WOUNDED KNEE
The Wounded Knee Massacre rapidly unfolded on 29 December 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek, on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. The U.S. Army was trying to assemble--and disarm—a group of Lakota Sioux, as part of the general take-over of indigenous peoples’ land and, specifically, to allay settlers’ apprehension about the performance of the Ghost Dance, which they believed signified preparation for war. The Dance was actually the center of a religious movement created by a Paiute prophet called Wovoka, who predicted the return of Jesus as a Native American. Upon that Second Coming, the white interlopers would disappear, the great buffalo herds would return, and the spirits of deceased ancestors would rejoin their families.
The massacre might have ignited when a deaf man named Black Coyote, failing to understand soldiers' orders, refused to surrender his rifle. Two soldiers grabbed him from behind. The rifle discharged. Reacting to that—or to a signal from a Ghost Dancer named Yellow Bird--a few Lakota Sioux produced hitherto hidden rifles and fired at the soldiers. A maelstrom of gunfire followed, even though many Lakota Sioux had already of course been disarmed.
Some 500 Army troopers had encircled the encampment, armed with, among other weaponry, four small artillery pieces: rapid-fire Hotchkiss mountain guns. The Lakota Sioux had totaled about 350: about 120 were women and children. Soldiers hunted down and killed women and children seeking to escape the carnage. Some got as far as two miles away from the camp.
Perhaps some 300 Lakota Sioux were killed. The Army lost 25 soldiers, and 39 were wounded, many from “friendly fire.”
Ten days before Wounded Knee, General Nelson A. Miles (1839-1925) had telegraphed Commanding General of the Army John Scofield that “the difficult Indian problem” could not be solved by the Army in the field. Rather, Congress should honor “the treaty obligations that the Indians were entreated and coerced into signing. They signed away a valuable portion of their reservation, and it is now occupied by white people, for which they [native Americans] have received nothing.” In a letter to his wife, Miles was more direct: the event was “the most abominable criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children”. Contrary to that measured assessment was that of L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), set out in an Aberdeen paper a few days after the horror: “. . . our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” Baum’s "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was ten years in the future.
For this campaign, the Army awarded a generous 20 Medals of Honor. Twenty. One was bestowed upon a soldier who had returned a panicked pack mule to the “skirmish line."
This photo, taken by George E. “Gus” Trager, shows soldiers holding moccasins and other “souvenirs” looted from Lakota Sioux dead. A local newspaper marveled at the trove: “the finest and rarest collection of war dresses, ghost shirts, trinkets, moccasins, etc., now on earth.” Some of the plunder made its way to a museum in Barre, Massachusetts, which returned to the Oglala Sioux in 2022 more than 150 items, including a “scalp” and a beaded baby’s garment with a bullet hole.