HENRY TIBBLES WAS devastated by the news of his wife’s death. The telegram from Omaha, which had taken three days to reach him, told of how Amelia had taken ill with severe pain. The ailment was not diagnosed immediately, and next day it was realized that she was suffering from appendicitis. Her appendix ruptured within hours, and twenty-four hours after becoming ill Amelia died from peritonitis.
After receiving the news at his Boston hotel, Tibbles left the luncheon party in a state of shock and went to his room. There, he wrote later, he prostrated himself on his bed in grief, hardly aware that his companions were in the room with him. Standing Bear knelt beside him seemingly in silent prayer for some minutes before he reached out and laid his large hands on Tibbles’s head and began to pray aloud in his native tongue.
With Frank La Flesche translating, Standing Bear then said to him emotionally, “My friend, you have lost the one you love most. I knew her, too. She was beautiful and good. Your heart is very sad. A wife is closer to a man than a brother. We both suffer. But remember those others who suffer and die in that strange land. Do not go back home. Do not stop trying to help my poor people. They have no one to help them but you. Many husbands have seen their wives die, down in that hot country. They have no missionary to tell them of the good words God has spoken to those who have trouble. You can read God’s book, and kind people will say words to comfort you. You suffer greatly, but they suffer more. Promise me that you will not forsake them.”239
Tibbles looked around at the Ponca chief. He later wrote, “What could I do but take his hand and promise?”240 Within hours, two more telegrams arrived from Omaha, this time sent directly to Boston. One told Tibbles that Bishop Clarkson had buried Amelia in Omaha that same day. Another came from attorney John L. Webster, telling Tibbles not to worry about his girls Eda and May, as he had immediately placed them in a private boarding school at Omaha under the personal supervision of Bishop Clarkson.
We can be sure that Bright Eyes commiserated with Tibbles that evening and that Tibbles quickly wrote to his daughters, but he did not mention doing so in his later writings. Before Tibbles had time to wallow too deeply in his grief, B. W. Williams summoned the other members of the Boston Indian Committee to the Tremont House, and there, within an hour or so of the double dose of terrible news reaching Tibbles and Standing Bear, the committee met with the members of the lecture party.
The committee members expressed their profound sympathy to both grieving men, but they urged them not to lose sight of the fact that the Ponca cause was of primary importance. They reminded Tibbles and company about the huge public reception at Horticultural Hall in a few hours, with thousands of Bostonians expected to turn out. The committee was unanimously of the view that all four members of the quartet should attend the reception, and the three speakers should all say at least a few words to the crowd. Tibbles resisted the idea, feeling that he simply could not face the ordeal of the public appearance with his heart dragging on the ground. “A soldier on the fighting line,” one of the committeemen responded, “if his brother falls or his wife dies, still must keep his place in the battle.”241
Still Tibbles resisted. Then Standing Bear reminded him that he himself had never given up, even though he had lost three of his four children. “I am older than you,” he went on to say, “and I have suffered more. Now my brother is dead. He did not die of disease, but was cruelly murdered. All these things I bear. Your wife was dear to me. I know how sore your heart is, but do go to the meeting and say one word for those who suffer and die with no one to pity. If you can do that, it will make your burdens lighter, not heavier.”242
So Tibbles accompanied Standing Bear, Bright Eyes, and Frank to the public reception that evening, to find a massive crowd gathered at Horticultural Hall. Boston was a city of 250,000 people by 1870, with 75,000 more women than men in 1879 as a result of Civil War casualties a decade and a half before. The Ponca cause strongly appealed to women with a sense of justice and morality, and there can be no doubt that women made up much of the crowd that night, with a small number of male chaperones to each group.
Very few of those attending knew of the death of Tibbles’s wife and Standing Bear’s brother. Had they known, their sympathy for the campaigners would probably have overwhelmed Henry Tibbles, who was only going through the motions. He spoke a few words to the crowd, although, as he later wrote, he would remember nothing of it. “My mind was not at the meeting—it was living over, moment by moment, eighteen hard, brave, wonderful years (with Amelia) that now were done.”243
The public reception that night was a huge success, as the Boston papers enthusiastically reported in coming days. That reception, combined with the news of the party’s double tragedy, won the Poncas thousands more fans. “Boston now was really stirred up,” Tibbles would write.244 During the following week in the city he could not walk down the street without being approached by an endless parade of complete strangers who wanted to pass on their sympathies, shake his hand, and wish him and his Indian friends well. Staff at the swanky Tremont House continually had to move away countless people who gathered outside the hotel to catch sight of the new celebrities.
The speeches at the massive Boston reception that night set the scene for grueling months of speeches by the crusading quartet throughout New England and then across the length and breadth of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and into the very lion’s den itself—Washington, D.C.—before they could go home to Nebraska. Tens of thousands of Americans came to see and hear a former frontier newspaper editor, an Indian chief, and a so-called Indian princess describe a great injustice—a great trampling of human rights—and explain how ordinary Americans could right the injustice, with their financial support and their vocal support for legislation to bring the Indian peoples under the protection of the law by recognizing them as citizens. At some venues, thousands were turned away because there was no more room inside.
The speeches changed little from engagement to engagement. Bright Eyes polished and modified her presentation over time, as she developed the theme that law was liberty, and that without the protection of law Native Americans had no liberty. “If we cannot get the protection of the law,” she said of her own Omaha people in 1879, “we shall be driven from our reservation. And then what will become of my father and my mother and my sisters?”245
On the night of November 1, Bright Eyes, reading her address in a “modest, natural manner,” told the vast Boston audience that when Inspector Kemble had taken the ten Ponca chiefs south to inspect the Indian Territory two years earlier, her mother, the One Woman, worried that they would be left in a strange place from which they could not find their way home.246 Bright Eyes said she’d laughed at this, telling her mother that the U.S. government would never “treat the chiefs of a nation with whom it made treaties in that dishonorable way.”247 And yet her mother had been right; that was exactly what the representatives of the U.S. government had done. Now, as she and her fellow crusaders took the story of the injustices done to and threatened against the Ponca and Omaha peoples to the American people, Bright Eyes was helping her brothers and sisters find their way home. “All we ask of your government,” she said that night, “is to be treated as men and women, to be allowed to have a voice in whatever concerns us.”248
Standing Bear’s line remained consistent. That night in Boston when he and Henry Tibbles set aside their personal tragedies and set the stamp on the long hard campaign that lay ahead, he spoke, according to a reporter for the Boston Daily Advertiser, “with great animation and earnest eloquence, using vigorous gestures” as he would on hundreds of similar occasions in the months and years ahead.249
“I am the Ponca people,” he told his audiences. “I have been here 2,000 years or more.”250 He sadly he told America of the forced march of his people to Indian Territory and remarked, “When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us.”251
He told them of his personal tragedies. “My children have been exterminated, my brother has been killed.”252 And he told them of his attachment to the land of his forefathers beside the Swift Running Water. “My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land. I wish to be an old man here. I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father. Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land.”253
The simple honesty of the Indian chief ’s delivery, the undeniable human tragedy of his story, and the unpretentious nobility of the man himself sent ordinary Americans away from the Boston reception that night (and from meetings like it up and down the Northeast in coming months and years) with a heartfelt conviction that progress at the price of someone else’s pain and suffering is not progress at all. It is a crime. Though the proponents of progress and America’s “manifest destiny”254 fought them every step of the way, the road on which Standing Bear, Bright Eyes, Frank La Flesche, and Henry Tibbles embarked that first November night after that dark, dark October of 1879 seemed certain to lead to victory, justice, and equality for Standing Bear and his people.