Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)
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After some discussion with his scout, a half-Indian named John Shangreau,
Whitside agreed to wait until the band was camped at the creek before disarming
them. Disarming was further postponed until morning. The Lakota and their mili-
tary escort arrived at the creek after dark, where the cavalry counted 120 men, with
230 women and children. Whitside took precautions of both a humanitarian and
military nature. He issued rations to the band, and as they were short of tepees,
provided several army tents for additional shelter. He ordered a stove to be placed
in the tent where the ailing B ig Foot slept, and sent the regimental surgeon to
examine him. Whitside also posted two troops of cavalry as sentinels to prevent
escape, and positioned two Hotchkiss guns on a rise overlooking the camp. Hotchkiss
guns were capable of shooting 50 explosive shells a minute.
Command shifted during the night when Colonel James W. Forsyth, com-
mander of the 7th Cavalry, arrived with the remainder of the regiment. He arrived
with orders to take the entire band to the railroad station at Gordon, Nebraska,
where they would be shipped to a military p rison in Omaha. He add ed two more
Hotchkiss guns to those Whitside had already emplaced. All the guns were in posi-
tion to subject the camp of Big Foot’s followers to enfilade fire—directed along
the entire li ne of tepees and tents. The officers then opened a keg of whiskey to
celebrate their success in capturing the band. Another irresolvable controversy is
whether a large portion of the 7th Cavalry’s officers was drunk or hung over the
next mornin g. Contemporary accounts favorable to the military indignantly deny
it—the officers had only sociable refreshment. Other accounts say they were quite
tipsy. It is equally impossible to establish whether any sizable portion of the sub -
ordinate troops had been drinking—favorable accounts say no, just the officers.
Some tension arose in the morning. Forsyth issued military hardtack rations for
breakfast, then informed the Minneconjou that they were to be disarmed. A surviv-
ing Dog Chief named White Lance later recalled that “They called for guns and
arms, so all of us gave the guns and they were stacked up in the center.” The cav-
alry officers were not satisfied with the number or quality of weapons surrendered,
demanding more, then sending soldie rs to search every tepee. “They brought our
axes, knives, and ten stakes and piled them near the guns.” Accounts vary as to
whether or how many weapons Big Foot’s band h ad. According to some of the
cavalry, when the band was intercepted the previous afternoon, they were seen to
possess a number of the latest-model Winchester rifles, which were definitely not
to be found the next morning. Shangreau is cited as a witness that Big Foot himself
told his warriors that they would keep the best rifles—perhaps because of their
cost and recent purchase, rather than for imminent use in battle. But there was dis-
tinct fear that, once disarmed, the prisoners would all be killed. Two guns were
recovered after soldiers ordered all the warriors to re move th eir blankets, and
began conducting body searches. While this was going on, a medicine man named
606 Wounded Knee I (1890)
Yellow Bird began dancing Ghost Dance steps, calling out that the soldiers’ bullets
would not penetrate their sacred Ghost Dance shirts. “The bullets will not go
toward you” one survivor remembered him singing, “The prairie is large and the
bullets will not go toward you.” The assurance proved to be false.
The flashpoint of the massacre came when Black Coyote, the owner of one of
the last two rifles found, r aised the new Winchester over his head, saying it had
cost him a lot of money, and it belonged to him. Years later, a witness named
Dewey Beard, known at the time as Wasumaza, said that Black Coyote had the
gun pointed at no one, and would soon have put it down. Anoth er man named
Crazy Hawk described Black Coyote as “a young man of very bad influence, and
in fact a nobody.” A shot ran out, possibly fired by Black Coyote, and there was
a sound like the tearing of canvas. Accounts from surviving soldiers report that
five o r six o f the younger Minneconjou men stood up, aimed Winchesters at
the soldiers, and fired a volley. Then soldiers began firing indiscriminately into the
assembled Minneconjou and Hunkpapa. Fighting at close quarters lasted no more
than five minutes. Having just been disarmed, the Indians had to flee, although the
men briefly grappled with the nearest soldiers using fists, knives, clubs, and perhaps
a few pistols. Once out of contact with the soldiers, they were raked by fire from the
Hotchkiss guns. Cavalry officers testified afterward that they had repeatedly given
orders, when identifying a fleeing group as women and children, not to fire on them.
Surviving women and children said firing had been indiscriminate. When the shoot-
ing ended, soldie rs searched the field for survivors, picking u p four men and
47 women and children, who w ere loaded int o wagons and taken to Pine Ridge.
Twenty-five soldiers died, 39 were wounded. It is possible, but hotly debated, that
most died from cavalry bullets or shrapnel from the Hotchkiss guns.
A blizzard raged for two days after the killing. When it ended, a man named
Paddy Starr, who had secured a military contract to bury the dead at $2 per body,
led a crew of 30 men onto the battlefield. They found a total of 102 adult men
and women, 24 old men, 7 old women, 6 five- to eight-year-old boys, and 7 babies
under two years old, who were dead. O ne of the older men was Big Foot. Three
pregnant women were found shot to pieces. A four-month-old baby, wrapped in
a shawl next to her dead mother, had survived with only frostbite. She had a
buckskin cap, embroidered with beadwork in the design of an American flag. Con-
temporary Lakota sources asserted that many wounded had crawled some distance
away to die afterward, and that up to 300 of the original band may have been
killed.
General Miles, who was on his way to take charge personally at the scene, cri-
tiqued Forsyth’s disposition of his cavalry, mounted and dismounted, as fatally
defective, making it inevitable that large numbers of troops would be killed and
wounded by fire from their own ranks, an d that large numbers of women and
Wounded Knee I (1890) 607
children would be killed. Miles had commanded some of the final campaigns that
confined the Lakota to a reservation in the late 1870s, practicing a sophisticated
combination of overwhelming force and respectful treatment. Although he had
been badly misinformed as to what was happening in the field in 1890, the indis-
criminate slaughter at Wounded Knee had upended the tactics he preferred. Kick-
ing Bear and Short Bull were within a day’s march of Pine Ridge, where they had
planned to surrender rather than face combat with army troops. Upon receiving
word of what had happened at Wounded Knee Creek, they reversed their intention
and stampeded a good number of the residents of Pi ne Ridge al ong with them.
Approximately 4,000 Lakota, 800 to 1,000 of them warriors, were surrounded by
a military cordon i n White Cl ay Valley. The Oglala and portions of other b ands
again decided to surrender ; a body of Brule
´
among them refused, and established
pickets t o prevent anyone from leaving. As troops moved closer, while portions
of the trapped Lakota were able to slip away and give up, resolution to fight on
was worn down, until finally all surrendered January 15, 1891.
H. W. Brands observed in The R eckless Decade that “Suppressing the Ghost
Dance without triggering violence would have required a steady hand and an abil-
ity to inspire confidence among distrustful Indians—talents in short supply among
the white officials who dealt with Indians.” The episode of the Ghost Dance and
military occupation had impressed upon the Lakota that they were in fact con-
quered, and dependent upon the goodwill of the U.S. government, without opening
any significant benefici al results for either the “progressive” or “traditional ” fac-
tions on each of the reservations. Might had triumphed, but destitute of any moral
authority to build upon, or secure the future loyalty of those subjugated. The
deaths at Wounded Knee inspired generations of bitter resentment, and a sense
that, however powerful the wasicun had become, their promises were worthless,
and cooperation pointless.
Eastern civilians who thought of themselves as friends of the Indians fervently
advocated that with schools, church missions, and allocation of reservation land
into 160-acre farms, all the tribes would become good Americans. The
“progressive” factions among the Lakota attempted to cooperate with this vision,
both before and after the shooting at Wounded Knee. They had modest advantages
in patronage—agents tried to steer allotments of food and other supplies to the
“friendlies”—but it was difficult to show that this vision would sustain the people.
As wasicun settlers discovered over the subsequent 50 years, the western plains
were not suitable terrain for fa rming crops. Many years, the crops wither ed and
died. Small family farms, so dear to the heart of reformers, were particularly vul-
nerable. Farming was not, in Lakota culture, respected work at all. When 3,000
cattle were provided as breeding stock, many communities made a promising
beginning, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not follow up with sufficient
608 Wounded Knee I (1890)
breeding stock and assistance to establish a prosperous economic base. In 1973,
when the American Indian Movement was invited to occupy the Pine Ridge reser-
vation, the younger traditionalists who asked for AIM’s assistance had embraced a
politically radical vision. The most entrenched of the “progressive” partisans had
degenerated into a political patronage machine, while life on the reservation
remained in a state of cultural, political, psychological, and economic demoraliza-
tion. Wounded Knee Creek was the obvious symbol, and the obvious location, to
reopen a battle long settled by force, but never resolved by opening up a viable
road on which the people could move forward, or replace the way of life they
had been forced to give up.
—Charles Rosenberg
See also all entries under Pueblo Revolt (1680); Pima Revolt (1751); Pontiac’s Rebellion
(1763); Flight of the Nez Perce
´
(1877); Trail of Broken Treaties (1972); Wounded Knee II
(1973).
Further Reading
Andersson, Rani-Henrik. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 . Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2008.
Brands, H. W. The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002.
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart a t Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, Rinehart a nd Winston,
1971.
Coleman, William E. Voices of Wounded Knee . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2000.
Hittman, Michael. Wovoka and the Ghost Dan ce. Lincoln: Un iversity of Nebraska Pr ess,
1990.
Utley, Robert Marshall. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2004.
Wounded Knee I (1890) 609
Dakota Uprising (1862)
The La kota people w ho participated in the G host Dance and died at Wounde d
Knee were by no means the only Sioux to rebel against American expansionism
in the mid-19th century. By the 1860s, the expansion of the United States’ military
and political reach and repeated mineral and agricultural rushes had induced grow-
ing numbers of settlers to the West to seek t heir fortunes. Indian resistance t o
incursions on their territory was continuous, however, and the series of often
costly small wars and isolated military engagements that accompanied the settle-
ment of the West provoked a search for alternative ways to subdue the Indians of
the trans-Mississippi West and promote the settlement and development of the
West. In the 1850s, the Indian Bureau, recently transferred from the War Depart-
ment to the Interior Department, determined to reduce the level of expensive mili-
tary conflict with a new round of treaties and the creation of n ew agencies and
reservations. Among the first objects of this new policy, and under pressure from
growing numbers of settlers and the military power of t he United States, the
Government the Eastern Branch of the Dakota Nation ceded vast territories that
included much of southern Minne sota in the 1851 Traverse des Sioux Treaty and
again in 1858 with the an additional treaty. In return, the government promised
annuity payments and rations.
The new India n Bureau policy was intended to do far more tha n simp ly bu y
Indian compliance, a temporary solution at best; the Bureau hoped that the new
policy would eventually solve the Indian question by undermining the cultural dis-
tinctiveness and political and social cohesion of American Indians by fostering
dependency and forcing assimilation. Inspired by less-than-be nevolent intentions
at the outset, then, Bureau officials rarely resisted using the withholding of annu-
ities or rations as a cudgel to enforce Indian compliance, and when the Civil War
invited further government neglect of its Indian policy, the resentment that had
been seething among t he Dakotas exploded in an extraordinary outbreak of vio-
lence, the Minnesota Uprising of 1864.
By 1862, the Indian Bureau had succeeded in rendering the lives of the Dakota
Indians of Minnesota intolerably difficult: they had been dispossessed of millions
of acres and restricted to reservations by treaty, they faced a severe local crop fail-
ure and a dearth of game, and they were further aggravated by the slow arrival of
rations and the suspension of annuity payments while the wartime Congress
debated the merits of paying them in either gold or currency. Indians’ tempers
flared as the policy that the Indian Bureau had intended to use to break the Dakotas
instead generated a fierce resentment and galvanized them into a people with a for-
midable ability to resist. In August 1862, after having recently been confronted by
611
a foolishly obdurate agency official who advised t hat if hungry, they could eat
either grass or dung, the Dakotas rose in revolt.
On Aug ust 17, four young Dakotas attacked and killed five settlers. Though
apparently spontaneous, their isolated act tr igger ed further general and coordi-
nated action on the part of the frustrated Dakotas. Little Crow, the 60-year-old
chief of the Mdewakanton band, assumed leadership of the uprising, and within
a day of the initial outbreak of violence, angry Indians had a ttacked doze ns of
settlements across southern Minnesota, killing some 400. Terrorized settlers fled
to Fort Ridgley, where they came under siege while Dakotas nearly succeeded in
taking the nearby town of New Ulm. Relie f was slow in arrivin g—an overly-
cautious Minnesota militia of 1,500 took almost two weeks to arrive—but the
successful defense of Fort Ridgley and New Ulm marked signaled the end of
the uprising, and by mid-September, the militia had decisively defeated the
Dakotas who chose to resist. Almost 800, some 700 settlers and 100 soldiers,
among them Indian agents whose mouths had been stuffed with grass, had been
killed.
Some of Little Crow’s followers scattered to the West, while others chose to
release their captives and turn themselves in to authorities. Not all Dakotas chose
to participate in t he uprising, and most of those chose to remain peaceful and
stayed on their lands in Minnesota. Called “crocodiles,” “wild beasts,” “red jawed
tigers whose fangs are dripping with the blood of innocents” as a result of the
uprising, however, Minnesotans cast Indians in general and the Dakotas specifi-
cally as an enemy race and determined that all Indians would be punished.
Swift and fierce retribution fell upon the peaceful and rebellious Dakotas alike
when the government rounded up and imprisoned several hundred. Of the 303
Dakotas initially sentenced to die for the uprising, the state executed 38 on
December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass h anging in U.S.
history. Little Crow and his son initially evaded capture, but were killed by a
farmer when they returned to Minnesota in 1863. Vengeance at Mankato could
not purge the collective memory of the violence of the event from the residents,
though. For decades after, and as far north as the border with Canada, grand-
mothers vividly described the 1862 uprising to their grandchildren, a cautionary
tale to youngsters that even in defeat harbored “bad, cruel, fiendish and devilish”
thoughts and were bent on avenging their ancestors.
Preoccupied with the Civil War, the U.S. Army initially chose not to follow the
Dakotas west, though it did keep pressure in the Indians with renewed attacks in
1863 and 1864. Settlement slowed only temporarily, however and with Union vic-
tory in 1865 and the expansion of the railroads, a massive influx of land-hungry
settlers insured continued conflict. The Minnesota Uprising, followed by the Sand
612 Wounded Knee I (1890)
Creek Massacre in 1864, marked the renewal of hostilities across the West that
quickly grew in violence and intensity after the Civil War.
—Gerald Ronning
Further Reading
Carley, Kenneth. The Dakota War of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press ,
2001.
Johansen, Bruce. The Native Peoples of North America: A History.NewBrunswick,NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Keenan, Jerry. The Great Sioux Uprising: Rebellion on t he Plains, August–September,
1862. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the
American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Sioux
The people identified by French fur t raders and voyageurs as Sioux shared a
common language and long-established alliances. There are at least three distinct
dialects—Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota— sometimes also used to describe the
branch that speaks it; the Lakota, or Teton Sioux, are best known in American his-
tory. The Teton in turn consisted of seven tribes: Oglala, Hunkpapa, Sans Arc,
Brule
´
, Minne conjou, Blackfeet (not to be confused with the distinct Blackfeet
tribe, traditional enemies of the Sioux), and Two Kettles. T heir Dakota relatives
in the lake cou ntry of what became Minnesota , the Santee Sioux, consisting of
four bands, were the first to face collision with military expansion and settlement
from th e United States into their traditional homel and. The Nakota, also known
as the Yanktonais, were closely associated with the Lakota in late-19th century
battles against the United States. It is commonly understood in anthropology,
and in native traditions, that the Dakota lived on the western side of the upper Mis-
sissippi valley, until their traditional enemies, the Ojibwa, armed with French mus-
kets, drove them further west. Emerging onto the P lains in the late 18th century,
the Lak ota obtained horses, previously acquired by southern Plains tribes from
the Spanish, and became masters of the area around the Black Hills and the Pow-
der River country. Historically enemies of the Pawnee, Crow, and S hoshone, the
Lakota became close allies of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and, under pressure
from western settlement, of the Kiowa.
Wounded Knee I (1890) 613
Oglala chief Red Cloud is generally credited as being the only Native American
leader to fight the U.S. military to a stand-off, securing a treaty in 1868 that guaran-
teed the Lakota possession of the Black Hills (Paha Sapa), and a good part of what is
now western South Dakota, eastern Wyoming, and western Nebraska. At the time,
the priority for the United States was peace in the Platte Valley to secure the Union
Pacific Railroad line. Red Cloud held out for military evacuation of the Powder River
country, the last good hunting ground left, before coming in to sign a treaty. Four
years later, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, producing a stream of prospectors
and soldiers into the region. This generated a series of renewed military penetration,
reinterpretation of the treaty, new treaty commissions, and battles, culminating in the
1876 battle at the Little Big Horn that wiped out General George Custer and his 7th
Cavalry. Resistance was undermined by depletion of the buffalo herds and loss of
game generally. Repeated military attacks on villages, destroying supplies of pem-
mican, buffalo robes, tipis, clothing, tools, and horse herds, while survivors ran off
on foot, left the Lakota weak and unable to continue fighting. Red Cloud had
accepted a reservation in western Nebraska when he concluded hostilities in 1868.
By 1877, all the Lakota were at least nominally confined to a reservation, and in dan-
ger of reprisals if found anywhere else. Until 1889, the seven Lakota tribes held the
western half of South Dakota as their reservation. Far from accepting that annuities
in food and other goods were a kind of welfare for dependent peoples, Lakota
accepted annuities as promised payment for land relinquished, and loss of hunting
grounds; some even thought of the annuities as tribute to the lords of the land.
—Charles Rosenberg
Further Reading
Gibbon, Guy E. The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Gilliland, Bruce. Seven Coun cil Fires: History o f th e Teton Siou x, 1679–1890 . Kimball,
NE: LeMoyne, 1998.
Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890)
Tatanka Yotanka, roug hly tr ansl ated into English as Sit ting B ull , was a spiritual
leader of the Hunkpapa, one of seven divisions within the Lakota, commonly known
to French and English-speaking North Americans as Teton Sioux. Born approxi-
mately 1831 along the Grand River, in what is now South Dakota, he was shot to
death December 15, 1890, in a prelude to the famous massacre at Wounded Knee
Creek. Sitting Bull was among the most steadfast in opposing cession of land to
the United States, and as such was respected, or at times resented, by members and
614 Wounded Knee I (1890)
leaders of all the Lakota, not just his own tribe. He was present at the battle on the
Little Big Horn River in 1876 where General George Custer and most of his com-
mand were wiped out. Contemporary accounts differ as to whether he participated
in the battle. Another Hunkpapa named Gall was generally recognized as the tribe’s
war chief. In the spring of 1877, Sitting Bull led the main body of Hunkpapa into
British-ruled Canada. Hunting in the Yellowstone country in October of the previous
year, he had told Colonel Nelson Miles that he did not want war; he wanted to be left
alone. Miles replied that there would be no peace until all Indians were settled on
reservations. Sitting Bull remained in Canada until 1881, but found game scarce
and the Canadian government unwilling to provide any supplies. Crossing the border
on July 19 with 186 followers, he was sent to Fort Randall as a military prisoner. In
1883, he was released to the Standing Rock agency on the Sioux reservation, where
he denounced a treaty breaking up the reservation into small pieces, opening nine
million acres for sale and settlement.
The Indian Bureau agent assigned to Standin g R ock, John “White Hair”
McLaughlin, tried in every way to break Sitting Bull’s influence, to no avail.
McLaughlin’s report that Sitting Bull was the real power behind the Ghost Dance
revival in 1890 was critical to the spiritual leader’s arrest and death. While he
lived, no other representative was acceptable. Invited to speak at the driving of
the last spike in the Northern Pacific Railroad, he is said to have improvised in
Lakota “You are all thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us
outcasts,” while an embarrassed army translator delivered in English the flowery
greeting previously prepared. In the summer of 1885, he toured with Buffalo Bill
Cody’s Wild West Show, but declined to accompany the show to Europe in 1887
because “I am needed here. There is more talk of taking our lands.” Sitting Bull’s
attitude toward the Ghost Dance religion is unclear. He appears to have remained
aloof, but not unsympathetic. He allowed the dance to be practiced at Standing
Rock, but never committed himself to its apocalyptic vision that a new earth, with-
out the people who called themselves “white,” would appear. He combined a firm
determination to preserve Lakota land and traditions, wi th a realistic sense of
American military firepower. Considering him a “fomenter of disturbances,”
Miles, by 1890 a general, ordered his arrest. When 45 Indian Police were ordered
to arrest him, a firefight broke out in which a police captain wounded Sitting Bull,
and a lieutenant shot him through the head.
—Charles Rosenberg
Further Reading
Anderson, Gary Clayton. Sitting Bull and the Paradox of Lakota Nationhood. New York:
HarperCollins, 1996.
Utley, Robert Marshall. Sitting Bull: The Life and Times of an American Patriot.
New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008.
Wounded Knee I (1890) 615