Indian Wars & Battle of Wounded Knee

Such was the battle--or massacre--of Wounded Knee, the last significant episode of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars, and the last ghost of an effort by American Indians to assert their independence in a traditional context. For some years thereafter, several thousand Army troops--then a substantial fraction of the U.S. Army--remained stationed near Indian reservations to suppress any potential uprisings. Even in the opening years of the twentieth century, when the Army was called upon to garrison the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, concern was expressed about drawing down the forces guarding Indian reservations. But, with Wounded Knee, the era of armed confrontation was over. Whether appropriately or ironically, a few years later the historian Frederick Jackson Turner would declare 1890 to be the year that the American frontier was "closed."

Once the shooting was ended, Wounded Knee largely disappeared from the consciousness of at least non-Indian Americans for nearly three generations. In 1938, a measure (HR 2535) was introduced in Congress to compensate Lakota survivors of Wounded Knee; the measure explicitly described the action as a massacre. The he

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me kind of forcible response, or was the government's response a consequence of self-induced panic? An attempt to evaluate these background questions fully lies outside the scope of this discussion, which will concentrate on the events at Wounded Knee itself. Did a "battle" ever take place, in the sense that any significant number of soldiers were killed by Lakotas, or were the Army casualties almost entirely the result of to their own fire? To what degree was the subsequent shooting a consequence of panic, and to what degree was it a deliberate massacre? This phase of the investigation begins with a review of testimony taken by the Army shortly after the events. The following excerpts from soldiers' testimony are taken from To Set the Record Straight: The Real Story of Wounded Knee, a limited-edition set of transcripts assembled by John M. Carroll. Major S. M. Whitside, one of Forsyth's battalion commanders, summarizes the search that was made of the encampment: "As a result of this search," he states, "about 40 arms were found and taken out of the way, the squaws making every effort to conceal the arms by hiding and sitting on them, and in various other ways, evincing a most sullen mien." As this was going on in
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Approximate Word count = 10951
Approximate Pages = 44 (250 words per page)