Wounded Knee Massacre

WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE

WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE marked the climax of United States efforts to subjugate Lakota-speaking Sioux Indians at the end of the nineteenth century. During 1890 a new religious movement called the Ghost Dance captured the loyalty of many western Indians. On the Sioux reservations, this movement attracted men and women who resented the government's heavy-handed tactics and were drawn to new rituals that promised an era of peace and future union with dead relatives. Unfortunately, just as tensions began to rise over the Ghost Dance, an inexperienced political appointee, Daniel Royer, took control of the agency at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. On 15 November, fearing that the ghost dancers might become violent, Royer called for military assistance. Tensions rose again on 15 December, when the Indians at Pine Ridge learned that Sitting Bull had been killed while being arrested on a nearby Standing Rock reservation. The agent there had believed arresting the old warrior would quell the Ghost Dance at his agency. Fearing similar action at the neighboring Cheyenne River reservation, the Miniconjou leader Big Foot gathered his followers and departed overland to join allies at Pine Ridge. Big Foot and his band were apprehended by elements of the Seventh Cavalry near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge reservation on the evening of 28 December.

On the morning of 29 December, with troops deployed in a hollow square around the Indians, regimental commander Colonel George A. Forsyth ordered everyone in Big Foot's band to surrender their weapons. One warrior fired a concealed gun while being disarmed; the surrounding troops responded by opening fire. Hotchkiss guns on a nearby hillside fired indiscriminately into the Indian encampment gunning down those fleeing to safety. When the shooting stopped Big Foot, along with 145 others, including 45 women and 18 children, lay dead. The official death toll rose to 153 when seven of the fifty-one band members known to be wounded that day later died. In addition, an unknown number either were killed and carried from the scene by relatives or escaped and later died from their wounds. The army reported twenty-five soldiers dead and thirty-nine wounded; Forsyth's superiors asserted that some of the army casualties were victims of crossfire from their own comrades. His commander relieved him of his command and charged him with incompetence, but he was exonerated. Later, twenty

---

soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for their service in the massacre. Sioux leaders continue to protest these awards and to advocate the creation of a memorial park at the site.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Utley, Robert. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964.

Frederick E. Hoxie