The Wild Frontier (42 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
During the exodus of the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph in 1877, the Bannock Indian scouts attached to the troops of General Howard disinterred and mutilated the bodies of recently killed Nez Perce.
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General Sherman commented that after the Nez Perce were defeated by the army in Montana, it was extraordinary in that the Indians “abstained from scalping, let captive women go free, [and] did not commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful families, which is usual.”
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That was because of Chief Joseph’s orders. One must wonder what the course of history would have been had all the chiefs and all commanders of soldiers given and enforced similar orders.
In the Bannock War in 1878, a group of Umatilla Indians approached the Bannocks and Paiutes on the pretense of joining them in the war. Instead, they persuaded Paiute chief Egan to leave his warriors and come with them. They then killed him and gave his scalp to General Nelson A. Miles. An army surgeon took Egan’s head to make sure the scalp was his.
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In 1879, Nathan C. Meeker was the Indian agent for the Ute tribe in Colorado. He had been an agricultural reporter for the
New York Tribune
and had become overly zealous in trying to get the Indians to plow up their pony pastures in order to raise more crops. Medicine man Canalla, also known as Johnson, went to Meeker’s house to protest. Meeker told him the Ute
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had too many ponies and had better kill some of them. Johnson threw Meeker out of Meeker’s own front door.
Meeker telegraphed for troops. By the time they came, the agency buildings were burned, Meeker and 9 other agency employees were found dead in the burned buildings, 3 women and 2 children were captured and taken into the mountains, and 13 soldiers were killed. Twelve Ute were charged with murdering Meeker and committing outrages on the captive women (2 were Meeker’s wife and daughter). None was
tried because their personal situations were lost in the larger matter of whether or not the Ute should move from their homeland, where the miners hoped to discover silver. They moved.
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The
Times
summed it up:
No one doubts that Mr. Meeker meant well, but his conduct was nevertheless the immediate cause which precipitated the outbreak. He was a professional philanthropist…. It is a peculiarity of men of this type that they are prone to insist upon reforming other men by force. They are honestly anxious to do good, but they are determined to do good in their own way and in spite of the objections of those whom they propose to benefit.
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Events were beginning that would lead to the Wounded Knee Massacre. The Ghost Dance played an important role. The efforts of Wovoka, the Paiute medicine man, caused its spread among Indians. Wovoka was brought up as a youth on a ranch near Yerington, Nevada, with a devoutly Christian settler family named Wilson. When he was 32, he became ill with a fever. An eclipse of the sun happened during this time. Afterward, he said he had been taken to the spirit world, where he visited with the Supreme Being, and returned to spread the message that the world would soon end, then come alive again in a pure, aboriginal state with the Messiah present.
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When the Sun died [the day of the eclipse], I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give my people.
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This new world would be inherited by all Indians, including the dead. Wovoka called for meditation, prayers, singing, and especially dancing, through which an Indian might briefly die and glimpse the paradise to come. This Ghost Dance spread rapidly. Some followers considered him the Messiah, and he was referred to as the Red Man’s Christ. Kicking Bear and Short Bull, Sioux medicine men and brothers-in-law, visited him with others and thereafter they emphasized the possible elimination of whites and use of Ghost Dance shirts to stop white men’s bullets.
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Wovoka claimed he could produce fog, snow, a shower, a hard rain, or sunshine. As part of his claim to be the Messiah, Wovoka’s message to the Indians was this:
All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, then all the Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can’t hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. Then medicine man tell Indians to send word to all Indians to keep up dancing and the good time will come. Indians who don’t dance, who don’t believe in this word, will grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and be burned in fire.
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Alan Axelrod described how the Ghost Dance
spread through the Sioux reservations with increasing fervor and excitement, reaching fever pitch in the summer of 1890. White authorities were alarmed, and it became apparent that the Sioux reservations were on the verge of a general uprising.
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Dee Brown reported that
by mid-November Ghost Dancing was so prevalent on the Sioux reservations that almost all other activities came to a halt. No pupils appeared at the schoolhouses, the trading stores were empty, no work was done on the little farms.
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The Ghost Dance was not well understood and, Robert G. Hays said, “terrified white society.”
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The towns around the reservations filled with hysterical people, and settlers appealed for protection. The new Indian agent at the Pine Ridge Reservation, Daniel F. Royer, telegraphed Washington, “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. We need protection and we need it now.”
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The settlers were alarmed because it was thought the Sioux reservations were near an uprising such as had occurred in Minnesota in 1862.
The government attempted to arrest Sioux chief and medicine man Sitting Bull on December 15, 1890, 14 days before Wounded Knee, because he had invited his nephew, Kicking Bear, to come demonstrate the Ghost Dance. Approximately 40 Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin. About 160 Ghost Dancers gathered outside to try to prevent the
arrest. One of them, Catch-the-Bear, pulled a rifle and shot at Lieutenant Bull Head of the Indian police. Bull Head shot back and struck Sitting Bull. Indian police officer Red Tomahawk also fired, this time hitting Sitting Bull in the head. Several people were killed in the fight that followed, 7 Indian civilians and 5 Indian police officers. Women participated, armed with knives and clubs.
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Big Foot
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was known as a peacemaker who settled disputes among the Sioux.
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He received an invitation from Red Cloud to visit the Pine Ridge Reservation.
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Red Cloud hoped that Big Foot could help solve Indian problems with the whites.
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Big Foot set out from the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota with about 230 women and children and 120 men.
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During the trip, he got pneumonia and had to ride in a wagon.
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Big Foot at one time had been a Ghost Dance believer. Unknown to the army, he had ceased to believe. When he moved his band south to Pine Ridge, General Nelson A. Miles in Rapid City, South Dakota, erroneously assumed he had been invited there by the Ghost Dancers. His name was on a list of “formentors of disturbances,” so Miles ordered Big Foot taken prisoner.
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The Seventh Cavalry found him 30 miles east of Pine Ridge,
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and he was arrested.
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Before his arrest, Big Foot had raised a white flag asking for a parley, but this was refused by Major S. M. Whiteside, who demanded unconditional surrender, which was at once given, and the Indians moved on with the troops to Wounded Knee Creek. Unconditional surrender meant that “all arms would be yielded peacefully upon request.”
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The Sioux were then surrounded by the army at Wounded Knee Creek, where they camped in the center of a ring of cavalrymen.
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Colonel James Forsyth commanded the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old outfit. He saw that Big Foot was ill, so he provided a tent warmed with a camp stove for him, and he sent his own regimental surgeon to attend him.
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Forsyth had instructions to disarm the Indians and take them to the railroad so that they could be removed from the “zone of military operation.” A fight was not expected,
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but Forsyth did have Hotchkiss guns or cannons, which fired 2-inch explosive shells at the rate of almost 50 a minute.
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He ordered 4 of these guns placed in position around the Sioux camp.
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The Sioux warriors were wearing their Ghost Shirts. The soldiers began searching the Sioux for guns. They found about 40 weapons.
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Medicine man Yellow Bird took action, apparently expecting a fight. He began dancing the Ghost Dance, tweeted on his whistle, performed incantations, sang a holy song, and incited the warriors to fight, reminding them that the army bullets could not penetrate their Ghost Shirts. “You wear ghost shirts and no white man’s bullet may hurt you.”
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Indian Angie Debo observed in connection with this search by the soldiers that “in such a crisis the Sioux were always likely to give way to panic or blind rage, and in either case to begin shooting.”
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What did these Sioux do? They began shooting. Black Fox (some say Black Coyote) took out a rifle from beneath his blanket. He fired into the search party. Several other warriors did the same thing with the encouragement of Yellow Bird. Military historian S. L. A. Marshall stated that several Sioux simultaneously fired guns concealed under their blankets.
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The fact that the Indians had not only rifles but also knives
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and war clubs
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is some evidence that the Sioux did not intend to surrender but were ready to fight.
When the Hotchkiss guns were fired into the Indian camp, they caused a stampede of the warriors, women, and children, who fled up a dry ravine and tried to hide. Marshall described what happened next:
The frenzied cavalrymen and Indian scouts, once the heavy fire lifted, pursued to cut down many of these pitiful fugitives, showing them little or no mercy. Here is the sequence in Wounded Knee that is most generally condemned and really nothing sensible may be said in mitigation of it…. The grisly chase and killing went on for more than three hours and the trail of bodies extended outward from the camp for more than three miles.
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This was the atrocity.
James Mooney, who immediately investigated the battle under the auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution, concluded,
There can be no question that the pursuit was simply a massacre, where fleeing women, with infants in their arms, were shot down after resistance had ceased and when almost every warrior was stretched out dead or dying on the ground.
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Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Boston medical school, had been serving as governmental physician to the Pine Ridge agency. He was one of the first on the scene after the battle. Brandon stated he described, “quite dispassionately, the
way young girls had knelt, and covered their faces with their shawls so they would not see the troopers come up to shoot them.”
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Oglala Sioux chief American Horse (possibly the nephew of the American Horse killed at the Battle of Slim Buttes) described firsthand some of the deaths:
There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce…. A mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing…. The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through … and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys … came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.
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There were about 350 people with Big Foot. By the time the battle ended, the Indian dead, according to Angie Debo (who has made the only known breakdown among men, women, and children), included 84 men and boys of fighting age, 44 women, and 18 children.
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Quite possibly most of the women and children were killed while fleeing, which means that the atrocity part of the battle took the lives of perhaps 62 Indian women and children.
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The range of estimates of Indian dead is from 153 to “most likely” 300.
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The range of soldier death estimates is 25 to 60.
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Fair approximate figures would seem to be 170 Indian dead and 30 soldier dead. The fight was not completely onesided. There were 39 wounded soldiers in addition to the 30 dead.
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There was a bad blizzard in the Dakotas after the battle, and Ralph K. Andrist stated that “the bodies were found partially covered with snow and frozen into the grotesque attitudes of violent death.”
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The blizzard prevented clearing the area for several days. A photograph of the body of Big Foot is said to be perhaps the most widespread photograph of the massacre. He was later buried with the rest of the dead in a common grave.
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