Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  Newspaper editors and local politicians exploited the dance as an excuse to call in the military, kill off the Indians once and for all, and take the rest of their land. A prime example was written by the owner and editor of the Aberdeen, South Dakota, Saturday Pioneer, Lyman Baum, who in ten years would become famous as L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of 0{. His paper was one of seven weeklies published in Aberdeen, along with two dailies—not an unusual number of papers for one town in a time when the periodicals were needed for land-claim legal notices. Baum, who ardently supported women's suffrage and other liberal causes, wrote about Indians with the belligerent bombast typical of the frontier journalist. On January 3, 1891, he opined: "The PIONEER has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indian. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up with one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."43

  The Lakota did not need the wicked witch's crystal ball to know what was in the newspapers—Indian-school students kept even the illiterate abreast of the news. And so tension mounted on both sides.

  One of Kicking Bear's key acts was to go in October 1890 to Standing Rock Reservation and win over Sitting Bull and his followers. Kicking Bear told Sitting Bull's people: "My brothers, I bring you the promise of a day in which there will be no white man to lay his hand on the bridle of the Indian's horse, when the red men of the prairie will rule the world and not be turned from the hunting-grounds by any man. I bring you word from your fathers, the ghosts, that they are now marching to join you, led by the Messiah who came once to live on Earth with the white men, but was cast out and killed by them. I have seen the wonders of the spirit-land and have talked with the ghosts. I traveled far and am sent back with a message to tell you to make ready for the coming of the Messiah and return of the ghosts in the spring."44

  Kicking Bear, who brought the ghost dance to Sitting Bull and Big Foot. He was credited with originating the idea of bulletproof ghost shirts. (George E.Spencer, Minnesota Historical Society)

  The great promise of the ghost dance, Kicking Bear said, came straight from the Great Spirit, who had informed him:

  I have neglected the Indians for many moons, but I will make them my people now if they obey me in this message. The Earth is getting old, and I will make it new for my chosen people, the Indians, who are to inhabit it, and among them will be all those of their ancestors who have died, their fathers, mothers, brothers, cousins and wives—all those who hear my voice and my words through the tongues of my children. I will cover the Earth with new soil to a depth of five times the height of a man, and under this new soil will be buried the whites, and all the holes and the rotten places will be filled up. The new lands will be covered with sweet-grass and running water and trees, and herds of buffalo and ponies will stray over it, that my red children may eat and drink, hunt and rejoice. And the sea to the west I will fill up so that no ships may pass over it, and the other seas I will make impassable. . . . Go then, my children, and tell these things to all the people and make all ready for the coming of the ghosts.45

  Short Bull, a Brulé medicine man also admired as a warrior. He helped bring the ghost dance religion to the Lakota reservation. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, B567)

  Sitting Bull remained skeptical about the ghost dance, but his people adopted it, so as a leader he felt obliged to sponsor dances. At this time he was involved in a friendship—some said a relationship—with a white woman from Brooklyn, New York. Her name was Catherine Weldon, and she represented the National Indian Defense Association in opposing efforts to force the Lakota to become farmers and laborers. She had first visited Standing Rock in 1888, returned in 1889 to fight the Crook Commission, and returned again in 1890 intending to live on or near the reservation. She befriended Sitting Bull and moved in with him, teaching his wives household skills and helping Sitting Bull pay for status-giving feasts for his people.46

  Newspapers reported, and perhaps Standing Rock agent James McLaughlin believed, that Sitting Bull could not have supported the ghost dance without her money. In fact, she opposed Bull's participation in the dances, fearing it would get him killed.47She knew that McLaughlin—who blamed Sitting Bull for any management problems that arose among the Lakota—was looking for an excuse to arrest the aging holy man and that the dance was just what he needed. Such dances technically were illegal because the federal government had outlawed Lakota religious rituals in 1883. Sitting Bull contended that practicing the ghost dance was a matter of freedom of religion, which he knew whites considered a right. He also thought that if the religion were true, the people should dance. If it were false, the dancing would do no harm.

  However, McLaughlin did consider the dances dangerous, particularly to the peace and tranquillity of Standing Rock. He sent a contingent of thirteen Indian police to throw Kicking Bear off the reservation, but the police came back to report that they had not ejected the apostle, because they feared his powers.48McLaughlin sent in another contingent, who proved less intimidated and escorted Kicking Bear off Standing Rock.

  Weldon wrote to McLaughlin asking him to overlook the participation of Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa people in the ghost dance and blaming the whole thing on Kicking Bear, whom she called by his Lakota name: "Please have pity on the Uncpapas & Sitting Bull, who has been under the evil influence of Mato Wanah Taka. Have pity on him & do not send the police or Soldiers & I will induce him to come to you of his own accord. S. Bull will surely accompany me to the agency: but please do not detain him his brain has suffered; [sic] but his heart is good. He will be all right now that Mata [sic] Wanah Taka has gone. My heart is breaking when I see the work of years undone by that vile imposter. I will stay here of my own accord for several days & see what my influence can do."49

  Failing to steer Sitting Bull and his band away from the ghost dance, and fearing she would see him killed if she remained on the reservation, Weldon packed up and returned to New York in November 1890.50She wrote on November 20 to Sitting Bull, telling him: "You are deceived by your prophets, and I fear some bad white men who are leading you into endless trouble. [By "bad white men" she meant Mormons, who she was convinced were behind the ghost dance.] I said enough when I was among you, you ought to remember my words. If I spoke harsh to you sometimes, forgive me; a true friends [sic] warning is not always pleasant to hear. I meant it for the best."51

  Lakota allies also tried to dissuade Sitting Bull from holding the dances. Gray Eagle, who had been with Sitting Bull in Canada and was a brother of two of Bull's wives, told him: "Brother-in-law, we have settled on the reservation now and we are under the jurisdiction of the government, and we must do as they say. We must cut out the roaming around and live as they say, and must cut out this dancing."

  But Sitting Bull would have none of this advice. "Yes, you are right," he replied. "But I could not give up my race as it is seated in us. You go ahead and follow what the white man says, but for my part leave me alone."52After Weldon's departure, Sitting Bull continued to hold dances at his compound in the broad valley of the Grand River, flanked by gentle prairie hills.

  Meanwhile, from beyond the reservation, settlers listened to rumors about the ghost dance and managed to frighten themselves, corroborating one another's manufactured fears and becoming pawns in the game of national expansion. James Mooney, an anthropologist who investigated the ghost dance movement and its effects for the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1890s, reported: "In view of the fact that only one noncombatant was killed and no depredations committed off the reservation" during the entire ghost dance scare, "the panic among the frontier settlers of both Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa was something ludicrous. The inhabitants worked themselves into such a high panic that ranches and even whole villages were temporarily abandoned and the people flocked into the railroad cities with vivid stories of murder, scalping, and deso
lation that had no foundation whatever in fact."53

  The fright was compounded when a new agent, Daniel Royer, arrived at the largest of the Lakota reservations, Pine Ridge. A pharmacist and leading Republican citizen in Alpena, South Dakota, Royer knew nothing about administering a reservation or managing Indians. He was picked for the job by the newly minted senator Richard Pettigrew as payback for helping elect Pettigrew when Dakota Territory became two states in 1889. Royer lacked the personality for the job, but he had one quality that Pettigrew appreciated: He followed orders. While the Senate considered Royer's appointment, he received a letter from Pettigrew outlining in part the senator's plans for the reservation: "If you secure the appointment I shall want to clean out the whole force of farmers, teachers, and clerks as far as possible and put in Dakota men. You can not make an appointment until you consult Moody [Gideon C. Moody, the other South Dakota senator] and I about it."

  Royer may have been up to the task of bringing in Pettigrew allies, but he was not up to the challenge of the ghost dance. He feared the Lakota, and they soon knew it, mockingly calling him Young Man Afraid of His Indians. Frightened by the dancing, he repeatedly demanded that the Indian Bureau request troops for the reservation.

  Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux who was the Pine Ridge medical doctor; Elaine Goodale, the superintendent of reservation schools and soon to be Eastman's wife; and American Horse and other progressive Indians tried to keep Royer steadfast by telling him that if he ignored the dance, the messiah movement would die out in spring, when the whites did not disappear. But Royer cracked on November, 1890, when an Oglala ghost dancer named Little fought back with a knife against a squad of Indian police who attempted to arrest him for cattle theft. The fight took place in front of Royer's office. While Royer watched from his door, a mob of two hundred Lakota armed with guns and knives surrounded and captured the police. One Lakota held a stone war club over a policeman's head.

  "At this critical moment, a fine looking Indian in citizen's clothing faced the excited throng, and spoke in a clear, steady, almost sarcastic voice," wrote Charles Eastman, who witnessed this event as he would witness so many crises during the winter of 1890—91.54This man, American Horse, apparently had stepped from Royer's office at the start of the confrontation. "Stop! Think!" he said. "What are you going to do? Kill these men of our own race? Then what? Kill all these helpless white men, women and children? And what then? What will these brave words, brave deeds lead to in the end? How long can you hold out? Your country is surrounded with a network of railroads. Thousands of white soldiers will be here within three days. What ammunition have you? What provisions? What will become of your families? Think, think, my brothers. This is a child's madness."

  Jack Red Cloud, son of the chief and a traditionalist who was hostile toward progressive Indians, put the muzzle of a cocked revolver up to American Horse's face. "It is you and your kind who have brought us to this pass," Red Cloud said.

  American Horse did not flinch, Eastman reported in his autobiography: "Ignoring his rash accuser, he quietly reentered the office; the door closed behind him; the mob dispersed, and for the moment the danger seemed over."

  Eastman believed it likely that American Horse had saved everyone at the scene from death, "for the murder of the police . . . would surely have been followed by a general massacre." But in the end Little escaped, a free man. Royer panicked and began peppering the Indian Bureau with demands for troops, of which he said "nothing short of 1,000" could rescue him from "the mercy of the Ghost Dancers."55In mid-November Royer fled with his family in a carriage across the twenty-eight miles to Rushville, Nebraska, refusing to return to the reservation unless a military escort went with him.

  In January 1891 at Pine Ridge, American Horse (left), a leading progressive, shakes hands with Red Cloud, a famous war chief who turned to conciliating the Americans. (Library of Congress)

  And that was exactly how he did return, at dawn on November 20, with 170 cavalry troops, 200 infantry, and a Hotchkiss cannon and Gatling gun.56The horsemen were from the Ninth Cavalry, an African-American unit that the Lakota dubbed buffalo soldiers because of their hair. At the same hour, no buffalo soldiers and 120 infantry arrived at Rosebud, the Brulé reservation, the first time the Lakota had seen army troops lined up against them since the wars of the 1870s. And so the ghost dancers, who had expected buffalo to come, instead got buffalo soldiers, whose arrival frightened not only the dancers but also Lakota who were ignoring the new religion. Chaos ensued. At Kicking Bear and Short Bull's direction, many dancers retreated to the Stronghold, a triangular plateau a few hundred feet high, about three miles long, and two miles wide in the Badlands, north of Pine Ridge. There they could hold out for months, living on wild game and on livestock that they had driven up there. Access to the Stronghold was by a single trail only the width of a wagon, so the area was easily guarded. Here, followers of Kicking Bear decided to fight it out, if necessary, in a last stand to match Custer's.

  CHAPTER 5

  Death Comes for Sitting Bull

  WHEN THE TROOPS RODE INTO Rosebud on November 20,1890, about one thousand Brulé rode out, driven by fear. Within ten days, they had joined with other fleeing Lakota, forming a group that included some six hundred warriors, all headed for the Stronghold.1Along the way, they raided Indian homes and took cattle from Indian farms.

  Once ensconced in the highland, the Lakota settled in to dance all winter and to fight to the bloody end if the army showed up.2Brigadier General John Brooke, commander of the Department of the Platte and the officer in charge of the troops at Pine Ridge and Rosebud, was under orders from General Nelson Miles to get the Indians at the Stronghold to surrender. Brooke knew that if the military approached the plateau, a bloody battle would ensue, so he sent in a one-man peace commission: Father John Jutz, a seventy-year-old Catholic missionary who had come to Pine Ridge two years earlier and had earned the Lakota's respect.

  At the Stronghold, Jutz parlayed with several chiefs, including ghost dance apostles Short Bull and Kicking Bear. Among the chiefs was Two Strike—Nomkahpa in Lakota, a name that commemorated a battle in which he had, with a single swing of his war club, knocked down two enemies riding the same horse. For two decades he had been a hard-core opponent of U.S. encroachment on Lakota territory, leading raids against the Union Pacific railroad and fighting the army. He headed the Brulé band to which Plenty Horses' family belonged, so the young man probably was at the Stronghold.

  By 1890 Two Strike was in his early seventies. Military and agency officials claimed he had become a bit erratic in his behavior, perhaps senile. When the military had first arrived at Pine Ridge, he had boasted that he personally would stab General Brooke. Among the Lakota he had attracted a considerable following and spoke with authority. During an entire night of discussion with Jutz, Two Strike was one of several chiefs who agreed to ride into Pine Ridge to talk with Brooke. They set out the next morning. Fearing that Brooke was using the meeting as a ruse to capture them, the chiefs rode with an escort of twenty-four warriors. They spoke with Brooke, ate with him, talked over the situation, and returned to the Stronghold without making any promises.

  Miles castigated Brooke for failing to work out an immediate surrender. Under pressure, Brooke dispatched to the Stronghold thirty-two friendly Lakota with a half-breed scout, Louis Shangreau, whom the Lakota knew well. Initially, the Stronghold leaders opposed any compromise. Short Bull, the first day, gave Shangreau a message for Brooke: "If the Great Father would permit us to continue the dance, would give us more rations, and quit taking away portions of the reservation, I would be in favor of returning. But even if you say that he will, how can we discern whether you are telling the truth? We have been lied to so many times that we will not believe any words that your agent sends us. If we return he will take away our guns and ponies, put some of us in jail for stealing cattle and plundering houses. We prefer to stay here and die, if necessary, to loss of liberty. We are free now and have plenty of
beef, can dance all the time in obedience to the command of Great Wakan Tanka. We tell you to return to your agent and say to him that the Dakotas in the Badlands are not going to come in."3

  The Brulé chief Two Strike (left) and Brulé leader Crow Dog surrender to the U.S. military in January 1891. (Library of Congress)

  Shangreau stayed two more days while the ghost dance went on without end. On the third day, when the chiefs sat down at about noon to talk over the situation again, Two Strike abruptly took the floor and shocked everyone by announcing his intention to take his people to the agency and surrender. Crow Dog, a Brulé chief in his late fifties who had once served as head of the agency police at the Rosebud Reservation, stood and agreed to do the same.4

  Short Bull jumped up and urged everyone to stick together and remain true to their cause. He condemned Shangreau as a traitor and a liar and called upon the warriors to kill him.

  As Short Bull's followers brandished their rifles like clubs, warriors who had arrived with Shangreau formed a shield around him, and Two Strike's men jumped in to help. The fight drew in more and more warriors.

  Crow Dog responded with a masterly diplomatic move. While the Lakota clashed around him, he pulled his blanket up over his head and sat motionless and silent. His silence spoke loudly, however, and the combatants stopped fighting and turned their attention to him. After bemoaning that the Lakota were spilling one another's blood, Crow Dog declared that he would go to Pine Ridge and give up. "You can kill me if you want to, now, and prevent my starting," he said. "The agent's words are true, and it is better to return than to stay here. I am not afraid to die."