Wounded Knee Tragedy

Wounded Knee Tragedy (29 December 1890), bloodbath that engulfed Chief Big Foot's band of Miniconjou Lakota Sioux by the U.S. Army. The slaughter grew out of a revitalization movement known as the Ghost Dance, which swept western Indian reservations in 1889–1890. Prescribed dances and rituals promised the eradication of white people, a return to the old way of life, and reunion with ancestors long dead. On the impoverished and demoralized Sioux reservations in the Dakotas, people embraced the new religion with fervor. Fearful of violence, Indian agents called for military assistance. Strong forces occupied the Pine Ridge and Rosebud agencies.

The overall commander, Major General Nelson A. Miles, sought to end the confrontation peacefully. At the same time, he pressed for the imprisonment of such “troublemakers” as Sitting Bull and Big Foot. Sitting Bull was killed on 15 December 1890 while resisting arrest by Indian policemen on the Standing Rock Reservation. Big Foot eluded arrest and led his people in a trek toward Pine Ridge. His intent was not hostile, as the military assumed, but peaceful. Cavalry intercepted the band and escorted it to Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation to be disarmed. Big Foot lay in his wagon, ill with pneumonia.

Colonel James W. Forsyth and the Seventh Cavalry, about 500 strong and bolstered by four small‐caliber cannon, surrounded the Indian encampment of about 350 people. Neither side intended a fight, but the Indians resisted disarming, and the search for weapons built tension and suspicion. A rifle accidentally discharged and touched off battle. After a brief exchange of close‐range fire and hand‐to‐hand fighting in which Big Foot was killed, the Indians scattered and the artillery opened fire. The village was flattened and knots of Indians fleeing in all directions were cut down. Nearly two‐thirds of Big Foot's people, including women and children, were killed or wounded, while the troops lost twenty‐five killed and thirty‐nine wounded. After Wounded Knee, General Miles maneuvered his forces in such fashion as to bring about the surrender of the Ghost Dancers.

The Indians and even General Miles accused the troops of indiscriminate massacre. Although few such incidents can be documented, Wounded Knee poisoned relations between whites and Indians and still symbolizes the wrongs inflicted by one people upon another. In 1973, 200 members of the American Indian Movement chose the site of the Wounded Knee conflict to protest conditions of Indians, a symbolic act that again resulted in violence.
See also Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars.

Bibliography

Robert M. Utley , The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, 1963.
Richard E. Jensen,, R. Eli Paul,, and and John E. Carter , Eyewitness at Wounded Knee, 1991.

Robert M. Utley