Last Year's Lesson: Wounded Knee Massacre - Dec. 29, 1890

A group of Lakota Sioux were surrounded and a tragic firefight erupted on this day in 1890. There's more detail in the August 10, 2009 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, here's a rerun for today, brought to
you by Tracy V. Wilson. Welcome to this day in
History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com and from
the desk of Stuff you missed in History Class. It's
the show where we explore the past one day at
a time with a quick look at what happened today
in history. Hello. I'm Holly Fry and I am sitting

(00:23):
in this week for Tracy V. Wilson. It's December twenty nine,
and we are talking today about an event that happened
in eighteen ninety, which was the Wounded Knee massacre. But
first we have to talk about the Ghost Dance. The
Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement originally established in eighteen
sixty nine by a piute dreamer called wad Suab, and

(00:44):
while in a trance state, Wadzuab dreamed that the spirits
of the departed we're going to return and make the
world into a paradise of eternal life without conflict among people's.
Based on his visions, he began to urge people to
perform a traditional round dance over a seri reas of
nights as a form of religious practice. This was intended
to connect to the land of the dead with the

(01:05):
promise that the souls of the departed would come back
to their loved ones in several years, and his ghost Dance,
as it was called, caught on and spread from Mason
Valley in Nevada to California and up the Pacific Coast.
Wadzuab died in eighteen seventy two and the ghost dance movement,
which was still in its infancy, faded out from practice.

(01:27):
But that wasn't actually the end of the ghost dance.
It was revived by Jack Wilson, who also went by
Wovoca in the eighteen eighties after he had a vision
during an eclipse and he began to preach to the
Paiute people that their deceased ancestors would return from the dead,
and that white people would eventually be gone from the earth,
and that peace, health, and prosperity would return to the

(01:49):
Native American tribes. And to ensure that this cleansing and
transition to a new world of prosperity happened, according to Avoca,
the ghost Dance had to be performed for five nights
in a row, and then those five nights of dancing
repeated every six weeks. Now, at this point in history,
relations between Native Americans and the US government were not good.

(02:11):
The US had repeatedly broken treaty agreements virtually everyone they
had signed with the Native Americans, and they also pushed
Native Americans onto smaller and smaller parcels of land and reservations,
so that the land that they had lived on for
in many cases years and years and years, could be seized.
The Ghost Dance was an entirely pacifist movement which forbade violence,

(02:33):
but just the same it terrified the U. S Government,
which did not understand it. Over the course of eighteen
ninety there was increasing consternation on the part of the
government and military that this embrace of traditional customs and
the rejection of white culture would lead to trouble. From
the White Field Agent perspective, they saw large numbers of

(02:53):
Native Americans gathering, and they jumped to conclusions that they
were doing something threatening. And by this point the Ghost
Dance had spread once again, and some of the Lakota
Sioux had begun to practice it. There had also been
an addition to the dance of so called ghost shirts
decorated with red paint and other ornamentation, which they believed

(03:13):
would protect them from bullets fired by the guns of
white men. A large gathering of people traveled in December
to see the Lakota leader, Sitting Bull, and practice the
ghost dance together. Believing that the Native Americans were practicing
a war dance as a prelude to an uprising, Indian
agency police moved in to arrest Sitting Bull on December

(03:36):
fift eight, and this led to a fight in which
Sitting Bowl was killed. Two weeks later, a group of
ghost dancers, having fled Standing Rock Reservation we're Sitting Bull
had been killed, were captured and brought to a camp
at Wounded Knee Creek with the Lakota Sioux chief Spotted
elk by the U. S. Army seventh Cavalry that was
on December. The camp was surrounded by the military with

(04:01):
an armed perimeter. On the morning of the twenty nine,
an Army colonel named James Forsyth demanded that the Lakota disarm.
There is conflicting information as to how things unfurled from there.
The Lakota may have begun their ghost dance agitating the soldiers,
but we don't know for certain. A young Lakoda man

(04:21):
named Black Coyote refused to disarm according to accounts by
white soldiers, but Lakoda accounts of the incident indicate that
Black Coyote was deaf and he simply did not understand
the command to disarm. But as an attempt was made
to forcibly take Black Coyotes rifle, the gun went off
and this catalyzed an intense short range firefight. Because of

(04:44):
the close quarters, some cavalry members were firing on their
fellow soldiers at times, and when the whole thing ended
less than an hour after it had begun, between one
hundred and fifty and three hundred Lakota were dead. Tabulation
of that number is inconsistent. An estimated half of the
Lakota who had been killed were women and children, and

(05:05):
thirty one U S cavalrymen were also killed. If you
would like to hear more about this tragic incident, there
is an episode in the Stuff You Missed in History
Class archive by previous hosts Sarah and Katie that was
originally aired in two thousand nine. I want to thank
Chandler Mays and Casey Pegram for they're always amazing work
on the audio for this podcast, and if you would

(05:25):
like to subscribe to This Day in History Class, I
encourage you to do so. You can do that on
Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app, or anywhere you
get your podcasts. You should also check in with This
Day in History Class tomorrow. But I'm afraid it is
another tragedy.