On December 29, 1890, two weeks after the killing of Sitting Bull, the United States Seventh Cavalry opened fire on Miniconjou Ghost dancers near Wounded Knee Creek. Some army officials claimed that the dancers were armed and that the Ghost Dance was a call for the extermination of all whites. Many Lakota believed that the massacre stemmed from the Seventh Cavalry's enduring bitterness over Custer's loss at the Little Big Horn fourteen years earlier. In "Voices of Wounded Knee", William S. E. Coleman brings together for the first time all of the available sources - Lakota, military, and civilian. He recreates the Ghost Dance in detail and shows how it related to the events leading up to the massacre. Using accounts of participants and observers, Coleman reconstructs the massacre moment by moment. He places contradictory accounts in direct juxtaposition, allowing the reader to decide who was telling the truth. His balanced treatment suggests that the massacre grew out of decades of broken treaties, cultural misunderstandings, power struggles between the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Army, and erroneous and inflammatory reports by irresponsible members of the press.
William S. E. Coleman is a professor of theatre at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He and his wife spent nearly thirty years gathering documents from collections in the United States and abroad to create this book.
- ISBN10 0803215061
- ISBN13 9780803215061
- Publish Date 1 September 2000
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 July 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Nebraska Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 446
- Language English