This article traces the events leading to and including the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890, and its immediate aftermath. It covers the origins of the Ghost Dance movement, the military mobilization on the Lakota reservations, the death of Sitting Bull, Big Foot's flight and capture, and the engagement at Wounded Knee Creek. For broader context on U.S.-indigenous relations see Colonial-Native Relations - History. For the 1973 occupation see Wounded Knee (1973) - History. For contested interpretations see Wounded Knee (1890) - Debate.

Following the Great Sioux War of 1876-1877 and the forced cession of the Black Hills, the United States confined the Lakota to a reservation in the western Dakota Territory. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had guaranteed the Black Hills and a large swath of the northern Plains to the Lakota in perpetuity; the Agreement of 1877, signed under military pressure following the Little Bighorn campaign, extinguished those claims. Subsequent federal policy further reduced the Lakota land base. The Sioux Act of 1889, signed by President Grover Cleveland and implemented under the authority of the newly created state of South Dakota, broke the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller reservations - Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Lower Brule, and Crow Creek - and opened approximately nine million acres of the intervening land to non-indigenous homesteaders. Lakota leaders including Sitting Bull and Red Cloud opposed the agreement; government negotiators led by General George Crook pressed hard for signatures, and the required three-fourths adult male Lakota assent was obtained only narrowly and under disputed circumstances.

Conditions on the new reservations deteriorated rapidly. Federal annuity payments arrived late or in reduced quantities. Crop failures in 1889 and 1890 produced near-famine conditions on several reservations. Congressional appropriations for Lakota beef rations were cut substantially in 1889. The federal Office of Indian Affairs simultaneously pressed assimilation policies, breaking up communal landholding and suppressing traditional religious practices. Reservation agents had broad authority to withhold rations as punishment for noncompliance. The combination of land loss, food shortage, and cultural suppression produced the conditions in which the Ghost Dance movement spread with unusual speed among the Lakota.

Wovoka, a Northern Paiute man living in Nevada, reported a vision during a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, in which he was taken to the spirit world and shown a restored earth where dead ancestors would return, the buffalo would be replenished, and white settlers would disappear or be absorbed. He taught that this transformation would be brought about through righteous living, peaceful conduct, and performance of a circular dance repeated over several days. The movement he founded drew on earlier prophet movements in the Great Basin and Pacific Northwest, including the earlier teachings of his own father Tavibo.

By 1889 and 1890 the Ghost Dance had spread to dozens of indigenous peoples across the Great Basin, the Plateau, and the Plains. Its reception varied by community. Among some peoples it remained a minor religious observance. Among the Lakota, who had experienced severe land loss and reservation hardship in recent years, it spread rapidly and was adapted in ways that emphasized its transformative and, in some versions, protective dimensions. Short Bull and Kicking Bear, Lakota emissaries who had traveled to Nevada to meet Wovoka in 1889, returned with accounts of his teachings that were inflected with Lakota religious concepts. The Lakota version of the dance incorporated the Ghost Shirt - a garment that adherents believed would protect them from bullets, a claim not present in Wovoka's original teachings.

Reservation agents, alarmed by the scale and intensity of the movement, called for military intervention. Agent Daniel Royer at Pine Ridge, who had taken the position only months earlier and had no experience with Lakota communities, sent repeated telegrams to Washington describing the Ghost Dance as a prelude to uprising. Agent James McLaughlin at Standing Rock was more measured in his assessment but also moved to suppress the movement. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs ordered the dances stopped in November 1890.

President Benjamin Harrison ordered Army deployment to the Lakota reservations in November 1890. General Nelson Miles was placed in overall command. Approximately 3,000 soldiers were moved into position around the reservations. The deployment itself contributed to tension; many Lakota, fearing a repeat of the 1876 campaign, fled toward the Badlands. A group of several thousand Lakota Ghost Dance adherents, known to the Army as the “hostile” camp, gathered in the Stronghold area of the Pine Ridge Badlands under Short Bull and Kicking Bear.

Agent McLaughlin at Standing Rock identified Sitting Bull - the most prominent Lakota leader and a skeptic of accommodation, though not himself an active Ghost Dance leader - as the primary threat to order. McLaughlin sought authority to arrest him. Miles authorized the use of Lakota Indian police for the arrest rather than Army troops, to reduce the risk of confrontation.

On December 15, 1890, forty-three Lakota police under Lieutenant Bull Head surrounded Sitting Bull's cabin at the Standing Rock Agency settlement of Grand River before dawn. Sitting Bull was informed he was under arrest. As police escorted him out of his cabin, a large crowd of his followers assembled. Sitting Bull's warrior Catch-the-Bear shot Bull Head; Bull Head and another officer, Red Tomahawk, shot Sitting Bull as they fell. Sitting Bull died at the scene. Six of his followers and six Lakota policemen were also killed in the ensuing melee.

Sitting Bull's death prompted approximately 200 of his followers to flee Standing Rock southward toward the Cheyenne River Reservation, joining a band there under Hunkpapa chief Big Foot.

Big Foot, also known as Si Tanka, was a Miniconjou Lakota chief from the Cheyenne River Reservation known for his diplomatic abilities and his practice of settling disputes. He had been among the signatories of the 1889 agreement and was not himself a militant, though some of his followers were Ghost Dance adherents. General Miles placed him on the list of leaders to be arrested when he learned that Sitting Bull's followers had joined Big Foot's band, now numbering approximately 350 people.

Big Foot's band left the Cheyenne River Reservation around December 23, 1890, heading south toward Pine Ridge, where Red Cloud had invited them. Their precise intentions remain a matter of historical interpretation. Big Foot himself had developed pneumonia and was seriously ill by the time the band reached the Badlands. Army units searched for the band throughout late December.

On December 28, 1890, Major Samuel Whitside and four troops of the 7th Cavalry intercepted Big Foot's band near Porcupine Butte in South Dakota. Big Foot came forward under a white flag and was taken into military custody. Whitside reported his condition as critical. The band was escorted to Wounded Knee Creek, approximately five miles away, and ordered to make camp for the night. Later that evening, Colonel James W. Forsyth arrived with additional 7th Cavalry troops and took command. The combined force numbered approximately 500 soldiers with four Hotchkiss mountain guns positioned on a rise overlooking the camp.

On the morning of December 29, Colonel Forsyth ordered the Lakota men to assemble and surrender their weapons. Soldiers surrounded the camp; the Hotchkiss guns remained trained on it from the surrounding high ground. The disarmament process proceeded with tension. Soldiers entered tipis searching for weapons. The Lakota men assembled had yielded some arms; the soldiers believed more were concealed.

A deaf man named Black Coyote - accounts vary on his role and intent - refused to surrender his rifle, stating he had paid for it. During the physical struggle over the weapon, it discharged. The precise sequence of what followed is recorded differently in Lakota survivor accounts, soldier accounts, and subsequent investigations. Within moments, soldiers opened fire at close range into the assembled Lakota men. The Hotchkiss guns on the hill opened fire on the camp, where women and children were located. The fighting, such as it was, lasted perhaps half an hour. Some Lakota fled into a dry ravine and were pursued.

When the shooting ended, between 250 and 300 Lakota were dead. Estimates compiled by subsequent investigators generally range from 250 to 300; Lakota accounts and some Army records suggest the higher figure. The dead included Big Foot, who was found frozen near his tent. Approximately half of those killed were women and children. Twenty-five soldiers were killed, most by friendly fire in the close-quarters engagement. Approximately 50 Lakota survived with wounds; a number of wounded died in subsequent days.

The bodies of the Lakota dead were collected over the following days. A civilian contract burial party interred them in a mass grave on the hill where the Hotchkiss guns had been positioned. The grave site was later marked; it became a formal memorial site.

News of Wounded Knee reached the Lakota camps at Pine Ridge and in the Badlands within days. Several hundred Lakota warriors attacked Army positions near the Pine Ridge Agency on December 30 at the engagement known as the Drexel Mission Fight or the Battle of White Clay Creek, in which soldiers from the 7th and 9th Cavalry (the latter a Buffalo Soldiers regiment) repelled the attack. No further large-scale armed engagements followed.

General Miles ordered Colonel Forsyth removed from command, considering the engagement a tactical blunder and its conduct reckless. An Army investigation initially sustained that judgment, but the War Department reinstated Forsyth in February 1891 after a second review concluded the engagement had been unavoidable.

The Ghost Dance movement effectively collapsed among the Lakota after Wounded Knee, though it persisted in modified forms among other peoples. Short Bull and Kicking Bear, still in the Stronghold with several thousand Lakota, surrendered to Miles in January 1891. The military occupation of the Lakota reservations was wound down over the following months.

Survivor testimonies were collected by James Mooney of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who conducted fieldwork on the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee in 1891. His account, published as The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), remains a foundational primary-source document. Additional survivor accounts were collected by journalist Charles Allen and by Lakota interpreter and writer Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), who was working as the Pine Ridge Agency physician and treated wounded survivors.

Eighteen soldiers received the Medal of Honor for their conduct at Wounded Knee, including Colonel Forsyth. A 1990 congressional resolution called on the President to rescind the medals; the request was not acted upon. Lakota leaders and some members of Congress have periodically renewed the request.

The site at Wounded Knee Creek is located on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965. Jurisdiction over the physical site has been a source of ongoing dispute between the United States government, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and private landowners.

Whether Wounded Knee constituted a deliberate massacre planned in advance, an engagement that escalated out of military negligence, or a defensible response to armed resistance is disputed among historians; the Army's own contemporaneous assessments were contradictory. See Wounded Knee (1890) - Debate.

The identity of who fired the first shot, and whether Black Coyote's discharge was accidental or intentional, is unresolved in the historical record; Lakota survivor accounts and soldier accounts differ materially on this and on the subsequent sequence of events. See Wounded Knee (1890) - Debate.

Whether the Medals of Honor awarded to 7th Cavalry soldiers for Wounded Knee should be rescinded is a contested question with both historical and contemporary political dimensions; opponents of rescission and proponents have each offered sustained arguments. See Wounded Knee Medals of Honor - Debate.

Some historians argue that the Ghost Dance movement, and Lakota responses to it, cannot be understood without treating the land cessions of 1889 as a proximate cause of the crisis; others emphasize the role of inexperienced agency personnel and military overreaction independent of the land question. See Wounded Knee (1890) - Debate and Sioux Act (1889) - Debate.

Whether the Wounded Knee engagement should be classified legally or historically as a massacre, a battle, or another category is a question with significance for Lakota claims regarding the Medal of Honor rescission and for federal recognition frameworks. See Wounded Knee (1890) - Debate.

1. Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Part 2. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896.

2. Utley, Robert M. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. Yale University Press, 1963. Second edition, 2004.

3. Greene, Jerome A. American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890. University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.

4. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

5. Eastman, Charles A. From the Deep Woods to Civilization. Little, Brown, 1916.

6. Coleman, William S. E. Voices of Wounded Knee. University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

7. Jensen, Richard E., R. Eli Paul, and John E. Carter. Eyewitness at Wounded Knee. University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

8. U.S. Senate. Report of the Secretary of War, 1891: Report on the Sioux Campaign. 52nd Congress, 1st Session, 1891.

9. Andersson, Rani-Henrik. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

10. Michno, Gregory F. The Mystery of E Troop: Custer's Gray Horse Company at the Little Big Horn. Mountain Press, 1994. [Background on 7th Cavalry.]

11. Kappler, Charles J., ed. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. 2. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. [Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, text.]

12. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. [Influential popular history; methodology critiqued by some academic historians.]

13. Hunhoff, Bernie. “The Wound That Won't Heal.” South Dakota Magazine, 2014.