Biography
Plenty Horses was a Sicangu Lakota young man who, nine days after the December 29, 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, shot and killed Lieutenant Edward Casey of the 22nd Infantry. Held for trial at Fort Meade and then in federal court in Sioux Falls. The court ultimately acquitted him after the judge ruled that a state of war existed between the Sioux Nation and the United States — meaning the killing was a combatant act, not murder.
Photo: J. C. H. Grabill, Deadwood and Lead City, South Dakota. Borders cropped from the original scan.
Arrest chronology and original court records
The National Archives at Kansas City’s December 2012 newsletter, pages 3–4, identifies Plenty Horses as Tasunka-Ota and reports that he was arrested on February 19, 1891 and imprisoned at Fort Meade. This conflicts with the previously stored January 8 arrest date. Other historical accounts place apprehension and transfer on different February days, so the structured arrest is conservatively recorded as February 1891, with no verified day and no separate jail-admission date inferred. The stored February 1 is only a month-precision placeholder.
The same Archives account explicitly records a not-guilty plea and discharge from custody on May 28, 1891 after the second trial’s acquittal; the release was already recorded. Its reproduced court documents are an April 13 receipt for indictment/jury/witness copies and an April 30 jury note reporting inability to agree. Those administrative/trial dates are not custody endpoints. The newsletter reports a birth year of 1869 and death on June 15, 1933, already present in the profile.
