1973 : 1881 : And the Twelfth of February

In 1973 on the twelfth of February 143 prisoners of war began their journey home from Vietnam.  Their release was part of the cease-fire agreement.  But before I came upon that bit of history for the twelfth day of this month, I came upon a heading “The Ponca Quixote” in the Saturday evening Issue of The Lowell Weekly Sun, 1881.

The “Ponca Quixote” refers to a Mr. Dawes who had the audacity to request of the Department of the Interior, headed by a Mr. Shurtz, that the Ponca Tribe be allowed to return to their ancestral homelands.  The reporter for the Lowell Weekly states that the removal of the “comparatively small” tribe was of “little consequence” until “inflated” by Mr. Dawes, the Quixote figure of the headline. 

Okay, so let’s mix this up a little.  In the 1973 article about POW’s coming home, one is mentioned as held behind at a Saigon hospital for medical treatment.  We, the United States Government, didn’t offer medical treatment to the Ponca.  It is true their numbers were comparatively small; they had made the trip before, been moved from fertile ground where they grew maize to unfriendly ground where they could grow nothing, been reduced by one in four by malaria, reduced further, by a third of their former population, by starvation and deprivation and forced marches that left bloody footprints in the snow.

Mr. Dawes, a.k.a. Senator Dawes later in the article, represents the Boston Philanthropists of 1881.  Mr. Shurtz represents the “giant” the Boston Philanthropists have sent (by the gist of the article) a diminutive Quixote to battle.  The “giant” Mr. Shurtz is absolutely correct, I’m sure, that the Ponca chiefs had agreed to the move, had signed papers to be under the protection and care of the U.S.  But I have to ask history, the historical “us” of time, to put ourselves in the situation of those Ponca chiefs.  The land they’d been given as theirs in a treaty the previous century, that same land had been given over now to the Sioux tribes.  The Sioux didn’t much care for the resident Ponca and their maize-growing ways and so they raided them as often as they could and killed them as often as they could.  So, “historical us of time”, if you were one of those Ponca chiefs, wouldn’t you sign papers to protect your remaining “comparatively small” peoples? 

What does this have to do with 143 prisoners of war freed by the victorious North Vietnamese in 1973?  Probably nothing.  I am old and I make connections where other than time being a factor that winds through all things little else does.  Except perhaps to me.  There are wars; prisoners are taken; wars end; prisoners are freed.  But not the Ponca who seemed to have remained prisoners, until they became, in 1966, so inconsequential as to have been written off as a Native American Indian Tribe still in existence. 

I read hints (on a Nebraska Historical internet site) they were coming back; the material was dated; I hope they are.  I hope they have.