The eight children of Joseph La Flesche (1822-88)—Carey, Francis (or Frank), Louis, Lucy, Marguerite, Rosalie, Susan, and Susette (or Yosette)—were born on the Omaha Reservation near Bellevue, Nebraska, just south of present-day Omaha. Their father, a mixed blood also known as Inshtamaza or Iron Eyes, was a chief of the Omahas. Inshtamaza's father, a Frenchman named Joseph, was a trader for the Hudson's Bay Company; his mother, named Watunna, was either an Omaha or a Ponca. During his early years Inshtamaza was raised among the Omahas. However, his father was often absent on extended trading expeditions, and his mother sent the younger Joseph with two of his aunts to live among the Sioux. Several years later, when his father returned, the younger Joseph rejoined his father and often accompanied him on hunting and trading excursions. During this time he learned to speak French.
It was during one of these trading expeditions that the younger Joseph met Mary Gale, an Omaha, whose tribal name translated as "the One Woman." Mary Gale was the child of Nicomi, a mixed Omaha-Iowa woman and the daughter of an Iowa chief, and Dr. John Gale, an army contract surgeon. In 1827, Dr. Gale was transferred. Forced to leave his wife and daughter behind, he made provisions for their future by creating a trust, which he placed in the control of his friend Peter Sarpy, a trader with the American Fur Company who operated near Fort Atkinson, Iowa. Four years later, in 1831, Sarpy married Nicomi. Joseph was employed by Sarpy at his trading post, where he met Mary Gale. Joseph and Mary Gale were married in 1843.
Immediately after his marriage to Mary Gale, Joseph was adopted into the Omaha tribe by Chief Big Elk, who proclaimed Joseph his "oldest son" and successor. In the following years, Joseph served the Omahas as an interpreter and a trader, and when Big Elk died in 1853, Joseph was recognized as one of the two head chiefs of the tribe. Joseph believed that for the tribe to survive it would have to adapt to the encroaching non-Indian culture that was filling Nebraska with settlers—a belief influenced by his conversion to Presbyterianism, which cost him his position as a chief.
Although he accepted Christianity, Joseph refused to abandon all Omaha traditions, and for a while he maintained three views—Mary Gale; Tainne; and a third woman, whom he took as a wife in 1862. However, as a concession to his new religion, his third wife was sent away. He had another wife, either a Pawnee or an Oto, who died in childbirth, and probably yet another wife, our knowledge of whom is limited to a remark by a missionary that she was "giddy." Joseph also had several other children, including one possibly named Harriet, of which no record remains inasmuch as none of them reached maturity. Tainne probably died in April 1883. Mary Gale died on February 28, 1909.
Mary Gale was the mother of Louis (1848-60), Susette (1854-1903), Rosalie (1861-1900), Marguerite (1862-1945), and Susan (1865-1915). Tainne was the mother of Francis (1855 [or 1862]-1932), Lucy (1865-1923), and Carey (1872-1952). Under Omaha tradition all were considered brothers and sisters instead of half siblings. Louis La Flesche was baptized on December 27, 1850; he died while attending the Presbyterian Mission School on the Omaha Reservation. Of the four daughters of Mary Gale, Marguerite was the most beautiful and least impetuous, Susan the most active and aggressive, Rosalie the most intellectual, and Susette the most retiring.
Joseph raised his children in the traditional Omaha way. His older children lived in an earth lodge, forty feet in diameter, about one mile south of the Presbyterian Mission and its school while they were young. In 1857 Joseph decided to abandon his earth lodge and built a two-story frame house nearby. This was the first time a Plains Indian had constructed his own house. Within four years there were eighteen other houses nearby, and the settlement became known as Joe's Village.
As a part of his belief that the Omahas had to make the transition to the non-Indian world, Joseph sent his children to the reservation's Presbyterian Mission School, where they received a preparatory education. He also refused to allow his daughters to partake of the tradition whereby Omaha women were tattooed with a "mark of honor." By the time they completed their studies, the La Flesche children could speak English as well as Omaha, were able to read and write English, and were knowledgeable in geography and arithmetic. Although Francis attended the mission school along with his sisters, he much preferred the company of a group of Omaha youths who called themselves "the Middle Five."
After completing their studies at the Presbyterian Mission School, Susette, Marguerite, and Susan were sent to a private finishing school, the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Susette fulfilled the requirements to be a teacher in 1875 and returned to the Omaha Reservation, where she taught in the government school, the Omaha Indian School. Susan also returned to the reservation and accepted a position as an assistant teacher. In 1884 Marguerite received a government scholarship to attend Hampton Agriculture and Normal Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Susan accompanied her, and they were later joined by Lucy. On May 20, 1886, both Susan and Lucy graduated from Hampton, with Susan giving the salutatorian address. Marguerite, whose senior paper was titled "Customs of the Omahas," graduated from Hampton in 1887 and then returned to the Omaha Reservation as a teacher at the Omaha Indian School.
In 1888 Marguerite married Charles F. Picotte, who oversaw her family's farm allotments on the Omaha Reservation. They had two sons and two daughters who reached adulthood. In 1892, Charles died and Marguerite resumed her teaching duties at the Indian school. Susan and Marguerite lived across the street from one another in the town of Walthill, Nebraska (a few miles from the Omaha Agency), where they both were respected civic leaders. Marguerite later married Walter Diddock, the Omaha Agency's industrial farmer.
Lucy married a full-blood Omaha named Noah Leaming (or Noah Stabler; the record is not clear). The son of Mahazhahkeda, he took the name La Flesche upon marriage because his family was of lower status in Omaha society than his wife's. Lucy and Noah returned to Nebraska to farm their allotment. Noah died in the winter of 1919 of the Spanish flu. In 1897 Carey married Phoeby Cline. They had five daughters and two sons. Francis married Alice Mitchell in 1877 and divorced her in the same year. He married Rosa Bourassa, a mixed-blood Ojibwa, in 1906; they probably were divorced in 1908, but the records are confusing. Susette, Lucy, and Frank had no children.
After graduating from Hampton, Susan was accepted at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, from which she received her degree in medicine in 1889. She graduated at the head of a class of thirty-three students, and was the first Native American female to become a medical doctor in the United States. After completing her training in Philadelphia-area hospitals, Susan returned to the Omaha Reservation and served as the physician at the Omaha Indian School. The hospital built by the reservation's Presbyterian church was named in Susan's honor. She also served as an interpreter and adviser to many tribal members and was an influential member of the Presbyterian church in Bancroft, Nebraska. Susan eventually married Henry Picotte, the brother of Charles Picotte. They had two sons.
When she was four years old, Rosalie was enrolled in the Presbyterian Mission School on the Omaha Reservation. She later also taught at the school, where she met Edward Farley, the school's industrial teacher. In June 1880 she married Farley. They had ten children, three girls and seven sons. She also taught Sunday school at the Presbyterian church on the reservation.
Later Rosalie and her husband oversaw "the pasture," which they held under a twenty-year lease agreement with the Omaha tribe as pasturage for cattle grazed on the Indians' land. As managers of the operation, Edward and Rosalie were responsible for fencing the land and collecting grazing fees from non-Indians. Rosalie also served as the contact person, interpreter, and adviser for the Indians, who grazed their cattle for free. Revenue from grazing fees was divided between the tribe and the Farleys. Rosalie also served as an adviser to the famed ethnologist Alice Fletcher during the course of her work to preserve Omaha traditions and heritage. Rosalie died on May 9, 1900.
While Joseph's children were receiving their formal education, they also became involved with traditional Omaha culture and heritage. This was especially true of Francis, who, as a male, had more opportunities to participate in tribal ceremonies. Delving into tribal history with zeal, when his father explained to him the importance of adapting to changing ways, he responded, "Yes, but let us save the old as we move into the new." In 1874, as a teenager, Francis participated in his first traditional Omaha buffalo hunt. Two years later, in 1876, the annual hunt was ended by federal officials and Francis lamented that "some of the boys will never get a chance [to hunt buffalo] . . . never to cut the beast open, either, and eat the raw liver with the gall over it."
In May 1877 Susette witnessed the forced removal of the Ponca tribe from its nearby homeland to a reservation in Indian Territory—present-day Oklahoma. The plight of the Poncas, who were closely allied with the Omahas, deeply affected her, and she joined her father on a visit to the Poncas before they began their trek southward. Both realized that the Omahas would probably soon follow the Poncas on the journey southward.
That same year, 1877, Susette applied for a teaching position at the Indian school on the Omaha Reservation. Informed that she would have to pass a teaching examination and receive a certificate from the School Committee of Nebraska, she applied for a permit to leave the reservation to take the examination. Although her request was refused, she left the reservation anyway and took the test without the agent's permission. After receiving a "certificate of good character" from the agent, she was hired at a salary of twenty dollars per month, half of what non-Indian teachers received.
Stories of the Poncas' suffering in Indian Territory continued to reach the La Flesches in Nebraska. Disturbed by the plight of their friends, in 1878 Susette and her father visited the Poncas on their temporary reservation among the Quapaws in Indian Territory. She returned an outspoken opponent of the government's treatment of Indians.
The following year, 1879, a group of Poncas led by Standing Bear left Indian Territory and returned to their ancient homeland, but on their arrival in Nebraska they were arrested and taken to Fort Omaha in preparation for their return to Indian Territory. While they were imprisoned at Fort Omaha, two reporters for the Omaha Herald, Thomas H. Tibbles and W. L. Carpenter, visited them. After hearing tales of their suffering, the reporters took up their cause and implemented a campaign to gain their release. Tibbles's The Ponca Chiefs: An Indian Attempt to Appeal from the Tomahawk to the Courts, published in 1879, helped win support for Standing Bear and his followers.
In April 1879, Susette became acquainted with Tibbles when, at the request of the Reverend J. Owen Dorsey, a missionary among the Indians, she wrote him describing the plight of the Poncas in Indian Territory. At the same time, she helped prepare a petition from the Omahas to "the friends of the Poncas" asking that the Poncas be allowed to return to their homeland in Nebraska. The New York Herald called her petition "one of the most extraordinary statements ever published in America." Their efforts resulted in Standing Bear's being brought to trial, where he was able to plead his case. Both Susette and her father traveled to Omaha to attend, with Rosalie filling Susette's teaching position temporarily. It was at this time that Susette first met Tibbles. They were elated when the court ruled in Standing Bear's favor, providing the nation with one of its most important civil rights decisions—that "an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law of the United States" and therefore has the right to seek legal redress before the courts.
Afterward, Susette quickly became involved in the Indian-rights movement and, apparently at Tibbles's suggestion, took the name Bright Eyes. At the insistence of the Omaha Committee, as the supporters of the Poncas called themselves, Joseph and Susette again traveled to the Ponca Reservation, where they learned that many of the tribe had died and most of the survivors were ill. Shocked, Susette became even more outspoken regarding the mistreatment of the Indians. Along with her brother Francis and Standing Bear, Susette undertook a speaking tour of such eastern cities as Boston and New York in an effort to end the government's policy of forced removal of the northern tribes to Indian Territory. In November 1879, Susette met Helen Hunt Jackson, who quickly became an outspoken supporter of the Indians.
Susette was convinced that the only solution to the "Indian problem" was American citizenship. Such an action would legally give the nation's Native American population equal status with its other residents. It was her belief that the effort to assimilate Native Americans into American culture was a mistake, and that the greatest error in government Indian policy was to treat the Indians as wards, incapable of caring for themselves. She made this argument before congressional committees and at the White House, and then in the fall of 1880 she made a second eastern tour.
Tibbles's wife, Amelia Owen Tibbles, died in October 1879. On July 23, 1881, in a ceremony performed by the Reverend S. N. D. Martin at the Ponca Reservation mission, Susette and Tibbles were married. Afterward she traveled widely with Tibbles, once to Europe, speaking out for Indian rights.
At Tibbles's urging, she developed her talent for writing—a means of communication that allowed them to expand their audience. In 1881 she published Ploughed Under: The Story of an Indian Chief, telling of the suffering of the Native Americans in a changing world. Tibbles also published a number of books describing the mistreatment of Native Americans. They included The Ponca Chiefs, released in 1880; Hidden Power: A Secret History of the Indian Ring, published in 1881; and Buckskin and Blanket Days: Memoirs of a Friend of the Indians, which was not printed until 1957.
Some of their views brought Susette and her husband into conflict with her siblings. She also had some problems with Tibbles's two daughters, Eda and May, who at first were resentful of their stepmother; however, these early problems were overcome. Susette spent much of her later years on the Omaha Reservation. She also maintained a residence in Lincoln, Nebraska. She died near Bancroft on the Omaha Reservation on May 26, 1903.
Francis La Flesche became active in Native American affairs as an ethnologist, working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institution. He was closely associated with Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a friend of Susette's, who eventually adopted him "to be my son" in the spring of 1891. Fletcher, considered the foremost woman scientist of her day, worked with Francis on The Omaha Tribe, published as the twenty-seventh annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1911. Previously, in 1900, he had published The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, in which he told about his youth at the mission school on the Omaha Reservation. He also had earned a law degree (LL.B.) in 1892 and another (LL.M.) in 1893 from National University. In 1912 he was elected vice president of the American Anthropological Association, and in 1926 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Nebraska.
Alice C. Fletcher, The Omaha Tribe Bureau of American Ethnology, Twenty-seventh Annual Report (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911); Norma Kidd Green, Iron Eye's Family: The Children of Joseph La Flesche (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 1969); Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Bright Eyes: The Story of Susette La Flesche, an Omaha Indian (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957).
Kenny A. Franks
Oklahoma Heritage Association
