Wounded Knee Massacre
29 December 1890Wounded Knee Creek, Pine Ridge Reservation, Oglala Lakota County, SD
The Seventh Cavalry killed some 250 to 300 Lakota - mostly unarmed, many women and children - while disarming Spotted Elk's band on Pine Ridge.
In the winter of 1890 the Ghost Dance, a religious movement promising renewal and the return of the buffalo, spread through Lakota country as rations were cut and land was taken. The government read it as an uprising and sent troops. Sitting Bull was killed by Indian police on 15 December. Spotted Elk - called Big Foot by the army - led his Minneconjou band toward Pine Ridge seeking protection.
The Seventh Cavalry intercepted them and camped the band at Wounded Knee Creek. On the morning of 29 December soldiers began confiscating weapons. A shot was fired, and the cavalry opened fire with rifles and four rapid-firing Hotchkiss guns positioned on the hill above the camp. Between 250 and 300 Lakota were killed, including Spotted Elk; soldiers pursued and shot people, including women and children, for miles along the ravines. Twenty-five soldiers died, many of them in their own crossfire.
The dead were buried in a mass grave on the hill. Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for the action, awards that Lakota nations have spent more than a century asking the United States to rescind. Wounded Knee is conventionally described as the end of the Indian Wars; it is more precisely the point at which armed resistance was answered with the destruction of a camp of families.
Sources
- Wounded Knee Battlefield, in Soldier and Brave: Historic Places Associated with Indian AffairsNational Park Servicenps.gov
- Wounded Knee Battlefield: National Historic Landmark documentationNational Park Servicenpgallery.nps.govIncludes the timing of the firing and the casualty figures.
- Burial of the dead at the battle of Wounded Knee, S.D.Library of Congress (1891)loc.govPhotograph of soldiers burying the Lakota dead in a mass grave.