The Wounded Knee Massacre (1890): What Happened and What Came After

By 1890, the Great Plains had been remade. The railroads were finished, the bison were nearly gone, and settlers were plowing under grass that had fed Native nations for generations.

The Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne and other peoples of the plains had been pushed onto reservations, often on land settlers didn’t want. Treaties were broken, rations came up short, and federal policy aimed to turn Native people into something else.

That policy of assimilation rested on the belief that Native cultures were inferior. It borrowed from the thinking behind Manifest Destiny, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears.

Wounded Knee is where those threads pulled tight. On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry killed at least 250 Lakota men, women and children on Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.

This article walks through what happened, what the survivors said, what’s still being fought over, and what Wounded Knee means to the Lakota today.

Wounded Knee at a Glance

Date: December 29, 1890
Place: Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, homeland of the Oglala Lakota Nation
Who: The Seventh Cavalry and a band of about 350 Miniconjou Lakota, joined by some Hunkpapa, led by Spotted Elk, known as Big Foot (Si Tanka)
Dead: Most modern estimates run from 250 to 300 or more Lakota. Twenty-five soldiers were killed and 39 wounded, some likely by their own side’s fire.
Afterward: A mass grave on Cemetery Hill, a survivors’ monument raised in 1903, 20 Medals of Honor, a 1990 congressional statement of “deep regret,” and a 2025 federal law protecting the site

The Ghost Dance: A Promise of Renewal

In the late 1880s, a Northern Paiute prophet named Wovoka (also known as Jack Wilson) began preaching a vision. He said it came to him during the solar eclipse of January 1, 1889.

Sepia photo of a large crowd of Lakota people in a ring for a Ghost Dance on an open plain at Pine Ridge Agency — A Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, photographed from a distance in 1890. (Photo Credit: J. E. Meddaugh, National Park Service (Little Bighorn Battlefield collection))

The vision promised a renewed earth, the return of the dead and a world without the settlers’ pressure. Historians generally describe Wovoka’s original message as one of peace and renewal.

The movement spread fast across the Plains. Among the Lakota, the dance took on a new element: ghost shirts that some dancers believed would turn aside bullets.

For the people dancing, this was religion. For the people watching, it looked like war.

The Government’s Fear and Misunderstanding

Agents on the reservations saw crowds dancing and heard rumors. Alarmed telegrams went east, and by late 1890 more than five thousand soldiers had been mobilized in what’s now called the Pine Ridge Campaign.

The press poured fuel on it. A HistoryNet review of South Dakota newspaper coverage found hysteria and open calls for genocide in the weeks before Wounded Knee.

The Seventh Cavalry, the regiment that lost Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876, was among the units sent to Pine Ridge. A religious ceremony had been read as an uprising.

The Killing of Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull, or Tatanka Iyotake, was the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who helped defeat Custer. By 1890 he was living on the Standing Rock Reservation, and officials believed he was feeding the Ghost Dance.

Historians still debate how involved he actually was. What’s clear is that agency officials wanted him out of the way.

Before dawn on December 15, 1890, Native police working for the Standing Rock agency went to arrest him at his cabin. A fight broke out, and Sitting Bull was killed. Others on both sides died with him.

His death rattled the whole Plains. Some of his followers fled south to the camp of a Miniconjou leader named Big Foot.

Two weeks later, the Army caught up with them.

Big Foot (Spotted Elk) and the Road to Wounded Knee

Black-and-white portrait of Spotted Elk (Big Foot), Miniconjou Lakota chief, seated in a suit and hat holding a pipe stem — Spotted Elk (Big Foot), headman of the Miniconjou Lakota, photographed in 1888. He became chief in 1877 after the death of his father, Lone Horn. (Photo Credit: T. W. Smillie)

Spotted Elk, known to his own people as Si Tanka and to the Army as Big Foot, led a Miniconjou Lakota band on the Cheyenne River Reservation. He had a reputation as a man who preferred peace.

The War Department had him on a list of leaders to arrest. When he heard Sitting Bull was dead, he decided to take his people to Pine Ridge instead.

The plan was to meet Red Cloud and help work out a peace. Big Foot was sick with pneumonia, and the band of about 350 people, roughly 230 of them women and children, traveled in deep winter.

On December 28, Major Samuel Whitside’s battalion of the Seventh Cavalry intercepted them near Porcupine Butte. The band didn’t fight. They were escorted about five miles to Wounded Knee Creek and told to make camp.

That night, Colonel James Forsyth arrived with the rest of the regiment, bringing the force to roughly 500 soldiers. Four Hotchkiss guns were set up on a rise above the camp.

Some who were there later said the regiment wanted payback for the Little Bighorn. Historians argue about how much that mattered, but interviews gathered by Judge Eli Ricker suggest it was on some soldiers’ minds.

The Disarmament and the Massacre

On the morning of December 29, the Lakota men were called to a council and ordered to give up their weapons. Soldiers ringed the camp, and the Hotchkiss guns sat trained on the tipis.

Black-and-white photo of Lakota tipis and horses on prairie at Wounded Knee, with mounted soldiers on the ridge behind — The Library of Congress catalogs this print as "U.S. troops surrounding the Indians on Wounded Knee battle field," a title that echoes how the Army described the killing. Mounted troops hold the ridge above the camp. (Photo Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

The search dragged on and tempers frayed. Then came the moment every account circles back to.

A Miniconjou man named Black Coyote held onto his rifle. According to many accounts he was deaf and couldn’t hear the order, and others say he didn’t want to surrender a rifle he’d paid for. In the struggle with soldiers, the gun went off.

Some versions add a medicine man tossing dust into the air and a few young men throwing off their blankets to fire. Survivors and soldiers never agreed on who fired first or why.

Historian Jeffrey Ostler argues that Wounded Knee wasn’t a chain of accidents. He reads it as a series of acts, from the disarming to the burial of the dead, held together by racism.

What happened next isn’t in dispute. Soldiers fired at point-blank range into the men, and the Hotchkiss guns opened up on the camp with two-pound explosive shells, tearing through tipis where women and children were sheltering.

Lakota who ran for the ravine were caught in a crossfire. At least one Hotchkiss gun was turned on the ravine itself. Soldiers on the far side of the camp were hit by their own side’s fire.

Women and children who fled across open ground were chased for miles. Days later, Charles Eastman would find a woman’s body three miles from the camp, covered in snow.

Turning Hawk, a Lakota who wasn’t at the creek but visited the site afterward, described what the bodies showed. His account went into the official 1891 report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs:

“All the men who were in a bunch were killed right there, and those who escaped that first fire got into the ravine, and as they went along up the ravine for a long distance they were pursued on both sides by the soldiers and shot down, as the dead bodies showed afterwards.

“The women were standing off at a different place from where the men were stationed, and when the firing began, those of the men who escaped the first onslaught went in one direction up the ravine, and then the women, who were bunched together at another place, went entirely in a different direction through an open field, and the women fared the same fate as the men who went up the deep ravine.”

How Many People Died?

Nobody knows exactly. The Army’s early count was around 150, but relatives carried off many bodies and wounded people died afterward in the cold.

Most modern estimates put the Lakota dead between 250 and 300, and some run higher. The Pentagon’s own 2024 review order cited 350 to 375 Lakota killed or wounded.

Fifty-one wounded Lakota were taken to the Pine Ridge Agency. Among the dead was Big Foot himself.

Army losses were 25 killed and 39 wounded, and more died later. Historians believe some of those casualties came from friendly fire.

The Blizzard and the Mass Grave

A blizzard moved in that night and lasted days. Wounded Lakota still lay out on the field.

On January 1, Charles Eastman, the physician at Pine Ridge, reached the site with a search party of Lakota men and a few white civilians. On January 2, Lakota searchers pulled a few more survivors from the snow.

Among those found alive was a baby girl. Lakota survivors called her Zintkala Nuni, Lost Bird. An Army officer adopted her, and her remains were returned to Wounded Knee decades later.

On January 3 and 4, 1891, civilian contractors hired by the Army dug a trench on the hill where the Hotchkiss guns had stood. By the Army’s count, 146 bodies went into it.

The trench was about 72 feet long. The names of those buried there are not known, and because relatives had already taken many of their dead home, the grave doesn’t equal the death toll.

Photographers from Chadron, Nebraska documented the scene, and soldiers posed beside the open grave. The pictures traveled widely.

What the Survivors Said

Dewey Beard (Iron Hail, Wasú Máza), Miniconjou Lakota, around 1925. He was shot at Wounded Knee, where his wife, parents and infant child were killed. He died in 1955. (Photo Credit: Louis Canedy)

Joseph Horn Cloud was about sixteen when the Seventh Cavalry opened fire. He lost his parents and two brothers, and he narrowly survived himself.

In 1906 he sat down with Judge Eli Ricker, who recorded interviews with Lakota survivors and witnesses in notebooks now called the Ricker Tablets. History Nebraska has pages from his interview online.

His half-brother, Dewey Beard, known then as Wasu Maza or Iron Hail, was shot and lost his wife, infant child and parents. He had fought at the Little Bighorn as a young man, and his life ran to nearly a century. Beard described the moment Black Coyote’s gun went off, and the chaos that followed.

Charles Eastman, the Santee Dakota physician also known as Ohiyesa, reached the field three days later. Of the aftermath, he wrote:

“We saw the frozen bodies lying close together and piled one upon another. I counted eighty bodies of men who had been in the council and who were almost as helpless as the women and babes when the deadly fire began, for nearly all their guns had been taken from them.

“A reckless and desperate young Indian fired the first shot when the search for weapons was well underway and, immediately, the troops opened fire from all sides, killing not only unarmed men, women, and children, but their own comrades who stood opposite them, for the camp was entirely surrounded.”

Eastman wasn’t there when the shooting started, so that second paragraph is what he’d been told. Read it as an informed account, not an eyewitness one.

Black Elk, then 27, was wounded riding toward the fight. Decades later he described the bodies strewn along the gulch, and his account remains one of the most quoted in American writing.

In 1903, survivors and relatives raised a monument over the mass grave. It says it was erected “in memory of the Chief Big Foot massacre,” and it ends with a line the survivors chose: “Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.”

The Lakota called it a massacre long before the word stuck in textbooks. The monument names about 185 of the dead.

The Army’s Response

Army commander Nelson Miles was appalled, at least on paper. He called Wounded Knee a “horrible massacre of women and children,” relieved Colonel Forsyth of command and ordered a court of inquiry.

Historians note that Miles’s own orders had helped set the stage. And the inquiry went nowhere for the Lakota: it exonerated Forsyth, who was restored to command.

The War Department then awarded 20 Medals of Honor to soldiers of the regiment. That decision is still being fought over.

The Medals of Honor: A Fight That Isn’t Over

The number most often cited is 20. Some historians count 19 for conduct at the creek itself and note that records for a few are hard to verify.

The U.S. Army Medal of Honor, a gold star on a pale blue ribbon with white stars, against a black background — The Army's Medal of Honor. Twenty were awarded for Wounded Knee, and Lakota descendants have pushed for decades to have them rescinded. This photo shows a modern example of the medal. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army)

A 1916 review rescinded 911 Medals of Honor from other campaigns. None of the Wounded Knee medals were touched.

In 1990, on the centennial, Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret” to the descendants of the victims and survivors. It was not a presidential apology, and the medals stayed.

Beginning in 2019, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley and a string of House sponsors introduced the Remove the Stain Act to revoke them. In July 2022, the House passed an amendment by Rep. Kaialiʻi Kahele to the FY23 defense bill. Kahele called it an “uncomfortable truth” that this land was taken from Indigenous peoples.

The amendment didn’t survive negotiations with the Senate. The final law only encouraged the Pentagon to review the awards.

In July 2024, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a review by a panel of five experts, including two from the Department of the Interior. The panel was to look at each soldier’s individual conduct, including whether any attacked noncombatants or people who had surrendered.

The panel’s findings were never made public. In May 2025, Warren, Merkley and Rep. Jill Tokuda reintroduced the Remove the Stain Act.

In late September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the medals would stay, saying the soldiers “deserve those medals.” The National Congress of American Indians called Wounded Knee “not a battle” but a mass killing of unarmed Lakota, and said “there is no honor in murder.”

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s president said the decision dishonors every veteran who earned the medal through valor. A descendant of a soldier at Wounded Knee told reporters he believes the medals were rightly earned.

Congress can still rescind the medals by law. That’s what the Remove the Stain Act would do.

Remembering: The Big Foot Memorial Ride and a Protected Site

In 1986, Lakota elders including Curtis Kills Ree and Birgil Kills Straight started the Si Tanka Wokiksuye, the Big Foot Memorial Ride. Every December, riders retrace Big Foot’s route on horseback across the winter plains, a journey of roughly 300 miles over about two weeks that ends at Wounded Knee around December 29.

Brick and white entrance gate with a metal arch and cross at the Wounded Knee memorial cemetery under a blue sky — The entrance to the Wounded Knee memorial cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The site became a National Historic Landmark on December 21, 1965. (Photo Credit: SharonPapierdreams, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birgil Kills Straight has said the descendants never got to complete the mourning ritual that follows a death, and that the ride is part of finishing it. In 1992 the ride was revived as the Oomaka Tokatakiya, the Future Generations Ride, with a focus on youth.

The massacre site itself is a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1965 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. It’s also a cemetery, and sacred ground on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

In 2022, the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe bought the 40 acres at the massacre site together, with the Oglala paying $255,000 for a 51% share and the Cheyenne River paying $245,000 for 49%. The two tribes signed a covenant promising to keep it as a memorial with no commercial development.

On December 19, 2025, President Trump signed the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act. The law, sponsored by Rep. Dusty Johnson and Sen. Mike Rounds, places the land in restricted fee status, protecting tribal ownership.

Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said it finally pledged federal protection for hallowed land. It passed the Senate unanimously.

Wounded Knee Again: The 1973 Occupation

More than eight decades later, on February 27, 1973, roughly 200 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over the small town of Wounded Knee. The place was chosen for what it meant.

Grainy newspaper photo of people gathered inside the Wounded Knee church during the 1973 occupation — Occupiers gather inside the Wounded Knee church in late February 1973. The Wikimedia Commons record of this photo identifies AIM leader Dennis Banks as seated at right. (Photo Credit: Walter Fisk, Rapid City Journal, March 1, 1973)

The occupation grew out of a conflict inside the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Tribal chairman Richard Wilson had many opponents, who saw him as a tool of the federal government, and traditionalists had invited AIM onto the reservation.

Occupiers included leaders like Dennis Banks, Russell Means and Carter Camp. About half of those inside were women, and Madonna Thunder Hawk and nurse Lorelei DeCora Means ran the medic stations.

They demanded that the United States honor its treaties and that Wilson be removed. For 71 days, until May 8, they were ringed by U.S. Marshals, FBI agents and other federal forces.

Two men were killed: Frank Clearwater, who was Cherokee and Apache and died April 25 after being shot April 17, and Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont, an Oglala Lakota shot April 26. Ray Robinson, a civil rights activist who came to support the occupation, disappeared and is presumed dead. U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm was seriously wounded.

It ended with a surrender of arms and a wave of arrests and trials. Congress went on to pass a run of Native-related laws, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975 and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978.

A note on a common mix-up: the two FBI agents killed on Pine Ridge, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, died on June 26, 1975 at the Jumping Bull property, not during the 1973 occupation. AIM member Leonard Peltier was convicted of their murders and always denied it. President Biden commuted his sentence on January 20, 2025, and he was released to home confinement that February. You can read more in our post on Peltier going home.

Wounded Knee Today

Wounded Knee isn’t a closed chapter. Madonna Thunder Hawk told ICT that the elders of 1973 had been raised by grandparents who remembered 1890, and said “that’s how close we are to our history.”

Oglala Lakota Nation welcome sign beside a South Dakota welcome sign on prairie grass, Pine Ridge Reservation — A welcome sign for the Oglala Lakota Nation stands beside South Dakota's on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which covers all of Oglala Lakota County. (Photo Credit: Steve Elliott, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Pine Ridge Reservation covers all of Oglala Lakota County, one of the poorest counties in the country. Between 2020 and 2024, about 57.6% of its residents lived below the poverty line, and child poverty was 60.1%.

A 2017 University of Washington study put life expectancy in the county at 66.8 years, the lowest in the nation and below that of India or Iraq at the time. Residents also travel long distances over remote roads for medical care.

Those numbers don’t come from nowhere. They sit on top of land loss, broken treaties and a federal government that has never fully met its obligations to Native nations. You can read more in our look at life on Indian reservations today.

Wounded Knee was a massacre, not the end of anything. The Lakota are still here, still on that land, still telling the story in their own words.

Frequently Asked Questions

Most historians, and tribal governments including the Oglala, Cheyenne River and Rosebud Sioux Tribes, call it a massacre. Army reports at the time called it a battle, and Congress’s 1990 resolution referred to the Wounded Knee Massacre. The Seventh Cavalry had surrounded a camp of about 350 people, most of them women, children and elders.

Most modern estimates put the Lakota dead between 250 and 300, with some higher. The Army’s early count was around 150, but relatives carried off many bodies and wounded people died later in the blizzard. Twenty-five soldiers were killed, and some likely died from friendly fire. The Pentagon’s 2024 review order cited 350 to 375 Lakota killed or wounded.

It grew out of Army panic over the Ghost Dance, a religious movement, combined with a plan to arrest and disarm Lakota leaders. After Sitting Bull was killed on December 15, 1890, Big Foot’s band headed for Pine Ridge seeking safety. The Seventh Cavalry intercepted them, and a struggle during disarmament set off the shooting.

The Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement begun by the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka in 1889. It promised renewal of the earth and reunion with the dead. Among the Lakota, some dancers wore ghost shirts they believed would turn bullets. U.S. officials misread the ceremony as preparation for war.

The 1890 event was a massacre of about 350 Lakota by the Seventh Cavalry. The 1973 event was a 71-day occupation of the same place by about 200 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement activists protesting tribal and federal policy. They share a place and a memory, but they’re separate events 82 years apart.

Yes. The Pentagon reviewed the 20 medals after 2024, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in September 2025 that none would be rescinded. Tribal nations and the National Congress of American Indians condemned the decision. Congress could still rescind them by law, and the Remove the Stain Act was reintroduced in May 2025.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe own the 40-acre site together. They bought it in 2022, and a federal law signed December 19, 2025 places the land in restricted fee status to protect it. The tribes have pledged to keep it a memorial with no commercial development.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary and tribal sources

Historians and reporting