Eyewitness At Wounded Knee

On a wintry day in December 1890, near a creek named Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the Seventh Cavalry of the U. S. Army opened fire on an encampment of Sioux Indians led by Big Foot. Coming two weeks after the killing of Sitting Bull, in a tense atmosphere of suspicion and misunderstanding, the careless discharge of one gun set off a massacre that claimed more than 250 lives, including those of many Indian women and children. The tragedy at Wounded Knee, which is generally considered the last episode of the Indian Wars, has often been written about but the existing photographs have received little attention until now. Eyewitness at Wounded Knee brings together and assesses for the first time some 150 photographs that were made before and immediately after the massacre. Present at the scene were two itinerant photographers, George Trager and Clarence Grant Moreledge, whose work has never before been published. Accompanying commentaries focus on both the Indian and military sides of the story. Richard Jensen's "Another Look at Wounded Knee" dwells on the political and economic quagmire in which the Sioux found themselves after 1877. In "Your Country Is Surrounded," R. Eli Paul discusses the army's role at Wounded Knee. John Carter, in "Making Pictures for a News-Hungry Nation," deals with the photographers and also the reporters and relic hunters who were looking to profit from the misfortune of others. Their words enhance our appreciation of the haunting images in this first book-length photographic history of the events that led up to and followed the bloodshed at Wounded Knee.

The battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 was actually a massacre of a group of Native American Lakota who were carrying a flag of peace. Students will discover in this book the events leading up to and after that horrible event. They'll read eyewitness accounts of those events as well as descriptions of the shooting that erupted by some who were there at Wounded Knee. Also included is information about the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 and the Siege at Wounded Knee in 1973. Review questions appear throughout the book to reinforce what students have studied. Also included are suggestions for further study, using the internet and multiple intelligence activities. A complete answer key is provided. This book will help students better understand the tragic history of Native Americans and hopefully make them want to investigate further to find out more about not only the Lakota, but other tribes as well.

On December 28, 1894, the day before the fourth anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Lakota chief Two Sticks was hanged in Deadwood, South Dakota. The headline in the Black Hills Daily Times the next day read “A GOOD INDIAN”—a spiteful turn on the infamous saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” On the gallows, Two Sticks, known among his people as Can Nopa Uhah, declared, “My heart knows I am not guilty and I am happy.” Indeed, years later, convincing evidence emerged supporting his claim. The story of Two Sticks, as recounted in compelling detail in this book, is at once the righting of a historical wrong and a record of the injustices visited upon the Lakota in the wake of Wounded Knee. The Indian unrest of 1890 did not end with the massacre, as the government willfully neglected, mismanaged, and exploited the Oglala in a relentless, if unofficial, policy of racial genocide that continues to haunt the Black Hills today. In From Wounded Knee to the Gallows, Philip S. Hall and Mary Solon Lewis mine government records, newspaper accounts, and unpublished manuscripts to give a clear and candid account of the Oglala’s struggles, as reflected and perhaps epitomized in Two Sticks’s life and the miscarriage of justice that ended with his death. Bracketed by the run-up to, and craven political motivation behind, Wounded Knee and the later revelations establishing Two Sticks’s innocence, this is a history of a people threatened with extinction and of one man felled in a battle for survival hopelessly weighted in the white man’s favor. With eyewitness immediacy, this rigorously researched and deeply informed account at long last makes plain the painful truth behind a dark period in U.S. history.

On December 29, 1890, American troops opened fire with howitzers on hundreds of unarmed Lakota Sioux men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, killing nearly 300 Sioux. As acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson shows in Wounded Knee, the massacre grew out of a set of political forces all too familiar to us today: fierce partisanship, heated political rhetoric, and an irresponsible, profit-driven media. Richardson tells a dramatically new story about the Wounded Knee massacre, revealing that its origins lay not in the West but in the corridors of political power back East. Politicians in Washington, Democrat and Republican alike, sought to set the stage for mass murder by exploiting an age-old political tool—fear. Assiduously researched and beautifully written, Wounded Knee will be the definitive account of an epochal American tragedy.

The varied and colorful career of Charles Wesley Allen (1851-1942) took him throughout the northern Plains during an exceptionally turbulent era in its history. He was at the Red Cloud Agency when Red Cloud attempted to prevent the raising of the American flag and the Lakota nearly took over the agency. Allen also visited Deadwood at the height of the Black Hills gold rush, helped build the first government agency on the Pine Ridge reservation, and reported on the Lakota Ghost Dance. Allen happened to be walking through the Indian camp at Wounded Knee when shots rang out on December 29, 1890, and his is arguably the best of all the eyewitness accounts of that tragedy. ø This is Allen's previously unpublished vivid account of the years he described as "the most exciting chapter of my life." As much the chronicle of the passing of an era as a personal narrative, its simple, direct, and often moving prose captures the injustices, gritty details, and relentless energy of a period of dramatic change in the West.

In Voices of Wounded Knee, William S. E. Coleman brings together for the first time all the available sources-Lakota, military, and civilian-on the massacre of 29 December 1890. He recreates the Ghost Dance in detail and shows how it related to the events leading up to the massacre. Using accounts of participants and observers, Coleman reconstructs the massacre moment by moment. He places contradictory accounts in direct juxtaposition, allowing the reader to decide who was telling the truth.

Thomas Jefferson complains about haggling over the Declaration of Independence ... Jack London guides us through the rubble of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake ... Langston Hughes visits the Scottsboro Boys on death row ... Andy Warhol paints the scene at Studio 54 ... John Seabrook receives e-mail from Bill Gates. Three hundred eyewitnesses -- some famous, some anonymous -- give their personal accounts of the great moments that make up our past, from Columbus to cyberspace, and infuse them with a freshness and urgency no historian can duplicate. David Colbert has brought together a multitude of voices to create a singularly rich American narrative. Here are the vivid impressions of men and women who were witnesses to and participants in these and other dramatic moments: the first colony in Virginia, the Salem witch trials, the Boston Tea Party, the Oklahoma land rush, the Scopes Trial, the bombing of Nagasaki, the lunch-counter sit-ins at the outset of the civil rights movement, New York City's Stonewall Riot, the fall of Saigon, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. With unparalleled and thrilling immediacy, these excerpts from diaries, private letters, memoirs, and newspapers paint a fascinating picture of the evolving drama of American life.

"The Wounded Knee Massacre of 29 December 1890, involving the loss of more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children in South Dakota, marked the tragic climax of the Indian wars in the American West. This book compiles a variety of little-known sources explaining what happened at Wounded Knee, encompassing early and later accounts by men, women, and grown children that appeared in official government reports, newspapers, and collected published reminiscences"--