“As they drove they passed near a house, from which several other shots were fired at the flying mother, when her husband again rode up and kept off the whole party until the wagon could get ahead. Finally, as the ponies were tired out, this heroic man abandoned the wagon and put the two children on one of the spare ponies and his wounded wife and himself upon another and continued to retreat until the Whites gave up the pursuit. He finally reached the agency with the wife and children.”
To give readers an adequate conception of what has too frequently occurred in the West, I desire to state that while One Feather and his family escaped, wounded, the wife of the other Indian, Few Tails, was shot twice, and lay helpless on the ground all night. In the morning she found one of the ponies alive, and mounted it and reached a settler’s house fifteen miles away.
“Instead of meeting help and sympathy, however, she was driven off by the two men there with loaded rifles, and leaving her horse in her fright, she hurried away as well as she could with a bullet in her leg and another in her breast, passing by the trail of One Feather’s wagon with the tracks of his pursuers fresh behind it, until she came near a trader’s store about twenty miles farther south. Afraid to go near it on account of her last experience, the poor woman circled around it, and continued, wounded, cold, and starving as she was, to travel by night and hide by day until she reached the Bad Lands. The rest may be told in her own words:
“‘After that I traveled every night, resting daytime, until I got here at the beef corral. Then I was very tired, and was near the military camp, and early in the morning a soldier came out and he shouted something back, and in a few minutes fifty men were there, and they got a blanket and took me to a tent. I had no blanket and my feet were swelled, and I was about ready to die. After I got to the tent a doctor came in—a soldier doctor, because he had straps on his shoulders—and washed me and treated me well.”
“A few of the soldiers camped near the scene of the attack had joined in the pursuit at the beginning, on the representations of some of the murderers, but abandoned it as soon as they found their mistake. According to all the testimony, the killing was a wanton, unprovoked, and deliberate murder, yet the criminals were acquitted in the local courts. The apathy displayed by the authorities of Meade county, South Dakota, in which the murder was committed, called forth some vigorous protests. Colonel Shatter, in his statement of the case, concludes, referring to the recent killing of Lieutenant Casey: ‘So long as Indians are being arrested and held for killing armed men under conditions of war, it seems to me that the white murderers of a part of a band of peaceful Indians should not be permitted to escape punishment.’ The Indians took the same view of the case, and when General Miles demanded of Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses the surrender of the slayers of Casey and the herder Miller, the old chief indignantly replied: ‘No; I will not surrender them, but if you will bring the white men who killed Few Tails, I will bring the Indians who killed the white soldier and the herder; and right out here in front of your tipi I will have my young men shoot the Indians and you have your soldiers shoot the white men, and we will be done with the whole business.”
“In regard to the heroic conduct of One Feather, the officer then in charge of the agency says: ‘The determination and genuine courage, as well as the generalship he manifested in keeping at a distance the six men who were pursuing him, and the devotion he showed toward his family, risking his life against great odds, designate him as entitled to a place on the list of heroes’.”
“This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Oglala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre, Dec. 29, 1890.
“Col. Forsythe in command of V. S. Troops.
“Big Foot was a great Chief of the Sioux Indians. He often said ‘I will stand in peace till my last day comes.’ He did many good and brave deeds for the White man and the Redman.
“Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong, died here.
“The erection of this monument is largely due to the financial assistance of Joseph Horncloud, whose father was killed here.”
This was paid for, and put up by Indians—not white people.