December 29, 1890 Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota
A bit of history for Angry Bear readers which should be remembered.
December 28, 2023, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson
On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
A dozen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.
In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
Has echoed down across the generations: the solution to the ‘Indian Problem’. From the Klu Klux Klan to Hitler to … today. I’m not so sure about that adage about history ignored doomed to repetition … history only repeats to those that are paying attention
This is beauty … this is balance
This is part of the history many are trying to erase. It does not sit well with them. But as stated many times history tends to repeat itself if ignored, but that does not seem to be an issue with these people.
Curious why you believe many are trying to erase this history. I have no sense of that at all, but maybe there is the equivalent of “Holocaust denial” going on. Is it a regional thing, maybe?
Of course you have no sense of it, you’re a bot, an automaton
A collection of random programmed responses …
Ten Bears:
I would have said differently to Eric. But, then I am XMilitary and can see what took place here. This was a deliberate show of power to a perceived lesser people as seen through the eyes of a different culture and race of people expressing the show of power. Indians were to be eradicated or subject to the whims and will of others who were afraid of them even when half-starved and subject to the elements. It is not hard to imagine a different scenario of providing aid and comfort. Not capable then nor now. Eric expresses the attitude quite well. There always has to be one . . .
Turtles Run thinks that “many” are trying to erase this from history. My question remains unanswered as to why TR feels that way. My sense is that the honest treatment of Wounded Knee 1890 is far better secured in the historical record in 2023 than say in 1965, even though the events are a further 48 years in the past. There is Holocaust denial, so I presume there could be Wounded Knee denial, yet it seems a pretty obscure stream of historical analysis. I have never encountered it ever, which is why I asked if it might be regional. So who are these “many”? TR doesn’t say and neither do you nor Bill in his reply.
Alright then, if you’re human, to which “Holocaust” do you refer?
Upwards of thirty-five million First Americans were put to the sword in the name of the christian dog in what we today think of as “America” alone, a genocide of upwards of a hundred million humans beings across the “western hemisphere”
Was that not a holocaust?
Gaitlin guns at dawn. Old men, women and children gunned down in automatic weapons fire, was that not a holocaust? Fields and farms burned, livestock driven off and killed, smallpox purposefully introduced, was that not a holocaust?
Was that not a holocaust?
(((WAS THAT NOT A HOLOCAUST !?)))
Eric:
You wish my attention?
Native American history other than Thanksgiving Day, the Little Big Horn and the Trail of Tears + Pres. Jackson being an ass; there is little taught. There is some spectacular learning history to be learned about the people who were here before us, infected them with disease, taken their children away from them, and took their lands.
Every damn time you pull this crap and I end up having to plainly tell you, you are acting like a boorish idiot. Pick up a book and read. Try “I Will Fight No More Forever” about Chief Joseph and excellent tactician who had the women and children with him as he resisted the white soldiers. Much of this was about the taking of “their” land.
Go read Empire of the “Summer Moon.” Battle between Comanche Indians, the military, and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief. Spectacular horse warriors. And probably the most feared Indians in the west.
You are sitting right in the middle of multiples of tribes in Wisconsin. Extend yourself a bit and learn.
I tried to teach you about paragraphs and breaking your comments apart based on separate points. You show difficulty in writing in English. Now you are showing silly behavior. Nobody is trying to erase Indian history, it is just not taught in schools and is largely ignored which includes early on when they were mistreated, slaughtered and move off their land. That is untold and Turtles Run is right. Obsurity is evident because it is not taught,
History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.
~Karl Marx
Not for nothing were the Spanish explorers who were the first Europeans here known as Conquistadors.
About America’s favorite Conquistador…
Christopher Columbus wasn’t the hero we learned about in school
CNN – June 12, 2020