The Ponca Trail and Standing Bear's Walk North, 1879

In January of eighteen seventy-nine, a Ponca chief named Standing Bear left Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma and began walking north. He was carrying his son's bones. He was going home.

Two years earlier, in eighteen seventy-seven, the federal government had forcibly relocated approximately seven hundred thirty Ponca people from their homeland along the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska to Indian Territory. Within two years, roughly one-third had died of disease and hardship, including Standing Bear's son, a young man named Bear Shield, who made his father promise to bury him in the earth of their homeland.

Standing Bear kept the promise. He walked north with a small group through the winter. They reached the farm of General George Crook near Omaha in late March. Crook, to the surprise of later historians, arranged legal representation and then declined to enforce the removal order he was legally required to serve.

The trial that followed, Standing Bear v. Crook, was heard in the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska by Judge Elmer S. Dundy. On May twelfth, eighteen seventy-nine, Judge Dundy ruled that an Indigenous person was a person within the meaning of the law, entitled to the protection of the writ of habeas corpus. The government appealed. The ruling stood. Standing Bear walked out of the courthouse.

His son is buried in the Niobrara homeland he carried those bones to reach. Standing Bear himself lived out his life near the river and is buried there as well.