By August of 1890, the U.S. government was fearful
that the Ghost Dance was actually a war dance and, in time, the
dancers would turn to rioting. By November, the War Department sent
troops to occupy the Lakota camps at Pine Ridge and Rosebud,
convinced that the dancers were preparing to do battle against the
government. In reality, the Indians were bracing themselves to defend
their rights to continue performing the sacred ceremonies. In
reaction to the military encampment, the Lakotas planned various
strategies to avoid confrontation with the soldiers, but the military
was under orders to isolate Ghost Dance leaders from their
devotees.
The
Hunkpapa Sioux Chief, Sitting Bull, had returned from Canada with a
promise of a pardon following the Battle at Little Bighorn and was an
advocate of the Ghost Dance. At his request, Kicking Bear traveled to
the Standing Rock reservation to preach and made numerous Hunkpapa
Sioux converts to the new religion.
Kicking
Bear:
"My brothers, I bring to you the promise of a day in which there will
be no white man to lay his hand on the bridle of the Indian horse;
when the red men of the prairie will rule the world . . . I bring you
word from your fathers the ghosts, that they are now marching to join
you, led by the Messiah who came once to live on earth with the white
man, but was cast out and killed by them."
Kicking
Bear (quoting Wovoka):
"The earth is getting old, and I will make it new for my chosen
people, the Indians, who are to inhabit it, and among them will be
all those of their ancestors who have died...
I
will cover the earth with new soil to a depth of five times the
height of a man, and under this new soil will be buried the
whites...The new lands will be covered with sweet-grass and running
water and trees, and herds of buffalo and ponies will stray over it,
that my red children may eat and drink, hunt and rejoice."
(Source: Eyewitness at
Wounded Knee, 1991)
Reservation agents began to fear that Sitting
Bull’s influence over other tribes would lead to violence. By
December reservation official grew increasingly alarmed by the Ghost
Dance outbreak, and the military was called upon to locate and arrest
those who were considered agitators, such as the Sioux Chiefs,
Sitting Bull and Big Foot.
On December 15, 1890, Sitting
Bull and eight of his warriors were
murdered by agency police sent to arrest
him at the Standing Rock reservation. The
official reason given for the shooting
claimed that he had resisted arrest. Fearing further reprisal, some
of his followers fled in terror to Big Foot’s camp of Miniconjou
Sioux. While many of Big Foot’s group were devout Ghost Dancers,
others had already begun to leave the religion. Old Big Foot was a
peaceful leader and was not attempting to cause further agitation of
the situation. But after the slaying of Sitting Bull, Big Foot was
placed on the list of "fomenters of disturbances," and his arrest had
been ordered. Upon arrest, his group was to be transferred to Fort
Bennett.
Under cover of the night on December 23, a band of
350 people left the Miniconjou village on the Cheyenne River to begin
a treacherous 150-mile, week-long trek through the Badlands to reach
the Pine Ridge Agency.
Although Chief Big Foot was aged and seriously ill with pneumonia,
his group traversed the rugged, frozen terrain of the Badlands in
order to reach the protection of Chief Red Cloud who had promised
them food, shelter, and horses. It is reported that both Big Foot and
Red Cloud wanted peace. On December 28, the group was surrounded by
Major Samuel M. Whitside and the Seventh Calvary (the old regiment of
General George Custer). Big Foots band hoisted a white flag, but the
army apprehended the Indians, forcing them to the bank of Wounded
Knee Creek. There, four large Hotchkiss cannons had been menacingly
situated atop both sides of the valley overlooking the encampment,
ready to fire upon the Indians.
A rumor ran through the camp that the Indians were
to be deported to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) which had the
reputation for its living conditions being far worse than any prison.
The Lakotas became panicky, and historians have surmised that if the
misunderstanding had been clarified that they were to be taken to a
different camp, the entire horrific incident might have been
averted.
That evening, Colonel James Forsyth arrived with reinforcements and
took over as commander of the operation. The Indians were not allowed
to sleep as the soldiers interrogated them through the night. (It has
been reported that many of the questions were to determine who among
the group had been at Little Bighorn fourteen years earlier. In
addition, eyewitnesses claimed that the soldiers had been drinking to
celebrate the capture of the ailing Big Foot.)
The soldiers ordered that the Indians be stripped
of their weapons, and this further agitated an increasingly tense and
serious situation. While the soldiers searched for weapons, a few of
the Indians began singing Ghost Dance songs, and one of them (thought
to be the medicine man, Yellow Bird, although this is still disputed
by historians) threw dirt in a ceremonial act. This action was
misunderstood by the soldiers as a sign of imminent hostile
aggression, and within moments, a gun discharged. It is believed that
the gun of a deaf man, Black Coyote, accidentally fired as soldiers
tried to take it from him. Although the inadvertent single shot did
not injure anyone, instantaneously the soldiers retaliated by
spraying the unarmed Indians with bullets from small arms, as well as
the Hotchkiss canons which overlooked the scene.
(Hotchkiss canons are capable of firing two pound explosive shells at
a rate of fifty per minute.)
With only their bare hands to fight back, the
Indians tried to defend themselves, but the incident deteriorated
further into bloody chaos, and the 350 unarmed Indians were
outmatched and outnumbered by the nearly 500 U.S. soldiers.
The majority of the massacre fatalities occurred
during the initial ten to twenty minutes of the incident, but the
firing lasted for several hours as the army chased after those who
tried to escape into the nearby ravine. According to recollections by
some of the Indian survivors, the soldiers cried out "Remember the
Little Bighorn" as they sportingly hunted down those who fled --
evidence to them that the massacre was in revenge of Custers demise
at Little Bighorn in 1876.
(Recorded by Santee Sioux, Sid
Byrd, from oral histories of several survivors.)
Many of the injured died of exposure in the
freezing weather, and several days after the incident the dead were
strewn as far as approximately two to five miles away from the
original site. By mid-afternoon on December 29, 1890 the
indiscriminate slaughter ceased. Nearly three-hundred men (including
Chief Big Foot), women, and children -- old and young -- were dead on
the frosty banks of Wounded Knee Creek. Twenty-nine soldiers also
died in the melee, but it is believed that most of the military
causalities were a result of "friendly" crossfire that occurred
during the fighting frenzy. Twenty-three soldiers from the Seventh
Calvary were later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for the
slaughter of defenseless Indians at Wounded Knee.
The wounded and dying were taken to a makeshift
hospital in the Pine Ridge Episcopal Church. Ironically, above the
pulpit hung a Christmas banner which read:
Peace
on Earth, Good Will to Men.
A blizzard swept over the countryside the night of
December 29, and when it cleared days later, the valley was strewn
with frozen, contorted dead bodies. A burial party returned to the
site on New Years Day, 1891. The bodies of the slain were pulled from
beneath the heavy snow and thrown into a single burial pit. It was
reported that four infants were found still alive, wrapped in their
deceased mothers shawls.
American Horse, Oglala Sioux,
and
others described the
carnage:
"There was a woman with an infant in her arms who
was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce...A mother was
shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was
dead was still nursing...The women as they were fleeing with their
babies were killed together, shot right through...and after most all
of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not
killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little
boys...came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came
in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them
there."
While only 150 bodies were interred in the mass grave, Lakotas
estimate that twice as many Indians perished that brutal morning in
1890 -- on a reservation supposedly protected by two treaties.
Black
Elk:
"I did not know then how much was ended. When I
look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the
butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the
crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes young. And I can
see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried
in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful
dream . . . . the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no
center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."
(Source: Black Elk Speaks, c.
1932)
Wounded
Knee Research Resources
Return to 1890s
America: A Chronology
Contributed by Lori
Liggett
Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies Program
Summer 1998