The "Good Indian"

Nebraska, 1903

At the time that Little Bear, the Sioux Indian, was executed for the murder of two companions, his body was brought back from Sioux Falls by a deputy marshal, relates the Omaha Excelsior.

The marshal was well known to everybody up near Niobrara, and at the train several spoke to him, and it was soon noised about that he was in charge of the "dead Indian" in the baggage car. But the unfortunate redskin had had another companion in his last moments and who had promised to follow him to his last resting place, a man of the same Sioux nation, though of another tribe, the Rev. William Holmes, an ordained priest of the Episcopal church.

He had heard of the plight of Little Bear, who was singing his death song alone in his cell at Sioux Falls, and resolved to go to him, to extend to him the comforts of religion and to do all in his power to bring him to a sense of his crime, for Little Bear insisted he was only meting out Indian justice to those he had killed in old Indian fashion. Mr. Holmes converted Little Bear and baptized him.

The marshal and the Indian minister and Bishop Williams, of Omaha, were seated together in the smoker when the train stopped at Creighton, and a bluff and hearty cattleman entered, and, seeing the marshal, but not noticing Mr. Holmes, cried out:

"Hello, marshal. I hear you have a good Indian with you today," referring, of course, to the old adage that the only good Indian is a dead one.

Quick as a flash the marshal jumped to his feet and said, to avoid mortification of his friend, the dark-skinned minister:

"To be sure I have — let me present you to him — the Rev. William Holmes, of the Episcopal church, and Bishop Williams, of Omaha!"

The bluffness all died out of the stranger and he sank into the vacant seat offered him without a word.

But Bishop Williams says there was a very merry twinkle in the eye of the "good Indian."

—Davenport Daily Republican, Davenport, Iowa, March 4, 1903, page 5.