Wounded Knee 1890: Hotchkiss Guns, Black Coyote and 19 Medals of Honor

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By 1890 the Lakota had lost treaty lands and the bison, the center of Plains life, and depended on delayed and short government rations. Out of that despair came the Ghost Dance, founded by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, a nonviolent circle dance that promised the return of the ancestors and the bison. Kicking Bear brought it to the Lakota along with painted ghost shirts, which rumor said were bulletproof. Agent D. F. Royer begged for troops against what settlers called the Messiah craze, and General Nelson Miles warned of a great Indian war. In mid-December, Sitting Bull was shot dead during a botched arrest, and some 200 of his followers fled to join Spotted Elk, known to the Army as Big Foot.

On December 28 the 7th Cavalry intercepted Spotted Elk, sick with pneumonia, and about 350 followers, roughly 120 men and 230 women and children, and camped them at Wounded Knee Creek under 500 troops and four Hotchkiss guns. Next morning, during disarmament, soldiers grabbed Black Coyote, a deaf man holding a new Winchester, and his rifle went off. Nearly 300 Lakota were killed or wounded; 25 soldiers died, many likely by friendly fire. Miles called it a deliberate massacre and relieved Colonel James Forsyth, but a court of inquiry cleared him.

• The Hotchkiss mountain guns fired up to 40 explosive shells a minute into the tipi camp.
• After a three-day blizzard, burial crews found four infants still alive under the shawls of their dead mothers.
• Days later, L. Frank Baum wrote an editorial calling for the extermination of Native Americans.
• The Army awarded 19 Medals of Honor for Wounded Knee, one citation partly for rounding up a stampeded pack mule.
• The Remove the Stain Act repeatedly failed in Congress, and in September 2025 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the medals would stand.