Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890: The Three Hundred at the Creek

The morning of December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety, began as a disarmament. Colonel James Forsyth commanded approximately five hundred soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, arrayed around a camp on Wounded Knee Creek where a band of Miniconjou Lakota had surrendered the previous evening. Their leader, Chief Spotted Elk, the man the Army called Big Foot, lay in a tent. He had pneumonia. He had brought his people in from the cold.

The band numbered roughly three hundred fifty people, most of them women, children, and elderly men who had been following the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement the government had decided was a threat. Soldiers began confiscating rifles. When they reached a man named Black Coyote, who was deaf and did not understand the order, he refused to give up his weapon. The accounts of what happened next vary in detail but agree on result. Four Hotchkiss mountain guns positioned on the surrounding high ground opened fire.

What followed was not a battle. Approximately two hundred sixty to three hundred Lakota were killed. Women and children were pursued for miles across the frozen creek bottom. The soldiers lost approximately twenty-five of their own, the majority to friendly fire from the crossfire. Spotted Elk was found dead in the snow, wrapped in a blanket, his head propped on his arm as if he had stopped to rest.

Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for their conduct that day. Congress has considered rescissions. The Biden administration ordered a review in twenty twenty-four. As of this writing, not one medal has been rescinded. No federal apology has been enacted into law.

The site is a National Historic Landmark on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The mass grave is there. The grass grows over it every spring.