The typical history of the American West usually includes several accounts of conflicts between the U.S. Army and Indians, some of which are described as “battles” or “wars.” In many of these histories, the 1890 conflict at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, is cited as the last battle in the Indian wars and the end of the Ghost Dance religion. Neither of these is true: military conflicts with Indians continued into the twentieth century (even though Indians tend to disappear from most twentieth-century American histories) and the Ghost Dance is still celebrated.
The Army’s massacre of peaceful American Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee involved three things: (1) the Miniconjou Sioux under the leadership of Big Foot (also known as Spotted Elk), (2) a pan-Indian religious movement known as the Ghost Dance, and (3) the American government’s tradition of suppressing American Indian religions through military force.
The Miniconjou Sioux
The term “Sioux” actually refers to three linguistic divisions – Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota – and each of these is further divided into distinct groups or tribes. Of these three, the Lakota, also called the Teton or Western Sioux, is the westernmost group. The seven Teton tribes are sometimes called the Seven Council Fires. However, they were never a single political unit: each of the tribes was autonomous. The Miniconjou (also spelled Minniconjou and Mineconjou), whose name means “those who plant by the stream”, is one of the Seven Council Fires.
The Sioux migrated into the Great Plains from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Sioux oral traditions tell of an origin near the northern lakes east of the Mississippi. They did not become horse-mounted Plains Indians until about 1775.
In 1851, the United States held a treaty council at Fort Laramie in what is now Wyoming. The council included representatives from the Sioux tribes although the official records fail to note which Sioux tribes participated. In general, the American government had difficulty distinguishing one Indian tribe from another and the government simply declared that the Sioux were a single tribe and appointed Frightening Bear as the chief of all of the Sioux nations. In the Fort Laramie Treaty, the United States recognized that the Sioux owned 60 million acres of land.
In 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie established the Great Sioux Reservation and preserved the Powder River and Big Horn country as unceded Indian territory. The reservation was “set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians” (article 2). The treaty was signed with 10 Sioux tribes – Brulé, Oglala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arcs, Santee— and with the Arapaho.
It took two decades for American greed to generate dissatisfaction with the idea of a Great Sioux Reservation. In his chapter on the Teton in the Handbook of North American Indians, Raymond DeMallie writes:
“In 1888 the Great Sioux Reservation was, from the perspective of the United States, a great barrier to progress. The Northern Pacific Railroad was stalled at Bismarck, unable to build across reservation lands, and the rich farm and grazing land throughout the reservation had the potential to support homesteaders who would provide an economic boost to the region.”
In response Congress broke up the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller reservations.
The Ghost Dance
In 1889, the Paiute prophet Wovoka (known to the Americans as Jack Wilson) died during an eclipse. He then returned to life with a message and a dance for his people. The message called for peace and promised an exclusively Indian world. As word of Wovoka’s message spread among other tribes, many people came to Nevada to visit with the prophet and to hear his words. The Sioux heard about Wovoka from the Shoshone. Eleven Sioux, including Kicking Bear and Short Bull, journeyed from their reservation in South Dakota to see Wovoka and to carry his words back to the people.
In Nevada, Wovoka took Kicking Bear into a sweat lodge, placed him on a bed of sage, covered him with a buffalo robe, and then fanned him with an eagle fan. Kicking Bear went into a trance in which he entered the land of the dead where he saw his deceased relatives.
Kicking Bear returned to South Dakota and introduced the Sioux to Wovoka’s Ghost Dance. Commenting on the spread of the Ghost Dance on the Sioux reservations, Sioux physician Charles Eastman, in his 1918 book Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, notes:
“The teachings of the Christian missionaries had prepared them to believe in a Messiah, and the prescribed ceremonial was much more in accord with their traditions than the conventional worship of the churches.”
In South Dakota, Kicking Bear introduced an innovation to the Ghost Dance in the form of a special shirt. The shirts are decorated with a star and crescent moon and feathers at the shoulders. Kicking Bear claimed that bullets would not go through these shirts. The new shirts became a part of the Ghost Dance movement for many of the Sioux. The idea for the Ghost Dance shirts seems to have been inspired by Mormon missionary efforts among the Paiutes on the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho.
Anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe, in her book The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization, writes:
“Proselytized by Kicking Bear, Jack Wilson’s creed was distorted among the Lakota, becoming a millenarian movement yearning for utopia instead of the Paiute prophet’s sensible guide to a clean, honest life.”
While all American Indian religions were already illegal, the American government specifically outlawed the Ghost Dance in 1890 and sent military units to the reservations to stop it. At Pine Ridge, the army was given a list of Sioux “criminals” who were to be immediately arrested. This list included Big Foot, Hump, Sitting Bull, and others. Their “crime” was simple: they had embraced a new religion, one which had not been approved by the United States government.
Big Foot
Big Foot, also known as Spotted Elk, was born about 1825 and became a Miniconjou leader—“chief” in English terminology—in 1874. In his biographical sketch of Big Foot in Notable Native Americans, John McDermott writes:
“Native accounts of Big Foot describe him as a great hunter. He was also a skilled hunter who possessed a string of fine ponies, most obtained from the Crow and other enemies. He was best known, however, for his political and diplomatic successes. An able negotiator, Big Foot was skilled at settling quarrels between rival parties and was often in great demand among other Teton bands.”
In his book Who Was Who in Native American History: Indians and Non-Indians From Early Contacts Through 1900, Carl Waldman writes:
“Big Foot established his reputation through diplomatic rather than military skills. He was known as a compromiser who was called on by other Sioux to settle disputes.”
In 1877, Big Foot’s Miniconjou band was settled on a reservation by the American government. John McDermott writes:
“Being a person accustomed to finding ways of reconciling disparate views, Big Foot sought means to adapt to white ways.”
Big Foot took up farming in the European manner and encouraged his people to do the same.
In 1889 Kicking Bear brought the Ghost Dance to the Miniconjou. John McDermott writes:
“It was believed that the Ghost Dance would restore the world to its aboriginal state; it promised for the return of Native ancestors and all plant and animal life. Devasted by war, hunger, and disease, the Minniconjou welcomed the new religion.”
Carl Waldman reports:
“It caught on among Big Foot’s and Hump’s Miniconjou bands, now made up mostly of widows, who danced in the hope of bringing their dead husbands back. The size of Big Foot’s band increased as other Indians joined them for the Ghost Dance.”
In 1890, Big Foot’s Miniconjou band moved to Cherry Creek with the intention of meeting up with Hump’s Miniconjou band for a Ghost Dance. Hump, however, had surrendered his band to the Indian agency and so Big Foot then moved his band to an area below the forks on the Cheyenne River. John McDermott writes:
“While he did not participate in the Ghost Dance thereafter, many of his tribesmen continued to dance, spurred on by the medicine man Yellow Bird.”
After hearing that Chief Sitting Bull had been murdered because he was suspected of being involved with the Ghost Dance (Sitting Bull was not involved), Big Foot’s band set out for the Pine Ridge Agency. Big Foot had been told that if he and his people come to the agency at Pine Ridge under a flag of truce that they would be given food and medical attention. With white flags flying from their staffs, the Indians expected the soldiers to honor the truce. Big Foot was very sick with pneumonia and had to be transported in a wagon.
On route to Pine Ridge, Big Foot’s band was intercepted by an army detachment under the command of Major Samuel Whitside. Big Foot’s band surrendered and were escorted to Wounded Knee. The 350 cold, hungry Miniconjou Sioux camped below a plateau.
Wounded Knee
On December 29, 1890, Colonel James Forsyth took over army command and he had eight companies of soldiers, nearly 500 men, surround the Indian camp. In his entry on Wounded Knee in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Paul Robertson writes:
“On a hill overlooking the camp, four rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannons, capable of firing fifty two-pound explosive shells per minute, were trained on Big Foot’s band.”
The following morning, soldiers came into the Indian camp to disarm the Indians. The soldiers removed the blankets from the women, leaving them shivering in the cold. In some cases, the soldiers lifted the women’s dresses, exposing their genitalia, while supposedly looking for guns and amusing the onlooking soldiers. Carl Waldman writes:
“Big Foot, extremely sick, his breathing labored, was carried outside to sit with a group of old men in front of his tepee. The Indians surrendered their guns. The soldiers further searched the tepees and brought out axes, knives, and tent stakes, as well as sacred bundles. At this, a medicine man by the name of Yellow Bird began dancing and chanting.”
It is not certain what exactly happened next, but it resulted in the soldiers opening fire on the unarmed Indians. Using the Hotchkiss guns, the soldiers managed to kill most of the unarmed men, women, and children. Chasing fleeing women and shooting them was sport to the soldiers and the bodies of some of the women were found four to five miles from the slaughter site. Sioux physician Charles Eastman was one of the first civilians at the site and he reported in his 1916 book From the Deep Woods to Civilization:
“Fully three miles from the scene of the massacre we found the body of a woman completely covered with a blanket of snow, and from this point on we found them scattered along as they had been relentlessly hunted down and slaughtered while fleeing for their lives.”
Charles Eastman also writes:
“I counted eighty bodies of men who had been in the council and who were almost as helpless as the women and babes when the deadly fire began, for nearly all their guns had been taken from them.”
With regard to army casualties, Carl Waldman writes:
“The soldiers lost 25 men, with 39 wounded, most, it is thought, from their own bullets and shrapnel.”
Twenty-three of the soldiers received the Medal of Honor for their heroic action against unarmed Indians. Lakota writer Joseph Marshall, in his book The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn: A Lakota History, asks:
“How can anyone be decorated for bravery or for commitment to duty when killing defenseless women and children?”
After the battle, a grave 6 feet deep, 10 feet wide, and 60 feet long is dug. The Indian bodies are thrown into the grave one at a time. According to historian Renée Sansom Flood, in her book Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota:
“They stripped all salable articles from the bodies as if they were skinning rabbits. The clothing was sold piece by piece to the many spectators.”
Paul Robertson describes it this way:
“The whites stripped many of the bodies, keeping as souvenirs the Ghost Shirts and other clothing and equipment that people had owned in life, or selling them later in the thriving trade over Ghost Dance relics that ensued.”
In his evaluation of the events surrounding the “battle” at Wounded Knee, Sioux physician Charles Eastman writes:
“I have tried to make it clear that there was no ‘Indian outbreak’ in 1890-1891, and that such trouble as we had may justly be charged to the dishonest politicians, who through unfit appointees first robbed the Indians, then bullied them, and finally in a panic called for troops to suppress them.”
Indians 101
Twice each week, Indians 101 presents different American Indian topics. More American Indian histories and biographies from this series:
Indians 101: Murdering a Peaceful Chief, Peopeo Moxmox
Indians 101: Looking Glass, Nez Perce Chief
Indians 101: Roman Nose, Cheyenne Warrior
Indians 101: Henry Roe Cloud, Winnebago Educator
Indians 101: Red Jacket, Seneca Sachem
Indians 201: Sarah Winnemucca, Paiute Activist
Indians 201: William Weatherford, Red Stick Leader
Indians 201: Mary Musgrove Bosomworth, Creek translator, leader