Thomas Henry Tibbles

• Thomas Henry Tibbles
• Born: May 22, 1840
• Died: May 14, 1928

Populist editor and Indian-rights worker, was born in Washington County, Ohio, to William Tibbles and Martha (Cooley) Tibbles. Information about his early life is sparse and contradictory; the year of his birth is variously given as 1838 and 1840. By his own account in Buckskin and Blanket Days (1905), Tibbles ran away from home as a child and was brought to western Missouri by the family that took him in. He took part in the Kansas border wars as a member of John Brown’s antislavery company and returned in 1858 to Ohio, where he attended Mount Union College in Alliance. In 1861 he married Amelia Owen, a recent emigrant from England. They had two daughters, Eda and May.

As an army scout and newspaper correspondent on the Great Plains during the Civil War, Tibbles often lived among the American Indians and was initiated into the Soldier Lodge of the Dakota (Sioux). After the war he became an itinerant Methodist preacher in Missouri and Nebraska. In 1873 he began a period of intermittent employment on newspapers in Omaha, Nebraska, while assembling a congregation and building a church and parsonage. In 1874 he was active in bringing relief from the East to victims of the grasshopper famine.

In 1879 Tibbles became a national figure through his involvement in the case of thirty-four Ponca Indians who had been arrested after fleeing the Oklahoma Indian Territory reservation and taking refuge with their relatives, the Omaha, on the way back to their homelands in Minnesota and South Dakota. Tibbles took the lead in forming a committee of lawyers and prominent citizens to support Chief Standing Bear’s suit in federal court for recovery of the tribe’s original reservation and clarification of their legal status. On behalf of the Omaha Committee, Tibbles undertook several speaking tours of the East in the company of a New Jersey-educated Omaha Indian, Susette La Flesche, also called Bright Eyes. The pair was widely acclaimed, especially in Boston, where the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee was formed to advance the assertion that Indians were persons under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case came to trial in April 1879 and the Ponca were freed.

All this activity aroused the displeasure of Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, who repeatedly pointed out that both the Senate and the Supreme Court had specifically excluded Indians from the Fourteenth Amendment, that Indians therefore could not sue in federal court, and that raising money for something that could not be done was fraudulent. When Tibbles visited the Ponca who had remained in Oklahoma, counseling them to flee northward, Schurz had him arrested for trespass. Tibbles then wrote a novel, Hidden Power (1880), in which he accused Schurz of being a tool of the “Indian ring”—politicians and businessmen with a vested interest in keeping Indians powerless and dependent. A large man with a ruddy complexion and a shock of snowy hair, Tibbles retained his customary genial manner even when lambasting the “satraps of Wall Street” and the “mullet heads” he considered their dupes.

Under a steady barrage of questions from Tibbles, the Boston Committee, and the press, Schurz began to agree that Indians should have equal standing before the law, a condition that he said could come about only after they had abandoned tribal life and taken up land claims as individuals. In this way the Ponca case helped bring about a new government policy toward Indians of land allotment in severalty—i.e., to individuals, rather than to tribes—which became the objective of succeeding administrations also. The new policy was enacted in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, of which Tibbles claimed to be the original author.

Amelia Tibbles died in 1879. In 1881 Tibbles married Bright Eyes, and for the next fifteen years they continued writing, testifying before Congress, and lecturing in the United States and England for Indian rights. Tibbles’s eyewitness accounts in the Omaha World-Herald of the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee (1890), in which more than 200 men, women, and children of the Teton Sioux tribe were massacred by U.S. troops, were so restrained and balanced that they incurred the wrath of his editors and readers. In 1893 Tibbles and Bright Eyes went to Washington as congressional correspondents for a syndicate of weeklies published by the Farmers’ Alliance, to whose cause Tibbles was attracted by his unsuccessful farming ventures as well as by his lifelong sympathy for the underdog. As editor of a Populist weekly in Lincoln, Nebraska, The Independent, Tibbles again rose to national prominence, and in in 1904 he was nominated by the People’s party as the vice-presidential running mate of Thomas E. Watson. He was the editor of another Populist paper, the Investigator, from 1905 to 1910, when he returned to the Omaha World-Herald. Bright Eyes died in 1903, and in 1907 he married Ida Belle Riddle of Ute, Iowa. He died at his home in Omaha in his late eighties.

In addition to works cited above, Tibbles wrote Ponca Chiefs (1880). under the pen name Zylyff, and The American Peasant (1892), an analysis of the farmer’s plight. A sketch of Tibbles’s life appears in the publisher’s foreword to the 1957 edition of Buckskin and Blanket Days. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936) and C. O. DeFrance, “Some Recollections of Thomas H. Tibbles,” Nebraska History Magazine, October-December 1932. For appraisals of the Indian reform movement see R. W. Mardock, Reformers and the Indian (1971), and L. B. Priest, Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren (1940).