NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY by History Hourly

Author:History, Hourly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Wounded Knee Creek

“From this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there.”

—Chief American Horse

Chief Spotted Elk and around three hundred of his Lakota followers left the Cheyenne River Reservation in the evening of December 23, travelling south-west towards Pine Ridge. Like so many other aspects of this incident, the precise number of Lakota accompanying Spotted Elk is the subject of debate, with estimates ranging from two hundred to three hundred and fifty. What is known is that this group carried a white flag to make clear that they had no hostile intentions. They travelled mainly at night in order to avoid being discovered by U.S. Army patrols and, for the first few days, this was successful. In the early morning of December 28, they made camp near Porcupine Butte, a mountain in the far northeast of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

A detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry under the command of Major Samuel M. Whitside had been sent out to search for the group after they left the Cheyenne River Reservation, and during December 28, they found the Lakota camp. Whitside’s orders were to arrest Spotted Elk, confiscate all weapons, and to take all the members of the group by train to a military prison at Fort Omaha, four hundred miles to the south-east in Nebraska.

Chief Spotted Elk met with scouts from the cavalry detachment and agreed to surrender. Under guard, the Lakota group was marched around five miles west, to a spot near Wounded Knee Creek, and were instructed to make camp there on the night of December 28. The site chosen was overlooked by high bluffs, and the small detachment of cavalry who had originally located Spotted Elk’s group were joined by other troops of the 7th Cavalry under the command of Colonel James W. Forsyth, who arrived during the evening and night. Most of the approximately five hundred U.S. soldiers set themselves up in positions on the bluffs above the Lakota camp. Four Hotchkiss M1875 mountain guns were also set up covering the Lakota camp. These were light, breech loading field guns firing two-pound explosive shells.

Early on the morning of December 29, Colonel Forsyth entered the Lakota camp with a small detachment of troops from Troop K of the 7th Cavalry and requested to speak with Chief Spotted Elk, who was by this time so ill that he had to be carried from a wagon and laid on the ground. Earlier, the Lakota had brought out a number of guns which were handed over to U.S. troops and piled in the snow next to the camp.

The scene as Colonel Forsyth spoke to Chief Spotted Elk was witnessed and later recalled by Philip Wells, interpreter to Colonel Forsyth and himself part-Sioux.

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