ROOM FOR THE INDIANS
by
Dr. Robert Haldane Jr.
Copyright 1999
Coincidence, Cosmic Plan, Serendipity - I find it the Creator's smile on my life! In 1992, I retired from the Pastorate of the Congregational Church of the Messiah in Los Angeles, California, and moved to my retirement home in Zephyrhills, Florida. I had been drawn across this fantastic country, with a twenty-two-year stop in Jackson, Michigan - from Maine to California. Always I was eager for relationship with Native Americans, nor did this omit our 50th state and my continuing love for Hawaii.
Also, in 1992, Joe Starita, an award-winning journalist and former N.Y. City bureau chief for The Miami Herald, moved back to his native Lincoln, NE. He, too, had long been interested in Native Americans. With the help of the Elders of Pine Ridge Reservation, he met with the Dull Knife family and spent the next two and a half years interviewing them. He examined more than a century's worth of family and historical material. The result was a book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, A Lakota Odyssey, which, after the Bible, is one of the most significant books in my life.
Both my sister, Betty, and I had treasured and carried the picture of Dewey Beard, Bets, and me taken at Cedar Pass in 1941. Betty has a friend, Debbie Butters, who is very involved in Native American affairs. She was given the name "Cedar Woman" by her Indian friends. Debbie got a first edition copy of the Dull Knife book and finding that it contained multiple references to Dewey Beard, she lent Betty her copy.
Betty took me to Borders Book Store in Portland when I went to visit her in the summer of 1996. She bought me an early Christmas present - Joe Starita's book! She was right when she told me I'd hardly be able to put it down until I had finished it. How I related to the Dull Knife family members! I felt I knew them through the pages of the book. Somehow a subliminal goal was forming to get to know them personally.
At the writing of The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, Guy Dull Knife, Sr. was the sole surviving W.W.I veteran in the Lakota Nation. The Starita interviews with him were in Room 103 of the Sierra Vista nursing home in Loveland, Colorado. Fascinating are the stories of family and friends who fought with Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Red Cloud in wars against the U.S. Army, and in wars with the U.S.Army against Germans, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and Iraqis. Five generations of Dull Knifes had "gone from Custer to Hussein, from the Sun Dance to Holy Communion, from buffalo meat to pizza, from writing history on animal hides to programming computers."4
However, the first attraction of the book was to get to know more about the man encountered when I was thirteen and who had left such an impression on me. Wasee Maza ( Iron Tail)5 was his name in Lakota. By that name, he qualified as a Minneconjou Sioux brave at age sixteen. That's when he first rode with a war party in 1874.
Wasee Maza, Iron Tail, 1898
The card of introduction that Beard had given my father in 1941 had to have been four or five years old! He was not 79 years old, but 83 or 84. He was born in 1857, and was still eighteen in June of 1876 when he rode in the battle of Little Big Horn. According to his granddaughter, Celane (Marie) Not Help Him, he was in his 99th year at the time of his death in November 1955.6
Dewey Beard and his second wife, Alice, lived for fifty some years in a dugout,7 a few hundred yards from the cabin that was the Guy Sr. and Rose Dull Knife homestead. Guy Dull Knife, Jr., a principal interviewee for the Starita book, was intrigued as a youth with this neighbor who showed up at powwows wearing a cavalry jacket and gunbelt. He used to listen to Beard's stories for hours! I understand his thrill at knowing someone who had been in the battle of which he had so often heard. He and his friends asked the old man many questions and Beard's love of children motivated long and patient sessions. I can imagine the wide-eyed boys listening to the descriptions of warrior games designed to select by ordeal those who could endure pain and hardship to earn membership in elite warrior societies! Starita reports that Dewey Beard preferred telling Guy, Jr. and his friends what his life had been like at their age.
The accounts of eighteen year old Beard riding into the battle of Little Big Horn, as related to Starita by Guy Dull Knife, Jr., sent me looking for other accounts. There are many ("Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews" [Ricker Collection], "The Last Days of the Sioux Nation" [Utley], and "Lakota Noon" [Michno], for example) which supplement the Guy, Jr. recollections. Most of the material provides a consistent story, though one would expect discrepancies, since both the interviews with Beard, long after the events, and the stories he told the boys at the Dull Knife homestead were subject to the same memory tricks as our own often are. Guy, Jr. was also remembering Beard's stories after some years.
Sitting Bull
I'm confident that my chosen hero, Dewey Beard, was eighteen when he crossed the Little Bighorn into the battle. Crazy Horse was in charge of the Oglala. Acting as chief for all the groups - Minneconjous, Santees, and Cheyennes - was the Hunkpapa Holy Man, Sitting Bull. He stood for freedom and the old way of life.
On June 25, 1876, both Standing Bear and Beard recalled that their uncle, Black Elk, (who later became a renowned Oglala holy man) warned them to collect their horses because he had a "funny feeling" that something might happen that day. So Beard went for his horse. From Black Butte on the river bluff he could see a long column of soldiers. He said that Sitting Bull's nephew, One Bull, rode out to meet them, raising his hand in the peace sign. But Beard said that all at once the soldiers spread out and began to fire. The fight was on.8
Black Elk and friend
Beard caught his favorite pony, "Little Yellow Horse," and raced back to his tipi to prepare for battle. He braided the pony's tail, daubed on some white paint and painted some hailstones on his forehead, grabbed his bow and arrows and was off! On the way, he joined four other Lakotas. One went down and Beard rode toward the ford where they heard shots. He could see dust swirls from the rain of bullets on hundreds of warriors, not far from the Minneconjou camp. According to Miller ("Echoes," p.38) "Beard raced up the hills, seeking to charge into the thickest of the fighting."
More than an hour had passed when a Lakota named Spotted Rabbit rode up and challenged them to try to capture the white leader alive. Having no idea what they might do with him if successful, Beard nevertheless joined the chase. After all, it was a daring plan requiring more courage and skill than simply killing him. The apparent leader came into sight. Beard charged him, right behind Spotted Rabbit. Just as they were coming to arm's length, Spotted Rabbit's horse was shot from under him. Little Yellow Horse shied away and at that moment Charging Hawk, a Minneconjou, fired from nearby and killed the buckskin-clad leader. I like to guess how history might have been changed if Dewey Beard had succeeded.
After the battle was over, Beard searched among the bodies. He found "Long Hair" (Custer) on the ground with his horse's reins still tied to his wrist. I believe this is the time when Dewey Beard took the trophies: the 7th Cavalry jacket and gunbelt that Guy, Jr. saw him wear at Powwows9 years later.
When Iron Hail (Beard) was thirty-three, he camped in Big Foot's village, at Wounded Knee Creek, with his wife and baby son, Wet Feet. Convinced that the buffalo would return and there would be a great revival of Lakota culture, Ghost Dance believers were apparently a threat from the point of view of many whites. Soldiers soon moved nearer the reservation. In December 1890, the Ghost Dancers had everyone on edge, believing that Sitting Bull was about to join the group here. The soldiers surrounded the camp and ordered the Indians to give up their weapons. A gun was fired - some speculate by Sitting Bull's deaf-mute stepson who wouldn't have known what the order was. Others guess it was by Black Coyote, a crazy man. In any case, chaos followed.
Beard headed for the ravine. People were falling everywhere. He rushed the soldiers, looking for a gun. In hand-to-hand combat he managed to dispatch a soldier and get his gun. But his Hail sign did not protect him and he was shot down. He managed to get to his feet and was the last Indian into the ravine. He had been struck by bullets in the arm, chest, and leg. (He carried a bullet in one lung for the rest of his life.)
When he reached the bottom of the ravine, he saw many dead children. The sight of those infants and children never left him. He was weak from loss of blood but he responded to the calls of his people to help them. His own mother called to him, "My son, pass by me; I am going to fall down now." A shot rang out that killed her. Iron Hail was disabled in his right arm, so he carried his Winchester on his left shoulder - right thumb in his teeth to diffuse the pain. He made his way toward his brother, White Lance, rumored to be dead. But he found his brother half-dead. He also found his brother, William Horn Cloud, sitting against the bank, shot in the breast, dying. There was a symbolic handshake while Iron Hail quoted their father. Hotchkiss or Gatling guns continuously fired at them from the banks. Beard quotes many cases of ministering to dying or fleeing persons - young women and children. His wife was nursing Wet Feet. Hiding in the rocks in the ravine, she was shot in the breast and killed. The child, aspirated blood and vomited. He was never well again. He died the next March.
The wounded Beard saw five Oglala Sioux on horseback. He called them, but though it was about sundown, they were afraid and ran away. But he kept calling, and finally came upon his brother, Joseph. Joseph got off his horse and the five Oglala joined him. They put Beard on the horse and got him to White Clay Creek. They took him to Holy Cross Episcopal Church, which was becoming a medical station.
I believe this massacre at Wounded Knee is one of the blackest marks on American history. Some of us were shocked and shamed by Mei Lai in Vietnam, but this was Native American people, women and children galore slaughtered by the U.S. Army! General Nelson Miles took command of the military. He made an effort in the direction of justice by prosecution of the responsible 7th Cavalry officers. Beard's testimony was vital to the War Department prosecution. In the process, Beard and Miles became friends. After the turn of the century, Beard was brought to Washington, D.C. where he met Admiral George Dewey. Dewey was recently returned from his Manila Bay victory. Beard was so impressed by the Admiral, he took his surname - a great tribute from one war hero to another! So it was that the Minneconjou, called Iron Hail, with the nickname Beard, became known as Dewey Beard.
Admiral George Dewey
Michno reports that while Dewey Beard was in D.C., he was asked to pose for sculptor James Earle Fraser, who made a bas-relief composite profile of Beard and an Oglala and a Piegan. This was used for the Indian side of the buffalo nickel issued in 1913. That image fared much better than the Sockalexis Wahoo image! However, official U.S. government policy and popular prejudice were appalling. According to Starita, "On March 14, 1891, a small item appeared in the Chadron Democrat. Datelined Chicago, it read: `Buffalo Bill has secured the consent of the government and will within a few days start for Europe with the hostile Sioux now held at Fort Sheridan. They are to be a part of his Wild West Show.'"10
On October 21, 1913, Dewey Beard received a commendation from the U.S. Government. The official document read in full:
"This is to certify that twenty-two years ago I gave Dewey Beard a certificate of good character and am much gratified to learn that he has maintained that character ever since. He is one of the survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which he was twice seriously wounded and lost his father, mother, two brothers, sister, wife and child killed. Nelson A. Miles, Lieutenant General U.S. Army."11
After Dewey Beard remarried, he and Alice were harmonious fixtures of the community for fifty years. In summer, they pitched a canvas tipi at Cedar Pass and posed for tourists in the Dakota Badlands. How I regret that Alice was not around when Betty and I were such tourists! The Beards' only son, Tommy, had tuberculosis and his health was a constant worry. Tommy being unable to support his wife and daughter, Dewey and Alice Beard took their granddaughter, Celane Marie, and raised her as their own. Guy Dull Knife, Jr. remembers playing with her - as much as any macho boy owns up to playing with a girl!
When Beard was ninety-seven, TB took his son. He mourned in the old Lakota way, cutting his hair and slashing his arms and legs. Guy, Jr. said he was sitting in a pool of blood, crying and wailing in grief and pain and no one could get through to him. "Finally, someone called an ambulance and they took him to the hospital. He lived through more than anyone I have ever known, but he did not live long after Tommy died."12
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