• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 458 0

helped Standing Bear get away from the soldiers was the assistant editor of the Omaha Herald, Thomas Tibbles. In a book published a year later, Tibbles (masked behind a pseudonym, Zylyff) recalled, “On the 29th of March, 1879, at about eleven o’clock at night … the city editor came in and informed [me] that he had just returned from Fort Omaha … where there was a band of Ponca Indians under arrest for running away from the Indian Territory.” It was not, however, the city editor who came into Tibbles’s office. Tibbles attributed the tip to the city editor to protect his source. It was General George Crook, the commanding officer of Fort Omaha, who came to his office that night.4

General George Crook (1828-1890) (photo credit 38.2)

Tibbles knew a good story when he saw one, and at Fort Omaha he saw one. He wrote it up for the Omaha Herald, then telegraphed it to papers nationwide:

Gen. Crook held a formal council with the Ponca Indians this morning … Standing Bear, hitherto in citizen’s clothes, in full Indian costume [said] … “Before I went to the [Indian] Territory, I had a good house and a barn.… I had cattle and hogs and all kinds of stock, and somebody came and took all my things away.… If a white man had land and someone should swindle him, that man would try to get it back, and you would not blame him. Look on me! … I need help.” …

Gen. Crook, turning to Standing Bear, said, “It is a very hard case, but I can do nothing myself. I have received an order from Washington and I must obey it.”

To describe Tibbles as a journalist is to give his résumé short shrift. As a teenager in Kansas, he had joined the ranks of abolitionist John Brown in the bloody confrontations in which Brown (who later attacked the U.S. Army arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia) was then engaged. After serving in the Civil War—possibly as a Union spy—Tibbles became an itinerant preacher, then a journalist, and eventually an impresario. After seeing his story picked up in Chicago, St. Louis, and three New York newspapers, he knew it would behoove him to keep it going. But how?

Tibbles reasoned that if he were being held by the government, his reaction would be to get a lawyer. He therefore took the case to a lawyer. His keen instincts led him to John L. Webster, a boyhood friend who, much like himself, had substantial ambitions. (Webster later became active in Nebraska politics, unsuccessfully seeking a U.S. Senate seat and the Republican nomination for vice president.) Where Tibbles saw a potentially big news story, Webster saw a potentially big legal issue—so big that, to help assure it got attention, he sought a cocounsel, former Omaha mayor Andrew J. Poppleton. The legal bombshell they spotted was a writ of habeas corpus, a procedure to have a person in custody brought before a judge. It takes place every day in courtrooms across America. But it had never before been applied for an American Indian.

Because Standing Bear was in the custody of General Crook, the petition was presented in court as Standing Bear v. Crook. General Crook, the nominal defendant, did not testify in the proceedings for reasons that, in his memoirs, become crystal clear. “[I] stated bluntly that [my] interest in the case was official, that personally [I] sided with the Poncas,” he wrote, adding, “The Poncas were … simply another case of injustice to the Indians, a subject with which [I] was becoming increasingly familiar.”

As Tibbles had hoped, the court case quickly commanded the attention of the nation’s press. “At Omaha yesterday, Judge Dundy of the United States Court granted a writ of habeas corpus commanding General Crook to show cause why he has in custody Standing Bear and other Ponca Indians who fled from the Indian Territory,” the New York World reported in August 1879. “The United States District Attorney has been directed to … endeavor to have the writ dismissed. He takes the ground that … the Indians stand as wards of the government, as minors are to their parents.”

The U.S. attorney’s legal argument matched the attitude of many Americans at that