Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre

by Heather Cox Richardson

The Minneconjous had decided to take up this invitation when rumor had reached them that they would be imprisoned if they stayed at Cheyenne River. They were worried about running from their army escort, but more worried that they were walking into a trap. Famous Oglala leader Red Cloud was at Pine Ridge, and they gambled that he could protect them from the army.

But the troops had been at Wounded Knee only a day or so when important news arrived from the Pine Ridge agency. On the morning of December 28, the officers at Wounded Knee had received reports that the Badlands Sioux were coming in to army headquarters. This would effectively end the threat of a shooting war that had loomed for the past six weeks.4

About a mile away from where the scouts told them the Indians had been eating, Whitside ordered the troops to dismount and string out in a half circle as they advanced. As soon as they spotted Indians in the advance of their band, the soldiers formed a line and set up their guns in a dry creek bed between the hills, a low ravine full of pines.8

The Indians finished their meal and began moving slowly toward the army camp, not a war party but a community band of about three hundred men, women, and children.

The Minneconjou band had run from their reservation in fear of imprisonment, and had been in such a hurry they had taken little with them in the way of supplies.

The men and women of Big Foot’s band were nervous as they headed toward Wounded Knee. They distrusted soldiers and knew they were in some trouble for running away from their army escort at Cheyenne River, but also knew they had done nothing wrong and hoped their unwillingness to join the Badlands Sioux would mitigate officials’ anger. They were eager to get on to the Pine Ridge agency, where they expected to meet family members and take shelter with the Oglala leader Red Cloud.

Wanting simply for their journey to end safely, the Minneconjous were shocked to see that army officers evidently considered them a dangerous war party.

When they were about fifty yards away, three men left the band. They came forward, one on foot between two on horseback, carrying a white flag.

Whitside was determined that Big Foot and his people would not escape from him as they had done from the last officer charged with capturing them. He set two troops of cavalry around the Indians, forming a military cordon. He had the two loaded Hotchkiss guns set up on a slight knoll about fifty yards from the Indian camp and ordered all the artillerymen to stay on duty throughout the night.

Whitside had not taken away the Indians’ guns the previous day, but Forsyth had orders to disarm them before moving them to the agency.

Confused and sullen, the younger Indian men had no intention of being disarmed in the face of such overwhelming military power.

Despite what Kelley had written the night before about the long experience of the soldiers of the Seventh in Indian wars, many at Wounded Knee Creek were new recruits. They had never been close to hostile Indians, but they had certainly read about them in blood-curdling dime novels and seen them portrayed in stage shows where brave cowboys protected innocent women from savages intent on taking blonde scalps.

These raw soldiers were frightened and vengeful.

For months, the troops had been reading newspaper reports, written by men like Kelley, claiming that these same treacherous Indians were planning to exterminate nearby settlers. The soldiers were tense.

Eventually, the soldiers turned up about thirty-eight old guns. The search through the tepees had been slow, and Forsyth was frustrated and angry. He could not believe that the young men didn’t have more—and newer—guns. It seemed clear to him that the Minneconjous were hiding their best weapons.

Three Indians had been searched without incident when a young warrior standing apart from the search held his new, valuable Winchester over his head and announced in Lakota that he had paid a good deal of money for the gun and would not give up such an expensive weapon without being paid for it. Three soldiers grabbed him from behind and they all began to struggle. Troops around them pointed their weapons at the Indian. As the men wrestled, an army scout shouted: “Look out! Look out! They are going to shoot!”26 As the soldiers and the warrior struggled, the gun fired into the eastern sky.27

An instant of silence marked the line between an anxious surrender and a full-blown military engagement. As the gunshot echoed, the soldiers, standing in ranks, fired a volley that felled half the Indian men immediately. The volley also brought down a number of soldiers, since Forsyth had given no thought to positioning the troops for battle when he arranged them. Bullets tore through the boys playing leapfrog; all of them died together.

Those Sioux left standing counterattacked with knives, clubs, fists, and guns that they snatched from wounded soldiers.

While the men fought in front of the tepees, the Indian women and children in the camp tried to flee. They whipped up the horses they had been hitching to wagons and ran to the northwest, or east on the road toward the shelter of the store and the post office. But most of the men and many of the women and children could not get to a wagon and the road. Instead, they ran to the south, where they could hide in a ravine that ran behind the camp.

The soldiers fired on the Indians as they tried to escape. They shot the running Sioux as the artillery turned the Hotchkiss guns on the fleeing wagons.

As soldiers moved off over the plains and the sound of gunshots grew more distant, Kelley put down his gun, quickly surveyed the battlefield, noted the dead, and wrote a new report.

Over the next two hours, the soldiers hunted down and slaughtered all the Sioux they could find, riding them down and shooting them at point-blank range as they tried to escape.

Soldiers shot babies in their cradle-boards. The only good Indian was a dead Indian, many of the troops had been taught, and they had just turned about two hundred and fifty Sioux into good Indians.

Like other nineteenth-century Americans, President Harrison believed himself to be engaged in a titanic struggle over the soul of the country.

Their opponents, Democrats and members of various reform parties, countered by pointing to falling wages, child labor, and city tenements as evidence that the system was broken. While businessmen lobbied their friends in Congress and state legislatures for favorable legislation, workers took to the streets to protest poverty wages and dangerous working conditions. Each side was convinced that the other was destroying America.

Harrison’s presidency had witnessed a desperate battle between Republicans and Democrats for control of the nation. Republicans had held the White House and controlled the Congress for most of the post-Civil War era, but by 1890 their grip was weakening.

They lectured to wage laborers, poor farmers, and young entrepreneurs about laws that put the fruits of their labor into the pockets of the rich. “Wall Street owns the country,” western organizer Mary Elizabeth Lease thundered in the summer of 1890. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

“The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master,” Lease snarled.31

As the midterm election of 1890 approached, Democrats had battered at the Harrison administration’s support for big business and toleration of the trusts. For the Republicans, much was at stake.

an attempt to secure the outcome of the midterm elections, the Republican Congress tried to shore up the numbers of Republican voters. They tried to cut back the numbers of Democrats who could vote by passing a federal elections bill that placed the military at polls in the South and in New York City.

While Republicans argued they were trying to prevent voter fraud, Democrats and Populists chided them for simply trying to stack the vote for the Republicans.

Both parties knew that control of the government in 1890, and then in 1892, would turn, in part, on western voters.

Harrison’s men believed that westerners tended to be Republican, so they worked to bring western states into the Union as quickly as possible. Dakota Territory might make two new states if it could be divided, but most of the land in the southern part of the Territory consisted of the Great Sioux Reservation.

unable to vote, and uninvolved in the political war, the Sioux nonetheless became crucial fi...

To court settlers in Dakota Territory, in 1889 Harrison’s men subdivided the Great Sioux Reservation into small blocks, opening up more land for private development. An influx of settlers would give the Territory enough people to make a case for two new states.

The destruction of their huge reservation proved disastrous for the Sioux. The bison herds that had once roamed the Plains had largely been destroyed, and the smaller reservations had too little game to support the native populations living on them.

Destitute and in real danger of starvation, the Sioux turned to a new religious movement. The Ghost Dance promised to bring back the world of game and plenty that had been theirs before the coming of whites. If they danced on certain nights, stopped fighting amongst themselves, and dealt honestly with all men, they believed, their ancestors would come back from the afterworld, herding before them the vanished game that would sustain the tribes.

Incompetent and frightened by the Indians, they interpreted the religious enthusiasm as tremors of an approaching war.

The new reservations covered huge expanses of land with wide-flung camps of different Indian bands. Each was overseen by a single politically appointed government agent who was responsible for seeing that the Indians received all the goods and payments guaranteed to them by treaty. Those agents disbursed the money that Congress appropriated for the Indians every year, and they held complete authority over how the funds were spent.

Agents made a practice of awarding inflated contracts to their friends, who fulfilled them with rotten food, shoddy clothing, and poor construction . . . if they bothered to fulfill them at all. The agency system had been corrupt long before Harrison took office, but a bad system was made worse on Harrison’s watch, and the Sioux in South Dakota suffered more than other tribes in other states.

Harrison’s men replaced seasoned agents with hacks in the fall, distributing the lucrative agency jobs to loyal party men. This turnover at the agencies would be catastrophic for the Sioux.

On the Pine Ridge Reservation, the new Republican agent was good at drumming up Republican votes, but he feared and hated Indians.

Back East, Democrats took the panicked agents at their word when they foretold a war. Democrats argued that the corruption that characterized the Republican Party under Harrison had sent pacified Indians back to the warpath, where they threatened the lives of settlers.

The election of 1890, held early in November, made Harrison’s political fears a reality. The Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives by a margin of two to one.

Worse, though, was that Republican control of the Senate remained in doubt even after the elections were over. The administration had counted on controlling the Senate, and initial election returns suggested that the Republicans had held on to a majority by four seats. But this was not the relief it should have been, for those four senators were not firmly pro-administration Republicans.

The outcome would remain in question until the state legislature met in January 1891. The results of the election depended on more than settling the issue of the ruined ballot boxes.

And in late 1890, South Dakotans were especially susceptible to encouragement from the administration to back a Republican. The new state was mired in a recession and desperate for money and contracts to boost the local economy. Such a situation demanded attention from the Harrison administration.

Westerners had a long, and what one historian has called a “diabolical,” history of support for government involvement with Indians. They liked the government either to send contracts to Indian reservations or to send in the army to fight them, for either policy brought money into the local economy.

As early as 1866, William Tecumseh Sherman privately acknowledged that the western cry for military action against Indians was a veiled attempt to create a nearby market for agricultural products.32

Once Indians were on reservations, Indian agents bought beef and grain, as well as shirts, shoes, blankets, and so on, to feed and clothe their charges. Army mobilizations were even more profitable. Soldiers needed rations, of course, and so did their horses and pack animals.