WORTHINGTON -- Nelson Miles was a clerk in a Massachusetts crockery store.
I never knew there were crockery stores, but of course there would have been such. If you are going to have a crockery store you need a clerk: Nelson, the Miles' boy.
Anyway --
When he was 55 years old, by that time a general in the United States Army, Nelson Miles said it was, "a massacre." He was talking about the incident beside Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota four days after Christmas in 1890. Three hundred Sioux people -- men, women and children -- were shot dead by 500 U.S. soldiers from the 7th Cavalry. Twenty-five soldiers also died in the melee. Some of the soldiers shot one another during the tangle.
Later that day and on into the next day, there was a snowstorm which buried many of the bodies under drifts. The cold made them rigid.
ADVERTISEMENT
Wounded Knee Creek is on the Pine Ridge Agency, directly west from Worthington along I-90. There was one doctor at Pine Ridge at that time, Dr. Charles Eastman. He received his medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine only one month earlier.
In the third day after the massacre, Jan. 1, 1891, Dr. Eastman received notice of what had happened. He called for volunteers. One hundred men, white and Indian, set out for the fateful site beside the frozen creek.
Eastman remembered:
"The white men became very nervous, but I set to examining and uncovering every body to see if any were living. Although they had been lying untended in the snow and cold for two days and nights, a number had survived. Among them I found a baby about a year old warmly wrapped and entirely unhurt." The baby, a girl, was bundled tightly in a blanket, still gripped by her mother's frozen arms.
One more thing interesting about Dr. Eastman --
He was the first man, woman or child from newly settled southwest Minnesota to win national fame. Eastman was born at Lower Sioux Agency, near Morton, near Redwood Falls, in 1858, four years before the Sioux War. The name given him by Blue Earth, chief of his parents' Santee Sioux band, was Ohiyesa. The Winner.
When the war broke out, Ohiyesa's band fled to Manitoba, Canada. His father barely escaped being one of those hanged at Mankato. The father changed his name to Jacob Eastman and became a Christian. That was safer.
The first thing remarkable about the boy, Ohiyesa, now Charles Eastman, is that he emerged from this background, from a missionary school at Flandreau, S.D., and from a normal training school at Niobrara, Neb., to become a graduate of the Boston University School of Medicine and a physician. He might have been a doctor treating wealthy people in New York City. He chose to go to Pine Ridge, where no one had money.
ADVERTISEMENT
The next thing about Eastman -- he quit medicine and became a writer. Charles Eastman is the author of nearly a dozen books on American Indians. His stories fascinated America. Today book sellers label them "classics." "Indian Boyhood" is probably the most famous.
There were still more things. Eastman was given a special appointment by President Theodore Roosevelt to attempt to make the treaty allotments to Indian people fair. He spent seven years working at that.
Dr. Eastman died Jan. 8, 1939. I had to look that up. I can remember our teacher, Leona Freyberg, told us Charles Eastman died that day. This was something important, she said. Miss Freyberg either read an Eastman story to us or told us about his books and writing.
Well, I guess that of the people of our area -- whether Redwood County or Rock County, Cottonwood or Pipestone -- no other man or woman has yet achieved so much. Tim O'Brien has earned wide recognition for writing fiction. Charles Eastman was focused on non-fiction, on memoirs and travel writing.
It's too bad we don't erect signs or plaques, or print brochures, to honor our greatest people. If some poor immigrant boy wondered what ever he could accomplish coming out of Worthington or Windom or Luverne, Minnesota, we could point to the example of the Indian boy born on the Lower Sioux Agency.
Ray Crippen is a former editor of the Daily Globe. His column appears on Saturdays.
