The Army, the Interior Department, and the Wounded Knee Massacre

            On December 29, 1890, at least 150 Native Americans of the Miniconjou Lakota people, including 89 women and children, were massacred by troops from the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment under the command of Colonel James Forsyth. As news of the massacre spread east from Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota where it occurred, different versions of the events, told respectively by members of the military, agents of the Office of Indian Affairs (within the Department of the Interior), and the media, emerged depending on the sources and recipients of information. By early the following year, the prevailing opinion about the massacre was that it had been a justified response to aggression by the Sioux. Public opinion and political repercussions were instrumental in resolving the issue of responsibility for the Wounded Knee massacre largely in favor of the version propagated by the military, rather than the more sympathetic version presented by the Department of the Interior.

            The Army’s version of events underwent its own evolution. The person who served as the source of information to Washington was General Nelson Miles, Commander of the Division of Missouri, although he was not present at Wounded Knee. His initial telegraph, to Army Commander-in-Chief John Schofield, reports “severe loss” on the part of the Lakota, which, he states, “may be a wholesome lesson to the other Sioux” and “may possibly bring favorable results” (Miles, 2015a, para. 1). However, the next day, Miles telegraphed Brigadier General John Brooke, commanding officer of the Army of the Platte, seemingly angry with the events at Wounded Knee, stating, “Some one [sic] seems to be suppressing facts” and that “Whatever the circumstances of that fight with Big Foot [i.e., Spotted Elk, chief of the Miniconjou and killed at Wounded Knee] may be it must have had the effect of increasing the hostile element very largely” (Miles, 2015b, para. 2).

Over the next few days, General Miles conferred with Schofield as an investigation began into the actions of Colonel Forsyth. On January 2, 1891, three days after the massacre, Schofield told Miles on behalf of Secretary of War Redfield Proctor, “He [President Harrison] hopes that the report of the killing of women and children in the affair at Wounded Knee is unfounded, and directs that you cause an immediate inquiry to be made and report the results to the Department. If there was any unsoldierly conduct, you will relieve the responsible officer, and so use the troops engaged there as to avoid its repetition” (Schofield, 2015, para. 8). A board of inquiry was established on January 4, and Miles relieved Forsyth of his command. By this point, Miles had already learned that a burial party that he had commanded to go to Wounded Knee, led by Major Samuel Whitside, had interred 146 Indians at the creek, including dozens of women and children (Russell, 2015, para. 11).

Within two weeks, however, the inquiry was over, and Colonel Forsyth had been reinstated, over the objections of General Miles and likely due to the testimonies of the soldiers under Forsyth’s command. Forsyth would go on to be promoted to brigadier general. By the time President Benjamin Harrison reported on the massacre in his State of the Union Address, the notion that the U.S. troops under Forsyth might have committed crimes against humanity had been effectively buried. While acknowledging that the Lakota had valid complaints about rations and other provisions, Harrison nevertheless stated, “the Sioux tribes are naturally warlike and turbulent, and their warriors were excited by their medicine men and chiefs, who preached the coming of an Indian messiah who was to give them power to destroy their enemies.” General Miles, the President wrote, “is entitled to the credit of having given thorough protection to the settlers and of bringing the hostiles into subjection with the least possible loss of life” (Harrison, 1891, para. 82).

Indeed, by the time General Miles wrote his annual report for Secretary Proctor at the end of 1891, even the general himself was more concerned with placing the events within the context of the larger effort to get the Indians to come to the reservations and how the massacre delayed the achieving of that goal. He refers twice to the massacre explicitly. The first mention is brief: “The unfortunate affair at Wounded Knee Creek December 29, 1890, in which 30 officers and soldiers and 200 Indians (men, women, and children) were killed or mortally wounded, prolonged the disturbance and made a successful termination more difficult” (Miles, 2013, para. 4) The second, in contrast, is more lengthy:

The result may be summed up in the loss of nearly 200 people, delay in bringing the Indians to terms, and caused 3,000 Indians to be thrown into a condition of hostility with a spirit of animosity, hatred, and revenge. The spirit thus engendered made it more difficult to force back, or restore the confidence of the Indians, and for a time it looked as if the difficulty would be insurmountable. (Miles, 2013, para. 9)

In neither case, however, does Miles indicate that the fault for the massacre lay with the Army, although he notes that the commander office (Forsyth) was relieved of his command. This report is more or less Miles’s final word on the massacre, and it is remarkable for its nondescript nature.

            In contrast, the annual report of the Office of Indian Affairs for 1891 is remarkable for what it says about the massacre and the victims. The first mention of the massacre occurs in the main part of the report, in a section discussing the Sioux uprising at large. The commissioner (Thomas J. Morgan) refers to the “fighting” as “short, sharp [and] indiscriminate,” and then continues, “The bodies of women and children were scattered along a distance of two miles from the scene of the encounter,” before finally referring to the Indians that fled as “frightened and exasperated” (Morgan, 1891, p. 130). The reader is further referred to an appendix of three pages of testimonies of Miniconjou survivors.

In the section of the report on South Dakota, the massacre is mentioned again. After detailing the campaign to get the Indians on the reservations and conceding that the reports of the massacre have been conflict, the agent for the state writes about the Indians killed, “As this band of Indians were on their way to the Pine Ridge Agency headquarters it is not probable that any hostility was intended” (Morgan, 1891, p. 390). Why was the likely peaceable nature of the Miniconjou killed at Wounded Knee not included in Miles’s report?

According to historian Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College), the differences between the accounts of the Interior and War departments were emblematic of a struggle for power over Indian affairs between the two departments. In her book, Richardson argues that the Commission of Indian Affairs, as part of the Department of the Interior, was motivated largely by political patronage; “its officers,” she writes, “[…] dispensed the valuable government jobs and lucrative contracts for Indian supplies to political supporters. By siding with reformers on the issue of managing the Indians, politicians kept this significant patronage power in their own hands” (Richardson, 2010, p. 47).

The Democratic administration under President Grover Cleveland had staffed the commission with agents sympathetic to the Sioux, but when the administration became Republican in 1889, the filling of positions with patronage jobs resulted in the hiring of agents fearful of Indians and ignorant of Indian culture. Nevertheless, upper-level positions continued to be staffed by more sympathetic people, and commissioner Morgan was among them, while Secretary Noble, a Harrison administration man, was more comfortable calling in the military, despite longstanding rivalry between the departments over who should manage Indian affairs. Conversely, the War Department, staffed with men with years of experience both fighting and negotiating with Indians and who felt a grudging respect for Native Americans, was more likely to be halting in the use of force. The result was that hostile agents and raw field officers were responsible for the massacre; in turn, more sympathetic senior officeholders within the interior department sought to exculpate the Indians, while the senior War Department leadership sought to keep the Army’s reputation clean.

            Another part of the answer lies in the two departments’ sources of information. Whereas the Army report relied almost entirely on the testimony of soldiers in the Army unit at Wounded Knee, with the only testimony of Indians that of scouts in the employ of the Army, the Interior Department’s information, as noted, came from Miniconjou who witnesses the massacre. As a result, the disposition of the Indians at Wounded Knee as not aggressive and as victims was more effectively communicated. The final part of the answer, and that which bears specifically on why President Harrison’s statement so closely reflected the official account of the Army, has to do with the media.

            Newspapers had been escalating public concern about the Lakota for months, specifically regarding the Ghost Dance religion that had inspiring the less assimilationist Sioux and motivating their resistance to some extent. For example, an article from November 22, 1890, in the Daily Tobacco Leaf Chronicle, published in Clarksville, Tenn., reported that Indians at Wounded Knee Creek were “still carrying on their dances and that they had heard of the arrival of the military, but what is of much more importance to the agents is they have strapped on their guns and are dancing fully armed” (“More Serious,” 1890, p. 1).

The American Studies scholar Christina Klein (also of Boston College) has identified the journalist William Fitch Kelley as a major culprit regarding the role of the press. Arguing that Kelley’s writing was part of a larger narrative that sought to subordinate the Sioux to a larger cultural order and narrative of stability in the face of widespread social upheaval, Klein writes, “For Kelley, the military represented the forces of order and the rebellious Indians the forces of chaos. In contrast to the tightly-disciplined army, the hostile Indians sowed mayhem among themselves and throughout the entire area” (Klein, 1994, p. 52). Kelley’s reportage was marked by grossly biased characterization of the Sioux and rank favoritism of the Army’s version of events. In this regard, and in so far as Kelley’s reports were representative, newspaper reports generally reflected the public’s opinion of the Lakota.

President Harrison’s response, therefore, can be seen as the culmination of several factors, including the competing versions of the events of the massacre between the interior and war departments, not to mention within the Army itself, as well as the public opinion, as enunciated in the newspapers, that the Indians were to blame. On the one hand, Harrison’s report acknowledges the complaints of high-level Interior personnel about the privations that the Lakota faced. On the other hand, the report simultaneously exculpates the Army of any wrongdoing, thus vindicating the version of the President’s own appointees at the top of both departments. Nevertheless, Indian affairs remained the province of the Department of the Interior. When President Harrison lost re-election to Grover Cleveland in November 1892, the issue past back to an administration that viewed itself as reformist.

In conclusion, the Wounded Knee Massacre was largely the result of inexperienced field officers the Commission of Indian Affairs and the Army. Because the departments of Interior and State relied on different witnesses, their versions of events at the Wounded Knee Massacre differed as well. The authoritative version as communicated to the people by President Harrison more closely resembled the accounts in newspapers and in the Army’s accounts, although the President conceded that the Sioux had legitimate grievances. In this regard, the “official” version was shaped both by the media’s treatment of the massacre and by the desire of upper-level cabinet officials to shield the administration.

References

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