Battle Of Wounded Knee Essay Research Paper

Battle Of Wounded Knee Essay, Research Paper

On December 15, 1890 authorities feared that the Sioux’s new Ghost

Dance? religion might inspire an uprising. Sitting Bull permitted Grand

River people to join the antiwhite Ghost Dance cult and was therefore

arrested by troops. In the fracas that followed, he was shot twice in the

head.

Sitting Bull’ followers were apprehended and brought to the U.S

Army Camp at Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota.

Moving among the tipis, soldiers lifted women’s dresses and

touched their private parts, ripping from them essential cooking and

sewing utensils. The men sitting in the council heard the angry shrieks of

their wives, mothers, and daughters. Several Lakota, offended by the

abusive actions of the cavalry, stubbornly waited to have their weapons

taken from them. It was a show of honor in front of their elders, for few

of them were old enough to have fought in the “Indian Wars” fifteen years

before.

That night, everyone was tired out by the hard trip. James Asay, a

Pine Ridge trader and whiskey runner, brought a ten-gallon keg of whiskey

to the Seventh Cavalry officers. Many of the Indian men were kept up all

night by the drunken Cavalry where the soldiers kept asking them how old

they were. The soldiers were hoping to discover which of the men had been

at the Battle of Little Bighorn where Custer was killed.

On the bitterly cold morning of December 29, 1890, Alice Ghost

Horse,

a thirteen- year old Lakota girl rode her horse through the U.S Army camp

looking for her father, one of the Indian men who had been rounded up

earlier that day.

Less than fifty yards away she could see her father sitting on the

ground with other disarmed men from Chief Big Foot’s band, surrounded by

more than 500 heavily armed soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry. She looked

North up the hill where four “guns on wheels” were mounted. Troopers

watched silently on each side of the Hotchkiss battery.

To one side Alice noticed a familiar figure standing with hands

raised above his head, his arms turned upward in prayer. It was the

medicine man by the name of Yellow Bird. He stood facing the east, right

by the fire pit which was now covered with dirt. He was praying and

crying. He was saying to the spotted eagles that he wanted to die instead

of his people. He must have sense that something was going to happen. He

picked up some dirt from the fire place and threw it up in the air and

said, “This is the way I want to go, back to dust.”

Seventh Cavalry interpreter Phillip F. Wells, whose knowledge of

the Lakota language was poor, later told military investigators that a man

named Yellow Bird stood up at Wounded Knee and deliberately incited the

Lakota to fight.

Colonel Forsyth gave a bizarre order: each soldier was told to aim

his unloaded gun at an Indians forehead and to pull the trigger. After

Wells translated the demeaning order to the astonished Lakota, they could

not comprehend this foolishness. Looking at each other, their faces grew

“wild with fear.”

Alice then saw two or three sergeants grab a deaf man named Black

Coyote who had yet to be disarmed. His friends had been so busy talking

that they had left him uniformed. The soldiers tore off his blanket,

roughly twirling him around. He raised his rifle above his head to keep it

away from them. In the midst of yelling, jerking, and twisting, the

struggle ended unexpectedly when the rifle pointed toward the east end

discharged in the crisp morning air.

Lieutenant James Mann screamed, “Fire! Fire on them!” On command

the troops opened fire in an explosive volley, enclosing both attackers

and victims in a dark curtain of pungent smoke.

That day over three hundred elderly men, women, and children, all

disarmed were brutally murdered. After the genocidal procedure occurred, a

blizzard hit, and it was on the forth day that search parties were sent

out to bury the dead.

A newspaper reporter accompanying the burial party described the

first body they found as that of a male about twelve years old. The boy

had been shot.

He was wearing a “ghost shirt” embolized with an eagle, buffalo, and

morning-star insignia. They believed that these symbols of powerful

spirits would protect them from the soldier’s bullets.

Many of the wounded survivors later died or were secretly carried

away in the night by Lakota from other bands. The dead were buried in

hidden locations, and carefully concealed from federal officials who later

underestimated the death toll at 146, over two hundred less than the

actual number butchered an their own land.

The frozen bodies were taken to the top of the hill overlooking

the valley where they had died. Gravediggers carved a gaping hole form the

earth, six feet deep, ten wide, sixty long. When the orders were given to

bury the first load, three soldiers jumped into the grave and each corpse