Long Way Home: A Story of John Francis Brewer

 By Alexander Ziwahatan
(Great-great grandson of John Francis Brewer, Yankton Sioux)

The winter of 1904 was cold enough to crack the ground in St. James, Nebraska. The wind cut across the prairie like a blade, carrying with it the smell of wood smoke and iron stoves. In that small frontier town lived eleven-year-old John Francis Brewer, a boy of mixed blood — one-quarter Sioux, a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe — who still spoke his mother’s Dakota words when no one was listening.

He had a cousin near his own age. They hunted grasshoppers in summer, skipped stones across the Missouri, and thought the world would always be theirs. Then the wagon came.

The Taking

Two men arrived wearing government coats and authority in their posture. They told his parents the same thing they told hundreds of Native families: The boy must go to school. They promised education, clothing, Christian values — a better future. But everyone in the settlement already knew what that meant.

For Native families at the turn of the century, “school” had become a word of dread. Under federal policy, children of tribal descent — full-blooded or mixed — were taken from their homes to boarding institutions meant to erase their heritage. The officials called it “civilizing.” The parents called it what it was: taking.

John’s mother held him until her knuckles went white. His father said nothing, because words had no power against the government. The cousin’s family pleaded, too, but the agents were unmoved. They loaded the boys into the wagon and headed north, toward a place they had never seen.

The boys did not speak for hours. The older of the two cried silently, wiping tears with the back of his hand so the men wouldn’t see. John stared at the land rolling past — the brown grass, the frozen river — trying to memorize it all. In his heart, he promised himself he would come back.

The School That Wasn’t a School

They called it a “boarding school for Indians,” but it was nothing like a school. The first thing the boys lost was their hair. The second was their language. The third was their names.


John and his cousin were given numbers. The teachers told them they must forget their old ways, that their language was wicked, their songs heathen, their parents ignorant. They were told that only by surrendering their identity could they be saved.

In truth, the Indian boarding school system was an arm of the government’s assimilation policy — designed to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Between 1880 and 1930, tens of thousands of Native children were forced into such institutions across the Plains. Many never came home.

For John, every day was punishment. They were made to scrub floors until their hands cracked and bled. If they spoke Dakota, they were beaten with straps or made to stand for hours with buckets of sand held out from their sides until their arms failed. Food was scarce, and what little they were given was rancid.

The nights were worse. The dormitories smelled of sweat, sickness, and fear. The younger children cried for their mothers until the sound faded into silence. Sometimes one of them would disappear, and no one would say why.

Months passed like that. Time blurred into obedience and hunger. John learned to keep his eyes low, to move quickly, to hide any sign of defiance. Yet something inside him refused to die. He whispered to his cousin in secret: “We’ll go home. We’ll find the river and follow it.”

The Plan

The boys began to plan in whispers, trading scraps of information like precious stones. They watched the routines of the guards, the patterns of the bells, the direction of the river that glimmered beyond the fence.


They would leave at night, when the moon was thin. They would take nothing but courage. To make the staff believe they were dead, they would stage their own drowning. The cousin had heard older students talk about a small boat by the dock — leaky, abandoned, but still floating. If they could sink it with their clothes inside, the river would carry away the evidence.

For weeks they waited, pretending to behave. Then, one bitter night when frost sparkled on the windows, they slipped out through a gap beneath the dormitory floorboards. The ground was hard as stone. Their breath steamed in the cold air.

Down by the river, they stripped off their thin uniforms. John filled the sleeves with stones while his cousin held the lantern low. They placed the bundle in the boat, shoved it into the current, and watched it drift away. The river swallowed it whole.

“If they find it,” John whispered, “they’ll think we drowned.”

Then they turned and disappeared into the dark.

The Long Walk Home

The first hours were full of fear. Every sound made them flinch. They ran until their lungs burned, then walked until dawn. When the sun rose, they were already miles away.

For days they followed the river, hiding by day and walking by night. They had no food except what they could steal — frozen ears of corn left in the fields, turnips buried under the frost. They drank from streams when they could find them. Their feet bled, their stomachs cramped, but the pull of home was stronger than pain.

Sometimes they saw smoke on the horizon and veered away, afraid of being caught. Sometimes they found animal tracks and followed them, hoping for water. The land seemed endless — a rolling sea of prairie grass and snow patches, each hill crest leading only to another.

After the first week, hunger began to twist their minds. They spoke to each other less, saving breath. At night, when they lay side by side in the grass, John thought about his mother’s hands, about her humming voice, about the way she brushed his hair before dawn chores. Those memories kept him alive.

The cousin weakened first. His lips were cracked, his eyes dull. One evening he stumbled and couldn’t rise. John shook him awake, begging, “Come on. We’re close.” But the cousin only whispered, “I’m so hungry.”

John forced him to stand, half-carrying him across the next mile. They were ghosts now — two thin silhouettes moving against the moonlit plains.

The Eagle

It happened on the thirteenth morning. The air shimmered with heat despite the cold — the strange fever of exhaustion. The boys could barely see straight. Then John looked up and saw it: an eagle soaring above the ridge.

At first he thought it was a dream. But the bird circled once, twice, and then glided slowly toward the west.

In Sioux belief, the eagle is sacred — Wanblí, the messenger between the people and the Creator. To see one in a moment of despair is to be reminded that the spirits still walk with you. John’s mother had told him that long ago.

He nudged his cousin. “Look. The eagle’s showing us something.”

They followed it.

The great bird led them over a ridge and down into a shallow valley. There, almost hidden behind a stand of trees, was a farmhouse — smoke rising from its chimney, the scent of hay and horses in the air. The boys stumbled toward it, half-convinced it wasn’t real.

A woman came out to hang laundry. When she saw them — two starving, barefoot children with torn shirts and frostbitten hands — she froze. Then she ran to them, calling for her husband.

Without asking questions, she led them inside. The warmth hit them like a wave. She fed them bread and milk, wrapped them in blankets, and sat by the stove while they ate.

Later she asked who they were. John told her only that they were trying to get home. The woman nodded. She understood without needing details. There were many such boys in those years.

They slept in the barn that night, belly full for the first time in months. When John woke at dawn, he stepped outside and looked to the sky. The eagle was gone, but a single feather lay in the frost. He picked it up and tucked it inside his shirt.

The Final Miles

The couple gave them food for the journey — bread, a few potatoes, a scrap of cured meat — and pointed them south. “Follow the river,” the man said. “It’ll take you home.”

They walked for more days, stronger now but wary. The weather shifted, the clouds turned gray, and the wind carried snow. Sometimes they saw wagon tracks or heard distant dogs, but no one stopped them. The prairie swallowed all sound.

At night, John dreamed of his mother’s cooking, of warm corn soup, of laughter by the fire. He would wake up shivering, whisper a prayer to the spirits, and press the eagle feather to his lips.

Finally, one morning, the landscape began to change. He recognized a hill, then a grove of trees, then the outline of the family’s small cabin. He stopped and stared, afraid it might vanish if he blinked.

When they reached the yard, his mother was outside hanging laundry. She saw them and froze, her hands still clutching a sheet. For a moment she thought she was seeing ghosts — her son, her nephew, returned from the dead.

Then she screamed his name and ran to him.

She collapsed around him, sobbing, clutching his face between her hands as if to be sure he was real. The cousin’s mother came running too, crying into her apron. The boys were home. They had walked more than two hundred miles across South Dakota’s plains to come back to where they belonged.

Aftermath

They never spoke much about what happened afterward. The government agents didn’t return for John, perhaps believing the boys had drowned. Others weren’t so lucky. Families across the Plains lost children who never came home. Some were buried in unmarked graves beside the schools.

John grew up in that silence. He became a farmer like his father, raised a family, and lived to see the seasons change eighty-four times. But those who knew him said that every winter, when the wind came hard from the north, he would grow quiet. Sometimes he’d stand by the door and stare at the sky until an eagle passed overhead. Only then would he nod and return to his chores.

Reflection

When I first learned this story, I didn’t believe it could be real. It sounded like something from myth — a boy escaping captivity, guided home by an eagle. But history proves otherwise. Thousands of Native children endured exactly what my great-great-grandfather endured: forced assimilation, abuse, hunger, and despair.

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, there were more than 350 Indian boarding schools across the United States, with at least 25 in South Dakota alone. The stated purpose was to educate, but the true aim was cultural genocide.

Hair was cut short. Native names were replaced with English ones. Children were beaten for speaking their own language. Some were forbidden to return home even during holidays. The trauma of that era still echoes through Native families today.

For my family, John’s return was a miracle — a thread of survival that carried forward. He lived to see grandchildren and great-grandchildren, though he rarely spoke of the journey. The story came down through whispers, through elders, through the kind of oral memory that refuses to fade.

When I imagine those two boys — thin, barefoot, walking beneath the stars — I think about what it takes to believe in home after the world has taken everything from you. I think about the eagle circling above them, both real and sacred, as if the Creator Himself had sent a messenger to show them the way.

And I realize that survival is more than endurance. It’s faith — faith that the land remembers you, that your people still call your name, that no system can fully erase what was written in your blood.

Legacy

John Francis Brewer died in 1977 in Yankton, South Dakota. He was buried on land not far from where he was born, where the Missouri still winds through the prairie. His life spanned wars, droughts, the Great Depression — and yet, beneath all of that, the truest story remained the one he lived as a boy.


He never returned to any school. He never let his own children forget who they were.

When his descendants gather today, the stories come back like smoke from an old fire. Someone always mentions the eagle. Someone always says, “He walked home.”

For me, telling his story isn’t about tragedy alone. It’s about the resilience that lives in our bones — the proof that even when the world tried to erase him, John Francis Brewer walked back into existence with every step he took across that frozen land.

He was eleven years old.
He was starving.
He was terrified.
And still, he followed the eagle — and found his way home.

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