Wounded Knee, December 1890

By the late eighteen eighties, the Lakota world had been reduced to a fraction of its former territory. The bison were gone, exterminated in a decade of commercial slaughter. Reservation land allotments had been cut again and again by federal policy. Hunger was common. In that context, the Ghost Dance spread across the Plains: a spiritual movement, begun by a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, promising renewal and the return of the old world. Thousands of Lakota danced. Federal authorities, alarmed by the movement, moved to suppress it.

On December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety, roughly three hundred fifty Lakota people led by Chief Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot, were encamped along Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Spotted Elk was ill with pneumonia, traveling by wagon. They were surrounded by five hundred soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry. The soldiers began collecting weapons. A deaf tribesman named Black Coyote resisted surrendering his rifle. In the struggle, a shot fired. Within minutes, soldiers opened fire with rifles and four Hotchkiss mountain guns.

Between two hundred fifty and three hundred Lakota were killed, the majority women, children, and elderly. Twenty-five soldiers also died, most from their own crossfire in the chaos. The dead were buried in a mass grave on a hill above the creek. Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor. A movement has sought revocation of those medals ever since.

Wounded Knee Creek flows quietly today through the Pine Ridge Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota. The massacre site is a national historic landmark, tended by the Lakota people who have never left.