The Story Behind The Gruesome Wounded Knee Massacre, December 29, 1890

The Wounded Knee Massacre was one of the most notorious episodes of violence by the United States government against Native Americans.

While most peoples know about the horrors of the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota, few know the backstory to the incident, which involves a Paiute prophet named Wovoka.

In 1889, Wovoka went into a deep trance. When he emerged, he told his tribesmen that he had foreseen the way to paradise. He claimed that if the Native Americans returned to their traditional ways and performed a sacred dance, the buffalo would come back to the plains, the whites would be driven out, and the dead would return to help in the fight. It was this last prophecy that gave the religious movement its name – the Ghost Dance.

The Plains Indians who had once roamed free across the American west had seen their centuries-old way of life disappear within a generation. Confined to small reservations on the lands that had once been theirs and dependent on American bureaucrats to meet even their most basic needs, some Native Americans turned to this new religion in a last hope that their old way of life could be restored.

The movement spread like wildfire amongst the Sioux, where it would set off the final chapter in the great war between whites and natives that had begun when the first European settlers arrived two centuries earlier.

Before the Wounded Knee Massacre, tensions were already high between the Sioux and the Americans by the time the Ghost Dance craze became popular. The government agents who worked on the reservations had no idea of the meaning behind it and became nervous that is was some kind of war dance. One bureaucrat finally became so frightened that he sent a telegram to the government requesting military backup, frantically claiming, “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy… we need protection and we need it now.”