Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  The alarmed "hostiles," as the army called them, moved into the valley of White Clay Creek, perhaps 4,000 people in all, as many as 1,000 of them warriors. General Miles had about 3,500 of his own blue-coated warriors nearby, amounting to half the army's infantry and cavalry, plus scores of enlisted Indian scouts.7He had 2,000 more ready to enter the fray as needed—in all, a fifth of the U.S. Army was at his disposal on the reservations.8By shifting these forces around, Miles blocked the route to the Stronghold and kept all the fleeing Indians in the White Clay Valley, where they camped.

  Shooting erupted at other places on Pine Ridge, however, as the warriors under Two Strike and from other bands made forays in the wake of Wounded Knee. They attacked a Ninth Cavalry wagon train that was bringing supplies to the agency and also burned houses along the road to the Drexel Mission, the Catholic church that was Father Jutz's home. The day after Wounded Knee, Brooke ordered Forsyth to take his troops to the mission and drive off any hostile Lakota. Jutz and his colleagues had taken refuge in the church, but the priest had been assured by the Lakota that they would not attack him.

  Forsyth reached the church, assured himself that all was well, and then proceeded north along White Clay Creek, where he led his men into a deep valley. The Lakota, who in all likelihood were mostly Two Strike's Brulé and included Plenty Horses, quickly took a position along the steep valley walls and trapped Forsyth and his troops. He had to be rescued by the Ninth Cavalry's buffalo soldiers.

  Snow had begun to fall the day of Forsyth's battle in the valley near Drexel Mission, and it continued to fall and pile up for the next two days. On New Year's Day a burial party of about one hundred or so civilians, including ten or fifteen white men, went to the Wounded Knee battlefield to bury the dead in a mass grave for two dollars per body. Among the party was Dr. Charles Eastman, who hoped to find and help survivors. A photographer and several reporters also joined the group. "Fully three miles from the scene of the massacre we found the body of a woman completely covered with a blanket of snow," Eastman wrote, "and from this point on we found them scattered along as they had been relentlessly hunted down and slaughtered while fleeing for their lives."9

  The bodies lay under the snow, scores of still and silent mounds. Indians in the party began to cry or to sing their death songs. Miraculously, one old woman from Sitanka's band, an American flag sewn onto her hat, had survived the days and nights of freezing cold that followed the shooting. So had a girl, only about a year old, who would be adopted by a white officer and his wife. An old man also was brought in alive, found his wife and daughter at Goodale's chapel, and died a day or two later. "All this was a severe ordeal for one who had so lately put his faith in the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man," Eastman wrote. "Yet I passed no hasty judgment, and was thankful that I might be of some service and relieve even a small part of the suffering."10

  The burial crew dug a pit sixty feet long and six feet deep and threw in Big Foot and more than 140 of his people, stripping jewelry, clothing, and ghost shirts from many of the bodies. Later, anonymous Lakota would smear the posts erected at the burial site with red paint that had been sent to them by Wovoka and that was supposed to have ghost dance powers.

  Black Elk, a young warrior who would be a noted holy man in later life, took an overtly dimmer view of Wounded Knee than did Eastman. Recognizing that the shooting at Wounded Knee killed the ghost dance, he wrote in his autobiography: "And so it was all over. I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream."11

  As with Sitting Bull's death, white response to Wounded Knee ranged from compassion to satisfaction. Philadelphia resident Sarah Dickson wrote to Herbert Welsh of the Indian Rights Association shortly after the battle, alluding to Helen Hunt Jackson's seminal book on Indian issues, A Century of Dishonor: "Alas that the dishonor still clings to the Century & this dreadful war is partly the fault of our so called Christian nation."12

  The Chadron Democrat took a view more familiar to residents of the recent frontier, editorializing on January i, 1891:

  For once it has occurred that more Indians than soldiers have been slain, and we doubt not but that either Gen. Miles or Brooke will be cashiered from the service as was Gen. Harney for such pitiless bloodshed. Nothing will be done about the poor soldiers who were slain, but the Indian department [sic] is undoubtedly already getting in its work upon some crank of a congressman to present a bill before that august and wise (?) body to investigate the cause that led to the late massacre (?) and uncalled for (?) slaughter of such dear, good Indians. . . . We glory in the revenge of the Seventh, although they sustained a heavy loss, and notwithstanding there may have been but a few in the late fight left who belonged to the Seventh during Custer's life. . . . We predict that the killing of Big Foot and his warriors will have a telling effect on the messiah craze, and will civilize more reds who are yet alive than all the power of God and education that has been pumped into them for the past 16 years.13

  General Nelson Miles, rumored to be interested in running for president, said, "I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee."14He immediately ordered an investigation into the shoot-out.

  CHAPTER 7

  Casey's Last Ride

  WHEN LIEUTENANT EDWARD WANTON CASEY arrived at the Pine Ridge reservation in mid-December 1890, his orders required him not to fight the Lakota but to keep an eye on them and to avoid conflict. Restraint was General Nelson Miles's way of dealing with a people who knew they had been defeated and just needed to be reminded of it. By keeping his troops from attacking, Miles hoped to succeed in demonstrating the power of the military without having to unleash it. Miles's approach struck old Indian fighters as a touch peculiar. Frederic Remington, who traveled with Casey during the Wounded Knee crisis, quoted one seasoned soldier who pointed out that neither he nor Casey's Cheyenne scouts understood Miles's limited warfare: " 'This is a new kind of war. Them Injuns don't understand it, and to tell you the truth, I don't nuther. The Injuns say they have come all the way from Tongue River, and are going back poor. Can't get Sioux horses, can't kill Sioux,' and in peroration he confirmed his old impression that 'this is a new kind of war,' and then relapsed into reveries of what things used to be before General Miles invented this new kind of war."1

  One of Casey's assignments was to reconnoiter the Stronghold, the natural fortress in a remote part of Pine Ridge that several thousand Lakota had occupied at the height of hostilities. Recent reports indicated that the Indians had abandoned the Stronghold, and Casey was supposed to find out if the reports were true. The officer and his Cheyenne scouts rode there through twelve miles of Badlands, rugged, barren country cut up with ravines and arroyos. Remington described the Stronghold: "All about the plain were strewn the remains of dead cattle (heads and horns, half-butchered carcasses, and withal a rather impressive smell), coyotes, and ravens—all very like war. These Brulés [sic] must have lived well. There were lodge poles, old fires, and a series of rifle pits across the neck of land which the Sioux had proposed to defend, medicine poles, and near them sacrifices, among which was food dedicated to the Great Spirit, but eventually consumed by the less exalted members of Casey's command. I vandalized a stone pipe and a rawhide stirrup."2

  Lieutenant Casey (center) leads his Indian recruits prior to their assignment to Pine Ridge during the ghost dance panic. (Christian Barthelmess, Montana Historical Society, Helena)

  Soon, on the plain below, Casey's group spotted the dust of retreating Lakota, who fired at them. Casey had a hard time keeping his Cheyenne warriors from attacking—the scouts feared they would go back to Fort Keogh without the Lakota horses they expected to take as war booty. "
The Cheyennes were uneasy, and not at all pleased with this scheme of action," wrote Remington. "What could they know about the orders in Lieutenant Casey's pocket?"3

  Soon Casey was confronted with a large body of Lakota warriors. The Cheyenne wanted to fight, but Casey held them back. Resting his hand on his revolver, he told them, "I will shoot the first man through the head who falls out of the ranks."4 Leaving the scouts in the command of another soldier, Casey rode out to speak with the Lakota. The sun was setting, and darkness came while Casey talked. "The daring of Casey in this case is simply an instance of a hundred such," Remington wrote. "By his prompt measures with his own men, and by his courage in going among the Sioux to powwow, he averted a bloody battle, and obeyed his orders." Three or four Brulé from the hostile group visited Casey's camp that night, resulting in uneasy rest for the troops and scouts.

  The next day white troops from Casey's unit had to make a running retreat when the Lakota opened fire on them. Strictly obeying Miles's orders against fighting, the troops rode hard, some of them on horseback and some— including Remington—in a wagon pulled by a laboring team of horses. "Above the pounding of the horses and the rattle of the wagon and through the dust came the cowboy song from the lips of Mr. Thompson [a Civil War veteran who rode in the wagon]: 'Roll your tail, / And roll her high; / We'll all be angels / By and by.' "5

  But in fact they survived, after making a run of ten miles "at a record-breaking gallop," Remington wrote. "We struck the scout camp in a blaze of excitement. The Cheyennes were in warpaint, and the ponies' tails were tied up and full of feathers. Had the Sioux materialized at that time, Mr. Casey would have had his orders broken right there."

  That night Casey and the scouts slept outdoors and woke with frozen sleet on their faces. It was the last day of 1890. The sleet that glazed them fell likewise on the dead at nearby Wounded Knee.

  PERSISTENT HOSTILITIES BETWEEN THE ARMY and Two Strike's White Clay encampment of some one thousand warriors did not keep Casey's Cheyenne troops from daily contact with the hostiles, allowing Casey to invite a few Lakota warriors to drop in and talk at the nearby army camp on White River where Casey was stationed.6 The evening of January 6, 1891, perhaps half a dozen hostiles palavered with Casey and his men.7 Casey sensed that they wanted the shooting to end. Pondering this potential, Casey apparently decided to ride the next morning to Two Strike's camp to see if he could meet with a chief or two and talk peace. Officially, he hit the trail to check out the camp in a reconnaissance mission, as he was authorized to do. He was not authorized to set up discussions with chiefs, but his actions on January 7 suggest that is what he intended to do, and his second in command of the scouts, Lieutenant Robert Getty, corroborated this view later when he wrote, "Casey started out with the intention of penetrating the hostile Camp to have a talk with the principal chief, and thought he could accomplish his object by boldness." 8 And if negotiations failed, riding out to the camp for a look around was still an important part of Casey's duties.

  Two Strike and Crow Dog's camp in 1890. Lieutenant Casey was trying to visit these people when Plenty Horses shot and killed him. (Nebraska State Historical Society Photograph Collections)

  Casey took only two Cheyenne scouts. Had he shown up at the Lakota redoubt with more men, he would have been perceived as out for blood. He may have been taking his cues from a similar effort completed successfully in Arizona almost five years earlier, when Lieutenant Charles Gatewood had ridden with two Apache scouts into the camp of one of the fiercest Indians ever to carry arms: Geronimo. This warrior chief of the Chiricahua Apache had surrendered to the military a few months before Gatewood's ride, then had changed his mind and run off into the Sierra Madres with about two dozen warriors. When Gatewood rode in, he flatly told Geronimo to surrender. Geromino's jaw may have dropped at Gatewood's sheer audacity, but the warrior actually had little choice. He was being hunted by U.S. soldiers, civilian militiamen, Mexican soldiers, and Apache scouts. Weary of war, facing destruction, Geronimo gave up.9

  Casey may have figured that what worked for Gatewood would work for him. After all, Casey knew that, like Gatewood, he had a persuasive argument on his side: The Lakota camp was surrounded by U.S. soldiers, and the Indians knew their backs were against the wall.10 Casey probably also thought that he had one other important factor on his side: justice. Like many officers, he believed that the Indians had been wronged. Throughout his almost twenty-year career in the West he had seen again and again the same sorry scenario in which whites provoked Indians to violence and then called in the military to punish them.11 As a just man, Casey wanted to set things right with the Lakota and restore peace and security, such as they were, to the reservations. He would meet the Lakota halfway. More than halfway. He would ride all the way into their camp and talk it over.

  Despite similarities between Casey and Gatewood, important differences also should have been apparent. Geronimo knew and trusted Gatewood, while Casey was riding toward a village of strangers—armed, dangerous strangers conditioned to respond negatively to white men in blue uniforms with brass trim. Moreover, the two scouts who rode with Gatewood were related to members of Geronimo's band, while the scouts with Casey were Cheyenne— sometimes allies, but lately enemies, of the Lakota.12

  LIEUTENANT CASEY MOUNTED HIS BLACK horse at 9 a.m. on January 7, 1891.13 The two Cheyenne soldiers he had selected to go with him were twenty-nine-year-old White Moon (Is-she-wo-go-mi-ast in Cheyenne) and twenty-five-year-old Rock Road (O-ni-me-o). Both had enlisted in May 1890, and both were married. Probably neither had fought in battle before.14

  By midafternoon Casey and his men, according to some reports, were within a mile and a half of the Indian camp, although some witnesses put them four miles away. The trio stopped along White Clay Road to greet a group of perhaps forty Lakota who were watching cattle and perhaps butchering beef.15 At about this point Casey told Rock Road to go back to check on three Cheyenne scouts somewhere in the area. Rock Road left Casey to carry on the mission with White Moon.16

  Two Lakota, both in war paint, then joined Casey and White Moon as they headed toward Two Strike's camp. One of these was an Oglala called Broken Arm. The other was the Brulé named Plenty Horses, who had been riding the edges of the camp that day, keeping watch for approaching enemies. Plenty Horses had been at Pine Ridge the day of the shooting at Wounded Knee and had fought against the army in the days that followed. He was in no mood for fraternizing with U.S. soldiers. "Of course I was in a bad frame of mind," he would say later. "Our home was destroyed, our family separated, and all hope of good times was gone. There was nothing to live for."17

  Nevertheless, when Casey and Plenty Horses first met, Casey had extended a hand, saying, "Hau, Kola"—hello, my friend. Plenty Horses shook hands and, as the two rode side by side for a mile or so, talked in English.

  At some point along the way, the four riders met a Lakota named Bear Lying Down, who had just ridden out of the camp. Although he was not a hostile and had a travel pass from General Miles, he had spent the previous night with the warriors because they would not let him leave. Casey asked Bear Lying Down to return to the camp and request a meeting with a chief. At that moment Casey exceeded his authority. He was not supposed to seek contacts with Indian chiefs, although he was permitted to speak with them if they initiated a discussion.

  The chief on whom he pinned his hopes was probably Red Cloud, the old warrior who had first won fame in the 1860s when he led the Lakota in fighting the U.S. Army to a standstill. In January 1891 Red Cloud was about seventy years old and had traded in his war lance for more peaceful means of persuasion. He lived on the Pine Ridge reservation in a two-story house that was more comfortable than that of the reservation agent, and he had avoided any participation in the ghost dance.18 Nevertheless, Red Cloud had tremendous symbolic value to both whites and Lakota, so much so that the hostiles had kidnapped him from his house during the brief shoot-out at Pine Ridge headquarters. "I being in danger of my life between two f
ires I had to go with them and follow my family," Red Cloud explained a few days later to Thomas Bland, of the National Indian Defense Association, who was investigating the Lakota ghost dance conflict. "Some would shoot their guns around me and make me go faster."19 He would never have received such treatment during his days as a warrior chief, but then a chief had more status than did a waning cultural symbol. Casey, counting on the old diplomat to work out yet another peace, may not have known that Red Cloud was a virtual prisoner.

  While waiting for Bear Lying Down, Casey told Plenty Horses that he wanted to visit the Lakota camp. Plenty Horses later said that, thinking of the vulnerable women and children living there, he told the officer to go no closer. And so Casey, Plenty Horses, White Moon, and Broken Arm settled down to wait for the messenger's return.

  Bear Lying Down, meanwhile, talked with Red Cloud, who was instantly alarmed at the news that an army officer was nosing around on the outskirts of the Lakota camp.20 Red Cloud wanted an end to the hostilities, but he knew that several hundred young warriors beyond the confines of his tepee were eager to gun down a U.S. soldier, particularly one with brass on his shoulders. Given what had happened at Wounded Knee, Red Cloud feared that an assault on the officer would lead to a large Lakota body count that would include women and children. The safety of this soldier was as important to him as it was to the army, perhaps more so.

  Plenty Horses, the young Brulé who killed Lieutenant Casey, during his imprisonment at Fort Meade. (Library of Congress)

  Red Cloud gave Bear Lying Down an immediate answer and sent him back to Casey along with Pete Richard, Red Cloud's half-white son-in-law. The two riders did not bring Casey the message he had hoped for. Red Cloud, Richard said, was planning to slip out of the camp and go to the Pine Ridge agency soon, and he would talk then. Red Cloud also sent a warning: Leave immediately. "I told him [Casey] he had better go home at once," Richard would later relate, "for the young fellows were just the same as if they were drunk or crazy."21 Chiefs always had trouble controlling hot-blooded young warriors.