December 29, 1890: The Wounded Knee Massacre

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.

July 25, 1890: Annie Oakley, Little Sure Shot -- This Time, Too Sure

July 25, 1890: Annie Oakley was, and remains, America's most famous trick-shot artist with a rifle. The Sioux Chief Sitting Bull gave her the Native American name "Little Sure Shot." This time, she was a little too sure.

Phoebe Ann Mosey was born on August 13, 1860 in a log cabin near Willowdell, Ohio. Her father died when she was only 6 years old. To feed her family, she hunted wild animals, and became an expert with a rifle.

Legend has it that, on Thanksgiving Day 1875, only 15 years old, she defeated one of the top marksmen of the time, Frank Butler, a 28-year-old Irish immigrant, in a shooting contest in North Star, Ohio: Each of them made 24 straight shots, but Annie made her 25th, and Frank didn't make his. The legend is true, except for the year: It was 1881, so Annie was 21, and Frank 34. So it wasn't an egregious age difference when they got married the next year, and Annie began using the surname Oakley. They never had children.

In 1885, they joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. William F. Cody, then 39, was a Pony Express rider and then a U.S. Army scout during the American Civil War, rising to the rank of Colonel -- hence, in the musical Annie Get Your Gun, the song "Colonel Buffalo Bill." Nicknamed for his skill at hunting buffalo -- he was among those who had nearly rendered the once-plentiful species extinct -- he had been running a traveling show depicting stories from "The Wild West" since 1872, at a time when the Western U.S. was still at its wildest.

Among the people who participated in his show were James B. "Wild Bill" Hickock (until his death in 1876) and (until his assassination by the U.S. government in 1890) the Hunkpapa Lakota leader known to the white man as Sitting Bull . Being only 5 feet tall, Sitting Bull called Annie "Little Sure Shot."

Cody took his Wild West Show all over the world, and performed before Queen Victoria of Britain in 1887, as part of the celebration of her Golden Jubilee, the 50th Anniversary of her ascension to the throne.

In 1890, the Show toured Europe. A crowd of 20,000 cheered her in Paris, and President Sadi Carnot of France offered her a commission in his Army. On March 3, they performed in Rome, before a crowd that included Pope Leo XIII.

On July 25, they performed in Berlin. Among the 10,000 people in attendance were the Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II; and Princes Rupprecht of Bavaria, Maximilian of Baden and Leopold of Prussia. William W. Phelps, the U.S. Minister to Germany, and his family were also on hand. At one point, a bucking bull broke loose, and rushed toward the crowd. Cody handled it himself, lassoing the bull and bringing it to a halt, and got a standing ovation.

One of Annie's tricks was to have Frank stand absolutely still, smoking a cigarette, and she would shoot the ash off it. Having seen her accomplish this, despite the legend saying that she was hungover, the Kaiser stood up, and volunteered to be her next "target."

A grandson of Victoria, his mother was the British Queen's eldest daughter, Princess Victoria. Like his cousins, who eventually became King George V of Britain and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, he adored his grandmother. But he always resented his mother, who, as other witnesses were ready to report, mistreated him. Apparently, even to this day, it is a tradition for British royals to treat their grandchildren wonderfully; their own children, not so much.

Just 31 years old at the time, Wilhelm had ascended to the throne only 2 years earlier, as his grandfather, Wilhelm I, had died of old age, and then his father, Friedrich III, had died of cancer only 3 months later. A difficult birth left Wilhelm with a withered left arm and, it has been speculated, brain damage, which led to his later erratic behavior.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, circa 1890

Just 4 months before this show, he had fired Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire, the man who made his grandfather the last King of Prussia and the 1st Emperor of Germany. Bismarck was 75, and had frittered away much of his popularity with anti-worker policies, so it was far from unwarranted.

Now, Wilhelm was essentially Germany's dictator. But even if he had still been a mere constitutional monarch, Annie did not dare refuse his volunteering. Regardless of whether she was hungover, she wasn't stupid: She told the Kaiser to hold the lit cigarette in his hand, rather than his mouth. That's the part of the story that everybody forgets. He had enough sense to understand, and the stunt worked: She shot the ash off, and nobody got hurt, not even their pride.

On November 1, 1894, Annie demonstrated her skill in one of Thomas Edison's earliest films. In 1898, at the start of the Spanish-American War, she wrote to President William McKinley, "offering the government the services of a company of 50 'lady sharpshooters' who would provide their own arms and ammunition should the U.S. go to war with Spain." McKinley declined her offer. She was badly injured in a train accident in 1901, and scaled back her touring.

Buffalo Bill Cody died in 1917. By that point, World War I was raging, and nearly everyone outside Germany blamed the Kaiser for starting it, and for the bloodshed and turmoil that resulted. Annie claimed to have written him a letter offering him a rematch on the lit-cigarette trick, but said he never responded. The following year, the Kaiser abdicated, and Germany surrendered, ending the war.

Annie Oakley was badly injured again in 1922, this time in a car crash, but recovered, and was still performing as late as 1924. She died of pernicious anemia on November 3, 1926. She was 66 years old. Frank Butler was so distraught that he refused to eat, and died only 18 days later.

Exiled to the Netherlands, Kaiser Wilhelm II died in 1941. If Annie Oakley had been less sure of a shot, she might have killed him in 1890. Most likely, due to the Kaiser's volunteering, it would have been considered an accident, and she wouldn't have been prosecuted. His brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, would have been regent to Wilhelm's son, Kronprinz Wilhelm, until he turned 18 in 1900, making this prospective Kaiser Wilhelm III 34 years old in 1914.

Would World War I have been avoided? Or was there enough "war fever" in the Imperial German military that a war with Britain, or France, or Russia, causing the other alliances to kick in, was inevitable? We'll never know.

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July 25, 1890 was a Friday. Baseball was the only professional team sport in America, and it was the year of the Players' League, so there were 3 major leagues.

In the National League:

* The New York Giants lost to the Cincinnati Reds, 10-6 at League Park in Cincinnati.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Cleveland Spiders, 8-5 at an early version of League Park in Cleveland.

* The Boston Beaneaters beat the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, 7-3 at Recreation Park in Pittsburgh.

* The Chicago Colts beat the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, 5-3 at West Side Park in Chicago. The Colts became the Cubs, and the Bridegrooms became the Dodgers.

In the Players' League:

* The New York Giants beat the Cleveland Infants, 11-8 at Brotherhood Park in Cleveland. Although these Giants had several of the defecting Giants of the NL, they went back, so the PL Giants folded with the PL.

* The Brooklyn Ward's Wonders beat the Buffalo Bisons, 8-3 at Olympic Park in Buffalo.

* The Boston Reds beat the Pittsburgh Burghers, 10-2 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Stockings, 7-3 at South Side Park in Chicago. Both teams folded with the PL, and were not connected to the later A's and White Sox.

And 1 game was played in the American Association: The Toledo Maumees beat the Rochester Broncos, 7-6 at Culver Field in Rochester, New York.

June 25, 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn

June 25, 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn is fought in the Montana Territory. The 7th Cavalry of the U.S. Army fights several tribes of Native Americans. The tribes win.

The main group of Natives was the Lakota Sioux, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The Cavalry was led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. He had graduated 35th and last in his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1861. Because the Civil War was raging, he rose fast, and had the brevet (temporary) rank of Major General. After the war, his questionable actions led the Army to drop him back down to Lieutenant Colonel.

Custer had managed some victories against Natives in the intervening 11 years, and began to believe he was invincible. But on the Little Bighorn River, he found out otherwise. The legend that there were no U.S. Army survivors isn't even close to being true, but of the 700 men under Custer's command, 274, including Custer himself, a 36-year-old Ohioan, died. The Natives lost about half that many, out of around 2,500.

Reports of the battle began to reach the Eastern United States on Centennial Day, July 4, 1876. The anger of "the white man" toward "the red man" was stronger than ever. A year later, Crazy Horse was captured and executed. Sitting Bull, too, would eventually face what the white man would call "justice," in 1890, at Standing Rock, South Dakota, not long before the last major battle with the Natives, called Wounded Knee.

The most familiar photograph of Sitting Bull.

There is no known photograph of Crazy Horse,

due to a Native superstition about a camera "capturing the soul."

The battle was nicknamed Custer's Last Stand, and Custer was seen as a hero. In truth, he was an unearned egomaniac, and deserves to be ridiculed by history.

The site of the battle is now part of the Crow Indian Reservation, in the southeastern part of the State of Montana. The closest city is Billings, 60 miles to the northwest. The closest major league city is Denver, nearly 500 miles south -- unless you consider the Canadian Football League to be a "major league," in which case the closest is Regina, home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, 460 miles northeast.

In 1960, novelty singer Larry Verne had a Number 1 hit with "Mr. Custer." Even by the standards of that time, in which Westerns dominated television and were still big in movies, it was racist as hell toward Natives. It also perpetuated the myth of the cavalry charge order, "Forward, ho!" No such order has ever existed in the U.S. Army.

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June 25, 1876 was a Sunday. As a result, even though this was the 1st season of baseball's National League, there were no games, because the NL forbid Sunday ball until 1892. Football was in its infancy, hockey was a newborn sport even at the most mildly organized level, and basketball wouldn't be invented for another 15 years. So there were no scores on this historic day.