AS THE SUMMER of 1879 was beginning, Henry Tibbles headed east by train. He no longer had a paid job, but he did have a crusade, and throughout his life a cause would always be more important to him than a dollar. As he traveled, his mind went back to the highs and lows of the famine relief crusade of 1874. That campaign had cost him a great deal but had taught him even more.
As the crusader stepped down from the train in Chicago at the end of June to commence his Ponca campaign, it was with the conviction that he was far better prepared to do battle than he had been five years before. He hoped that this latest venture would exceed the successes of the 1874 crusade and raise waves of sympathy and barrels of funds for the Ponca cause without the stinging personal abuse his appeals for the famine victims had engendered. This time, surely, the merits of his cause would be self-evident, his credentials unimpeachable. Yet he knew that his Indian Ring opponents would be far more formidable than the Nebraska boosters who had tried to discredit him five years back. “Warned by what had happened then, I could easily guess what would lie ahead of me now,” he later wrote.205
Churchmen on the Omaha Ponca Committee had prearranged with their brethren in Chicago for a large public meeting at Farwell Hall to give Tibbles the opportunity to address the people of Chicago as his first step in the new campaign. Before the meeting, Tibbles went around the city’s newspaper offices. After producing his endorsements and copies of Omaha newspaper articles and editorials about the plight of the Poncas, he was given a hearing by reporters at each paper. Presenting the facts as he knew them, he did his best to bring the continuing Ponca problem into the limelight.
The resulting press was favorable, if guarded. But it was enough, combined with the efforts of local church people and the brief fame of the Standing Bear court case, to ensure that the Chicago public meeting was well attended. As Tibbles nervously addressed the crowd in his halting but earnest fashion, he told the story of the injustices done to the peaceable Ponca people, and of the need to raise a fighting fund to ensure that Standing Bear’s victory would not be a temporary one. When a collection was taken following Tibbles’s speech, the sympathetic audience contributed $600 to the cause, and the following day the Chicago Tribune gave Tibbles’s address favorable front-page coverage. The crusade was off and running.
Conscious of the accusations that had been flung at him about mishandling donations raised during his famine fund-raisers, Tibbles refused to touch a cent of the money contributed to the Ponca crusade. As he hurried on to Boston, the organizers of the Chicago meeting forwarded the funds directly to Revered Sherrill, treasurer of the Omaha Ponca Committee.
Boston was a key destination on Henry Tibbles’s campaign tour. While New York City had more people, Bostonians boasted that their city had more class. It had fine public and private buildings, as well as highly respected institutions. Booming economically, with waves of immigrants arriving from Ireland, Canada, and Europe, it embraced modernity with an efficient streetcar system and imaginative urban expansion projects. Like New York, it had introduced hansom cabs from London several years back, considered the mark of an international city. While Chicago and New York tussled for recognition as the commercial capital of America, Boston, with its satellite towns such as Cambridge, home to Harvard University, just across the Charles River, was indisputably the intellectual capital, with more eminent writers, publishers, and philosophers per square mile than any other region in the country. There were people in Boston who could influence and shape the opinions of an entire nation, and it was these people Henry Tibbles wanted to reach.
By the time Tibbles arrived in Boston it was July. As he knocked on the doors of the eminent people of the city, he found that just about everybody who was anybody in Boston had left town for the summer and gone to the country or the seashore. He became increasingly dispirited, until a letter reached him from Amelia back home in Omaha. “My wife, whose sympathies were strongly with this work, brought me fresh courage,” Tibbles later wrote. “Just as fearlessly as she had ridden the wild horse or braved the shootings in our gospel tent, she now was facing this new venture which might wreck our own fortunes for good and all.”206
The next door the crusader knocked on belonged to Delano A. Goddard, editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser. Goddard was captivated by the Poncas’ story and by the rustic who told it. He promised the paper’s backing and introduced Tibbles to the son of the late Nathan Hale, the Advertiser’s founder. A grandnephew of a Revolutionary War hero, the bushy-bearded fifty-seven-year-old Edward Everett Hale had gained national fame as a successful novelist and liberal theologian at the forefront of the social gospel movement. Hale was an advocate of worthy causes ranging from the education of poor black people to worker housing and world peace, and the Poncas’ story attracted his attention and his strong sympathy.
Within days, Hale had written a powerful editorial entitled “Indians and the Law” supporting the Poncas, and Goddard ran it in the Advertiser alongside a page 2 article penned by Goddard himself describing the mistreatment of the tribe. The article and editorial, in Tibbles’s words, “broke the Boston ice” for him.207 Hale, an ordained Congregational minister, introduced Tibbles to other churchmen in the city. Consequently the day the Ponca material appeared in the Advertiser, July 30, he was able to address the directors of the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others of North America (SPGAIONA), when they met at the offices of an insurance company. Founded in Boston by Baptists in 1813, this group had extensive influence and resources.
Impressed by Tibbles’s address and his dedication, the SPGAIONA quickly swung behind the Ponca cause, with the society’s directors forming a committee of five leading citizens, including Edward Everett Hale himself, to organize a large public meeting at Tremont Temple on August 5 at which Tibbles and other Indian rights advocates would speak. In the meantime, Tibbles would have to kick his heels around Boston.
The gospel society committee did its job well, for the affluent and the influential flooded back into the city from their summer homes for the meeting. As chief speaker they secured Wendell Phillips, a famous abolitionist considered one of the finest orators of his day. Phillips, renowned for delivering speeches without a single note, sent Tibbles word that he wanted him to speak first. Once Phillips heard what the Westerner had to say, he would make his own appeal to the audience.
Tibbles arrived at the large basement meeting hall well in advance of the advertised starting time of noon, nervous and clutching a thick pile of letters, newspaper clippings, and documents relevant to the Ponca case. The hall was slowly beginning to fill when he walked onto the stage. A line of chairs had been arrayed for the five organizing committee members and the evening’s two speakers. At one end of the line sat Wendell Phillips. Sixty-seven-year-old Phillips, with thinning gray hair, clean shaven except for distinctive sideburns high on his cheeks, wearing an expensive suit, silk vest, and large bow tie, nodded to the Westerner. Tibbles nodded back. He had met Phillips years before but guessed he would not remember him. Terrified of sitting next to the famous man, the out-of-towner went to the far end of the line of chairs and took a seat beside one of the less daunting committee members.
The committee member, B. W. Williams, proprietor of a lecture bureau, shook Tibbles’s hand and indicated where he was to stand when the time came for him to speak. Williams, who like Edward Everett Hale was an ordained minister, had been inspired by the example of an enterprising Bostonian, James Clark Redpath, who some years earlier had set up a lyceum bureau in the city and proceeded to make himself rich. In these days before radio, television, movies, and the Internet, a public whose appetite for entertainment was whetted by books, newspapers, and magazines wanted to see and hear the famous people whose work they read, and about whom they read. Before the Civil War, lyceum societies had sprung up all over the country, with members at first giving lectures to each other on various intellectual subjects. Before long, they began bringing in lecturers of note, and a speakers circuit had grown, particularly in the Northeast, with fees often being paid to the orators from either donations or door charges. Seeing the moneymaking potential, J. C. Redpath had set up as an agent for these speakers. Famous authors were his mainstay, but in time he represented every kind of stage and musical act, with his vast client list ranging from writer Mark Twain to theater and circus impresario P. T. Barnum.
As Redpath experienced quick success, other agents competed with him in Boston, Chicago, and New York. In Boston, B. W. Williams ventured into the field, setting up the Williams Lecture and Musical Bureau. The bureau soon proved profitable, although Williams’s firm and the other agency in Boston, the Midland Lyceum Bureau, were dwarfed by the Redpath operation. After Redpath sold out to his partners in 1875, it blossomed into two agencies, the Boston Lyceum Bureau locally and the Redpath Lyceum Bureau of New York, which shared a catalog of famous clients.
Seated on the Boston stage, Henry Tibbles was soon deep in conversation with the speakers agent. Williams knew all the notables in the audience and pointed them out to Tibbles as they took their seats. “Poets, historians, scientists, lecturers,” Tibbles wrote. “In they walked until I got thoroughly frightened.”208 Soon the hall was full to overflowing and Willams was on his feet and moving to the lectern. To get the proceedings under way, Williams introduced the mayor of Boston, Frederick O. Prince.
A handsome man with short dark hair and a distinctive gray walrus mustache, Mayor Prince would soon become a prominent player in the pro-Ponca movement in New England. He launched the Massachusetts campaign with a rhetorical broadside of the kind that had made his name in the Boston political arena. Prince declared that he was surprised that in a country which boasted so much philanthropy and refinement there were men who dared to defy public opinion with an act against the peaceable Ponca tribe of Indians that exceeded in its cruelty all other wrongs perpetrated by the strong against the weak. Then, to explain the tale of atrocity in detail, he had the pleasure to introduce courageous Omaha newspaper editor T. H. Tibbles.
As applause filled the hall, Henry Tibbles nervously came to his feet. He later wrote that, conscious of the eyes of all these learned Easterners focused on him and of the famous Wendell Phillips waiting to be inspired by his inexpert speech, he was trembling so badly he could hardly walk. Clutching his batch of support materials, Tibbles made his way with difficulty to the lectern and then stood looking out over the sea of expectant Bostonian faces. In sudden terror, his mind went blank. His hand shook so much that he lost his grip on his collection of papers. The documents dropped from his hand, hit the floor, and spread in all directions. He looked down at the papers for a horror-struck moment, then, with hardly a thought, kicked them away with his foot. He returned his gaze to the silent but sympathetic crowd, girded his courage, and took the plunge into oratory.
“I take it this audience doesn’t wish me to read from those official documents,” he began, indicating the papers on the floor. “They’re at the service of any person present. What you wish is to hear some salient facts upon which you can form a judgment.” He then proceeded to give them the facts about the Ponca tribe and the gross mistreatment they had received from the government that represented them. “I make no assault upon any individual,” he assured his listeners. “I assault the system.”209
After giving a heart-wrenching account of the plight of the Poncas, Tibbles moved on to suggest measures that he felt needed to be introduced to change the system of which he was so critical. He said that all Indians must be granted the protection of the courts, as Standing Bear had been. And he supported the principle President Hayes had espoused for the past few years of “severalty” for Indians, in which a plot of farmland was granted to each adult male Indian, instead of the present system of collective ownership of a reservation by an entire tribe, so that any Indian could be a landowner in the same way that individual whites owned their land. With individual land ownership would come citizenship and the protection under law that was currently denied Indians.
Whether he had discussed the severalty concept with Standing Bear, Iron Eye, or Bright Eyes is unclear, but they seem not to have opposed it at that time. In principle, there was a valid rationale to President Hayes’s idea. By making an individual Indian a landowner in the eyes of the law, the government could neither control nor tamper with his land the way it currently tampered with and controlled the reservations, which, while technically reserved for exclusive Indian use, were still treated as federal land.
The right of an Indian to be represented in court was the central tenet of the original district court petition by attorneys Webster and Poppleton and of the campaign that Tibbles had now brought East. When the newspaperman reminded his audience why Judge Dundy had found in Standing Bear’s favor and expressed the judge’s liberal sentiments with the words, “Any human being that God ever made can come into my court,” the audience burst into loud, sustained applause.210
To Tibbles’s relief, when he finished his disorganized though heartfelt speech he received another wave of warm applause from his audience. Smiling gratefully, he turned and began to retrace his steps to his seat, with the sound of clapping following him. In the process, he crossed paths with Wendell Phillips, who was walking to the front of the stage to take his turn at speaking. As they passed, Phillips paused briefly and said in Tibbles’s ear, “Don’t go away after the meeting until I have the opportunity to speak to you.”211
Phillips then took center stage and proceeded to deliver an off-the-cuff speech that Tibbles later described as “a masterpiece.”212 Phillips had given his first speech forty-two years before at Boston’s famous Faneuil Hall, protesting the murder of an abolitionist. He was just twenty-five years old at the time. He was immediately recognized as a brilliant orator who could stir the hearts and minds of any audience, and he had never lost his touch in the thousands of speeches he had given since. Now, after echoing the Nebraskan’s sentiments about the Poncas, the failings of the existing system, and the depredations of the Indian Ring, receiving “liberal applause” every time he praised the Indians or condemned the ring, Phillips declared that Indians needed access to the courts to protect their property.213
Phillips then proposed a set of resolutions in favor of the Poncas, which included the establishment of a committee of ten ardent and influential Bostonians to provide ongoing moral and financial support to work conducted on behalf of the tribe. The proposal was loudly and enthusiastically endorsed by the gathering, without a single dissent, and the Boston Ponca Committee was born. A mirror of the Omaha committee, it would in time include Mayor Prince, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, and several Boston publishers, as well as the constant Edward Everett Hale.
Wendell Phillips then turned his attention to the last speaker and proceeded to paint Henry Tibbles as the bravest man in America for taking on such formidable opponents in aid of a peaceable yet downtrodden Indian tribe. The experienced orator delivered his words in such a passionate, theatrical way that the audience came to its feet as one, applauding and cheering. Hundreds rushed onto the stage to drag a stunned Henry Tibbles to his feet and grasp him by the hand. Time and again, Bostonians congratulated Tibbles for his courage and pledged to do all they could to improve the treatment the Indian peoples received. Phillips waited patiently in the wings for the last handshake and the last promise and then, as the hall emptied, he walked up to Tibbles and said, “Come take dinner with me.”214
Phillips took the elated crusader to a modest little restaurant on a side street. As they sat across a table after placing their orders, Phillips looked at Tibbles for such a long time without saying a word that the newspaperman began to squirm with embarrassment. Finally, Phillips said, “I don’t know what to say to you.”
“I wish you would say something!” Tibbles returned with a laugh.
Phillips laughed too. Then he said, “I suppose Boston would not say you were an orator according to its standards, but you influenced that audience in a way I could not. I never saw a Boston audience act in just that way before.”
Phillips’s demeanor changed as he leaned a little closer and passed on a friendly but serious caution, telling Tibbles not to be seduced by the reaction of the audience that evening. It would be easy to think that the righteousness of the cause would guarantee it would always be like this, he said, that it was just a matter of fronting up to audiences in a few major cities and then in Washington for the government to bend to the will of the Poncas’ supporters and change the system.
Phillips assured Tibbles he was not trying to talk him out of continuing the Ponca crusade. “I want you to go on with this work. You have the facts and a peculiar way of presenting them that take hold of the hearts of people.” But the obstacles would be immense, his opponents fierce. “I know the Indian Ring.” He glanced at Tibbles’s thick, black hair. “Your hair will be gray before the first law is passed that does away with the present system. Men of national reputation will attack you.” But, despite the slings and the arrows, he said, Tibbles must continue with his crusade. As they parted after dinner, Phillips wished Tibbles well and invited him to call on him at any time if there was assistance he could render.215
During the next few days, Tibbles met with the new Boston Ponca Committee to discuss tactics. They agreed he must continue delivering his Ponca lectures, rough and ready as they were. It was also felt that a book or pamphlet about the Ponca cause should be sold, with proceeds going to the cause, and committee member John S. Lockwood, a publisher, expressed interest in putting it out. Tibbles mentioned the book he had already drafted, Ponca Chiefs, telling Lockwood that it contained all the Standing Bear material he’d collated, including his own press articles and the many relevant documents provided to him by Standing Bear, Bright Eyes, and others. It was agreed that once Tibbles returned to Omaha he would finalize the manuscript and then mail it to Lockwood.
As for lecturing, over dinner Wendell Phillips had recommended that Tibbles secure himself a lyceum agent. These agents, he would have told his new friend, were the best avenue to speaking engagements at leading venues in New England and elsewhere. They knew how to attract big crowds, and they knew how to make money—and the Ponca cause needed both. Following that first Boston speech, Tibbles received an invitation to visit his companion on the platform that night, B. W. Williams, member of the Boston Ponca Committee and, more importantly, B. W. Williams the agent.
Recommendation and invitation meshed, and within days of his Boston address Tibbles was in the office of the Williams Lecture and Musical Bureau. While he didn’t run the largest agency, Williams was no less entrepreneurial than his opposition at the Boston Lyceum Bureau and the Midland Bureau. He knew that a speaker didn’t have to be famous to attract a crowd. Lyceum audiences were hungry for enlightenment and entertainment. While religious speakers were always popular, a lecturer at the other end of the scale doing good business was Carleton Hughes, a former clerk in the dead letter office in Washington, who revealed the secrets of thousands of ill-addressed letters that found their way to the office, some containing thousands of dollars, and the often incredible efforts of the post office to find either addressee or sender.
Inspired by what he had seen at Tibbles’s first outing and some subsequent good press (on August 11 the Chicago Tribune called Tibbles “the heroic Editor of Omaha”), B. W. Williams recognized the crowd appeal of Tibbles’s subject. But, like Wendell Phillips, Williams did not find Tibbles a particularly enervating speaker. Tibbles had the facts and he had sincerity, but, in Williams’s eyes, this campaign needed an additional speaker, one who could deliver a Wendell Phillips entrée on the heels of a Tibbles appetizer.
Then one of them, either Williams or Tibbles, made a suggestion. Tibbles did not to claim it as his idea, and it probably came from astute businessman Williams: What if Standing Bear himself addressed their audiences? What could serve the Ponca cause better than to have the chief speak for himself? For the vast majority of people who could be expected to flood to the speaking engagements, this would be the first real live Indian chief they had ever seen. The sensational Wild West dime novels of Buntline and Ingraham were being devoured by a public enamored with both the perceived barbarism and the romance of the Indian way of life. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling shows would soon tap into this same public fear cum fascination. And of course Standing Bear had already achieved national notoriety as a result of his court victory. His name alone on a poster promoting a speaking engagement was guaranteed to attract attention, much more so than Tibbles’s name.
Tibbles probably worried that Standing Bear would need an interpreter and so would not have the impact of an English speaker, but Williams would have reminded him that even with an interpreter Standing Bear had created a dynamic effect when he spoke in Judge Dundy’s courtroom. So, there in the Boston office of the lecture bureau, Tibbles took it on himself to sign a contract with Williams on his behalf and on Standing Bear’s behalf, agreeing that he and the Ponca chief would tour the cities of the East to promote the Ponca cause at a series of public meetings. Williams agreed to organize, promote, and manage the engagements at cities that he nominated.
There would be an added attraction. Unlike most lecturers doing the rounds, the Ponca speakers would not charge admission to their addresses. Audiences would be asked for donations, which would go to the Ponca fighting fund. Expenses would be deducted—Williams’s promotional costs, as well as the costs for the transportation, food, and accommodation of the touring party. After that, in a normal commercial arrangement Williams would retain a percentage of the take as a commission and pass on the balance to the speakers. In this case Williams would not be taking a commission for his services. But even though he didn’t take a fee, in the long run he could still profit handsomely from the deal. If Standing Bear and Henry Tibbles proved to be the drawing card the agent expected them to be, the profile of the Williams Lecture and Musical Bureau would skyrocket, and Williams could be expected to attract plenty of new speakers and paying customers.
As Henry Tibbles headed back home to Nebraska in early September with the Williams bureau contract in his pocket, he was thinking about how he would convince Standing Bear to make the trip east with him. As he sat in train carriages rocking west, he would have told himself that he would need to take along an interpreter. The most natural choice was of course Bright Eyes. She was committed to the cause, and she had proven an excellent translator up till then, one with whom Standing Bear was comfortable and one he trusted. Not all interpreters could be relied on to translate with accuracy or sensitivity. But there could be a problem. As Tibbles knew, protective Iron Eye would not like the idea of his eldest daughter going east with two men. Iron Eye, like Standing Bear, would need some convincing about this speaking tour.
When Tibbles arrived back in Omaha on September 6, he was formulating some persuasive arguments for his Indian friends.