Oh What a Slaughter (19 page)

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.

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.

For a time, though, almost any gathering of Indians, of any size, continued to awaken old fears. When the northern Cheyenne broke out in 1877 the whole of the population of the Great Plains went into a panic. The old apprehension was waiting there in the yeast of pioneer memory; it easily swelled up. In situations such as occurred at Wounded Knee, one shot, accidental or not, was enough to set off one more unnecessary slaughter.

The Great Plains of the American West is a huge space, and yet there proved to be not enough room in it for two races, two ideas of community identity to coexist. Both races, it seemed, needed all the land there in order to survive in their traditional ways. Wounded Knee was a final spasm in the long agony of dispossession.

Black Elk said that he didn't realize at first how much had been lost on that snowy battlefield. In fact, by the time of Wounded Knee, a whole continent had been lost to the native peoples. A process begun in the seventeenth century on the shores of Virginia and Massachusetts got finished on that bleak plain in South Dakota at the ending of the year.

Wounded Knee was not the last conflict between the white government and the native people, but after Wounded Knee the scale changed, and also the methods of dispossession. The latter, since then, has mainly been accomplished through the Congress and the law courts. Chiseling turned out to work as well as shooting. The Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma suffered a second dispossession when they were made American citizens—merely a clever ruse to end their system of communal ownership of land. They ceased to be sovereign nations—as brand-new American citizens they were easily cheated.

The white man's appetite for land and profit never slackened: the Indians repeatedly found themselves left with the short end of the stick. Within the last year revelations of large-scale misuse of Indian trust funds have come to light, an indication that this pattern hasn't changed. Large gatherings of Indians are still viewed with suspicion by police, even when Indians are the police. The general attitude seems to be that it cannot be good for too many Indians to assemble, even if they are only getting together for celebration and meditation.

Despite all these losses the native tribes of America still exhibit a good deal of resilience. Some have prospered running casinos—others have managed significant wins in court.

Just over the hill from the Wounded Knee battlefield is Wounded Knee village, a rather cheerful, somewhat suburban community. Someone has taken the trouble to line the highway with vividly painted Drive-Slow signs, urging drivers to remember
that there are children at play. The signs insist on responsible driving, and this in a place where most people don't like to drive slow. Wounded Knee, the battlefield, is, like most of the other massacre sites, a somber place; but you only have to go over the hill a few hundred yards to realize that the Sioux are still here and still lively.

History, both ancient and modern, reminds us that the impulse to turn whole groups of people into meat shops is not likely to be extinguished. Wounded Knee may have been an impulsive massacre, but the others I have considered were not. What happened in Rwanda was not impulsive, either: nor was Saddam's gassing of the Kurds.

Long ago, when I was a young cowboy, I witnessed a herd reaction in a real herd—about one hundred cattle that some cowboys and I were moving from one pasture to another along a small asphalt farm-to-market road. It was mid-afternoon in midsummer. Men, horses, and cattle were all drowsy, the herd just barely plodding along, until one cow happened to drag her hoof on the rough asphalt, making a loud rasping sound. In an instant that sleepy herd was in full flight, and our horses too. A single sound on a summer afternoon produced a short but violent stampede. The cattle and horses ran full-out for perhaps one hundred yards. It was the only stampede I was ever in, and a dragging hoof caused it.