IT WAS LATE in the afternoon of March 29, a Saturday in the early spring of 1879. Thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant John Gregory Bourke, West Point graduate, Medal of Honor winner, and aide-de-camp to Brigadier General George Crook, commander of the Military Department of the Platte, slowly made his way across the parade ground at Fort Omaha, Nebraska, toward the general’s headquarters.
Bourke, a man of medium height and solid build who sported a bushy mustache beneath a prominent nose, glanced over his shoulder with deep-set gray eyes to two Indians in European dress who followed on his heel. Bourke allowed the pace to be dictated by the solid man of medium height who came immediately behind him—Iron Eye, paramount chief of the Omaha tribe. The fifty-seven-year-old chief walked with a labored limp. Years before, Iron Eye lost a leg to a surgeon’s knife after stepping on a rusty nail, and the doctors provided a wooden and later a cork substitute. Although the false leg slowed him down when he was on his feet, he was a horseman without peer. Behind the chief came his eldest daughter, Bright Eyes, a diminutive twenty-four-year-old who wore a dark ankle-length dress and had her hair neatly tied back. Bourke knew that the Omahas weren’t comfortable in the heart of the U.S. Army post, having come down off their reservation near Decatur in northeastern Nebraska without government permission, but he also knew that they had come on a mission. Without a word and with blinkered determination, the pair traipsed along behind the lieutenant, across the fort’s parade.
When it was built in 1868 as Sherman Barracks, Fort Omaha was a typical U.S. Army frontier post of its day. In design it was like most other forts, with low wooden buildings surrounding a vast square parade ground. When the Indian treaties of 1868 finally established the borders of the Indian reservations of Nebraska, astute Omaha businessmen banded together to buy the sixty-four-acre site several miles outside their town. Then they had friends in Washington press the federal government to purchase it for the location of the army fort that would be built in the area to watch over the reservations and protect Omaha, the largest city in the new state of Nebraska. They sold the land to the War Department at a handsome profit. The post subsequently built on the site was thrown together so roughly and cheaply that now, just eleven years later, Fort Omaha’s army surgeon condemned his rotting, vermin-ridden, wooden base hospital as too unhealthy for use, and General Crook declared the guardhouse unfit for habitation by prisoners. The fort’s headquarters building was so rundown that the War Department had given the go-ahead for the construction of a new headquarters, and work was to begin within weeks.
Bribery, inflated government contracts, and shoddy workmanship typified the way things were done during the tumultuous administration of Abraham Lincoln’s ultimately impeached successor, Andrew Johnson, and the two scandal-prone terms of President Ulysses S. Grant. Now, in 1879, two years after the tightest election in U.S. history, President Rutherford B. Hayes was in the White House. He was a reforming Republican who vowed to put an end to the scandals and corruption that had pervaded the government since the War of the Rebellion (as the Civil War was then known) ended in 1865. In some respects the Hayes administration changed the way the government did business, yet a number of the problems Hayes inherited were the result of policies that he endorsed. One of those problems, involving reservation Indians in the Department of the Platte, was about to take center stage in a way that no one in Washington or Nebraska could ever have anticipated.
A few minutes before, Lieutenant Bourke had been summoned to the fort gate that would one day bear his name and informed that Chief Iron Eye and his daughter had come in off their reservation after riding a hundred miles on fast Indian ponies, and were asking for an interview with General Crook. Bourke felt certain their visit involved the twenty-six members of the Ponca Indian tribe under the leadership of clan chief Standing Bear who were camped in three temporary lodges on the parade ground near the fort’s main entrance.
The Poncas had been morose ever since a detachment from the 9th Infantry Regiment brought them in to Fort Omaha two days earlier. Since their arrival they had stayed in the lodges—two of which were created by linking pairs of their wagons with a covering of hides. Then they brooded. To most of the soldiers at the post, the Poncas “had a fit of the dumps,” as Bourke later put it.1 After more than a decade dealing with Indians in several American states and territories, the lieutenant was of the opinion that all Native Americans shared two common racial traits—notions and the dumps. In the first case, he observed, an Indian would get an often irrational notion in his head, which nothing and no one could change. In the latter case, Bourke would see one or more tribesmen lapse into a morbidly dejected state, for a day or for weeks on end.2 From what Bourke had heard, these Poncas on the parade at Fort Omaha had every reason to be down in the dumps—they were exhausted, many of them were sick, they were homeless, they were mourning the death of their chief ’s son, and they were under military arrest.
Lieutenant Bourke led Chief Iron Eye and his daughter up the wooden steps and into Fort Omaha’s headquarters building. Bourke, originally with the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, had served General Crook as his ADC for the past nine years, joining him when Crook commanded the army’s Arizona Department and never leaving his side through the general’s successful campaigns to subdue the renegade Apaches under Cochise and Geronimo, then accompanying him to Nebraska when Crook was given command of the Department of the Platte in 1876. Now the loyal lieutenant escorted the three Omaha Indians into General Crook’s office.
Smiling warmly, Brigadier General George Crook came around from behind his desk and grasped the Indian chief ’s hand. Fifty-year-old George Crook was an imposing figure. More than six feet tall, he was solidly built. His blond hair was cut short, his mustache and beard neatly trimmed. His side whiskers, or sideburns (after Civil War general Ambrose Burnside who made them fashionable), were thick and bushy in the Burnside style.
According to John Bourke, General of the Army William T. Sherman described General Crook as the greatest manager the U.S. Army ever had, as well as its greatest Indian fighter.3 George Crook was also the most unorthodox general the U.S. Army ever had. Son of a tanner and a low-ranking graduate of West Point Military Academy in 1852, Crook abstained from tobacco, only drank tea or coffee when in the wilds (he dunked his hardtack in it), and on the rare occasions he consumed alcohol it was just a spoonful of whiskey.4 In his pursuit of personal physical fitness he lifted weights before breakfast. An expert woodsman and tracker, he was a passionate ornithologist who stuffed rare animals and birds for a hobby. A crack shot, he often slipped away to hunt and fish alone. For twenty-six years he had studied the language, customs, and psychology of the Indian tribes he fought, tracked, and parleyed with in Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Washington, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nebraska, Montana, and Dakota Territory. “Association with the natives,” John Bourke said of General Crook, “enabled him to constantly learn their habits and their ideas and in time to become almost one of them.”5
During his first nine years in the army Crook was as inveterate an Indian fighter as any man in uniform. He carried a stone arrowhead in one thigh as a permanent souvenir of an 1857 skirmish with the Pit River tribe of California, during which he killed his first Indian, but not his last. Yet, since the carnage of the Civil War, Crook’s attitude had changed. Over the past decade or so he had achieved more through negotiation with the tribes than any of his predecessors had via military offensives. His unorthodox approach and his determination to avoid bloodshed whenever possible, together with a determination to treat Native Americans as human beings rather than animals, brought him many detractors, both inside and outside the army. He considered the Indian the “intellectual peer” of any white man and was determined to deliver on any promise he made to the Indians.6
Fortunately for Crook, he had the backing of the people who counted, men who recognized his skills. His immediate superior, General Phillip Sheridan, was Crook’s former classmate and roommate at West Point and later his chief during the Civil War. From Chicago, Sheridan commanded the army’s Division of the Missouri, of which Crook’s Department of the Platte was a part. It was Sheridan who had coined the saying “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”7 But he was astute enough to see that Crook had the very rare and very useful ability to win the trust of Indians.
George Crook had an even more influential supporter in Washington— President Hayes. The men were longtime friends. Both were originally from the state of Ohio, of which Hayes had been governor for eight years, and Hayes had served under Crook as a Union army regimental and divisional commander during the Civil War. Hayes admired and respected Crook, writing, in 1864, “General Crook is the best General we have served under,” and later, “General Crook has won the love and confidence of us all.”8
Crook had allies in the U.S. Congress too. Men such as thirty-six-year-old William McKinley, another Ohio native (who later became the twenty-fifth president of the United States), who was at this time a congressman for Ohio. McKinley knew Crook well, having served as one of his staff officers during the Civil War when Crook commanded a cavalry brigade and the Army of West Virginia with distinction. According to John Bourke, McKinley considered Crook “the brains of the Army,” mirroring a sentiment expressed earlier by Hayes.9
As long as George Crook continued to deliver results on the frontier, his supporters in the corridors of power continued to overlook his eccentricities, which included a penchant for mules rather than horses. He brought his favorite mule, Apache, up from Arizona with him, and rode him on active duty for years. George Crook disliked military uniforms and usually wore civilian dress while on duty. In Arizona, his canvas suit and sun helmet, which gave him the appearance of an archeologist, gave rise to the name the Apaches attached to him, Chief Tan Wolf. The Sioux of Dakota Territory called him Three Stars, although no one knew why. A U.S. Army brigadier general only wore one star, and Crook rarely wore a uniform of any kind, let alone one bearing insignia of rank. This March day in 1879, Three Stars Crook wore a plain civilian suit as he greeted Iron Eye.
Crook had known Iron Eye for the past three years. He liked him, respected him, trusted him, and the feelings were mutual. Iron Eye was not a man of striking stature. He was a little overweight and had a double chin, but he possessed an intelligent round European face and penetrating eyes. His thinning dark hair, untidily long, was slicked down with grease. He wore white men’s clothes and affected white men’s ways. His Indian mother, Watunna, had married Joseph La Flesche, a French trader working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. In addition to his Indian name, Iron Eye, he took his father’s European name, Joseph La Flesche. He also gave his children European names. His eldest boy, Woodworker, was Francis La Flesche, or Frank as he was called by those who knew him. Iron Eye’s eldest daughter, Bright Eyes, was Susette La Flesche, and his other surviving children by two wives were named Rosalie, Marguerite, Susan, Lucy, and Carey La Flesche.
Chairs were provided for the Omaha pair by the general’s longtime orderly, Private Andrew Peisen. As John Bourke watched Iron Eye and his eldest daughter being seated in front of the standing general, he would have expected Iron Eye to speak in his native Omaha tongue while his daughter translated; although the chief spoke good French, he only possessed basic English.
As Bourke knew, Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche was a fluent English speaker who had excelled at the Presbyterian Mission School on the Omaha reservation and later spent several years at a finishing school for white girls, the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. A little time before, she had been appointed principal of the government school recently established on the Omaha reservation. Overcoming acute shyness, she flourished in the role. Bourke considered her a “lady of excellent attainments and bright intellect.”10
The soft-spoken General Crook, looking on his guests with perceptive blue eyes, invited the chief of the Omahas to speak. In his native tongue, and translated by his daughter, Iron Eye announced that he had come to speak for Standing Bear and his fellow Poncas, the prisoners on the parade. The general gave an impassive nod, indicating the chief should continue. But it was the young woman who now did the talking, in English.
Miss La Flesche was a neat package. Little more than five feet in height and slim, she had a boyish face with a well-defined nose, mouth, and chin, and expressive dark eyes that were indeed bright when she became passionate—“sparkling black eyes,” one acquaintance noted.11 Unlike her bronze-skinned father, her complexion was pale, European. She wore her hair parted in the middle and drawn tightly back in a bob in the style of conservative white women. Her black dress was sober and unpretentious in the best Presbyterian fashion. Though her English vocabulary was excellent, her sentence construction betrayed her childhood experience of speaking Omaha exclusively until she was eight. Anyone meeting her without knowing her background would probably have thought her, by appearance and speech, to be of European origin. French or Spanish perhaps.
Until this point in her life, she would have taken such an assumption as a compliment. Although she had been raised on the reservation as an Omaha, she had white blood on both sides of her family. Apart from her father’s La Flesche connection, her maternal grandmother, Voice of the Waters, an Omaha-Iowa mix, had married John Gale, surgeon at Fort Atkinson on the Missouri. Christened Yosette by the Presbyterian missionaries who founded her school but taking the name Susette, Iron Eye’s eldest daughter grew up under church influence believing that she and her people must adopt the ways of the whites, must civilize, must assimilate, to prosper.
Where possible she spoke English and always went by her European name. Only among her family did she accept the use of the name Bright Eyes—Inshta-theamba as it was rendered in the Omaha tongue. Bright Eyes was her “at home name,” she said.12 In the future, she would gain notoriety and ultimately international fame as Bright Eyes, even being called a princess because she was the daughter of the ruler of an American Indian nation (a title she hated). Eventually she accepted that she could not escape her native name and that she could actually use it as a tool in her people’s cause, and she resigned herself to accept the universal use of Bright Eyes. But much was to transpire before that happened.
It took a great deal of pluck for the shy young woman to present herself in front of a general, even if it was in the company of her protective father. But pluck was something she had plenty of, as she had demonstrated before now. Two years previously, when she had arrived back at the Omaha reservation from private school in New Jersey, she had applied to teach at the reservation’s new government school. In response she had been told that she must pass a written examination and receive a teaching certificate from the School Committee of Nebraska. So Bright Eyes asked the Omaha reservation’s resident Bureau of Indian Affairs agent, Jacob Vore, for permission to leave the reservation to attend the examination. He refused.
Determined not to take no for an answer, Bright Eyes slipped off the reservation and took the examination anyway. She duly passed and was awarded her teaching certificate. But the authorities made her wait two frustrating years; finally she not only was employed at the mission school but was appointed its principal. Bright Eyes was not concerned that she was only paid $20 a month, half what a white teacher earned. She would have paid the government for the privilege of teaching the young people of her tribe.
Now, nervously at first, and focused intently on the standing general, the young Omaha woman began to tell George Crook a story, speaking from the heart. She would have brought along wads of notes written in neat and methodical schoolmarm style, since she was a great one for keeping detailed records, but she didn’t need them—the tale she had to tell was printed indelibly on her mind, if not her soul.
Even though some of what Bright Eyes had to impart was already known to him, the general did not interrupt her. George Crook was a good listener. His officers knew that whether they were giving him a report or making a submission, the general would take in their every word without a single interjection, comment, or change of expression.
And so it was that, with Chief Standing Bear and his followers just outside the window on the parade ground, prisoners, Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche began to tell a story of the Ponca people, the Omahas’ near relatives. A story of tragedy and injustice.