Wounded Knee Massacre

On 29 December 1890, soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry Regiment killed between about 250 and 300 Lakota, many of them women and children, at a camp beside Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The killings began during an attempt to disarm Spotted Elk's band of Miniconjou Lakota. Sometimes called the Battle of Wounded Knee, the event is generally regarded as the close of the Indian Wars and has become one of the defining symbols of the treatment of Native Americans by the United States.

By 1890 the Lakota had lost much of their land, the great bison herds on which their way of life depended had been almost wiped out, and families on the reservations relied on government rations that had been cut. General Nelson Miles himself reported that they were living on half or two-thirds rations and that treaty promises had not been kept. In these conditions many turned to the Ghost Dance, a movement inspired by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, which promised the return of the dead and of the buffalo and the departure of the whites. Some Lakota believed that special Ghost Dance shirts could stop bullets. Settlers and officials saw the dance as a threat, and large numbers of troops were sent to the reservations.

On 15 December 1890 Indian police tried to arrest the Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull at Standing Rock, fourteen years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In the struggle that followed he was shot dead. Some of his followers fled to join Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot, whose band left the Cheyenne River Reservation on 23 December to seek shelter with the Oglala leader Red Cloud at Pine Ridge.

On 28 December a cavalry detachment under Major Samuel Whitside intercepted the band, which numbered about 350, roughly 120 men and 230 women and children, and escorted it to Wounded Knee Creek. Colonel James Forsyth arrived with the rest of the regiment, bringing the troops to about 500, and four Hotchkiss mountain guns were placed overlooking the camp.

On the morning of 29 December soldiers began searching the camp for weapons. Accounts of what happened next differ. According to several testimonies, Black Coyote, a deaf man who had not understood the order, resisted handing over his rifle; as soldiers seized him, the gun went off. A few young Lakota men then fired concealed weapons, and the soldiers opened fire at close range. Many of the Lakota men had already been disarmed. The Hotchkiss guns fired into the tipis, and women and children who ran for a nearby ravine or across the prairie were pursued, some for miles. Miles later wrote that a large number of women and children trying to escape "were hunted down and killed". Twenty-five soldiers also died, some perhaps from their own side's fire.

After a three-day blizzard, civilians hired by the army buried the frozen Lakota dead in a mass grave on the hill where the guns had stood. Miles relieved Forsyth of command, but an army court of inquiry largely cleared him, and he was later promoted. Nineteen Medals of Honor were awarded specifically for Wounded Knee, a number historians have questioned and Native organisations have asked to be rescinded. Survivors and descendants formed the Wounded Knee Survivors Association to seek compensation and protect the site.

In 1903 relatives erected a monument over the mass grave in memory of the "Chief Big Foot massacre". The site became a National Historic Landmark in 1965. In 1973 members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days, choosing it for its symbolic meaning, and in 1990 both houses of Congress expressed "deep regret" for the massacre on its centenary.

Our 1880 map shows the Dakota country before the massacre, and the 1900 map shows the United States ten years after it.