[The very first time I went to Wounded Knee, a sign at the foot of the hill was edited where the word Battle had been. Instead of Battle, what was added instead was the word Massacre. Up until her last weeks on earth, Marcella LeBeau did what she could to rescind the medals given to the men of the 7th Cavalry for what happened at Wounded Knee in December of 1890. It was no battle. It was a massacre.]
The command is given to disarm. In the face of such untoward odds, the men are wary—not only does the positioning all around them seem ominous, but giving up weapons is akin to giving up oneself.
Troops are dispatched to search and seize what arms they can turn up in the encampment behind them. What happens is not pleasant. The women do not take kindly to mistreatment, the brutal ways the bluecoats plunder their selves, their children, and their possessions. When the soldiers return, they have more guns, but also axes, knives, bows and arrows, tent stakes, even beadwork awls.
It is early winter, but there is more than enough emotion in the air to ignite the landscape. Fear, prejudice, a history of deception, mutually defiant cultural values, and nothing less than hate is set here like so much kindling, waiting for the pop of a flame; the whole place is combustible.
Somewhere on the peripheries of the council circle stands a man variously described as half-crazed or desperate. He was, by all accounts, a man of faith, a medicine man. Some name him Yellow Bird; others claim Yellow Bird was nowhere near Big Foot’s camp. Whatever his identity, his behavior calls upon the warriors to honor the dignity of Lakota history and culture. In the Lakota language, he espouses something of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance, tells the men not to fear. He promises eternal life.
“The men are hiding guns,” an officer says.
It’s December, still early in the morning, and the Lakota men are wrapped in blankets. A search follows. In a pile in the middle, almost seventy old rifles lie over each other like fallen branches.
Then, something happens. Even today nobody knows exactly what. The men from the Seventh Cavalry draw their rifles and swords. Magazines click open and close; guns are lifted into position to fire.
Many claim some soldier—who knows who? —tried to wrestle Black Coyote, one of the Minneconjous, a man some say was deaf. The medicine man gets to his feet, picks up a handful of dust, and throws it at the soldiers, shrieking an exhortation in the Sioux language. Some cavalryman wrestles Black Coyote for the possession of a rifle, while down the line another soldier begins struggling with another for a rifle some claim was concealed in the blanket the man wore. Black Coyote keeps telling his people white man’s bullets will not harm them.
What follows is fierce and bloody hand-to-hand combat in a council circle soon choked by dust and smoke, and thick with bullets, most of them from army issue rifles, bullets that flew indiscriminately, killing many of Big Foot’s men in the middle, as well as bluecoats on either side. That the blue coats could have avoided shooting each other at such close quarters seems impossible, despite claims to the contrary in military hearings conducted some months later.
With the first shots, hundreds of Lakota women and children run into ravines just beyond the fighting. With dozens of their own down in the middle of the fight, Forsyte’s soldiers, in a fit of madness, take no prisoners. For several hours after the bloody combat that began in front of Big Foot’s tent, scattered gunfire continues as far as three miles away, up and down the ravines that cut through the tawny prairie around the creek called Wounded Knee, as Lakota people—women and children—are slaughtered.
That afternoon, when the shooting ended, Army personnel loaded 39 of their wounded into wagons, along with their dead, numbering 25. Fifty-one wounded Lakota were located, 47 of them women and children, some of whom—like six of the cavalry survivors—would soon succumb to their injuries. Sioux dead were left on the field and in ravines. Exactly how many had been killed will never be known. Many consider 300 a just estimate.
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