Wounded Knee Massacre

Date December 29, 1890

This last major confrontation between American Indians and US government troops represented the end of violent resistance by American Indians to the loss of their independence and signaled the closing of the American frontier.

Also known as Battle of Wounded Knee

Locale Wounded Knee Creek, near Pine Ridge, South Dakota

Key Figures

• Sitting Bull (1831–90), last great Sioux warrior chief
• Big Foot (c. 1825–90), chief of the Minneconjou Sioux
• Wovoka (Jack Wilson; c. 1858–1932), Paiute messiah of the Ghost Dance religion
• William Cody (Buffalo Bill; 1846–1917), frontier scout and showman
• James W. Forsyth (1835–1906), Seventh Cavalry officer in charge at Wounded Knee
• James McLaughlin (1842–1923), agent in charge at the Standing Rock reservation
• Nelson A. Miles (1839–1925), commander of the Division of the Missouri

Summary of Event

On December 15, 1890, two weeks before the Battle of Wounded Knee was fought, Sitting Bull, the last great Sioux warrior chief, was killed in an effort to suppress the Ghost Dance religion, which had been begun by Wovoka. Wovoka’s admixture of American Indian and Christian beliefs inspired hope in an eventual triumph of the American Indians over the White settlers, who, Wovoka envisioned, would fall through the earth and disappear forever. Although Wovoka preached passivity and patience, some of his zealous disciples carried a more aggressive message. Among them were a Minneconjou Sioux named Kicking Bear and his brother-in-law Short Bull. They and other followers of Wovoka introduced the Ghost Dance to the Dakota reservations, including Standing Rock and Pine Ridge.

In an effort to suppress Ghost Dancing, James McLaughlin, the government agent in charge of the Standing Rock reservation, first arrested Kicking Bear, then moved against Sitting Bull, an old adversary and, in McLaughlin’s mind, the symbolic center of tribal unrest. McLaughlin was convinced that Ghost Dancing could be suppressed only if Sitting Bull were in prison. He called Sitting Bull a fomenter of disturbances, prompting General Nelson A. Miles, US Army commander of the Missouri Division, to send William Cody to Standing Rock to persuade the chief to negotiate with Miles. However, McLaughlin complained to Washington and had Cody’s mission aborted.

What followed was a fiasco. Forty-three American Indian police, commanded by Lieutenant Bull Head, surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin and ordered him to come outside. Sitting Bull obeyed, but one of the assembled Ghost Dancers, angered at the arrest, shot Bull Head with a rifle. While attempting to fire back at his assailant, Bull Head accidentally shot Sitting Bull at the same moment that another American Indian policeman fired a lethal shot through the old chief’s head.

When news of Sitting Bull’s death reached Big Foot, the chief of the Minneconjou at Cherry Creek, he decamped his followers and started a journey toward Pine Ridge, hoping to find protection under Chief Red Cloud. His band consisted of 120 men and 230 women and children. Big Foot himself was ill with pneumonia and had to make the journey in a wagon. On December 28, near Porcupine Creek, the Indians encountered troops of the Seventh US Cavalry under the command of Major Samuel Whitside. Although near death, Big Foot arranged a meeting with Whitside, who informed the chief that his orders were to escort the American Indians to Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot agreed to comply with Whitside’s directions, because Wounded Knee was on the way to Pine Ridge. Whitside then had his men move Big Foot to an army ambulance to make his trip more comfortable.

The combined American Indian trains reached Wounded Knee Creek before nightfall. Whitside oversaw their encampment south of his military bivouac and provided them with rations, tents, and a surgeon to tend Big Foot. He also took measures to ensure that none of the American Indians could escape by posting sentinels and setting up rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns in key positions.

During the night, the remaining Seventh Cavalry troops arrived, and command of the operation passed from Major Whitside to Colonel James W. Forsyth. The colonel told the junior officer that he had received orders to accompany Big Foot’s bands to the Union Pacific Railroad for transport to a military prison in Omaha. The next morning, on December 29, after issuing hardtack rations to the American Indians, Colonel Forsyth ordered them to surrender their weapons, and his soldiers stacked up the American Indians’ arms and ammunition. Not satisfied that all weapons had been turned in, Forsyth sent details to search the American Indians’ tipis. The searchers then ordered the American Indians to remove their blankets, which, the soldiers assumed, masked hidden weapons.

The situation grew tense. The American Indians were both humiliated and angry, but they were badly outnumbered and almost all of them had been disarmed. Only the Minneconjou medicine man Yellow Bird openly protested. He began performing Ghost Dance steps and chanted lines from the holy songs that assured the American Indians that their Ghost Shirts would not let the soldiers’ bullets strike them.

The soldiers found only two rifles during the last search, but one of them belonged to a deaf Sioux brave named Black Coyote, who resisted them. Soldiers grabbed him and spun him around, attempting to disarm him, and at that point Black Coyote fired his rifle, possibly by accident. The debacle followed has been called a battle, but it was little more than a massacre. The soldiers opened fire on the unarmed Minneconjou at once, slaughtering many of them with repeated volleys from their carbines. Most of the American Indians tried to flee, but the Hotchkiss guns opened up on them from their hillside positions. Firing at a rate of almost one round per second, the soldiers’ shots tore into the camp, indiscriminately killing braves, women, and children. The Hotchkiss guns turned the rout into a massacre.

When it was over, Big Foot and more than half his followers were dead or seriously wounded. One hundred fifty-three lay dead on the ground, but many of the fatally wounded had crawled off to die elsewhere. One estimate claimed that there were barely more than fifty American Indian survivors, only those transported after the massacre. Twenty-five soldiers were killed; most had been shot accidentally by their own comrades, not by American Indians.

After the wounded troopers were decamped and sent to Pine Ridge, a detail of soldiers rounded up the surviving American Indians: four men and forty-seven women and children. Placed in wagons, they also set out for Pine Ridge, leaving their dead to a blizzard that prevented their immediate burial and froze them into grotesque, hoary reminders of the debacle.

Significance

An inquiry followed the events at Wounded Knee, prompted by General Miles, who brought charges against Forsyth, but the colonel was exonerated and nothing else came of the investigation. The affair traditionally has been viewed as the last armed resistance of American Indians to reservation resettlement. It and the death of Sitting Bull, both in 1890, although not singled out, were certainly factors in the conclusions of Frederick Jackson Turner, who claimed in his renowned 1893 thesis that the US frontier closed during the year of the massacre.

For American Indians, however, the infamous day did not die with the victims. On February 27, 1973, more than two hundred members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took the reservation site at Wounded Knee by force, proclaiming it the Independent Oglala Sioux Nation and demanding that the federal government make amends for past injustices by reviewing all American Indian treaties and policies. Federal marshals immediately surrounded the group. After a two-month standoff, the marshals persuaded the American Indians to surrender with promises of a public airing of grievances. For American Indians, Wounded Knee has remained an important symbol of the Euro-American injustice and suppression of their people.

Because of this lingering injustice, activists continued to make efforts into the third decade of the twenty-first century to have the site and its significance sufficiently preserved as well as to undo the positive recognition bestowed on some of the White soldiers involved. Beginning largely in the 2010s, several national legislators had supported calls from American Indian tribes to officially rescind twenty Medals of Honor given to soldiers who had perpetrated the massacre as a measure of accounting for the atrocities of the incident. While the state Senate of South Dakota passed a resolution in 2021 demanding a congressional investigation into the medals, congressional members continued to argue on behalf of federal legislation such as the Remove the Stain Act. In 2022, the Oglala Sioux and the Cheyenne River Sioux made a joint purchase of forty acres of land, previously privately owned, near the site to ensure that it returned to American Indian ownership for educational and cultural preservation. Additionally, the tribes praised the return of more than one hundred artifacts from the site that had been stolen and kept in a Massachusetts museum. The following year, US representative Dusty Johnson, having collaborated with Sioux representatives, introduced the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act with the aim of bestowing federal protection on the land through a trust-like status, further enabling preservation to occur. Later that year, the House passed the bill.

Bibliography

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Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. 1932. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

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Walker, Mark. "Tribes Want Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Massacre Rescinded." The New York Times, 23 Apr. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/us/politics/tribes-medal-honor-wounded-knee.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.