Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  Powers, in the Plenty Horses trial and in others, proved himself a capable lawyer, valued enough locally that, in 1892, he was appointed city attorney for Sioux Falls.

  Pete Culberston—leader of the bushwhackers who killed Few Tails— reinvented himself, touring the country with his own Indian Pete's Wild West show from 1910 to 1920.

  He wasn't the only participant in Wounded Knee and its aftermath whose life became someone else's entertainment. Sitting Bull was dead less than a month before North Dakota senator Lyman Casey (not a relative of Lieutenant Casey) urged the Indian Bureau to move swiftly to acquire as many of the chief's personal effects as possible, including his cabin, which ended up on display at the Chicago World's Fair.

  When Cody's Wild West show opened at the World's Fair, the gray horse on which Sitting Bull was to have ridden to prison on December 15, 1890, led the procession, mounted by a man carrying the American flag.

  Short Bull and Kicking Bear, the leading ghost dance apostles among the Lakota, left the reservation to join Cody's Wild West show.

  Bull Head and the other policemen killed while arresting Sitting Bull were buried with honors. McLaughlin, who went on to become a top official in the Indian Bureau, spent years winning small compensatory pensions from the government for the police widows.

  Elaine Goodale married Dr. Charles Eastman. They separated in 1921 after thirty years of marriage. He had a heart attack on January 7, 1939—the forty-eighth anniversary of Casey's death—and died the next day, at the age of eighty. He was buried in Detroit. Elaine survived not only the last Indian war but also both world wars, dying in 1953, at age ninety, after decades of service for the Lakota. She was buried in New England.

  Wovoka led a quiet life as a ranch hand and medicine man until his death in 1932. His people, the Paiute, called him "Our Father" until the day he died.

  On March 20,1894, Miles recommended that Lieutenant Edward Casey receive posthumously the Medal of Honor for his role in capturing the horses of Lame Deer's village in the raid of 1877. The medal was never awarded.

  Just before he retired in 1903, Nelson Miles was promoted to commanding general of the U.S. Army, the last officer to achieve that exalted rank. He died in 1925 of a heart attack while rising from his chair at a circus as the band commenced playing "The Star-Spangled Banner."

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1 Sources for the spirit ride were local newspaper stories and an April 2003 interview with Birgil Kills Straight.

  2 For details on these various developments, see Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984).

  3 Myriad sources are available on the religious movement called the ghost dance and will be cited more specifically below. However, good general sources include Robert Utley's The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); the classic James Mooney work The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (1896; reprint, New York: Dover, 1973); and W. Fletcher Johnson's Life of Sitting Bull and History of the Indian War of 1890-'91 (published by Edgewood), an interesting little curiosity that was on sale by March 1891—it was a nineteenth-century quick-and-dirty book that sought to capitalize on sensational current events. Some of its facts are wrong, but it reveals prevailing attitudes about events on the Lakota reservations. Out of print, it can be found with relative ease at various used-book outlets. I purchased two copies from eBay.

  4 Sources on Wounded Knee abound. Highly readable books on the subject, used in putting together this chapter, include William Coleman's Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Robert Utley's The Last Days of the Sioux Nation New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); Tom Streissguth's Wounded Knee 1890: The End of the Plains Indian Wars (New York: Facts on File, 1998); Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civi-liiation (1916; reprinted, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press); Elaine Goodale Eastman's memoir, Sister to the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).

  5 Quoted in Julia McGillycuddy, Blood on the Moon: Valentine McGillycuddy and the Sioux (1940; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 272.

  6 Key sources on the shooting include the New York World and Sioux Falls Argus-Leader newspapers for April and May 1891. The shooting will be covered and cited later in this book in detail.

  CHAPTER 1. AN OFFICER'S LIFE

  1 During the battle of Seven Pines, in Virginia, Silas Casey's troops faltered, and he was subsequently vilified in the press for poor leadership. However, he was quickly exonerated, with the difficulties on the field blamed on the greenness of his troops and an overextended line of attack.

  2 Material on Thomas Lincoln Casey is found in many sources. Perhaps the best repository of information on him, and certainly on others in his family, is the archive of Historic New England, formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Boston, Massachusetts, which holds Casey family papers dating to the eighteenth century.

  3 As a baby, Edward seems to have gotten off on a good foot. His family was loving, supportive, and highly approving. Thomas Lincoln even took time off from his studies at West Point to write his parents, "It gives me great pleasure to hear that you are all well & that the young chap is progressing fully." (Historic New England, box 102 of Casey family material, letter dated April 11, 1851.) Edward's mother, Abby—a native Rhode Islander and the daughter of a U.S. congressional representative—was unabashedly proud of the family baby. While living in Athens, Georgia, in 1855—military spouses sometimes took a break from frontier life—she wrote to Silas that four-year-old Eddie went to Sunday school with his older siblings and that "he was the best scholar there, and Mrs. Knight gave him a stick of Candy." (Historic New England, box 29, folder 29.9.) He was just barely five when she wrote Silas on January 9, 1856, that she was teaching Eddie his letters and that he "seems quite ambitious to learn." The following October she wrote: "Eddie is quite improving in his studies—he goes regularly to school—and comes home every day to puzzle me with the spelling of a very hard word of three letters. I asked him what I should say to you—he 'says give Pa my love, and tell him I ache to see him' he was delighted with the pictures and arrows, he is growing tall—but—very thin." (Historic New England, box 29, folder 29.10, letter dated October 3, 1856.)

  4 The account of the Lame Deer incident described here is from George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyenne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955; reprint of 1915 edition published by Charles Scribner's Sons), pp. 387-97. Other accounts differ slightly, including on matters such as the identity of individual members of Lame Deer's band, but Grinnell drew his information from participants in the battle and seems more reliable.

  5 While at West Point he ran into some domestic problems that probably made him long for the calm of a good Indian fight. In 1882 his father died, and Edward was stuck serving as executor of the estate after Thomas Lincoln refused to do it. Edward and brother Silas attempted to sort out who was to inherit what. Negotiations were complicated by two factors discussed obliquely in family correspondence—the dark underside of the Casey family. (Historic New England, box 121, folder N.)

  Edward's mother, Abby, had died in the early 1860s, and his father a few years later had married a woman named Florida, who now wanted more cash than the senior Silas had left her. She threatened to go to the newspapers to tell the world how her war-hero husband had not left her enough money to live on. She was hoping that the publicity would net a bigger government pension. Thomas Lincoln entered the fray, telling her he would see what he could do about the pension. And then the mess got messier—the sons found out their father apparently had been on "intimate" terms with another woman, as they put it delicately in their correspondence. This nameless woman refused to give up bonds Silas had given her. Edward spent a large part of 1882 working out these problems.

  6 Presumably Casey was pleased with this assignment. He had written two years earlier to Thomas Lincoln that he liked the area: "My
company goes to [Fort Lewis] with four other companies under the Major. The post is very near Durango Col. where I was encamped during the winter of '79 & '80. It is the post above all others I would select & those I have heard from [there] are well pleased." (Historic New England, box 70, folder Q, p. 30, a letter dated November 1882.)

  7 Maurice Frink and Casey E. Barthelmess, Photographer on an Army Mule (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), pp. 63-70.

  8 "My proposed route would be upon a right line drawn from the mouth of the La Plata River to the upper end of the Canyon, making such divergences as would enable me to visit one or two of the Moqui and Pueblo villages and also such detours as the nature of the country would of course render imperative." (Ibid., p. 56.)

  9 Barthelmess was a great fan of Lieutenant Casey and would name one of his sons after him. One of Barthelmess' grandsons runs the Range Rider Museum in Miles City, Montana, a treasure trove of photographs and other material about Casey and Fort Keogh. Another Barthelmess grandson lives in California and controls the photo collection that his musician-grandfather put together. His name is Casey.

  10 Casey sought to preserve his expedition in a report he filed on his return to Fort Lewis, including maps, thirty-five photographs shot by Christian Barthelmess, the earnestly collected barometric records, and Casey's field notes. Sent eventually to the National Archives, the report and all the rest are missing now, lost decades ago. All that is left is a fourteen-page letter that the post commander, Colonel Peter Swaine, ordered Casey to write in detail—in detail, Swaine emphasized—explaining how the lieutenant had managed to lose two men, four pack mules, and a wagon in the course of the trip. See Frink and Barthelmess, Photographer on an Army Mule.

  11 She was either a widow or a divorcee—surviving records do not indicate which.

  12 Casey's debts are discussed in a letter from Lieutenant W. H. Kell to Thomas Lincoln Casey, January 22, 1891, archive of Historic New England, box 83. Letters from Mrs. N. W. Mason to Thomas Lincoln Casey after Edward's death, and a letter from brother Silas Casey—all in the archive at Historic New England—discuss Edward's relationship with Nettie Atchison and his depression over his situation, which his nephew Silas (Thomas' son) suggested in a January 8, 1891, letter to his mother, might have made Edward reckless enough to ride into the White Clay Creek camp virtually alone. "He seems to have exposed himself unnecessarily and—it is my firm conviction—purposely. There has been a great gap in his life, something which he has never told us fully but which has been evident to me. In other words life has not been worth living to him since a certain 'affair.' " Historic New England, box 97, folder 189.

  13 This description of life at Fort Keogh in the 1880s is drawn largely from Josef James Warhank, "Fort Keogh: Cutting Edge of a Culture," master's thesis, Department of History, California State University, Long Beach, 1983. This document is available online. Just run a search for "Fort Keogh."

  14 The list of Casey's personal effects is taken from the complete list, compiled after his death, in Historic New England, box 83, January 1-15, 1891. Two houses of the sort in which Casey lived still survive. One is falling into ruin. The other is restored and open to the public at the Range Riders Museum in Miles City, Montana.

  15 Details on Fort Keogh are from Warhank's 1983 master's thesis. Details about Casey's travels come from West Point sources and from Frink and Barthelmess, Photographer on an Army Mule.

  16 Letter from Lieutenant W H. Kell to Thomas Lincoln Casey, January 22, 1891, archive of Historic New England, box 83.

  17 National Archives, record group 393, box 12.

  18 Robert Lee, "Warriors in the Ranks: American Indian Units in the Regular Army, 1891-1897," South Dakota History 121 (1991): 262-302.

  19 Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 191.

  20 Text on the origins of Casey's involvement with Cheyenne troops comes from Frink and Barthelmess, Photographer on an Army Mule, p. 104, as well as other parts of that excellent source. Box 121 of the Casey family papers at Historic New England includes letters from Lieutenant Casey to his brother Thomas, written in late spring, in which he outlines his activities in creating the Cheyenne unit.

  Officers selected to command Indian scouts, the secretary of War would declare in 1866, must be of high character, believe in the potential for civilizing the Indians, and be patient and faithful men "imbued with the missionary spirit." Casey was quite likely such a man. His West Point obituary reported: "His classmates will tell you his popularity in army circles began with his cadet days, and that his manliness, gentleness and generosity were proverbial. His sense of humor was keen, and he was fond of jest, but never to hurt a friend." It continued with praise tainted to modern ears with a measure of Victorian prejudice: "His selection for [commanding scouts] was most appropriate, for his good will toward the Indians had been manifested in many ways, and he possessed, in a peculiar degree, the faculty of controlling them. Those under his command loved him and were rapidly moulded into the best of light cavalry, and, in what is more remarkable, into civilized men." His death was reportedly lamented among the Cheyenne as if he were one of their own.

  In addition to the correct character, Casey had experience with Indians. He had led a mixed group of civilian and Cheyenne scouts while serving with Miles in the late 1870s, and he had been the first officer to drill Crow scouts at Fort Keogh. However, the Crow had proved undisciplined—in the sense that they once opened fire on and killed a Lakota delegation approaching Fort Keogh for peace talks—which was why Swaine decided to turn to the northern Cheyenne. In the Crow's defense, it must be said that scouts brought into service in earlier years were neither trained by the military nor subject to military discipline. That changed at Fort Keogh. Casey signed up his Cheyenne scouts as regulars in the army and trained them in fighting and drill.

  21 Richard Upton, ed., The Indian Soldier at Fort Custer, Montana, 1890-1898 (El Segundo, CA: Upton and Sons, 1983), pp. 37-38.

  22 Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers, is an excellent source of information on Indian scouts and the military, and much of what follows on that general subject in this book is drawn from Dunlay.

  23 Frink and Barthelmess, Photographer on an Army Mule, pp. 99-100.

  24 See Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers, for several discussions of this subject.

  25 Ibid., pp. 10-13.

  26 National Archives, record group 393, part 5, entry 28, vol. 2, Fort Keogh, Montana.

  27 This letter, dated May 28, 1890, is from box 121 of the Casey family papers at the archive of Historic New England.

  28 Historic New England. See note 2 for this chapter.

  29 Frederic Remington, The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels, ed. (n.p.: Castle, 1986), p. 64.

  30 This letter, dated May 28, 1890, is from box 121 of the Casey family papers at the archive of Historic New England.

  31 This letter is from ibid.

  32 This letter, dated July 18, 1890, is from ibid.

  33 This letter, dated June 8, 1890, is from ibid.

  34 Remington also gave a nod to the skills the Indians brought to the military: "An Indian is the best possible light irregular cavalryman, and his methods cannot be improved by introducing ours, and he can learn little indeed from a white trooper." See Remington, Collected Writings, pp. 65-66.

  35 Robert Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 186.

  36 Letter dated December 12,1891, from box 121, Archive of Historic New England.

  37 See note 12 for this chapter re the letter from Kell. Kell put the date as December 14 and pointed out that reports citing other dates were wrong. These wrong dates crop up in print even today.

  38 Letter to Mrs. N. W. Mason from Mrs. Nettie Atchison, dated January 15,1891, in which Mrs. Atchison quotes a letter from Lieutenant Casey dated December 21, 1890. From box 83 of the Casey family
papers at the archive of Historic New England.

  CHAPTER 2. CONFLICT ON THE PLAINS

  1 Royal B. Hassrick, The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 350.

  2 Stanley Vestal, Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984; reprint of 1934 edition published by Houghton Mifflin), p. 268.

  3 Robert W Larson, Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), p. 6.

  4 Ibid., pp. 6-7.

  5 You can find any number of sources on Lakota history. This thumbnail sketch of that history is put together from Larson, Red Cloud', Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota, 3rd ed., revised (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975); and George Hyde, Spotted Tail's Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961).

  6 Larson, Red Cloud, p. 10.

  7 Ibid., p. 3.

  8 Ibid., p. 13.

  9 By the late eighteenth century the Lakota were on their way to becoming the mounted, formidable warriors who would resist white encroachment on the northern plains in the 1800s. Nevertheless, when they finally reached the Missouri River, they met a people who, unlike the Omaha and Iowa, would not be moved: the Arikara (Larson, Red Cloud, pp. 15-18). In addition to hunting, the Arikara grew crops of corn, squash, sunflowers, pumpkins, and beans and traded their crops for Kiowa horses. Their villages of earth lodges were protected by earthen fortifications. Unable to shove the Arikara aside, the Lakota nevertheless found them useful, sometimes trading with them for corn or other agricultural goods that the Sioux thought it unmanly to grow.