The Final Surrender

With some 500 Army troopers preventing the escape of the Indians at Wounded Knee camp, Col. James Forsyth ordered the captives to surrender their weapons.  The Indians refused and the colonel grew impatient.  He ordered his men to search the tepees and the persons of the Indians themselves.  To lay hands on a warrior was both dangerous and insulting. 

Black Coyote, a young Sioux warrior, was therefore insulted by the Army's treatment and fired a wild shot during the ensuing scuffle.  The Army, of course, took that as a call for a murderous, close-range assault.  The Indians fired back and it became a blood bath from thereon.  From a low hill, four Hutchkiss guns took out the fleeing Indians - men, women and children until the snows turned red.

Twenty-five officers and troops were killed and 39 wounded.  The Indian count was 153-300, depending on whose estimate you believe.  Civilians were paid $2 per body to bury the bodies. One member of the burial party put it this way, "It was a thing to melt the heart of a man, if made of stone.  To see these little children with their bodies shot to pieces and thrown into the pit."

Those Indians at Pine Ridge Reservation, some 4,000 of them, gathered at White Clay Creek and surrounded the Army as it approached.  Eventually another cavalry came to their rescue.  General Miles surrounded the village and sent men to talk to the Sioux Chiefs.  He got them to surrender without further bloodshed on January 15, 1891, ending the war with the Native Americans.  It was not a proud era in America history...

Next time...Railroads change the Nation
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On March 26, 1872, An earthquake felt from Mexico to Oregon rocks the Owens Valley in California, killing 30 people. People hundreds of miles away in Tijuana, Mexico, felt the shaking. It is estimated that it had a magnitude of 7.8. One of most famous accounts of this earthquake came from explorer and scientist John Muir, the man who was instrumental in the establishment of Yosemite National Park.