Today, December 29, is the anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee. As Tim Giago reports, in an article earlier this month:
December 29, 2007 will mark the 117th anniversary of the slaughter of innocents at Wounded Knee. As is their custom, the Lakota people will gather at the mass grave where the bodies of men, women and children were dumped and they will pray and ask the United States government to apologize for this day of death. They will pray that the Medals of Honor handed out to the murderers be rescinded and they will pray for peace between the Lakota and the rest of America. There will be a ceremony called “Wiping Away the Tears,” and this ceremony will conclude a day of mourning, a day when the Lakota reach out to the rest of America for peace and justice.
Americans may have forgotten Wounded Knee and pushed it to the back pages of history, a bad memory to some, but the Lakota people have not nor will they ever forget this terrible day until they at last see justice.
From the U.S. Army Website
http://www.history.army.mil/reference/iwcmp.htm
Pine Ridge. November 1890- January 1891. Accumulated grievances, aggravated by teachings of an Indian prophet named Wovoka, who claimed to be the Messiah, brought about this last major conflict with the Sioux. General Miles, commander of the Department of the Missouri, responded to a Department of Interior request to check the rising ferment by ordering apprehension of the great Sioux leader, Sitting Bull, who was killed during the attempted arrest at Standing Rock Agency on 15 December 1890. Meanwhile, large numbers of Sioux had been assembling in the Bad Lands, and a serious clash took place at Wounded Knee Creek on 29 December 1890 between Col. James W. Forsyth’s 7th Cavalry and Chief Big Foot’s band with considerable losses on both sides. Almost half the infantry and cavalry of the Regular Army (including elements of the 1st, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th Cavalry and the 1st, 2d, 3d, 7th, 8th, 12th, 16th, 17th, 20th, 21st, 22d, and 25th Infantry as well as the 4th Artillery) were concentrated in the area, and in January 1891 the warriors were disarmed and persuaded to return peaceably to their reservations.
http://www.history.army.mil/books/AMH-V1/ch14.htm
The Custer disaster shocked the nation and was the climax of the Indian Wars. The Army poured troops into the Upper Plains; and the Indians scattered, some, like Sitting Bull’s band, to Canada. But gradually, under Army pressure or seeing the futility of further resistance, the Indians surrendered and returned to the reservation. Thus their greatest single victory over the U.S. Army sowed the seeds of the Indians’ ultimate defeat as the United States brought to bear its overwhelming power to settle the issue once and for all.
The last feeble gasp of the Indian Wars occurred in 1890 and grew out of the fervor of the Ghost Dance religion. The Sioux were particularly susceptible to the emotional excitement and the call of the old way of life represented in these ceremonies, and their wild involvement frightened the agent on the Sioux Reservation into calling for military protection. The Army responded by a series of military actions known as the Pine Ridge Campaign. One part of that campaign had the 7th Cavalry, now commanded by Col. James W. Forsyth, move to Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Agency, where on December 29 the regiment attempted to disarm Big Foot’s band. An Indian’s rifle was discharged into the air as two soldiers disarmed him, precipitating a battle in which more than 150 Indians, including women and children, were killed and a third as many wounded, while 25 soldiers were killed and another 37 wounded.
The Battle of Wounded Knee was the last Indian engagement to fall in the category of warfare; later incidents were more in the realm of civil disturbance. The nineteenth century was drawing to a close, and the frontier was rapidly disappearing. Territories were being replaced by states, and new settlers, towns, government, and law were spreading across the land. The buffalo were gone, and the Indians were confined
to reservations to depend on the government for subsistence. An expanded rail system was available to move troops quickly to trouble spots, and the Army could now concentrate its forces at the larger and more permanent posts and relinquish numerous smaller installations that had outgrown their usefulness. By 1895 the Army was deployed more or less equally around the country on the basis of regional rather than operational considerations.
In the quarter century of the Indian Wars the Army met the Indian in over a thousand actions, large and small, all across the American West. It fought these wars with peacetime strength and on a peacetime budget, while at the same time it helped shape Indian policy and was centrally involved in numerous other activities that were part and parcel of westward expansion and of the nation’s attainment of its “manifest destiny.” Along the way it developed a military culture of self-sufficiency, of experienced small-unit leaders and professionals serving together as part of a brotherhood of arms. Operations against the Indians seasoned the Army and forged a core of experienced leaders who would serve the republic well as it moved onto the world scene at the turn of the century.
PINE RIDGE
The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota was the site of the last military conflict between the U.S.
Army and American Indians. The reservation became the focal point of the Ghost Dance religion founded
by the Paiute shaman Wovoka in 1890. Wovoka taught that a Messiah was coming to liberate the Indians
and return their world to a time before whites had arrived. The Bureau of Indian Affairs banned the Ghost
Dance and requested that the Army disperse its converts. This resulted in an extensive military campaign
from November 17, 1890, to January 21, 1891, with multiple converging columns conducting operations
in the states of Nebraska and North and South Dakota. Over 5,500 soldiers were involved in these opera-
tions to disarm and control Indians, which resulted in numerous armed engagements and dozens killed or
wounded. The most controversial and costly battle of the campaign, for both sides, was the Battle of Wound-
ed Knee on December 29, 1890; but the battle cannot be understood outside of the wider context of the
campaign.
MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENTS FOR THE BATTLE OF WOUNDED KNEE.
http://www.history.army.mil/html/moh/indianwars.html