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

by Heather Cox Richardson

In the interests of “civilization,” he also forbade the Sioux from eating offal—the heart, liver, reticulum, and kidneys of the beeves. Although he could not have known it in these very early days of nutritional science, his command robbed the Indians of crucial vitamins and minerals that were not available from the muscle meat to which he limited them.48

Having already acquired the Sioux lands and eager to force the Indians into the exciting economic development they insisted the West was enjoying, Republican congressmen were in no hurry to provide extra food for the Sioux.49

The reduction in rations came at an especially unfortunate time. Crops had been poor in 1888 and 1889, and while settlers and Indians both were suffering, the Indians were worse off than their American neighbors.

The cuts exacerbated the angry divide in Sioux communities between traditionalists and progressives. Traditional leaders blamed the progressive Indians, the mixed bloods, and the squaw men for having convinced members of the tribe to approve the treaty, thereby bringing on the reduction in rations that the traditionalists had always said would follow.

the same time, the government rewarded the leaders who had approved the cession with goods and new houses, leading opponents to accuse them of being bought. The progressives became outcasts, mocked for their stupidity and accused of betraying their people. Those who had signed the treaty, in turn, railed against the Crook Commission.

Led by progressive American Horse, a delegation of Sioux took their complaints to the capital. They conferred with Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble on December 18, telling him that they had signed the paper only conditionally. They counted on the fulfillment of Crook’s promises, including his assurance that the government would finally honor the provisions of the old treaties by building schools and mills and providing farm implements.52

Without more funds, Noble told them, he could not restore the beef allowance. Nor could he make reparations for the ponies taken from the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Indians in 1876. Only Congress could authorize the money that would improve the reservation schools and provide adequate farming tools.

After two years of drought, the Sioux faced the winter of 1889 to 1890 with little food and a great deal of resentment. The long, cold South Dakota winter exacerbated both their hunger and their anger. Underfed Indians entered the season easy prey to the epidemic of influenza that was sweeping the United States—and much of Europe as well—that year. It

As Indians attended one funeral after another, they concluded that the leaders in Washington had not only stolen the Indians’ land but actually now wanted them to die.

While not deliberately launching a program of extermination, the administration certainly did nothing to stop the crisis on the reservations. Harrison Republicans made it clear that they would not be sad to see the end of the Sioux.

Like Pettigrew, President Harrison clearly thought of the Sioux as obstacles to be brushed out of the path to economic growth. The president ignored the commitments of Crook and his commissioners and threw open the reservation for settlement on February 11, 1890, although none of the outstanding promises to the Indians had been fulfilled.

And yet despite the tremendous enthusiasm of the early settlers, the drought and hard economic times on the plains meant that the expected land boom never really materialized. Word was beginning to spread through the East that South Dakota was not the agricultural paradise railroad promoters had promised.

While the land rush was not as successful as Republicans hoped, it was nonetheless devastating for the Sioux. They had lost almost half their land. No longer able to hunt for enough game to feed themselves, they would be dependent on the government for food.

return for the loss of their land they had received nothing. Crook had not been able to deliver on his promises, and because settlers didn’t snap up Sioux acreage as government agents had said they would, its value plummeted. Only land that sold in the first three years would bring in $1.25 an acre; for the next two years it would be 75 cents an acre, and then it would drop to 50 cents an acre, the same low price that the Sioux had utterly rejected when the Pratt Commission had tried to get them to sell in 1888.

At Chicago’s Grand Pacific Hotel, General Crook died of heart failure on March 21, 1890. Red Cloud told Father Francis Craft, a Catholic missionary: “Then General Crook came; he, at least, had never lied to us. His words gave the people hope. He died. Their hope died again. Despair came again.”

With Crook dead, the Sioux gave up on earthly aid and turned to another world for assistance. In March 1890, Short Bull from the Rosebud Reservation and Kicking Bear from Cheyenne River, along with five fellow travelers, returned home from a trip to Nevada bringing back with them the news that a prophet had foretold a new era in Indian history.

Utah, they stopped for a day at a town on the Great Salt Lake itself, where they marveled, perhaps, that such a broad stretch of water supported no fish. Their agents had warned the Indians that the people they would meet on their travels were “bad people.” By this they meant the Mormons who lived in Utah and Nevada, who were pariahs in the late nineteenth century, still tainted in outsiders’ eyes by their practice of polygamy (which the church would not outlaw until September 1890).

The Sioux travelers, who had had plenty of experience with the opinions of government agents, no doubt reserved judgment about this warning, and they were pleasantly surprised to find the Mormons they met easy to get along with. They did not drink or fight or behave badly, and they provided the pilgrims with food and railroad passes. They had heard of the new Indian religion and treated it with respect. When pressed by an agent later for details about his trip, one of the travelers responded with a dig: “I thought it strange that the people should have been so good, so different from those here.”67

The landscape shaped the economy, and thus the relationship between the Indians and the settlers. The harshly beautiful environment helped to protect Indians from whites’ greed for land, for the settlers had no need to scoop up unproductive land along with productive tracts.

Indians lived in camps among the scattered cattle ranches, working for ranchers in the summer and going back to their traditional ways in the winter, hunting, fishing, and gathering seeds and pine nuts. The Paiutes had managed to maintain their own culture with less direct interference, and they interacted with settlers on terms closer to equality than the Sioux could.

“All the whites and Indians are brothers, I was told there,” one traveler recalled. “...

The Paiute Indians who inhabited these wickiups dressed in white man’s clothing, spoke English, and earned wages, but they retained their native culture. They foraged off the land and ignored white consumer goods, using their earnings primarily to buy guns and ammunition, blending two worlds in a way the Sioux had not managed.

As they moved together in the dark for hours, Sioux dancers could feel the rebirth of Indian unity through the hands they clasped on either side, their brothers and sisters joining with them in a sacred hoop.78

After the travelers had danced for two nights, Wovoka explained to them his revelations. If the Indians would live in peace with the whites, stop quarrelling among themselves, work hard, and not lie or steal, they would be reunited with friends and relatives who had died. Illness, aging, and death itself would end. The ancestors would bring back the old world by herding game before them as they returned from the spirit realm. A new land would cover the old, ruined one, covering the whites and any Indian who refused to embrace the new doctrine.

To bring this paradise on earth, Wovoka instructed, Indians had to dance the Ghost Dance on five successive days, repeating the sequence periodically until the new world came.

Observers disagreed about whether Wovoka was a prophet or Christ himself, returned to earth, but at least some of the Sioux seeing him at Walker Lake apparently believed he was divine. Telling the audience that he bore wounds on his hands, feet, and back inflicted by white people, Wovoka explained that God blamed the whites for his crucifixion, and had sent his son Wovoka back to the Indians, since the whites were bad. If the soldiers tried to arrest him, he promised, he would open his arms wide and make them disappear, or the earth would swallow them.82

Not everyone was convinced of Wovoka’s special relationship to God.

Word of their experiences and the promise of the new religion inspired the Sioux to call a council to hear the travelers’ account of their adventure, but the initiative didn’t get far at first. One of the Pine Ridge agent’s men passed news of the excitement to Agent Hugh D. Gallagher, who threw three of the Pine Ridge enthusiasts into jail for two days. They refused to tell him what the ferment was about, but his antagonism curtailed plans for a council.85

Meanwhile, the Indians from other reservations had left Pine Ridge and headed home to their own people. At Rosebud, Short Bull and Mash-the-Kettle immediately began to tell their relatives about the messiah, causing the Brulés to neglect the fields they were supposed to be planting.

While Allen made fun of the new religion, his article noted a new aspect of the movement that made settlers uneasy. According to Allen, the root of Ghost Dancing lay in the belief the Christ had abandoned the white men because of their wickedness, wickedness especially evident in their theft of Indian land.

By their actions, the whites had given up their right to salvation. Now Christ was coming to save the Indians and, Allen said, “kill off all the whites.”89

By June, it seemed like the Ghost Dance had run its course. Warm weather and spring rains had given Indians more faith in this world and less need for divine intervention.

Crops promised well for those that had managed to get seed wheat—an easier proposition for reservation Indians, to whom it was provided, than for settlers, who had to borrow to buy it because their own crops had been too poor the previous year to give them a surplus for seed.

Western promoters bristled with renewed confidence, insisting that farmers still complaining about poor conditions had brought their problems on themselves. With the promise of bumper Dakota crops, they claimed, farmers had indulged in foolish extravagances.

This rosy optimism was short-lived. In July, hot winds swept the Plains. Relentlessly, they burned up the promise of the spring. Vegetable gardens were the first to bake. Then the crops withered and died. Finally, even the native hay crop turned brown and dry.

Farmers suffered in the heat, too. Their crops died; they couldn’t pay the mortgages on their farms or the notes on their machinery. Slowly, they, too, began to starve. Settlers who had come to the Dakotas from the East either organized to demand relief from the government or turned around and went home.

Indians, though, had no political influence and no choice but to stay. They were bewildered, an observer noted, by the political machinations that had brought them to such distress and offered them no relief.97 Rather than helping them, in fact, it appeared the government had plans to make things worse. The census that had begun the previous summer and had resulted in such a disastrous cut to rations was under way again.

The Indian Commissioner and the administration were both openly advocating that the government cut Sioux rations further and spend money instead on books, plows, and farming tools to make the Indians self-sufficient. This plan made great sense to anyone trying to move the Sioux into the American economy, but it did not fit either the needs of the Indians or the environment of the Plains.98

The Sioux refused to cooperate with the census count. Some bands refused to be counted, others threatened to bolt to agencies to which they hoped to be transferred, and still others, angry at the land cession, moved as far away from their agencies as possible and called for others to join them. To keep the Indians tractable during the census count, Secretary of the Interior John Noble called in the army. Soldiers camped outside of Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River Reservations in the summer of 1890.99

To the dismay of many western Republicans who expected the government to act in their interests, the administration seemed not to care about their plight. Harrison’s people were firmly in the corner of eastern industrialists, and the core issue for businessmen, the issue above all others, was the tariff. Harrison’s men were determined to give industrialists the tariff they wanted, even if it squeezed the suffering farmers.

But by the following summer, congressional leaders had made it clear instead that the revision would reflect the desires of businessmen. Western Republicans, like many other party members, were increasingly unhappy with the Republican administration, and their allegiance was wavering.

Under Reed and his men, tariff reform would be undertaken by committed protectionists without any input from representatives of the farming or laboring constituencies that were eager for lower rates. Reed stacked the House Committee on Ways and Means, which would write new tariff legislation, with hard-core pro-business party cronies. The thirteen-member committee would have two New Yorkers, while Reed cut the entire agricultural South down to a single representative.

Despite Frank Leslie’s unbridled enthusiasm, however, the administration was facing a genuine challenge to tariff revision. By the spring of 1890, the economy was sliding into a recession that some people—even some Republicans—worried was about to become a serious depression.

Privately, Harrison and his cabinet officers were anxious. The tight money market worried them for both economic and political reasons. Although the administration refused to acknowledge it, Republican economic policies had created a hazardous level of speculative investment in western railroads as well as the dangerous inequalities of wealth that were driving the nation into a panic.

Harrison’s men refused to admit their economic policies had anything to do with creating the trouble, but they were incredibly eager to fix it. Their solution was higher tariffs. They insisted that more protection for American industry would permit more businesses to grow, and those new businesses would hire more workers. Once employed, workers could begin the climb to prosperity, earning higher wages according to their worth.

But the administration’s tariff policy flew in the face of the opinions of a growing majority of Americans. Those suffering in the faltering economy were more enthusiastic about lowering the tariff to make goods cheaper than they were about waiting and watching for an economic miracle. As the economy continued to suffer and businessmen continued to profit, anti-tariff forces gained momentum.

Democrats pushed tariff reform aggressively.

Although the rhetorical flourishes in his speech made a coherent argument elusive, Mills managed to communicate that high tariffs promoted monopoly, destroyed competition, and slowed consumption by keeping prices high. Americans needed foreign markets to sell their surplus, and they should not worry about the competition of foreign goods, because their products were the best in the world.

To reform the tariff and restore American greatness, Mills called on “a race of men who severed a continent from despotism and dedicated it to free men, free government, free institutions, free thought, free speech, free labor and free trade.” The event gave tariff reform “a splendid boom,” according to the Boston Globe.

Far more dangerous to the Harrison administration than Democratic enthusiasm was the fact that moderate Republicans were also swinging away from it on the issue of protection. Harper’s Weekly had begun to argue that high tariffs were a sort of welfare for business, leading to the very sort of centralized government that Republicans should oppose. High tariffs created treasury surpluses, which bred “extravagance, corruption, and jobbery” as politicians spent profligately to keep themselves in office.