Wounded Knee: December Twenty-Ninth, Eighteen Ninety

The morning of December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety, was cold and still at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Approximately three hundred fifty Miniconjou Lakota, a band led by Chief Spotted Elk, known also as Big Foot, had surrendered to the United States Seventh Cavalry the night before. They were being escorted toward the agency. Lakota men were being disarmed in camp when firing began.

Witnesses disagree on how the first shot was fired. Several Army accounts name a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote who resisted giving up his rifle; Lakota oral accounts dispute this. What the Army's own records confirm is the outcome: Hotchkiss mountain guns positioned on the surrounding hills opened fire into the encampment. When the engagement ended, somewhere between two hundred fifty and three hundred Lakota lay dead, among them women and children who had fled the camp. The precise number is not established in a single authoritative count; the Oglala Sioux Tribe archives and South Dakota Historical Society each cite the range of two hundred fifty to three hundred. A blizzard arrived that night and froze the bodies where they fell. Soldiers buried them in a mass grave on the hill.

Nineteen soldiers received the Medal of Honor for the engagement at Wounded Knee. Congress has considered rescinding those awards multiple times. As of this writing, none has been rescinded.

The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-five. It sits within the Pine Ridge Reservation, on land the Oglala Sioux Tribe governs today.

In February of nineteen seventy-three, members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee for seventy-one days, demanding that the Senate honor treaty obligations and investigate the living conditions on Pine Ridge. Federal marshals surrounded the occupation. Two AIM members were killed. The standoff brought the unresolved historical record back into national attention, though it produced no treaty review.

The creek is quiet now. The mass grave is marked. The medals have not been returned.