Federal judge rules in favor of Standing Bear in 1879

Col. John H. King, commander of Fort Omaha in Nebraska, assessed the health of 30 Native Americans from the Ponca Tribe who had been arrested and brought into the fort on March 27, 1879.

They had been traveling with Chief Standing Bear for the purpose of burying the remains of the chief’s son back in their tribal homeplace in northeastern Nebraska. The boy had died in Indian Territory in Oklahoma, a victim of malaria.

These men were “guilty” of having left the reservation in Oklahoma without official government permission.

Col. King declared that the Ponca detainees were too ill to be sent back to Oklahoma immediately. He said they needed several weeks’ time to heal, recover and build up their strength before they could possibly attempt the 600-mile journey. The Ponca would remain captives inside the fort.

 

Headquarters building at Fort Omaha

The delay worked in favor of the Ponca, as Standing Bear’s situation came to the attention of Thomas Henry Tibbles, assistant editor of the Omaha Daily Herald. He was an ardent crusader who sympathized with the Native Americans.

 

Tibbles prepared a strategy to gain public support for Standing Bear and his people. Tibbles editorialized at great lengths about the mistreatment of the Ponca people. He convinced local clergymen to back him and spread the word from their pulpits as well as petition authorities in Washington, D.C.

“I had to devise a case and a method that could release these abused Poncas – one that could recast our nation’s whole Indian Policy,” Tibbles said later.

He persuaded two prominent Omaha lawyers to waive their fees and defend Standing Bear – John Lee Webster and Andrew Jackson Poppleton.

Webster and Poppleton

Along with Tibbles, they planned a court case based on the newly approved Fourteenth Amendment (adopted in 1868), one of the Reconstruction Amendments that addressed citizenship rights and equal protection under the law (in response to issues affecting freed slaves following the Civil War).

Standing Bear’s lawyers filed a federal court application for a writ of habeas corpus to test the legality of the detention and continued confinement of the Poncas. 

U.S. District Court Judge Elmer Scipio Dundy, “known to be sympathetic to the downtrodden,” issued the writ and ordered the opposing parties to appear in court in Omaha on April 30, 1879.

 

U.S. District Attorney Genio M. Lambertson of Lincoln, Neb., represented the federal government. He argued that “the Indian was neither a person nor a citizen within the meaning of the law…and Indians were not entitled to the rights and privileges of citizens.”

 

Webster and Poppleton contended that the Fourteenth Amendment did indeed apply, and Standing Bear and his people were entitled to equal protection under the law. Furthermore, they said “the U.S. government had no right to take the Poncas’ land or move them to Indian Territory.”

Judge Dundy allowed Standing Bear to address the court through an interpreter. Standing Bear rose, extending his hand toward the judge’s bench and spoke:

“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. God made us both.”

 

Ultimately, Judge Dundy agreed with Standing Bear and his attorneys, ruling on May 12, 1879, that “an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law” and that Standing Bear was being held illegally. The decision freed the Ponca from imprisonment and allowed Standing Bear to return to his homeland to bury his son.

News spread like wildfire.