Oh What a Slaughter

by Larry McMurtry

  When feeling even slightly nervous about conditions at Standing Rock, agent McLaughlin had a tendency to put the blame on Sitting Bull. In the fall of 1890 the increased presence of soldiers was naturally nervous-making for the Indians. The Indians got the sense that they were going to be punished yet again, though no one knew why and no one wanted to be punished. More and more Sioux adopted Short Bull’s tactic and drifted off to the Badlands or the hills.

  It took almost no movement on the part of the Sioux to frighten the settlers.

  Agent McGillycuddy, who, as a doctor at Fort Robinson, had treated Crazy Horse’s wife, was not a man easily panicked. Apropos the Ghost Dance, he made the reasonable point that even the Seventh-day Adventists put on strange robes and performed strange rituals in their wait for the coming of the Messiah. Why shouldn’t the Sioux be granted the same license?

  Agent McGillycuddy’s reasonable opinion did not prevail. The army was alarmed, and so a plan was made to arrest the usual suspect, Sitting Bull. General Miles reasoned that if a bunch of white soldiers rode in to arrest Sitting Bull there would very likely be a violent protest, perhaps even a revolt. Miles’s first notion was to summon Buffalo Bill Cody, whose show was then in Chicago, in hopes that Cody could coax Sitting Bull to join him for a special performance of some kind. If Sitting Bull agreed, then he could be arrested somewhere off the reservation and sent to a military prison.

  It doesn’t seem likely that Cody had been informed about this plan; after all, he employed more than one hundred Indians in his show. If he had assisted in the arrest of their most renowned chief it is doubtful that the Wild West Indians would have approved. They might even have revolted themselves, perhaps killing a few of the cowboys and stagecoach drivers that they routinely chased in the show.

  Cody may have sensed, or found out, what the real plan was. On his own he made his way to Standing Rock; but then agent McGillycuddy objected to allowing Sitting Bull and Cody—in his view two slippery characters—to get together. Cody was told there could be no meeting, after all; in a huff the great showman went away without ever seeing his old star.

  Sitting Bull had last talked to Crook in 1889. Since then he had been living quietly. McLaughlin knew that arresting him would be tricky: it would require great care. He thought it might be accomplished through the use of Indian policemen, of which by this time there were a goodly number. The young men of the Sioux may have regarded their policeman jobs as status symbols.

  When the day of the arrest came no fewer than forty native policemen went to Standing Rock to arrest the old man. They were under the command of a Lieutenant Bullhead. As an extra precaution a detachment of cavalry went with them.

  The native policemen arrived early, perhaps hoping to whisk the prisoner out before the camp was really awake. Sitting Bull himself was still asleep. Once awake, though grumpy, he finally agreed to go to the agency—it was not the first time he had been so summoned. The arresting officers were Lieutenant Bull-head and Sergeant Red Tomahawk.

  Red Tomahawk

  Bullhead

  By the time Sitting Bull got dressed and stepped outside, a big crowd of Ghost Dancers had gathered. Seeing that he had crowd support, Sitting Bull suddenly balked. He appeared to change his mind. The old show horse that Buffalo Bill had given him was waiting, but Sitting Bull suddenly dug in his heels, forcing the policemen to push him toward his horse. Angered by this treatment of their leader, a Sioux named Catch-the-Bear whipped out a rifle and shot Lieutenant Bullhead, who shot back, hitting Sitting Bull. Red Tomahawk also fired, hitting Sitting Bull in the head. Sitting Bull fell, dead. At this juncture fierce fighting broke out between the Ghost Dancers and the native policemen. The nearby cavalry, hearing sounds of battle, came rushing in and managed to save most of the native policemen, who otherwise would probably have been slaughtered to the last man.

  The old show horse, some say, took the shooting as his cue and went through his repertoire of tricks while the battle raged.

  Dee Brown and others have argued that it was only the power of belief in the Ghost Dance, with its promise of a Return, that kept a general revolt from flaring up. Some Sioux may have hesitated on that score, but, with Sitting Bull dead right before their eyes, many merely felt leaderless and fearful. Sioux by the hundreds soon fled the Standing Rock Reservation and made their way to the camp of the strongest surviving chief, in this case Red Cloud, who was at the Pine Ridge Agency.

  Other frightened Sioux fled to the Badlands, where Short Bull still was. Others went to the mountains. Still others flocked to the other Ghost Dance sites.

  Not many seemed to want to stay in the place where Sitting Bull had been killed, a place where worse might follow.

  Perhaps as many as one hundred Standing Rock Sioux made their way to the camp of Big Foot, a well-respected Minniconjou chief.

  Big Foot was then camped east of Pine Ridge, near Cherry Creek.

  Wounded Knee (III)

  Two days after Sitting Bull’s death, the army issued a warrant for the arrest of Big Foot himself. The old chief had done nothing hostile at all; he was merely on the arrest list, with many others, as a possible fomenter of trouble. In the eyes of the military he was an enemy combatant, much like the unfortunate Afghans who are being held in Cuba today.

  What made this arrest order particularly inconvenient was that Big Foot was seriously ill. He had pneumonia, and was hardly able to stand, yet he was traveling in an open wagon, in wintertime. He was spitting blood; his shirt was stained with it.

  On December 28 he saw some cavalry approaching and immediately ran up a white flag. The commanding officer of this troop, Major Samuel Whiteside, insisted that Big Foot and his band come with him to the large cavalry encampment on Wounded Knee Creek. The major wanted to disarm the Indians then and there, but a half-breed scout named John Shangneau persuaded him to wait until the Indians were safely in camp.

  Once in the camp the Indians were carefully counted: 120 men and 230 women and children. Major Whiteside had by this time realized that Big Foot was seriously ill; he had a heated tent prepared for him and sent an army doctor to attend him.

  Sometime after dark more soldiers arrived. Colonel James Forsyth took over the command, with orders to take Big Foot and his followers to a military camp near Omaha, a goodly distance from Wounded Knee Creek.

  By morning Big Foot was very sick indeed; he was barely able to breathe. His people, now entirely surrounded by soldiers, were naturally very fearful.

  The next morning Colonel Forsyth ordered all the Sioux to assemble, so the process of disarming them could begin. Though not happy with his order, the Sioux began, rather tentatively, to comply.

  (From this point on, it is only fair to say, there are many versions of what happened, all made by participants.)

  The army, with its propensity for taking things too far, too fast, began to search the tents and the baggage in them, confiscating knives and hatchets as they went. Not many rifles were surrendered, and most of the ones handed over were defective in varying degrees. One of the few good rifles belonged to a Sioux named Black Coyote (or Fox), who brandished his gun above his head and informed the crowd that he had paid good money for it, an indication of his reluctance to part with it.

  In the opinion of a witness named Dewey Brand, Black Coyote did intend to turn in his gun and was just having a little fun, but opinions as to Black Coyote’s intentions are numerous. One Sioux thought Black Coyote to be a man of bad character. The soldiers were hustling Black Coyote away when his rifle evidently went off—perhaps an accident. Some think no one was hurt, others think an officer was either killed or wounded.

  Whatever the truth of that, the well-primed soldiers—most of them members of the 7th Cavalry—began to fire indiscriminately into the mass of Indians. Big Foot, the sick chief, was killed by the first volley. The Sioux then began to fight with what little they had to fight with—knives, clubs, etc. Some of the soldiers who had been carrying out the disarming fell in hand-to-h
and fighting.

  Next, a Hotchkiss gun opened fire. This fire would seem to be as dangerous to the soldiers as to the Indians on the flats and, indeed, some of the soldiers were in danger from friendly fire. The marker at Wounded Knee says that 146 Indians were killed: the death toll for soldiers is usually thought to be between twenty-five and thirty-one. The Indians began to flee—many were cut down. A blizzard was on the way. When the firing finally stopped most of the wounded Indians were gathered up and taken to the Pine Ridge Agency, where they were housed in the mission.

  James Mooney believes that when the sun rose that morning neither the soldiers nor the Indians were expecting trouble. This seems hard to believe. The Sioux were surrounded by soldiers. A machine gun was trained on the camp.

  There were more than one hundred warriors with Big Foot. Mooney says a Ghost Dancer named Yellow Bird blew on an eagle-bone whistle and may have danced a few steps. In Mooney’s account the Sioux at first relinquished only two rifles, prompting the provocative search of tents and baggage. Mooney thinks Yellow Bird may have told the Sioux that if they were wearing their Ghost Shirts the bullets would not find them. Mooney isn’t sure what may have gone on between Yellow Bird and Black Coyote. No one is sure whether the latter fired accidentally or on purpose, or whether he wounded an officer or what.

  Once the soldiers began to fire into the crowd, a frenzy developed that was not much different from the killing frenzies at the other massacres. Fear, nervousness, blind rage all contributed to a force that was soon unstoppable. The Sioux either fought or fled, and were hunted down in either case. Some got as far as two miles from the point of eruption before they fell. Mooney thinks Yellow Bird may have egged Black Coyote on, but did he? The point, if there is one, is that in situations of high tension it takes only one vague, perhaps accidental, action to start a violent spasm of killing.

  All the ingredients for catastrophe were there: the armed and jittery soldiers, a group of frightened, nervous, much harassed Indians. Perhaps Black Coyote meant to fire his gun, but then perhaps not. He was being shoved around—the shot might have been accidental.

  At the other massacres—Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant—massacre was the whole point of the engagement. But at Wounded Knee it seems that it really could have gone differently. A peaceful surrender might have been carried out. But a gun went off, and then many guns went off in response, and, before long, dead human beings littered the plain.

  As with Sand Creek and Camp Grant, the ferocious violence at Wounded Knee bred violence elsewhere; for a short time there was a revolt among the Sioux, a great many of which were camped near Pine Ridge. Some immediately went into fighting mode; there were a number of ambushes and small attacks. Colonel Forsyth and his troops came under strong assault and might have fared badly had not reinforcements arrived. For some three days after Wounded Knee confusion reigned—confusion mixed with terror. There was plenty of trouble in the south, and yet, at the same time, Indians who had not yet heard of Wounded Knee were trickling into Pine Ridge.

  On New Year’s Day 1891, a party of soldiers was sent to the battlefield, charged with burying the dead and bringing in such wounded as had survived the battle and the subsequent blizzard. Mostly the soldiers found dead bodies, and yet four babies were found alive, and also a woman named Blue Whirlwind and her children. The dead bodies were stripped and thrown into an open pit. “It was a thing to melt the heart of a man, if turned to stone … to see those little bodies shot to pieces,” one witness reported.

  A little girl was found wearing a cap with a beadwork American flag on it. She lived.

  A cowboy named Henry Miller seems to have been killed in the first battle. Why he was there in the first place is not stated.

  For Red Cloud it was a particularly anxious time—he was afraid his own hotheads might go out, undoing all he had accomplished in his years of diplomacy.

  A Negro private, W. H. Prather, of the 9th Cavalry, wrote a lengthy poem about the battle:

  The redskins left their agency, the soldiers left their post

  All on the strength of an Indian tale about Messiah’s ghost

  Got up by savage chieftains to lead their tribes astray,

  But Uncle Sam wouldn’t have it, for he ain’t built that way.

  Private Prather was only outdone in eloquence by Black Elk, the Oglala sage:

  I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the high hill of my age I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard.

  A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation’s hoop is broken. There is no center anymore and the sacred tree is dead.

  Black Elk

  James Mooney’s book contains pictures of the children who survived: Marguarite Zitkala-noni, Jennie Sword, Herbert Zitkalazi, and the children of Blue Whirlwind. Captain Colby of the Nebraska State Militia adopted one little girl; Lost Bird, she was called. George Sword, the captain of the Indian police, adopted another little girl, who was called Jennie Sword. One boy, Herbert Zitkalazi, was adopted by Lucy Arnold, a teacher at the agency. Herbert was the son of the medicine man Yellow Bird, he of the eagle-bone whistle.

  * * *

  Confusing claims circulated and still do. The many descendants of the dead tell the stories they heard, and the stories differ.

  Spotted Horse claims that Black Coyote did fire the first shot and that it killed an officer. Others insist that the shot missed.

  American Horse, who had been at the Fetterman massacre and even claimed to have cut Fetterman’s throat, said that he had seen a mother shot down while nursing a baby. “And that especially was a sad sight,” said American Horse.

  The influential leader Young Man Afraid of His Horses—which means the enemy was afraid of his horses—had been away at the time of the massacre; when he returned he used his considerable influence to quiet things down. He did his best to stop the raiding and skirmishing and, to a degree, succeeded. General Miles, in his turn, made conciliatory sounds; slowly things returned to normal, if anything about reservation life can be said to be normal.

  By the middle of January 1891, the Wounded Knee uprising was over. Many Sioux later claimed that it was men of the 7th Cavalary—Custer’s old troop—who started the ferocious firing. They thought the attack was revenge for Custer, who had been defeated and killed fifteen years earlier; many of the descendants of the massacred, as reported in William Coleman’s Voices of Wounded Knee, certainly believed the 7th was out for revenge that day.

  If so, the 7th in this case probably exceeded their mandate. Miles and the other military men could hardly have wanted a massacre—they were well aware that there were thousands of Sioux near Pine Ridge who might go out again and have to be expensively rounded up and subdued.

  Meanwhile the power of apprehension did its work. The citizens of communities far away in Nebraska and Iowa fled from what they feared would be the return of terror. Some of these communities were at least 150 miles from the nearest Indian. Mooney considered these panics to be entirely ridiculous.

  Not long after the Wounded Knee outbreak a man named Albert Hopkins, who wore a blanket and claimed to be the Messiah, appeared at Pine Ridge. He claimed the Indians were expecting his arrival, that he acted under what he called “the Pansy Banner of Peace.” Besides being the Messiah he was also president of the Pansy Society of America. Red Cloud ridiculed him and had him put off the reservation, but he later surfaced in Washington. He said the Indians would all be waiting for his appearance in the spring, but then he vanished and was heard from no more.

  The Waning Moon

  Though the big historical marker at Wounded Knee claims that the Ghost Dance ended there, in fact it didn’t. It was taken up by the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and other tribes then living in Oklahoma.
A second Sitting Bull appeared, this one an Arapaho. A Ghost Dance was held by the Canadian River, near the present-day town of Darlington, Oklahoma: a thousand or more Indians were said to have danced. The Arapaho Sitting Bull instructed all comers: Caddos, Wichitas, and other southern tribes. The local whites were alarmed at first, but the soldiers who came in contact with this Sitting Bull found him to be likable and free of humbug—free also of threat.

  The dances continued under various leaders—many delegations traveled west to visit Wovoka and receive his instruction—but, in time, most of the tribes who practiced the Ghost Dance lost faith in it. This is not surprising, since none of the things predicted ever came to pass. No new earth formed, no flood swept away the whites. The Paiutes, who had the easiest access to Wovoka, kept dancing longest. There may have been isolated Ghost Dances in northern Arizona as late as 1912; but the failure of the dance to achieve the desired results caused it to be abandoned by most Indians.

  * * *

  Why the Ghost Dance frightened the white authorities so much is still puzzling, and yet it clearly scared them. The fact that Sitting Bull—the Sioux—was doing nothing remotely aggressive didn’t save him from death. He failed to stop the Ghost Dance at the whites’ request, which he rightly judged to be hypocritical. The whites had their dances: why shouldn’t Indians have the same right?

  Perhaps some whites feared the Ghost Dance because subconsciously they thought it might actually work, at least to the extent of reawakening the warrior instinct in the Sioux. This did happen, but only briefly; wiser heads, such as Young Man Afraid of His Horses, were quick to soothe the situation and prevent more killing.

  Long before 1890 the Sioux leaders were well aware that they stood no chance in a shooting war with the American army. Their great victories were a decade and a half behind them. Red Cloud in the north and Quanah Parker in the south did everything they could to ease the difficulties their people felt during this time of transition. Scattered acts of renegadism did occur, but nothing large-scale was ever attempted again.