From Wounded Knee to the gallows : the life and trials of Lakota chief Two Sticks

291 Pages·2020·12.363 MB·English

by  Philip S. Hall, Mary Solon Lewis

FROM WOUNDED KNEE
TO THE GALLOWS

F R O M W O U N D E D
K N E E T O T H E
G A L L O W S
THE LIFE AND TRIALS OF LAKOTA CHIEF
T W O S T I C K S
PHILIP S. HALL
MARY SOLON LEWIS
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS : NORMAN
Publication of this book is made possible through the generosity of Edith
Kinney Gaylord.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Hall, Philip S., 1943– author. | Lewis, Mary Solon, 1936– author.
Title: From Wounded Knee to the gallows : the life and trials of Lakota chief Two Sticks /
Philip S. Hall and Mary Solon Lewis.
Description: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “The story of the Lakota chief Can Nopa Uhah,
Two Sticks, who was wrongfully accused of murdering four white cowboys and hung
in 1894. Uses government records, newspaper accounts, and unpublished manuscripts
to give a clear and candid account of the Oglala’s struggles in the events leading up to
and in the wake of Wounded Knee”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019058088 | ISBN 978-0-8061-6491-5 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Two Sticks, 1832?–1894. | Lakota Indians—Biography. | Oglala Indians—
Social conditions—19th century. | LCGFT: Biographies.
Classification: LCC E99.T34 H35 2020 | DDC 978.004/9752440092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058088
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. ∞
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the
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• •
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Staring at the Hangman’s Noose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. The Political Road to Wounded Knee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3. The Indian Unrest That Brought Can Nopa Uhah
to the Gallows. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4. The Killing of Ike Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5. The Peacemaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
6. A Good Indian Is Murdered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
7. The Indian Who Killed Lieutenant Casey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
8. Plenty Horses’s Second Trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
9. Frontier Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
10. For What, Simply Killing an Indian? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
11. Pine Ridge, 1891: A Time of Gloom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
vi Contents
12. Pine Ridge, 1892: A Year of Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
13. No Water and His Camp of Malcontents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
14. The Brown–Eastman Dispute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
15. Looking at the Brown–Eastman Dispute through
Others’ Eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
16. Can Nopa Uhah’s Crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
17. Catching the Culprits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
18. The Frontier Peers into the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . 185
19. The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
20. Two Sticks’s Trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
21. The Hanging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
• •
ILLUSTRATIONS
Richard F. Pettigrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Daniel Royer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Area of operation of Sixth Cavalry, December 1890 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Little, instigator of the 1890 Indian revolt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Young Man Afraid of His Horses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Tasunka Ota (Plenty Horses) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Participants in Plenty Horses’s second trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Map of Sioux Indian lands, showing the diminished reservations
and ceded lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Sioux delegation of 1891 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
No Water’s village . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Dr. Charles A. Eastman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Elaine Goodale Eastman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Father Florentine Digmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Two Sticks, Joe Bush, Cyrus Fry, and Chris Matthiessen . . . . . . . . . 182
vii
viii Illustrations
Indians held in the Lawrence County Jail in October 1894 . . . . . . . . 209
Drawing of White Clay Creek area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Drawing of the halfway camp dugout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
• •
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people aided us in this project, and we thank them profusely. In
particular, at Black Hills State University, Sarah Freng, research librarian,
always greeted our requests to order microfilm and to search out other possible
mother lodes of information with a smile; Scott Ahola, assistant director, was
never too busy to help; and the late Bobbi Sago, director of the Case Archives
and Special Collections, directed us to out- of- print rare books containing nug-
gets. Lori Terrill, the newly installed director of the Case Archives and Special
Collections, guided us to several useful pictures from the Collins Collection.
Hannah Marshall, archivist at Deadwood History, most graciously assisted us in
our search for information about Two Sticks’s attorney, William McLaughlin. She
also brought our attention to historic photos in the Deadwood History collection.
Then there is Mark Thiel, archivist and curator of special collections at Marquette
University, who, not incidentally, once lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation and
was the archivist at Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota.
At the South Dakota State Historical Society, Ken Stewart, research room
administrator, Matthew Reitzel, manuscript archivist, and Virginia Hanson,
government records archivist, always welcomed us to their domain, seem-
ingly unconcerned about reels of microfilm that would need refiling when
we departed.
Carol Hauck, librarian at Deadwood Public Library, was of considerable
assistance, as was Lori Cox- Paul, director of archival operations at the National
ix