Meeker telegraphed for troops. By the time they came, the agency buildings were burned, Meeker and 9 other agency employees were found dead in the burned buildings, 3 women and 2 children were captured and taken into the mountains, and 13 soldiers were killed. Twelve Ute were charged with murdering Meeker and committing outrages on the captive women (2 were Meeker’s wife and daughter). None was
tried because their personal situations were lost in the larger matter of whether or not the Ute should move from their homeland, where the miners hoped to discover silver. They moved.221 The Times summed it up:
No one doubts that Mr. Meeker meant well, but his conduct was nevertheless the immediate cause which precipitated the outbreak. He was a professional philanthropist…. It is a peculiarity of men of this type that they are prone to insist upon reforming other men by force. They are honestly anxious to do good, but they are determined to do good in their own way and in spite of the objections of those whom they propose to benefit.222
Events were beginning that would lead to the Wounded Knee Massacre. The Ghost Dance played an important role. The efforts of Wovoka, the Paiute medicine man, caused its spread among Indians. Wovoka was brought up as a youth on a ranch near Yerington, Nevada, with a devoutly Christian settler family named Wilson. When he was 32, he became ill with a fever. An eclipse of the sun happened during this time. Afterward, he said he had been taken to the spirit world, where he visited with the Supreme Being, and returned to spread the message that the world would soon end, then come alive again in a pure, aboriginal state with the Messiah present.223
When the Sun died [the day of the eclipse], I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give my people.224
This new world would be inherited by all Indians, including the dead. Wovoka called for meditation, prayers, singing, and especially dancing, through which an Indian might briefly die and glimpse the paradise to come. This Ghost Dance spread rapidly. Some followers considered him the Messiah, and he was referred to as the Red Man’s Christ. Kicking Bear and Short Bull, Sioux medicine men and brothers-in-law, visited him with others and thereafter they emphasized the possible elimination of whites and use of Ghost Dance shirts to stop white men’s bullets.225 Wovoka claimed he could produce fog, snow, a shower, a hard rain, or sunshine. As part of his claim to be the Messiah, Wovoka’s message to the Indians was this:
All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, then all the Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can’t hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. Then medicine man tell Indians to send word to all Indians to keep up dancing and the good time will come. Indians who don’t dance, who don’t believe in this word, will grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and be burned in fire.226
Alan Axelrod described how the Ghost Dance
spread through the Sioux reservations with increasing fervor and excitement, reaching fever pitch in the summer of 1890. White authorities were alarmed, and it became apparent that the Sioux reservations were on the verge of a general uprising.227
Dee Brown reported that
by mid-November Ghost Dancing was so prevalent on the Sioux reservations that almost all other activities came to a halt. No pupils appeared at the schoolhouses, the trading stores were empty, no work was done on the little farms.228
The Ghost Dance was not well understood and, Robert G. Hays said, “terrified white society.”229 The towns around the reservations filled with hysterical people, and settlers appealed for protection. The new Indian agent at the Pine Ridge Reservation, Daniel F. Royer, telegraphed Washington, “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. We need protection and we need it now.”230 The settlers were alarmed because it was thought the Sioux reservations were near an uprising such as had occurred in Minnesota in 1862.
The government attempted to arrest Sioux chief and medicine man Sitting Bull on December 15, 1890, 14 days before Wounded Knee, because he had invited his nephew, Kicking Bear, to come demonstrate the Ghost Dance. Approximately 40 Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin. About 160 Ghost Dancers gathered outside to try to prevent the arrest. One of them, Catch-the-Bear, pulled a rifle and shot at Lieutenant Bull Head of the Indian police. Bull Head shot back and struck Sitting Bull. Indian police officer Red Tomahawk also fired, this time hitting Sitting Bull in the head. Several people were killed in the fight that followed, 7 Indian civilians and 5 Indian police officers. Women participated, armed with knives and clubs.231
Big Foot* was known as a peacemaker who settled disputes among the Sioux.233 He received an invitation from Red Cloud to visit the Pine Ridge Reservation.234 Red Cloud hoped that Big Foot could help solve Indian problems with the whites.235 Big Foot set out from the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota with about 230 women and children and 120 men.236 During the trip, he got pneumonia and had to ride in a wagon.237
Big Foot at one time had been a Ghost Dance believer. Unknown to the army, he had ceased to believe. When he moved his band south to Pine Ridge, General Nelson A. Miles in Rapid City, South Dakota, erroneously assumed he had been invited there by the Ghost Dancers. His name was on a list of “formentors of disturbances,” so Miles ordered Big Foot taken prisoner.238 The Seventh Cavalry found him 30 miles east of Pine Ridge,239 and he was arrested.240 Before his arrest, Big Foot had raised a white flag asking for a parley, but this was refused by Major S. M. Whiteside, who demanded unconditional surrender, which was at once given, and the Indians moved on with the troops to Wounded Knee Creek. Unconditional surrender meant that “all arms would be yielded peacefully upon request.”241 The Sioux were then surrounded by the army at Wounded Knee Creek, where they camped in the center of a ring of cavalrymen.242
Colonel James Forsyth commanded the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old outfit. He saw that Big Foot was ill, so he provided a tent warmed with a camp stove for him, and he sent his own regimental surgeon to attend him.243 Forsyth had instructions to disarm the Indians and take them to the railroad so that they could be removed from the “zone of military operation.” A fight was not expected,244 but Forsyth did have Hotchkiss guns or cannons, which fired 2-inch explosive shells at the rate of almost 50 a minute.245 He ordered 4 of these guns placed in position around the Sioux camp.246
The Sioux warriors were wearing their Ghost Shirts. The soldiers began searching the Sioux for guns. They found about 40 weapons.247
Medicine man Yellow Bird took action, apparently expecting a fight. He began dancing the Ghost Dance, tweeted on his whistle, performed incantations, sang a holy song, and incited the warriors to fight, reminding them that the army bullets could not penetrate their Ghost Shirts. “You wear ghost shirts and no white man’s bullet may hurt you.”248
Indian Angie Debo observed in connection with this search by the soldiers that “in such a crisis the Sioux were always likely to give way to panic or blind rage, and in either case to begin shooting.”249 What did these Sioux do? They began shooting. Black Fox (some say Black Coyote) took out a rifle from beneath his blanket. He fired into the search party. Several other warriors did the same thing with the encouragement of Yellow Bird. Military historian S. L. A. Marshall stated that several Sioux simultaneously fired guns concealed under their blankets.250 The fact that the Indians had not only rifles but also knives251 and war clubs252 is some evidence that the Sioux did not intend to surrender but were ready to
fight.
When the Hotchkiss guns were fired into the Indian camp, they caused a stampede of the warriors, women, and children, who fled up a dry ravine and tried to hide. Marshall described what happened next:
The frenzied cavalrymen and Indian scouts, once the heavy fire lifted, pursued to cut down many of these pitiful fugitives, showing them little or no mercy. Here is the sequence in Wounded Knee that is most generally condemned and really nothing sensible may be said in mitigation of it…. The grisly chase and killing went on for more than three hours and the trail of bodies extended outward from the camp for more than three miles.253
This was the atrocity.
James Mooney, who immediately investigated the battle under the auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution, concluded,
There can be no question that the pursuit was simply a massacre, where fleeing women, with infants in their arms, were shot down after resistance had ceased and when almost every warrior was stretched out dead or dying on the ground.254
Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Boston medical school, had been serving as governmental physician to the Pine Ridge agency. He was one of the first on the scene after the battle. Brandon stated he described, “quite dispassionately, the way young girls had knelt, and covered their faces with their shawls so they would not see the troopers come up to shoot them.”255
Oglala Sioux chief American Horse (possibly the nephew of the American Horse killed at the Battle of Slim Buttes) described firsthand some of the deaths:
There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce…. A mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing…. The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through … and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys … came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.256
There were about 350 people with Big Foot. By the time the battle ended, the Indian dead, according to Angie Debo (who has made the only known breakdown among men, women, and children), included 84 men and boys of fighting age, 44 women, and 18 children.257 Quite possibly most of the women and children were killed while fleeing, which means that the atrocity part of the battle took the lives of perhaps 62 Indian women and children.258 The range of estimates of Indian dead is from 153 to “most likely” 300.259 The range of soldier death estimates is 25 to 60.260 Fair approximate figures would seem to be 170 Indian dead and 30 soldier dead. The fight was not completely onesided. There were 39 wounded soldiers in addition to the 30 dead.261
There was a bad blizzard in the Dakotas after the battle, and Ralph K. Andrist stated that “the bodies were found partially covered with snow and frozen into the grotesque attitudes of violent death.”262 The blizzard prevented clearing the area for several days. A photograph of the body of Big Foot is said to be perhaps the most widespread photograph of the massacre. He was later buried with the rest of the dead in a common grave.263
The Wounded Knee Massacre ended the American-Indian War on December 29, 1890, 268 years after it began, even though there was a skirmish the following day. Wounded Knee caused Sioux factions to unite, and the day after the battle, they ambushed the Seventh Cavalry near the Pine Ridge agency. General Miles marshaled 3,500 troops and slowly and with patience contracted the ring of soldiers around the Sioux while urging them to surrender and promising them good treatment. They surrendered on January 15, 1891.264
After the battle was lost by the Indians, a shocked Wovoka started emphasizing peace with the settlers. His cult gradually died out, and he too finally died in 1932 at the Walker River Reservation in Nevada.265 No organized Indian warfare followed Wounded Knee.
WHEN CONSIDERING Wounded Knee, it is easy to forget that the Sioux had had a fierce reputation for warfare in the period from 1850 to 1890. The year 1876 was the worst year for the army since the end of the Civil War. An extraordinary number of soldiers died at the hands of the Sioux and their allies that year.266 The events that have been called the Sioux Wars included the Grattan Massacre in 1854-55 (the Mormon Cow War), the Santee Sioux Uprising in 1862-64, the War for the Bozeman Trail in 1866-68 (which included Fetterman’s Massacre and the Wagon Box Fight), and the War for the Black Hills, which included 8 battles, one of which was Custer’s Last Stand.267 The Sioux were the predominant tribe in each of these wars, and they were not to be taken lightly anywhere, including at Wounded Knee, but they had suffered defeats in the last 5 battles in the War for the Black Hills, and, as Carl Waldman put it, the Sioux, “desperate in defeat for any glimmer of hope, took to the new religion”—that is, the Ghost Dance religion.268
Several conclusions were reached by officials who investigated Wounded Knee. The army investigation by General E. D. Scott found (perhaps predictably) the following: (1) There was nothing for the army to apologize for; (2) The firing was started by the Indians; (3) the killing of the women and children must have been mostly by Indian bullets; (4) the attack by the Indians was treacherous; and (5) their attack was explained in that they were under inexcusable religious hallucination.269 Scott also concluded that “the wholesale slaughter of the women and children was unnecessary and inexcusable.”270 Marshall properly concluded that in the Scott report “there was some whitewash and some truth.”271 Although it was true that the Indians started the battle, it was also true that the killing of the Sioux, including women and children, in the dry ravine was unnecessary and inexcusable, an atrocity.
Mooney concluded that “the medicine man, Yellow Bird, at the critical moment urged the warriors to resist and gave the signal for the attack; that the first shot was fired by an Indian; and that the Indians were responsible for the engagement.” “Suddenly Yellow Bird stooped down and threw a handful of dust in the air.”272
S. L. A. Marshall in Crimsoned Prairie: The Indian Wars concurred:
There is no doubt who started that day’s fight, though it is often called a massacre…. [D]eliberate Sioux action, so timed as to indicate that it had been well plotted, initiated the slaughter. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee [the title of the Brown book] may be a lovely phrase. It is still a false and misleading sentiment, dignifying conspiracy and honoring treachery.273
Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn concluded in Indian Wars that Wounded Knee was “a tragic accident of war that neither side intended … for which neither side as a whole may be properly condemned.”274
The frontier also ended in 1890. That year, the Census Bureau announced it could no longer designate a frontier on its map as it had done in previous decades.275 Even more important, wrote Alan Axelrod, “it was becoming clear even to the most resolute that the [Indian] cause was hopeless … and [that] four centuries of war between white man and red had come to an end bitter and inglorious, suffused with exhaustion, sorrow, and shame.”276
SOME CONCLUSIONS can be reached about the atrocities. There were many more atrocities committed in this war than in all other United States wars combined. As Gilbert noted, the war was one of “unique ferocity” in which “the savages—red and white—did things to each other which sensitive outsiders found unbelievable.”277 The reader may understandably find them unbelievable as well, but they are documented in the literature by credible historians, and it would appear that they are not disputed even by Indian advocates.
There is some irony in the fact that the war started with a hat—Trader Morgan’s hat—which led to the Powhatan Wars and ended with some shirts—the Ghost Shirts that Yellow Bird at Wounded Knee claimed would protect the Sioux warriors from the soldiers’ bullets. Two items of clothing played a part in starting a long, bitter war and bringing about its end as well. There isn’t a moral here, but it is an interesting coincidence.
More
than 16,000 atrocities connected with a death278 are recorded in the atrocity chapters. This fact (an average of 60 atrocities each year during the 268-year war) is depressing. No attempt has been made here to calculate additional death figures not connected with atrocities.
Some historians and writers have attempted to estimate all deaths resulting from specific parts of the war. Indian casualties are especially hard to determine because of the Indian practice of carrying their dead from the field of battle whenever possible.
Carl Waldman’s Atlas of the North American Indian estimated that “many tribal populations declined by more than 10 percent from Indian-white conflicts” (over a period of time not stated).279 If we accept the estimate that there were 295,500 Indians in the United States in 1630, then more than 29,000 Indians (presumably mostly warriors) may have been killed when the Indians fought around that time. That was a big loss.
Here are some other estimates. Gallatin wrote that it was his opinion that more Indians were killed from 1600 to 1791 by the Iroquois alone than were killed by the Europeans.280 Wilcomb E. Washburn estimated that in King Philip’s War in 1675-76, the English (which included the Americans who fought with them) lost 600 men and the Indians 3,000.281 Bil Gilbert in God Gave Us This Country calculated that 360 settlers were killed in the Wyoming Valley Massacre in 1778, 500 at Fort Mims in 1813, and 200 Cheyenne at Sand Creek in 1864.282 Richard VanDerBeets concluded in his Held Captive by Indians that between 1782 and 1790, 1,500 settlers along the Ohio River were injured, killed, or captured.283 Clark Wissler, author of Indians of the United States, figured that between 1707 and 1814 there were about 100 battles between Indians and whites. In addition, there were at least 1,000 raids on both sides. The losses from the raids alone were 8,000 whites and 4,000 Indians.284 Washburn made an estimate that for the period from 1798 to 1898, not more than 4,000 Indians and some 7,000 soldiers and civilians were killed.285 This is consistent with the figures reported from the atrocity information to the effect that more whites than Indians were killed.
The Wild Frontier Page 31