have commiserated with an officer, quoted anonymously in the Washington Star, who said that after Wounded Knee he felt "like throwing aside the uniform that honors me with its covering and donning in its place the blanket of the savage. Then I could fight and be sure that my cause had a just foundation." Cited in William S. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 379. Casey also would have agreed with a comment made by an officer who commanded Crow Indian troops: "For seventy-five years our little army, always the friend and benefactor of the Indian in time of peace, has been called upon from time to time to do battle with him in cruel and bloody wars. The justice of the case was well known to lie often with the so-called 'hostile' tribe, and many a gallant officer and man have, in the very act of destroying its camps and shooting down its warriors in the bloody fight, deplored the iniquity of the cause they represented." From Harper's Weekly 36:156—60. Reprinted in Richard Upton, ed., The Indian Soldier at Fort Custer, Montana, 1890-1895 (El Segundo, CA: Upton and Sons, 1983), pp. 156-60.

  12 Thomas W Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 181.

  13 For general information on Casey's meeting with Plenty Horses, see Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, pp. 256—68; Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); and Maurice Frink and Casey E. Barthelmess, Photographer on an Army Mule (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965). The National Archives files, especially record groups 75 and 393, include important materials on the ghost dance and the military response to it. The Casey-family collection at the archive of Historic New England and various contemporary newspaper accounts, particularly those published in May 1890 in the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, provide details of Casey's encounter with Plenty Horses.

  14 National Archives, record group 393, part 5, entry 28, vol. 2, Fort Keogh, Montana, p. 26 for Rock Road and p. 44 for White Moon.

  15 Letter from Lieutenant Robert Getty to assistant adjutant general, April 13, 1891, National Archives, microfilm 983, roll 1, p. 838; and the New York World, April 26, 1891.

  16 New York World, April 26, 1891.

  17 Ibid.

  18 For an excellent account of the Red Cloud wars and Red Cloud's life on the reservation, see Robert W. Larson, Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux (Norman: University oi Oklahoma Press, 1997).

  19 Quoted in Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, pp. 232—33.

  20 Red Cloud's reaction can be found in National Archives, microfilm 983, roll 2, pp. 1, 172—76.

  21 Ibid., pp. 1, 175.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid., pp. 1,172-73.

  25 Ibid., pp. 1,176.

  26 Casey's body did not lie abandoned, for long. On the day of the shooting, the military retrieved the frozen corpse, which was found naked but without such traditional Lakota mutilations as scalping, removal of ears, and slashes to the thighs—wounds the Lakota believed the dead would continue to suffer the afterworld.

  The military turned over Casey's body to a doctor and undertaker in Oelrichs, South Dakota, for embalming and dressing. The physician injected the body with enough zinc chloride to preserve it for a month. The face was disfigured, presumably from the exit wound, so that Casey was unrecognizable except when viewed in right profile. On the evening of January 8, the coffined body was placed on the 9
p.m. train and shipped east, escorted by a corporal. Cost of embalming and undertaking totaled fifty-five dollars. (Casey archive at Historic New England, box 83, folder B3, p. 77, letter dated January 9, 1891, written to Thomas Lincoln Casey by a captain with an illegible signature.)

  The body arrived in New York City, three hours late, on January 11. The burial was at the family farm in Warwick, Rhode Island. Thomas Casey hired two carriages for the burial at a cost of four dollars. (Historic New England, box 83.)

  The Silas Casey Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, named for Casey's father, sent a wreath. Casey's older brother Silas put a small bouquet of violets on the coffin before it was lowered into the ground. The family then retreated to the Casey house for dinner. (Historic New England, box 106, Thomas Lincoln Casey's diary entry for January 11, 1891. Frink and Barthelmess, Photographer on an Army Mule, pp. 101-2, as well as genealogical information from various Web sites and particularly, for most of the details about the burial, records at Historic New England.)

  Nettie Atchison urged the family to bury Casey at West Point, which she wrote "was the wish of his heart." She added, "He had a dread oi being buried at the farm." She continued to protest his burial after it was completed, but his brother Thomas decided to leave the dead lie. Historic New England, box 83, January 15 to 31,1891.

  27 Historic New England, box 121, Thomas Lincoln Casey's day diary for January 8, 1891.

  28 Historic New England, box 121, folder M, news clip in Thomas Lincoln Casey's scrapbook.

  29 Historic New England, box 83, January 1 to 15, 1891.

  30 Casey had written to Nettie around Christmastime, telling her: "Do not worry about me. A man's time comes only when the Almighty is ready for it. But pray that I may do what my duty requires and that my Scouts may deserve credit." Nettie's letters can be found in box 83, January 15 to 31,1891, at Historic New England.