4/10/2023 0 Comments Black coyote![]() ![]() In an account from one of the Indians present that day at Wounded Knee, Charles Turning Hawk, who was sympathetic to the U.S. Scattered fighting continued, but the massacre at Wounded Knee effectively squelched the Ghost Dance movement and ended the Indian Wars. A few days later they returned to complete the job. As the remaining troopers began the grim task of removing the dead, a blizzard swept in from the North. When the smoke cleared and the shooting stopped………Īpproximately 300 Sioux were dead, Big Foot among them. Many ran for a ravine next to the camp only to be cut down in a withering cross fire. Clouds of gun smoke filled the air as men, women and children scrambled for their lives. From the heights above, the army’s raked the Indian teepees with grapeshot. ![]() ![]() Within seconds the charged atmosphere erupted as Indian braves scurried to retrieve their discarded rifles and troopers fired volley after volley into the Sioux camp. Panicked, the soldiers took the shot as a sign to open fire on the now-unarmed tribe. A small scuffle ensued, during which a shot was fired into the air (by whom and why is unknown). When a trooper tried to size the rifle of one man, Black Coyote, raised his rifle over his head and said he had given money for it and no one was going to take it unless he was paid. The Army demanded that the Lakota hand over their weapons. The next morning, December 29, Chief Big Foot, racked with pneumonia and dying, sat among his warriors and powwowed with the army officers. Forsyth arrived with the remaining regiment of the 7th Cavalry and surrounded the Lakota camp. 7th Cavalry, Major Samuel Whiteside captured Chief Big Foot (also known as Spotted Elk) his group of Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota’s near Porcupine Butte and took them to Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota where they set up camp for the night of December 28, 1890. Chief Big Foot was next on the list, but when he heard of Sitting Bull’s death, Big Foot led his people south to seek protection at the Pine Ridge Reservation. Sitting Bull was killed in the attempt to arrest him on December 15, 1890. The order went out to arrest Chief Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock Reservation. The leaders should be arrested and confined at some military post until the matter is quieted, and this should be done now.” During the fall of 1890, the Ghost Dance spread through the Sioux villages of the Dakota reservations, revitalizing the Indians and bringing fear to the whites.Ī desperate Indian Agent at the recently created Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota wired his superiors in Washington, “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy….We need protection and we need it now. These “Ghost Shirts” they believed would protect them from the bluecoats’ bullets. Many dancers wore brightly colored shirts emblazoned with images of eagles and buffaloes. To hasten the event, the Indians were to dance the Ghost Dance. A tidal wave of new soil would cover the earth, bury the whites, and restore the prairie. Wovoka called himself the Messiah and prophesied that the dead would soon join the living in a world in which the Indians could live in the old way surrounded by plentiful game. Emissaries from the Sioux in South Dakota traveled to Nevada to hear his words. In a desperate attempt to return to the days of their glory, many Sioux sought salvation in a new mysticism preached by a Paiute Shaman called Wovoka. Of course this was not very popular, especially with the Sioux tribe. Despite the public scorn for the agents, the Indian Office stated that the “chief duty of an agent is to induce his Indians to labor in civilized pursuits. ![]() In the late 19th century, the job title of Indian agent was to attempt to civilize Indians by assimilating them into American culture. As told by the Eye Witness to History (1998), by 1890 the once proud Sioux Indians found their free-roaming life destroyed, the buffalo gone, themselves confined to reservations dependent on Indian Agents for their existence. ![]()
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