Chapter 2
THE STORY OF INJUSTICE
LONG AGO, THE Ponca and four related tribes—the Omaha, the Osage, the Quapaw (also called the Akansa), and the Kaw (also known as the Kansa)—lived along the Atlantic coast of North America in Virginia and the Carolinas. In the fourteenth or fifteenth century, the five tribes migrated inland, and sometime before 1500 the Ponca and the Omaha separated from the other tribes and settled in what was to become Minnesota. Under pressure from the aggressive Dakota people (or the Sioux as the whites came to call them), these two tribes moved further west and south, settling for a time in southwestern Minnesota and the Black Hills of South Dakota before being pushed down toward the Nebraska region by the Sioux.
The Ponca tribe settled near the junction of two waterways, the wide Missouri and a river they called the Niobrara, or the Swift Running Water. This new homeland straddled the border of what later became the states of South Dakota and Nebraska, but in 1879 it was in the Dakota Territory. Their cousins the Omahas settled further to the south, along the Missouri in eastern Nebraska. There around the Swift Running Water, for generations to come, the Ponca people lived in peace and happiness.
White explorers Lewis and Clark passed through the region in the summer of 1804 on their epic trek to the Pacific Ocean. They camped at the mouth of the Niobrara and found the Poncas to be a small, friendly tribe with permanent riverbank villages of cone-roofed houses built from sod. Like the Omaha, the Ponca people farmed corn for most of the year and went after buffalo in the summer on an annual hunt. The hunts provided meat to eat and hides and sinew and bone for shelter, clothing, and implements, as well as an opportunity for young men to show their prowess as hunters. And so it was for the next sixty-four years.
Several times between 1817 and 1865 the Poncas signed treaties of peace with the government of the United States, with the treaties of 1858, 1859, and 1865 reserving portions of the traditional Ponca land for the tribe’s exclusive and permanent use. The Poncas gave up much of their land to the U.S. government in return for an assurance in writing that the government would aid and protect the tribe.
The 1859 treaty caused great consternation among the Poncas when it was learned that the white surveyors sent to redraw the boundaries of the reservation had included their traditional burial grounds and best cornfields beside the Niobrara in the land ceded to the government, something they had never agreed to and would never agree to. This was corrected in the treaty of 1865, when the small but important tract containing the burial grounds and cornfields was officially returned to Ponca ownership.
Apart from these treaty dealings with Washington, no white man bothered the Ponca tribe, and the Ponca tribe bothered no white man. Fewer than a thousand men, women, and children in all, they lived in peace and solitude on their little reservation, having nothing to do with the skirmishes that the region’s larger Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Arapaho tribes were having with the U.S. Army in the 1860s.
Everything changed in 1868. In that year, through a clerical error in Washington, the U.S. Congress assigned the territory occupied by the Poncas to the Sioux. The Ponca tribe spent the next eight years fighting off Sioux raiding parties of forty and fifty warriors at a time and trying to convince Washington to correct the blunder. In one of those devastating raids alone the Sioux drove off half the Poncas’ many hundreds of ponies.
In the mid-1870s things went from bad to worse for the Ponca tribe, again through no fault of their own. Raids by their old enemies the Brulé Lakota Sioux had become so bad that the Poncas signed a paper, which the Indian Affairs Bureau took to Washington, asking for permission to move down to the reservation of their cousins the Omahas, at least until the government stopped the Sioux raids. In its wisdom the U.S. Congress—the Great Council as the Indians called it—chose not to support the request with legislation. The Poncas solved that particular problem by persuading the Brulé to agree to a truce, and life became less hazardous for the Poncas as they farmed their fields without needing to keep a rifle close by.
The other problem, also involving the Sioux, was not as easy to solve. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota. Thousands of white gold miners swarmed onto the Sioux and Cheyenne reservations. Instead of enforcing the treaties that guaranteed this land to the Indians, the government was largely inactive or, worse, gave military protection to white prospectors trespassing on Indian land. The Gold Rush invasion was the last straw to the Sioux and Cheyenne. The U.S. government did not even keep its treaty promise to build a school for every thirty children on the Sioux reservation—not a single school had been built. Sioux and Cheyenne tribes banded together under Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Crazy Horse to resist the white invasion.
In reply, in the summer of 1876 Washington sent in three army columns. One of these columns, led incautiously by the impatient, brash, overconfident Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, stumbled onto at least 5,000 warriors encamped on the Little Big Horn River on June 25, 1876. Custer and 266 men of the 7th Cavalry Regiment were killed in the ensuing battle. George Crook knew all about this operation. He had been leading one of the other columns, and days before the Custer fight he had fought a battle on the Rosebud River against Crazy Horse, before pulling back. Hounding the renegades later that year with a mixed force of cavalry and Indian scouts, Crook “broke the Cheyenne and helped break the Sioux.”13
The Ponca and Omaha tribes heard rumors about these fights on the Rosebud and Little Big Horn but thought little of it. They continued to lead their quiet, inoffensive lives, not realizing the reaction throughout the United States to Custer’s defeat by the Sioux and Cheyenne—near panic in many quarters. As the Poncas and Omahas were to learn, public hysteria led Congress to decree the forcible removal of a number of northern tribes, who were resettled on reservations well to the south in what was called Indian Territory—present-day Oklahoma. The Poncas, who had played no part in the Custer fight, were erroneously associated with the Sioux. The Poncas, who had never ever raised a hand against the white man, were included on the list for relocation.
One Sunday in the late autumn of 1876, Reverend Samuel D. Hinman, an Episcopal missionary who had been working among the Sioux to the north, arrived at the largest of the three Ponca settlements, near the junction of the Missouri and Niobrara rivers, and prepared to conduct a service in the reservation’s mission church. This settlement was called the Agency Village because an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was permanently stationed there. The Ponca church and schoolhouse were also sited here. Of the smaller Ponca settlements, the Point Village was eight miles away on the Niobrara River, near the white town of Niobrara City. A little way south of the Agency Village lay Hubdon Village.
Just twenty Poncas were practicing Christians, converted eight years before when an Episcopal missionary lived among them for upward of two years. But two hundred Poncas regularly turned up to Sunday services, which were usually conducted by a white teacher named May.14 And there, 180 of them would sit stony faced and silent through the hymns and sermons. Up to seventy-five Ponca children also went to the mission school during the week.15 Although few were Christians, their parents wanted the little ones to learn how to speak and read and write the white man’s language—this, they knew, was the way of the future. But this particular Sunday the Poncas heard a sermon unlike any they had ever heard before.
Reverend Hinman, who was known to and respected by the Poncas, told the tribe that soon they would be taken by the U.S. government to the south and never allowed to return to their homes here. Hinman said that he was sorry for the Poncas, but he could not do anything to help them; he could only pity them. He urged the tribe to do what was right and to trust in God. The Ponca people left the church following the service in a state of consternation.
Runners were sent around all the houses of the Agency Village and to the other villages on the reservation to pass on the news. From every corner the cry came back that the Poncas would not leave the home of their fathers and go to some strange land. In an attempt to learn more, the ten worried elders of the tribe sat down cross-legged in a circular council with Samuel Hinman and plied him with questions. But the minister declared that he only knew that someone had ordered that the Poncas be taken down south. Then Hinman went away, and for a little time it seemed that his warning was false.
Then, one day in early January 1877, Edward C. Kemble, an official with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, arrived at the Ponca settlement without warning. Kemble, a weedy, mustachioed man, was a newspaper editor in California for two decades before becoming one of the first roving Indian Affairs inspectors in the 1870s. When Inspector Kemble summoned the Ponca leaders to a meeting in the mission church, they came: White Eagle, the old paramount chief, and the chiefs of the nine Ponca clans—the Black Bear People, the Many People, the Elk People, the Medicine People, the Buffalo People, the Snake People, the Ice People, the Sons of White Men, and a small clan whose name would be lost over time. This ninth clan, with a total of fifty-five members, was led by a lean, normally quiet-spoken man in middle age by the name of Standing Bear who lived at the Point Village. His clan would soon become known simply as Standing Bear’s People.
Inspector Kemble informed the chiefs that the U.S. government had decided to move all 752 Ponca people to a new reservation. Paramount chief White Eagle, tall and straight, with a long face and nose, asked where this new reservation was located, and Kemble informed him that it was in the Indian Territory, some six hundred miles to the south (future Oklahoma), a place the Poncas had never heard of. White Eagle shook his head; his people had lived and died here for generations. Here they had buried their ancestors, and to leave would be to desert their fathers and their grandfathers.16
Kemble then produced a piece of paper that he said the Poncas had signed two years before, asking to be removed to Indian Territory. This was the 1875 request to be granted asylum with the Omahas, but the interpreter at the time had bungled the translation—in English the request asked for removal to “the native people’s country,” which Kemble said meant Indian Territory, not the Omaha reservation.17
In response, a speech was made by one of the clan chiefs—Standing Bear. He told Kemble that this was the Poncas’ land, that they had never sold it to anyone or asked to go to Indian Territory. They had harmed no man, they had kept to their treaty with the United States government. And there on the land of their fathers they would continue to live, and die.18
Kemble persisted, telling the chiefs that the land in the Indian Territory was much better than that here in Dakota Territory, and that the government would pay them for their old land. Chief White Eagle responded that he would only consider leaving if he personally received a letter from the Great Father, as the Indians called the U.S. president, a letter telling him that the Great Father wanted the Poncas to move.
Inspector Kemble retreated to the nearest telegraph office and wired Indian Affairs in Washington for instructions. A telegram soon came clicking back along the wire to Kemble—Indian Affairs Commissioner John Quincy Smith instructed his inspector to take White Eagle and the other Ponca chiefs down to Indian Territory so they could see it for themselves and choose their own location for a new reservation. Once the site was chosen, Kemble would take the chiefs to Washington to meet the president and sign a relocation agreement.
Kemble returned to the Poncas with this message, which he said came directly from the Great Father. To make it sound as if the Poncas had an element of free will in the exercise, Kemble told White Eagle that when he went to Washington, he could tell the Great Father which land in the Indian Territory he liked and which he didn’t like. But this was not a decision White Eagle was prepared to make on behalf of his people. It was the Ponca way for such important things to be decided in council, where every chief could speak for or against the proposed course of action. Kemble was left tapping an impatient foot as White Eagle met with the leaders of the Ponca clans.
Sitting cross-legged in a circle, White Eagle, Standing Bear, and the eight other clan chiefs discussed the matter, with each man stating his view. After a time, a consensus was reached—the Poncas should at least consider the Great Father’s offer, and the chiefs should view this new land. They felt that if they agreed to at least go down and look at the country in the Indian Territory, “all the trouble would be ended.”19
On Saturday, February 2, 1877, Kemble and the Indian Affairs agent to the Poncas, the recently appointed James Lawrence (who was described as “a young fellow” and was probably in his twenties), set off for Indian Territory.20 With them went White Eagle and the clan chiefs Standing Bear, Standing Buffalo, Big Elk, Little Picker, Sitting Bear, Little Chief, Smoke Maker, White Swan, and Lone Chief (the son of a French trader and a Ponca mother also known as Antoine Le Claire).21
To interpret, Kemble and Lawrence took along Lone Chief ’s nephew, Charles Le Claire. Le Claire, called Charlie by the whites, had mixed blood like his uncle and had received a school education. Charlie and Agent Lawrence were longtime friends, and Lawrence had given Charlie the paid position of Indian Affairs interpreter at the Ponca reservation because Charlie had been instrumental in Lawrence being appointed agent.22
As they were about to set off, the chiefs told Kemble that they wanted to stop at the Omaha reservation on the way to talk to their cousins the Omahas—no doubt to seek the opinion of the Omahas on this matter of relocating to Indian Territory. But Kemble would not allow it.23 To avoid any chance of the Poncas talking to their cousins the Omahas, Kemble took the party by wagon to Yankton, then capital of Dakota Territory, on the far bank of the Missouri. There Kemble purchased “civilized clothing” for the chiefs—shirts and vests in the main; most of them retained their Indian leggings and moccasins. At Yankton the party was joined by Reverend Hinman, who had been asked by the Indian commissioner to accompany the chiefs south and help convince them to agree to relocate. 24 They then boarded a train for the journey south—a trip inside a railroad carriage being a novel and daunting first for the Indians.
When they reached Independence City in southeastern Kansas, Kemble transferred his charges to wagons for the next leg of the journey, to the Osage reservation. It straddled the border between Indian Territory and Kansas, not far away. The Poncas were welcomed by their cousins the Osages, who themselves had been relocated from southeastern Kansas to Indian Territory not many years before. But the Ponca chiefs were not impressed by the condition of the Osages: “They were without shirts, their skin burned, and their hair stood up as if it had not been combed since they were little children.”25 They still lived in round earth lodges like the Poncas once had before they progressed to wooden cabins. Privately the Osages warned the Ponca chiefs not to consider settling down in the Indian Territory—it was “bad land,” they said.26 Accompanied by Osage guide William Conner, the party headed for Indian reservations a hundred miles away.
Several tribes from the southeastern United States had been forcibly removed to the Indian Territory in the 1830s—the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Within the past decade, northern tribes such as the Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, Quapaw, and Kaw had also been relocated here by the government. It was southeast to the Quapaw and Kaw reservations in the northeastern corner of Indian Territory that Edward Kemble took the Ponca chiefs on their tour of inspection.
Day after day they bumped around the desolate Indian Territory. Even in winter the Ponca chiefs found the rocky, hilly terrain they were shown to be hot and inhospitable. “The Warm Land,” the Indians called it. Clan chief Standing Bear found that when he kicked the dry earth, there were stones underneath. This was not land where corn or wheat or potatoes would grow in abundance. This land did not compare with the Poncas’ lush green homeland. Standing Bear came to the bitter realization that Kemble had lied to the chiefs about Indian Territory.
At the camps of the relocated Quapaw and Kaw, the Poncas came across Indian brothers who were miserable and indolent. As they spoke with the migrants in their shared tongue, they discovered that much sadness lingered in the tipis, for the people, especially the children, were dying from a variety of illnesses, including malaria. Old White Eagle and several others fell ill themselves after the party was lashed by a storm that lasted almost a week.
Undaunted, Kemble and Lawrence dragged the chiefs on an arduous tour of prospective sites, but the Poncas were unimpressed. They could see that this Indian Territory was a dry, dusty, broken land, a land of rocks. Its few low trees were unhealthy. The tribes that had already been relocated here were poor, sick, and unable to do much for themselves. The Poncas on the other hand were industrious farmers whose own land in the north was fertile and productive. The chiefs were unanimous in their opinion—this was no place for the Ponca people. The chiefs were also unanimous in their disappointment with these white men for attempting to move them to this terrible place. Seeing their growing unhappiness, Kemble brought the chiefs up to Arkansas City in southern Kansas. This inland steamboat port near the junction of the Arkansas and Walnut rivers was the last white settlement in Kansas before the border with Indian Territory less than thirty miles away. Here Kemble checked his party into the Central Avenue Hotel.27
The presence of the Ponca chiefs aroused quite a stir in Arkansas City. A city in name and aspiration only, it was a small nine-year-old frontier outpost whose fortunes depended largely on the needs of the Indian reservations in Indian Territory. Using government money, the Indian Affairs Bureau agents and their employees at the nearer reservations bought stock, seed, hardware, building materials, food, and transport in Arkansas City and spent a good part of their wages in the stores and saloons there. The flow-on affect boosted the local economy. The more tribes the government brought to Indian Territory the greater the likelihood the railroad would be extended from Wichita and Arkansas City would prosper. As a result, the possibility of the Ponca tribe being resettled in the Indian Territory excited the imaginations and expectations of the town’s businesspeople.
With everyone in the district curious about these Indians—the next potential pot of gold for the town—an enterprising local businessman saw a way to immediately profit from the visit of the Ponca chiefs. Since the Civil War, portrait photography had become all the rage across America, and professional photographers had a constant stream of customers wanting their pictures taken for posterity. I. S. Bonsall, city clerk of Arkansas City, also ran the town’s photographic studio, and he convinced Inspector Kemble to herd his Ponca charges in front of his glass plate camera on the day of their arrival—Tuesday, February 20.
The town’s postmaster, Nathan Hughes, also ran a business on the side—he was publisher and editor of one of the town’s two weekly newspapers, the Arkansas City Traveler. In his February 21 edition of the Traveler, editor Hughes, who had written that the Poncas were tall, well-built men, informed his readers that copies of the photograph of the Ponca chiefs would be available for purchase from Bonsall’s Photograph Gallery within a few days. In that photograph, while interpretor Charlie and a white— Hinman, Kemble, or Lawrence—look quite pleased with themselves, White Eagle, Standing Bear, and the other chiefs look decidedly unhappy.
After a night’s rest in Arkansas City, Inspector Kemble informed the chiefs in the hotel dining room that he now wanted to show them more Indian Territory sites, well to the south. But almost three weeks of this torturous exercise had been enough for the Ponca chiefs. White Eagle said he was ready to go to Washington to see the Great Father. Standing Bear and the others concurred.
Still Kemble urged the chiefs to come with him to see more prospective sites. But White Eagle said that he wished to tell the Great Father that he had not seen any land in the Indian Territory that he liked and so the Poncas would keep their own land in the north. But Kemble was not giving up. He now told White Eagle that he would take the chiefs to see the president only if they agreed to resettle their people in the Indian Territory. White Eagle countered that if Kemble wouldn’t take him to see the Great Father, then he should take the chiefs home to their own country.
The temper of the Indian Affairs representative flared. Angrily, Kemble declared that he would not take White Eagle to see the president. And, he said, the president had not instructed him to take the Ponca chiefs back to their own country. This staggered White Eagle and his fellow chiefs, as Kemble had intended. White Eagle asked what he should do, if Kemble would neither guide the chiefs to Washington nor take them back to their homes in the north. Kemble probably only smirked in response, confident he had the Poncas over the proverbial barrel.
Poncas were accustomed to speaking their minds and to speaking truthfully. They naively expected the representatives of the godlike Great Father they dealt with to do the same. Now the chiefs realized the Great Father had not personally invited them to Washington, and White Eagle accused the inspector of not talking straight.28
Kemble snarled back that if the chiefs did not agree to choose land in the Indian Territory, then he and Lawrence would leave the chiefs where they were, to starve. They would not take them back north. The chiefs responded that it would be better that ten of them died here in this terrible place rather than the whole tribe. Kemble and Lawrence stormed away, with Kemble declaring that if the chiefs wanted to stay there and die they could.29 Fuming, Kemble led Lawrence and Reverend Hinman upstairs.
The chiefs, stunned by this exchange, suddenly had visions of being stranded in this strange land and dying here without ever seeing their families again. The shattered White Eagle was close to tears at this point. But then he remembered that he was a man and pulled himself together.30
The shocked chiefs discussed their predicament in the Central Avenue Hotel dining room. All agreed that the Great Father could not have caused this situation; it must have been all Kemble’s doing. It was also agreed that they had no choice but to walk home. Standing Bear now rose to the occasion. He reminded the others that the government still owed the tribe money it had promised them. The Indian Affairs men had money. Standing Bear sent interpreter Charlie Le Claire upstairs to Kemble and Lawrence to tell them that if they would not take the chiefs home they should at least give them some of the money that was owed them to pay their own way home. Charlie came back down with the reply—the Indian Affairs men would not give them one cent.
Standing Bear sent Charlie upstairs with another message. If they took the chiefs to Washington and the Great Father told them personally that the Poncas must come to Indian Territory, then Standing Bear supposed that they would have to agree to relocate. The reply came back that the Great Father had nothing to do with the matter and Kemble and Lawrence weren’t taking the chiefs anywhere. They could stay there and die as far as they were concerned.
Again Standing Bear sent Charlie upstairs with a message—if the Indian Affairs men would not take them back home nor give them money to get home, then at least they could give them a paper to show to white men along the way, identifying the Indian party as “friendly,” as opposed to hostiles on the loose, and authorizing their journey. Standing Bear knew that by U.S. law, Indians traveling off their reservations either had to be escorted by Indian Affairs officials or soldiers or had to possess a written pass from a government officer. Kemble replied that he and Lawrence would give the chiefs nothing, not even a paper.
Standing Bear and his colleagues now decided they would go home on foot, all six hundred miles or more, without food, without money, without authorization. But two of their number, Lone Chief and Little Chief, were much too old and frail to walk the distance; both were almost blind. The others agreed that they would not be able to carry the old men on their backs all the way back to the Swift Running Water. So Standing Bear sent the two old chiefs up to Kemble and Lawrence with Charlie and another message—if the able-bodied chiefs must walk home they would, but the Indian Affairs men must care for the two old men. Before sending them upstairs, Standing Bear had instructed the elderly pair to stay with Kemble, Lawrence, and Hinman no matter what. This time there was no reply from Kemble, but the old men did not come back down. It was now nine o’clock at night. The argument that had been going on between Kemble and the chiefs for many hours had at last come to an end, but without a resolution.31
Exactly what happened next is open to dispute. The Ponca chiefs unanimously claimed that Kemble and his associates abandoned them at Arkansas City. Kemble later declared that the chiefs had run off, and he informed the Arkansas City Traveler that they had left the town to walk home that same night, having “started at midnight.”32 But the chiefs’ version is likely the more accurate one.
Next morning, according to the accounts of both Standing Bear and White Eagle, they and the six other younger chiefs awoke at the Central Avenue Hotel to discover that Kemble, Lawrence, Hinman, Charlie, and the two old chiefs had gone. It eventuated that Kemble had decided that if the Poncas wouldn’t choose land in the Indian Territory, then he would choose it for them. While Agent Lawrence took the interpreter and two elderly chiefs to Independence to wait for the inspector to join them, Kemble and Reverend Hinman rode back to Indian Territory and summarily chose a site on the Quapaw reservation as the best place for the relocation of the Ponca tribe.
Kemble quickly penned a letter to Commissioner Smith recommending the chosen site and then returned to Arkansas City to post the letter and pick up the eight stubborn chiefs, expecting them to be chastened and humbled after being left to their own devices in a strange place for several days. But he discovered to his dismay that Standing Bear and his colleagues had called his bluff. With a total of $8 between them and with just the clothes on their backs and a blanket each, and with barely a word of English between them, the eight chiefs had set off to walk all the way home.
Kemble wired Washington that most of the Ponca chiefs had run off. Soon the U.S. Army and government representatives all the way from southern Kansas to Dakota Territory were receiving telegrams from the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs warning them to be on the lookout for the Ponca chiefs. The chiefs, it was announced, had absconded from official custody.
Standing Bear and White Eagle later told of a hellish trek from Kansas to the Niobrara. It was winter, and the further north they went the deeper the snow became. Within the first ten days the leather moccasins on the men’s feet wore away, and they had to walk in the snow with bleeding bare feet. Staying away from towns, roads, and rail lines to avoid arrest, the chiefs traveled across the prairies. Standing Bear said that at night they mostly slept in the open, sometimes in haystacks if they could find them, wrapped in their blankets, huddled together, trying to keep each other alive in the intense cold, and every night expecting to freeze to death. For food, Standing Bear said they found old ears of corn that had dried in the fields, and they pounded the corn with stones. After fifty days, they reached the Oto reservation in southern Nebraska, toward the end covering just a few painful miles a day.
The Indian Affairs agent at the Oto reservation gave the exhausted chiefs food and questioned them at length, expressing surprise at the way they claimed to have been treated by Inspector Kemble and promising to tell Washington their side of the story. According to White Eagle, the agent warned the chiefs that he had received a telegram from Washington ordering him not to give them food, shelter, or help of any other kind if they showed up at the Oto reservation.
For ten days the chiefs rested up with the Otoes, who sheltered them, fed them, replaced their moccasins, and gave them ponies and provisions for the remainder of the journey home. The Poncas gratefully thanked the Otoes for their comfort and aid, and again set off for home, this time aiming for the Omaha reservation in northern Nebraska before making the final leg of the trip to the Niobrara.
Their cousins the Omahas welcomed the chiefs when they reached the Omaha village at the junction of the North and South Blackbird Creeks— Joe’s Village, the whites called it, in reference to Chief Iron Eye’s “American” name, Joseph La Flesche. At Iron Eye’s large, two-story wooden house, the eight chiefs told their story to a concerned Iron Eye, who had more than a passing interest in the Poncas. One of the Ponca chiefs, White Swan, who also went by the name Frank La Flesche, was Iron Eye’s brother. Like Iron Eye, White Swan was an Omaha with Ponca blood. He had married a Ponca woman and lived and raised a family among the Poncas. Another attentive listener was Iron Eye’s twenty-two-year-old daughter Bright Eyes, who had recently arrived home from school in the East.
After the chiefs sadly told their story, Bright Eyes and her father agreed that the president and the American people should know about the unjust treatment the Poncas had received. Bright Eyes took out pen and paper and wrote a statement from the chiefs, in English, telling of their ordeal. Then she wrote a telegram from the chiefs to the American president in Washington, asking him whether it had been on his authority that his men had taken the Ponca chiefs down to Indian Territory before threatening them because they did not choose land there. “Please answer,” the chiefs’ telegram concluded, “as we are in trouble.”33
When push came to shove, Sitting Bear was apparently too afraid to put his name to either the statement or the telegram. To be on the safe side, in case the documents went astray, Bright Eyes penned copies of both, which she kept in a safe place. Then the other seven chiefs continued on to the Niobrara on horseback, and Bright Eyes, who had been raised a Presbyterian, took Standing Bear to see the reservation’s Presbyterian minister of the past ten years, Reverend William Hamilton, who lived three miles from Joe’s Village.
After Bright Eyes explained the Ponca problem to Hamilton, he called in John Springer, “an educated Omaha” and member of Hamilton’s flock, provided money and horses, and told Springer to take Standing Bear across the Missouri River to Iowa.34 There Springer was to send the chiefs’ telegram to the president and then give their statement to the editor of a Sioux City newspaper known to Hamilton and urge him to print it. Standing Bear and Springer quickly set off, followed the Missouri north, and crossed the river. From Sloan, Iowa, they dispatched the telegram to Washington, before continuing on to Sioux City, where they saw the newspaper editor.
Once they had completed their tasks, Springer gave Standing Bear money to get home, wished him well, and then returned to the Omaha reservation. As Springer had instructed him, Standing Bear bought a Sioux City and Pacific Railroad ticket to Yankton and took a train north. Yankton, on the banks of the Missouri not far from the mouth of the James River, was within a day’s walk of the Niobrara once Standing Bear had gotten himself across the Missouri.
In the streets of Yankton he caught sight of Agent Lawrence and Reverend Hinman, but they didn’t spot him. He slipped unnoticed from the town, crossed the Missouri, and walked home to the Ponca reservation, where he rejoined his anxious wife, children, brothers, and sister. All the other Ponca leaders, including the two elderly chiefs, had safely arrived ahead of him.
The Ponca chiefs’ telegram to the president was never even acknowledged. There is no telling whether it ever reached its destination; it may have only gone as far as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Meanwhile, a favorable article based on the chiefs’ statement appeared in the March 31 edition of the Sioux City Daily Journal under the headline “Weary and Footsore: The Poncas Tell the Story of Their Grievous Wrongs.” The story was subsequently picked up and run by the Niobrara Pioneer on April 5.
In the meantime, Inspector Kemble had been recalled to Washington for consultations with Commissioner John Quincy Smith. On the Niobrara, some thought all this business about moving to Indian Territory was now ended.
Back in Washington, Edward Kemble was taken by Indian Affairs Commissioner Smith to report to Smith’s boss, Zacharia Chandler, the Interior secretary. Chandler was leaving office in weeks and would be replaced by an appointee of the new president, Rutherford B. Hayes. Chandler decided to leave the Ponca problem to his successor as Interior secretary, German-born Carl Schurz.
On paper, the bearded, bespectacled Secretary Schurz appeared to be a potential ally of the Ponca people, but he became one of their greatest foes. An antigovernment revolutionary as a college student at the University of Bonn, Germany, Schurz was imprisoned but made a daring escape and fled to the United States in 1852. A liberal idealist, he joined the antislavery movement and became actively involved with the Republican Party. For his part in organizing support for Abraham Lincoln’s presidential nomination, Schurz was appointed U.S. ambassador to Spain in 1861. With the outbreak of the Civil War he returned to the United States and joined the Union army, becoming a brigadier general. The actions of his troops at the Battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg were criticized, but Schurz himself came out of the Civil War with an untarnished reputation. First a newspaper editor, then a U.S. senator from Missouri for six years to 1875, he was given the Interior portfolio by President Hayes expressly to clean up Indian Affairs.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, administered by the War Department until 1849 before coming under the Interior Department, had become rife with corruption at all levels. At the reservation level, many BIA agents had been pocketing large amounts of the funds allocated to the feeding, housing, and education of the Indian tribes in their care. Meanwhile, land speculators, merchants, bankers, and railroad contractors had their greedy noses in the trough, making fortunes as the West was opened up to settlement and the Indians were pushed off their lands. They were aided and abetted by corrupt Washington officials and politicians on the take. In return for kickbacks, Indian Affairs administrators gave BIA construction and supply contracts to cronies who undersupplied and overcharged as a matter of course, providing poor-quality goods to the tribes at top dollar. Politicians who suppressed inquiries into bureau activities and voted through Indian bills that favored business interests received the support of wealthy party bosses who controlled congressional seats. Anticorruption reformers coined a name for the greedy businessmen and corrupt politicians who played this game—the Indian Ring.
The Indians protested, of course, but as wards of the state they had no rights, no vote, no representation. Their protests had gone largely unheard for years. Even from inside the government establishment the Indian Ring was difficult to combat. For years, General George Crook had been complaining about corruption in the system, but for the most part he had been ignored or deflected by his superiors. Like other honest men, he would have had high hopes of a new broom sweeping away corrupt practices when the administration of his friend Rutherford Hayes came into office.
Interior Secretary Schurz’s reforming brief from the White House had been primarily a financial one. Indian Affairs had been hemorrhaging money for years, and President Hayes gave Schurz a very clear directive— cut BIA expenditures. At the same time, Schurz had to administer the removal of tribes to Indian Territory as Congress dictated. The Poncas’ refusal to budge from the Niobrara was a small but annoying thorn in Secretary Schurz’s side.
After taking office on March 12, Schurz wasted no time acting to resolve the lingering Ponca problem. Having interviewed Inspector Kemble, the new Interior secretary contacted his counterpart at the War Department, George W. McCrary, acquainting him with the problem he was having with the stubborn little tribe in the Dakota Territory. The two secretaries knew each other well. When Schurz had been a Republican senator, McCrary served in the House of Representatives as a Republican member from Iowa. Secretary McCrary agreed to give Indian Affairs full army support in the Ponca affair and passed an instruction to that effect to the army’s commanding general, Civil War hero William T. Sherman. Schurz then sent Inspector Kemble back to Nebraska with orders to shift the Poncas, one way or another.
In April 1877, Inspector Kemble arrived back on the Niobrara. He and Agent Lawrence wasted no time calling for a council with the Poncas. This time, all the men of the tribe took part in the council, although only the chiefs spoke.
Before the inspector could address the council, Standing Bear came to his feet. Pulling his red council blanket around his shoulders, he asked why the Indian Affairs men had come to the Ponca reservation when they had not been invited. He informed Kemble that the Poncas wanted nothing to do with him and had no interest in selling their land to them. He advised both Indian Affairs representatives to go away and not come back until they had a letter from the Great Father, and cash in hand, if the government truly wanted to buy Ponca land. Then, he told them, if the Poncas wanted to sell their land, they would. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. He finished up by telling the two Indian Affairs men to leave at once.35
Around the circle, men grunted their approval of Standing Bear’s position. Beside Standing Bear, his younger brother Big Snake rose to his feet. In his thirties, Big Snake was a huge man who stood head and shoulders above the tallest member of the tribe. He was a gentle giant who had a reputation in the tribe as a peacemaker. But now Big Snake folded his arms and glared at Kemble and Lawrence. Intimidated by Standing Bear’s words, Big Snake’s physical presence, and the unity of the tribe, the Indian Affairs men departed in a rage. The council broke up with many Poncas feeling better than they had in a long time now that Standing Bear had stood up to the white men.
After Edward Kemble wired Washington about this latest impasse, he received a short, sharp telegram from Interior Secretary Schurz: “Press the removal.”36 Kemble decided to take off the gloves.
Next morning, Standing Bear was rudely awakened when Bluecoats, soldiers from Fort Randall thirty miles up the Missouri, dragged him from his bed in front of his wife and children. He was chained and hauled from his house. Outside, he found that Big Snake had also been arrested. The two of them were put on horses and taken to Fort Randall.37 They were brought before a panel of eight army officers and informed that four written complaints had been lodged against them. Asked what he had to say in his defense, Standing Bear told the officers the story of the journeys to and from Indian Territory. The officer in charge, appalled by the story, promised to wire Washington to see what could be done for the Poncas, which he did, without result. The brothers were then put in detention, to give them time to reflect on their options.
Standing Bear and Big Snake were returned to the Ponca reservation just in time for a new Ponca council with Kemble and Lawrence. This time a white lawyer appeared and spoke long and passionately of the Poncas’ right to remain on their land. Standing Bear and his fellow chiefs didn’t know this man. Solomon Draper was an attorney who edited the Niobrara Pioneer in nearby Niobrara City. He spoke on behalf of the businesspeople of the town who considered the Poncas quiet, unthreatening neighbors and preferable to the Sioux. While the Poncas were grateful for his attempt to help them, in the end Kemble lost patience with Draper and refused to let him continue speaking. The inspector then informed the Poncas that the time for talking had passed. They must all go to Indian Territory, and that was that. The leading Ponca chiefs, just as determined, defiantly told Kemble that they would not go, and the council came to an abrupt end.
But the chiefs were not unanimous. There were men Standing Bear described as “half-breeds,” men he did not get on well with who were close to Agent Lawrence. Lone Chief and nine other “half-breed” elders had begun to speak in favor of going to Indian Territory. In the third week of April these men packed their relatives and their belongings into 46 wagons, and 170 of them left the reservation with Agent Lawrence, heading for Indian Territory, overcoming attempts by other members of the tribe to block the path of their wagons as they left. Chief White Eagle later testified that Kemble had promised money to those who went south with Lone Chief.38 This attempt to destroy the tribe’s unity did nothing to soften the resolve of the rest of the chiefs to stay put.
Retreating yet again, Kemble wired Washington with the news that he had convinced part of the tribe to head south but the majority of the Poncas were still sitting stubbornly on the Niobrara. Interior Secretary Schurz had no time for men who only partly fulfilled his orders. He instructed Commissioner Smith to send a more effective officer to deal with the Poncas.
In May, Inspector E. A. Howard arrived on the Ponca reservation to take up where his predecessor had left off. The abrasive Howard, a former Union army major, had apparently been chosen because he accepted no nonsense from anyone. Howard immediately directed White Eagle to convene a council of his chiefs, which the government’s man would address. Standing Bear again took his place in the council circle with his fellow chiefs, interested to learn what this new man sent by the Great Father would say.
A four-hour conference followed, but at the end of it Inspector Howard stood up and asked a terse question—would the Poncas remove to Indian Territory of their own volition, or would he have to use force to make them go? The chiefs did not reply. Howard stomped unhappily from the meeting, mounted up, and rode away.
In the general’s office at Fort Omaha, Lieutenant Bourke had been listening intently to Bright Eyes as she told her story. His sympathy for the Poncas had been aroused. As he would later write, he saw a far from benevolent motive behind the Interior Department’s determination to shift the benign little Ponca tribe. “They had a reservation which,” he said, “unluckily for them, was arable and consequently coveted by the white invader.”39 In fact, the rich, dark alluvial soil along the Niobrara that supported communal Ponca farming produced “the finest Indian corn on the Plains.”40
Toward the end of the second week in May, Inspector Howard returned to the Niobrara along with Agent Lawrence, who had handed the “half-breed” Poncas over to Inspector Kemble at Columbus, Nebraska, for the remainder of their journey south. A sudden thunderstorm had ominously preceded Howard’s arrival. This time he brought Bluecoats with him; many Bluecoats—four detachments of cavalry and one of infantry from Fort Sully and Fort Randall, under the command of a captain.41 This time there would be no discussion, no negotiation, and no toleration of resistance.
Around noon, Standing Bear was coming in from the fields where he, one of his brothers, and another member of their clan had been plowing. His children were in school at the Ponca reservation schoolhouse near the agency—the residence and office of Indian Affairs agent Lawrence at the Agency Village. Standing Bear had almost reached his house in the Point Village, where his wife, Susette Primo, whose lineage was part Ponca, part white, was cooking lunch. The smell of freshly baked bread would have been wafting out from their two-room forty-by-twenty log home.
Standing Bear was proud of that house. He had felled and hauled the trees, fashioned the logs, and built his family’s home with his own hands. It was a slow process because he had never done such a thing before, and there was no one to teach him how. But he had seen the fine big house that his friend Chief Iron Eye had built on the Omaha reservation—the first frame house built by a Plains Indian—and he had learned from his example. After that, Standing Bear built himself a stable and cattle sheds. Emulating him, all the other Ponca men also replaced their old earth lodges with log houses they built themselves.
Now a lone horseman came cantering up to Standing Bear. It was Charlie, the interpreter, and he delivered devastating news. Soldiers had come to the Agency Village, he said. They had come to make war with the Poncas, if they did not go to Indian Territory. The officer in charge of the soldiers had given an order that every Ponca head of household was to load up all his possessions and take them to the agency. This was to include their farm implements, their household items, their livestock, their grain; everything that could be moved. Standing Bear knew that it was pointless trying to resist the soldiers—he was no longer a young man, the tribe had few rifles, and there were too many Bluecoats.
Unhitching his eight horses from his plows, Standing Bear harnessed them to his wagons. It took him three days to take all he owned to the agency—four cows, three steers, four hogs, twenty-one chickens, two turkeys, plows, axes, hatchets, saws, hoes, pitchforks, five wagonloads of corn, one hundred sacks of wheat, and all his household items, including a table, chairs, two beds, even the two stoves from his house. Two years later, Standing Bear would still be able to list every single item. It was estimated at the time that the buildings, land, stock, and goods and chattels taken from Standing Bear were worth in excess of $4,000—at a time when a journalist in Omaha earned $15 to $25 a week and a good house could be rented in the city for $25 a month.42
While Standing Bear was bringing his possessions to the agency, all the other Ponca men were doing the same, coming from north and south with their loaded wagons. Any Ponca who failed to comply saw the soldiers take his possessions away. In the presence of a large number of soldiers the Poncas filled evacuated houses near the agency with their belongings and then glumly watched the soldiers lock up the houses.
Inspector Howard now assembled the Ponca men. They sat in a large council circle as Howard told them that they could keep their horses and their wagons, but now they must all start for Indian Territory. Standing Bear was defiant. He told Howard that he would not go to Indian Territory. If he must, he would go and live with his friends the Omaha tribe, he said. Howard told him that he should go to Indian Territory and see how the first part of the tribe—the “half-breeds”—were living down there. If the Poncas didn’t like what they saw, then he would let them come back up to live with the Omahas.43
Although White Eagle was inclined to think this a reasonable offer under the circumstances, Standing Bear didn’t trust this inspector any more than he had trusted his slick-tongued predecessor, Kemble. He sat there, contemplating refusing to move. But his wife, Susette, a tall, “comely,”44 and “highly intelligent” woman, came and whispered urgently in his ear.45 Susette had relatives in the party that had already gone down to Indian Territory, and she told Standing Bear not to resist but to go south as the soldiers ordered, as she wanted to go see her relatives in the Indian Territory. Although she didn’t tell Standing Bear this, she also would have wanted to prevent the soldiers from putting a bullet or a bayonet in her husband. While Inspector Howard addressed the Ponca menfolk, soldiers had spread out, with bayonets fixed, around the edge of the village, surrounding it. Standing Bear bowed to his wife’s wishes, and when a soldier took him by the arm and pulled him to his feet, he did not resist but went unhappily to his wagons and horses and prepared to go.
The troops moved through the village’s collection of log houses like a slow, inexorable flood, forcing the terrified women and children from their homes while other soldiers held back the Ponca men. Driven before the bayonets (“just as one would drive a herd of ponies,” White Eagle said later) and with women and children crying, they were forced to the Niobrara, which had risen during a storm, and made to cross.46 The men too, with 72 wagons and 500 horses, were forced to ford the surging river, unloading the wagons and carrying the contents across, to link up with the women and children from all three Ponca villages and pack the wagons again on the other side. As they were supervising the crossing, several of Howard’s troopers got into difficulties and were swept from the backs of their horses by the fast-moving torrent. Without hesitation, Ponca men dove into the river and rescued the soldiers.
Thunderstorms raged for several days, making travel impossible, so that the Poncas had to huddle in and under the wagons. On Saturday, May 19, the sky cleared and at 10:00 A.M., Inspector Howard ordered the column to move out. With an escort of twenty-five mounted soldiers under Captain Fergus Walker, the sodden wagon train slowly set off.
There were several men among the Poncas who were Omahas and Yankton Sioux; they’d married Ponca wives and settled down with the Poncas and raised families. Howard told these men that they were not considered Poncas by the government and had to take their families and go back to their own tribes.47 With women and children wailing at being separated from their Ponca relatives, these families also departed, some heading north, some south. They would later follow and rejoin the Poncas and share in their fate.
Once the miserable Ponca caravan was out of sight beyond the southern horizon with its army escort, Inspector Howard and Agent Lawrence supervised the military rear guard as it moved through the three Ponca vil- lages. At Howard’s direction every Ponca log house was torn down—236 of them.48 All the barns and outbuildings were demolished. They knocked down the tribe’s grist mill, sawmill, and blacksmith shop, and, since they had been built by the tribe, did the same to the church and schoolhouse. Only one structure was left standing—the government’s own agency building.
After Howard set off to join the train of Ponca wagons, the livestock, tools, and personal possessions that the Poncas had brought to the agency were taken away by Agent Lawrence, who was not making the trip south, along with the threshing machines, reapers, and mowers owned by the tribe. The Poncas never saw their possessions again. There is no record of what happened to those possessions, whether Indian Affairs sold them or whether the soldiers sold them and kept the proceeds. On that traumatic day, May 19, 1877, the trials of the Ponca people began in earnest.
Marching south under escort, the Poncas were soon deluged by rain. Day after day they slogged on through a ceaseless downpour that turned their path to thick, clawing mud. Within two days, two Ponca children died from exposure. Showing no sympathy, Howard and the soldiers drove the hundreds of wet, shivering people along mud-clogged byways and across swollen rivers. Standing Bear was in the midst of the throng, trying to protect and provide for his wife Susette and his children—a son, Bear Shield, whose age is variously given as twelve and sixteen, an adult daughter, Prairie Flower, who was married to clan member Shines White and had two very young children of her own, and Standing Bear’s infant daughter, Fanny.
The Ponca wagon train was steered away from the Omaha reservation by Howard so that the Omahas would not interfere with the Poncas’ removal, but news of the dispossession soon reached Chief Iron Eye. He was angered and saddened by what he heard. He had many relatives and friends among the Poncas, who had regularly intermarried with the Omahas. His mother, Watunna, had been a Ponca. When he was young, Iron Eye had been adopted by the then paramount chief of the Omahas, Big Elk, and had succeeded Big Elk as chief after his death.
Iron Eye’s daughter Bright Eyes, who had tried to help the Ponca chiefs earlier in the year by penning the statement and the telegram that Standing Bear took to Iowa and by involving Reverend Hamilton, was determined to again help the Poncas. She had dear relatives among them, including her favorite uncle, White Swan, to whom she was particularly close. Bright Eyes also had many Ponca friends, including Standing Bear’s daughter Prairie Flower, who had been her “girlhood companion.”49 The two had apparently gone to school together. Bright Eyes convinced her father that they must ride after the Poncas and see what they could do to help them.
Among his many horses Iron Eye had two ponies that were famous in northern Nebraska for their speed. On these ponies, Iron Eye and Bright Eyes slipped off the reservation without the knowledge of agent Jacob Vore and made an illegal dash south to overtake the Ponca column. At the Loup River they came to the town of Columbus, 120 miles west of the city of Omaha, to find they had arrived ahead of the Ponca wagon train. Before long, the sad Ponca caravan came into sight. They found the Poncas sick and miserable. Among those who had fallen ill was Standing Bear’s daughter and Bright Eyes’s friend Prairie Flower. Iron Eye found his brother White Swan, and he and Bright Eyes spoke with him about what the government was doing to the Poncas.
From White Swan they heard about the forced removal, and he assured them that no Ponca had signed an agreement to go to Indian Territory. He also told them something that sent a chill down their spines. When some Poncas had expressed a desire to live with the Omahas rather than go to Indian Territory, just as Standing Bear had done, Inspector Howard had told them that was not an option, as the Omahas would soon be going down there too.
When Inspector Howard discovered Iron Eye and Bright Eyes in his column, he ordered them to leave. The Omaha pair only had a chance for heart-wrenching farewells with their relatives and friends before gloomily turning around and going back to their own reservation. As they went north, part of Captain Walker’s military escort followed them, making its way back to its post on the Missouri. From here on, the Poncas, now living on government stores doled out by Howard, were totally dependent on the inspector. After a two-day pause in Columbus, he ordered the Poncas to resume their trek.
As the column continued to trundle south, Standing Bear worried about Prairie Flower’s deteriorating health. They had no doctor, no medicines; all Standing Bear and his wife and son-in-law could do was pray for her. Ten days later, on June 6, when the column was outside the town of Milford, Nebraska, just west of the state capital, Lincoln, Prairie Flower died, claimed by pneumonia.
Standing Bear was a Christian. He was one of the score of Poncas who had been converted to Christianity by Episcopalian missionary J. Owen Dorsey six years before. Desperately Standing Bear had prayed to the Great Spirit that his child might be spared. Now the devastated Standing Bear buried Prairie Flower and offered prayers to heaven that the Great Spirit might accept her departed soul. When the Christian ladies of Milford heard that the chief ’s daughter was dying, they came hurrying out from the town and prayed with Standing Bear and his people. Under their auspices, Standing Bear and his wife interred Prairie Flower in a Christian cemetery at Milford.
That night, as the wails of grieving Poncas filled their camp, a tornado struck out of nowhere, destroying tents, damaging wagons, hurling people into the air, and seriously injuring several tribe members. The next day Inspector Howard still ordered the column to resume its southerly march. Within twenty-four hours a Ponca child died. Soon other adults were also dying. But Howard never permitted the march to pause, apart from allowing the burial of the dead.
When the shambling column reached the Oto reservation on June 14, the Otoes took pity on their Ponca brothers and gave them the few ponies they could spare so that some of the women and children might go on horseback. By the time the bedraggled column reached Manhattan, Kansas, ten days later, Howard was alarmed by growing sickness among his charges and worried how the fatalities might reflect on him. So he employed a white doctor from the town to attend the Poncas. The doctor’s attentions were too late for two women of the tribe, who died the next day.
Near Burlington, Kansas, a Ponca male named Buffalo Track suddenly attacked Chief White Eagle, blaming him for the tribe’s loss of homeland and the growing list of deaths. Soldiers dragged Buffalo Track off the shaken old chief, and Howard sent the man back to the Omaha reservation in Nebraska under guard to cool off. He later rejoined the tribe down south.
On July 9, fifty days after setting out, the Poncas reached the Indian Territory destination that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had planned for them—the hot, mosquito-ridden reservation of their cousins the Quapaw near the Kaw River. Here the Poncas were reunited with those Poncas who had preceded them. The “half-breeds” and their families were living, weak and dejected, in tents. Without their farming implements they had not been able to work the hard, dry land. Accustomed to three meals a day in the north, they were only being given enough rations for one meal a day by the Quapaw agent, A. G. Boone, a grandson of famous Kentucky pioneer Daniel Boone.
When Standing Bear informed Howard that this land was not suitable for his people and they wanted to go back to the Omaha reservation as the inspector had promised, Howard advised him that the Poncas were now prisoners and would be punished if they attempted to leave the Quapaw reservation. Having done all that Commissioner Smith had required, Inspector Howard then handed responsibility for the Poncas over to Agent Boone and returned to Washington.
Howard had done his job with brutal efficiency, but he was already having doubts about the whole business. Back at his desk, when he penned his official report he told Commissioner Smith that the removal of the Poncas to Indian Territory “will prove a mistake, and that a great mortality will surely follow among the people when they have been here for a time and been poisoned with the malaria of the climate.”50 His superiors ignored him. Howard’s prediction proved unhappily accurate. By the end of that year, 158 Ponca men, women, and children had died since the tribe left the Niobrara.
Standing Bear regularly expressed his dissatisfaction with this place to Agent Boone. He also reminded him that the tribe had been promised that once it settled in the Indian Territory its leading men would be taken to Washington to see the Great Father. Standing Bear felt sure that the president did not know how the Poncas had been treated and wanted to tell him of their terrible state, face-to-face.
Boone transmitted the complaints to Washington, and in the summer they came across the desk of Ezra A. Hayt, whom Carl Schurz had just appointed to replace Smith as Indian commissioner. Hayt, a wealthy former dry goods wholesaler from New York City and a onetime member of the board of Indian commissioners, recommended to Schurz that they agree to the Washington excursion—visits to the capital always produced shock and awe among Indian leaders, as they saw for themselves the magnificence and power of the United States in all its glory. Toward the end of the fall, Indian Affairs officials arrived from the East, collected Standing Bear, White Eagle, and other leading men of the tribe, and took them up to Kansas. From there they were conveyed by train to the nation’s capital.
In early November, in a large white limestone building on Pennsylvania Avenue named the Executive Mansion, better known as the White House, Standing Bear and White Eagle met President Rutherford B. Hayes. In the cabinet chamber, the bearded, fifty-five-year-old president shook hands with the chiefs and invited them to sit and air their grievances and wishes. Standing Bear reverently, respectfully told the Great Father that his people had been wronged, that they were now in an awfully bad place, and that he hoped he would do something for them. At the president’s invitation he told him the story of the forced removal of the Poncas to Indian Territory against their wishes, and of the many deaths that had resulted on the march and since. To Standing Bear, President Hayes seemed astonished by the story of the Poncas’ woes. The president told the chiefs that this was the first he had heard of their treatment. Coming to his feet, indicating that the interview was at an end, he told them he would order an investigation into their situation.51
Next the chiefs were taken to the Interior Department, where they conferred with Commissioner Hayt, who bluntly informed Standing Bear and his fellow Ponca chiefs that there was “no way by which their request to be sent back North could be complied with without action of Congress in the matter.”52 Hayt, who was completely bald, was later described as a “bald-headed liar” by Spotted Tail, paramount chief of Brulé Lakota Sioux, after Hayt failed to keep a promise to his people.53
Several days later the Poncas were brought back to the White House for a second meeting with President Hayes. Having been briefed by the Interior Department, the Great Father now told the disappointed Ponca chiefs that as their tribe was in Indian Territory they had better stay there. He told them to go back and hunt for better land down there, and he would have the possessions confiscated from them in the north sent to them when they had chosen a new site for a reservation. He assured them that from now on the Poncas would be treated well. Those responsible for their mistreatment were gone, he said, referring to the previous administration, and that was all in the past. The president expressed his confident belief that before long sickness would leave the tribe once the Poncas became accustomed to the new country. Standing Bear replied that he could only obey the president’s orders.54
The overawed and trusting chiefs went back to Indian Territory to tell their people of their momentous meetings with the Great Father, and of his promise of better times ahead. At first, the president seemed to keep his word. An Indian Affairs inspector soon arrived to take Standing Bear and other chiefs to search for a new Indian Territory reservation site. The best of the locations shown to them was 150 miles away on the west bank of the Arkansas River, around the junction with the Salt Fork. In lieu of going home to the Niobrara, Ponca leaders chose this as their new home.
But Agent Boone received no funds to make the relocation possible— nothing for transport, nothing for extra rations or clothing or for housing once they reached the latest destination. In the spring of 1878, the Pon- cas were made to walk all the way to the Arkansas River. Until their newly assigned Indian Affairs agent, William H. Whiteman, finally joined them in July, they were left to their own devices and received no rations for months on end. They were in such dire straits that local white settlers collected food for them. Still, the Poncas’ spirits lifted a little once they reached their new reservation, for it was more fertile than the Quapaw land. And they looked forward to their possessions confiscated at the Niobrara being sent down to them, as the president had promised.
But during the summer, illness returned to the tribe with a vengeance. Poncas died by the score. Even their horses perished—the tribe had come south with five hundred horses and had acquired another two hundred since, but now only one hundred were still alive.55 Few Ponca tents were without a fatality. The camp was filled with the moans of the sick and the dying. Some of the sick, lying in their beds, “would ask for another good day to live to get back” to their home country in the north.56
Standing Bear’s sister succumbed to the sickness and died. Standing Bear himself was ill and became too weak to plow. He felt totally helpless—like a child, he was to say, unable to help even himself, much less help his people.57 Paramount Chief White Eagle succinctly described how battered the surviving Ponca people felt: “We were as grass that is trodden down.”58
In October Commissioner Hayt paid a surprise visit to the new Ponca reservation at the Arkansas River. After a cursory inspection he told Interior Secretary Schurz that conditions among the Poncas were “very much improved.” Later he noted, “It is true that during the first four months of their residence in the Indian Territory they lost a large number by death, which is inevitable in all cases of removal of Northern Indians to a Southern latitude.” But he was certain that the tribe’s health would soon improve as they became “acclimated.”59
The health of the Poncas did not improve. As winter took a grip, one of the many who became ill was Standing Bear’s teenage son, Bear Shield. A few years back Standing Bear had lost a son. Now, completely at a loss, with Indian remedies having failed and no white doctor to call on, Standing Bear could only nurse his last son and heir as best he could and pray to the Great Spirit.
Bear Shield had gone to school at the tribe’s Niobrara schoolhouse. He could speak English, could read and write, and he had been a great help to his father. Like his father, Bear Shield was a Christian, and to his father’s great pride he had often taken aside members of their tribe and read to them from the Holy Scriptures. But as he felt his life slipping away, Bear Shield began to worry about the afterlife. It was a Ponca custom to bury the bones of dead tribe members with those of their ancestors, so that they would not be alone in the afterlife. A Ponca who was not buried with his ancestors was doomed to wander the next world alone. Bear Shield did not want to be alone in the afterlife. In December, with his last breaths, Bear Shield made his sobbing father promise that he would bury his bones among their ancestors beside the Swift Running Water.
His son’s death, in his arms, was the last straw for Standing Bear. The Great Father had been wrong. This land was fatal for the Poncas. Their health had not improved. What’s more, none of their belongings had been brought down to them from the north as Rutherford B. Hayes had promised. Now Standing Bear, heartbroken over his family tragedies, was also heartbroken at the realization that the almost mystical Great Father had deceived him. Over recent months he’d begun to think of escaping this place. In one scenario that he played out in his mind he would send the women and children on ahead, and he and the warriors would act as a rear guard to fight off pursuit as the Poncas fled to the mountains. But, realizing that most of the warriors were too sick to march, let alone fight, he decided the best chance lay with a small group breaking away. Failure, he told himself, could be no worse than staying where they were.60
In the new scheme, the escapees would return to the Niobrara, where Standing Bear would bury his son with their ancestors as he had promised, and where he and his family would resume their former life. Once he reached the old homeland, he would be able to send for other Poncas so that they too could go back home. Sad but determined, Standing Bear began to carefully plan his escape.