WHEN BOTH SIDES had presented their case, Judge Dundy announced that he would give due consideration to their submissions and hand down his decision at a future date. The crowded courtroom was now completely silent. Most spectators had already formed their opinion about which way the judge should find, and there would have been disappointment that a verdict was not delivered on the spot to end the suffering of Standing Bear and his people.
But the session was not completely at an end. Now occurred what Tibbles described as “an interesting bit of routine.”154 After Andrew Poppleton resumed his seat at the end of his address, the U.S. marshal got up and walked across to the bench. Tibbles says that what followed was heard by only a handful of people nearest the bench, including himself. Judge Dundy leaned down to the marshal and murmured, “Court is adjourned.”
The marshal, facing forward, meaning that few in the gallery could even see his lips move, whispered, “Hear ye. Hear ye. The Honorable District Court of the United States is now adjourned.”155
Judge Dundy then looked over to the patient clan chief of the Poncas and said that he could now speak. A ripple of excitement ran through the crowd. Tibbles and Crook had made sure that, in Tibbles’s words, “an excellent interpreter” was ready and waiting. This was not the far from excellent interpreter Willie Hamilton, who had apparently been sent back to the Omaha reservation after completing his translation of Standing Bear’s testimony the previous day. This time the interpreter was Bright Eyes.156 Tibbles did not name her, as he attempted to obscure his personal contact with her during this period. Publicity and the cover blurb for Plowed Under (1881), Reverend Harsha’s book to which Bright Eyes would contribute a foreword, said that she “testified” at the Dundy hearing. She didn’t testify in the accepted sense; this reference relates to her role as translator of Standing Bear’s closing address. What’s more, the fact that she performed this role at the court hearing is part of Omaha and Ponca tribe tradition to this day, and has been included in several books about her family.
Standing Bear had no problem with his words being translated by a woman. At that time a number of men, white as well as Indian, would not have agreed to a female spokesperson. Before long, Bright Eyes was translating for him in other forums. What’s more, Standing Bear knew and trusted Bright Eyes, had watched her grow up with his daughter Prairie Flower.
In the courtroom, now that the judge had played out his little charade with the marshal, which was primarily for Standing Bear’s benefit, to give him the impression that he was addressing the court while it was still in session, Bright Eyes rose and went to Standing Bear and informed him that he could now plead his case. Slowly, Standing Bear came to his feet and moved to sit in front of the judge. Tibbles, who had been expecting this turn of events, wrote that neither Standing Bear nor the unwitting crowd in the gallery “dreamed that the court session was officially over,” although the lawyers for both sides had been forewarned by the judge that he would allow Standing Bear to speak after the close of the hearing.157
According to Henry Tibbles, all eyes were fixed on “the sad, mild, yet strong face of Standing Bear, who sat in front of the judge.”158 Standing Bear half faced the bench and half faced the audience. The St. Louis Republican, which was represented by a journalist in court that day, reported, “It was strange to see the red man in all his gorgeous attire defending himself and his followers before a court of justice.”159
Standing Bear had no real time to prepare his address, since Tibbles told him that same day, via Bright Eyes, that the judge would allow him to speak in the evening. Tibbles would have told him to keep it brief and to the point. Apart from that, the Ponca chief was on his own.
Holding his red blanket around his shoulders with one hand, Standing Bear came to his feet and then stretched out the other red-brown hand in front of him and held it there. For fully a minute he did not utter a sound, and the members of the audience, with their eyes fixed on him, began to grow tense and uneasy, as if they feared he could not go on. At last, to the relief of his many supporters, he looked up to Judge Dundy on the bench and began to speak, slowly, softly, with Bright Eyes repeating his words in a “sweet, girlish, and expressive voice.”160
“I see a great many of you here,” Standing Bear began. He paused, waiting for Bright Eyes to translate. Henry Tibbles wrote that the chief made his entire speech in this manner, with sentence by sentence translation, displaying an expert natural sense of timing and drama, for the stop-start delivery only added to the increasing emotional tension of the occasion. Now Standing Bear smiled sadly. “I think a great many are my friends.” He asked the audience where they thought he came from. From the water? From the woods? Or from where? No, God made him, just as he made all of them, and God put him on his land. But a man he did not know came and ordered him to leave his land. Standing Bear objected. He looked around for a friend to help him, but there was none. “Now I have found someone,” he said, casting his sad eyes in the direction of his attorneys and waiting for the translation, “and it makes me glad.”161
He said that 158 of his people died in the foreign land down south. He did not want to die there. He came away to save his wife, his children, his friends. He wanted to go home, to live and be buried in the land of his fathers. He never tried to hurt a white man. Once, when out hunting, he found an American soldier on the prairie, almost frozen. He took him home, made him warm, and fed him until he could go away. Another time he found a white man who was lost and hungry. This man too he took home and fed, and he set him on the road to his own people. Had he been a savage, he would have killed these men and taken their scalps.162
The St. Louis Republican, noting that “Standing Bear is a man of rare ability for an Indian,” commented that “his oration was marked by its intense feeling and eloquence.”163 Now came the most eloquent and intensely felt passage of all. Slowly, Standing Bear again raised his hand to the perpendicular and held it there.
“That hand is not the color of yours.” He paused, allowing Bright Eyes to render his words in English, then resumed. “But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain.” Again he waited for the translation. “If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain,” the Ponca chief went on. “The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both.”164
This came from a man who had never heard of William Shakespeare, never read or witnessed a performance of The Merchant of Venice. Yet his speech, with its eerie echoes of Shakespeare’s victimized moneylender Shylock, was, we are led to believe, all of his own creation, without any contribution from his white friends.
Now Standing Bear turned his gaze to a window and the spring Nebraska sky beyond. His tone, says Henry Tibbles, grew tense. “I seem to stand on the bank of a river. My wife and little girl are beside me. In front, the river is wide and impassable, and behind there are perpendicular cliffs. No man of my race ever stood there before. There is no tradition to guide me.
“A flood has begun to rise around us. I look despairingly at the great cliffs. I see a steep, stony way leading upward. I grasp the hand of my child. My wife follows. I lead the way up the sharp rocks, while the waters still rise behind us. Finally, I see a rift in the rocks, I feel the prairie breeze strike my cheek.
“I turn to my wife and child with a shout that we are saved! We will return to the Swift Running Water that pours down between the green islands. There are the graves of my fathers. There again we will pitch our tipi and build our fires.
“But a man bars the passage! He is a thousand times more powerful than I. Behind him, I see soldiers as numerous as leaves on the trees. They will obey that man’s orders. I too must obey his orders. If he says that I cannot pass, I cannot. The long struggle will have been in vain. My wife and child and I must return, and sink beneath the flood. We are weak, and faint, and sick. I cannot fight.”
He paused, bowing his head. Women in the audience were crying. Slowly he raised his head again and turned to look at Judge Dundy. The look on his face, Henry Tibbles wrote, was one of “pathos and suffering.” Standing Bear looked Elmer S. Dundy steadily in the eye, then declared in a low, intense voice, “You are that man!”165
For a moment, the courtroom seemed to catch its breath. Henry Tibbles saw tears in Judge Dundy’s eyes. Glancing over to George Crook, he saw that the general sat leaning forward, covering his eyes with his hand. Not a soul spoke. The only sound was the sobbing of several female audience members. Then, glassy-eyed, the judge looked at the marshal and nodded.
Breaking the spell, the marshal called, at normal volume, “All rise!”
As the entire court came to its feet, a sudden roar erupted from the gallery. Some people cheered, others yelled—with exultation. The audience came crushing forward. General Crook strode the few paces to Standing Bear and, smiling, shook his hand. In moments Standing Bear was surrounded by scores of well-wishers, all wanting to shake the surprised chief by the hand, clap him on the back, and congratulate him. Wiping his eyes, Judge Dundy quietly slipped from the courtroom.
Standing Bear, surprised by the warmth of the people of Omaha, had no idea what his speech had achieved. At first, by the public reaction, he may have thought he had won his case. It would take Bright Eyes to tell him that Judge Dundy had gone away to think about the matters raised in the submissions by the lawyers, before he announced his decision one way or another.
Now came the waiting for the announcement of that decision.