In the Shadow of Wounded KneeIn the Shadow of Wounded Knee
The story of the last deaths in the American Indian wars and their far-reaching ramifications
The massacre of at least 150 Indians by the U.S. Army along Wounded Knee Creek in the Lakota reservation on December 29, 1890 generally is considered the closing salvo in America's Indian Wars. But as Roger L. Di Silvestro reveals in startling detail, the fight was hardly over. Two tragic events in the weeks immediately following would reignite the conflict and forever color its legacy.
In the Shadow of Wounded Knee is the first book to chronicle the senseless killings that riveted the country in 1891: the assassination of Lieutenant Edward Casey by the young Brulé Lakota warrior Plenty Horses, and the ambush of Few Tails and two other Indians by rancher Pete Culbertsons and his brothers. According to frontier justice of the day, Plenty Horses would have been summarily hanged and the Culbertsons would never have been tried. Yet in the aftermath of Wounded Knee--a slaughter that had horrified politicians, soldiers, and citizens alike--the trial of Plenty Horses made headlines nationwide as a cause célèbre. Soon prosecutors faced a quandary: if Plenty Horses were convicted, then the Army itself would have to be held accountable for its actions at Wounded Knee. How Plenty Horses--a "civilized" Indian who was educated in a school back east--was ultimately exonerated, and the Culbertsons were forced to stand trial, forms a fascinating closing chapter in the Indian Wars and in the last days of the Old West.
The trial of Plenty Horses is now largely forgotten, a piece of America's past that constitutes something of a dark secret from a time when the hammer of history was forging the modern era. In the Shadow of Wounded Knee shows America at the instant it was shifting from a wild frontier country into a modern nation and how the cost of building America was paid not just in human lives but with the sacrifice of human hopes and dreams and the future of entire cultures. The Indian wars did not end at Wounded Knee, nor even with Lieutenant Edward Casey's death, but rather in that Sioux Falls federal courthouse, where a lone warrior awaited his fate at the hands of a society that had killed countless numbers of his people and seemed determined to kill at least one more.
The story of the Indian Wars usually ends with the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, but De Silvestro, nature author and senior editor at National Wildlife magazine, continues the account through the killing of a US Army lieutenant the following month, and the trial of Lakota Many Horses for it. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Documents the Army massacre of 150 Native Americans in December, 1890, along Wounded Knee Creek in the Lakota reservation, detailing its link to an assassination and the murders of three Native Americans that rallied politicians, soldiers, and citizens to condemn the events at Wounded Knee and fight for Native American rights during two sensationalized trials.
Documents the Army massacre of Native Americans along Wounded Knee Creek in the Lakota reservation, detailing how the event rallied politicians, soldiers, and citizens to condemn what happened and fight for Native American rights.
From the community