Wounded Knee and the Ghost Dance Tragedy Review

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(More customer reviews)The massacre of three hundred Hunkpapa and other Sioux people, including women and children, was the culmination of America's genocidal conquest of the western territorities "purchased" from France or stolen from Mexico. That the massacre also involved the suppression of a "native American" spiritual/religious movement, initiated by the self-proclaimed Messiah Wovoka, makes the event even more iconic. This 28-page pamphlet tells most of the bare facts of the massacre, along with details of Wovoka's life and thought, in a style made all the more eloquent by its simplicity and conciseness. It's a story that all Americans should know well, and never forget.
Author Jack Utter, both a lawyer and a forester by training, is certainly the oracle among historians of the expropriation and near extermination of the Great Plains indigenous peoples. This pamphlet was written for the Wounded Knee centennial in 1991. It's available at many of the National Monument/Park bookstores of the West. It's not an of anti-American diatribe. It's a forthright chronicle of documented events.
Among the strangest curiosities of this shameful history is its inter-involvement with the growth of the circus and of circus arts in America. The lynchpin was the flamboyant Buffalo Bill Cody, a buffalo hunter as a young man employed to supply meat for the workers on the transcontinental railroad, Cody spent most of his adulthood as a showman, traveling widely with his popular Wild West Circus. In 1885, Cody secured government permission to take Sitting Bull and other Sioux warriors on a tour that visited cities of the USA and Canada. Sitting Bull refused to accompany that show to Europe, preferring to stay with his people and attempt to defend their scant rights. Later, after the Wounded Knee slaughter, Cody in fact took some of the survivors of that event on a tour that reached Europe. Honorably, Cody paid his "wild Indians" proper wages, and some of them returned to their reservations effectively as free elders.
In 1913, Cody produced and filmed a "recreation" of the 'Battle of Wounded Knee' as part of a projected series of movies about famous battles in the West. Cody managed to persuade General Nelson Miles, the most successful of all 'Indian fighters' and the highest-ranking officer in the US Army, to serve as his consultant. Miles had been the commanding officer, from a distance, at the massacre. A number of older Sioux were also involved in the film project. Unfortunately, the film has vanished.
General Nelson Miles has been almost forgotten now in the 'pageant' of American history, but he's worth learning about. He was ubiquitous in his era: an officer in the Union Army in the Civil War, the warden of Jefferson Davis after the War, the most effective field commander against the warlike tribes of the Trans-Mississippi, known to the warriors of those tribes as Bear Coat, the general who pursued and entrapped both Geronimo and Chief Joseph, the officer in charge of the troops who crushed the union workers in Chicago during the Pullman strike, the officer in command of the invasion of Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War, eventually the military commander-in-chief of the entire US Army under Theodore Roosevelt, involved in the suppression of the Huk independence fighters in the Philippines and in suppression of 'rebels' in China, a perennial dark horse candidate for President, the most decorated soldier in the history of his country. An honorable, high-minded, well-meaning man, from all accounts, especially his own!
Miles seldom acknowledged his errors, but he did express regret at the bloodshed at Wounded Knee. In fact, he relieved the field officer closest to the slaughter, Colonel Forsyth, of duties and order a court martial of him. The 'court of inquiry' exonerated Forsyth. Eighteen participants in this mockery of a battle were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

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