The Plains Indians were 1he last obstacle to white control of the West. The seven
tribes of the Teton Sioux, numbering about 16,000 in 1880, were placed on a reserva-
tion in South Dakota. There the military proceeded to “civilize” them. They were
forced to give up their traditional economy and to become wards of the state. Children
were put in white schools and parents who balked lost their food rations. Religious and
political customs of the Sioux Indians were outlawed. The original treaty was broken
and half their land was taken in return for food and money that was never delivered.

By the end of the century, often defeated, demoralized Indians were ready for the
irrational hope offered by the Ghost Dance, a ritual first started by California tribes in
the 1870s. The Ghost Dance, Indians believed, had the power to alleviate their
miserable state. The last of the Ghost Dances started in 1890 when an Indian,
Wovoka, reported that in a dream, which he experienced in a trance during a solar
eclipse, God told him that if Indians danced the Ghost Dance, dead Indians would
come back to life. To whites, and especially to the U. S. Army, the Ghost Dance was
symbolic of Indian resistance, and though it did not encourage Indians to fight,
because they believed a miracle would save them, it was seen as a threatening activity.

This fear of the Ghost Dance may explain, in part, what happened during an
encounter at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on December 29,1890 between a cavalry
unit and a band of Indians, 120 men and 230 women and children, led by Sioux Chief
Big Foot. The Indians were on the way to the Pine Ridge reservation in North Dakota
when they met four cavalry units which were under orders to capture Big Foot
because he was considered one of the “fomenters of disturbances.” The Indians
immediately hoisted a white flag to indicate they would not fight. They were taken to
an army camp on Wounded Knee Creek.

As the soldiers ordered the Indians to give up their arms, the medicine man,
Yellow Bird, started the Ghost Dance urging his tribesmen to join him chanting in
Sioux, “The bullets will not go toward you.” When one young Indian initially refused to
give up his rifle, the soldiers opened fire. Only a few Indians had arms and most tried to
flee the gunfire. “We tried to run,” Louise Weasel Bear said, “but they shot us like we
were buffalo. 1 know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean
to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children.”11

At the end of the attack, 153 Indians were left dead in the field, but one estimate
placed the actual number killed at 300 since many of the wounded crawled away and
died soon after. Wounded Knee signalled the end of the Ghost Dance and was, in a
very real sense, also the end of the Indians’ courageous stand against an invading
force. Years later, the revered Sioux medicine man, Black Elk, who witnessed the
tragic event said:

I did not know how much was ended. When 1 look back horn this high
hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children
lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as 1
saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else
died there in that bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A
people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream .. . the nation’s
hope is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the
sacred tree is dead.12