Standing Bear of the Poncas -- iii

 

"Warm County," the Poncas called it--Indian Territory, what would become Oklahoma—didn’t sit well with the Poncas. The place didn’t feel at all like home and offered no rest for the weary, just more despair. The people were weary and hungry when they arrived and stayed weary and hungry for months, unable to work.

The government promised wagons, then didn’t distribute them, afraid the Poncas would get aboard and go back home. The government provided plows, but no oxen; and the Poncas’ horses were skin and bones. The people were living in tents, distanced from each other by the agent, who thought keeping the people apart would discourage their plotting some dark-of-night escape. Salty water all around made them to vomit. A year after their arrival in "Warm Country," they’d lost faith in the government and abandoned hope altogether.

“I stayed till 158 of my people had died,” Standing Bear explained later. “Then I ran away with thirty of my people—men and women and children. Some of the children were orphans.”

Mid-afternoon, January 2, 1879, thirty Poncas and three wagons left Warm Country amid sub-zero temperatures that fell into even deeper cold every hour.

Just a few weeks before, Standing Bear had lost his first-born, Bear Shield, a young man, his third child to die since they’d been forced to leave their homes and their lands. In the throes of death, Bear Shield had begged his father to bury his remains back in the land of his grandfathers’, just off the banks of Running Water, the Niobrara River. “I promised him I would,” he told people thereafter. “I could not refuse the dying request of my boy.” A trunk in one of those wagons that pulled out of Warm Country that January afternoon held the fastidiously dressed body of his boy.

The agent stayed holed up in the January cold while those thirty Poncas began the long trip back home. Six days passed before he even recognized they were gone. Six days.

The landscape from eastern Oklahoma north through Kansas and Nebraska alters only when cottonwoods rise in the valleys of occasional rivers that crossed the Poncas’ path and offered the only sustained shelter from icy winds. What money they’d taken with them, and what commodities they’d packed along, were quickly exhausted, forcing them to beg to stay alive. Homesteaders, most of them as poor as Standing Bear’s people, only rarely didn’t or wouldn’t feed them and give them shelter.

On March 4, 62 days after they’d left Indian Territory, Susette LeFlesch and her Omaha friends were apprised that the Poncas had set up camp some distance west of the Omahas, where they were camped, regaining strength for the last push home.

The Omaha and the Poncas were relatives. Between them there was blood and a great storehouse of good will. Planting season was about to begin, so the Omaha, who couldn't help but recognize their cousins' condition, offered the Ponca some open land to grow crops just as they had farther north beside the Niobrara.

But thousands of miles away, Washington was not interested in tolerating the humiliation the rag-tag Poncas had inflicted on their authority by flouting the government's demands. This time, carrying out their original orders, bringing them back, once more, to Warm Country fell to Brigadier General George Crook, the government's premiere Indian fighter. Crook’s had done distinguished service in the Civil War, as well as in Indian wars throughout the west. At the time, General Crook’s residence was Fort Omaha, where you can still visit his house today.

Crook had always been his own man, sometimes going off for days all by himself while his troops were on mission he’d leading. But his military record read like none other.

As commanded by Washington, Gen. Crook and his troops traveled north and west from Fort Omaha to the Ponca encampment, west of the Omaha Reservation, and demanded Standing Bear’s people return, under arrest, with him.

They were worn down by their long, mid-winter pilgrimage. They told General Crook they'd rather die than return to Warm Country, but they followed his demands and returned to the fort at Omaha.

No one—not Standing Bear or any of his people, not their friends the Omahas, not any of the settlers who'd helped them, not even Brigadier General George Crook—no one would have or could have begun to guess what would happen next.

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Tomorrow: The Trial