AS THEIR STRUGGLE continued, Bright Eyes and Tibbles became increasingly close. Their crusade threw them together, as they shared their triumphs and defeats, their newfound national celebrity, and the vitriol cast their way by their opponents. They shared hotels, restaurants, and railroad carriages for days, weeks, and months on end, as year after year they and Standing Bear had toured the eastern states promoting Indian rights, with the three Indians in the party liable to arrest at any time as wards of the state on the loose.
They had hoped that the five-month tour of 1879–1880 would see them achieve their goals—land title for the Poncas on the Niobrara, the Indian Territory Poncas returned to their homeland, guaranteed tenure to their Nebraska lands for the Omaha tribe, and their call for equal rights for all Indians adopted by Congress. They’d been encouraged by the fact that Interior Secretary Schurz had instructed the attorney general not to proceed with the appeal against the Dundy decision (Lambertson had moved for a dismissal on January 5, 1880). Schurz wanted the Ponca case to die and be forgotten; another court hearing would only have given the crusaders more national publicity. Determined not to be forgotten, they’d thrown everything into their speaking campaign.
Bright Eyes, who did not have a strong constitution in the first place, collapsed several times on the arduous tour. Tibbles begged her to ease up but she wouldn’t, fearing that her people might suffer if she thought of herself. But when Tibbles discovered that beneath her glove her right hand was black and blue from all the handshaking that followed each speaking engagement, he instructed the tour manager provided by the Boston committee to quietly ask the people in line to meet her to shake Bright Eyes’s hand gently. Even so, by April 1880, after almost half a year of continuous lecturing, the crusading quartet looked and felt totally “battered,” as Tibbles wrote in Buckskin and Blanket Days. On a train to Baltimore, their exhausted state shocked a fellow passenger, Mrs. Mary Porter Tileston Hemenway.
Without saying a word to the party, the fifty-nine-year-old Mrs. Hemenway, widow of wealthy Boston merchant Augustus Hemenway, and a noted philanthropist, got off the train at Baltimore and wired the Boston Indian Committee that she would pay for the crusading quartet to spend ten days resting up at a popular Virginia seaside resort town, Old Point Comfort. Courtesy of Mrs. Hemenway, Bright Eyes, Standing Bear, Frank La Flesche, and Henry Tibbles enjoyed a ten-day break during the second half of April, before finally returning to Nebraska.
They went back west with the knowledge that an Indian bill containing provisions for Standing Bear’s band to be granted tenure to land on the Niobrara had been presented to the Senate by Massachusetts senator Henry L. Dawes, longtime chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and was about to be approved (the bill passed the Senate on April 30). They also knew that earlier that month attorneys John Webster and Andrew Poppleton had teamed up once again and gone back to the district court on behalf of the entire Ponca tribe, this time to literally sue the Sioux—for restoration of the land that had been taken from the Poncas by the treaty of 1868. That case was heard later in the year.
Back home by May 1880, the members of the quartet tried to pick up the pieces of their old lives. Standing Bear went home to his wife and daughter on the island at the mouth of the Niobrara, where they were living in a tent. He worked his fields and helped his family and the rest of his little community keep their promise to the government that they would fend for themselves. Bright Eyes, unemployed since she had re- signed the job she loved at the Omaha reservation government school, went to work in the fields with her family, as did her half brother Frank. Tibbles was reunited with his tearful daughters for the first time since the death of their mother.
Once the dust had settled, Tibbles met with General Crook, John Webster, and the members of the Omaha Indian Committee to review the 1879–1880 campaign. They had to agree that the campaign had achieved some notable successes. There was the matter, for example, of William Whiteman, the detested Indian Affairs agent on the Ponca reservation in the Indian Territory. When the crusaders reached Washington in December 1879, Bright Eyes presented the Bureau of Indian Affairs with statements she collected from White Eagle and others about Whiteman’s financial mismanagement. Pessimists would have been sure that the bureau would dismiss the accusations contained in those statements. But just days before Christmas, Special Inspector Pollock and Mr. Pugh from the Interior Department suddenly arrived at the Ponca agency in the Indian Territory and demanded to see Whiteman’s account books. A week later, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced that William H. Whiteman was retiring, effective forthwith.255 The Poncas’ Indian Territory jailer had been undone.
Following Whiteman’s dismissal, Nathan Hughes wrote in the Arkansas City Traveler, “A very bitter fight has been waged against Whiteman, and he alleges that no defense has been allowed him. The charges are based on affidavits of exorbitant prices paid for supplies purchased in open market and have no connection with the charges or influence of those who have been striving, since the death of Big Snake, for the Agent’s removal. Whiteman is a gentleman of good address, a fine lawyer, and it has always been a wonder to us why he accepted an appointment as Agent at a very moderate salary.”256
The reason Whiteman had accepted that “very moderate salary” was unearthed by the men from Washington—Whiteman had been accepting kickbacks from local contractors while overpaying for their goods and services. The amount involved was never revealed. Eight years before, the Indian Affairs agent at the Arapaho agency had embezzled $30,000 of the $90,000 allocated to the tribe by the government. One of his suppliers alone sold goods to the agency at a profit margin of 125 percent and then split the take with the agent.
Whiteman’s was the crusaders’ first proverbial scalp. Within weeks, there were others. First, during early January 1880, Indian Affairs Commissioner Ezra Hayt announced that a member of his board of commissioners, a churchman by the name of Barston (described by John Bourke as a “whining, psalm singing hypocrite”), was dismissed for illicitly supplying stoves to the bureau for use on Indian reservations.257
The Indian Affairs corruption scandal was fanned by newspapers such as the New York Daily Sun, whose publisher, Charles A. Dana, pioneered the human interest story. Dana was a strong critic of Rutherford B. Hayes and his claim to be rooting out corruption from Washington’s corridors of power. The Sun referred to Hayes as “His Fraudulency the President.”258 As the press applied the heat, the scandal spread—upward. Within weeks, Interior Secretary Schurz announced the dismissal of Commissioner Ezra Hayt for corrupt practices. The establishment was rocked by Hayt’s fall. The pro-Indian lobby was jubilant.
The crusaders had other successes during this period too. Sitting in the Boston audience on November 1, 1879, had been forty-nine-year-old writer Helen Hunt Jackson, a correspondent who wrote under the byline of H.H. for the New York weekly Independent. Within days Jackson had approached Henry Tibbles about joining the crusaders on tour. Jackson became the fifth member of the team, a mentor for Bright Eyes and a motivator for them all. Both Standing Bear and Bright Eyes soon became extremely fond of H.H. She would have been present later that month when Bright Eyes became the first woman ever to speak at Boston’s famous Faneuil Hall and Standing Bear, the first Native American to do so.
Through contacts such as Edward Everett Hale the crusaders made many famous, influential friends. At the Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of a Boston committee member, influential book publisher Henry Houghton, the members of the crusading party were introduced to a host of household names. The most celebrated of them all, a white-haired old man, waited impatiently for them at the top of Houghton’s front steps; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was world famous for his poems The Wreck of the Hesperus, Paul Revere’s Ride, and, most notably, The Song of Hiawatha, a story of Chippewa chief Hiawatha and the beautiful Indian maid Minnehaha.
As Bright Eyes came up the steps to meet Longfellow, he took her hand and said, “This is Minnehaha!”259 Longfellow monopolized Bright Eyes for an hour before allowing other noted guests such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell to talk to her that night.
Yet, for all their notoriety and new friends, the crusaders had not achieved any of their primary goals. Before losing his job, Commissioner Hayt had recommended to Congress that the Indian Territory Poncas be paid compensation for their lands on the Niobrara, but White Eagle and most of his people didn’t want that. They wanted to go home to the Niobrara, as Standing Bear and his little band had. Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Schurz had stated his determination to keep the Poncas in the Indian Territory, in order to prevent other relocated tribes from agitating to be returned to their homelands. In a string of letters, statements, and press interviews he defended his position and his handling of the removal of the Poncas, blaming the previous administration, Congress, even Inspector Kemble, finding fault with everyone but himself.
The crusaders’ hopes had been fanned when Senator Dawes first introduced his Indian bill to the Senate. The Dawes bill was referred to a five-man Senate select committee, and in February 1880 one of the first witnesses to give evidence to the committee was Standing Bear. The Dawes Bill was passed several months later.
Once the crusaders read the Dawes legislation, they realized there was a major problem with it. While a provision of the bill stated, “Each member of the Ponca tribe of Indians now occupying a part of the old Ponca reservation, within the limits of said great Sioux reservation, shall be entitled to allotments upon said old Ponca reservation,” it also required that for the allotment process to go ahead three-fourths of all male Sioux must agree, in a referendum arranged by the Interior Department, to cede the land back to the Poncas.260 That referendum was to take place whenever the Interior secretary saw fit. As the crusaders knew all too well, Interior Secretary Schurz did not see fit and would never see fit if he had his way. Apart from Schurz’s concession that the Poncas had genuine grievances, all the momentum of the crusaders’ 1879–1880 campaign seemed to come to a shuddering halt at Carl Schurz’s door.
In June, Tibbles, restless and worried about what the Interior secretary might do behind the crusaders’ backs, went down to the Poncas in the Indian Territory without permission, taking Omaha interpreter Henry Fontanelle along with him. Once he linked up with White Eagle and his Poncas, Tibbles updated them with regard to all that was being done on their behalf in the East and wrung a promise from them that under no circumstances would they sign any documents presented to them by the Interior Department before they were checked by lawyer John L. Webster.
Inevitably Tibbles was caught by Indian Affairs men and thrown off the reservation. Tibbles’s brief arrest was a source of great propaganda for the Interior Department, which could now paint a leading Ponca crusader as a lawbreaker. In August 1880, the Council Fire, which supported the Interior secretary, had declared Tibbles “a professional adventurer” and accused him of “wild and untruthful utterances and suspicious actions in connection with this Standing Bear case.”
But not every step the crusaders took during this period was a backward one. While Tibbles went south, Standing Bear went north to the Rosebud agency of the Brulé Lakota Sioux in Dakota Territory, visiting with Spotted Tail, powerful paramount chief of the Brulé. For hundreds of years the Sioux had tormented the Poncas, and there was no guarantee that they would vote to give the Poncas back even a portion of their old homeland if and when Secretary Schurz set the referendum in motion. Yet, after Standing Bear put his case to the Sioux chief, Spotted Tail called a council of his clan chiefs, who agreed the Brulé would support the return of land to Standing Bear’s band if the government held the referendum.
In the fall of 1880 the Omaha Indian Committee and Boston Indian Committee concluded that it would be necessary to put pressure on Secretary Schurz to set the Sioux vote in motion. They decided to restart the public campaign in the East, meaning that the four crusaders would have to go back on the lecture circuit. That November, while Webster and Poppleton prepared to present their case against the Sioux in court the following month, Standing Bear again parted from his wife and daughter at the Niobrara, Bright Eyes and her brother Frank came down from the Omaha reservation, and Henry Tibbles said good-bye to his daughters—having brought his sprightly seventy-eight-year-old widowed mother, Martha Tibbles, west from Ohio to care for Ida and May while he was away.
Lyceum agent B. W. Williams quickly booked a speaking tour for 1880–1881 that took in much of the Northeast once again, involving engagements on at least five days of each week and frequently on seven. The team started the tour in New England, scene of their great triumphs during the previous season. In Boston they were joined for the second year running by their writer friend Helen Hunt Jackson (H.H. as they affectionately called her), who came east from her home in Colorado to travel with the crusaders during the current tour.
One Friday night in November 1880, Tibbles, Standing Bear, and Bright Eyes addressed a packed house at Worcester, Massachusetts, as the new tour gathered momentum. In the supportive audience that night sat Senator George F. Hoar, a Worcester resident. Stirred up by what he heard at the meeting and read in the press the next day, the bookish Senator Hoar wrote to President Hayes at the White House, enclosing a press clipping about the meeting and expressing his concern at the wrong done the Poncas by the government. “I feel profound anxiety that the order for redressing this wrong should come from you,” he wrote, “not from a Senator or the Congress.”261 Hoar also pointed out that the press was assigning the blame for this terrible wrong to Hayes’s Interior secretary.
An irritated President Hayes replied swiftly: “As soon as practicable I will give the matter attention, and will be glad to confer with you when you return [to Washington]. I suppose General Schurz has been most shamefully treated in this affair, but I may be mistaken. I will look into it carefully.”262 Hayes promptly discussed the senator’s letter with Schurz, who convinced the president that the problem with the Poncas had been caused by Congress; his department had only complied with the laws and treaties endorsed by Congress.
Senator Dawes also heard the hullabaloo in his home state, and he approached the Interior Department to find out what it intended to do about the Poncas. He was told that Secretary Schurz planned to bring the Indian Territory Ponca chiefs to Washington in December to resolve their complaints. Dawes didn’t like the sound of that and wrote the president to tell him so. Hayes wrote back, “While I am confident that there is no foundation to your apprehension of wrong-doing to the Poncas in case they visit the Interior Department next month, I will nevertheless give heed to your caution and see that nothing unfair or inconsiderate is done.”263
Meanwhile, in late November, Webster and Poppleton went to court in Omaha to pursue the Ponca action against Chief Red Cloud and his Sioux. Once again, they appeared before Judge Elmer S. Dundy. On December 4, a news report emanating from Omaha flashed around the nation via telegraph: “Judge Dundy in the United States Circuit this morning decided in the Ponca Indian case—to recover their old reservation and establish a title thereto—that the Ponca tribe of Indians have legal estate in the reservation, and are entitled to possession thereto. This case is the first on record where one Indian brought suit against another in the courts of the United States, and has aroused deep and widespread feeling on account of the wrong done the Poncas.”264
Although this victory was celebrated by the Indian lobby, it hardly raised an eyebrow in middle America. Unlike Standing Bear’s original victory over the government, this latest case was generally perceived as a tiff between Indians that was of no concern to whites. But it didn’t go unnoticed in Washington. Spurred by the ruckus being raised by the crusaders on tour, the increasingly embattled President Hayes now came under intense pressure from the press and church groups to set up an independent commission to look into the Poncas’ complaints.
On December 8, Hayes wrote in his diary, “A great and grievous wrong has been done to the Poncas.” But he added that he didn’t blame Carl Schurz; rather, he blamed Senator Dawes for not bringing the problem to his attention earlier—following the line put to him by Schurz two weeks earlier. This was despite the fact that Standing Bear and White Eagle personally informed Hayes of the mistreatment of the Poncas when they were at the White House two years previously.
President Hayes agreed to set up a four-man Presidential Ponca Commission, which met for five weeks from December 18 to ascertain the facts surrounding the Poncas’ removal from the Niobrara and their present condition and to recommend ways the government could redress their situation.
But before President Hayes could announce the composition of his commission, General George Crook had a word in his ear. Officially Crook went to Washington to attend a December 15 White House dinner for thirty-six in honor of former president Ulysses S. Grant. Before the alcohol-free dinner, Crook took his old friend and one-time subordinate Hayes for a stroll across the grass from the White House to the Washington Monument, construction of which was then nearing completion. Together the pair climbed the 898 clanging metal steps to the top and surveyed the city from a vantage point that no one other than those associated with the construction had previously enjoyed.
Three days later, when the president formally named the members of his Ponca Commission, General George Crook was its chairman, replacing an earlier candidate.265 It seems the price for Crook’s participation was a promise from Crook to Hayes that the commission’s final report would avoid criticizing the government or its individual employees and would stick to determining whether the Poncas’ grievances were legitimate and, if so, recommend what should be done to redress those grievances.
On paper Crook seemingly had two allies among the commission’s four members—his subordinate, Brigadier General Nelson Miles, and Walter Allen, a reporter from the Boston Advertiser nominated by the Boston Indian Committee. The fourth commissioner was William Stickney, a member of the Indian Bureau’s board of commissioners, considered a representative of the enemy by the friends of the Poncas. General Crook’s ADC, John “Ink Man” Bourke, was appointed recorder (secretary) to the commission. To assist and advise the commission, Reverend J. Owen Dorsey of Washington’s Bureau of American Ethnology was brought in. He had an intimate knowledge of the Ponca situation, having converted Standing Bear to Christianity; later he had attempted to help the Poncas after Standing Bear was arrested at the Omaha reservation in 1879 by writing to Washington about their mistreatment.
The White House then instructed the Interior Department to bring White Eagle and his clan chiefs to Washington to speak before the Presidential Ponca Commission. James Haworth, an Indian Affairs Bureau inspector, and William Whiting, the new Indian Affairs agent at the Ponca reservation in the Indian Territory (a former Union army colonel whose name was confusingly similar to that of his disgraced predecessor), quickly brought White Eagle and his chiefs to Washington, where Indian Affairs denied them independent interpreters and sealed them off from the press and from Standing Bear, Bright Eyes, and Tibbles.
Carl Schurz then moved to circumvent his opponents. Before the chiefs could testify in front of General Crook and the Ponca Commission, Secretary Schurz personally interviewed them in private over two days, on Christmas Eve and then on December 27, supposedly to allow them to air their grievances. For these meetings Schurz used Oto interpreters in the pay of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who’d been brought up from Indian Territory by Agent Whiting. To show the press how magnanimous he was, on Christmas Day Schurz had the members of the Ponca delegation brought to his Washington home to meet his family.
On December 27, at the end of the two-day interview, White Eagle and his colleagues, exhausted, brow-beaten, denied access to lawyers or other advisers, and told by Schurz that the government would never let them go back north, caved in and agreed to stay in the Indian Territory and sign away their land in the north if they were paid compensation, had their children returned to them from Carlisle, and were provided with a school and other facilities. Secretary Schurz swiftly issued a press statement, saying the Poncas had signed an agreement freely giving up all claim to their Dakota Territory land and expressing satisfaction with the Indian Territory reservation. As Henry Tibbles had feared, Schurz railroaded White Eagle and his people into signing away their homeland and consigning their future to the Warm Land.
In a diary entry on August 10, 1880, Lieutenant John Bourke described Carl Schurz as “that spindle-shanked Mephistopheles presiding over the Department of the Interior.” In the medieval legend of Faust, Mephistopheles was one of the seven chief demons, second only to Satan. Helen Hunt Jackson, who corresponded with Schurz in 1879–1880 about the Poncas, described Schurz as “that false souled man” and accused him of “astounding and wholesale lying.”266
Chairing the president’s commission, General Crook ignored Schurz’s Ponca agreement, considering it acquired under duress, and proceeded to take fresh evidence from White Eagle and his chiefs, this time using a Ponca interpreter. He took his commission members to Indian Territory and the Niobrara so they could talk to the Poncas at each location and see the situation for themselves.
Standing Bear had no doubt about who was to blame for the Poncas’ miseries. Testifying to the commission when its members visited the Niobrara, he said, “If the Secretary is sick or foolish, I hope you will act as physicians and heal him. I mean the one who speaks German.”267
In late January, Lieutenant Bourke worked day and night in an office at the War Department writing up the commission’s report. That report found that the Poncas had been removed without lawful authority and advocated returning all the Poncas to the Niobrara who wanted to go. Crook didn’t want to be seen as forcing the Poncas back to Dakota Territory after Lone Chief and Standing Buffalo had told the commission they would be happy to stay where they were; that would only be a continuation of the heavy-handed government treatment of the tribe. To give Poncas in the Indian Territory time to consider their options, the report recommended allowing tribe members a year to decide where they wanted to live. The commission also recommended allotting land to individual Poncas at both reservation sites, depending on where they chose to be, and paying compensation for their mistreatment.
As Bourke was writing his report, it came to light that one commission member was writing a minority report. The odd man out was not the Indian Bureau’s William Stickney, as might have been expected, but Walter Allen from the Advertiser. In his minority report Allen made much the same recommendations as Crook, but he went farther, discussing the causes of the Ponca injustices and strongly attacking the role of the government and Secretary Schurz in particular. Point by point, Allen challenged Schurz’s claims about how he’d handled the matter and about the legitimacy of Interior Department actions since 1877. He also challenged the December 27 agreement signed by the Ponca leaders from Indian Territory, declaring that free will had played no part in it; Allen, like Crook, knew that Schurz had pressured the Poncas to sign it.
On January 24, General Crook went to the White House to present the commission’s majority and minority reports to the president. After Hayes took possession of the reports, he told the general that he would shortly present them to Congress. He then stunned Crook by informing him that he would also be attaching a copy of the agreement signed by the Indian Territory Poncas, which Carl Schurz had rushed to him on December 27; this was the document declaring their contentment with the Indian Territory reservation and their desire to remain there.
There is no record of what passed between the two men in this White House meeting, but it seems that Crook informed Hayes that the Poncas told him that Schurz had worn them down until they saw no option but to sign the agreement. Hayes retorted he could not believe Carl Schurz would be a party to such pressure tactics. Ignoring Crook’s protests, Hayes said he would be passing the new agreement on to Congress with the Ponca commission reports and commending all three documents to the Senate and the House.
When Crook met up with Lieutenant Bourke shortly after leaving the White House, he appeared devastated. Bourke was fit to explode after the general told him what transpired in his meeting with the president. That night, an embittered John Bourke confided to his diary that he considered a two-faced President Hayes guilty of duplicity and treachery, for what he was about to do to the Poncas.
President Hayes duly presented the commission’s two reports and the chiefs’ agreement to Congress in the first week of February, declaring that the December 27 statement clearly indicated that the Poncas in the Indian Territory were healthy, comfortable, and contented, and recommending that Poncas who wished to stay there should be allowed to do so. In taking the Interior Department’s line, Hayes rejected Crook and endorsed Schurz and his actions. Perhaps he felt he must stand by a senior member of his cabinet and a friend. Perhaps he suspected that Crook had inspired Walter Allen to write the minority report with its scathing attack on Schurz as a way of getting at Schurz without breaking his word to the president that his report would not criticize individuals; after Crook’s behind-the-scenes role in the habeas corpus case this wasn’t impossible. If Hayes truly suspected Crook of trying to outflank him, he used this tactic to put him in his place.
Although Crook was quite caustic about others when he later wrote his autobiography, he rarely uttered an unkind word about anyone and always overcame slights and reverses. His friendship with the Hayes family ultimately survived this rocky episode.
Hayes was to leave office on March 3, having previously decided not to run for reelection. He left the Ponca problem to the next Congress and his successor in the White House, fellow Republican James A. Garfield. John Bourke later wrote that as far as the Ponca tribe was concerned the only positive outcome of the Ponca Commission was that “members of the band who had returned to the mouth of the Niobrara were permitted to remain there unmolested.”268
One of the recommendations of Crook’s report was that all Indians should be able to appeal to the courts for the protection of their rights and property, and this theme was promptly taken up in Congress. A Republican senator, Samuel J. Kirkwood, sat on a Senate select committee that held its own Ponca inquiry through February 1881 using the Crook commission reports and the December 27 statement as its starting point. Determined to continue to influence events and defend his position, Interior Secretary Schurz took the unprecedented step of sitting with the select committee and questioning the committee’s witnesses. This select committee was not subjected to the restrictions that Hayes had imposed on Crook. It also looked into the killing of Big Snake, although it was subsequently unable to lay blame for the death of Standing Bear’s brother.
Consequently, on March 3, 1881, the last day of the Forty-sixth Congress, Kirkwood pushed through a Ponca bill of his own creation. Much like the Crook recommendations, the Kirkwood bill gave Poncas in the Indian Territory the right to go home to the Niobrara but allowed those in the Indian Territory to stay there if they chose, allotting 320 acres per man for Poncas who made their home in Dakota Territory and 160 acres per man for those who remained in the Indian Territory. Parts of the Ponca reservation on the Niobrara not allotted would be taken over by the government, but the tribe would be paid $53,000 a year for five years in compensation.
The Kirkwood bill was not perfect, but it was the best news yet for the Poncas and their supporters. None of the provisions could be acted on until the Sioux voted in favor of officially ceding the Niobrara land to the Poncas, but the new bill required the Interior secretary to implement that vote before year’s end. On the strength of the Kirkwood bill and the success of the second Webster-Poppleton legal challenge before Judge Dundy, General Crook allowed Standing Bear and his Poncas to transfer from the island at the mouth of the Niobrara to land on the northern-western bank of the river, in advance of but in expectation of the Sioux vote being put into effect.
Back north of the river for the first time in almost four years, Standing Bear pitched his family’s tent and made plans to build a simple wooden frame house. Other Poncas in Dakota Territory did the same and looked forward to all tribe members coming home from Indian Territory and being reunited in their homeland. But the bulk of the tribe was too frightened to risk it until the authorities said they could all go home. The killing of Big Snake had convinced many in the Indian Territory that they would suffer a similar fate if they tried to go against the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The Interior secretary, who was now required by law to arrange for the Ponca tribe to have their land returned to them by the Sioux, was no longer Carl Schurz. When President Garfield took office in March, he didn’t retain Schurz as secretary of the Interior, although Schurz had lobbied for a cabinet post in the new administration. On March 7, Carl Schurz left the Interior Department and moved to New York to become editor of the Evening Post. He was never brought to account for the misery he visited on the Poncas and other Indian tribes in the name of expediency, but his reputation was so stained that he never again held a government post, nor was he elected to another public office. Till his dying day he claimed to be a reformer who fought to end government corruption. Yet, tellingly, a friend and admirer, politician Henry Watterson, remarked, “Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political conditions in the United States.”269
The new Interior secretary was a Republican politician who resigned from the Senate to fill Schurz’s empty chair—Samuel J. Kirkwood, the same Senator Kirkwood who put through the new bill in support of the Poncas—and he set up the machinery enabling the Sioux vote to be taken by the Indian Affairs Bureau by the end of the year.
That spring the crusaders went home to Nebraska again, this time convinced that their struggles were nearing an end. After consulting Iron Eye and the One Woman, and with the weight of their two-year battle seemingly lifted from their shoulders, Henry Tibbles and Bright Eyes quietly informed their friends that they would marry in the summer.
Henry Tibbles’s autobiography includes no reference to his romance with the little Indian girl fifteen years his junior, fearing an accusation that he and Bright Eyes had begun their affair while he was married. For the same reason, he did not mention Bright Eyes’s early pivotal role in the Ponca campaign. Despite Tibbles’s attempts to camouflage their relationship early on, there is little doubt it was purely platonic prior to Amelia’s death. Both Henry and Bright Eyes were deeply religious, and the very thought of an extra-marital affair in those straitlaced times would have been abhorrent to them both.
It’s possible that Tibbles fell in love with the spirited young woman while his first wife was alive but kept his feelings to himself. After Amelia’s death, Bright Eyes became an emotional backstop for Tibbles, just as he had already filled that role for her.
On July 23, 1881, wedding guests gathered at the little stone Presbyterian mission church on the banks of the Missouri on the Omaha Indian reservation. They had come to witness the wedding of Thomas Henry Tibbles and Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche. It was to be no marriage of convenience; there was genuine affection between the pair. Harvard ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who traveled with the newlyweds on a visit to the Omahas, Poncas, and Sioux in 1881 described the loving couple in her diary, calling them “Mr. and Mrs. T.” In her company they shared intellectual jokes and were as playful as puppies with each other.270
So it was that guests joined the bride and groom at the Presbyterian church on the Omaha reservation in the summer of 1881 to participate in their wedding, officiated by Reverend S. N. D. Martin.271 There is no record of the guest list, but Bright Eyes’s parents, Iron Eye and the One Woman, would have been there, and her siblings, including her sister Rosalie, who the previous year had married the Omaha reservation’s industrial teacher Edward Farley, and her sister Susan, home from medical school for the summer. Susan was to become the first Native American woman to graduate as a doctor of medicine. Tibbles’s mother, Martha, was probably at the wedding, together with his daughters, Ida and May. Gen- eral Crook would have been there, and probably John L. Webster and his wife and other Omaha Indian Committee members. Standing Bear and his wife, Susette, would have been there, along with other members of the Ponca band from the Niobrara, including medicine man Buffalo Chip and his wife. By this time a total of 130 Poncas had fled Indian Territory and joined Standing Bear at the Niobrara.
The bride, who was dwarfed by her tall, broad-shouldered groom, would have worn a simple, full-length white dress, the groom, his Sunday-best suit. As Bright Eyes became Susette La Flesche Tibbles, Henry would have looked at his new wife with pride. In two years she had gone from a shy but determined young lady to one of the most famous women in America, although she disliked every aspect of her celebrity apart from the fact it gave her the chance to speak out on her people’s behalf.
As for Henry Tibbles, in many ways he was a different man from the rough-and-ready frontier newspaperman Bright Eyes had first come to know. Time among the elite of the East had given him a little polish, although not enough to erase his western charm. Shocked by his first wife’s death and pummeled by the slings and arrows of two years of arduous campaigning for the Poncas and Omahas, Tibbles confirmed the prediction made by Boston orator Wendell Phillips. He had said that Tibbles’s hair would turn gray before the laws were changed to benefit the Indians, and over these past two years, Tibbles’s thick, jet-black hair turned very gray. In another two years it was totally gray and eventually turned snowy white.
Henry Tibbles’s many enemies were unimpressed by the marriage. “I fear poor Bright Eyes has made a mistake,” Deputy Interior Secretary Alonzo Bell wrote from Washington to his former boss Carl Schurz in New York shortly after news of the wedding became public. “But I am willing to forgive her if the act has effectually disposed of Tibbles.” Bell hoped that Bright Eyes’s “sacrifice” would give the country “a rest from the vexatious borings of the Tibbles school of philosophy.”272
Mr. and Mrs. Tibbles were not sure what they would do in the long term; both had already tried their hand at writing books and articles, and Bright Eyes had also taken up painting. But they agreed to go on one last eastern speaking tour starting in December. With the Poncas almost certain to achieve the security of tenure that Standing Bear had fought for, the Omaha and Boston committees asked the crusaders to undertake one final tour to push for land ownership and citizenship rights for all Indians.
Standing Bear also agreed to join the latest speaking tour, although he could ill afford to spend time away from his struggling little farm, where his wife and daughter labored in the fields at his side. He had already piled up the lumber to build his house, but as he returned to the Niobrara following the Tibbles wedding he would have been convinced the tour was the right thing to do. Other Indians, including Bright Eyes, were committed to extending the campaign to all their Native American brothers and sisters. Standing Bear felt that of all Native Americans he had the most to be grateful for now that he was living unmolested on the land of his fathers, as he had hoped and dreamed. His house could wait.
This last lecture tour promised to open the door to rights for all Native Americans. The vote by the Sioux ceding the Niobrara homelands back to the Ponca tribe would go forward over the winter. The Kirkwood bill would then come into effect, legitimizing the Poncas’ occupation and individual ownership of those lands. Other moves in Congress pointed to the Omahas being given title to allotments on their reservation; they too could then get on with their lives free of the threat of dispossession. That year 1881 was a positive one, a happy one, full of promise that all was sure to come right for the Ponca and Omaha peoples and their Indian brothers and sisters.