Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  The courtroom erupted in cheers, and although Marshal Fry rapped on the clerk's desk for order, the tumult continued. Powers shook Plenty Horses' hand, and Plenty Horses actually broke down, tears streaming, according to the New York World. "I'm free," he said. "Good, good, good."23 The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader reported an altogether different reaction, saying Plenty Horses "was the coolest person in the room. His face did not for a moment light up with joy. On his face there was no trace of delight, as before there had been none of anxiety or fear."24

  When Judge Edgerton announced the discharge of the prisoner and adjourned the court, the crowd rushed to Plenty Horses, reaching out for him. He shook hands with dozens of women, bowing slightly to each and smiling. His attorneys eventually got him out of the courtroom. Outside, he met a dozen or more Indians, among them American Horse, who grasped Plenty Horses' hand and expressed the ambivalence that haunted the trial. "I am glad you are free," he said. "You killed Casey. That was bad. He was a brave man and a good one. He did much for the Indian, but the whites cruelly starved us into such a condition that the young men were crazy and you did not know what you did."25

  Later, Plenty Horses found time for another interview with the New York World's J. J. McDonough. "I am a free man, and my liberty is as precious to me as anyone living, but I would rather have died than to be called by the court a murderer," Plenty Horses said. "Had it not been for the good fight made by my attorneys I doubt if I should ever had a chance to return to my people. They are entitled to the credit of saving my life, and if ever an Indian had occasion to feel grateful to white men I have towards them. I shall go back to the reservation tomorrow to meet my father and mother. They are broken hearted."26

  McDonough also interviewed the jurors that evening and learned that all of them agreed with Judge Shiras's decision. The reporter suspected that, had the case been handed over to them for a verdict, they would have freed Plenty Horses. An editorial in the Argus-Leader came to a contrary conclusion. After canvassing the jury, the paper's editorial staff concluded that the verdict would have been manslaughter.

  Captain Baldwin, who had been a friend of Casey, capped the day by telling a reporter: "Casey was on hostile ground, and he died like a soldier. If he could be alive today and appear as a witness, he would not desire the punishment of this poor savage." But it goes without saying that Baldwin's feelings were mixed. While talking with Nock and Powers after the trial, he broke down in tears.

  Plenty Horses, meanwhile, took a room at the Merchants Hotel and went for a drive around town with some friends. "I am awful glad," he told the Argus-Leader reporter. "I will go back to the agency and be a good Indian. I will ride my pony and be once more happy."27

  He did not forget the men to whom he owed his life. He had no money, but he had hospitality, and so he invited Powers and Nock to visit him at home, promising that he would provide them his father's ponies for a tour of the reservation and would fete them with dog soup, a Lakota delicacy.

  The next morning, Plenty Horses and his friends visited the local photo parlor, Butterfield & Ralston, to have their pictures taken. Leroy T. Butterfield also had taken photographs after the first trial, shot after shot: Plenty Horses alone; Plenty Horses with his Lakota friends; Plenty Horses with the defense attorneys, prosecuting attorneys, and Cheyenne witnesses, White Moon standing in back gazing with grave dignity into the camera. The photographs illustrated the split that had complicated Plenty Horses' life and contributed to the death of Lieutenant Casey: Plenty Horses is wearing the shirt and slacks of a white man, but he is wrapped in his ever-present blue blanket and sports a pair of moccasins. Butterfield subsequently sold copies of the photographs as souvenirs.

  After the trial, key participants gathered in a local photo studio for portraits. Left to right, front row: Tom Flood, Living Bear, Plenty Horses, Bear Lying Down. Second row: William S. Sterling, J. G. Ballance (bearded), Pete Richard, Broken Arm, Jack Red Cloud, He Dog, Philip Wells. Back row: William Rowland (white mustache), White Moon, Deputy U.S. Marshal F. C. Fry, Deputy U.S. Marshal Chris Mattheison, Rock Road, William Thompson, George P. Nock, David Edward Powers. (Courtesy of the Siouxland Heritage Museums, Sioux Falls, South Dakota)

  Although too poor to afford a train ticket home, Plenty Horses accepted no white charity. But he did take payment from three or four young women who wanted his autographs as "valuable mementos." In this practice he was following in the tradition of Sitting Bull, who had sold autographs while being taken to Fort Randall shortly after his surrender, charging men three to five dollars. Unlike Plenty Horses, however, Sitting Bull did not charge women, although he sometimes traded autographs for a kiss.

  Soon, Plenty Horses and the other Lakota boarded a train for the reservation. Among his friends was Broken Arm, who had been there at the beginning, when Casey was shot, and now at the end, when Plenty Horses was free.

  FOR U.S. ATTORNEY WILLIAM STERLING, when one case closed, another opened. In Sturgis, South Dakota, the Culbertsons were about to face their trial, and getting a conviction in their case would be even more difficult now that Plenty Horses had been acquitted.

  The Culbertson trial began on June 22 in Sioux Falls, with Sterling assisting state's attorney Alex McCall, whose commitment to prosecuting the case was weak—he did not even want to try the men.

  Unfortunately, no known trial transcripts survive, and newspapers did not cover the Few Tails case as thoroughly as they had Plenty Horses'. In any event, the trial was perfunctory, to the point, anticlimactic, and heartless in ignoring the grief and anguish, physical and otherwise, of the victims. The editor of the Sturgis Weekly Record summed up what was almost certainly the prevailing attitude about the Culbertson trial in regard to the Plenty Horses case: "Now, what sort of a newspaper must it be that would advocate or countenance the conviction of any white man for shooting an Indian in the same time that this other condoned crime was committed. No! The RECORD editor has lived 'out west' too long. You can't make fish of one and flesh of another. It don't 'size up right' with these crude ideas of justice that seem to sprout from the ground."28

  Four men were being tried, as charges against James Juelfs, a wealthy rancher, had been dropped. The trial opened with Clown's testimony. The Bismarck Daily Tribune reported that she identified Andrew Culbertson as one of the gunmen but could not identify the others. The Daily Tribune also expressed the widely held belief "that it will be impossible to convict since the acquittal of Plenty Horses at Sioux Falls."29

  The defense attorneys called Clown back to the witness stand on Saturday, June 27, in an unsuccessful attempt to break down her testimony. The sergeant who had visited the Few Tails camp the night before the shooting also was called, and he testified that the six Indians traveling by wagon were the only Indians in the area.30

  On June 30, the defense attorneys—one Judge Polk, along with T. E. Harvey and Colonel W H. Parker—opened their case. As in the Plenty Horses trial, the defense team did not deny that their clients had launched the attack but rather insisted that the fight was a matter of self-protection.

  Sterling should have been heartened when three of the defendants took the stand one after another and told similar stories so ludicrous that no one could possibly believe them. The gist of the stories was that the ranchers had found a band of 120 to 150 Lakota attempting to rustle about thirty of the Culbertsons' horses. The cowboys hastily armed themselves with guns furnished by the state (presumably guns issued as part of a plan to arm citizens during the ghost dance scare), and went in pursuit. When they were within a hundred yards of the Indians, the ranchers demanded the horses and were answered with gunfire. "A lively skirmish followed, Indians, horses and whites scattering in every direction," reported the Argus-Leader with what sounds like a hint of sarcasm. The same article also mentioned that during the trial on July 1, "facts were disclosed . . . that two of the Culbertsons were indicted in Bon Homme county in 1882 for horse stealing but acquitted through a technicality."31

  In m
arked contrast, Sterling brought to the witness stand the sergeant from the Quinn ranch army outpost who had investigated the ambush site. He testified that the cowboys had come to his camp to report that they had been attacked by the Indians. Two army privates had gone with the cowboys and helped them shoot at One Feather and his family. The sergeant outlined how he arrived at the scene later, studied the tracks at the site of the ambush, and concluded that the cowboys had attacked the Indians while hidden.

  Despite the strong evidence for the prosecution and the sheer stupidity of the cowboys' testimony, the Argus-Leader ominously reminded readers: "It is a popular belief that it will be impossible to get a jury in this part of South Dakota to convict these men owing to the general bad feeling that exists over the acquittal of Plenty Horses. The prosecution, however, claims to have a chain of evidence that will prove conclusively that the men are guilty of the charge in the indictment."32

  The attorneys made their closing remarks. Parker spoke for the defense in what the local newspaper reporter called "a masterly effort in every particular."33 The jury adjourned for two hours and took three ballots. In the first two, only one juror opposed a verdict of not guilty. On the third round, that juror gave up, and the four alleged gunmen were sent home.

  The editor of the Sturgis Weekly Record did not let the trial close without comment: "Thus ends one of the greatest farces that Meade county [sic] has ever experienced. Probably not one man in a thousand has thought for a moment that these men should even have been arrested—much less placed on trial. But the outside pressure has been such that nothing would do but to haul them up, keep them in jail for months, and finally bring them before a court of justice—for what? Simply killing an Indian, that, with others, was engaged in horse stealing."34

  DESPITE THE OUTCOME OF THE Culbertson trial, the acquittal of Plenty Horses was in many senses a victory for Indians: One of their own had gone peacefully under arrest, had weathered the trial system, and had come out still standing. Perhaps the Indians might find fairness and justice in the hands of the whites after all. Perhaps the trial and the acquittal were signs that the United States wanted to expiate its sins, or at least avoid committing new ones. Or perhaps, after Wounded Knee, the government just did not want to kill another Indian.

  Or perhaps another, darker issue helped to drive the verdict. The day after Plenty Horses' acquittal, the Argus-Leader weighed in with its opinion, fully agreeing with Judge Shiras' decision while adding: "The defendant is a coward, and his act was treacherous and cruel. Plenty Horses in his heart is not a patriot but an assassin. The ARGUS-LEADER has no sympathy with those who try to put a halo about him and who affect to believe him a hero. But from a legal standpoint he was not guilty of murder, and the court's instruction to the jury was good law." Still, the editorial writer could not resist making a crucial point: "If the Sioux trouble was not a war, the Indians killed at Wounded Knee were simply murdered by our soldiers."35

  How close to the heart of the court's decision did Wounded Knee lie? Doubtless the U.S. Army and the War Department did not want to resurrect the ghost of Wounded Knee. The battle, the fight, the slaughter—whatever it was called—was widely perceived, particularly in the more populated East, as a national disgrace. That disgrace would have been compounded had Plenty Horses been found guilty of murder and perhaps even if he had been judged guilty of manslaughter. The court virtually had to find him innocent or open up a Pandora's box of questions about Wounded Knee that no one wanted answered or even asked. The Plenty Horses verdict made certain that Wounded Knee would never rise again, that the issue could be buried out on the remote South Dakota plains with the bodies of the battlefield dead. Miles himself, determined that Forsyth at least should be punished, tried for twenty-five more years to launch another investigation into the Wounded Knee catastrophe, but never succeeded.

  One other mystery remained at the close of the trial. Living Bear was still missing, and Marshal F. Curtis Fry learned that the deputy he had sent to bring in Plenty Horses' father had turned up in Sioux City, where he apparently had paused for a spontaneous holiday all his own. No one was certain whether he had even gone to the reservation to get the crucial witness. According to the conventional wisdom of the time, many at Pine Ridge—presumably military or agency personnel—were bitterly against Plenty Horses and had tried to keep his father from testifying.36 The Argus-Leader editorialized a bit in its report on the incident, opining that the deputy would "have to tell a pretty straight story, or he will be decapitated so quickly that he won't know what struck him. The deputy is said to have been heretofore a courageous and conscientious officer, and there is therefore the greater surprise at the turn affairs have taken."37 But no matter—the case was closed.

  Epilogue

  WITH THE PLENTY HORSES CASE finished, the government and the public seemed ready to forget Wounded Knee, and the trial gave them reason to do so. The verdict excused any atrocities perpetrated in December 1890 and January 1891 on Pine Ridge and other Lakota reservations, from the shooting of Sitting Bull to the slaughter at Wounded Knee. The shoot-out holds an infamous place in our history, but it is still recounted not as a massacre of unarmed Indians, including women and children, but as the last battle of the Indian wars. Several soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for their role in the one-sided fight.

  Today, a movement is afoot to rescind those medals, but that is only a small gesture. The people who perpetrated the massacre are beyond punishment, and the truth of what happened at Wounded Knee is beyond reach. All we have left are whispers and speculation. As time passes, the question of Wounded Knee grows faint, and we forget.

  But the Lakota remember, and they preserve that memory as a touchstone with their past. In recent years the Lakota have sponsored an annual trek that follows the path of Sitanka and his people as they moved to their meeting with fate and history. Riding horseback, the Lakota make the journey even in the coldest winters, when windchill indexes can fall past seventy degrees below zero.

  Called the "Big Foot Ride," after Sitanka, the yearly odyssey first occurred in 1987 after Birgil Kills Straight, a descendant of a Wounded Knee survivor, had a recurring dream urging him to initiate the ride as a way to heal the wounds of the 1890 massacre.1 Eighteen other riders joined him that first year. The commemoration has continued since, honoring the dead and offering lessons in leadership to today's young by reviving the memory of Sitanka. The ride extends for 350 miles and takes thirteen days, starting at Standing Rock Reservation on the anniversary of Sitting Bull's death and ending at Wounded Knee on December 28, the day before the anniversary of the massacre.

  After gathering in a circle for a prayer at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, the riders—who may exceed two hundred—move uphill to where army guns once stood and where the dead are now buried. Leaders lay out tobacco, sage, and food and offer a prayer for the women and children, elders and warriors, buried there. Reliving the tragedy each winter, they recall the suffering of their ancestors and find courage for the challenges that still await them today at Pine Ridge.

  The broken dream of the ghost dance lingers today at Pine Ridge in the form of deadly government neglect.2 At more than 2 million acres, Pine Ridge reservation is the second-largest Indian reservation in the United States, roughly the size of Connecticut. It is home to about forty thousand people, 35 percent of them under the age of sixteen. Median annual income is $2,600, with 85 to 95 percent unemployment. Infant mortality is 300 percent higher than the U.S. national average. Cervical cancer is 500 percent higher than the national average, and tuberculosis and diabetes 800 percent higher. Average life expectancy is forty-five years, the shortest for any community in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti.

  At least 60 percent of Pine Ridge homes need to be burned to the ground because of infestations by the potentially fatal black mold Stachybotrys. More than 33 percent of reservation homes lack basic water and sewage systems, and 39 percent have no electricity. Pine Ridge reservation
schools are in the bottom 10 percent of school funding provided through the U.S. Department of Education and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The school dropout rate is 70 percent. The teenage suicide rate is one and a half times that of the U.S. national average for teens.

  Alcoholism affects eight out of ten reservation families, and death from alcohol-related problems on the reservation is three times more likely than in the rest of the United States, even though the Oglala Lakota Nation has banned the sale and possession of alcohol on the reservation since the early 1970s.

  THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE PLENTY Horses trial have often been harsh for the Lakota. For the actual participants in the trial, fate delivered a more mixed result. The Carlisle school found the Plenty Horses verdict a sort of vindication. But the school did not survive long anyway. Richard Henry Pratt continued to run Carlisle until 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt, miffed with Pratt after a dispute about the Civil Service Commission, forced the old officer to retire, with the rank of brevet general. The commissioner of Indian Affairs asked Pratt to remain at Carlisle as director, which he did. However, Pratt later publicly criticized the Indian Bureau and was immediately fired. When he died in 1924, the school was a thing of the past, its buildings returned to active military service during World War I.

  Plenty Horses disappeared into obscurity, resurfacing only once, at a public appearance at the South Dakota exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. William Sterling was there, too, to deliver an address. David Powers told a reporter right after the trial that he did not think Plenty Horses would survive another two years—"It is my opinion that he has consumption"—but Plenty Horses outlived them all: Powers, Nock, Edgerton, Shiras, Sterling.3 He went back to the Rosebud reservation, married, and raised children. Relatives of his fought in World War I. He lived quietly, disappearing from the historic record until his death in 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was starting his first term as president, and Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany.