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Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings
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WOUNDED KNEE BATTLEFIELD
South Dakota
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Location: Shannon County, on a secondary road,
about 16 miles northeast of the town of Pine Ridge.
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The regrettable and tragic clash of arms at this site
on December 29, 1890, the last significant engagement between Indians
and soldiers on the North American Continent, ended nearly four
centuries of warfare between westward-wending Americans and the
indigenous peoples. Although the majority of the participants on both
sides had not intended to use their armsprecipitated by individual
indiscretion in a tense and confused situation rather than by organized
premeditationand although the haze of gunsmoke that hung over the
battlefield has obscured some of the facts, the action more resembles a
massacre than a battle. For 20th-century America, it serves as an
example of national guilt for the mistreatment of the Indians.
The arrival of troops on the Pine Ridge Reservation,
S. Dak., to quiet the Ghost Dance disorders of 1890 provided the climate
for the battle. After Indian police killed Chief Sitting Bull while
trying to arrest him on December 15 on the Standing Rock Reservation,
his Hunkpapas grew agitated and troop reinforcements arrived. When 200
of the Indians fled southward to the Cheyenne River, military officials
feared a Hunkpapa-Miniconjou coalition. Most of the Standing Rock
fugitives allied for a time with the Miniconjou Chief Hump and his 400
followers before joining them in surrendering at Fort Bennett, S.
Dak.
About 38 of the Hunkpapas joined a more militant
group of 350 or so Miniconjou Ghost Dancers led by Big Foot. After a few
days of defiance, Big Foot, ill with pneumonia, informed military
authorities he would capitulate. When he failed to do so at the
appointed time and place, General Miles ordered his arrest. On December
28 a 7th Cavalry detachment under Maj. Samuel M. Whitside intercepted
him and his band southwest of the badlands at Porcupine Creek and
escorted them about 5 miles westward to Wounded Knee Creek, the place
where Big Foot said he would surrender peacefully. Early that night,
Col. James W. Forsyth arrived to supervise the operation and the
movement of the captives by train to Omaha via Pine Ridge Agency. His
force, totaling more than 500 men, included the entire 7th Cavalry
Regiment, a company of Oglala scouts, and an artillery detachment.
The disarming occurred the next day. It was not a
wise decision, for the Indians had shown no inclination to fight and
regarded their guns as cherished possessions and means of livelihood.
Between the tepees and the soldiers' tents was the council ring. On a
nearby low hill a Hotchkiss battery had its guns trained directly on the
Indian camp. The troops, in two cordons, surrounded the council
ring.
The warriors did not comply readily with the request
to yield their weapons, so a detachment of troops went through the
tepees and uncovered about 40 rifles. Tension mounted, for the soldiers
had upset the tepees and disturbed women and children; and the officers
feared the Indians were still concealing firearms. Meanwhile, the
militant medicine man Yellow Bird had circulated among the men urging
resistance and reminding them that their ghost-shirts made them
invulnerable. The troops attempted to search the warriors and the rifle
of one, Black Coyote, considered by many members of his tribe to be
crazy, apparently discharged accidentally when he resisted. Yellow Bird
gave a signal for retaliation, and several warriors leveled their rifles
at the troops, and may even have fired them. The soldiers, reacting to
what they deemed to be treachery, sent a volley into the Indian ranks.
In a brief but frightful struggle, the combatants ferociously wielded
rifle, knife, revolver, and war club.
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Modern view of Wounded Knee
Battlefield, looking northward. Before artillery drove them out of the
ravine in the foreground, the Indians inflicted heavy casualties on the
troops. The Hotchkiss guns, located near the present Sacred Heart
Church, raked the Indian village, in the coulee near the modern
windmill. (photo George Grant, National Park
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Soon the Hotchkiss guns opened fire from the hill,
indiscriminately mowing down some of the women and children who had
gathered to watch the proceedings. Within minutes the field was littered
with Indian dead and wounded; tepees were burning; and Indian survivors
were scrambling in panic to the shelter of nearby ravines, pursued by
the soldiers and raked with fire from the Hotchkiss guns. The bodies of
men, women, and children were found scattered for a distance of 2 miles
from the scene of the first encounter. Because of the frenzy of the
struggle and the density of the participants, coupled with poor
visibility from gunsmoke, many Indian innocents met death accidentally.
In the confusion, both soldiers and Indians undoubtedly took the lives
of some of their own groups.
Of the 230 Indian women and children and 120 men at
the camp, 153 were counted dead and 44 wounded, but many of the wounded
probably escaped and relatives quickly removed a large number of the
dead. Army casualties were 25 dead and 39 wounded. The total casualties
were probably the highest in Plains Indian warfare except for the Battle
of the Little Bighorn. The battle aroused the Brules and Oglalas on the
Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, but by January 16, 1891, troops had
rounded up the last of the hostiles, who recognized the futility of
further opposition.
Although a comparatively small number of Sioux died
at Wounded Knee, the Sioux Nation died there too. By that time its
people fully realized the totality of the white conquest. Before,
despite more than a decade of restricted reservation life, they had
dreamed of liberation and of a return to the life mode of their
fathersa sentiment strongly manifested in the Ghost Dance
religion. But the nightmare of Wounded Knee jolted them from their
sleep. They and all the other Indians knew that the end had finally come
and that conformance to the white men's ways was the price of survival.
It was perhaps not purely coincidental that the same year as Wounded
Knee the U.S. Census Bureau noted the passing of the frontier.
The battlefield, though scarred by modern intrusions
and fragmented by a road system, remains an impressive reminder of the
last major military-Indian clash. It is located on the Pine Ridge Indian
Reservation. On the site of the 1890 troop positions are the Wounded
Knee store, post office, a privately operated museum displaying
battlefield relics, and other modern structures. Dominating the pleasant
pastoral scene is the modern church of the Sacred Heart Mission, a
simple white frame structure. It stands atop a low hill on the
approximate site of the Hotchkiss battery. Behind the church, in the
cemetery, is the mass grave of the Indians who died in the battle and
the Big Foot Massacre Memorial, erected by the Sioux Indians in 1903.
Below, on the site of the Indian camp, where the main fighting took
place, the State historical society and the Sioux have placed a series
of markers. Practically all the sites, as well as the surrounding lands
embracing Wounded Knee Creek and the ravines that figured in the
pursuit, are in private and tribal ownership.
NHL Designation: 12/21/65
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/soldier-brave/siteb30.htm
Last Updated: 19-Aug-2005
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