by In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars
31 Ibid.
32 Historic New England, box 121, folder E, p. 104, Thomas Lincoln Casey's scrapbook.
33 A shoot-out between Chippewa Indians and troops in Minnesota in 1898 left six soldiers dead, but it resulted from military support for a marshal arresting an Indian and was not an event in the Indian wars.
CHAPTER 8. AMBUSH OR SELF-DEFENSE?
1 Black Hills Weekly Journal, January 16, 1891.
2 Sturgis Weekly Record, January 23,1891.
3 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, May 16, 1891.
4 Marshall's report can be found on National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10937. A similar report from Marshall can be found in microfilm 983, pp. 1,188—1,197; although the two reports are nearly identical, some wording differs between them.
5 National Archives microfilm P2187, roll 4, item 10937, p. 1,065.
6 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, July 2, 1891, 8. The comment about the warning appeared in the Sturgis Weekly Record for January 23, 1891.
7 National Archives, microfilm 983, p. 1,188.
8 I found two reports by Marshall, one in National Archives, microfilm P2187 (D-G), roll 45, item 10937 and the other in National Archives, microfilm 983, beginning on p. 1,188. In the latter, dated January 22, Marshall states that he visited the wagon on the morning of the twelfth, and in the former, dated January 25, on the thirteenth. Given that the shooting occurred on the eleventh, and that Marshall reports in 10937 that he arrived at the Quinn ranch in the evening of the twelfth, I presume that the thirteenth is correct. I suspect that the date he reported in the document on microfilm 983 was a typo.
9 National Archives, microfilm 983, p. 1,191.
10 National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10937, p. 1,065.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Miles had left his Chicago headquarters in early December in favor of a command post in Rapid City, South Dakota, where he could keep a closer eye on military operations. A month later he moved to Pine Ridge itself.
14 Robert Wooster, Nelson A. Miles & the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 188.
15 The Pioneer, Deadwood, South Dakota, probably April 1891. Undated clipping found in National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 11944.
16 The following biographical sketch of Nelson Miles is based on material in Wooster, Nelson A.Miles.
17 Ibid., p. 35.
18 Like Casey, Miles could trace his family history in the New World back to the 1630s. One of his father's ancestors, the Reverend John Myles (as with so many immigrants in all eras, the family would adopt a new spelling in the New World), served as a captain in the colonial militia during King Philip's War (see note 16 for chapter 11 for more on that war). Miles's greatgrandfather and three of his great-uncles fought the British during the Revolutionary War.
19 Quoted in Wooster, Nelson A. Miles, p. 3.
20 Quoted in ibid., p. 125.
21 Ibid., p. 192.
22 Robert Lee, Fort Meade & the Black Hills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 127.
23 Ibid., p. 126.
24 Robert Utley, "The Ordeal of Plenty Horses," American Heritage 26, no. 1 (1974): pp. 19-20.
25 Indian Rights Association, Ninth Annual Report (1891), p. 43, quoted in Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 265. The name indicated that his reputation as a warrior was so fearsome that merely the sight of his horses frightened his enemies.
26 Many sources outline the events covered in this chapter. A good thumbnail description appears in Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. The story of the shooting of Few Tails, as related here, is pieced together from testimonies by Clown, One Feather, Red Owl, and U.S. soldiers as they appear in National Archives microfilm, P2187, roll 45, 10937. Other citations appear below. The quote here is from Clown's testimony.
27 See note 1 for this chapter.
28 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, May 13, 1891.
29 Sturgis Weekly Record, January 23, 1891.
30 Clown's testimony in National Archives, microfilm, P2187, roll 45, item 10937.
31 The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader for May 16, 1891, reported that the Culbertsons plotted the attack the night of January 10 but does not cite a source for this information.
32 Clown's testimony to military officials is in National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10937.
33 Ibid.
34 National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10937.
35 Black Hills Weekly Journal (Rapid City, South Dakota), January 16,1891, and the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, May 16, 1891.
36 One Feather's actions won the admiration of Captain F. E. Pierce, the acting Indian agent at Pine Ridge, who wrote to the assistant adjutant general of the Division of the Missouri in Chicago: "The determination and genuine courage, as well as the generalship he [One Feather] manifested in keeping at a distance the six men who were pursuing him, and the devotion he showed toward his family, risking his life against great odds, designate him as entitled to a place on the list of heroes. His wife was badly wounded at the first fire. One daughter is only 13 or 14, and the other girl a baby, less than one year of age, yet he protected and saved and took them to a place of safety." National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10937.
37 National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10937.
38 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, May 16, 1891.
39 Sturgis Weekly Record, January 23, 1891.
CHAPTER 9. THE LAST BATTLE
1 The account of Plenty Horses' arrest is based on Cloman's official report, which can be found in National Archives, microfilm 983, pp. 1, 163—68.
2 The accusation against Young Skunk proved to be a case of mistaken identification, and later he was released. The Indian who did kill Miller was never prosecuted, in large part because of the Plenty Horses trial and its outcome.
3 The source for quotes about Rushville is W. Fletcher Johnson, Life of Sitting Bull and History of the Indian War of 1890—91 (n.p.: Edgewood, 1891). This curious little book, fraught with inaccuracies but also offering interesting contemporary perspectives on the Wounded Knee conflict and related events, was published by March 1891, only three months after Sitting Bull was shot. The author also wrote other books about recent contemporary events, such as the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood.
4 "Towns not on railroad lines, struggling to survive, not uncommonly concluded that their only hope for prosperity was to prevail on a railroad to run a spur to the town, thereby connecting it to the great national network of rails. Railroads often 'auctioned off a lifesaving spur line to the town that made the highest bid; towns not infrequently bankrupted themselves to win a railroad line that, it was hoped, would make them flourishing cities, only to find their hopes defeated and their future bleaker than ever." Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America:A People's History of the Post-Reconstruction Era, vol. 6, McGraw-Hill (New York: 1984), p. 101.
5 For details on the grand jury, see Robert Lee, Fort Meade and the Black Hills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 130. This grand jury also investigated the case of Young Skunk, accused of killing the shepherd Henry Miller. With the help of Fast Horse, a Lakota friend of the jury foreman, the jury determined that Young Skunk was the wrong man and that Miller's killer was Leaves His Women, from the Rosebud Reservation east of Pine Ridge. Charges against Young Skunk were dropped. A June 9, 1891, letter from the acting agent at Pine Ridge to the commissioner of Indian affairs mentioned that Leaves His Women was indicted for Miller's murder by that date but that no action had been taken to arrest him and that none would be taken until the acting agent conferred with William Sterling, the U.S. attorney for South Dakota. The letter is item 21359 from microfilm P2187, roll 46, in the National Archives.
6 Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), p. 353.
&
nbsp; 7 J. W. Buel, Heroes of the Plains (Philadelphia: Standard Publishing, 1886), pp. 186-87; quoted in John R. Milton, South Dakota: A History (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 29.
8 Unreferenced newspaper clipping from microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10773. Apparently it was sent by former reservation agent Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy to Indian Bureau director T. J. Morgan with the former's letter of March 19, 1891.
9 See items 1183, 1260, and 1264 from record group 73, National Archives, which include Sterling's letter complaining about Miles's unwillingness to turn over Plenty Horses.
10 Quoted in Robert Utley, "The Ordeal of Plenty Horses," American Heritage 26, no. 1 (1974): 82.
11 Lee, Fort Meade and the Black Hills, pp. 130-31.
12 National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 44, item 3512.
13 National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10775.
14 National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 10773.
15 Lee, Fort Meade and the Black Hills, p. 131.
16 Burns's March 27, 1891, letter to military authorities at Pine Ridge is in National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45, item 12561.
17 Burns's March 28,1891, letter to Herbert Welsh is in National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45. The item number is illegible but may be 12562.
18 The details on Welsh's life are drawn from William T. Hagan, The Indian Rights Association:The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882—1904 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985).
19 Burns's March 28,1891, letter to Herbert Welsh is in National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45. The item number is illegible but may be 12562.
20 Sumner's letter to Welsh, dated March 29,1891, is item 12504 in National Archives, microfilm P2187, roll 45. See chapter 1 for Casey's similar attempt, in the name of fair play and justice, to defend four of his scouts accused of murder.
21 See Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, pp. 5—7, for this and the following information on the trip west.
22 Ibid., p. 4.
23 Ibid., p. 5.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 7.
26 Ibid., p. 6.
27 Ibid., p. 4.
28 Ibid., p. 3. In 1873 Welsh married Fanny Frazer, the daughter of a leading Philadelphia family. The wedding marked the beginning of sixty-six years of a marriage so bad that even Welsh's brother-in-law urged him to get a divorce in an era and a social stratum in which divorce was virtually unthinkable. Fanny did not share his interests or his energy—she was frequently ill or said she was—and so had no involvement in the active side of his frenetic life.
29 Ibid., pp. 9—10. These points are discussed throughout Hagan's book and appear at various points in the text.
30 Ibid., p. 14.
31 Ibid., pp. 16-19, for the story of the meeting.
32 Ibid., pp. 22-32. See also Lee, Fort Meade and the Black Hills, and Utley, "The Ordeal of Plenty Horses."
33 The information on Powers and Nock comes from the New York World, April 25, 1891, and from Dana R. Bailey, History of Minnehaha County, South Dakota (Sioux Falls, SD: Brown &Sanger, 1899), pp. 498 and 669.
34 The information on Sterling comes from Anonymous, Biography and Speeches of William B.Sterling with Memorial Addresses and Resolutions (Chicago and New York: W B. Conkey, 1897).
35 Ibid., p. 311.
36 David Laskin, The Children'sBlinard(New York: Harper Collins, 2004), p. 126.
37 Anonymous, Biography and Speeches of William B. Sterling, p. 112.
38 Ibid., p. 30.
39 Ibid., p. 3.
40 For an exhaustive source of information on western railroads, see David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999). For a shorter study, see Robert Edgar Reigel, The Story of the Western Railroads (1926; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964). For a thumbnail sketch of rail history in the late 1800s, see Smith, The Rise of Industrial America, pp. 89—112. The data cited here are from Smith.
41 Quoted in Anonymous, Biography and Speeches of William B. Sterling, p. 322.
42 Ibid., p. 331.
43 Ibid., p. 15.
44 Ibid., p. 319.
45 Ibid., pp. 15-16.
46 Ibid., pp. 48—49. Many of those points sound familiar to modern ears, but none so much as his use of Benjamin Harrison's war record in promoting Harrison for president. He pointed out that the Democratic incumbent, Grover Cleveland, had not even served in the Civil War, but instead had hired someone to go in his place—which was legal during the war, but not something to be proud of in the postwar years. Harrison, on the other hand, had risen to the rank oi general in the war, which made him into "a man who knows what it costs to be a soldier; a man whose fidelity and devotion to the interests of the soldier have never been questioned; a man who will see to it that the remnant of the great army of the Republic, which still remains, shall be treated not only justly, but generously." (Ibid., pp. 52-53 and 171 [the latter from an 1892 campaign speech].)
47 Sterling became a popular speaker at events throughout South Dakota, addressing various civic groups, such as the state firemen's association and the graduating classes of colleges and universities. He was famed for his eloquence—even Plenty Horses would compliment Sterling's style. At a girls' school in 1891, Sterling revealed relatively modern ideas, pointing out that in the previous half century, opportunities for the education of women had "grown from the narrowest limits, until today, they are equal almost to those which are afforded men; and I hope, and believe, that before the close of the present century, there will be no single avenue of education, or improvement open to men, to which access will be denied to women." (Ibid.,p. 119.)
He would wax poetic when he spoke about Dakota Territory—he was inspired by the booster spirit and would stretch the truth until it snapped and became a lie—and he took issue with anyone who suggested that the territory was anything but ideal even in matters so fundamental as climate. Speaking of a land in which broiling summer temperatures sometimes turned into prolonged droughts and winter brought pummeling arctic winds and blizzards, he said, "In the Winter, when our own people are basking in the open air, in the warm sunshine of a perfect Winter day, the people of the East huddle closely together around blazing hearth, while their teeth chatter and their bones ache with the dampness of Northern blasts." (Ibid., pp. 202—3.) Summers, he said, were kept cool by breezes blowing in from the snowcapped Rocky Mountains.
48 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, April 29,1891. Sterling expressed these feelings in court.
49 Frederic Remington, The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, ed. Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels (n.p.: Castle, 1986), pp. 70-77. The quote is on p. 77.
CHAPTER 10. A FRACTURED LIFE
1 Wayne Fanebust, Where the Sioux River Bends, a Newspaper Chronicle (Freeman, SD: Pine Hill Press [for the Minnehaha County Historical Society], 1984), p. 302.
2 Ibid., p. 330.
3 For details on Pettigrew's plans, see Wayne Fanebust, Echoes of November: The Life and Times of Senator R.F. Pettigrew of South Dakota (Freeman, SD: Pine Hill Press), 1997, pp. 225-38.
4 Fanebust, Where the Sioux River Bends, p. 328.
5 Ibid., pp. 355—56. The population today stands at a little more than 130,000.
6 Ibid., pp. 328-30.
7 The city of Sioux Falls itself became one of the quarries' biggest customers in the boom years of the late 1880s, consuming thirty thousand paving stones a day when Phillips Avenue, a major thoroughfare, required eight hundred thousand stones. Once paved, the avenue created a new problem: Drivers of horse-drawn carriages couldn't resist speeding over the new, hard surface. See ibid., p. 278.
8 Ibid., p. 339.
9 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, April 11, 1891.
10 Fanebust, Where the Sioux River Bends, pp. 302—3.
11 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, April 23, 1891.
12 Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, May 25, 1891.
13 New York World, April 25, 1891.
14 Clip
ping in Thomas Lincoln Casey's scrapbook, box 121, folder C, p. 1, Casey archive at Historic New England: The source of the clipping is unknown.
15 Pulitzer had promised readers a newspaper that would "expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses, and . . . battle for the people with earnest sincerity." It would also focus on scandals and other sensational material. In 1887 Pulitzer—a native Hungarian who came to the United States in 1864 and worked as a mule skinner and waiter before learning English and striking it rich in the newspaper business—would send the reporter Nelly Bly on a trip around the world to see if she could beat the author Jules Verne's fabled deadline for circumnavigating the globe in eighty days. (She did, completing the feat in seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds. The World sponsored a contest to see who could most closely guess the time, and more than a million people participated.) In 1890 the new headquarters for the New York World opened as the tallest building in the world, standing 305 feet tall. Pulitzer competed ferociously with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal m pursuit of lurid stories, and without question the Casey shooting fell into the right category, which is fortunate, because the World left for posterity perhaps the most detailed surviving reports of the courtroom activities. A transcript apparently was made of the trial—letters in the Indian Rights Association archive at the Philadelphia Historical Society indicate that the association paid for one—but apparently the transcript is lost.
16 New York World, April 25, 1891, for this and following quotes in this chapter.
17 Although Standing Bear describes in some detail living in a tepee, hunting with his father, and the joys of traditional Lakota life, he neglects to mention that his father was perhaps half white and owned a general store on the Brulé reservation. (Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975; reprint of 1928 edition published by Houghton Mifflin], pp. xiv—xv.) How accurately Standing Bear's description of Brulé childhood in the 1870s matches Plenty Horses' experiences is uncertain, but they were born only a year or so apart and both were Brulé, so similarities would be inevitable. Given that Plenty Horses' father, Living Bear, apparently owned a large number of horses, the son might have had the opportunity, in the 1870s, to learn the rudiments of hunting and other traditional skills as Luther Standing Bear did.
