Nicholas Cecil Leading Horse was born into the Sioux Nation in Valentine, Neb., on Christmas Eve 1946.
The youngest of Lewis and Margaret Leading Horse’s six children, he would grow up to become Tacoma’s most expensive street drunk.
From his mid-40s into his early 60s, he would cost taxpayers an estimated $2,407,100. The money was spent on emergency fire, police and medical care, ambulance rides, food, shelter, detox and sobering services, court and jail time, and rehabilitation efforts.
A decade ago, The News Tribune added up Leading Horse’s tab from the previous 10 years and put it in the seven-figure range. After a Sunday cover story about him was published on July 15, 2001, he became the face of the local problems presented by homeless addicts and alcoholics. He was the motivation to build better, cheaper ways to deal with them.
In his case, they eventually worked.
Cecil Leading Horse, at age 64, is sober.
Since Dec. 14, 2008, he has lived without alcohol or heroin in a studio apartment at the headquarters of Metropolitan Development Council – known as MDC – on Fawcett Avenue.
He lives two floors above the Sobering Center of Tacoma – a place founded, in part, because of him. He used it so much that he had his own room, his own plastic mattress. The staff there helped save his life the night he took his last drink.
Today, Leading Horse costs the public the same as most other low-income seniors living in subsidized housing on Social Security, Medicaid and food aid.
He pays $206 of the $366 cost of the subsidized apartment out of his monthly $674 Social Security check. He buys food, toiletries and cleaning supplies with $163 from the state Department of Social and Health Services.
He has a caseworker and goes to counseling at MDC for depression and addictions at a cost of about $3,000 a year. He has had one hospitalization, for an ailment not related to alcohol, for which Medicaid paid $13,000.
A year ago, The News Tribune heard that Leading Horse was sober and living in an apartment, with social services, at MDC. Those close to him said he wasn’t ready for the demands of having his story told.
Then last month, Joan Staples-Baum, who runs Tahoma Indian Center and has known Leading Horse since 1992, called to say he had achieved three years of sobriety. Since the paper had chronicled him at his lowest, she said, it should write about him now.
He was ready to tell his story, she said.
How could we trust Leading Horse had stayed sober so long? The counselors, firefighters and other professionals who know him attest to it. So does his behavior.
When he’s on the bottle, he cannot have a few drinks and stop. He drinks until the alcohol stops him and he becomes a public nuisance. He drinks himself into the ground.
The last time he got dry was July 2007. He ended up passed out on the street and was evicted from an MDC apartment that November for breaking house rules, said Mark Pereboom, MDC president and chief executive.
For this story, Leading Horse met with a reporter over five interviews, each two to five hours long, each with an advocate present.
He agreed that the medical, social and law enforcement records documenting his impact on the community were important to his story. With an advocate present, he signed forms releasing those documents to the newspaper after hearing a thorough explanation of what each meant.
That allowed for a thorough tally of his bills, minus hundreds of detox stays and ambulance transports for which records were not available.
For the story in 2001, the newspaper did not have access to his private medical data. It extrapolated on the number of incidents and arrived at a total – $2.1 million – that reflected the full cost of services rather than Medicaid reimbursements.
In recent interviews, Leading Horse agreed he had to be honest about his bad times, and he was unforgiving in his recollections. But as awful as his life was for so long, he believes some good has come of it.
“I know who I am. God, I know who I am,” he said. “When I was drinking and using, I broke all Ten Commandments. They say do not steal. I did that. They say do not commit adultery. I did that. They say do not kill. I sold some heroin to a man and he overdosed.
“Over the years, I asked God to forgive me. God has already forgiven me. I have to forgive myself. When I accept myself for who and what I am, then I feel at peace.”
BORN WITH A DEMON IN THE GENES
Lewis Leading Horse was a bootlegger, his youngest son says. A bringer of ruin to the Sioux, and to his own family. Cecil was seven when he picked up one of his father’s bottles and took his first drink, and his last for the next 12 years. He was reeling and sick when his mother found him.
“She said to Dad, ‘You get your bottle and get out of here.’ He was gone for a month,” Leading Horse said.
His father came back, stopped selling liquor and his daily drinking. From then on, he worked five days a week, drank with friends on Saturday and spent Sunday with his wife and children.
He changed, but all six of his children fell to alcoholism. As far as he knows, Cecil Leading Horse is the only one who has not died of it, the only one to achieve sobriety.
“They’re all gone because of drink,” he said. “My last sister was in Omaha, Neb. She was told not to drink. She drank a half a pint of vodka. She wanted to die.”
Leading Horse and her son were with her when she took the drink that loosed a torrent of blood into her stomach and lungs. She drowned in it.
Leading Horse dropped out of school in the seventh grade in Lexington, Neb., and worked as a laborer. He’d steal cars and drive them until the gas ran out. He began to drink at 19.
“That was just to belong to the crowd,” he said.
He almost regretted turning 21. Buying alcohol legally wasn’t as much fun as sneaking around to get it.
“Them days my father was telling me about the signs that said ‘No Indians Allowed.’ He said ‘When you grow up, you will be in places where they don’t like Indians,’ ” he said. “My dad was an angry man.”
So was his youngest child.
RUBY
Cecil Leading Horse was 21 when he put on a ceremonial ribbon shirt and went to a dance in Red Lake, Minn. The second he set eyes on Ruby Bull Head, he was jealous of the man dancing with her.
She is Chippewa, and her family honors tribal traditions.
“We got married in the Indian way,” Leading Horse said of the ceremony that did not include a formal marriage certificate. “I told her ‘I’m not going to wear a black suit or buy you a ring or flowers. You want that, you go marry someone else.’ ”
He and Ruby have three sons, ages 42 and 38-year-old twins. Their two daughters are 32 and 20.
“When my oldest son was born, my intention was to go to work,” he said. “I told Ruby, ‘I want the best for him. I don’t want my son to be wearing used clothes, not even used shoes.’ Them days, my friends, they were jealous. I had a son, and I was working, and they didn’t have jobs.”
He’d learned to weld and lay bricks. There was plenty of work, and the pay was good.
“I was getting $18.50 an hour welding,” he said.
He also was getting drunk, with bouts of sobriety.
“Each time, I’d get so far, and want to sober everybody else up,” he said.
In May 1971, his parents checked him in for treatment in Hastings, Neb.
“My father said, ‘Son, we can’t help you. Maybe these people can.’ I didn’t want to listen,” he said. “After 28 days, I walked out. I went to my room and got my clothes and walked to town two miles away. I bought a jug, and all my anger went away. I was happy.”
With him, but mostly without him, Leading Horse’s wife and children have stayed together. They all live together in Sioux Falls, S.D.
He has not seen them since 1996.
On one occasion, he and his eldest son met in Billings, Mont. Leading Horse rode a Greyhound bus east, and his son rode another west. The two had their reunion at the Rescue Mission.
There have been talks, over the phone, of other visits. Ruby keeps him up on family news.
“The youngest, Theresa, 20, graduated in nursing,” he said. “When she graduated, she was crying, she was so happy. I asked my wife, Ruby, what made her decide to be a nurse. She wants to help other people. I’m a proud parent. None of my kids, they don’t drink, they don’t smoke. I asked my oldest son, Nicholas Jr., ‘How come you don’t drink or smoke?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to be like you.’ ”
LEAVING, ALWAYS LEAVING
Ruby was pregnant with the twins when Leading Horse left the first time.
“I said, ‘I’m ready to go. I’m not going to be living off your parents.’ It took me two rides to get to Minneapolis, and three days to get a job roofing,” he said.
It took no time at all to fall in with the wrong people.
He met three white guys with a formula for fast cash.
“We used one guy’s truck and would break into houses and steal furniture,” he said. “They knew how to open the doors without kicking them in. They said to just grab anything and don’t touch anything without wearing gloves.”
They sold their first haul for $2,300, their second for $3,000, and they split everything equally. Leading Horse spent nine months in the break-in business.
Then he hooked a freight train to St. Paul, Minn.
At the day labor center, he waited half an hour until a guy walked in and asked ‘Who wants to go to work?”
He raised his hand. The job as a furniture mover paid $15 cash a day.
There was a long stretch of drinking, and some time with Ruby.
In 1979, at 33, he took off hitchhiking.
“It took me a year and 11 months. I could tell my kids I’d visited all 48 (lower) states,” he said.
He did not tell them that he’d tried heroin on the journey and had become an addict as well as an alcoholic.
When he came home, he stayed with Ruby 10 years. In 1985 he was found to be legally blind from cataracts and began getting Social Security disability checks.
EVERYTHING IS EASY IN WASHINGTON
In 1989 he got a letter from a cousin in Seattle.
“She made it seem like it was so easy to get by. Places were so cheap,” he said. “She sent me a bus ticket on Greyhound to Seattle and $20 and gave me her address on Lower Queen Anne. She did not write down the apartment number, so I went looking for her.
“I seen a store on the corner, and the first thing I seen was a bottle.”
He made his first purchase in Seattle and sat down at a bus stop to drink it.
Over the next three years, he got to know cops, firefighters and the emergency department staff at Harborview Medical Center.
His cousin went home to the Midwest in 1991.
Early in 1992, Leading Horse drifted south to Tacoma.
“The only place I knew was Wright’s Park and Tim’s Handy Mart,” he said. “I was always half drunk.”
On April 13, 1992, he made his first visit to St. Joseph Hospital. He made his second the same day. From that day to his last visit on Dec. 17, 2009, he would go – or more often be taken by ambulance – to St. Joseph 590 times. In 1995 alone, he made 121 emergency room visits.
Over the same period, he went to the emergency room at Tacoma General Hospital 756 times.
On his 499th visit to the emergency department, staff at TG told him they would have a 500th visit party for him. They figured it would be the next day.
“I forgot to go until the next day after that,” he said. “I went, ‘Damn. I missed my party.’ ”
Most times, aid crews would respond to a call about a man having convulsions or a seizure. A passer-by would see him face down in the park or the street, and call 911. Firefighters driving by would spot him passed out streetside.
His visits at both hospitals – 1,346 total – were paid for by Medicaid. Taking into account time spent off the streets in inpatient care, rehab, jail and prison, that averages out to just less than one ER trip a day. Some days there were three.
Most were for acute intoxication, including convulsions. Sometimes he fell and cut or injured himself, felt sore or had chest pains.
St. Joseph billed Medicaid a total of $364,886 for care it gave him from 1995 through 2009, said Gale Robinette, spokesman for Franciscan Health System.
Tacoma General billed Medicaid $785,966 for his care during the period he was drinking. Three visits for other problems since he’s been sober cost $13,000, said Marce Edwards, spokeswoman for MultiCare Health System.
Since his arrival in Tacoma, Leading Horse’s tab at the two hospitals has hit $1,575,476. That does not include ambulances, court and jail time, detox, rehab or time at the sobering center. His early detox records are not available, but he estimated they would be around $420,000, based on how often he checked in.
His cumulative bill was part of the impetus for the sobering center that opened at MDC in August 2005.
The point was to get chronic homeless inebriates into the right level of care at the right cost. They did not need an emergency department. They needed a place to sleep it off.
It worked for Leading Horse. In 2004, the year before the center opened, he went to the St. Joseph emergency room 51 times. In 2006, the center’s first full year of operation, he was down to 18 ER visits. In 2009, he went seven times.
NIGHTS ON A BUS BENCH
When he wasn’t in a hospital or sobering center, he needed somewhere else to lay his head.
“Every bus stop was my bus stop,” he said of his drunken days in Tacoma. “The bus stop in front of the Department of Corrections, I slept there and I drank there.”
The covered bench at the Commerce Street transit center was better in bad weather.
Leading Horse didn’t care much about eating, but he knew where the free meals were: Tahoma Indian Center and Hospitality Kitchen.
He liked being clean, and knew where he could get a shower, wash his clothes and get used clothes.
The first thing he did when he woke up was panhandle $3 or so to start drinking.
When Tacoma residents asked the city for an anti-panhandling ordinance, Leading Horse was a big part of the reason.
He was an impetus for the Alcohol Impact Area residents demanded when they got fed up with public places overtaken by people drunk on strong, cheap booze.
He is ashamed of the man he was then. When he was sober, there was a sweetness to him. When he was drunk, he led with his fists.
“Every time I went to jail, it was for assault,” he said. “I was in more jails than you can count.”
He said he was given a single cell because he would fight with other inmates.
In 2008, he passed out somewhere in public, as usual. Someone called 911.
“The paramedic tried to grab my bottle,” he recalled. “I used my left hand, and he went backward, and I hit him with my right. He was out before he hit the ground.”
Leading Horse was convicted of felony assault and spent four months of a yearlong sentence in the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton.
It was a welcome break for Tacoma’s emergency services.
A PLACE OF RESPITE AND CREATIVITY
When Leading Horse was still new to Tacoma, Indian Center director Joan Staples-Baum found him having a seizure and called 911.
“They told me to make him comfortable, cover him up, let him sleep it off, give him something to drink when he wakes up and let him sit for a while,” she recalled.
When he was sober, he was welcome to come for coffee, meals and companionship.
“He used to bring me some beautiful artwork,” Staples-Baum said. “He’s an incredible artist, and one of my favorites is a gray, purple and yellow abstract. It was what I thought his brain might be like. It still had light in it.” He uses colored pencils and markers to make pictures of eagles, dream catchers and Indian symbols.
“I draw to pass the time and to bring back memories,” Leading Horse said. “If I make a mistake, I won’t erase it. I’ll shade it in.”
The Indian Center is a program of Catholic Community Services of Southwest Washington, based in Tacoma. Staples-Baum encourages guests who are broken to seek help, or at least accept it.
She has worked there since 1991. She incorporates Indian ways into the day and honors guests by maintaining a safe environment.
There were times when Leading Horse did not extend the same honor.
“I had to boot you out a few times,” Staples Baum said to Leading Horse, who had come to visit her at the center on a sunny fall day.
He deserved it, he said. He knew the rules: No drinking. No drugs in the center.
The reasons are on the wall: photographs of Indians who have had contact with the center, some as benefactors and role models, some who came for fellowship, some who found a place to be safe from their addictions and demons.
The photos are of people who have died: some of natural causes, many from drugs, alcohol, violence or the elements.
Leading Horse used to come to the center with his friend, Bear. Away from the center, they drank together.
“You know, there are so many of us alcoholics and addicts that don’t listen. We know better,” he said.
They keep drinking and let the alcohol erode them from the inside out.
“Bear was a diabetic,” Leading Horse said. “First they cut his leg off below the knee. He went to Spokane and died in treatment.”
THE DUBIOUS RECORD
Leading Horse holds the state record for rehab visits to Pioneer Center North in Sedro Woolley, 105 miles north of Tacoma.
“I’ve been to Sedro-Woolley 28 times,” he said.
Those stays have cost taxpayers a total of $96,735.
He’d start at MDC’s detox center, move to Puget Sound Hospital, and then ride up to Pioneer North.
“In the past, I came there for three hots and a cot,” he said. “I’d get my (Social Security) money built up and when I got out, I’d go back on the drink again.”
That pot of money at the end of the stay, plus getting out of the elements and eating well, seemed like good enough reasons to go to Sedro Woolley, but not to get sober.
“I’d get there, and I’m just waiting to get back to Tacoma to get drunk,” he said.
“Why did you keep coming back to Tacoma?” Staples-Baum asked.
“My payee was here, and it would be a hard time changing,” he said.
Because he had no home, no address for his Social Security checks, he had a payee, a person who accepted the checks for him and doled the money out to him.
(Today he still has a payee because he is legally blind, but she’s not the same person who doled out money to him in his drinking days.)
If he had enough money, from the state or from panhandling, Leading Horse would buy vodka and fortified wine. If he was short, he drank cheaper.
“I got so bad, I drank rubbing alcohol,” he said. “Other people mixed it with water. Not me. Yeah, it burned. I got it down. I smiled.”
THE LAST DRINK
On Sept. 29, 2008, Leading Horse took his last drink.
He was about a block from the sobering center. The tree on the corner where he stood had a big hole in it, perfect for hiding a half pint of vodka and two cans of Steel Reserve 211.
“I took a big drink, hid my stash and came in (the sobering center),” he said. “I thought I was having dry heaves.” He was throwing up blood, splashing it on the floor, the bathroom, the staff. He blacked out.
“When I came to, I was on the way to the hospital. I started crying. I asked God to help me. I didn’t want to die. I looked at myself. There was blood all over me.”
In the ambulance, he heard someone say: “Step on it. Step on it.”
In the TG emergency department, he felt someone give him a shot in the chest, another in the arm and a cup of something to drink.
“When I came to, a nurse pushed a button and said ‘He’s up.’ The nurse, she was crying, she was so happy,” he said.
Dr. William Holderman repaired his ruptured esophagus. He had heard of Leading Horse, and now he was saving his life.
“I pulled up a chair and talked to him and listened to him,” Holderman recalled this month. “I told him, ‘I’m here to help you, and you have control over your illness.’ I told him the liver is an amazing organ and can withstand enormous damage, but this was the classic last straw.”
Before Leading Horse left the hospital, a nurse and doctor showed him videos of people who died of the same thing. One more drink, they told him, and he would be in the ground. “They said, ‘Even if you take a half teaspoon, we’ll never see you again. We’ll see your body.’ ”
He went to his tree.
His stash was still there.
“I opened it and poured it out,” he said. “I didn’t want to die drunk. I wanted to live.”
Because he wasn’t drunk, the detox and sobering centers couldn’t take him. He spent that night on a bench at the Commerce Street transit station.
The next day, he picked up his check and paid off his $65 tab at the Handy Mart.
And with that, Leading Horse began his journey toward sobriety. He started with 19 days at Puget Sound Hospital to recuperate from his throat injury and wait for an opening in Sedro-Woolley, where he then stayed for two months.
He still has the sobriety coin he was given when he left on Dec. 14, 2008.
A year later, staff invited him back to give a talk as an honored alumnus.
THE HOME HE FINALLY HAS
When he came back to Tacoma, it was to a real home.
Rebecca Bird, his friend and drug and alcohol counselor, arranged another chance with MDC’s transitional housing program.
Overlooking Seventh Street and Fawcett Avenue, Leading Horse’s studio apartment is spare, immaculate and a source of great pride. Every morning, he wakes up happy.
“I get up and look in the mirror, smile and say good morning to myself. Before, I did not have the courage.”
Or the mirror.
Now he has that, and the twin bed he bought at Kmart, his God’s Eye and dream catcher weavings on the wall, the clock radio, television and the small bookshelf that serves as his pantry.
The apartments are secure, closed to the general public. That has protected him from his old drinking companions and the many, many people who preyed on him for a few bucks from his Social Security checks.
For two decades, he could fit all he owned in a locker and a backpack. Now he has clean clothes every morning, a frying pan and a toaster to set off the smoke alarm.
“These are the things I couldn’t have when I was drinking and using,” he said. “I would look at things and wish I could have them, but I couldn’t. Now ...”
Now his alarm wakes him at 5:45 a.m. He punches the coffee maker on and starts his daily six or seven cups. He watches “Bonanza” on TV Land and cooks three eggs, four pieces of bacon and two pieces of toast. He cleans the apartment, takes out the trash, plans his day.
Twice a week he goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, two of which he leads. He lets people in and out of the two halls he uses.
“He is a key holder for both,” said his case manager, Lorrie Edson.“That is excellent. That is trust.”
Edson has known him since 2004. She’s been delighted to teach him how to use a stove, cook an egg, shop for groceries, clean a bathroom.
She has been part of the support system MDC has wrapped around Leading Horse, a support system he says he still needs.
He attends fellowship groups and house meetings. He manages his finances and keeps his apartment clean.
Some days he rides the bus to Pioneer Square in Seattle to see friends at the Chief Seattle Club, which, like Tahoma Indian Center, does not allow alcohol or drunkenness.
He gets out and about in his neighborhood with the walker he’s needed since a hip injury.
Going out has its dangers. One weak moment, he knows, could kill him.
His old friends are liabilities. He and Staples-Baum ran into each other at Safeway last month, and while they spoke, some old buddies saw him. They mocked him for being sober.
“You’re going to hear it because people don’t want to see you where you are,” Staples-Baum told him. “They want you where they are.”
He agrees. Now he turns it back on them. “I tell them they don’t have an extra set of clothes. I ask them when was the last time they had a shower or a decent meal.”
There is support, too, in the neighborhood.
When he rolls past the fire station a block away, firefighters yell “Hey, Cecil, good to see you doing so well.”
“Everybody’s proud of you,” Tacoma Fire Department Deputy Chief Jolene Davis said recently. “What a great comeback.”
His life is full of mistakes, but he’s choosing not to erase it. He’s shading it in.
THE HOME HE INTENDS TO REGAIN
“My (AA) sponsor came up here,” Leading Horse said, sitting at his kitchen table. “He looked around and said, ‘Damn. You have everything.’ ”
Someday, Leading Horse intends to give it all up.
“I don’t have plans,” he said. “I have intentions. My intention is to go back to where I grew up.”
He has spoken to Ruby about it. She told him that she’s had to be mother and father to their children. She said she’s taken him back before, and will take him back again.
“I’ve been waiting, and I can still wait,” she told him.
(Ruby declined to talk to The News Tribune for this story.)
During a recent phone conversation, Leading Horse said Ruby told their sons and daughters, “Dad’s coming home for Christmas.”
Leading Horse heard his son say, “About time.”
It’s not time yet. He, Ruby and his counselors have agreed it is too soon for such a life change.
“Summer,” Leading Horse said, hopefully.
He might take a plane. A Greyhound would be fine, too.
“The buses stop at every little town,” he said. “I’m not in a hurry to get home. This is my last trip.”
Nicholas Cecil Leading Horse, member of the Sioux Nation, imagines himself home again, and sober.
“I see myself as walking alone, in green grass, with birds chirping, and my destination is a hill,” he said. “Only I know when I reach that hill what’s going to be there.”
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/street
