The Wounded Knee Massacre was an 1890 armed conflict between Native Americans and the United States Army that occurred on December 29, 1890 near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The event was part of the U.S. Army's Pine Ridge Campaign and resulted from a failed attempt to disarm the Lakota people at the camp.
On December 28, 1890, a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Major Samuel M. Whitside approached Spotted Elk's band of Miniconjou Lakota and 38 Hunkpapa Lakota near Porcupine Butte and escorted them five miles westward to Wounded Knee Creek, where they made camp. The remainder of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, led by Colonel James W. Forsyth, arrived and surrounded the encampment. The following day, on December 29, 1890, the armed conflict took place.
The massacre resulted in significant casualties on both sides. Between 250 and 300 Lakota people were killed, with 51 wounded, including four men and 47 women and children, some of whom died later from their injuries. U.S. Army casualties included 25 soldiers killed and 39 wounded, with six of the wounded later dying. The event had lasting historical significance, as 19 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor specifically for Wounded Knee, and 31 overall for the Pine Ridge Campaign.
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.
c.250–300 Lakota killed, 51 Lakota wounded (four men and 47 women and children); 25 U.S. soldiers killed, 39 U.S. soldiers wounded (six later died)
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