Standing Bear's Walk

In the winter of eighteen seventy-eight, a Ponca chief named Standing Bear led a group of about thirty people north out of Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. They were walking home. The journey would cover roughly five hundred miles in bitter cold, across the frozen land they had been forced to leave just a year earlier.

The Ponca had lived along the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska for generations. In eighteen seventy-seven, the United States government removed them to Indian Territory in a confusion of treaty errors. Their land had been mistakenly assigned to the Sioux in an eighteen sixty-eight treaty, and rather than correct the paperwork, the government simply moved the Ponca. About a third of the tribe died in the first year in Indian Territory from disease and starvation. Standing Bear's son, Bear Shield, died there. Standing Bear had promised his son he would bury him in the Ponca homeland.

The group was arrested near Omaha in the spring of eighteen seventy-nine and held at Fort Omaha. A pair of Omaha newspaper reporters, Thomas Tibbles and his colleague, took up the story. Two attorneys filed a writ of habeas corpus on Standing Bear's behalf. The resulting case, Standing Bear versus Crook, heard before Judge Elmer Dundy in federal district court in Omaha, produced a ruling on May twelfth, eighteen seventy-nine.

Judge Dundy's decision was remarkable for its era. He ruled that an American Indian is a person within the meaning of the law, and that Standing Bear had the right to leave Indian Territory and could not be forcibly removed. It was the first federal ruling that recognized Native Americans as legal persons with rights before the court.

Standing Bear returned to the Niobrara. He is buried near Niobrara, Nebraska. The case he made, quietly, through interpreters, in a federal courtroom, changed American law.