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
Harrison,
B. (1891, December 9). State of the Union Address. Speech presented in
Washington,
D.C.
Retrieved February 1, 2017, from http://millercenter.org/president/bharrison/
speeches/speech-3767
speeches/speech-3767
Klein,
C. (1994). "Everything of Interest in the Late Pine Ridge War Are Held by
Us for Sale":
Popular
Culture and Wounded Knee. The Western Historical Quarterly, 25(1), 45-68.
Miles,
N. (2013, August 19). Annual Report of Major General Miles. Retrieved
February 1,
2017,
from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/2013/08/19/1891-annual-report-of-major-general-miles-part-4/
Miles,
N. (2015a, September 27). [Telegraph sent December 30, 1890, to Commander in
Chief
John
Schofield]. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/wounded-knee-investigation/
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N. (2015b, September 27). [Telegraph sent December 31, 1890, to Brigadier
General John
Brooke].
Retrieved February 1, 2017, from Miles, N. (2015, September 27). Retrieved
February 1, 2017, from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/wounded-knee-investigation/
More
Serious -- Indians Continue to Indulge in Ghost Dance. (1890, November 22). Daily
Tobacco
Leaf-Chronicle, p. 1. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88061072/1890-11-22/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1836&index=15
Morgan,
T. J. (1891). Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, for the
year 1891
(Vol. 1, Rep.). Washington, DC: GPO.
Richardson,
H. C. (2010). Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American
Massacre.
New York, NY: Basic Books.
Russell,
S. (2015, September 27). Wounded Knee investigation. Retrieved February 1,
2017,
from
https://armyatwoundedknee.com/wounded-knee-investigation/
Schofield,
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