The Massacre At Wounded Knee Analysis

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, leaders of the Sioux tribe on the Great Plains, strongly resisted the mid-19th-century efforts of the U.S. government to confine their people to reservations. In 1875, after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the U.S. Army ignored previous treaty agreements and invaded the region. This betrayal led many Sioux and Cheyenne tribesmen to leave their reservations and join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in Montana. By the late spring of 1876, more than 10,000 Native Americans had

The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee were both significant and terrible events that took place in American history during the 1800’s. These two eyewitness documents provide information and details about two important Indian battles against American troops. These events occurred 14 years apart but both were the result of the Sioux Indians being unsatisfied with their freedom taken from them.

President Harrison’s intended message in his “Report on Wounded Knee Massacre and the Decrease in Indian Land Acreage” is to ensure the people that the massacre was a self-defense act by the soldiers. He said that the natives were “naturally warlike and turbulent” which puts the blame on the massacre on the Natives. Modern American’s can learn a lot from the Wounded Knee Massacre. To Americans, the massacre represents the end of the Indian resistance. Although this massacre is usually not mentioned in history classes today is it defiantly something that should be remembered. American soldiers were violent towards the Indians. While men were trying to flee the American soldiers would shoot them in the back and let their bodies there to freeze.

In 1874, Custer led an army expedition to the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, a sacred property of the Lakota-Sioux Nation, which was recognized under the Sioux Treaty of 1868. There, Custer and his men found a great amount of gold, and when President Grant and the US administration offered to buy the area, the Lakota-Sioux nation refused to sell due to its holiness in their culture. Two years later, the

Col. George Armstrong Custer was given a order to explore the Black Hills within reservation boundaries. He was also ordered to map and find a comfortable place with enough resources to plant a future military post. While Lt. Col. Custer was exploring the hills words of found gold were being spread by geologists. This lead to Miners and Entrepreneurs invading the land for profit of gold, which violated the treaty directly. When the US tried giving the Lakota prices to buy Black Hills they rejected it, which led to a deadline in January of 1876. It was said that all Sioux report to the reservation on January 31, but when there was no response in return, the task was handed off to the military. (Little Bighorn Battlefield National

Many people think of the Civil War and America’s Indian wars as distinct subjects, one following the other. But those who study the Sand Creek Massacre know different. On Nov. 29, 1864, as Union armies fought through Virginia and Georgia, Col. John Chivington led some 700 cavalry troops in an unprovoked attack on peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers at Sand Creek in Colorado. They murdered nearly 200 women, children and older men. Sand Creek was one of many assaults on American Indians during the war, from Patrick Edward Connor’s massacre of Shoshone villagers along the Idaho-Utah border at Bear River on Jan. 29, 1863, to the forced removal and incarceration of thousands of Navajo people in 1864 known as the Long Walk. In terms of sheer

​The Great Sioux War or The Black Hills War (1876- 1877) was a series of battles trying to force the Sioux and Cheyenne people back into the Great Sioux Reservation. In 1868, the Treaty of Laramie was signed by Sioux leaders to give up their lands and move west onto the reservations. In 1874 LTC George Custer was tasked to reconnoiter the Black Hills (part of the Sioux reservation). His primary task was to survey the land and look for natural resources during a time of great economic depression. After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, rumors spread and miners flooded into the hills. Lakota Warrior, Crazy Horse, led many attacks on LTC Custer’s surveying parties in the hills. Crazy Horse and his warriors were trying to keep the white

In the third document, Treaty of Fort Laramie, shows over the years how much the Americans took the Native’s land. In 1868, the Lakota nation had mostly the Western land and over 10 years the Lakota land shrunk in size because of the US pushing them away from building the transcontinental railroad. In 1868, the Second treaty of Fort Laramie gave tribes, the Sioux and Cheyenne, a large reservation in the black hills of South Dakota. Then in 1874, White prospectors found gold in the Black Hill. Miners intruded onto Sioux land. Two chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, united to push back the intruder which is known as the battle of Little Bighorn.(81) The Battle was fought on June 25, 1876 near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory(Battle of little Bighorn).The Sioux and Cheyenne killed an entire force of of U.S troops.(78). Another document that showed how the land was taken from them is documen one. The map shows how the Native Americans lost mostly all of their land in the years of 1850-1870 that was when gold was discovered, battles, and the Sand Creek Massacre. The Western expansion cause many significant battles which cause many deaths of Native Americans as well as

Using an ancient tactic of warfare, the Sioux waited until troops thought the fighting had halted. Setting up decoys and the strategy plans, Red Cloud was ready to see the white man’s blood fall on the plains. When US Calvary men began to advance outside their fort range in search of a plea or peace treaty. Red Cloud gave the order for Crazy Horse to commence a raid. White men were butchered like cattle on the battlefield where

Brown mainly relies on historical research while writing the manuscript for “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee”. He studied personal descriptions, historical documents, and town council records to create a historically accurate account on how Americans conquered the West. While writing this book, Brown mainly writes about the events of the “Indian Wars”, which occurred during 1860’s through the 1890’s.

By 1876, gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gold was found on Sioux land, and this region was considered sacred to the Lakota Sioux Indians. The he land was to be protected and respected by the United States Army, because of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 18681, but the Army could not keep miners off the Sioux ground, which led to the increase of Sioux grievances towards the Americans; some grievances that are still taken offense to today. These battles and negotiations soon were known at the Great Sioux War of 1876.

The movie, filmed in 2007, depicts the lives of the Sioux Indians as if they were not a people that mattered. In the movie, they say, “the Indians lived like the poorest of whites.” They were pushed around and told repeatedly they could not stay on their own land. This was due to the Westward Expansion in the United States at the time. By 1876, most of the American Indians had already been forcibly relocated to reservation land. Red Cloud, a Sioux leader, settled with some of his tribe on the Sioux Reservation of the Dakota Territory and took the aid of the US government. When this happened, other Sioux leaders, such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, saw it as a surrender. These leaders refused to assimilate and went on to live life in their traditional way. Unfortunately, this all changed when the US found gold on Sioux land in the Black Hills. The movie tells the story of the Sioux Indians fight to try to remain in control of their own lives and stay on their own land. Then when they no longer can, the movie shows their path to surrendering to the whites and assimilating into the American culture.

Today a Monument stands in wounded knee, but it was once a reservation were native Americans used to reside. Back in 1890, a U,S Calvary executed an attack on wounded knee. The attack was aimed to stop Native Americans from preforming the ghost dance, a native American movement, this resulted in many lives. As a result, today we view the occurrence as an inhumane action, but it is not right to judge history by the standards of today.

Crazy Horse was brutally murdered and the Sioux surrendered (“Battle”). In 1890 the government learned that the Native Americans were doing the Ghost Dance (Cayton 265). The Ghost Dance was a ritual in which people join hands and twirled in a circle (Cayton 265). When the government saw the Ghost Dance, they thought the Native Americans were crazy and trying to rebel, so they tried to arrest Sitting Bull (Cayton 265). In this conflict that came to be known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, soldiers killed Sitting Bull, 120 men, and 230 women and children (Cayton 265). These battles pushed Native Americans onto reservations and took away their basic human rights.

On the morning of December 29, 1890, many Sioux Indians (estimated at above two hundred) died at the hands of the United States Army near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Indians were followers of the Ghost Dance religion, devised by Wovoka, a Paiute prophet, as a spiritual outlet for Indian repression by whites. The United States Army set out to intercept this group of Native Americans because they performed the controversial Ghost Dance. Both whites’ and the Sioux’s misunderstanding of an originally peaceful Indian religion culminated in the Battle of Wounded Knee. This essay first shows how the Ghost Dance came about, its later adaptation by the Sioux, and