Chapter 4
THE NEWSPAPER EDITOR

AT ONE O’CLOCK in the morning on Sunday, March 30, 1879, a secret meeting took place in the offices of the Omaha Daily Herald, one of Omaha’s leading daily newspapers. Only a single written account of what took place at that meeting exists. It was related by one of the participants, Thomas Henry Tibbles, in his autobiographical book Buckskin and Blanket Days. Another participant, General George Crook, also penned an autobiography, but it breaks off before the events of 1879. The reliability of Tibbles’s account in relation to one aspect is open to question. As the Standing Bear story unfolds, it becomes clear that Tibbles had a personal and, in part, honorable reason for claiming that only General Crook and he were present at this meeting.

Thirty-nine-year-old Tibbles, deputy editor of the Daily Herald, was filling in as editor in chief while the paper’s founder and editor, Dr. George L. Miller, was out of town. Thomas Henry Tibbles—Henry to his friends—had led a colorful life up to this point. Tall, solid, handsome, with tousled black hair and a long face adorned with a mustache and goatee, he looked like a country parson or a tub-thumping politician. He had been the former, and in time he would attempt to become the latter. He grew up barefoot in a basic settler’s cabin in Ohio, General Crook’s home state, one of nine children born to an outdoorsman father and a deeply religious mother. Tibbles left home at eleven on a quest for the righteous cause that would occupy the rest of his life. Convinced of the evils of slavery, he joined abolitionist John Brown’s forces as they fought pro-slavery vigilantes for control of Kansas Territory in 1856. After Brown’s arrest and execution, Tibbles attended a religious college for three years until the Civil War broke out in 1861. He served in the Union army as a scout and possibly a secret agent, rising to the rank of major by war’s end. In later newspaper interviews he spoke little of his wartime adventures except to mention several battles in which he participated and of narrowly escaping death on one occasion at the hands of Confederate guerrillas led by William Quantrill.

After the war, Tibbles, who claimed to be one of the best pistol shots in the West, worked as a newspaper reporter and frontier guide. He led a posse on the trail of outlaw Jesse James and, after 1871, became a guntoting circuit preacher for the Episcopal Church in Missouri and then Nebraska. Falling out with the church hierarchy in 1876, he left the ministry and went to work for the Omaha Daily Bee as a journalist, soon moving to the Herald, where he was quickly promoted to deputy editor. Hunting and fishing filled much of his spare time (during the Civil War he proved himself to be an expert woodsman and a crack marksman). He also had a good singing voice, putting together church choirs and conducting a choir of Herald newsboys. He even penned a hymn or two. But Tibbles’s main diversions were community affairs, politics, and worthy causes. Which is where General Crook came in. Literally.

Henry Tibbles later said that just before one o’clock in the morning of the last Sunday in March 1879 he was working late as usual in the editorial offices of the Omaha Daily Herald, then at the corner of 13th and Douglas Streets. Suddenly the door to the editor’s room opened and General Crook walked in and changed his life. Later events suggest that General Crook was not alone, that he had brought two companions with him to talk to Tibbles—the Omaha Indians Iron Eye and his daughter Bright Eyes.74

The indications are that Crook brought the pair into town after meeting with them at the fort and arranged for them to spend the night at the presbytery of Reverend William Harsha, the Presbyterian minister in Omaha. Iron Eye had been baptized a Catholic, but he converted to Presbyterianism and raised his children as Presbyterians.

It was only four miles from Fort Omaha to downtown Omaha. General Crook could have made the journey into town during the late afternoon or evening, but he timed his arrival at the Herald offices for the early hours of Sunday morning so that he and his Indian companions could do so unseen. Knowing that his friend Henry Tibbles habitually worked late, Crook waited until after midnight to hustle Bright Eyes and her father to the newspaper offices, safe from prying eyes, having shared his plan with Reverend Harsha.⁷⁵

The newspaper editor was understandably surprised by his friend’s unheralded late visit. He knew that Standing Bear and his party were under guard at Fort Omaha, after his city editor had put his head in the editor’s door two hours earlier to tell him that he’d just come back from Fort Omaha, where he learned the Ponca prisoners had been brought in. Tibbles would have made a note to follow up the story over the coming days, never imagining that General Crook would soon come calling on him with two Indians. Tibbles wrote that the general was not a happy man: “I could see by his face that something had gone very wrong.”⁷⁶ As General Crook took a seat across the large editorial table, the newspaperman began by asking how he could be of help.

“Tibbles,” Crook began with force and deep feeling, “during the twenty-five or thirty years that I’ve been on the plains in the government service I’ve been forced many times by orders from Washington to do most inhuman things in dealings with the Indians. But now I’m ordered to do a more cruel thing than ever before.” The general would then have invited Bright Eyes to speak on Iron Eye’s behalf as she had done before, to explain the cause of the War Department order in question.

There, sitting at the editorial table in the quietly industrious offices of the fourteen-year-old Daily Herald, a weary Henry Tibbles listened with increasing interest as, at General Crook’s urging, Bright Eyes overcame her shyness and retold the Ponca tribe’s sad story for the newspaper editor. When Bright Eyes finished, Crook again took up the proverbial baton, explaining that he had been ordered to arrest Standing Bear and the twenty-six Poncas accompanying him, with a view to stopping them from reaching their old home on the Niobrara and returning them under guard to the reservation beside the Arkansas River in the Indian Territory.

“I would resign my commission,” the general went on, “if that would prevent the order from being executed. But it would not. Another officer would merely be assigned to fill my place.”⁷⁷

Tibbles sympathized with Crook and the Poncas and asked what he could do to help. Which is what the general hoped he would do.

“I’ve come to ask if you will not take up the matter,” said Crook. He showed Tibbles the order he had received from the War Department in Washington via headquarters in Chicago, together with a copy of a communication from Secretary of the Interior Schurz to Secretary of War Mc-Crary. Schurz’s communication said, in part, “I respectfully request that the nearest military commander be instructed to detail a sufficient guard to return these Poncas to the agency where they belong.”⁷⁸ That agency was on the new Ponca reservation in the Indian Territory.

When Tibbles asked Crook if there was nothing he could do to change the minds of the powers that be in Washington, the general responded with exasperation, “It’s no use for me to protest. Washington always orders the very opposite of what I recommend.” He told Tibbles that the fate of Standing Bear and his people was now in the editor’s hands. This was not the first time that Tibbles and Crook had worked covertly together—the previous year Crook had sent Tibbles as his secret envoy to the Brulé, to urge them not to accept a proposal from Washington that the Brulé be relocated, which Crook considered against the interests of Indian and white alike. But Tibbles now protested that in a matter such as this Ponca business he had less power than the general.⁷⁹

To which Crook replied, “You have a great daily newspaper here which you can use.”⁸⁰ And then George Crook showed why William McKinley and numerous others respected his intellect—the general told Tibbles he had noticed a small loophole in his orders, one that he now urged the newspaperman to exploit. As he pointed out, Secretary Schurz had re- quested that he be instructed to “detail a sufficient guard to return these Poncas to their agency.” Based on that request, the War Department had ordered Crook to arrest Standing Bear and those accompanying him. But that was all.

The general had obeyed Schurz’s request and the War Department’s order to the letter. He had detailed a guard under Lieutenant Carpenter that had effected the arrest of Standing Bear and his party and now watched over them at Fort Omaha. But, to date, Washington had not ordered Crook to physically remove the Poncas back to their reservation in the Indian Territory. It was a semantic argument, true enough, yet it allowed Crook to delay the forced deportation of Standing Bear and his people. Until someone in Washington woke up and sent a direct order to remove the Poncas to Indian Territory, Crook said, he would simply keep them under guard at Fort Omaha. At the same time, he could not be accused of disobeying orders. Crook’s literal interpretation of his orders opened a narrow window of opportunity for someone to take up the Ponca cause.⁸¹

Tibbles appreciated the subtlety and potential of the general’s strategy. The question was, How long would he have before Secretary Schurz closed the loophole? Crook would have told Tibbles that it could be a week, perhaps two, if they were lucky, or just a matter of days, before the Indian Affairs agent at the Arkansas River reservation, William White-man, telegraphed Washington to ask why the army was not returning the Standing Bear party to the reservation as he had been led to expect, setting off alarm bells in Commissioner Hayt’s office and then Secretary Schurz’s office.

Crook had come to know Henry Tibbles well during his years in Nebraska. They shared outdoors pursuits, an interest in the Indian peoples, and a liberal temperament. When Tibbles was reluctant to become the champion of the campaign that Crook was advocating, the general appealed to his friend’s righteous zeal.

“You’re perfectly acquainted with all the crimes of the Indian Ring at Washington,” Crook said. “I ask you to go into the fight against those who are robbing these helpless people. You can win. I’m sure of it! The American people, if they knew half the truth, would send every member of the Indian Ring to prison.”⁸²

“General,” Tibbles answered, “if I once went into such a fight as that, I should never give up till I won or died. It would require at least five years and would cost thousands of dollars.”⁸³

Tibbles described this conversation some years later with the benefit of hindsight in an attempt to enlarge his original motive. Crook and Bright Eyes were asking for a one-off press campaign for this little band of Poncas, just like the other one-off crusading editorial campaigns that Tibbles had embarked on in the past for various causes. Neither Crook nor Tibbles could have imagined on that day in March the huge Pandora’s box that the campaign for Standing Bear ultimately opened.

Tibbles also protested that publicly taking up the cause of an Indian would make him very unpopular in some quarters, could even threaten his newspaper career. This was a very real possibility that would have been apparent to both men at the time. “You’re asking a great deal of me,” he told Crook.⁸⁴

According to Tibbles, the general replied, “I know I am. But no matter what we do, all that any of us can get out of this world is what we eat, drink, and wear, and a place to shelter us. If we can do something for which good men will remember us when we’re gone, that’s the best legacy we can leave. I promise you that if you’ll take up this work, I’ll stand by you.”⁸⁵

There was another factor that had the capacity to influence the attitudes of both men to this case—the Soldier Lodge. All the Plains Indians had secret warrior societies. Among the Omaha, the Ponca, and the tribes related to them the Soldier Lodge was the most sacred and the most secret of all. It was a great honor for a tribesman to be invited to become a member, but he had to pass an initiation ceremony to gain membership and the high respect of other Indians that went with it.

Soldier Lodge initiation traditionally took place during the tribe’s summer buffalo hunt. Portable lodges, or tipis, were set up in a circle around the central holy lodge and the three-day Sun Dance religious ceremony was conducted. Each initiate had four slits cut in the flesh of his chest, two on each breast. Two slivers of wood were forced between the slits. Leather thongs tied to the pieces of wood trailed away to the top of a tall wooden pole at the center of the dance circle, the sacred pole. This, it was believed, put the dancers in touch with Wakanda, the Great Spirit. The initiate then danced around the pole to a monotonous drumbeat until the pieces of wood ripped from his skin, which could take a number of hours. The longer the better, for that meant the initiate spent more time in touch with Wakanda. As Henry Tibbles revealed in his autobiography, over the years two white men were invited by the Omaha tribe to submit to Soldier Lodge initiation, and both passed the test. Until Tibbles revealed the secret in his life story, which was not published until long after his death, no other white was ever aware of the pair’s initiation. Tibbles identified himself as one of these two white initiates; the other, he wrote, was General Crook.⁸⁶

Apparently Chief Iron Eye went to Crook at Fort Omaha hoping that their links through the Soldier Lodge brotherhood would induce the general to help him and the Ponca people. And now Crook expected his fellow initiate Tibbles to acknowledge the unique honor the Omaha had bestowed on the pair, and the trust that had been placed in them by the tribe, by helping the cousins of the Omaha—as the Omaha had themselves helped the Ponca people.

The presence of the chief of the Omahas at the meeting between Tibbles and Crook would have highlighted the obligation that the Omaha tribe felt its two white brothers were under—especially when Bright Eyes told them that if the government would not permit the Poncas to return to the Niobrara, then it should let them live with the Omaha tribe. Anything would be better than a return to the deadly Warm Land. Iron Eye had already told Standing Bear that the Omaha people would happily give up some of the land on their reservation to their Ponca cousins.

The meeting at the newspaper office lasted several long, emotion-packed hours. When Tibbles, General Crook, Iron Eye, and Bright Eyes walked out of the offices of the Omaha Daily Herald together that Sunday morning, the first rays of dawn were streaking the eastern sky. It was 4:30 A.M., half an hour after the paper’s other editorial staff had left for the day. By this time, Henry Tibbles had decided to take up Standing Bear’s cause.

As his past made clear, Henry Tibbles was a serial crusader. He joined the Standing Bear coalition for all the right reasons. He was a good man, and he saw the injustices done to Standing Bear and his people for the crimes they were. But, for all that, he simply could not help himself when a budding crusade came knocking at his door. Tibbles was addicted to just causes, and to challenges. And he was never happier than when his current crusade pitted him against dangerous opposition.

He had begun young, dodging bullets and vigilantes’ nooses as a sixteen-year-old abolitionist in Kansas. After the Civil War, during his circuit preaching days in Missouri, his gospel tent was regularly shot up by drunks and atheists. When he moved to Nebraska, he claimed that he didn’t possess an item of clothing without at least one bullet hole in it. But he wouldn’t have missed a minute of it.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had considerable success as a crusader in the recent past. Assigned by the church to southern Nebraska’s more civilized and sedate Republican Valley in 1873, he set about ministering to the needs of the dirt-poor settlers of the region. Within a year, he had a new cause. A severe drought parched Nebraska in 1874. In the Republican Valley, the few crops that didn’t fail were blighted by a grasshopper plague. Wheat-growing settlers living in sod houses with high hopes and very little else began to struggle. Some packed up and left. Others were too poor to go anywhere; they stayed and starved, and a number died. Yet the problem was denied by local politicians, land speculators, and merchants in the far-flung rural communities on the recently opened prairies. “Boosters” these people were called—their wealth depended on “boosting” the prospects of their areas to attract a steady stream of new immigrants who would spend money with them. It wasn’t good for business to admit that new settlers living in famine-hit counties were having a tough time.

It was only when the U.S. Army identified the need for urgent drought relief in thirty-six Nebraska counties that people in authority began to take notice and the government began to muster emergency supplies for the affected areas. Nonetheless, as the winter of 1874–1875 loomed, Henry Tibbles was convinced that the slow relief effort would yield too little too late. And he took it on himself to do something about the problem.

Deciding to go east to make a public appeal for funds to help the starving farmers of southern Nebraska, Pastor Tibbles sought and received the endorsement of the Nebraska Aid Society. Then he set off for Illinois and the booming city of Chicago, center of the wheat trade. Hoping that wheat traders would spare a thought for struggling wheat farmers, the first thing Tibbles did when he arrived in the city was address the Chicago Board of Trade. Its members promptly donated $3,500 and set up a Nebraska Relief and Aid Committee.

But the very next day the Chicago press ran a report from Omaha denying a famine crisis in Nebraska and claiming that T. H. Tibbles was a fraud. Soon some eighty local papers throughout Nebraska were repeating the story. Tibbles moved quickly to salvage his reputation and his crusade, providing the Chicago committee with documentary proof from the U.S. Army that the army quartermaster was handling the distribution of relief funds and supplies in the Republican Valley. The Chicago farmers aid committee stuck by Tibbles, as did another that was set up in Milwaukee after he visited there. The crusade and the fund-raising meetings continued. But stories that he was a con man who was pocketing the relief money followed him and would be revived after he took up the fight for the Poncas.

Finding that the bad press was discouraging famine relief donors, Tibbles hurried back to Nebraska and recruited another Protestant minister to the crusade, Reverend G. W. Frost. The pair then set off on a new fundraising foray in the East. This second time around Tibbles also took along a written endorsement from Brigadier General Edward Ord, General Crook’s predecessor as commander of the U.S. Army Department of the Platte, a document confirming the plight of thousands of destitute Nebraska farmers. In Detroit, Buffalo, Utica, Troy, and finally New York City, Tibbles and his platform partner, Frost, spoke at public meeting after public meeting. Together they succeeded in raising $80,000 for the farmers in thirty days.

The Nebraska drought relief crusade taught Tibbles a lot, most importantly, the need to hope for the best while preparing for the worst when advocating a cause that had influential enemies. And at every step of the way he had to be seen as having nothing to gain personally from his efforts on behalf of those less fortunate than himself.

That Sunday morning in March 1879, walking the quiet streets of Omaha from the Daily Herald office to his nearby home in the golden light of the new day, Henry Tibbles was deep in thought about how he should approach this latest challenge.