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

by Heather Cox Richardson

Hunkpapa warrior Gall had lost his two wives and three children in the early fighting, and he fought to avenge their deaths. He led hundreds of warriors from all the different bands at the camp in a counterattack on Custer’s two hundred soldiers. The ensuing battle lasted only about thirty minutes. The troops dismounted and made a stand on a long, low hill. Quickly, though, their organization fell apart. The Indians stampeded the army horses, so there was no escape. Soldiers fought or ran, singly or in bunches, in the heat and smoke and whoops and screams, until the Indians had killed them all.

Shocked that the army officers would have put themselves into such an untenable military situation, Sitting Bull believed that the attacks had been a feint intended to distract the Indians from a major offensive to come. He stayed out of the fighting to survey the battle and marshal his forces against a final major attack. It never came.42

The Indians moved into the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains and celebrated their victory. They had killed 263 soldiers and wounded 60 others. Their own losses were relatively slight, probably no more than 40 killed and 60 or so wounded. While they mourned their losses, there was no doubt they had won a great victory.

The only survivors of Custer’s escapade were a few Indian scouts, who had run from the general’s suicidal plan, and a badly wounded horse, “Comanche.”

The profound symbolism of the lone horse draped in black indicated the fury of members of the Seventh Cavalry at what they saw as a heroic stand against murderous Indians, a willful view of a battle that, after all, Custer had launched against an encampment of Sioux in their own territory.46

Custer’s demise opened the way for Nelson Miles’s career to take off.48

For his part, Sitting Bull preferred to talk rather than fight. His coalition had been steadily crumbling as groups broke off to find fresher hunting ground, and those who remained were tired of war and eager to settle in for the winter.

The meeting broke up with gunfire, and Miles’s 398 soldiers advanced on the warriors. Over the next several days, the troops overran the Indian camps, then chased the Sioux forty-two miles to the south side of the Yellowstone. Both the soldiers and the Sioux had lost their conviction that the Indians were invincible.50

Over the next six months, Miles wore down Sioux resistance. Rather than letting his men hole up in winter quarters, he outfitted them in buffalo skin coats, had a bearskin coat made for himself, and then chased the Sioux through snow and frigid temperatures that sometimes reached 35 degrees below zero.

As the Sioux wearied, Miles and Crook kept the pressure on them in negotiations as well as on the field, promising them that they could keep their ponies and arms if they surrendered.

It seemed the back of Sioux resistance had been broken. On May 6, even Crazy Horse gave up. He brought almost nine hundred followers to Camp Robinson to surrender. The Indians had counted on lenient terms, but what happened at Fort Robinson suggested that their hopes were unfounded.

Sitting Bull and about four thousand of his people wanted no part of such leniency. They fled to Canada, insisting they would not be controlled by federal authorities.53

Miles’s victory further eroded the Sioux’s traditional way of life. In the aftermath of the fighting, angry government officials forced the Indians to give up the Black Hills, along with about a third of their reservation.

The punishment of the agency Indians who had stayed on the side of the government as well as those who had gone to war shook the confidence of agency Indians that they would be safe with the government. They were convinced that they could expect in the future to share in whatever punishments fighting Indians endured.

Those Sioux who continued to try to follow the buffalo were quickly disillusioned, for the settlers pouring into the eastern part of the Territory killed off the game. By 1878, the huge buffalo herds had been decimated and the Sioux tribes were assigned to agencies for rations.

On the reservation, the agents tried to induce the Sioux to accept the American economy and adopt white ways. Each left to act as he thought best, the agents achieved varied results and left varied legacies.

Spotted Tail learned the hard way, though, that not all white reformers were so easy to manipulate. In 1879, Indian reformer Captain Richard H. Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, taking as a principle to “kill the Indian and save the man.”

A year later, when Pratt proudly showed off the Brulé children to Spotted Tail and a number of other Brulé leaders whom he had brought east, the adult Brulés were horrified. Their children had been forced into menial labor, had had their hair cut, and had been baptized as Christians without their parents’ consent.

But Spotted Tail utterly refused to leave his own relatives at the Carlisle School and took them back to Rosebud. The episode taught the Sioux to loathe Pratt and to distrust reformers’ promises to “teach” their children.60

According to both tradition and treaty, agents delivered rations to the chiefs, who divided and distributed them. McGillycuddy tried to end this practice—in violation of treaties—in order to undermine the authority of the traditional leaders.

The agents hoped these men, raised to prominence by the agents rather than through tribal customs, would work with the government to bring the Indians to accept reservation life.61

Determined to get rid of all elements of tribal culture, McGillycuddy also forbade the practice of the Sun Dance, which played a vital role in Indian religion.

Indians joined the police force for a number of reasons. As police officers, they were able to protect their people from gangs of non-Indian horse thieves, against whom akicitas had no authority. In keeping order themselves, many surely believed, they were able to forestall the need for further military occupation troops to enforce order in the reservation.

“I went to Washington and to other large cities, and that showed me that the white people dug in the ground and built houses that could not be moved. Then I knew that when they came they could not be driven away.” Sword hoped to save what was left of his people by leading them into the white man’s world.

The Indians on the reservation faced a stark choice: They could try to adopt white ways or they could accept government rations while trying to protect their cultural heritage.

Within the tribes, those trying to adapt to new ways often clashed bitterly with traditionalists.

The army split Sitting Bull’s band between Standing Rock and Cheyenne River. Settling there, they stirred up the agency Indians with their stories of their free years in Canada, making it plain that they were at the agencies now only as a last resort.

“Let it be recorded that I am the last man of my people to lay down my gun,” Sitting Bull told reporters.

Officers negotiating Sitting Bull’s surrender promised the chief that he would be settled at Standing Rock agency, but the government did not honor this agreement.

The government held him a prisoner of war for two years.

Officials moved Sitting Bull to Standing Rock in 1883. There, the tensions between his followers and the agency Indians escalated. Sitting Bull fully expected to regain the leadership of his people; Standing Rock agent James McLaughlin, in turn, expected to turn Sitting Bull into just one more Indian farmer.

As soon as the fighting Sioux had been pushed onto the reservation or into Canadian exile, the way was clear for settlers and miners to pour into their land. The year 1878 saw the beginning of what was called the Great Dakota Boom, when settlement took off in Dakota Territory.

The growth was explosive: By 1890, the non-Indian population of the Territory had jumped to 328,808. The six towns of 1870 had become 310; 1,700 farms had become 50,158.69

Nothing could have pleased the Shermans more. When he retired in 1883, General Sherman reflected that, since the Civil War, he had done everything in his power to promote the growth and development of the West. In twenty years, the land had passed from the hands of dangerous “savages” to those of industrious families.

“I honestly believe,” he told his wife, that “in this way I have done more good for our country and for the human race than I did in the Civil War.”

But those who championed the industrial economy ignored that its benefits did not spread to everyone. The new economy bought prosperity for some at the price of suffering for others. Even as the army was forcing the Sioux to accept the free labor system, the new economic organization was under attack by Americans who were beginning to see its shortcomings.

Workers and farmers left behind by the postwar prosperity began to take a stand against Republican economic policies that promoted business growth at their expense.

The new world of industry was harsh for many wage laborers. Unskilled workers were easily replaced by others, and they had no bargaining power to protect their wages or to guarantee decent working conditions.

Wage laborers found themselves increasingly isolated from rising Americans. Growing factories pulled workers from Europe, and these new immigrants were different than the ones who had come to America from England, Ireland, and Germany before the Civil War. The newcomers were southern and eastern Europeans: Italians, Poles, Russians, Slavs.

Native-born Americans shied away from the new arrivals, who seemed to them alien and uncouth.

The new immigrants, in turn, generally preferred to live with their countrymen. The distrust with which they were viewed by native-born Americans meant they were often forced into dirty ghettos of crowded tenements, where strep infections, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid ran rampant, creating fear among outsiders that the newcomers might be carrying deadly germs.

Unlike the upwardly mobile native-born population that the Sherman brothers celebrated, many of these people had little hope of rising far.

Western farmers also suffered in the new economy. While boosters had promised prosperity and easy farming on the plains, the reality of life there was often far more difficult.

When, finally, they reached their destination, they found not the thriving towns the railroad literature described, but a boundless prairie that offered no obvious building material. Compelled either to dig out a hollow in the side of a bluff for shelter or to build a house of sod bricks, settlers found themselves living in dirt and marooned in a sea of grass, their closest neighbors miles away. They fought constantly to hold their fields against the buffalo and cattle that roamed the plains.73

Few people who had extra cash tried to homestead. Congressmen designed the Homestead Act to put poor families on western land, and while the plan worked, it also meant that homesteaders had no money to buy the supplies they needed to establish a successful farm.

Such debt might have been tolerable had crop prices been high, but they fell precipitously after the Civil War. Production of grain increased even after Europe’s fields recovered from the droughts of the mid- 1860s, so Americans dumped their huge crops into a saturated international market.

Overproduction kept prices dropping in the later decades of the nineteenth century, but the tariffs designed to protect agriculture could not help American farmers because they were exporting rather than importing crops.

Urban workers unable to work their way off the gritty factory floors and farmers ground into poverty turned to politics to bring back a world in which hard work led to success. They believed that they were falling behind because Congress had tilted the economy in favor of industrialists, and strongly resented what they saw as an unfair alliance between the government and big business.

Workers agitated for the regulation of wages, hours, and working conditions; farmers called for laws that regulated the storage, sale, and transportation of crops. Only the restoration of economic fairness, they thought, could make their work as valuable as it ought to be.

Their call for legislation was based in the widespread idea that hardworking Americans should be able to rise, but horrified Republican politicians and businessmen didn’t see it that way.