The Drexel Mission Fight was an armed confrontation between Lakota warriors and the United States Army on December 30, 1890, occurring on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on White Clay Creek approximately 15 miles north of Pine Ridge. The engagement took place the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre and arose from military efforts to verify whether Lakota forces had burned a Catholic Mission in the area. The Brulé Lakota involved were purported to be the same warriors under Chief Two Strike who had attacked the 9th Cavalry's supply train earlier that morning, indicating escalating tensions and continued conflict following the previous day's massacre.
The Seventh Cavalry under Colonel James W. Forsyth, equipped with eight troops and Battery E of the 1st Artillery—the same forces engaged at Wounded Knee—became heavily engaged by the combined Brulé Lakota forces while reconnoitering the mission. The Seventh Cavalry found itself hotly engaged in a valley while attempting to break contact and withdraw from the superior Lakota forces. Recognizing the severity of the situation, Forsyth requested assistance, and a battalion of the Ninth Cavalry responded to support the beleaguered Seventh Cavalry regiment. The Ninth Cavalry was a Buffalo Soldier regiment under the command of Major Guy V. Henry, who was nicknamed "Henry's Brunettes" by his troops.
The arrival of the Ninth Cavalry battalion proved crucial in the engagement, as the combined force of both cavalry regiments worked to extricate themselves from the valley and withdraw from the Lakota warriors. This engagement represented a significant moment in the final phases of the Indian Wars on the Great Plains, occurring immediately in the aftermath of the tragic events at Wounded Knee and demonstrating the continued military operations and tensions on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during this turbulent period.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.