Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

by Dee Brown

Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side.

I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman’s private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick;

Black Kettle slowed his pony and lifted his hand in the sign gesture of peace. A bullet burned into his stomach, and his pony swerved. Another bullet caught him in the back, and he slid into the snow at the river’s edge. Several bullets knocked his wife off beside him, and the pony ran away. The cavalrymen splashed on across the ford, riding right over Black Kettle and his wife, splattering mud upon their dead bodies.

It was then that General Sheridan uttered the immortal words: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”

One infant of some ten months was shot twice and one leg hacked nearly off.”

Two of the dead were women, bloody with many wounds. “The little girl began to scream and fought the orderly until he placed her on the ground, when she ran and embraced one of these squaws, who was her mother. I told Adjutant Lemly I intended to adopt this little girl, as I had slain her mother.”

‘Well, how do you think Mrs. Mills will like it?’ It was the first time I had given that side of the matter a thought, and I decided to leave the child where I found her.” 39

Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

After Jack left, he put his American flag on a pole and mounted it above his lodge. (Perhaps he had not heard that Black Kettle of the Cheyennes was flying an American flag at Sand Creek in 1864.)

simultaneously, Red Tomahawk shot Sitting Bull through the head and killed him. During the firing, the old show horse that Buffalo Bill had presented to Sitting Bull began to go through his tricks. He sat upright, raised one hoof, and it seemed to those who watched that he was performing the Dance of the Ghosts.

One estimate placed the final total of dead at very nearly three hundred of the original 350 men, women, and children. The soldiers lost twenty-five dead and thirty-nine wounded, most of them struck by their own bullets or shrapnel.