29 December 1890 -- Wounded Knee Massacre

“Ghost Dance” -- Robbie Robertson (Robbie Robertson and Jim Wilson, Composers)

1 January 1889, the moon passed directly between the sun and earth turning daylight into pitch darkness across a large swath of the American Northwest and regions of central Canada. Among the stunned witnesses to this remarkable phenomenon was the Paiute mystic Wovoka. But whereas most observers saw a rare but totally natural total solar eclipse, Wovoka experienced something more. Wovoka communed with the spirits as the moon blocked the rays of the sun.

Paiute Shaman Wovoka

c. 1856 to 20 September 1932

For centuries, Native Americans of many varied traditions practiced ritualized dancing of a similar sort. Dancers, sometimes interlocking hands, form a ring which slowly rotates to the sounds of ceremonial drumming. Wovoka’s vision informed him there was more to this “circle dance” than its participants realized. It was actually a Ghost Dance which, when combined with righteous conduct, would herald the dawn of a golden age for the abused and marginalized Native American peoples. Jesus Christ himself would return to redeem his true People, not white Christians who preached but never practiced benevolence, but those Native Americans faithful so disdained, so oppressed by a world dominated by greed and hate and selfishness. No longer would the People be divided by tribe or geography: They would be as one people, reunited with their ancestors, returned from the dead to be with those they had loved in life. Again the great bison would roam the plains in numbers too huge to imagine. And their white persecutors would return to across the seas from whence they had come.

Wovoka’s vision stroked the imagination of a horribly abused community. Native Americans were far, far too familiar with being victims of mass slaughter, thief, kidnapping, and exploitation of nearly any imaginable sort. Now, the tribes had been forcefully driven onto unwanted wastelands and ordered to scratch a living from the barren soil. To allay their guilt for perpetrating these atrocities, white leaders sent their Native American victims a pittance in foods and supplies. Much of this modicum of compensation somehow vanished into the pockets of unscrupulous middlemen long before reaching the desperate people for whom it might sway the scales of life or death. News of Wovoka’s revelation captured the imagination of desperate Native American communities from California to Oklahoma with each tribal group subtly adjusting the prophet’s message to confirm with its own traditions and customs. The Ghost Dance spread among like wildfire in a woodland drought among these much-abused peoples hoping desperately for some succor.

Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge Reservation

by Frederic Remington

The Lakota Sioux people confined to the Dakota Territory's massive system of reservations were desperately in want of succor. Once a proud people inspiring respect and awe among friends and foes alike, they had been reduced to mendicancy. The lands promised them in treaty after treaty was being steadily gobbled up by prospectors and settlers backed by the formidable might of the American army. Too many of their warriors had fallen resisting the irresistible influx of white newcomers. Too many of their young people had fled north to find asylum in more hospitable Canada. Too many of their young had succumbed to cold and starvation in the unforgiving winters. A drowning man will grasp at any straw, and the Ghost Dance would be that straw for the Lakota.

The Lakota Sioux, mother to many accomplished warriors, added a dash of fatalism when adapting the Ghost Dance to their traditions. No longer would the white oppressors return to unknown lands across the oceans. Rather, they would be swallowed up by great earthquakes. And faithful practitioners of the Ghost Dance need not fear the armed soldiers imprisoning them on this miserable and hostile plot of earth: Their ceremonial clothing, their Ghost Shirts, were proof against white rifles.

United States citizens and officials throughout the Great Plains and Great Basin regions of the American West were alarmed by the rapid spread and ardent practice of the Ghost Dance. It was widely suspected to be signaling an imminent general uprising. But nowhere did US officials respond so ineptly, so disastrously, so indecently as did James McLaughlin, Indian Agent at the Dakota Territory's huge Standing Rock Reservation. The Canadian-born McLaughlin, while repugnantly paternalistic and patronizing, was well intended toward those Native Americans confined to his keeping. Fearing an uprising that would never occur, he overreacted and initiated a tragedy.

James McLaughlin

12 February 1942 to 28 July 1923

McLaughlin thought to be proactive, preempting an insurrection that existed only in his nightmares, by striking force. He insisted a mobilized force of US cavalry stand ready to respond while  ignoring the advice of experienced military officers who themselves had been keeping a watchful eye on Native American unrest and saw no threat in the Ghost Dancer. Nor did other white men having experience with the Ghost Dancers. Surgeon and former Indian Agent Valentine McGillycuddy addressed both the unfairness and danger inherent in any attempt to suppress the rituals.

"The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians. If the Seventh-Day Adventists prepare the ascension robes for the Second Coming of the Savior, the United States Army is not put in motion to prevent them. Why should not the Indians have the same privilege? If the troops remain, trouble is sure to come"

But McLaughlin persisted in ordering the arrests of tribal leaders. On 15 December, McLaughlin dispatched native policemen to take the legendary Chief Sitting Bull into custody. The famous mystic was perhaps the strongest link in the fragile chain connecting the increasingly overlapping worlds of Native Americans and white outsiders.

Chief Sitting Bull

c. 1885

Sacred to Native Americans for his remarkably skilled and effective resistance to white domination, Sitting Bull was also beloved by millions of white observers because of his friendships and appearances with Buffalo and Anne Oakley. There exists no evidence that Sitting Bull had joined or planned to take part in the Ghost Dance movement. Still, with the great chief in custody, McLaughlin could not only prevent his joining the celebrants, but also perhaps persuade the old man to use his influence to dampen the Ghost Dancers’ enthusiasm.

At about 5:30 a.m. that frosty December morning, Lt. Henry Bull Head led 39 Indian Agency Police officers and four volunteers to Sitting Bull’s home and informed the chief that he was under arrest. Sitting Bull balked, refusing to accompany the tribal police. Lt. Bull Head tried a different tact promising to allow the chief safe passage back home if only he accompanied the tribal police and spoke with McLaughlin. A suspicious Sitting Bull refused to mount the house presented him, and the tribal police resorted to force. By now, an angry crowd had gathered, determined to prevent their respected chief’s arrest. When the tribal police physically seized Sitting Bull, Lakota Ghost Dancer Catch-the-Bear fired his rifle at Bull Head, striking the officer in the side. Attempting to return fire, Bull Head accidentally discharged his revolver into Sitting Bull’s chest. A second tribal policeman, Red Tomahawk, then shot the chief in the head. By the time a squadron of mounted US soldiers arrived to quell the melee, Sitting Bull, eight of his followers, and six tribal police officers, included Bull Head himself, were dead or dying.

Fearing the inevitable retribution to follow, Chief Spotted Elk, Ghost Dancer and ally of Sitting Bull, ironically one of the leading chiefs to urge Native Americans to practice peaceful coexistence with the white newcomers, fled with two-hundred of his followers to find safety with the formidable Lakota Chief Red Cloud, half-brother to Sitting Bull. Red Cloud had been one of the most effective Native American war chiefs resisting white encroachments on tribal lands. Eventually, he came to realize the futility of war and accepted the shamefully exploitative peace settlement offered him: His choice was either the bitter reservation life or the destruction of his people. Red Cloud offered not only the safety of the Pine Ridge Reservation Spotted Elk and his followers, but agreed to entreaty with white authorities on their behalf.

As we know from history, Spotted Elk would never reach the sanctuary offered him.

Chief Spotted Elk

1875

Even now, wiser and calmer heads urged caution. Major General Nelson Miles had perhaps more experience battling and knowledge of Native Americans than any other military officer in the American west. A very flawed man to sure, a firm adherent of what Rudyard Kipling would later term “The White Man's Burden” in his famous celebration of Anglo-American Imperialism, but also possessing a firm moral core, warned his superiors against overreaction immediately after Sitting Bull’s killing. He cabled his superiors in Washington, advising,

The difficult Indian problem cannot be solved permanently at this end of the line. It requires the fulfillment of Congress of the treaty obligations that the Indians were entreated and coerced into signing. They signed away a valuable portion of their reservation, and it is now occupied by white people, for which they have received nothing.

They understood that ample provision would be made for their support; instead, their supplies have been reduced, and much of the time they have been living on half and two-thirds rations. Their crops, as well as the crops of the white people, for two years have been almost total failures.

The dissatisfaction is wide spread [sic], especially among the Sioux, while the Cheyennes have been on the verge of starvation, and were forced to commit depredations to sustain life. These facts are beyond question, and the evidence is positive and sustained by thousands of witnesses.

Once again, a sane voice was ignored when it most urgently deserved heeding.

Major General Nelson Appleton Miles c. 1881

Unfortunately, one of the units under Miles command was the US Seventh Cavalry Regiment. Only 15 years, Sitting Bull’s Lakota warriors with their Cheyenne and Arapaho had inflicted upon the Seventh Cavalry the most devastating and humiliating defeat inflicted by Native Americans upon the United States military. At the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Native American warriors led by Lakota Chieftains Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse completely annihilated five of the Seventh Cavalry's 12 companies. Among the dead was the regiment's talented yet fatally self-confident commander, George Armstrong Custer. Irony abounds in this tragedy: It would be General Miles who defeated the forces which laid low Custer’s command.

It would be elements of the Seventh Cavalry which first encountered Spotted Elk’s ragged and pathetic band of refugees as they slowly trudged through the snow under the illusory safeguard of a white flag. On 28 December, Major Samuel Whitside’s troops intercepted the weary trekkers and detoured them to the  Wounded Knee Creek. Here they were ordered to make camp. Whiteside considered disarming the Lakota but instead heeded the warning of his half-Sioux translator/scout that doing so would provoke violence. Seventh Cavalry commander Colonel James Forsyth and the remainder of the Seventh Cavalry would arrive at the Wounded Knee Creek on the evening the refugees were making camp, bring the regiment up to full strength. Before settling down for the night, Forsyth ordered his troopers to surround the Native American encampment. Four light artillery pieces were readied for use.

As the sun rose on 29 December 1890, Colonel Forsyth ordered his soldiers to disarm the Lakota. As the troops circulated among the refugees taking their weapons, the disquiet became palpable. Angry voices were heard. Exactly what happened next was lost to the chaos which followed, but some details survive. According to the most reliable accounts, a Lakota man resisted soldiers attempting to relieve him of his rifle, and someone fired a shot, but we will never know just what initiated the horrific bloodbath that followed. At the sound of the gunshot, panicked refugees scattered desperately and excitable soldiers fired indiscriminately.

The Plains Indian Wars had been brutal and vicious. Native Americans and white interlopers alike were guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the wars had passed, and the white victors were not to be graceful winners. Many in the Seventh Cavalry saw opportunity to extract vengeance on the Lakota for the shameful defeat inflicted on their unit at the Little Big Horn in 1876. But Custer and his soldiers faced Native American warriors at the peak of their strength led by the redoubtable Crazy House. Now the guns of the Seventh Cavalry were trained upon tired old men and women, inexperienced youth, and frightened children guided by by Crazy Horse, by his tired and defeated cousin Spotted Elk seeking not martial glory, but to merely preserve the lives of his people. Captain Edward Godfrey, a survivor of the Little Big Horn, recalled the slaughter:

I know the men did not aim deliberately and they were greatly excited. I don't believe they saw their sights. They fired rapidly but it seemed to me only a few seconds till there was not a living thing before us; warriors, squaws, children, ponies, and dogs ... went down before that unaimed fire.

Victims of the Massacre

in the Wreckage of their Encampment 

Private Hugh McGinnis, an Irish immigrant who had enlisted to find a new beginning in this new world, was 21-years-old when he was twice wounded during the massacre. He would in time be the oldest surviving US soldier of Wounded Knee. In 1966, he would recall that awful day:

The pitiful wailing cries of babies and children mixed with the dull explosions of the old fashioned Hotchkiss machine guns rent the cold air.  The sickening thuds as these big lead bullets smashed into the body of a baby or a child, arms and head all flying in different directions.

The screams of mothers as machine gun bullets tore their bodies apart.  The curses of the Indian warriors, fighting machine guns and cannons with old muskets, knives and tomahawks, being cut down in rows by demon-crazed white soldiers.

All this happened seventy-four years ago at Wounded Knee Creek where soldiers of the 7th cavalry massacred in cold blood Indian men, women and children.  I am now ninety-four, the last surviving member of Troop K, 7th Cavalry.  The seventy-four years have never completely erased the ghastly horror of that scene and I still awake at night from nightmarish dreams of that massacre.

Black Elk, the famous Sioux medicine man and cousin to Crazy Horse recounted in 1931 his recollection of the slaughter: I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there.

The Body of Spotted Elk Shot as He Lay on the Ground

The number of slain Native Americans remain uncertain, but estimates range from “over 150” to “about 300.” Some of those wounded would succumb to their injuries, adding further to that ghastly if uncertain tally. A total of 31 soldiers died in the melee or of wounds sustained therein, many victims of “friendly fire.” The reckless employment of the four small artillery pieces is believed to have downed a number of the US troopers.

Private McGinnis, while undergoing treatment for a shattered thigh, recalled General Miles’ arrival:

General Nelson A. Miles who visited the scene of carnage, following a three day blizzard, estimated that around 300 snow shrouded forms were strewn over the countryside.  He also discovered to his horror that helpless children and women with babes in their arms had been chased as far as two miles from the original scene of encounter and cut down without mercy by the troopers.

Civilian Workers Hired by the US Army
Dispose of the Slain in a Mass Grave

Miles was overcome with anger and horror. After viewing the carnage and interviewing witnesses, he described the slaughter in a letter to his wife as "The most abominable criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children." General Miles immediately relieved Colonel Forsyth of command and ordered an investigation into his conduct. The War Department thought otherwise and, not only restored Forsyth to the ranks, but generously showered the Seventh Cavalry with decorations including, incredibly, 20 Congressional Medals of Honor.

For the remainder of his military career, Miles would devote his energies and influence to holding Forsyth accountable for the slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek. Those efforts would come to naught. Forsyth would retire from the US Army in 1897 as a much honored major general. The town of Forsyth, Montana and Camp Forsyth on the Fort Riley Military Reservation are both named for him.

James McLaughlin, the well-meaning if incompetent Indian Agent whose precipitant folly initiated this tragic chain of events, prospered as well. Five years after Spotted Elk and his followers were slaughtered by a frozen creek, McLaughlin received promotion to Inspector of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Department of Interior. Like Forsyth, he too boasts a town named in his honor: The largest city on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation bears his name. McLaughlin is interred there today, scarcely 20 miles from the very place where Sitting Bull was killed as the direct result of his clumsy bumbling. In 1910, Forsyth published his memoirs, a backwards glance at his long association with Native Americans. He entitled this work My Friend the Indian.

My Friend the Indian

James McLaughlin

Canadian singer/songwriter Robbie Robertson, born to a Mohawk mother, spent much of his childhood on the Six Nations First Nations Reserve near Toronto. Much of his work as a professional musician explores Native American history and ritual including this 1994 reminder of Wovoka’s vision.

“Ghost Dance” -- Robbie Robertson (Robbie Robertson and Jim Wilson, Composers)

The crow has brought the message to the children of the sun

For the return of the buffalo and for a better day to come

You can kill my body, you can damn my soul

For not believin' in your God and some world down below

You don't stand a chance against my prayers

You don't stand a chance against my love

They outlawed the Ghost Dance

They outlawed the Ghost Dance

But we shall live again, we shall live again

My sister above, but she has red paint

She died at Wounded Knee like a Latter Day Saint

You got the big drum in the distance, the blackbirds in the sky

That's the sound that you hear, when the buffalo cry

You don't stand a chance against my prayers

You don't stand a chance against my love

They outlawed the Ghost Dance

They outlawed the Ghost Dance

But we shall live again, we shall live again

We shall live again

Crazy Horse was a mystic, he knew the secret of the trance

And Sitting Bull, the great apostle of the Ghost Dance

Come on, Comanche, come on, Blackfoot

Come on, Shoshone, come on, Cheyenne

We shall live again

We shall live again

Come on, Arapaho, come on, Cherokee

Come on, Paiute, come on, Sioux

We shall live again

We used to do the Ghost Dance, used to do the Ghost Dance

But we don't sing them kind of songs no more