Broken Hearts at Wounded Knee

With the close of the Revolutionary War, waves of European settlers pressed against the western American frontier seeking room to pursue their agrarian lifestyle. Vast quantities of cleared land were required. Therefore justified by belief in their Manifest Destiny to settle America from coast to coast, these settlers set out to make history from east to west. The history of resistance by the indigenous population was made in the opposite direction.

One hundred and twenty-two years ago this week, their two histories collided for the final time astride Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Arguably the saddest chapter was written in the struggle of two nations to live independent of each other in the same country.

This is that story.

At one time the Sioux nation in confederation with the Cheyennes and Arapahos controlled the area from the Rockies on the west to the Missouri River in the central Dakotas on the east and from the Yellowstone River on the north to the Arkansas River on the south. Through this vast area streamed wagon trains and railroads during the last half of the 19^th century. While many settlers and adventurers were headed to destinations west of Sioux territory, more than a few settled, prospected, trapped, and hunted on Sioux land. Their frequent clashes brought death to both sides and disease to the Indian population who lacked the immunity the whites had developed from centuries of urban living.

Numbering an estimated 26,000 even after two centuries of European encroachment, the seven main tribes of the Sioux nation created the plains horse culture which enabled them to control their large domain. Thousands of horses and millions of buffalo made the Sioux the richest and largest Indian nation in North America and certainly the wildest, living as they did on the buffalo plains.

The period from 1860 to 1890, however, became the Gotterdammerung of the Sioux culture. In 1868 the aim of US frontier policy was to bring all of the plains Indians under the control of the federal government. Accordingly a treaty was negotiated with the Sioux living west of the Missouri – i.e. west of the central Dakotas – to renounce the claims to most of their 450,000 square mile territory and live on a 16,000 square mile reservation comprising South Dakota west of the Missouri River – about half of the state. Agents were appointed and agencies were established for their governance. Military posts were positioned to create an archipelago of armed forces in the territory. Railroads were to be allowed to cross the reservation. The promise of annuity payments, food rations, cows, physicians, farmers, teachers, and other inducements were to help these prairie dwellers and hunters transition to the white man’s civilization. Thus in one stroke the Sioux were reduced from a free nation to dependent wards of a foreign government.

Even though it was less than what they previously possessed, the land set aside for the Sioux would probably have been sufficient for their numbers if the buffalo had remained and the white man kept away. But times changed rapidly. The railroads enabled tens of thousands of hunters and emigrants to invade the plains on which the Sioux were given exclusive hunting rights beyond their reservation. In a few years the buffalo and native game were hunted by skinners to virtual extinction, eliminating the major food supply of the Sioux. When gold was discovered by illegal prospecting in the Black Hills – property within the reservation boundaries – thousands of miners and law-breakers steamed in despite their treaty violation and Indian protests. The Sioux were forced to renegotiate their land treaty, losing a third of their reservation, including the Black Hills.

Broken treaties and the loss of their last hunting grounds precipitated the Custer wars, which culminated with the massacre of almost the entire 7^th Cavalry Regiment in 1876. Six years later, the Sioux were told their reservation would be further broken up into five smaller reservations – Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Lower Brulé, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock – mostly non-contiguous. In the process, the Sioux lost the Bad Lands, a 60-mile strip which separated the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations on the south from the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock reservations on the north.

Within eight years of the Little Big Horn battle, the buffalo were entirely gone and the Sioux were dependent on government beef rations. Their lives, which for centuries had been organized around plains hunting, now became lives of idleness on the reservation and humiliating dependency. Between 1886 and 1889 Congress cut the Pine Ridge beef ration from eight million pounds to four million pounds and substituted Texas beef herds, which would lose 200 pounds of body flesh during the Dakota winters, instead of the agreed upon northern beef herds, which wintered better. Similar reductions were made on the other reservations.

However, unknown to the eastern Sioux tribes of Dakota, a hopeful great awakening was developing in the west among the Paiute tribe in the territories of Oregon and Washington. Their principal medicine man foretold an Indian millennium in which the Indian ancestors of all tribes and nations would be resurrected, the game and buffalo would be restored, Indians would be forever young, and the Europeans would be driven from Indian ancestral lands.

The apocalyptic Paiute who received this revelation from God, the Great Father, was called Wovoka, a man who alternately referred to himself as the Messiah and the Christ. He claimed to have originally come to earth to bring the white man to repentance from his evil ways, but Wovoka the Messiah had been rejected and indeed crucified by the whites, causing him to return to God. He would now be the Messiah to Indians only. He preached a non-violent lifestyle, exhorting Indians to live peaceful lives, abjure from lying, theft, and alcohol. God, Wovoka prophesied, would eliminate the white man in a flood whose precursor would be an earthquake, signaling Indians to climb to the tops of mountains until the flood recessed.

In order to bring about his apocalyptic millennium, Wovoka instructed all Indians to perform a Ghost Dance in accordance with a method he demonstrated to his early disciples. At the center of the dance circle a sacred pole would be erected. Four being a sacred number in Indian culture, they were to dance continuously throughout four nights and four days, repeating this ritual often in order to hurry the resurrection of their ancestors. The Dance of the Ghosts would also enable them to see some of their dead ancestors even before the final Indian eschaton. Wovoka prophesied that would occur in 1891 with the greening of the spring grasses on the prairie. Indeed other Paiute medicine men claimed to see ancestral ghosts at the edge of the dance circle when the Ghost Dance was performed, and entranced dancers told of encounters with long dead relatives after completing a dance.

Predictably, the news of the Ghost Dance religion spread across the country from tribe to tribe until it reached the ears of Sitting Bull, the most prestigious Sioux medicine man, and Red Cloud, their most famous chief. To confirm the veracity of the Ghost Dance religion, its prophet Wovoka, and to learn the dance ritual, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and other chiefs selected a legation of minor chiefs from several reservations and sent them west to find the Messiah. Remarkably, the delegates traveled west by train and were met at the terminus by Indians who said they were expecting them. Their hosts took them to the base of the Sierras where after two nights of waiting, they met Wovoka around a night camp fire. He told them he had seen them coming in a dream, in fact he claimed he had called them to come. The Sioux visitors saw the scars of crucifixion on his wrists but since he wore moccasins, they couldn’t see his feet. Throughout their visit to Wovoka, the Sioux delegation saw other representatives from many tribes who came and went after confirming the existence of the Messiah and learning his Ghost Dance.

The Sioux remained with Wovoka’s Paiutes through the winter. When Wovoka bade them goodbye in the spring he told them that on their return trip they would encounter a buffalo herd – something that would have been almost unheard of at that time. They were to kill one animal, leaving its head, tail, and feet on the prairie so the buffalo could come to life again. Not only did they encounter a rare herd, but also following Wovoka’s instructions to leave parts of the animal, they claimed to have seen a restored buffalo and the parts were gone.

Moreover, on their return trip, the Sioux delegates claimed to have encountered warriors who had been killed in the Indian wars as long ago as 40 years.

All of these wondrous things were reported to Sitting Bull and Red Cloud upon their return in April 1890. The delegates said Wovoka made the animals speak and made distant objects appear near. A traveler who wearied of his journey would wake up closer to his destination than he had been when he fell asleep the previous night. Their individual accounts of all they had seen were consistent, and having been selected for their character and reputations, they had no motive to collaborate in a lie.

Two of the delegates, however, Short Bull and Kicking Bear, were Sioux conservatives opposed to the white’s policy to civilize them and force abandonment of Indian ways. They supported the Ghost Dance religion and belief in its apocalyptic Indian millennium but not its philosophy of non-violence. They introduced into the dance special Ghost Shirt which, they claimed, would make the wearers impervious to the bullets of whites. Sitting Bull and Red Cloud, conservatives themselves, agreed with the innovations and ordered the dances to begin among all of the Sioux on each reservation.

Local white residents of South Dakota who witnessed the frenzied Dance of the Ghosts as performed by the Sioux became alarmed that it was a prelude to an outbreak of violence. They insisted that the agents stop its practice. Fatefully, after four Republican administrations Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, had been elected president in 1885 – about the time the Ghost Dance religion began to sweep the Indian tribes. Experienced Indian agents appointed and retained by Republican presidents had almost entirely been replaced by Cleveland with inexperienced agents. Not only were those agents alarmed by the Ghost Dance, especially among the Sioux, but also they had no relationship with the chiefs, medicine men, and sub-chiefs as their predecessors had which would have avoided a confrontation. One of the experienced ex-agents called the Ghost Dance religion “absurd.” The inexperienced current agents called for military intervention.

A list of Indian conservatives was compiled with recommendations that they be arrested and removed to military prisons to prevent their support of the Ghost Dance movement. Sitting Bull was among the names on that list. Every reservation had an all-Indian police force under the command of the Indian agent for the reservation. Sitting Bull lived on the Standing Rock reservation and its agent ordered the Indian police to arrest him under the cover of darkness.

When the police arrived at this cabin before dawn on December 15 and awoke him, Sitting Bull initially agreed to go with them after he dressed. But stepping outside, a crowd of supporters had converged and Sitting Bull changed his mind. When the police attempted to force him to mount his horse, one warrior in the angry crowd shot the police officer in charge, who in turn shot Sitting Bull in the chest. Another of the police shot Sitting Bull in the head and was himself shot. A close quarters gun fight erupted resulting in the deaths of Sitting Bull and seven supporters including his 17-year old son, six police, and two horses. The two police who killed Sitting Bull died in the hospital later.

Spotted Elk, who was called by soldiers the derogatory name of Big Foot, was chief of the Miniconjou Lakota Sioux. Hearing that Sitting Bull had been killed, he led his tribe off of the Cheyenne River reservation to join Red Cloud on the Pine Ridge reservation. Fearing that the intervention of the military would provoke widespread slaughter of the Sioux, their plan was to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the unrest the Ghost Dance had caused. However, before they could join forces, the military launched a search of the Black Hills with orders to arrest Big Foot. The unit assigned to find and arrest the Miniconjou chief was a battalion of the reconstituted 7^th Cavalry. Some of the battalion troopers were veterans of the 1876 Sioux uprising which wiped out most of their Regiment.

Major Whitside, the battalion commander, came upon Big Foot and his followers on December 28, 1890 in their encampment about 30 miles from Pine Ridge. They offered no resistance and put up a white flag asking for a parley. Whitside refused and demanded unconditional surrender, which was immediately given. The chief was seriously ill with pneumonia and was coughing blood. Unable to sit astride a horse, he had been transferred to a wagon. Surrounded by cavalry troops, Big Foot’s company was moved to Wounded Knee Creek to encamp for the night.

Additional troops arrived during the night commanded by Colonel Forsyth, swelling the military presence to 470 men to guard 106 warriors in Big Foot’s band plus about 230 women and children – all hungry, tired, and cold. Forsyth assumed overall command and stationed a cordon of troopers to surround the Indian teepees encamped around a pole on which the Indians had hoisted a white flag as a sign of peace and hope for safety. This cordon targeted the teepees with four Hotchkiss rotating cannons – a precursor to the heavy machine gun – each capable of firing a two-pound explosive projectile at a rate of nearly 50 rounds per minute. Forsyth’s massive show of military strength was a disaster in the making, especially since some of the Custer veterans hated the Sioux.

The next morning, December 29, began with preparations to disarm Big Foot’s band before they decamped. The first 20 warriors to emerge from teepees were told to surrender their weapons, but retreating to their teepees and assembling again in front of them, only two old rifles were produced. The cordon was tightened to within 20 paces of the warriors, all of whom had come out of their teepees by this time, including Big Foot who was seated on a bench in front of his. Troopers were dispatched to search the teepees, which agitated the warriors and their families as personal effects were thrown about in the search. About 40 more weapons were found, mostly old hunting rifles and muskets.

A soldier snatched the blanket off of a warrior named Black Coyote who was deaf, revealing a rifle which he refused to surrender because of the amount he had paid for it. The soldier’s demand for the rifle literally fell on deaf ears, and in the ensuing struggle for the weapon, it fired. Hearing rather than seeing what happened, the cordon troopers released a sheet of fire killing about half the warriors at point blank range. The surviving warriors threw off their blankets and fought the soldiers with knives, pistols, and war clubs. Because the Indians were poorly armed, the struggle was hand to hand and therefore especially bloody. Seeing the melee from their positions on a surrounding knoll, the Hotchkiss guns opened fire raking the teepee assembly area. Teepees set afire by exploding shells collapsed on their wounded inhabitants burning them alive. Within minutes 200 Indian men, women, and children lay dead among 60 troopers killed by friendly fire. Big Foot died in front of his teepee.

The Indian survivors of this holocaust raced for a dry ravine behind their encampment and were chased by enraged soldiers firing indiscriminately as Sioux fled unarmed. The Hotchkiss guns were brought up to deliver withering fire into the ditch. Bodies of women and children – obvious non-combatants – were scattered over two miles from the site of the initial confrontation, dispelling any argument that the butchery was not a massacre.

The slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek effectively ended the Ghost Dance religious movement and marked the close of the Indian wars against white domination. The Sioux nation effectively ceased to be a culture.

As the army on the scene began to clear the “battlefield” of bodies, a blizzard blew in from the north which lasted three days. The effort to remove corpses had to be suspended. When the blizzard subsided, the bodies had frozen into grotesque shapes. Civilian contractors were hired to remove and bury the Sioux in a mass grave atop the knoll where the deadly Hotchkiss guns had been placed. Remarkably, four infants were found alive in the human debris, wrapped in their deceased mothers' shawls.

The senior commander in the field, General Nelson Miles, severely criticized Colonel Forsyth’s handling of the capture of Big Foot and blamed him for the Wounded Knee slaughter. Miles relieved Forsyth of command and convened an Army Court of Inquiry to investigate him for his tactical dispositions. Forsyth was exonerated of responsibility for the massacre and later rose to the rank of Major General before retiring from the Army.

Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded by the US Army to troopers who fought in the Wounded Knee massacre. Throughout most of the 122 years that have followed, critics have repeatedly petitioned the federal government to rescind those medals. As yet, the government has refused.