P
The agent there orders his imprisonment, but Big
Snake, claiming he has committed no crime, refuses
to go to the jail. After he shows the troops sent to
capture him that he is unarmed, they beat him with
rifle butts and shoot him dead.
November to December
Standing Bear travels through the East on a
lecture tour.
Inspired by newspaper accounts sympathetic to his
tribe’s plight (see entry for APRIL 18, 1879), Ponca
leader Standing Bear tours several cities in the East,
delivering speeches about his people’s removal from
their homeland. To large audiences of non-Indians,
he tells his story through the two translators, Omaha
Indians Susette and Francis La Flesche. (Susette will
later gain renown as an Indian activist, while her
brother Francis will become one of the first Native
American ethnologists.) Despite a public outcry for
justice following Standing Bear’s incarceration and
tour, the Ponca in Indian Territory are forced to stay
on their reservation.
“For the past hundred years
the Indians have had none to
tell the story of their wrongs.
If a white man did an injury to
an Indian he had to suffer in
silence, or being exasperated
into revenge, the act of re-
venge has been spread abroad
through the newspapers of the
land as a causeless act, per-
petrated on the whites just
because the Indian delighted in
being savage.”
—Omaha activist Susette La
Flesche during her 1879
lecture tour1880Indian University is established in the
Cherokee Nation.
With a class of three, Indian University be-
gins educating students in Indian Territory.
Originally located in the town of Tahlequah in the
Cherokee Nation, the school is founded by the Amer-
ican Baptist Home Mission Society. The university
will quickly grow and move to a larger facility
in Muskogee, where it will be renamed Bacone
College.October 15 to 16Victorio’s Apaches are defeated at the
Battle of Tres Castillos.
Chased by American forces led by Colonel George
Buell, the renegade Apache led by Victorio (see
entry for SEPTEMBER 4, 1879) travel into Mex-
ico’s Chihuahua desert. There they are met by a
350-man militia of Mexicans and Tarahumara
Indians. In the brutal two-day Battle of Tres Castil-
los, 78 Apache, including Victorio, are killed, and
62 more are captured. (See also entry for OCTOBER
1881.)1881Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor
is published.
Inspired by the Standing Bear trial (see entry for
APRIL 18, 1879), journalist Helen Hunt Jackson
begins her career as an outspoken opponent of
American Indian policy. Her book A Century of
Dishonor chronicles the discrimination and injus-
tices endured by Indians over the previous hundred
years. Widely influential in intellectual circles, it
represents one of the most vehement attacks any
non-Indian has made upon the U.S. government
for its mistreatment of Indian people. (See also
entry for 1884.)