IN THE THIRD week of May 1906, Lincoln-based historian Addison E. Sheldon made his way to Standing Bear’s house on the flat beside the Niobrara River. He came in the company of an unidentified reporter for the New York Times and an interpreter. Sheldon brought a camera to record the image and a notebook to record the words of the former clan chief of the Ponca tribe. He was writing a chapter on Standing Bear in a detailed history of Nebraska published eight years later.
The Times reporter hoped to document Standing Bear’s reaction to the death of former secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz, in New York City on May 14. Papers nationwide were giving Schurz glowing obituaries. America had forgotten the Ponca case, and Schurz had worked hard to rehabilitate his reputation in his latter years by heading up a reform movement and writing well-received political biographies. Time and events had consigned the Poncas to a very small corner of history by 1906. Even when the fight for the Poncas and Omahas was at its zenith in 1881, sensational events pushed the Indians out of the news—the assassination of President Garfield and the Standard Oil scandal. After that, political dramas occupied the headlines, not to mention an economic depression and the Spanish-American War. But the Times editor hadn’t forgotten the Poncas; he wanted to know what Standing Bear thought of his onetime foe.
Standing Bear, now in his seventies, thin and wrinkled with short white hair, obligingly agreed to be photographed outside the humble little farmhouse he built on the flat prairie in the 1890s. For the first photos he wore his farm clothes. Because Sheldon wanted to include a classic image of an Indian chief in his book, eventually Standing Bear agreed to strip to the waist and be photographed holding his “peace” pipe. And he put on the last remaining emblem of his days as a leader of the Ponca tribe, his bear-claw necklace.
Once the photographs had been taken and Standing Bear put his shirt back on, he sat talking with his visitors, puffing on his pipe as he reminisced about days past and the men and women who peopled his life. Many of his friends, those who helped him become a person in the eyes of the law back in 1879, were gone now. Iron Eye, last chief of the Omahas, his good friend, died in 1888, still a comparatively young man. General Crook died in 1890 at age sixty. He was struck down by a heart attack while lifting weights in the Chicago hotel where he’d lived since becoming a major general and succeeding General Sheridan as commander of the Division of the Missouri. Standing Bear would have heard that many Sioux and Apaches wailed in mourning when they learned of General Crook’s passing.
The general’s loyal aide, John “Ink Man” Bourke, passed away six years later, just short of his fiftieth birthday. Judge Elmer Dundy died that same year, 1896, and was buried on Staten Island. Lawyer Andrew Poppleton was in his grave too, going blind before he died. Helen Hunt Jackson, unofficial fifth member of the crusading team, nationally famous in 1884 with Ramona, a best-selling novel about California Indians written after she served on an Indian commission in California, had only a year to enjoy her success, being claimed by cancer in 1885 at age fifty-four.
So many good people had been taken, and too many of them too young. Saddest of all, Standing Bear had lost his dear friend Bright Eyes three years back. Bright Eyes, his speaking tour partner until they finally gave up lecturing in 1883, died at forty-nine; some said of consumption, others, of cancer. She and Henry Tibbles tried farming near the Omaha reservation before leasing out their little property and becoming reporters. For a few years they were Capitol Hill correspondents in Washington, D.C., before returning to Nebraska when Bright Eyes’s health began to decline. Tibbles edited a Lincoln paper for a time, even going back to his old Omaha stomping ground and rejoining the paper in which he launched his Ponca crusade. It had a new name now; in 1889 the Daily Herald merged with a new Omaha daily, the World, becoming the Omaha World-Herald.
In her last years, Bright Eyes wrote magazine stories and painted. She assured everyone she was quite content. She and Henry did one last speaking tour in 1886–1887—a heady year in England and Scotland, meeting royalty, lecturing five days a week. The British called her Princess Bright Eyes. She continued to visit with New England literary friends, occasionally speaking in public, but she was happy to retreat from the limelight.
Bright Eyes died disappointed and estranged from her brother Frank. He achieved his goal of graduating from law school and became like a son to ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who found him a job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington as a clerk. The determined, imperious Fletcher personally led land allotments to individual Indians in the 1880s, starting with the Omahas in 1882. Too late, Bright Eyes realized that Fletcher and many like her were not true friends of the Indian. They set out to destroy Native American culture, forcing Indians to embrace the “civilized” white way. By breaking up reservations into thousands of little farms they broke up the tribes’ communal way of life and then redistributed millions of “excess” reservation acreage to whites.
Was Standing Bear disappointed? In 1889 a majority of the Sioux finally voted to restore the Niobrara land to the Poncas, and in 1890 Standing Bear and 166 other Ponca males who had returned to the old reservation were each given 320 acres. The government sold the balance to white settlers. By now, that land was in Nebraska, after Congress moved the state line north to the 43rd parallel in 1882, chopping 400,000 acres from what became South Dakota. Not that such tinkering with lines on maps meant anything to Standing Bear; he had kept his promise to his son, burying Bear Shield’s bones with those of their ancestors. He had brought his family home to the Niobrara. He had gained legal title to a slice of his homeland.
So, disappointed? No, but things were never the same as before. The Poncas had become two tribes—those who remained in the Indian Territory, the Maste’Pa’ca, or Hot Country Poncas as they called themselves, and those who returned to the old homeland, the Osni’Pa’ca, the Cold Country Poncas. Occasionally Standing Bear visited his relatives and friends in the Hot Country, and once the parting was so painful he even thought seriously of staying down there. But he had come home to the Niobrara. This was where he wanted to die. He was happy enough.
Puffing on his pipe, Standing Bear told Sheldon about the Poncas’ past, of the time before the treaties changed everything, of the days of skirmishes with the Sioux, of the annual Sun Dance and buffalo hunt. All gone now—the holy tent, the sacred pole, the dances, the ceremonies, the Soldier Lodge, the tribal way. Now only a few, like Standing Bear, remembered the rituals, the words, the steps, and soon he too would be gone. For Sheldon’s benefit too, for the first time in many years Standing Bear retold the stories of the terrible trek of the chiefs in 1877, the tribe’s forced removal to Indian Territory, the death of Prairie Flower and Bear Shield, the desperate escape back to the Niobrara, the anguish of his arrest.
After Standing Bear finished, the New York Times reporter asked him if he remembered Interior Secretary Schurz. The old Indian nodded slowly. He had never forgotten the Interior secretary, the one who spoke German. In 1880, when he was returning to the crusaders’ hotel in New York, a newsboy showed him a cartoon of Carl Schurz by influential political cartoonist Thomas Nast in the latest Harper’s Weekly. Buying the journal, Standing Bear took it back to the hotel, and in the hotel barber shop he borrowed a pair of shears and cut out the caricature. He asked Henry Tibbles to paste it into a scrapbook for him, and for years he would take out that cartoon and look at it again. It always made him chuckle.273 So, yes, he remembered Carl Schurz well enough. Schurz had been responsible for much of the ordeal his people had gone through, he told the man from the Times.274
The reporter then informed him that Carl Schurz was dead. Standing Bear dragged on his pipe, thought for a long time, and then he spoke the one word of English that he now used with any regularity. “Good,” he said.275
Two years later, on September 3, 1908, Standing Bear died at home. He was buried on his little allotment beside the Niobrara, on his own land, the land of his fathers. His greatest wish was fulfilled: “Let our bones be mingled together with the earth where our forefathers lie, and on which we lived for so many years and were happy.”276 Standing Bear would not walk alone in the afterlife.