The Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890
By 1890 the world the Lakota had known was effectively gone. The buffalo had been all but exterminated, the Black Hills had been taken against the terms of the 1868 treaty, the great reservation had been carved into smaller pieces, and the people were confined to agencies and dependent on government rations that often fell short. Into that despair came a religion of hope, and out of the response to it came one of the darkest events in the history of the northern plains.
A faith of return
The movement is usually called the Ghost Dance. It arose among the Paiute in the Great Basin, in the teachings of a prophet named Wovoka, who preached that through ritual dancing and right living the dead would return, the buffalo would come back, and the old life would be restored, with the newcomers swept away and the earth made whole. The vision spread across the West and reached the Lakota in 1890, where it was taken up with intensity by people who had little else left to hope for.
Among the Lakota the teaching took on its own shape. Some adopted the belief that special shirts worn in the dance would turn away soldiers’ bullets, a conviction that would prove tragically false. The dancing alarmed the agents and officials who oversaw the reservations, men inclined to read any gathering of Lakota as a prelude to violence. Frightened reports flowed east, troops were ordered in, and a religious movement of mourning and hope was treated as an uprising to be put down.
In the tension that followed, the great leader Sitting Bull, who had returned from exile years earlier, was killed in December 1890 during an attempt by reservation police to arrest him at Standing Rock. His death deepened the fear among the Lakota, and bands sought safety where they could find it.
Wounded Knee
One such band, led by Spotted Elk, often called Big Foot, set out across the frozen country, ill and exhausted, seeking refuge. The group was intercepted by the Army and brought under guard to a camp along Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge Reservation south of the Black Hills, in the final days of December 1890. There the soldiers, men of the Seventh Cavalry, the regiment Custer had once led, set about disarming the Lakota on the morning of December 29.
What followed remains contested in its particulars and clear in its result. As the soldiers searched the camp for weapons, a shot was fired in circumstances that have never been fully untangled, and the troops, who had artillery positioned on the surrounding rise, opened fire on the people below. Most of the Lakota were unarmed by then. The killing swept through the camp and beyond it, as fleeing men, women, and children were pursued and cut down across the snow. The dead numbered in the hundreds, including many women and children, with the bodies later gathered and buried in a mass grave on the site. Soldiers died as well, some likely in their own crossfire.
The Army gave out medals for the action and for years described it as a battle. It was not a battle in any honest sense. It was the slaughter of a people already disarmed and seeking shelter, and over time the language has shifted to call it what it was, a massacre.
The end of an era
Wounded Knee is commonly marked as the close of the armed resistance of the plains tribes and, in a larger sense, of the long frontier wars. After it, organized military resistance ended, and the Lakota faced the harder, slower struggles of survival under confinement, the loss of language and children to boarding schools, and the legal battles over land that would stretch into the next century and beyond, including the case of United States v. Sioux Nation.
The site remains sacred and sorrowful ground, and the memory of it runs deep among the Lakota. It returned to national attention in 1973 when activists occupied the area in a long armed standoff, drawing the country’s eyes once more to grievances that the first Wounded Knee had never resolved. For the region around Rapid City, it is a reminder that the history of these hills and this prairie is not only one of gold and monuments, but of a people who endured a catastrophe here and remained.