IN THE LAST days of April, Genio Madison Lambertson, U.S. attorney for the district of Nebraska, came up from Lincoln, where he was based, to represent General Crook and the government of the United States in district court and contest the writ issued on behalf of Standing Bear and his band.
The Indiana-born Lambertson had settled in Lincoln in the summer of 1874 with a new law degree and high hopes for a successful legal career, starting with a local law firm that soon made him a partner. Ambitious and energetic, he left Lamb, Billingsby & Lambertson in December 1878 to become district attorney. When he arrived in Omaha to discuss the Standing Bear case with General Crook in late April 1879, he was several weeks short of his twenty-ninth birthday and had been DA for just five months. This was his biggest case to date.
Lambertson would have previously corresponded with General Crook about the case, but now he traveled to Fort Omaha to formally interview the general, verify the facts of the case as he understood them, and inform Crook of how he intended to approach the hearing in court. The intelligent, determined, self-confident young district attorney (who was nonetheless so self-conscious about his unusual first name that he signed and introduced himself as G. M. Lambertson) was as certain as a man could be of having the writ thrown out. With no case like it in the annals of U.S. legal history, and with the seemingly indisputable fact that Indians had no rights under U.S. law, Lambertson would have assured General Crook when they met in his Fort Omaha office that the case was laughable and the general had nothing to worry about.
Lambertson was of the view, as was the government he represented, that Judge Dundy had been wrong in law to issue the writ on behalf of an Indian. Once the district attorney presented his argument to that effect, the court would have to find in the general’s favor and dismiss the writ. With the writ thrown out, Lambertson would have told Crook, the general could move Standing Bear and his Poncas back to Indian Territory without any further hindrance.
Little did twenty-eight-year-old Lambertson know that the blank-faced brigadier general sitting across the desk from him in civilian clothes not only had actively encouraged the other side to take him to court but wanted to lose the case. But Crook was not about to let Lambertson in on the secret.
Lieutenant John G. Bourke would have escorted the district attorney from General Crook’s office once the interview ended. Bourke later wrote that on one occasion he overheard Sioux war chief Crazy Horse, considered by many the cleverest Indian tactician of the nineteenth century, pay General Crook a remarkable compliment. “He [Crazy Horse] had a great admiration for Crook, and the feeling was reciprocated. Once he said of Crook that he was more to be feared by the Sioux than all other white men.”137
Crazy Horse did not refer so much to General Crook’s unflinching courage or his famously dogged determination as to his wiles. Now young Genio Lambertson was a pawn in wily General Crook’s plan to see the Poncas receive justice. At least Crazy Horse and the Sioux had known which side the general was on.
When the DA settled into his Omaha hotel on Tuesday, April 29, he would have been ignorant of the fact that it was a month to the day since Bright Eyes made her plea to General Crook on behalf of the Poncas and set this whole affair in motion. As he made final preparations for the opening of the case the next day and probably dashed off a confident note to his fiancée, Jane Gundry, at her Mineral Point, Wisconsin, home (they were to marry the following spring), Lambertson had no idea what he was letting himself in for.