Wounded Knee: The Last Massacre of the Indian Wars

On December 29, 1890, U.S. Army soldiers killed at least 250 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in approximately one hour. The Army labeled it a battle and awarded 20 Medals of Honor for it. Those medals have never been rescinded. Wounded Knee was not the end of federal violence against Native people — it was the end of the military phase. The institutional phase was already underway.

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Why Washington Panicked Over a Religious Movement

By 1890, the Lakota had been confined to reservations in South Dakota for over a decade, following the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877 and the forced cession of the Black Hills after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The land cessions had continued: the Sioux Act of 1889 broke the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller reservations and removed approximately 9 million acres of land, cutting federal rations at the same time.^1^

Into this context came the Ghost Dance movement, a religious practice originated by the Paiute prophet Wovoka in Nevada in 1889. The Ghost Dance offered a vision of spiritual renewal — dead ancestors returning, the earth restored, the disappearance of white settlers — achieved through ceremony and righteous living, not violence. Among the Lakota, it spread rapidly through 1890, partly because the people were starving and desperate and partly because it offered hope that no material condition could provide.

Reservation agents and military commanders interpreted the Ghost Dance as a military threat. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs requested troops in November 1890. General Nelson Miles sent approximately 3,500 soldiers to the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations. Sitting Bull, who had returned from Canada and was seen as a potential unifying figure, was arrested and killed on December 15, 1890, during a confrontation between Indian police and his supporters at the Standing Rock Agency.

Chief Big Foot — Spotted Elk — led a band of approximately 350 Miniconjou Lakota south from the Cheyenne River reservation toward Pine Ridge, seeking safety near Chief Red Cloud. Many in his group were survivors of the violence at Standing Rock. Big Foot himself had pneumonia and was traveling by wagon. The group was intercepted by the Seventh Cavalry — Custer’s old regiment — on December 28 and escorted to Wounded Knee Creek to make camp.^2^

December 29: How a Disarmament Operation Became a Massacre

On the morning of December 29, Colonel James W. Forsyth ordered his approximately 500 soldiers to disarm the Lakota. The soldiers formed a perimeter around the camp. Four Hotchkiss mountain guns — capable of firing 50 rounds per minute — were positioned on a rise overlooking the camp. The ratio of armed soldiers to Lakota was better than two to one.

The disarmament was tense. Most weapons had been surrendered when a deaf man named Black Coyote — who witnesses later said did not understand what was being asked and was arguing about the value of his rifle — was wrestled by soldiers. His rifle discharged. Within seconds, soldiers opened fire on the camp from all directions simultaneously.

The Hotchkiss guns began firing into the camp at a rate that witnesses described as continuous. People fled in every direction. Soldiers pursued them for roughly two miles up a ravine, killing people as they ran. The killing lasted under an hour. When it was over, at least 250 Lakota were dead, though estimates range to 300 or more.^3^ Among the dead were Big Foot, found frozen in the posture of a man trying to rise. Of the approximately 350 people who had camped there, fewer than half walked away.

Civilian contractor Philip Wells, who served as an interpreter that day, later wrote that he saw the soldiers shoot into groups of women and children who had taken shelter in a ravine. “The women who were not wounded were trying to save the children,” he said. Twenty-five soldiers also died, most from friendly fire given how completely the camp was surrounded.

What the Army’s Own Records Left Behind

The bodies of the Lakota dead lay in the snow for three days while a blizzard passed. They were buried in a mass grave on January 1, 1891. Charles Eastman — Ohiyesa — a Santee Dakota physician who had graduated from Boston University School of Medicine and was serving as the agency doctor at Pine Ridge, went out with a search party and found survivors in the ravine, some still alive under the snow. He later wrote that the sight “haunted” him for the rest of his life. His account is one of the most important firsthand records of the aftermath.^4^

The Army’s official framing — a battle, not a massacre — depended on the argument that the Lakota had fired first and that the soldiers had acted in self-defense. The 20 Medals of Honor awarded for Wounded Knee remain on the books. Efforts to rescind them, including bills introduced in Congress in 1990, 2019, and 2021, have not succeeded.

Wounded Knee in 1890 marked the end of large-scale armed conflict between the U.S. military and Native nations. What it did not mark was the end of federal violence against Native people — only a shift in the instruments used to inflict it. The boarding school system was already operating. Forced allotment of reservation lands had begun with the Dawes Act of 1887, which would transfer approximately 90 million acres out of tribal ownership by 1934. The broken treaties and the reservation system built the political conditions that Wounded Knee required. The killing at Wounded Knee was the final act of a military campaign; the institutional campaign was still years from its peak.

The mass grave at Wounded Knee is on private land. It has been the site of ongoing disputes between the Oglala Lakota and the landowner for decades. In 1973, Wounded Knee became the site of a 71-day occupation by American Indian Movement activists demanding treaty rights and an investigation into conditions on Pine Ridge. The place carries more than one history, and none of them are finished.

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Sources:

1. Utley, Robert M. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. Yale University Press, 1963.
2. Greene, Jerome A. American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890. University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.
3. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
4. Eastman, Charles A. From the Deep Woods to Civilization. Little, Brown, 1916.