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Although the city bearing their name is in Oklahoma, the Ponca Indians are a tribe of native Americans that originated in Nebraska and lived along the Niobrara branch of the Missouri River. In 1858 the Ponca, under their Chief Standing Bear, under pressure from the United States government, agreed to give up all of their land except for a section along the Niobrara and tried to change from being a nomadic people to being farmers. But on March 2, 1889 the United States government enacted a treaty assigning the land that belonged to the Ponca to the Sioux. As a result the Sioux repeatedly raided the area where the Ponca still lived, and many Ponca lives were lost.
In January of 1877, a United States government representative named Edward Kemble brought word from Washington DC that the government had decided that the best way to handle this problem was to relocate the Ponca to Indian Territory now known as Oklahoma. The tribe refused, but the government insisted. In 1878 the Ponca sent a contingent of ten chiefs, headed by Standing bear, by train with a government official to check out the land and report back to the people. Their report was not favorable. They chiefs were not accustomed to the climate and grew ill and refused to bring their people south to die. Kemble decided that their opinion of the relocation was irrelevant and abandoned the Ponca leaders. They were forced to walk five hundred miles back to their home in Nebraska with no money or food, and only one blanket and one pair of moccasins for each person.
It took two months for the Ponca to get back to Nebraska, and a contingent of U.S. soldiers was waiting for them. They forced the Ponca to relocate in a terrible journey that began on May 21, 1878. The soldiers formed a line and drove the people like cattle, as other soldiers confiscated- stole- their tools, seed and household goods.
Unwelcoming surroundings and diseases for which they had no immunity caused many deaths. The elderly, sick and young children, including Ponca Chief Standing Bear's own daughter, died before the tribe reached "the Warm Lands". No provisions to settle them had been made, and by the end of the year one hundred and fifty eight of the seven hundred and thirty Poncas had died from pneumonia, malaria and other diseases in Indian Territory. Standing Bear's twelve year old son died of disease in this period.
Standing Bear and about thirty others defiantly, but peacefully, returned to Nebraska, a trip which took ten weeks. They were detained at the Omaha Reservation on orders from the Secretary of the Interior in Washington, DC. The Ponca were detained at Fort Omaha by soldiers serving under General George Crook. The Ponca were ordered to return to Oklahoma territory, but convinced the authorities to allow them time to regain their strength after the long trip. When General Crook heard of the detainment he was infuriated at the mistreatment of the Poncas.
During the delay, Thomas Tibbles, who was a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald reported about the plight of the Ponca, with encouragement from General Crook. Tibbles sent the story to major newspapers and garnered their support, and thereby the support of the general public. As a result, attorneys John L. Webster and A.J. Poppleton, helped Standing Bear petition the court with a writ of habeas corpus. He asked for 14th amendment protection. (The Fourteenth Amendment states that no state shall deprive anyone of life, liberty or property without due process of law.) It was their contention that Standing Bear and the other Poncas had committed no crime and should not have been arrested.
G.M. Lambertson represented the government as they appeared before Judge Elmer Dundy. The ultimate decision to be made was whether the Ponca were even humans and citizens, and thus eligible for rights under the United States law. The government opined that an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen and therefore had no rights even to bring a suit before a United States court, but Judge Dundy ruled against the government.
On April 30, 1879 Judge Dundy declared that an Indian is a person within the law and that the Ponca were being held illegally. He set Standing Bear and the Ponca free. President Rutherford B. Hayes assigned a commission to investigate and found that the Ponca were being unjustly treated. The land along the Niobrara was returned to the Ponca. Some Ponca then returned to their native land, while others remained in Ponca, where their descendants are still settled.
Today the northern Ponca, those residing in Nebraska, are working to repopulate the area with bison, traditionally the Ponca's primary prey animal. The tribe has allocated about $6000 and a full time caretaker to oversee the project of fencing the area. As part of the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, in 1995 they were given six head of bison by the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Ft. Niobrara.
A twenty two foot statue of Standing Bear was erected on the southern edge of Ponca City, Oklahoma to honor the Ponca and their tribe's role in forcing the United States government to treat them as full citizens.
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