A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  After he and his ragged followers surrendered at Fort Buford, Sitting Bull was not allowed to settle at Standing Rock Agency with the rest of his people as he had been promised. Instead, he was sent down the Missouri River to Fort Randall. After twenty months of forced exile there with those who had followed him from Canada, Sitting Bull moved back to Standing Rock in May 1883. He spent most of the next seven years doing his best to peaceably resist the ways of the white man.2

  It was only after Sitting Bull had settled at Standing Rock that he began to understand the futility of resistance. A large chunk of the Great Sioux Reservation had been lost in 1876 to the whites and never again would the Sioux roam where they wanted, following the buffalo in the warm months and semihibernating far from the white man during the long plains winters. Even the Sun Dance, the most sacred Sioux religious tradition, was prohibited; the last one was held in 1883. Worst of all, the Lakotas were beholden to the wasichus for most of their food and supplies.

  Sitting Bull moved into a small cabin and attempted to till the soil just as most of the other Hunkpapas did. But he continued to fight the white man’s persistent attempts to eradicate his people’s way of life. The government — even those of its representatives who were kindly disposed to the Sioux — aimed to reduce the Indians’ adherence to tribal authority and tradition. Their goal was Americanization and all it entailed: individual responsibility and landownership; allegiance to Christ, God, and the flag; and ultimately, when virtually every trace of Sioux culture was erased, citizenship.

  Sitting Bull would have none of this. He settled in the southern part of the reservation, on Grand River, very close to his birthplace, and engaged only in those practices of the white man that he decided were tolerable. He sent all of his children to the day schools set up for them, but he did not convert to Christianity, though he acknowledged the noble work that some missionaries did. And he battled the shrewd and powerful Standing Rock agent, James McLaughlin, for control of the reservation’s people. McLaughlin was honest and cared for his Indian charges, but he took an instant dislike to Sitting Bull’s proud manner and intractable ways. When the holy man refused to bow to the agent’s wishes, McLaughlin quickly decided that Sitting Bull was an active impediment to his plans and spread the word of the Hunkpapa’s obstinacy and dangerous attitude. Realizing the power that Sitting Bull still wielded among his people, McLaughlin did his best to undermine him by dealing with other Lakota chiefs and appointing them to prestigious offices.

  Sitting Bull traveled east several times, once in the summer of 1885 with Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show, where the high point of the performance was a reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand. He toured with the former scout for four months, during which Cody paid him well and treated him honorably. The holy man was dutifully impressed by the wasichus’ wealth, power, ingenuity, and sheer numbers, but his friendship with the showman did not alter his views on the whites. “The white people are wicked,” he told a missionary. “I want you to teach my people to read and write but they must not become white people in their ways; it is too bad a life. I could not let them do it.

  “I would rather die an Indian,” he declared, “than live a white man.”3

  As the decade progressed, Sitting Bull continued to rally his people against efforts to further destroy the traditional Sioux way of life, particularly government allotment of Sioux land in severalty (individual ownership), which would result in the loss of nine million acres — almost half of the Great Sioux Reservation. But his strenuous efforts to prevent his people’s agreement to the Sioux Act of 1888 failed due to backroom dealings, factionalism, and whispered promises that were never fulfilled.

  That year, reduced rations and a bad crop led to persistent hunger on the reservations, and diseases made things worse. As a new decade neared, the Lakota people were hungry, low in spirits, and desperate for any sign of hope. So when rumors and reports of a Sioux messiah in the West began to reach Dakota Territory in the summer of 1889, they created a welcome excitement. Lakota emissaries were sent to ascertain the truth; they returned in March 1890 with tremendous news. The messiah, they reported, was a Paiute holy man in Nevada named Wovoka. His religion was a mix of traditional Sioux beliefs and elements of Christian theology, and it promised a new world where every Indian and all of his ancestors existed in a bountiful paradise filled with all kinds of game, including buffalo. According to Wovoka, a huge wave of earth would come from the west and push the wasichus back over the ocean to where they had come from. Though the new religion espoused a new world without white people, it was otherwise peaceful.4

  The Ghost Dance, as this faith came to be called by whites, caught on quickly at several of the Missouri River agencies, though Sitting Bull initially did not support it as it swept through Standing Rock. But another crop failure, combined with the loss of their land, short rations, and the usual miserable conditions on the reservations, intensified Sioux unrest. When word spread that believers would dance through the winter until the great change came the next spring, even Sitting Bull began to encourage the dancing. He refused white entreaties to disband the gatherings; he even forecast a mild winter to accommodate the ceremonies.

  Not surprisingly, this new religion did not meet with approval from the vast majority of whites in the area. Many of them, particularly a few inexperienced Indian agents and residents of nearby white settlements, considered any Indian dance a war dance. The result was widespread fear of a full-scale Indian uprising. The government reacted accordingly. Nelson Miles, Custer’s old friend and now commanding General of the Division of the Missouri (Phil Sheridan had assumed command of the army upon William T. Sherman’s retirement in 1883 and had died five years later, at the age of fifty-seven, after a series of heart attacks), called for 3,500 troops to be activated and sent toward the Missouri reservations to head off any trouble. One of the regiments ordered to the area was the Seventh Cavalry.

  Since the Sioux War of 1876 and the grueling Nez Perce campaign the following year, there had been little excitement for Custer’s old regiment. There had been marriages: at least nine enlisted men had married their fallen comrades’ widows. (One scout, Muggins Taylor, had wed the wife of his best friend, Mitch Boyer, and raised Boyer’s children as his own.) There had been decorations awarded: no fewer than twenty-four enlisted men had received the Medal of Honor for heroic acts during the Reno-Benteen siege, the most awarded for one action until a massive operation on Iwo Jima, sixty-nine years later.5 But save for the occasional small-scale Indian outbreak that never amounted to anything and ended as soon as it began, the Seventh’s twelve companies had spent the intervening dozen years garrisoning at many forts in the West. Only a handful of enlisted men and officers who had fought at the Little Bighorn still served. Edward Godfrey, Winfield Edgerly, George Wallace, and Charles Varnum had now joined Myles Moylan and Henry Nowlan as Captains; along with Lieutenant Luther Hare, they comprised the small core of veteran Indian fighters among the regiment’s officers.6

  Colonel James Forsyth, longtime aide-de-camp and then military secretary on Sheridan’s staff, had commanded the regiment since 1886. He, like most of the enlisted men, had almost no experience fighting Indians. Few of his troopers had even been under fire, and about 20 percent of them were fresh recruits.7

  The Seventh arrived by train from Fort Riley, Kansas, on November 26, 1890, and settled in at Pine Ridge Agency, about one hundred miles from their old nemesis, Sitting Bull, at Standing Rock. Their conduct at Pine Ridge would embroil the regiment in another controversial army investigation.

  The army had asked the Indian agents to identify the chiefs — most of them Ghost Dance leaders — who were giving them the most trouble. Plans were made to arrest the worst of them to head off any large-scale outbreak. On December 10, General Miles issued orders to have Sitting Bull arrested and removed from the reservation. James McLaughlin thought it would be best handled by his Indian police and began to plan this delicate mission.

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sp; Sitting Bull had just decided to visit the Ghost Dance leaders of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud agencies to learn more about the religion. Though he defended the right of his people to dance, he was still somewhat skeptical about its legitimacy. Those leaders had taken their followers, about 1,200 Oglalas and Brulés, to an area called the Stronghold, a large mesa with almost sheer sides that rose hundreds of feet above the Badlands in the northwest corner of Pine Ridge. Sitting Bull planned to leave for the Stronghold on December 15; when McLaughlin and his Indian policemen found out, they sprang into action.

  Just before 6:00 a.m. on the day of Sitting Bull’s departure, a contingent of forty-four Indian policemen arrived at his cabin on Grand River. They pounded on his door, and when someone opened it, they burst in and demanded that Sitting Bull leave with them. At first he agreed, and they allowed him time to dress. Then, as he was escorted outside, where a large throng had gathered, he changed his mind after his teenage son chided him for submitting. He declared that he would not go. As the crowd surged forward, one of Sitting Bull’s followers shot an Indian policeman, who staggered back and then fired his pistol at Sitting Bull, hitting him in the chest. Another policeman shot the holy man in the back of the head. A full-scale melee erupted. When the shooting was finished a few minutes later, Sitting Bull and six of his followers lay dead. Six Indian policemen also sustained fatal wounds. As Sitting Bull’s two wives and daughters sang their mourning songs, his bloody corpse was thrown into a wagon and delivered to the Indian agent. Like Crazy Horse before him, this great Lakota leader was killed with the help of his own people. Many major newspapers, the New York Times among them, crowed that Sitting Bull was finally “a good Indian.”8

  ON THE NIGHT of December 23, soon after hearing of Sitting Bull’s death, the old chief Big Foot and about 350 of his Minneconjou followers quietly slipped away from their Cheyenne River Agency and headed to Pine Ridge, one hundred miles south, to seek refuge with their Oglala brethren led by Red Cloud. The Minneconjous were worried about their safety: a large “camp of observation” had been set up near them by the army. The authorities thought that they might be headed toward the hostiles in the Stronghold and issued orders to apprehend them at all costs. But by the time Big Foot’s band reached Pine Ridge, the Stronghold was virtually deserted — almost all the Ghost Dancers had been persuaded to return to their agencies — and the Minneconjous posed no threat.

  Five days later, a battalion of the Seventh Cavalry chanced upon the Minneconjous about twenty miles east of Pine Ridge and just a few miles from where the troopers had bivouacked the night before in the nearby valley of Wounded Knee Creek. The bedraggled band of Sioux, its leader prostrate with pneumonia, surrendered and agreed to a military escort into camp. They pitched their fifty tepees9 a couple of hundred yards south of the regiment’s tents near a shallow dry ravine. Forsyth arrived with four more companies of the Seventh and an artillery battery that night. He carried orders to disarm the Minneconjous and escort them to a Nebraska railroad and thence by train to Omaha, where they would remain until the trouble had passed.

  Until late in the evening, the Seventh’s officers celebrated the capture of Big Foot’s band, visiting at various tents to congratulate one another. The night was clear and cold, but a keg of whiskey warmed them and made the occasion more convivial. A few of the officers grabbed some of the Minneconjou warriors and interrogated them as to which ones had been in the Custer battle fourteen years before.10 In fact, more than one newspaper had reported a desire for revenge by the regiment. One had written a few weeks earlier, “It is well-known that the Seventh Cavalry is fairly itching to be away and pursue the poor Indians. . . . Many of the present officers were with Reno on that day, only four miles distant, and it is safe to say the Sioux will receive no quarter from this famous regiment should the opportunity occur to wreak out vengeance for the blood taken at the battle of the Little Big Horn.”11 Another quoted Captain George Wallace as saying, “The Seventh has a bloody score to settle with them.”12

  The next morning, December 29, was cool and clear. The Minneconjous awoke to find themselves virtually surrounded by twice as many troops as the day before. No one expected any kind of resistance from the cold, hungry, and dispirited Indians — that was clear from Forsyth’s deployment. Most of his 470 troopers were arranged to form three sides of an open square, in front of a heated army tent in which Big Foot had spent the night. (Any trouble would have resulted in the soldiers firing into each other, a clear indication of Forsyth’s desire to disarm the Minneconjous without a fight.) Most of the other four companies were stationed south of the Indian camp on the far side of the ravine. On a low hill to the north sat a battery of four rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns, their barrels pointed at the Sioux village. The guns were capable of rapidly firing 2.6-pound exploding cartridges more than 4,000 yards.

  The 120 Minneconjou warriors were gathered to begin the disarmament. A medicine man painted blue, green, and yellow leaped among them in the Ghost Dance maneuvers, exhorting them to resist and telling them that the Ghost Shirts that most of them wore would repel the soldiers’ bullets. The warriors gave up a few old rifles, but none of the Winchester repeaters that the soldiers had seen the day before. The prostrate chief was carried out and placed on a pallet in front of the tent in hopes that he would command his fighting men to cooperate. When Big Foot insisted they had no guns, Forsyth ordered the tepees searched, and Captains Varnum and Wallace each took fifteen men and started on either side of the village. Eventually, about fifty guns were discovered hidden in the lodges or beneath the skirts of the women and thrown into piles. The tension increased, particularly among the young men on both sides: the Minneconjous were terrified that after the soldiers had disarmed them, they would kill them all; the inexperienced troopers were generally scared and on edge. Forsyth ordered the young warriors searched about 9:30 a.m. When Wallace attempted to take a gun from one especially hotheaded warrior (some later said he was deaf and did not understand what was required), he resisted. In the struggle, the Indian raised his rifle high and fired a shot.

  At that moment, the medicine man took a handful of dirt and tossed it into the air. A nearby group of Indians threw their blankets up to reveal their hidden rifles and may or may not have fired into the surrounding soldiers; no one knows for sure. A lieutenant yelled, “Look out men, they are going to fire!” and more than a hundred troopers fired their carbines at the warriors. All hell broke loose.13

  The two groups blazed away at each other. Captain Edward Godfrey yelled at his men not to shoot the women and children, but his First Sergeant said, “To hell with the women.”14 Some of the warriors made for the piles of confiscated rifles and grabbed a few. Others pulled knives and hatchets, broke through the line of blue, and ran toward the tepees, where until seconds earlier women had been packing up and small children had been playing in the dirt. Most of the troopers present fired their single-shot Springfields — the same model some of them had used at the Little Bighorn — as fast as they could reload, shooting at anything that moved. Big Foot was killed as he attempted to sit up, and an officer shot the chief’s daughter as she rushed to his side. After ten minutes or so of furious gunfire, the field was covered in smoke. Wallace and several other soldiers lay dead, some of them no doubt at the hands of their own comrades across the way.15 Twenty-five troopers lost their lives that day.16

  “Scout, we got our revenge now,” a lieutenant told an interpreter.

  “What revenge?” asked the scout.

  “Don’t you know? The Custer Massacre.”17

  The Seventh attacked in force, chasing down Indians throughout the valley. The Hotchkiss guns across the way were put to deadly use, firing up to fifty rounds a minute at any Indians in sight and raking the Minneconjou camp after shots were fired from the tepees. The surviving warriors, men and boys, fought fiercely, while most of the women and children escaped into the ravine behind the lodges. One Hotchkiss round found a wagon loaded with noncombatants, killing or w
ounding all on board.18 Troopers pursued those who escaped from the area, chasing them several miles before finding and killing them.19 Scattered firing lasted for a few more hours.

  Godfrey had fought in every major battle involving the regiment — Washita, Little Bighorn, and Bear Paw in September 1877, where his heroic leadership against the Nez Perce would eventually win him the Medal of Honor. In each of the first two actions, he had coolly conducted a textbook retreat while in command of a small contingent of troopers at a distance from the main battlefield. He had been on detached duty when his company had been ordered into the field, and he had rejoined it at Pine Ridge. Now he was out on his own again. His decisions at Wounded Knee — or at least those of the men he commanded — would not reflect well on him.

  He was ordered to take fifteen or twenty men and ride west to look for escaping Indians. Three miles from the carnage, his men detected a group hiding behind some brush in a ravine. From fifty yards away, Godfrey yelled for any women and children to come out. When none came forward, he ordered his nervous troopers to fire a volley into the brush. They did, firing half a dozen shots from twenty-five yards away, then heard a child’s scream. Godfrey halted the fire. Behind the bushes were a dead woman, two dead little girls, and a motionless and apparently dying boy. When the youth opened his eyes and moved, a trigger-happy recruit put a bullet in his brain.20

  The day after the engagement, there was more fighting at nearby White Clay Creek with a few thousand other Sioux. Forsyth allowed the regiment to become pinned down in a cul-de-sac valley, and only the arrival of a battalion of Ninth Cavalry buffalo soldiers drove the Indians away. Most of them headed toward the Stronghold. Over the next two weeks, Miles skillfully used a combination of power and persuasion to convince the Indians of the foolishness of further hostilities. By January 16, 1891, the 4,000 refugee Sioux had surrendered, and the situation was under control.