Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
What happened at Wounded Knee Creek on 29 December 1890, was not a battle but a massacre by soldiers of the families comprising Big Foot's band of Minneconjou Lakotas. Surrounded, desperately outnumbered and outgunned, provoked into a hopeless firefight, they ran and were slaughtered to the tiniest infant by mounted soldiers who hunted them for "several hours" (p. 19) and some three miles. About three hundred Lakotas were killed. Because Bigfoot's men had engaged the soldiers, the atrocity has been masked as a battle. Indeed, twenty-eight soldiers received medals of honor for participating in the massacre and associated activities.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.