IRONICALLY, IN HENRY Tibbles’s absence, a noted Boston lecturer had come through Omaha on a speaking tour during the summer. After he met Bright Eyes and was greatly impressed by her, the lecturer had urged the Omaha Ponca Committee to send her east to plead for the Ponca cause. As soon as Tibbles arrived back in town in early September, Bishop Clarkson and the other committee members assailed him with the idea, even before Tibbles could reveal that he was carrying a signed contract for a speaking tour for Standing Bear and himself. Realizing that he could very easily alienate the committee members if he revealed he’d committed to the Williams contract without first consulting them, he knew he would have to handle the subject of a speaking tour very delicately.
First, there was the matter of Bright Eyes’s involvement. Tibbles says that he resisted the idea at first. While he himself had been thinking of taking Bright Eyes along as interpreter, he had not envisaged her as one of the featured speakers alongside Standing Bear and himself. At the forefront of his mind was a doubt that she could overcome her shyness in the face of large groups and succeed as a speaker. As the committee members pushed for Bright Eyes to be approached with the proposal of going East to speak on behalf of the Poncas, Tibbles had no choice but come clean about the deal he had done with the Williams bureau. Showing the committee members his Williams contract, Tibbles suggested that Bright Eyes would make an excellent translator of Standing Bear’s speeches, but he continued to resist putting her on stage on her own.
The bishop and the other committee members were ahead of him. They had already convinced both Bright Eyes and Standing Bear to speak at a large public gathering organized by Reverend Harsha at the Omaha Presbyterian Church. This would be Bright Eyes’s big test. If she failed here, they said, there would be no point putting her through the trauma of solo appearances in the East. Standing Bear was supportive of the idea. He liked and respected Bright Eyes, and he could see her as a strong advocate for his people’s cause. So it was agreed that a decision would be made after Bright Eyes addressed the Omaha audience.
The day of the test speech came, and when Tibbles met Bright Eyes, her family members, and Standing Bear outside the packed Omaha church, the diminutive speaker was clearly very nervous. Reverend Harsha, Reverend Sherrill, Bishop Clarkson, and other Omaha clergymen, along with a large band of church ladies, escorted their two guests of honor into the building, and Tibbles followed along behind. To Henry Tibbles’s astonishment, when they saw Bright Eyes, the members of the large congregation jumped to their feet and clapped, cheered, and waved handkerchiefs in the air as she was led through the throng onto the platform at the front of the church.
As her friends and family gathered with Standing Bear behind her, the ministers guided Bright Eyes to the front of the platform, beside the pulpit, and the crowd resumed its seats. Typically dressed in a long dark dress and gloves, with her hair tied back, tiny Bright Eyes stood there, looking out over the faces of the silent, reverent audience. Every chair and bench was occupied. The walls were lined with more people, standing. The church doors had been left open, and many people who could not fit inside crowded the doorway or spilled back out over the church steps.
“There stood the little figure, trembling,” Tibbles later wrote, “and gazing at the crowd with eyes which afterwards thrilled many audiences. They were wonderful eyes. They could smile, command, flash, plead, mourn, and play all sorts of tricks with anyone they lingered on.”
For a long time she didn’t open her mouth, drawing the rapt attention of the crowd like metal to a magnet. Obviously frightened by the size of her audience, Bright Eyes looked like “a bird in a net.”216 Yet she never lost her dignity. And her obvious fear made her appear vulnerable to her audience and won their sympathy all the more. When she finally spoke, it was in a surprisingly rich, strong voice that carried all the way to the people on the steps outside. Tibbles had his notebook at the ready and recorded her words.
“Why should I be asked to speak?” she began. “I am but an Indian girl, brought up among the Indians. I love my people; I have been educated and they have not. I have told them that they must learn the arts of the whites and adopt their customs. But how can they, when the government sends the soldiers to drive them out?” She paused a moment, suddenly conscious that her listeners were hanging on her every word, before resuming.
“The soldiers drove Standing Bear and his wife and children from the land that belonged to him and his fathers before him—at the point of the bayonet. And on the way his daughter dies from the hardships of the journey. The Christian ladies of Milford, Nebraska, come to the Indian camp, pray for the dying girl, and give her a Christian burial.” She took a deep breath. “Oh, the perplexities of this thing they call civilization! Part of the white people murder my girl companion and another part tenderly bury her, while her father stands over her grave and says, ‘My heart breaks.’”217
She fought back tears. Her voice faded away. She swayed, then clutched at the pulpit for support as the strength went from her legs. There was a gasp from the audience. Women on the platform hurried forward and swarmed protectively around her, then led her away. Tibbles says that even though Bright Eyes had not been able to complete her first public address, the effect of her brief appearance had been electric. Women were crying, men were shouting, some even swore. “There in church, with the bishop on the platform,” Tibbles recorded.
“If I were Standing Bear,” Tibbles says one of the leading citizens of Omaha yelled, “I would let the courts go hang. I’d take my tomahawk and scalping knife and follow the trail of the secretary of the Interior. Then I’d settle the thing right there!”218
The meeting broke up amid this mood of heightened emotions. When the Ponca committee met soon after, the members agreed that even though Bright Eyes broke down before she could finish, she had a unique ability to stir an audience. Today we would say that she had that indefinable and elusive quality, charisma. Tibbles too recognized her star quality and gave up his objections to her taking the stage as a speaker in her own right on the eastern tour.
Following that Presbyterian Church meeting, after Bright Eyes had recovered, Tibbles asked Standing Bear if he would come east with him on the speaking tour he had already contracted in both their names. In all probability he posed the question through Bright Eyes. Tibbles would have expected the chief to be reticent and take some convincing, but, only days before, Interior Secretary Schurz had issued a statement to the press in which he had described Standing Bear as “morose, sullen, and indolent.”219 These were fighting words as far as Standing Bear was concerned (once they were translated and explained to him), and he readily agreed to make the speaking tour, knowing his participation could help bring the Ponca tribe back together on the Niobrara.
Then there was Bright Eyes. When the Omaha committee put the idea to her of also becoming one of the speakers on the eastern tour, she refused to even consider it at first. It would mean resigning her post as school principal, a job that she absolutely loved, and there was no guarantee she would ever regain it or anything like it. And then there was her father. He utterly disapproved of the idea of her going east on the tour.
Within days, as the disappointed Omaha committee rethought its tour plans, news reached Omaha that a bill was likely to be introduced in the next session of Congress by Carl Schurz’s Republican colleagues to authorize the immediate removal of the Omaha tribe from Nebraska to the Indian Territory. This rocked all concerned.
Tibbles hurried to Joe’s Village to discuss the news with Iron Eye, and to again put the proposal that Bright Eyes be encouraged to go east and lecture—on behalf of both tribes now. He told Iron Eye that now the Omahas were also under threat it had been decided by the committees in both Omaha and Boston that they would change their names. They would now be the Omaha Indian Committee and the Boston Indian Committee, and they would devote their energies and their funds to helping both the Omahas and the Poncas.
In the face of the new threat from Washington, Iron Eye now gave way. “Bright Eyes may go east to lecture,” he conceded, “if her brother Woodworker (Francis, a.k.a. Frank, La Flesche) goes with her.”220
Bright Eyes ceased to protest. For the good of her people, she would pluck up her courage and join Standing Bear on the podiums of the daunting cities of the East. Telegrams were sent off to the Williams bureau and the Boston committee to inform them that both Bright Eyes and Standing Bear would be coming on the tour, and the Omaha committee went into planning mode.
The committee discussed in fine detail the program that each lecture would follow. It was agreed that Tibbles would speak first, talking about what had induced him to take up the cause of the Ponca and Omaha peoples. He would then introduce Standing Bear, whose speeches would be translated by Bright Eyes or her brother. Standing Bear would tell a simple story of the inhuman treatment dealt out to his peaceful tribe, to his family and himself. Bright Eyes would step up to the lectern and give her speech last of all. Her address would be the call to arms. The preceding speakers had detailed the injustice; she would speak of how the people of America could help right the wrong.
The committee decided that when they were traveling or between engagements Frank and Standing Bear were to wear European clothing. This was Frank’s normal style of dress anyway, and he wore his hair reasonably short as a matter of course. Standing Bear would continue to keep his hair long—below his shoulders in tribal fashion—and on stage he would wear his buckskins, feathers, beaded belt, claw necklace, and red blanket. Bright Eyes would wear plain, dark, ladylike dresses, a white lace scarf, and gloves.
The Williams bureau telegraphed that the party’s first engagements had been booked for Boston in late October and early November, with other New England centers to follow. The excitement and the nervousness grew in various parts of Nebraska as the touring party’s departure day drew near—in Omaha, on the Omaha reservation, and at Standing Bear’s little settlement on the Niobrara. Standing Bear had been east of the Missouri on the chiefs’ disappointing trip to Washington, while the last time Bright Eyes had been east it was to a school in New Jersey, alone among white girls, many of whom would not have been warm toward an Indian girl in their midst. But she would have put bad memories behind her as she made her last farewells on the Omaha reservation, to the other members of the tribe, to her younger half brother and numerous sisters and half sisters, to her mother and stepmother.
The stories told about Bright Eyes never mentioned her mother, Mary Gale La Flesche, whose tribal name was the One Woman, nor of Iron Eye’s other wife, Tainne, an Iowa. Both lived in Iron Eye’s large house on the reservation at the same time with all their children. Iron Eye had a third, unnamed wife, but he had sent her away sometime before this. Tainne died after four years, but the One Woman lived for another three decades. She would have been a strong influence in Bright Eyes’s life. Perhaps Bright Eyes was also close to Tainne; we don’t know.
The patriarchal Indian social system that kept women in the background differed little from white society; white American women did not yet have the right to vote, and they were expected to play a subordinate role to their menfolk. Henry Tibbles makes no mention of Bright Eyes’s relationship with her mother or stepmother, but we can imagine a tear-filled parting one day in early October as the family’s eldest girl set off to walk and talk among the white people of America in the smoke-filled cities of the eastern states, to plead for America’s help to save the Ponca and Omaha people.
Tibbles made no mention of his wife, Amelia, when he wrote of the preparations for the tour. He assumed that Amelia would be supportive of his latest venture, as always, and made no reference to discussing it with her or to parting from her or his girls Eda and May that fall.
Suddenly the October departure day was on them. Standing Bear, Bright Eyes, and her brother came down to Omaha to link up with Tibbles, and the eclectic little band, sent off by the Indian committee and the church people of Omaha, headed east. To set them on their lecturing feet the crusaders were being accompanied to Chicago by Bishop Clarkson and Reverend Harsha of the Presbyterian Church. The churchmen would introduce them to the audience at their first engagement, in Chicago, which was being organized by the Presbyterians. After that, the quartet would be on their own.
The four crusaders had no idea how they would be received. Already the first rounds in a Ponca press war had been fired in the East ahead of their arrival. Some papers such as the New York Times had come out with pro-government articles declaring that the Poncas in the Indian Territory were “prospering fairly” and “contented.”221 As Henry Tibbles had feared, other papers criticized him personally, referring to his previous farm relief crusade and characterizing him as an adventurer. Pro-Ponca papers such as the Boston Advertiser responded with stories about the true state of affairs in the Indian Territory and defended Tibbles’s role, pointing out that all funds raised by him went directly to the fund administered by the Reverend Sherrill in Omaha.
Expecting much more mud to be flung their way in the coming months, the crusaders would have been hoping and praying that despite the opposition orchestrated by the Interior Department they could draw enough attention to their cause to prevent the Omahas from being dispossessed and to allow the Poncas stranded in the Indian Territory to be brought home to the Niobrara.