December 29, 1890: The Wounded Knee Massacre takes place near the creek and now town of the same name, in southwestern South Dakota. It is the last major action between the U.S. Army and Native Americans, and possibly the worst.
In 1876, the the Lakota Sioux fought the 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (who'd held the temporary, or brevet, rank of Brigadier General in the American Civil War), at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana, and the Cavalry lost more than 1/3rd of its men, including Custer.
One of the chiefs leading the Lakota troops was Sitting Bull. For 5 more years, he managed to avoid capture by U.S. troops, until finally surrendering. He joined William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West Show, but returned to the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, which had gained Statehood along with North Dakota on November 2, 1889.
In response to the many degradations the Natives faced, the "Ghost Dance" movement began, a nationalist movement similar to the later Black Panther Party and the Reconquista movement of Mexican-Americans.
Faced with a nonwhite people expressing pride in themselves and their traditions, white America's government did what it had done so many times, and would continue to do: It overreacted. In the tradition of "Cut off the head, and the body will die," the rebuilt 7th Cavalry went to arrest Sitting Bull. They arrived on December 15, 1890, and he refused to accept arrest, and was shot and killed. Although Native record-keeping made establishing his exact birthdate impossible, he was believed to be 59 years old.
The Cavalry, under the command of Colonel James W. Forsyth, moved on to Wounded Knee, 275 miles to the southwest. Arriving on December 28, they surrounded the Lakota camp. On the morning of the 29th, they went in to take the Lakota men's guns away. A Ghost Dance ritual was being conducted at the time. A man named Black Coyote refused to give up his rifle, citing the large amount of money he'd paid for it. What happened next is in dispute: Either Black Coyote fired, and a soldier grabbed his rifle, they struggled over it, and it went off.
What is not in dispute is what happened after that first gunshot: The Cavalry opened fire, and those few Lakota who still had their weapons returned what fire they could. More than 250 men, women and children were killed. That was nearly as many men as the 7th Cavalry lost at the Little Bighorn, but those were all trained soldiers. To put that in a modern perspective, it's nearly half again as many people as died in the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995, and 1/8th as many as were killed on 9/11 -- and since the U.S. had about 1/4th as many people in 1890 as it had in 2001, it's proportionately about half as bad as 9/11.
The Cavalry lost 31 men. Twenty men were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. There was no honor in what they did.
At the time, the President of the United States was Benjamin Harrison. His grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had been President for one month in 1841, before dying of pneumonia. In 1811, William Henry Harrison defeated Native tribes at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana. In 1813, his troops killed the Native chief Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames near what's now Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Now, perhaps unwittingly, he had finished his grandfather's work. Of course, white men's attacks on the Native peoples of North America went all the way back to the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, so it's not like "Old Tip" Harrison started it.
Wounded Knee is far from any major city. It's 104 miles southeast of Mount Rushmore, 350 miles northeast of Denver and over 400 miles northwest of Omaha. In fact, the Little Bighorn Battlefield is about 350 miles to the northwest, so it's closer to that than to Denver, the closest major league city.
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December 29, 1890 was a Monday. Baseball and football seasons were over. Basketball wouldn't be invented for another year. There was a hockey league at the time, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, but no games were scheduled for this day. So, there were no scores on this historic day.
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