In “Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre,’’ Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, combines a solid account of the political context with a vivid and moving narrative of events that led to the slaughter of about 300 Sioux in South Dakota.
The root cause of the Indians’ discord involved the breaking-up of the Great Sioux Reservation that had encompassed rolling Dakota grasslands and the sacred Black Hills. That action was initiated to open up the land for settlement and mining by whites and enabled the creation of two safe Republican states in the Dakotas to bolster the sagging fortunes of President Benjamin Harrison’s administration heading into the 1892 election.
As Richardson puts it, “[T]he road to the massacre had begun in Washington.’’
For the unhappy Indians, news of the prophet’s vision promised not only justice but salvation from their material circumstances. “The burning summer’’ of 1890 had parched the remaining Indian lands. “Crops were withering and dying . . . while prices for consumer goods remained high.’’ In that context, the Ghost Dance movement, Richardson writes, was embraced “as a religious response on the part of the Indians to dire conditions.’’
The inexperienced, politically appointed agents on the reservations, however, viewed the fervor as a precursor to an uprising. They frantically lobbied Washington for military intervention. Eventually solders were sent to the region, ratcheting up the tension.
A major turning point came with the death of Sitting Bull. Many government officials found in the old chief who had defeated Custer 14 years earlier a perfect scapegoat for the Indian problems. It was decided that Sitting Bull would be arrested but the mid-December operation went badly and the leader got killed, shattering “the détente between the troops and the Sioux on the reservations.’’
