The Drexel Mission Fight was an armed confrontation between Lakota warriors and the United States Army that took place on December 30, 1890, the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre. The engagement occurred on White Clay Creek approximately 15 miles north of Pine Ridge on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The immediate cause was a reconnaissance mission by the Seventh Cavalry under Colonel James W. Forsyth to determine whether Lakota forces had burned the Catholic Mission. The Brulé Lakota involved were reportedly the same warriors under Chief Two Strike who had attacked the 9th Cavalry's supply train earlier that morning, and they were drawn from the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
The Seventh Cavalry, equipped with eight troops and Battery E of the 1st Artillery—the same force that had engaged at Wounded Knee the previous day—became hotly engaged in a valley by combined Lakota forces while attempting to break contact and withdraw. As the cavalry faced determined resistance and struggled to extricate themselves from their tactical position, Colonel Forsyth requested assistance. In response, a battalion of the Ninth Cavalry, a Buffalo Soldier regiment commanded by Major Guy V. Henry and nicknamed "the Henry's Brunettes," moved to support the beleaguered Seventh Cavalry.
The arrival of the Ninth Cavalry's relief force proved decisive in the engagement. The combined cavalry elements were able to break free from the Lakota assault and successfully withdraw from the contested valley. This engagement represented a significant moment in the military response to the events surrounding Wounded Knee, demonstrating the operational coordination between different cavalry units and the role of African American soldiers in the final stages of the Indian Wars in the Great Plains.
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.
2 soldiers killed; 1 officer wounded; several Sioux killed
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.