The Wounded Knee Battlefield was the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 in South Dakota, United States. An 870-acre (350 ha) area was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1965. Along with all other National Historic Landmarks, it was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places when that program was inaugurated in 1966, listed as "Wounded Knee Battlefield". A museum at the site interprets the massacre.
The National Historic Landmark nomination was drafted by 1990 with a latter consultation with Indian representatives. Following the suggestion that the Indian representation should be increased, oral history interviews were conducted with four descendants. The interview summaries were included in the revised nomination.
The NRHP listing included one contributing site and one contributing object, and also 14 non-contributing buildings and 12 non-contributing sites. The non-contributing elements are fairly small and scattered so do not detract greatly from the setting. The contributing site is the area of the massacre itself, including the probable location of the post office and Mousseau's store. The contributing object is the 1903 monument. Non-contributing buildings include a log church built in 1975, a small frame dwelling, a concrete block visitors center from 1989, a log dwelling, a frame Church of God, a mobile home serving as that church's parsonage, three more frame buildings in the church complex, two other dwellings, and a concrete block building. Non-contributing sites include two cemeteries from the Catholic Church and from the Church of God, the Catholic Church foundation and basement from 1913 (burned in 1973), foundations and rubble of a 1930 store and gas station complex (burned in 1973), foundation of a concrete building, foundation of a metal building.
The National Historic Landmark program provides some monitoring. As of January 17, 2010, its webpage noted: "The area suffers from neglect." The program's recommendation (change since last report) was that "The owners need to provide regular maintenance at the site."
List of National Historic Landmarks in South Dakota
National Register of Historic Places listings in Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota
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.
This page covers Wounded Knee Massacre — Disarmament and First Shots (December 29, 1890). A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
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.