Wounded Knee Massacre (1890): Tragedy at Pine Ridge

The Wounded Knee Massacre took place on 29 December 1890 beside Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, when soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry killed an estimated 250 to 300 Lakota men, women and children. It came at the climax of a crisis over the Ghost Dance religious movement and two weeks after the killing of Sitting Bull. Often seen as the end of the Plains Indian wars, it remains one of the most painful events in the history of the United States.

Background: a world collapsing

By 1890 the Lakota had lost most of their land and their way of life. After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the government had taken the Black Hills, and the buffalo herds that sustained Plains life had been almost wiped out. In 1889 the Great Sioux Reservation was broken into six smaller reservations, opening some nine million acres to settlement.

Life on the reservations was harsh. Drought ruined crops, disease spread, and Congress cut beef rations even as people were told to farm land that could barely support crops. Missionaries and agents worked to suppress Lakota religion, language and customs.

The Ghost Dance

Around 1889 a Northern Paiute holy man in Nevada named Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, began teaching a new religion after a vision. He told followers that if they lived peacefully and performed a circle dance, a renewed world would come in which the dead would return, the buffalo would be restored and the whites would vanish. His message spread across the West.

Lakota delegates, including Kicking Bear and Short Bull, visited Wovoka and brought the Ghost Dance home in 1890. Among the Lakota it took on its own forms, including “ghost shirts” that some believed would stop bullets. Government agents saw the dancing as a sign of coming revolt.

Wovoka’s own teaching was peaceful, and the ethnologist James Mooney, who studied the movement for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology in the early 1890s, concluded that it was essentially a religion of hope rather than a plan for war. Some Lakota bands did withdraw to remote places such as the Stronghold in the Badlands, which reinforced official fears. In November 1890 the panicked agent at Pine Ridge, Daniel Royer, called for troops, and soldiers arrived on 20 November, followed by many more under the overall command of General Nelson A. Miles.

The death of Sitting Bull

Authorities believed that the famous Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull, living at Standing Rock Reservation, would lend his prestige to the movement. Early on 15 December 1890 a detachment of Lakota Indian police went to arrest him at his cabin on the Grand River. His supporters gathered, a shot was fired, and in the fighting that followed Sitting Bull was killed along with several of his followers and a number of policemen.

Some of Sitting Bull’s frightened Hunkpapa people fled south and joined the Miniconjou band of Spotted Elk, known to the army as Big Foot.

What happened at Wounded Knee

Spotted Elk, who was seriously ill with pneumonia, led his band of around 350 people towards Pine Ridge, partly in response to an invitation from the Oglala leader Red Cloud to help make peace. On 28 December 1890 they were intercepted by the 7th Cavalry under Major Samuel Whitside and escorted to a camp on Wounded Knee Creek. That night Colonel James W. Forsyth arrived and took command, bringing the force to about 500 soldiers with four Hotchkiss guns positioned on a rise overlooking the camp.

On the morning of 29 December the soldiers began disarming the Lakota men and searching the tipis. Tension rose as a medicine man performed Ghost Dance movements and soldiers seized weapons. A struggle broke out over the rifle of a man often identified as Black Coyote, who was reportedly deaf and did not understand the order. A shot went off.

Within moments the soldiers fired into the crowd of men at close range. Some Lakota men grabbed hidden or recovered weapons and fought back, but the Hotchkiss guns then opened fire on the camp. Women, children and elderly people fleeing into a dry ravine were pursued and shot, some of them up to two or three miles away. Much of the killing took place in less than an hour.

By the numbers

Aftermath

A blizzard swept the plains after the massacre. When a burial party reached the site in the first days of January 1891, many bodies lay frozen in the snow, and at least 146 were buried in a single mass grave on the hill where the guns had stood. Some wounded survivors were carried to the Episcopal church at Pine Ridge, which served as a hospital.

The next day, 30 December, soldiers clashed with Lakota near the Drexel Mission. The remaining Ghost Dance bands surrendered to General Miles at Pine Ridge on 15 January 1891.

Miles was furious at Forsyth, relieved him of command and ordered an inquiry, describing the killing of women and children as unjustifiable. The army, however, cleared Forsyth and restored him to command. Around twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for the action, which has long been a source of anger for Lakota descendants.

Timeline

• 1889, 1 January: Wovoka has his vision during a solar eclipse.
• 1890, 20 November: Federal troops arrive at Pine Ridge and Rosebud.
• 1890, 15 December: Sitting Bull is killed during an arrest attempt at Standing Rock.
• 1890, 28 December: Spotted Elk’s band is intercepted and camps at Wounded Knee Creek.
• 1890, 29 December: The massacre at Wounded Knee.
• 1891, 1-3 January: Burial party collects and buries the dead in a mass grave.
• 1891, 15 January: The last Ghost Dance bands surrender at Pine Ridge.

Legacy

Wounded Knee came the same year that the US Census Bureau declared there was no longer a clear frontier line, and it is often treated as the symbolic end of the Indian Wars. For the Lakota, it is a wound that has never closed; descendants hold memorial rides to the site each December.

The massacre gained wider attention through Dee Brown’s 1970 bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. In 1973 activists of the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee for 71 days, an event described in Wounded Knee occupation (1973). In 1990 Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret” for the massacre. Calls to rescind the Medals of Honor have been made repeatedly by Lakota groups and their supporters.

Like the forced removals of the Trail of Tears earlier in the century, Wounded Knee has come to stand for the wider human cost of US expansion for Native nations.

Why it matters

Wounded Knee marked the violent end of armed resistance on the Plains and the crushing of a religious movement born of despair. Its memory has shaped Native American activism and pushed the United States to reckon more honestly with the treatment of its Indigenous peoples.