Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  Later, officers who knew of Casey's activities would say that he went to try to make peace with the last of the fighting Lakota. Others would say he was seeking information on the hostiles' activities, dispersal, and intentions. His motives may remain forever unknown, but what is certain is that within sight of the camp he met warriors who had just come from there. They approached him amicably, and Casey sent a messenger into the camp to ask for a meeting with the principal chiefs. While waiting for the answer, Casey spoke for perhaps an hour with one of the warriors, Plenty Horses. Among other things, Plenty Horses told Casey he could come no closer to the camp because women and children were sheltered there.

  The messenger finally returned and told Casey to leave immediately, that his life was in peril. The warning came from an old and respected chief, Red Cloud, who in the 1860s had forced the U.S. Army to withdraw from Lakota territory. The young warriors were crazed with anger and with lust for the glory of battle, Red Cloud said. They would kill any military officer who came near.

  Plenty Horses was himself one of those dangerous young men, and he quickly proved that Red Cloud's fears were justified. After Casey received the warning, he talked only briefly before turning his horse to leave. Plenty Horses later would maintain that Casey had vowed to return with armed troops ready for a fight. The other witnesses reported that Casey had merely said he would be back. Everyone, however, agreed that as Casey turned away, Plenty Horses drew up his rifle and set his sights on the back of Casey's head so quickly that no one even realized what the warrior was doing until he pulled the trigger, and Casey fell dead.6

  Within days after the shooting, the last hostile Lakota surrendered to the military. Shortly after that, the army arrested Plenty Horses for Casey's murder. The following spring, the young Lakota stood trial in a federal court in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Newspapers carried his story nationwide. The New York World even assigned a reporter to the trial full-time. During courtroom breaks, women flocked around the erstwhile warrior to ask for his autograph.

  Accounts of Wounded Knee generally close with the end of hostilities in late January 1891, but in fact Wounded Knee continued to echo for months afterward in the trial of Plenty Horses, which for a brief moment threatened to raise the specter of whether the soldiers who killed scores of Lakota at Wounded Knee were not every bit as guilty of murder as Plenty Horses appeared to be.

  The trial of Plenty Horses is now largely forgotten, a piece of America's past that constitutes something of a dark secret from a time when the hammer of history was forging the modern era. In the Shadow of Wounded Knee shows America at the instant it was shifting from a wild frontier country into a modern nation and how the cost of building America was paid not just in human lives but with the sacrifice of human hopes and dreams and the future of entire cultures. The Indian wars did not end at Wounded Knee, nor even with Casey's death, but rather in that Sioux Falls federal courthouse, where a lone warrior awaited his fate at the hands of a society that had killed countless numbers of his people and seemed determined to kill at least one more.

  *Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation was called Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation during the late 1800s.

  CHAPTER 1

  An Officer's Life

  LIEUTENANT EDWARD WANTON CASEY WAS born into a long line of military officers. His great-great-grandfather had fought as an officer in the French and Indian War, and his grandfather, Wanton Casey, was an officer in the Revolutionary War. His father, Silas, was a West Point graduate and hero of the Mexican War who won honors for gallantry in the Civil War. Silas also rewrote the army training manual on tactics, which became known as Casey's Tactics.l

  Edward Casey's brother Thomas Lincoln had been first in his West Point graduating class in 1852 and, as head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' District of Columbia Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, finished the Washington Monument after twenty-five years of desultory construction under the command of other officers.2Brother Silas III, a naval academy graduate in i860, had built a distinguished Civil War record and in 1907 would be promoted to commander of the Pacific Squadron. Edward's sisters married officers.

  Edward Casey was born on an army post—the Bernicia Barracks near Berkeley, California—where his father was a captain in the Second Infantry. He grew up to the cadence of marching men, to the clank of sword and clink of spur, to the rumble of cannon on national holidays. He saw his father march off at the head of a military unit to fight Indians, and he collected the Indian artifacts his father sent him.3

  Edward in 1873 graduated thirty-fourth in a West Point class of forty-one. By the end of the year he was on frontier duty at Fort Sully in Dakota Territory. He volunteered in 1874 to go with George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry on an exploration of the little-known Dakota Black Hills, land that by treaty belonged to the Lakota. Instead, the army sent him to New Orleans to help quash civil disturbances.

  In 1875 Casey was reassigned to the West. The following year the Cheyenne and Lakota killed Custer and a large portion of the Seventh Cavalry in a battle on Montana's Little Bighorn River. After the battle, several thousand Indians who had camped together fragmented into smaller groups to wander across traditional hunting grounds in Montana and the Dakotas. The battle-scarred army determined to round up the Indians and put them on reservations.

  Second Lieutenant Edward Wanton Casey at the time of his West Point commencement, June 1873. (Montana Historical Society, Helena)

  During this 1876-77 campaign Casey was stationed at a temporary army supply depot in Montana where Glendive Creek flowed into the Yellowstone River, marking the point beyond which riverboats on the Yellowstone could not pass. Building materials for a fort farther upstream, near the mouth of the Tongue River, were being left at the Glendive depot. Casey's commander and the builder of the fort was Colonel Nelson Miles.

  For months after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Miles pushed his men hard and the Indians harder, attacking Cheyenne and Lakota all through the winter, when they were most vulnerable. He destroyed whole villages— tepees, meat, supplies, everything—during a season of scarce game and brutal weather. Hundreds of Lakota and Cheyenne surrendered to him, including Crazy Horse, the top Lakota warrior.

  Late in April 1877 Miles heard from scouts that Indians were hunting bison at the mouth of Rosebud Creek, about one hundred miles from where Miles was busily turning his smattering of primitive huts into a respectable fort. He immediately rounded up the troops for a foray against these Indians. The soldiers left on May 1, with Casey in command of white and Indian scouts.4

  When scouts on May 6 located a camp on Muddy Creek made up mostly of Miniconjou Lakota led by Lame Deer—Tacha Ushte in his own language—Miles prepared to attack the next morning, while the Lakota were still asleep. His strategy called for twenty-six-year-old Edward Casey to lead thirteen scouts and six soldiers in the opening charge. At the first light of dawn Miles gave the order, and Lieutenant Casey and his men spurred their horses, hooves thundering as they swept in among the tepees like a cyclone.

  Killing Indians was not Casey's priority. His job was to capture the ponies without which the Indians could neither fight effectively nor flee swiftly. In one rush, Casey stampeded the entire herd of some 450 ponies out of the village. Another wave of cavalry entered after Casey, and then another, and the shooting started. The soldiers chased the Lakota into the wooded hills, but the Indians got away. In all, three soldiers and six Indians were killed. Miles destroyed all the tepees and reportedly also tons of dried meat and hundreds of bison hides—everything the Indians had. He also brought back to his cantonment all of the Lakota ponies, letting his infantry use them as mounts. Miles brevetted Casey for gallantry.

  AFTER MUDDY CREEK, CASEY SERVED another year in the West before the army sent him to control striking workers in Chicago and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Next, he spent about two years on Indian campaigns in Texas, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and Colorado. From 1880 to 1884 the army gave him a breather fro
m war, making him an assistant instructor on tactics at West Point.5At the end of 1884 he rejoined the Twenty-second Infantry, stationed at Fort Lewis in southwestern Colorado.6

  In September 1887 he volunteered to lead a reconnaissance expedition from Fort Lewis into a little-known region—the area surrounding the Grand Canyon, which cut across Arizona Territory about 450 miles away.7The government had begun sending topographers and scientists into the canyon as early as the 1850s, and by the 1880s enough was known of the place that it was attracting adventurous tourists and gold-seeking speculators. On September 2, 1887, Casey sent a letter through the proper military channels to the assistant adjutant general of the Department of the Missouri at Leavenworth, Kansas, asking permission to lead an expedition to the canyon. "According to my information," he wrote, "no military itinerary has been made for the route I propose and the details of the country are not laid down upon any map I have ever seen. The country mentioned is in proximity to the reservations of the Navajo, Moqui and Pueblo Indians and for that reason some knowledge of the details might be of military interest."8

  Casey received approval on November 1 and set out at 4 p.m. the next day. With him went three other officers—one of them an assistant army surgeon— eight enlisted men, two civilian packers, fifteen pack mules, a wagon, and seventy-five days' rations. Among the group was a German immigrant, Christian Barthelmess, who was the Twenty-second Infantry's chief musician and semiofficial photographer.9

  The men had traveled only three miles south of the fort when they stopped to make camp, a short jaunt that allowed them to check their equipment while still close enough to have to go back for forgotten items. That evening, the regimental band and a number of officers came out to serenade the explorers. At eight o'clock the next morning they set out in earnest.

  But the going was slow. For a while they wrestled fruitlessly with an odometer mounted on a wagon wheel, but it was not designed for the type of equipment with which the expedition was outfitted. The expedition also stopped every hour for five minutes to take weather readings. "This was done with as exacting care as if the specific security of the United States and general welfare of the rest of the universe depended on it," wrote Barthelmess in a private account that he planned to publish in a German-language newspaper.10

  As the expedition continued, accidents befell the group. A mule kicked Private Charles Reid, fracturing a kneecap. Casey left Reid at Fort Defiance in the care of a doctor. Another private made it across the desert country to the Grand Canyon and then back to Colorado, within about forty miles of Fort Lewis, before suffering a bizarre accident as the expedition rested in Cortez, a young community where Casey bought grain for the hoofed stock and arranged for his men to sleep in an empty store near a stable. He gave his men the night off in a town that was still very much in the making. The dirt streets were unlighted, and a well five feet wide and sixty feet deep was being sunk at one intersection. The well was unmarked and unfenced, and the private stepped into it while returning to his quarters after dark, falling straight to the bottom.

  Casey's 1887 Grand Canyon expedition stops for water at Baker's Peak, Arizona. Lieutenant Casey, in striped trousers, looks down at the water barrels. (Christian Barthelmess, Montana Historical Society, Helena)

  A crowd gathered, and Casey and the other officers arrived. With a rope they lowered Lieutenant F. B. Jones of K Company into the dark hole. He tied the rope around the private, and both men were hauled out. The expedition's surgeon, Lieutenant Nathan S. Jarvis, and a local doctor agreed that the soldier was too badly injured for further travel. Casey left the private in the care of the civilian physician, agreeing to cover all costs himself.

  Next day, the rest of the men and animals headed down the trail toward Fort Lewis. Unfortunately, the trail led through the La Plata Mountains and a pass three feet deep in snow. The expedition had used up its food—seventy-five days of rations in sixty-four days of travel—and had almost worn out the horses and mules. The men made only eighteen miles that day. By the time they got to the fort, on January 5,1888, three of the men had frozen feet.

  Despite the effort and strife, Casey had not accomplished all he had set out to do. In a brief report he filed the day after his return to Fort Lewis, he wrote: "I made the Grand Canyon of the Colorado at a point ten miles below the mouth of the Little Colorado River. I was unable to make the north side of the Canyon owing to the snow on the Buckskin Mountains."

  CASEY WAS, BY CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS, a good soldier, bright, promising, and well liked. But his career had stalled. By 1890 he had not risen above the rank of first lieutenant, and he had not been promoted in ten years. Unfortunately for him, Congress had repeatedly downsized the army after the Civil War. By the 1880s the U.S. Army numbered fewer than twenty-five thousand soldiers and two thousand officers. Promotions came slowly.

  If Casey's career needed a boost at the time of Wounded Knee, his personal life needed resuscitating. Approaching middle age—he had turned forty on December 1, 1890—he was an unhappy bachelor whose finances were a debacle. In the late 1880s he had invested his own money and his sister's children's money in a cattle ranch that not only swamped him with debt but left him struggling to pay back his relatives. He also was involved in a seemingly hopeless love affair with Nettie Atchison, a divorcee or widow who lived at least part-time in Paris, France, with her two daughters.11She and Casey wanted to marry but felt that her daughters and his financial woes made a wedding impossible. 12

  Casey had no clear way out of his troubles. The Wild West was growing tame, the Indian wars were largely over, and Casey was stationed in eastern Montana at Fort Keogh, the military installation Colonel Miles had built upriver from the Glendive supply depot where Casey had been stationed in 1877. By 1888 the fort had been transformed from a collection of crude cabins, constructed of cottonwood poles stuck upright into the ground and roofed with logs and dirt, into the sort of post that soldiers call a country club.13As early as 1879 officers could communicate with several Montana and Dakota Territory military installations by telegraph and could enjoy the service of the first telephone in Montana, although the line ran only from Miles's house to the post telegraph office. By 1880 the troops had put in 650 miles of telegraph wires, which the public also could use, and by 1884 Miles could phone all the way to a cow town and stockyards depot on the other side of the Tongue River, founded at about the time the fort was built and named Miles City after the commanding officer. The soldiers also built roads throughout the area, eight hundred miles of them within a few years after the fort was founded, a boon to public transportation.

  Casey lived in a spacious, two story, brown clapboard duplex with a yard, dormers, porch, and a red shingle roof. He shared it with another officer and a pair of large wolfhounds. Casey's personal effects included curtains and drapes, a meerschaum pipe, doilies, theatrical costumes, watercolors, and oil paints in addition to such typically western equipment as pistols, swords, a buffalo robe, and fly-fishing gear.14

  The fort itself, named for an officer who had died with Custer at the last stand, did not even have a stockade. The only fortifications were strategically placed stacks of firewood.15Home to perhaps 1,400 people, including not only 600 to 800 troops but also the civilians who helped keep the caissons rolling along, the fort offered its soldiers a wide range of entertainment. It boasted a good library and a canteen—like a clubhouse for the soldiers—that provided food, games, and entertainment designed to keep the men from spending their paychecks in Miles City saloons.

  Dances were as frequent as marches, beginning in 1882 with grand balls every Wednesday evening. The Fort Keogh Dramatic Company, led by various officers down through the years, staged plays popular throughout the area. The officers also threw parties at the slightest excuse, celebrating promotions, returning troops, birthdays—they even held a party in honor of Martha Washington, who had been dead for most of a century. The regimental band put on regular entertainments, and traveling shows also stopped in, incl
uding the European Female Brass Band and Minstrel Company.

  In warm weather, the main form of combat for Keogh soldiers was baseball, the troops taking on teams from nearby towns and other army posts. The games made headlines in the Miles City newspaper. Tennis and bowling were popular, as was boxing. Sleigh rides were a favorite winter recreation.

  However dissatisfied Casey may have been with his position and his place, he grew skillful at mixing business with pleasure. A fellow officer, in a letter to Casey's brother Thomas, remarked that the lieutenant was always in the midst of any plan for a good time.16He was well liked by other soldiers, who used him as an example of what a good officer should be.

  But Fort Keogh provided Casey with little chance of fulfilling his potential, and his responsibilities often were menial. Once he led a contingent in banking the Fort Keogh parade ground so it could be flooded for ice-skating. In a three-page letter to the post adjutant, dated January 6, 1889, Casey reported on his slop barrel inspection.17He wrote that ice and snow were polluted with slops and "from spittoon cleaning." He concluded: "I request that sufficient slop barrels be furnished the entire post and will direct that they be asked for where needed and also that the barrels and stands be properly secured. They are sometimes upset by the cattle. Very Respectfully, Your Obedient Servant, EW [sic] Casey, 1st 22 Infty." The following day, Colonel Peter Swaine, then commander at Fort Keogh, referred the letter to all post officers and ordered that they "comply with its requirements and recommendations."