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. This engagement took place the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre and emerged from efforts to investigate reports that Lakota had burned a Catholic Mission in the area. The fight represented a continuation of tensions between the Lakota and U.S. military forces during this turbulent period on the reservation.
The engagement involved the Seventh Cavalry under Colonel James W. Forsyth, commanding eight troops and Battery E of the 1st Artillery—the same force that had been engaged at Wounded Knee the previous day. These forces became engaged by Brulé Lakota from the Rosebud Indian Reservation while reconnoitering to determine if the Catholic mission had been destroyed. The Brulé warriors were reported to be under the command of Chief Two Strike and were purported to be the same forces that had attacked the 9th Cavalry's supply train earlier that morning. The Lakota forces engaged the Seventh Cavalry in a valley, subjecting them to what the article describes as a "hotly engaged" confrontation as Forsyth's troops attempted to break contact and withdraw. Recognizing the severity of the situation, Forsyth requested assistance, which was answered by a battalion of the Ninth Cavalry under Major Guy V. Henry. This regiment of Buffalo Soldiers, nicknamed "the Henry's Brunettes," responded to support the embattled Seventh Cavalry.
The outcome of the engagement resulted in a combined military response that allowed the Seventh Cavalry to extricate itself from the valley engagement. The fight demonstrated the continued resistance of Lakota forces during this critical period in late 1890 and illustrated the complexities faced by U.S. Army units operating on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation amid the broader conflict.
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.
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