Roger Di Silvestro Read online
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 An Officer's Life
2 Conflict on the Plains
3 Freedom's Final Days
4 The Coming of the Ghosts
5 Death Comes for Sitting Bull
6 Gunfire at Wounded Knee
7 Casey's Last Ride
8 Ambush or Self-defense?
9 The Last Battle
10 A Fractured Life
11 On Trial
12 Justice Deferred
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Praise for In the Shadow of Wounded Knee
"Di Silvestro grabs hold of his story. It is, in a word, haunting. Its supernatural elements arrive with the ghost dance, a mystical religion that swept Native Americans near the end of the 19th century—with tragic consequences. An amalgam of Christian and native religious elements, the ghost dance—actually a series of dances accompanied by ceremonial cleansing, meditation and prayer—excited white settlers with fear while giving the Indians a tragic sense of invulnerability. They came to believe that under the power of the ghost dance, their shirts could stop white men's bullets.
"That the shirts had no such power the Indians learned to their sorrow and a white nation to its shame and outrage when, on Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. 7th Cavalry herded about 300 Indians in the cold and the snow of their pathetically poor South Dakota reservation and demanded their guns. One Indian shouted, 'No'; a shot, fired by which side no one knows, rang out. Firing commenced and continued for four hours. By the end of it, at least 150 men, women and children lay dead along the creek.
"Afterward, much of the fear and hatred of the Indian, which began in the late 16th century in New England, had disappeared from the standard American repertory of emotions, replaced by pity and shame. So it was that in a chance encounter on Jan. 7, 1891, when a young Lakota warrior fatally shot a West Point soldier from New England in the back of the head at close range, white public opinion no longer automatically took the white man's side.
"Plenty Horses was arrested in the murder of Lt. Edward Casey, but . . . This grave and civilized verdict was not, probably, what devotees of the Western myth as present on a thousand movie screens might have expected, but it was a sign of the political and emotional maturing of the American republic at that stage in its growth . . . Di Silvestro's story is encouraging to a student of the American character. Deep prejudices can—and have been—overcome."
—Los Angeles Times
"If you don't have any other book on Native America on your bookshelf, get this book. It's full of truth. It's going to tell you a lot of things that you don't know, a lot of things that have been kept hidden from all of you since 1890, since the massacre at Wounded Knee."
—Jay Winter Night Wolf, The Night Wolf Show
"A dispassionate encapsulation of the Wild West just before it devolved into myth."
—Kirkus Reviews
"In the Shadow of Wounded Knee tells a little of who we were as a nation, and how that nation dealt with the civic virtue of justice, not to mention truth . . . Di Silvestro has done a remarkable job."
—Decatur Daily
"Di Silvestro is particularly adept in his descriptions of the fissures within the various Lakota bands that were exacerbated by the strains of constant white encroachment on their lands. Di Silvestro also provides interesting biographical sketches of Casey and Plenty Horses, which elevates their eventual confrontation to the level of inevitable tragedy."
—Library Journal
"This first account of these cases is an eye opener, necessary in knowing where America has come from, and where it is going."
—Indian Life
"Readers new to the subject will find Di Silvestro's clear explanation helpful, the violent encounters dramatic and the trials absorbing."
—Publishers Weekly
IN THE SHADOW OF
Wounded Knee
IN THE SHADOW OF
Wounded Knee
The Untold Final Chapter of the Indian Wars
ROGER L. DI SILVESTRO
Copyright © 2007 by Roger Di Silvestro
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.
Map is from Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux, by Robert W Larson. Copyright © 1997 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Map is from The Last Days of the Sioux Nation by Robert M. Utley. Copyright © 1963 by Yale University Press. The map may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission of Yale University Press.
Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Di Silvestro, Roger L.
In the shadow of Wounded Knee : the untold story of the Indian Wars / Roger L. DiSilvestro.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-802-71838-9
1. Wounded Knee Massacre, S.D., 1890. 2. Dakota Indians—Wars, 1890-1891. I. Title.
E83.89.D57 2005
973.8'6—dc22
2005044264
First published in the United States by Walker & Company in 2005
This paperback edition published 2007
Designed by Maura Fadden Rosenthal/Mspace
Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
Visit Walker & Company's Web site at www.walkerbooks.com
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Jeanne
With appreciation for your confidence in my writing and for your uncomplaining toleration of my absences, moods, and obsessions, including the buffalo skull under my desk.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 An Officer's Life
2 Conflict on the Plains
3 Freedom's Final Days
4 The Coming of the Ghosts
5 Death Comes for Sitting Bull
6 Gunfire at Wounded Knee
7 Casey's Last Ride
8 Ambush or Self-defense?
9 The Last Battle
10 A Fractured Life
11 On Trial
12 Justice Deferred
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THESE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS REPRESENT SLIM THANKS to only a handful of the people to whom I am indebted for their help and support.
The staff of the archives of Historic New England, which was called the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities when I visited its Boston headquarters, won my deep appreciation and respect when they let me extend my time there beyond the restricted visiting hours. Their collection of material from Edward Casey's family, and their kindness in providing it to me, was invaluable
.
Also helpful in giving me access to the Casey family home near Newport, Rhode Island, was the staff of the Casey-farm historic site. It's such a beautiful place that it is hard to believe that Edward Casey did not want to spend his life there.
I owe special thanks to Theresa Norman, registrar of the Siouxland Heritage Museums, who let me examine the rifle Plenty Horses used to kill Lieutenant Casey, now stored at the Courthouse Museum in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Ms. Norman also was patient in dealing with my many queries and provided important research materials to me over the course of the final two years of research and writing.
I also thank John McCabe of the Springfield Armory National Historic Site in Springfield, Massachusetts, who offered information on the type of rifle Plenty Horses used to kill Lieutenant Casey.
My appreciation is deeply felt for the staffs of the various public libraries that helped me with great patience as I rummaged through their archival material. These include the libraries at the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation; Miles City, Montana; and Sturgis, Sioux Falls, and Rapid City, South Dakota, as well as the archival staff at the Philadelphia Historic Society, which houses the records of the Indian Rights Association.
I would be remiss in not expressing my gratitude to my agent, Gail Ross, in seeing this project through and in helping to shape it by providing the expert and well-reasoned input of her editorial advisers, Jenna Land and Howard Lee. They made the early stages a pleasure. Along similar lines, I offer my appreciation for my editor at Walker & Company, Jackie Johnson, who gave me the key to clarifying the structure of the book and provided exquisite editing and enhancement.
I thank Birgil Kills Straight and Sophie Lone Hill, a descendant of Few Tails, for the time they gave me in interviews that helped add dimension to the story of Wounded Knee and its aftermath. I also thank Casey Barthelmess for his help in obtaining photos of Lt. Casey and providing information on the subject of Casey and Wounded Knee.
Personal thanks go to friends and colleagues who read various drafts of the book and who, through their comments and attention, encouraged my commitment to the project. These include Vince Cosentino, whose reading of practically every long work I have written, both published and unpublished, serves as a reinforcement to my commitment to writing; Kathy Shay, who has remained a friend despite our scarcely seeing each other since my army days more than thirty years ago; Mike "Smoke" Pfeiffer, an archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service and old college friend; Linda Gallagher, who long ago urged me to write more nonfiction; and Dan Smith and Laura Gemery, former colleagues at the National Wildlife Federation.
Finally, I cannot acknowledge sufficiently my very old friend Don Nelsen, who after forty-some years, mostly with little personal contact, has managed to remain part of my professional and personal life. With his extensive knowledge of genealogical research, he turned up vital information I might otherwise have missed. His skill and efficiency often gave me the feeling that I had my own personal researcher on whom I could rely without question. Thank you very much.
This man wears a war bonnet because he has killed enemies. Therefore he is a good man. And men make him a leader because of his many deeds in battle. He has killed many men from all tribes of Indians and white men, too. Therefore he won leadership. It is so.
—Thunder Bear
IN THE SHADOW OF
Wounded Knee
Prologue
A FRIGID DECEMBER WIND WHIPPED across the South Dakota plains, rushing down from some distant arctic wasteland. In the southwestern part of the state, near the Nebraska border, snow dusted the trees and lay a foot deep over the hills and flats surrounding the creek the Lakota Indians call Cankpe Opi and maps call Wounded Knee.
But the treacherous cold did not stop Birgil Kills Straight and the 115 Lakota with him that day in 2003, when they came on horseback to Cankpe Opi at the end of a 350-mile ride that had taken nearly two weeks.1 Kills Straight and the others had gathered at this place, in the heart of the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, to honor the youths who rode among them, to teach them courage, self-discipline, and respect, to put them in touch with their history and culture, and to remember the Lakota who had died there more than a century before, cut down by the rapid fire of automatic weapons.*
Perhaps it was the ghosts of those dead that, in the late 1980s, had troubled Kill Straight's dreams, urging him to make these annual spirit rides, to start far north where the great chief Sitting Bull had been killed by Indian police and to follow southward the path of Lakota refugees seeking escape from U.S. Army troops. It had all happened so long ago, but it was fresh in Kills Straight's memory and in the memories of his people—that terrible December in 1890.
THE LAKOTA IN 1890 COULD not leave their six reservations without permission from a politically appointed white agent. They were not allowed to practice traditional religion. A far-roaming hunting people, they were forced to adopt an agrarian lifestyle in an arid land from which even experienced farmers could not eke out a living. Railroad tracks, telegraph wires, and the crude roadways of a new and growing society crisscrossed the plains that the Lakota recently had claimed as theirs. Aspiring commercial farmers busted prairie sod for crops. The wild grasses that for millennia had nourished vast numbers of bison now fed domestic livestock. South Dakota had attracted the business of six rail companies, promoting the development of some three hundred new towns. The U.S. Census Bureau in 1890 announced that the American frontier was closed, based on the number of people settled in the West and the amount of land in agriculture, rendering the Indians more or less officially a landless people, confined on reservations at the mercy of the latest immigrants. 2
And yet the Lakota did not give up. Ground down by poverty and defeat, they and other Indians in the West turned in 1889 to the deep spiritual beliefs that permeated their cultures, finding hope in a religious revival that featured endless dancing to induce visions of long-dead relatives. A Paiute holy man who had learned the dance in a vision preached that if the Indians danced and kept peace with the whites, God would banish the whites from the continent, resurrect all dead Indians and restore them to their families, and bring back the wildlife that had fed, housed, and clothed the Indians.3
The religious revival threw fear into settlers who lived near the Lakota reservations and thought they were witnessing a war dance. Newspaper editors, backed by politicians who wanted to grab Lakota lands, added oil to the fire by writing stories and editorials that predicted an Indian uprising. This incendiary combination led in autumn 1890 to the largest military buildup since the Civil War as U.S. soldiers poured into the Lakota reservations. Eventually, the ghost dancers would yield to the army and give up the new religion, but not without paying a price in human lives.
In mid-December the U.S. Army was tracking down a wandering band of some four hundred Lakota led by a sick, elderly chief named Sitanka, or Big Foot. After several days of [ ursuit, the army caught up with the Indians and made them encamp along Wounded Knee Creek. There, on the sunny but cold morning of December 29, the Seventh Cavalry had Sitanka's band surrounded, heavy guns staring down at the Indians from a hill that overlooked the camp. The soldiers assembled the warriors and demanded their weapons. During the disarmament, a warrior named Black Coyote held his rifle over his head and said he would not give it up unless he was paid for it. U.S. soldiers tried to wrestle the rifle away from him, and it went off. As the shot reverberated, a volley of gunfire ripped through the camp. Whether the gunfire came from U.S. troops or Lakota Indians is unclear, as eyewitness accounts disagree. 4 In any event, a lieutenant ordered the soldiers to fire. Within moments, frenzied killing began. For four hours, long after most of the Lakota men were killed in the opening volleys, troops on horseback tracked fleeing women and children and cut them down. When the killing stopped, the soldiers gathered up their dead and wounded along with wounded Indians and headed for the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation headquarters for medical help, leaving scores of slain Lakota where they had fallen.
As word of the slaughter spread like a bloodstain across the reservations, young warriors took up weapons, mounted horses, and rode off in pursuit of U.S. troops, determined to protect their families and elderly from another attack. Among the warriors rode a twenty-one-year-old Brulé Lakota who had lost a cousin in the gunfire along Wounded Knee Creek. The rider was called Tasunka Ota—Many Horses—although the whites translated it as Plenty Horses and sometimes as Young Man with Plenty Horses. Right after the shooting at Wounded Knee, he had joined other warriors to fight the U.S. soldiers.
The warriors wanted revenge. Plenty Horses did too, but he also wanted something far more important to him and his troubled life than mere vengeance. By the time Plenty Horses was ten years old, he had seen his people defeated and bereft of their lands. His adolescence had begun on a government-controlled reservation, where he was often hungry and, like all his people, powerless to do anything about it. At fourteen, Plenty Horses was spirited away by the government to a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and enrolled for five years in a program designed to make Indians look and act like conventional whites. When the government finally permitted him to return to the reservation, many Lakota no longer accepted him, perceiving him as tainted by white contact. "I was an outcast," Plenty Horses would say. "I was no longer an Indian."5
And then, two years after his return, came Wounded Knee and a chance to ride the warpath with the others, to prove that he was a true warrior, facing the enemy with bravery and fortitude in the Lakota tradition. Plenty Horses and the other warriors roamed the plains and skirmished with U.S. soldiers in the weeks following the massacre. The fights inflicted little damage to either side until a chance encounter on January 7, 1891.
While Plenty Horses rode with the warriors, another relatively young man was riding with the U.S. Army. Lieutenant Edward Wanton Casey was a West Point graduate who had served in the army for almost twenty years. He had participated after Wounded Knee in some of the skirmishes with the Lakota. By the end of the first week of January 1891, the fighting had wound down, and the last of the hostile Lakota, some four thousand men, women, and children, including eight hundred to one thousand warriors, were encamped along the White River in the western end of the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation. Reaching that camp was Casey's objective when, on January 7, 1891, he mounted his black horse at nine in the morning and rode out of his base camp with two Cheyenne Indians who had enlisted in the U.S. Army.