Some of the escaping women were ridden down three miles from the encampment. Please keep up the great work in bring the truth to light!.Stay up-to-date with our articles. That the president would make these awards was not as unusual in 1890 as it would be today. Some 19 years later, General Nelson Miles, assigned to investigate the Ghost Dance phenomenon among the Plains tribes, issued a warning that if the practice was not stopped, it could lead to an all-out Indian war. Miles was born in Westminster, Massachusetts, on his family's farm.
Heather: An excellent piece. Only three soldiers have been honored for their heroism in Afghanistan or Iraq.But we still honor twenty men for their actions in the Wounded Knee Massacre. The women and children had been separated from the Indian men during the morning.
They would travel to the agency in the morning.But in the morning things went deadly wrong. Army officers believed Sitanka’s men were running not for shelter, but to join with the Ghost Dancers in the Badlands. . Also, I believe at last count there have been around 12 or 13 Medals of Honor awarded for actions in Afghanistan and four for actions in Iraq. So there have been more awarded than I list here, because they have gone to members of other branches. Within a few hours, at least 230 Sioux, mostly women and children, were dead.The outcry against this butchery started in the army itself. General Nelson Miles and other soldiers on horseback in Puerto Rico.In July 1866, Miles was appointed a colonel in the regular army. They were, he insisted, plotting a war. Ghost Dancers did not threaten local settlers (who, indeed, visited Ghost Dances as spectators). Their food supply dropped further when an agent collecting information for the 1890 census undercounted the Indian population on which the government calculated necessary supplies and food stores. Personal Letter. The Medal of Honor and the Wounded Knee Massacre Expanding Women’s History: Anna Julia Cooper, Zitkala-Ša, and Sui Sin Far Many of the young men refused to give up their guns, which were not only expensive, but were the only hope the men had for feeding their families through the winter. There, Sioux were starving. When an influenza epidemic engulfed the world that winter, the Sioux, especially Indian children, died in disproportionate numbers.Spring 1890 brought rain and renewed hope for good farm yields, but a hot summer wind burned the crops away. On November 20, 1890, troops moved from Nebraska onto South Dakota’s Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations. When the wagons were motionless, the soldiers moved the guns to the creek bed and shot everyone who moved. Congress had created the Medal of Honor during the Civil War to honor officers and privates who had distinguished themselves by gallantry in action. The commanding officer put Sitanka, who was bleeding from his mouth and nose and having terrible trouble breathing, into an army wagon for the trip to Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge reservation.
They dismissed Miles’s report with their own, which blamed the Indians for the massacre and concluded that the soldiers had acted the part of heroes. (n.d.). The numbers in this piece are skewed because the medals were originally only open to members of the army, and I kept that distinction in place because I didn’t want to get into explaining how the medal changed. The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, was a domestic massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people, by soldiers of the United States Army.It occurred on December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek (Lakota: Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála) on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of South Dakota, following a botched attempt to disarm the Lakota camp.
In spring 1891, President Harrison awarded the first of twenty Medals of Honor that would go to soldiers for their actions at Wounded Knee. Thanks for a really instructive and interesting post.I enjoyed, benefitted from “To Make Men Free.” Thanks.Thanks, Gerald!
He worked in Boston and attended night school, read military history, and mastered military principles and techniques, including battle drills. I did not realize how many had been awarded for Wounded Knee.