ON APRIL FOOL’S Day 1879, the small army of newsboys ranging the streets of Omaha with the new day’s edition of the Omaha Daily Herald were touting sales with lines like “Criminal Cruelty—The History of the Ponca prisoners now at the barracks,” and “A tale of cruelty that was never surpassed—read all about it!”110
The newspaper sellers were soon doing a roaring trade, with the edition being snapped up by an intrigued populace. Soon all of Omaha was reading T. H. Tibbles’s Standing Bear news story. As Tibbles had anticipated, that same Tuesday, as Nebraskans were reading his material in the Herald, the Standing Bear story broke around the entire country. The vast majority of the editors who had received the story by Tibbles ran it, adding their own editorial comments.
Throughout the day, those press articles came ticking into the Omaha telegraph office, and the transcribed messages were piling up at the Daily Herald. The first in were from the Chicago Tribune and Missouri Republican. Both were for the Poncas “and denounced the cruelties practiced upon them.”111 New York papers soon followed—the Herald, the Tribune, and the Daily Sun—in what became a tide of national coverage over the next few days. Tibbles and his staff devoured each new report with growing elation. Some editorial writers were negative, but as Tibbles was able to report to General Crook and the church leaders of Omaha, “Newspapers everywhere came out strongly pro-Indian.”112
Tibbles waited expectantly throughout the day to hear that the newspaper coverage had spurred a positive response from Secretary Schurz in Washington. By day’s end, to his disappointment, the churchmen all advised that no reply had been received from the secretary of the Interior. That night, while fulfilling his double duties as acting editor and chief subeditor of the Herald, he plotted his next move in the Standing Bear affair. Henry Tibbles the crusader had only begun to fight.
Tibbles’s nocturnal fourth estate lifestyle meant that six days a week it was his habit to sleep until noon, before starting work at 1:00 P.M. for a fifteen- hour shift at the Herald. To give himself the time to devote to the Standing Bear case, he decided that he would get by on a few hours sleep a night until the case was won. It seems that during the morning of April 2 he went out to Fort Omaha to consult with General Crook, and he and the general agreed that if pressure from the clergy had no effect on Carl Schurz, then they had to find another way to prevent the secretary from having Standing Bear and his Poncas deported back to Indian Territory. Crook remarked that a white man in Standing Bear’s situation could have the legality of his arrest tested before a judge.113 Surely there had to be a legal remedy to Standing Bear’s problem, even though he was an Indian. Both men agreed that what they needed first and foremost was a good lawyer to advise them and, preferably, represent Standing Bear and his Poncas.
Omaha had plenty of attorneys who were looking for new business—R. R. Gaylord, John D. Howe, McBride and Bevins, T. W. T. Richards, John M. Macfarland, and Warren Switzer among them.114 But none wanted the Poncas for clients. For fear of offending the legal fraternity of Omaha, Tibbles didn’t write in detail about how every lawyer he approached in the city turned him down when he sought representation for Standing Bear and his people. The typical excuse from these lawyers would have been that they could not afford to act for the Poncas without a fee. But there was a more potent reason. As Tibbles had told George Crook when he first approached him, anyone who took the side of an Indian and thus took on the government could be marking himself for disfavor, discrimination, and perhaps even destruction.
It must have seemed to Henry Tibbles that no lawyer in Omaha had his scruples or his courage. There was also the fact that the Ponca cause seemed doomed to failure. As more than one attorney would have politely but firmly reminded Tibbles, the Poncas were Indians and as such had no rights under the law; and they would have told him that in their opinion the Poncas legally couldn’t even hire a lawyer, no matter how just their cause might be, without BIA approval.
As days passed with no response from Washington and with law office doors hitting him on the way out, Tibbles became even more determined. If no lawyer would offer him a solution, he would find it himself! He began spending his mornings in the Omaha Public Library, poring over law books. Far from enlightening him, the legal jargon only clogged his mind. The problem seemed insoluble.
There was a lawyer in the town who had all the qualifications to handle the case on behalf of the Poncas. And Tibbles had an entrée to him—both had gone to Mount Union College in Ohio, although Tibbles had left by the time the lawyer began attending. A prominent member of the Omaha Episcopal Church congregation, the Honorable John Lee Webster was a former politician and constitutional lawyer. Webster had practiced law in his hometown of New Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for a year after graduating from law school at the top of his class. He had come west more than a decade ago during Nebraska’s frontier days seeking to make a legal career but found himself attracted to the opportunities offered by territorial politics. After a stint as mayor of Omaha he served in the Nebraska legislature. Four years back he had been president of the Nebraska Constitutional Convention of 1875, which formulated the new state’s constitution. Tibbles considered Webster “a man whose opinions commanded respect in the courts and outside.”115 But Webster had a large practice 116and wasn’t looking for new clients.117 Would this prominent, expensive attorney even give Tibbles a hearing? There was only one way to find out.