More Questions Than Answers About Wounded Knee 1973’s First Fatality

This is Part Two of a weekly blog that will take a look at several aspects of the Wounded Knee Occupation as the 40^th anniversary of the controversial 71-day event continues from Feb. 27 to May 5. Next week: The residents of Wounded Knee.

Last year, the Oglala Sioux Tribe sent a list to U.S. attorney for South Dakota requesting that the he investigate approximately 56 suspicious deaths that had occurred in Pine Ridge or nearby.

It was an odd list. It looked like there was some padding going on. The first name that jumped out at me was Raymond Yellow Thunder. I wrote a book, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, in 2008, and I was perplexed as to why his name appeared there. The killers were caught, tried, convicted and served their time in in the 1970s. This all happened in Nebraska, outside of South Dakota and the FBI’s jurisdiction. And even if someone believed that the manslaughter charge should have been murder, what, you’re going to retry the case on a different charge 40 years later? Ridiculous.

The second name that jumped out at me was Frank Clearwater aka Frank Clear (or vice versa depending whether you’re in the FBI or American Indian Movement camp). Since the last name is in question, I’m just going to go with Frank for the remainder of this article.

Now here is a death worth investigating.

Frank Clearwater was the first fatality during the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973. His name has been surrounded in mystery since the day he arrived in the village on April 17.

The story, as told in several history books, reputable and otherwise, is that Frank Clearwater, 47, an Apache, made his way into the occupied village with his pregnant wife — Morningstar — arriving sometime on the night of April 16.

The two weary travelers laid down to rest in the either the church or one of the houses, and while they were sleeping one of the most intense firefights of the occupation broke out. A stray bullet penetrated the wall and struck Frank in the head.

A ceasefire eventually came and he was medically evacuated to Rapid City, where he hung on for eight days, but succumbed to his wound on April 25.

His widow then asked that he be buried at Wounded Knee Cemetery.

A dispute immediately broke out between AIM and its avowed enemy Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson. Wilson produced documents claiming that Clearwater was named Frank Clear Jr., and that he was a white man who had served time in a military prison for abandoning his post in World War II. Wilson said only Natives could be interred at Wounded Knee.

To make a long story short, Frank was ultimately buried at Crow Dog’s Paradise, AIM spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog’s home on the Rosebud Reservation.

So who is buried there? Frank Clear or Frank Clearwater?

As usual, we have two completely different interpretations of this event depending whether you believe the former FBI Special Agent in Charge Joe Trimbach, whose name appears on the cover of a book called, American Indian Mafia, or the AIM leaders.

American Indian Mafia goes into some, but not much detail of this event. Trimbach, of course, says he was Frank Clear. But he doesn’t go into why he would have lied to AIM leaders about his name and ancestry.

Curiously, in a timeline in the book’s Appendix, on page 513, it reads “April 17, 1973: Wounded Knee infiltrator Frank Clear is struck by a stray bullet that had penetrated a wall.”

“Infiltrator?” What a curious choice of words.

Is Trimbach saying that Frank was sent in to gather intelligence? I could ask him. But he wasn’t at Pine Ridge at the time, his superiors having removed him from the scene by that then. And now in his late 80s, I am not sure he would remember.

At the Augustana Conference in Sioux Falls, last year I asked Trimbach how many informants he managed to put inside the occupied village. None, he insisted. He was only on the scene for two weeks.

Later, I read his book in which it details gathering information from a total of four informants during his two weeks on the scene. This suggests to me that his memory is faltering in his old age, or he isn’t familiar with the information in a book that has his name on the cover.

Now to AIM. Four decades later, they continue to assert that Frank was a Native American. Proxies such as Ward Churchill, the former University of Colorado professor, asserted in his series of pro-AIM books that the documents Wilson produced were fake and it was a ploy to discredit him. He couldn’t be a martyr for their cause if he was an FBI informant.

My question to AIM leaders like Dennis Banks, who was there at the time of his arrival, is how did they know for sure? The prevailing story was the Frank and his wife weren’t there very long before they went off to rest.
They arrived at a time when leadership was deeply, and rightfully, paranoid about infiltrators.

According to Roland Dewing’s, Wounded Knee II, the best blow-by-blow account of the occupation published to date (sourced mainly from FBI documents), AIM initially gave authorities a number of names: First he was Matthew High Pine from Pine Ridge, then he was Frank Still Water, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, and finally Frank Clearwater, an Apache from Cherokee, North Carolina.

An Apache from North Carolina? Well, maybe.
Banks has a pretty bad record on telling who was and wasn’t a Native American. Doug Durham, a white man posing as an Indian, turned out to be the FBI’s most successful informant, and was one of Banks’ right hand men for years before he was discovered.

Was Frank Clear/Clearwater sent in as an informant? But with a pregnant wife? Or was he just a wannabe Indian, who was escaping a troubled past?

Or was he really who AIM claimed him to be?

I don’t have the answers, but I am certain they are out there. The Apache Nation would presumably have records of a Clearwater family.

And where is his widow — Morningstar — and where is the child — unborn at the time of its presumed father’s death, today? He or she would be about 40 or 41 years old. Could they shed any light on this man’s identity?

If you have answers to this mystery, send me a message. (stewmag (a) yahoo.com)

Stew Magnuson is the author of Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding, published by the Now & Then Reader. It is available as an eBook on Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iTunes.