A Massacre: Wounded Knee

The struggle between the Native Americans who had occupied North America for a thousand years and the fast-growing United States came to a tragic end on Dec. 19, 1890 — 135 years ago — when the U.S. Army attacked and killed an estimated 300 Lakota people at what is now Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Most of the dead were women and children and very few were armed. Nineteen of the soldiers would later be awarded the Medal of Honor.

The U.S. Was Unable to Stand By Its Agreements

The young United States government was fairly generous with the Lakota — at first. But over four decades, the Lakota found themselves more constrained in their hunting grounds and more restricted in the territory where they were allowed to settle.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 placed boundaries around Lakota territory for the first time. Migrant white settlers were allowed to travel through Lakota land to head west.

In 1868, the U.S. agreed to give up the Bozeman trail and three forts. The Lakota were allowed to hunt buffalo on surrounding land but weren’t allowed to settle outside their lands.

In 1875, the government required the Lakota to abandon their hunting grounds. The previous year, gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, so the government annexed that region as well.

In 1889, the government shrank the former Great Sioux Reservation even more, cutting a corridor through Lakota land and dividing it into six separate reservations.

A Peaceful Spiritual Movement Spreads

The Lakota people were heartbroken over the poor treatment they received from the U.S. government and from the settlers who poured into the Dakota territory. Not only were their lands taken away, but the influx nearly killed off the native buffalo population. The settlers brought with them sicknesses to which the Lakota had no natural defenses: measles, whooping cough, influenza.

In the winter of 1890, however, the peaceful Lakota began to take comfort in what came to be called the Ghost Dance: a spiritual movement that had begun in Nevada in 1870 in which Native Americans believed they would eventually find justice with the fall of the United States and the return of their land, their dead ancestors and the herds of Buffalo. Believers danced wearing white muslin shirts that they believed would protect them from bullets. By 1890, a third of the Lakota had become believers in the Ghost Dance.

An 1891 illustration of Native Americans performing the Ghost Dance. Note the guns and knives. In fact, no weapons of any kind were allowed in the nonviolent Ghost Dance rituals. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

One can imagine the stir that was caused when the white newcomers learned of the Ghost Dance. Many were convinced it was the start of an armed movement. Newspaper coverage wasn’t helpful — the Chicago Daily Tribune, for example, reported “Indians dancing with guns,” the aim was “to wipe out the whites” and that “fighting (was) expected at any moment.”

On Nov. 13, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison ordered the army into reservations to prevent “any outbreak that may put in peril the lives and homes of the settlers in adjacent states.” One-third of the entire U.S. Army responded.

A Massacre of Mostly Unarmed Lakota

Authorities at the Standing Rock Reservation — 275 miles north of Wounded Knee — sent in police to arrest the most prominent Lakota chief, Sitting Bull.

They arrived at his home at dawn on Dec. 15 to take him into custody. However, some of Sitting Bull’s enraged followers opened fire. In the gunfight, police shot Sitting Bull in the head and chest, killing him.

Sitting Bull

This resulted in widespread panic through the Lakota people. They began to flee their homes to evade the U.S. troops.

On Dec. 28, a small band of Lakota refugees, cold and hungry, surrounded to the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek in southwest South Dakota. The next morning — Dec. 29, 1890 — troops began ransacking the Lakota’s tipis looking for weapons.

At one point, two soldiers were trying to wrestle a gun away from an elderly Lakota man. The gun discharged. No one was hurt, but the soldiers who had surrounded the camp site opened fire with rifles and rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns on the mostly unarmed Lakotas. “Remember Custer!” one cavalryman yelled during the melee.

Women, children and elderly Lakota fled up the creek while the few able-bodied Lakota men tried to slow down the troops as best they could.

Eventually, night fell. Temperatures dropped and a fierce snowstorm rolled in. When soldiers and a burial detail returned three days later, they found victims had turned to ice. They also found a few Lakotas still alive and a few infants who had survived in the arms of their dead mothers.

At least 150 and possibly as many as 300 Lakota people — two-thirds of them women and children — had been mowed down in the massacre. Also killed were 25 U.S. soldiers, but those were found to have been struck by friendly fire.

Soldiers rounded up the dead and buried them in mass graves. Photographers arrived to make pictures that would run in newspapers and would also be turned into popular postcards.

A few survivors were taken into custody and later given to “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who used them in his Wild West Show.

The Army would award 19 Medals of Honor to troops for their service at Wounded Knee.

Soldiers of the 7th Cavalry assigned to burial detail hold moccasins and other souvenirs they looted from the dead. Photo from Voice of America.