456. Fall of the Sioux: The Massacre at Wounded Knee (Part 3)
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He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions, forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard-working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these his conquerors

were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood, and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt! What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast, and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies!

The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies, inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall, the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The whites

by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced.

Better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings and speak in later ages of the glory of these grand kings of forest and plain. So that, a jaw-dropping editorial.

In the Saturday Pioneer, published in Aberdeen in South Dakota on the 20th of December 1890, was by L. Frank Baum, who was, of course, the author of The Wizard of Oz. And Dominic, people often say, well, that escalated quickly.

And you begin reading it and it seems a moving threnody on the death of Sitting Bull, a tribute to the nobility and character of the Sioux. And then it ends up with him saying, well, let's kill them all. And it's extraordinary, isn't it? Sitting Bull has died. What a great man he was. The rest are whining curs that lick the hand that feeds them or something.

So let's get rid of the lot. Unbelievable. Yeah. And I was looking up some more of his editorials. Yeah. I mean, you yourself, you know, you've been known to write the occasional right wing editorial in a newspaper. Trenchant, I think is the word, Tom. Trenchant. Yes. But I mean, nothing on this scale. So when he's not calling for...

basically the genocide of the Sioux. He's describing General Miles, the man who effectively destroyed the last resistance of the Lakota war bands. He's describing him as weak and vacillating. And it just seems amazing. It's incredible, isn't it? The great thing about that editorial though, so that editorial is published in the short period of time between the death of Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee Massacre, which are the two great subjects that we'll be talking about in this final episode.

The great thing about that editorial, horrible as it is, is it absolutely captures that strange ambiguity of American attitudes to the Plains Indians. Because on the one hand, there's all that stuff about, oh, their great nobility, these grand kings of forest and plain, the wild nature untamed by years of subjection. And then on the other hand, the whites by laws of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent. There is that kind of social Darwinist attitude

And the lack of magnanimity in it, actually. Yeah. No sense of guilt, no sense of conscience or regret. I mean, maybe this is overstretching it, but one of the famous characters in The Wizard of Oz is the cowardly lion. The lion that has been broken and tamed and is too scared to be fierce and wild in the way that a lion should. Yeah. Maybe I'm over-egging it. But, I mean, it does set quite a light on The Wizard of Oz. It does indeed, yeah. Anyway...

So he went there, again, I didn't know anything about this, but looked it up. He arrived there in 1887 in South Dakota and started up as a shopkeeper. And then he took over as editor of the Saturday Pioneer in 1890. So the same year that he's writing that editorial. So he's going in hard, isn't he? Yeah, very hard. So it's interesting you said he moved to South Dakota because obviously in the last episode we talked about how many people did move.

The pressure from the Republican administration to admit South Dakota and North Dakota as two states that they're hoping are going to be Republican and hold the balance of power in Congress. The enormous pressure on the reservations from the advance of the railroad, the death of the bison, the arrival of so many settlers.

And then that's, we talked, didn't we, about the ghost dance movement, this sort of extraordinary cult millenarian movement that really has gathered strength in the summer of 1890 because of the drought and because, you know, Native American society is in such freefall.

And the press feeding frenzy and the arrival of the troops that General Miles has sent all these troops mobilized a huge component of the U.S. Army. And then we ended last time by the press point the finger quite unfairly at Sitting Bull. So he's the ringleader in all this and there's going to be a massive bloody uprising. And remember Buffalo Bill said, I'll go and get him. I know Sitting Bull. I've worked with Sitting Bull. And then Agent McLaughlin, who hates Sitting Bull with a passion.

I'll go and get Sitting Bull. Leave it with me. Yeah, I'll do it. And so Sitting Bull doesn't even know all this is happening. You know, that all these sort of forces are gathering against him, that the storm clouds of public obloquy. Yeah. Yeah. A gathering. A new storm. Exactly. But he is oblivious to this, Tom. Because he's in love, isn't he? Ish. He's been hanging around with Mrs. Weldon. Mrs. Weldon is a new arrival on the scene. We also had to throw in a few new characters near the end of a series to spice things up.

She's from Switzerland and she's in her early 50s. And she, in a way that we've already alluded to, but obviously would become very familiar later on,

She has basically fallen in love with Native American culture, with the idea of Native Americans. Yeah, because you don't get, I mean, kind of less Lakota war chief than a 50-year-old Swiss. No, you don't. Not at all. No offence to Swiss listeners. But that's the appeal, isn't it? That's the appeal for Mrs. Weldon. Yeah. Is that, you know, the cuckoo clock or whatever, chocolate, melted cheese, chocolate.

She's sick of them. She's had enough. She wants the Sundance. Right, exactly. So she's gone over to the US and she's joined an Indian rights group. So there's an element of a much older and more Swiss Greta Thunberg. She's gone over to the US. Has she started dressing up as a Lakota though? I don't know that she wears Lakota dress, but I do know that she's moved to the reservation. So having initially sort of corresponded and done public pressure and stuff,

She decides, you know what, I'm actually just going to go and live at Standing Rock. And she goes to the Standing Rock agency and she writes to Agent McLaughlin and says, I love Sitting Bull. He's brilliant. I think of him like a father. And she moves in with him. So he's built these two cabins on the banks of the Grand River with

With his sort of coterie, his kind of following. So his extended family and friends and stuff. And Mrs. Weldon arrives with her son, Christy, who's 12. I don't know anything about Christy. I mean, God knows what he makes of all this. Are they Protestants? Must be. I would have thought if they're Swiss. Because McLaughlin is a very devout Catholic, isn't he? Yes, he is. So the idea that Sitting Bull is now hanging out with Swiss Protestants just confirms his darkest suspicions. You reckon? Well, I think it must be.

Playing into his animus against Sitting Bull. He's like Charles V in the middle of the 16th century, is he? Yes. But the weird thing is that actually Sitting Bull is not really... I mean, he doesn't experience the ghost dance, does he? Because the great thing about him was that he could see into the future. He is afforded visions. But it doesn't work for him. No, not at all. He's probably distracted by fondues and stuff. So Mrs. Weldon has moved in. He hears about the ghost dance. And he says, hmm...

I'm interested in it because he's interested in spiritual things. So he gets this guy kicking bear. He says, come over to my sort of bit of the reservation and teach us the dance. And they held the dance and they have more dances. Sitting bull presides over them. And when dancers have visions, he says, you know, what did you see? And he tries to interpret what it means, but he,

He doesn't have any visions himself. This is the tragic thing. So he tries to have ghost dance visions, but he doesn't succeed. I mean, Sitting Bull is renowned for the truth of his visions. Yeah. I wonder if any of the ghost dancers have second thoughts. If Sitting Bull isn't seeing what is the visions of the future that others are claiming to see...

Do you think they think maybe they're bogus? I don't know. Maybe they just think he's a busted flush. I mean, this hangs over him because in particular, his authority, partly because of the agent openly humiliating him, his authority on the reservation is in deep decline. And actually, he's lost a lot of his authority to gall. Yeah.

Yeah. Tom, the fashion of, you know, the captain of the team and stuff, hasn't he? Much admired by Mrs. Custer. Yes. So Gaul has now said, let's collaborate with these guys. Let's get on with the reservation bosses. And Sitting Bull has none of it. And some historians have suggested Sitting Bull embraces the ghost dance, not because he massively believes in it.

but because it's a really good way to restore his authority against the more, inverted commas, progressive chiefs. Because Gaul is now kind of wearing Western clothes, isn't he? And kind of dabbling with Christianity. Yeah. So Mrs. Weldon, she, as you would expect, if she is indeed a Swiss Calvinist, she thinks this is madness. She says to Sitting Bull, don't get into this ghost dance business. If you do, they will turn against you. People will use it as a pretext to kill you.

And actually, Sitting Bull says to her, well, I'd be very happy if they did kill me, frankly. I'm really miserable. I'm tired. I've got nothing to do. He says his heart would find rest if the soldiers did kill him. And Mrs. Weldon then has a massive strop and says, right, that's it. I'm out of here. I'm gone. And so she disappears. She takes Christy and off they go.

And lots of observers said when she left, it was like the light went out of Sitting Bull's life. The presence of this Swiss widow was what was keeping him going. And now he's really depressed and miserable. Fondue's gone. No more fondues. High precision time pieces have gone. There's nothing left to live for. Yes, exactly. The elaborate and frankly slightly shady banking arrangements that he had, which he'd pinned his hopes, have vanished. That's right.

The tragedy of it, even racist, genocidal columnists can sense the tragedy of it. They can indeed. The only person who doesn't, of course, is Agent McLaughlin. Yeah. Agent McLaughlin is, while this is going on, is sort of sharpening his knives. He thinks the Mrs. Weldon stuff, by the way, is an absolute disgrace. And he says, there's no doubt in my mind that she and Sitting Bull are sleeping together, which seems not to have been true.

But McLaughlin says he's a polygamous libertine and habitual liar, a man of low cunning, devoid of a single manly principle in his nature or honourable trait of character, capable of inciting others to any amount of mischief. And that's what he's worried about, isn't it? That he will cause trouble. Exactly. So there are different versions of exactly what happens next, but I think what follows seems pretty fair, pretty reasonable. So that McLaughlin's solution to the Sitting Bull issue, which, I mean, isn't really an issue, but he's trumped it up,

is he will use the agency police. Who are Lakota themselves. Who are Lakota themselves, exactly. They're called the Metal Breasts, the Cheska Mazza. I don't know how to pronounce that. We'll just call them the Metal Breasts, I guess, because they wear their badges, kind of big sheriff-type badges. They're going to arrest Sitting Bull on the 20th of December, which is the day when everyone gets their rations, because everybody would be distracted by getting their rations. They can just swoop in, hoover him up, and take him off to Fort Yates.

And the guy who he enlists to do this is a guy called Henry Bullhead. So Bullhead was a Lakota who had once been one of Sitting Bull's warriors, but he subsequently converted to Christianity and sort of puts on trousers and stuff and has become...

you know, more loyal than the most loyal agency policeman. And actually, Bullhead has a feud with Sitting Bull, where Sitting Bull's friend catch the bear over a horse, which means that he absolutely loathes Sitting Bull with a passion. So Henry Bullhead is like, great, I can't wait to do this. I'll take charge. But they have to accelerate their timetable very unexpectedly because Sitting Bull is

They get word that Sitting Bull is actually planning to go on a little trip. He's going to go and visit the Pine River Reservation, another reservation. So Bullhead and McLaughlin say, right, we're going to have to hoover up Sitting Bull at once. And Bullhead orders the rest of the police, assemble at my cabin on the night of the 14th of December. So we're approaching now the sort of the great showdown. And his men, the other policemen,

arrive at the cabin that evening. And to give you a sense of what sort of people these are, these are Lakota, as you said. So a good example, one of the best accounts we have for this comes from a guy who's called John Lone Man. And Lone Man

had fought Custer at the Battle of the Little Bitcoin. He was a Hunkpapa warrior. But he had converted to Catholicism and become a farmer and become a kind of agency policeman. And in other words, was your classic kind of good Indian, I suppose, is what people would have called him at the time. And Sitting Bull must, in some way, serve as a reproach to him. Yeah, of course. A reminder of what he has given up. Totally, Tom. I think that's a really good point. I think for these people, Sitting Bull's insistence that he will not...

assimilate. It's a standing rebuke, isn't it? It's a reminder of their own perfidy, I guess. I mean, maybe that's what drives some of their animus against him. As they assemble, about 40 of them assemble at Bullhead's cabin, they all gather. Most of them don't speak any English, so a farmer has to translate the orders that they've been given into Lakota.

A lot of them are Sitting Bull kind of extended relatives. Sitting Bull's brother-in-law is there. A nephew of Sitting Bull's is there. And a lot of them are quite anxious and troubled about this. They know it's a kind of slightly shameful thing, I think, that they're doing.

They spend the night, they can't sleep. It's obviously freezing out there on the plains. So they're all sort of telling old war stories. I mean, the irony of it, they're telling stories about their own battles against the US Army. And then just before dawn, Bullhead leads them in prayers, Christian prayers. Again, a brilliant symbol of the assimilation process. And then at four o'clock in the morning, it's pouring with rain, but they go out in these, it's very sort of bleak scene. I haven't seen that many Westerns, to be brutally honest.

But I imagine this would be so cinematic. Yeah, it's like the shootout in Unforgiven. Exactly, like Unforgiven, yeah. Exactly that. They ride out in a column. Four o'clock in the morning, it's freezing cold, rain pouring down. They cross the frozen Grand River and they assemble outside Sitting Bull's cabin.

So they go into the cabin, they push their way in and Sitting Bull is in bed. The different accounts, some say lying down or sitting down with one of his wives and a small child. And he is totally naked. Yeah. And Sitting Bull goes to reach for a rifle or something. And a couple of these guys grab him and they blow out the light. And Bullhead says to him, I've come to take you to the agency. You're under arrest.

And Sitting Bull gets up and they're sort of pushing him around. And he says sarcastically, oh, this is a great way to do things, not to give me a chance to put on my clothes in winter. And they say, fine, get him some clothes. So his wife goes to the next cabin next door to go and get him some clothes.

And as they lead him towards the door, there's already a knot of people assembled outside who are sort of shouting, what have you come for? You know, leave Sitting Bull alone, all this kind of thing. And it's very tense and it's dark and no one can see what's going on. And tempers are kind of flaring. And then isn't it his son who plays the crucial role in this story? The tragic role. Exactly. So first of all, it's this guy, Catch the Bear, who is a great enemy of Henry Bullhead.

And catch the bear, says, oh, here they are. Oh, yeah, we knew they were coming, the metal breasts. What absolute dogs these people are. Yeah. You know, we should stand up for our chief. And Sitting Bull at this point, even at this point, is still looking like he's going to go with these guys. You know, he's very anxious and almost a bit befuddled, I think. Almost it's the middle of the night, so he's confused. Yeah. But then his son, he has a son called Crowfoot. There are different estimates of his age. He's between 12 and 14, probably.

And everyone says of Crowfoot, Crowfoot was very kind of mature for his age. He tried to be one of the adults, not a little boy. Because he is the first generation that can't test himself as a warrior. It's true, Tom. Yeah, it's true. And he's always grown up believing his father Sitting Bull's stories about, you know, you stand up, you don't let yourself be pushed down. And Crowfoot says to Sitting Bull, you always called yourself a brave chief, but now you're allowing yourself to be taken by the metal breasts.

And at that, Lone Man said later that that was the point that pushed Sitting Bull over the edge. When his own son, teenage son, says to him, oh, you're not really as big a man as I thought you were. You're a coward. He says, well, actually, I'm not going to go. No, I'm not going.

And Lone Man said to him, Uncle, nobody's going to harm you. The agent wants to see you and then you'll come back. Don't worry. Don't make any trouble. And so they're still in the cabin. People outside are shouting and stuff. A couple of policemen grab Sitting Bull by the arms and they push him outside. Is he still naked at this point? No, he's got some clothes on, I think.

I mean, I picture it with him now clothed, because they brought him some clothes, haven't they? Yeah. Let's imagine him clothed, Tom, because it's more decorous. But kind of more splendid. You think so? Yeah. Okay. Well, whatever. Imagine it as you will. That's the beauty of the rest is history. Sometimes we're vague on the facts so you can imagine them for yourselves. Yeah. We're conjuring an image with words. Yeah. But it's a deliberate choice, isn't it? It's an editorial choice that, Tom, rather than a failure of research. Yeah. That's the magic of it. So...

So they grab Sitting Bull by the arms and they kind of semi-push him outside. And Bullhead is really clearly anxious and slightly losing patience. Well, because presumably hostile crowds are gathering around, so he's twitchy. Exactly. And he hits Sitting Bull on the back and he shouts to him, you have no ears, you wouldn't listen. And at that, this bloke catch the bear who's on Sitting Bull's side. He just thinks, bring this on. And he throws off this blanket that he had and there's a rifle underneath.

And he shoots at Bullhead. He hits him. And Bullhead, what's really unclear in the melee, in the darkness, is either he does it deliberately or as he's falling, he fires his own gun and it hits Sitting Bull right in the chest. And at that, another bloke called Red Tomahawk is like, oh, right, let's go for it. Let's do it. And he takes his gun and shoots Sitting Bull in the head.

Sitting ball is down and now total chaos. Most of the policemen end up taking refuge in the cabin and this kind of bullets flying into the walls of the cabin and the splinters everywhere. And in all this chaos, the other guys are outside blasting away with their rifles. Lone man sees something crawling along and it's this boy Crowfoot. And Crowfoot says, it's a terrible scene. Crowfoot says, my uncles do not kill me. I don't want to die.

And Lone Man turns to Lieutenant Bullhead. Bullhead is still alive. He's been hit in the stomach, but he's lying there bleeding to death, but he's still kind of compos mentis. And they say, what should we do with this guy, Lieutenant? And Bullhead says, oh, do what you like with him. He caused all this trouble. So they're like, oh, well, we'll kill him then. So they hit this boy on the head with their rifle butts, and then they shoot him and throw his body out of the door of the cabin. And Dominic, what reputedly adds to the pathos and horror

horror of this episode and I don't know if it's true but I've always read it is that his horse which supposedly had been given to him by Buffalo Bill and had been trained to do kind of dance steps in response to the shooting at the climax of the show is supposed to have started doing the dance. That I did not know. As

The bullets are whistling and as Sitting Bull is lying there dead. That's an incredible detail. And, you know, as a kind of coda to the whole tragic story and the fusion of show business with the horrors of what had actually happened, whether it's true or not, it should be true. Definitely should be true. If we make this Western, that will definitely be taking place. That's a terrible detail, Tom, and I'd like to believe it is true because it's such a good...

twist to the story. Yeah. So whether the horse is dancing or not, Henry Bullhead's men then sort of disgrace themselves, I would say. Well, actually, maybe they don't by their own standards because people will remember 6,000 episodes ago when we talked about the culture of the Plains and the Plains Indians. And we talked about the habit of mutilating the bodies of your enemies so that they would be

poorly equipped to face you in the afterlife. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you've killed Sitting Bull, the greatest warrior of his age, I mean, you don't want to meet him in your afterlife, do you? And if you do, you want to make sure that he hasn't got any hands or anything. So they just get out their revolvers and they empty them into the body. One man hits him, keeps hacking at his face with an axe. Somebody's cutting him with a knife and another bloke gets a big club or something. And he just basically beats Sitting Bull's head to a pulp.

By this point, some of the US Army have arrived and the US Army are appalled by this scene. And actually, there's a soldier who says to them, what the hell are you doing? Leave that man alone. He's dead. Stop it.

And the army men take it outside. They have an ambulance or a truck or something, and they want to load it with the dead bodies. And it's actually the metal breasts, the Indian police, who say, we don't want Sitting Bull's body along with our comrades. You know, he's dead to us now, as well as being dead. And eventually they compromise that they will put his body in with the others, but he will be upside down, kind of face down as a sign of humiliation while the others are face up. And...

Anyway, that's the end of him. Two days later, they hold the funerals for everybody who died in the shootout because eventually the shootout kind of peters out, Sitting Bull's followers skedaddle. And all the policemen, including Henry Bullhead, who had been shot, are given a sort of big funeral, full military honors, combined Catholic and Protestant service. When that is done, Agent McLaughlin, who is there,

goes to the corner of the cemetery, this basically a pauper's grave with a rough wooden coffin and that sitting bull. There's no prayers. There's no service. There's no nothing. And no memorial. Yeah, no. The only people there are officers in the US Army who are basically presiding and the gravediggers who are prisoners, who are people in the kind of penitentiary. They kind of shovel in a bit of earth. Bang, done. That's the end of him.

And then you said about the horse. Yeah, because it ends up going on tour, doesn't it? The log cabin. Don't they have a dwarf or something? It does have a dwarf. Yeah. I mean, this is that sort of, as the story continued, if you go back to when we first did Custer, one of the parallel sort of stories underneath all this, you know, this is the age of the great rise of American capitalism.

And of course the mass entertainment that goes along with it. Yeah. And actually it's the Indian Wars as the balance shifts towards the United States and it's clear they're going to win. So the wars turn into, even while they're happening. Entertainment. Entertainment. And this happens with Sitting Bull. So the following year, some people from Mandan, North Dakota buy his cabin.

and they transport it to Chicago for the World's Fair. And it is actually billed. It's like a ride. It's like a Disneyland ride. It's billed as Sitting Bull's Death Cabin.

And they have a glala there, all dressed up. In war paint and feathers and things. Yeah, exactly. Who will show you, oh, here are bullets. And they concoct this kind of cock and bull story about, oh, this bullet was fired by this person. This was Sitting Bull. So where does the dwarf come in? Because then, unbelievably, as if that wasn't...

you know, indignity enough. They then say, well, this is brilliant. We'll take it to the Coney Island amusement park. And they have a land at Coney Island called the historic Sioux Indian war village. It has 50 ghost dancers. So-called. I mean, I don't know whether they even are ghost dancers. People pretending to do the ghost dance has teepees and it has a female Sioux dwarf said to be the only dwarf in the tribe. And as well as sitting bulls cabin. And,

And finally, Tom, a nod back to an episode a long time ago where we brought county cricket into it. They have an exhibition of taxidermy. Oh, right. Of stuffed animals. So what, buffalo? So I guess buffalo, bison, like plains animal, foxes, you know, who knows? Yeah. So they're also being wiped out. I mean, the one consolation from this terrible story is they didn't stuff Sitting Bull. Yeah. Because I wouldn't put it past them.

Anyway, that's the end of Poor Old Sitting Bull. What a terrible story. And what is the impact on the Lakota? I think a lot of the Lakota, some of them are glad to see him go. Gould and his collaborators, like, yeah, he's a load off our minds. He was just a terrible drag and a pain. But I think most of them deep down

It is a further sign of their kind of, I feel harsh using these words because they're so loaded, but it's almost as though they've been kind of spiritually emasculated, cut off from their heritage, cut off from their history. You know, this guy who was perceived as being the symbol of authenticity and integrity. I mean, of course, we can debate about how much that is a construct.

But for him to be gone, I mean, that's why L. Frank Baum writes that editorial. Yeah, because it's in the wake of that, isn't it? Because the end of Sitting Bull feels like, bang, that is the end of the story, the whole story. Although, of course, it isn't. It isn't. So, Dominic, should we take a break now? Yeah. And when we come back, we will look at the, well, it's a masker, isn't it? That is effectively the end of this story. Yeah, the story of Wounded Knee and the end of the ghost dance. So we'll do that after the break, Tom.

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History and welcome back to the very last segment of what has turned out to be an 11 episode sweep through the story of Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull. By this point in the story, they are all dead. The United States has comprehensively won. The Lakota have beaten people. But Dominic, there is one last conversation.

confrontation to come, isn't there? There is. So some people will be familiar with the book by Dee Brown that was published at the beginning of the 70s called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. And that was the book that really transformed. I think it's now regarded as a bit outdated, isn't it, Tom? I think it's regarded, though... As a classic. As a highly significant book in terms of how...

this kind of clash is understood. Totally. It was transformative. Because the story of how the West was won is now kind of how the West was lost. Exactly. It was absolutely transformative in the way people viewed that balance between Americans and Native Americans, for want of a better phrase. And he obviously got the title from the poem that you quoted in the previous episode. Yeah. But this idea of wounded knee as this...

terrible scar, psychological scar, and the end point, the end point of the whole story. And that's really what we're building up to now. So Sitting Bull, you mentioned, you know, what did the Lakota make of the death of Sitting Bull just before the break? Sitting Bull's kind of following his people, his relatives and stuff. They all flee in panic after his death. And they flee to a village on the Cheyenne River, which has a chief called Bigfoot, who

Now, Bigfoot has been very into the ghost dance, but he's actually a moderate kind of person. He's well known as a kind of somebody who will make peace. And he's actually, therefore, quite a good person to go to because he should be able to negotiate with the government, with the agency officials and so on.

General Miles, who is still lurking around with his troops, he's quite anxious that Bigfoot is out there. And he says, right, we need to bring Bigfoot in. We need to get his village and we need to escort these people to a fort where we can basically have them under surveillance and we can sort them out and then assimilate them back into the reservation. But instead of coming back to a fort as planned,

Just before Christmas, Bigfoot's camp, which is now about 300 people, they have an escort, military escort, but they slip away from the escort and they head off randomly across the plains. And actually what they're doing is they're a bit frightened. They're worried that they're being lured into a trap at this fort.

which they probably weren't. But you can see why they think that. Oh, totally. You can see why they think it. Looking at what happened to Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Correct. It's not unreasonable that they think that at all. And they say, we're going to go to a different reservation, the Pine Ridge Reservation. Red Cloud, who's now 640, he's there and he will be able to look after us. And so the commanders send more troops to ram these guys up. They say, well, we can't have these guys just roaming randomly across the sort of the center of America. Go and get them.

So it's absolutely freezing cold. So it's December in the sort of South Dakota, Nebraska borderlands. It's really bleak. I mean, this adds to the sort of the atmosphere. Somber quality of the story. Exactly. Exactly, Tom. The troops are looking for these guys and the troops make camp at a place called Wounded Knee Creek, which is right in those borderlands and the snow falling and everything. And everybody's cold and miserable and their mood is very gloomy.

And on the 28th of December, their scouts say we've spotted Bigfoot's people. Actually, Bigfoot's people are in an incredibly bad way. Bigfoot himself has got pneumonia in the winter. He's incredibly ill.

And basically he and his people have given up hope and they've actually decided they're going to come in after all. And what they're going to do is they want to come and join up with us, the army, so we can all go together to the Pine Ridge agency. And the scouts say they're hungry. They haven't eaten for days. They're just sort of in rags and they're huddled in blankets. A lot of them are ill. You know, they're a really pitiful scene. But

But they're very anxious and nervous. They know they've run away from their escort. They're worried they're in trouble and all this. So the commander's like, okay, we'll find them. We'll tell them to come in. So they find that evening, Bigfoot's people turn up, 300 of them, very miserable sort of spectacle kind of, you know, it's like the sort of the exodus of the Israelites or something. And the army give them some food and they set up a cordon around them so they can't get away. And at that point, army reinforcements arrive. So that evening,

And as luck would have it, the army reinforcements are the second battalion of the 7th Cavalry. They're commanded by a guy called Colonel Forsyth. And so now what we have is almost 500 soldiers.

And they have, by the way, these guns called Hotchkiss guns, which are kind of like machine guns mounted on carts or trolleys or something. So the kind that Custer had not taken. Exactly. Yes, exactly right. Am I right in thinking that the members of the 7th Cavalry who were there, they're all kind of raw recruits. They are. They haven't really had combat experience, but obviously they've been raised on stories of the massacre.

of the 7th Cavalry. Totally, yeah. So they're kind of itching for vengeance, itching to win battle honours for the 7th Cavalry that will redeem its lost honour. Yeah. And also a sense that the people that they're facing are inveterately savage and dangerous. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Tom. So a very large proportion of them have literally never fired a gun before. They are the rawest of recruits. But as some historians say, this is the generation now

that have grown up being pumped with adventure stories, dare I say, cowboys and Indians. Now, as we said in the previous episode, cowboys never fought Indians because they came in after the Indians had been driven out. But these are probably the first people who have

grown up reading these stories and obsessed with the idea of the sort of the cruelty and savagery of the Indians. But also that it's becoming a myth, isn't it? Yeah. That Custer's Last Stand has already become a myth. Exactly. I think there in the Seventh Cavalry is exactly that. They know that this is Custer's

They're Custer's boys, kind of posthumously. A scalp for Custer. That's what they're talking about. And so that night, the soldiers are sitting up getting absolutely wasted, drinking, and they're talking about, were any of these people at the Bighorn? Which one do you reckon was at the Bighorn? All of this kind of thing. And actually...

Some of the Lakota who lived to tell the tale said that that night they would come up to them and point guns at them and say, were you at the Bighorn? Were you at the fight with Custer? You know, kind of drunkenly. So it's quite an intimidating scene. Morning break, so at the 30th of December now. Somehow I skipped a day there, but we can live with that. Actually, since we're episode 11, nobody's listening anyway, so...

So it's freezing cold and snow is falling and it's incredibly kind of bleak and cheerless scene. And Colonel Forsyth rounds up Bigfoot's people and he positions his troopers around them in a circle. Which is quite Custer coming across the Dakota or Cheyenne village, isn't it? Yeah, the Washita, the massacre of the Washitatum. So he says, before we move off, I really must take all your weapons.

And so his troops are all around them. But it's very difficult for him to get order. Bigfoot is too ill. So Bigfoot's just kind of huddled up in a kind of bed somewhere. A lot of the men are in their ghost dance shirts and they're kind of wandering about randomly. It's all very, you know, it's got a cross between a kind of battle and a kind of rock festival and a sort of scout camp or something. Or a refugee camp, I suppose would be the analogy. Yeah. It's just really hard for him to be heard.

So finally, very stridently, he manages to assert his authority and he says, "Right, I want all your guns." Now, the guns are so important to them. For them, the ownership of the gun is like owning a horse or something. It's so precious to you. It is your identity. And a marker of your dignity. A dignity. And it's very expensive. It's probably one of the most single, if not the single most expensive thing you own.

And so a lot of these guys are very reluctant to give over their guns. And a lot of them are actually hiding their weapons. They've deliberately hidden their weapons under blankets and, you know, in boxes and stuff. And so there's a bit of a standoff. And Colonel Forsyth says, if you're not going to surrender your guns, you know, this is a complete shambles. We're going to start to search you personally. We're going to search you.

We make you lift your blankets to show that you don't have any guns. And he sends some soldiers forward to do this. They search, by some accounts, three guys. And then they approach another guy called Black Coyote. Black Coyote is a younger warrior, but he's also deaf. And he holds his gun over his head. It's a Winchester. And he says, I've paid a lot of money for this gun. I don't understand what's going on because obviously he's deaf.

but I have no way I'm giving you my gun because you will have to pay me for it. And some soldiers come to him. It degenerates pretty quickly into a struggle for the gun. And at some point,

It's hard to tell exactly what happens, but the gun goes off and a shot goes up into the sky. Into the icy air. And at that point, an army scout, or either just before, just after, it's hard to tell, shouts, look out, they're shooting, they're shooting. And the commanding officer...

Colonel Forsyth just loses it completely. Because everything has presumably prepped him to lose it. I guess so, Tom. You're being very generous. I mean, they have worked themselves up into a state where they think they are confronting dangerous hostiles. Yes, of course. And they are doing it in the context of everything that had gone before. They think that they are still

a part of this history that they are so familiar with. I guess, yeah, you're right. You're right. And actually the comparison is with, think of so many imperial massacres in history by colonial forces against, you know, occupying forces. Yeah. But I think particularly with this, that sense of the drama of this great period of history where the two sides have been matching each other and now that has gone. And it's almost as though people on both sides are

can't bear to let it go. Yeah, I can see why you're saying that. You can understand that with the ghost dance. You know, you'd want to believe that there's a possibility that the buffalo will come back, that the white people will go, that it will go back to being the way it was. But don't you think there's possibly also a sense on the part of the American army that just

just to kind of patrol refugees and coral them up is kind of demeaning compared to riding into battle and coming up against Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse or warriors of that caliber. I mean, a bit like the young boys of the Lakota wanting to prove themselves. You know, there's a new generation of the 7th Cavalry and they want to feel that they are part of this story too, don't you think? I do, Tom. I think that you're absolutely right. I think, um,

There's a sense in which everybody there is kind of play acting in the way that they have been. Yeah. So the Buffalo Bill stuff and the Sitting Bull cabin being taken on tour and things, it's becoming a kind of drama and now they're back in it. I completely agree with you. I think there's an element of the kind of role playing going on, particularly from the 7th Cavalry. It was also there in the press reports that we talked about last time, predicting this great Indian war. They wanted to believe that something was going to happen, but

But also, I don't know, it always seems to me with this story that so much of the great saga has been played out in very dramatic technicolor scenes in baking heat and dust and light. And now it's monochrome. Yeah, really dark, cold, snowy, pathetic and bleak ending. And it's the blood on snow. The blood on the snow, yeah. So the soldiers, when Forsyth's shouted, start shooting fire, fire on them.

the soldiers immediately, as in so many massacres in history, they just start shooting and then it becomes infectious. The extraordinary thing is, of course, he has put his men in a circle. The soldiers are killing each other. So this is one of the things that outrages his commanders about this, is that actually soldiers shoot each other in the chaos. It's so squalid, isn't it? Friendly fire, women and children dead. I mean, it's kind of the worst. But in the middle...

300 people, there were children playing games, there were boys playing leapfrog. The boys who play leapfrog all die immediately. They're just torn apart by bullets. At that point, those Sioux who have weapons, so knives, clubs, some of them do have hidden guns or they grab guns from soldiers. They try to fight back and it just degenerates straight away into this horrendous sort of orgy of bloodshed.

And the soldiers, of course, what happens in those first few moments confirms what the soldiers suspected, right? That, you know, we are facing these dreadfully savage people and they're going to turn on us. And they're like, oh, they have. So they become even more relentless. The artillery use these machine guns, these Hotchkiss guns, and they are just ripping through, as

As you said, refugees is the word. They're ripping through these unarmed refugees. Lots of people try to run for it. They run into a ravine. But the soldiers then take the machine guns and fire down into the ravine to kill all the people hiding there. Even when women and children crawl out of the ravine, troopers follow them, shooting at them. And...

just as Black Kettle Rashita was killed isn't Bigfoot he's shot in the back isn't he? He's shot in the back and so is his daughter Oh his daughter too He's shot in the back first she runs to his body and they shoot her in the back

Those who survive, so almost all the men are killed. Women and children, they try to take refuge in the sort of surrounding canyons and things. And the soldiers fire. They fire, keep firing. They follow them when they find piles of bodies, when they find children, small children moving. I mean, fair to point out, Custer behaved better.

than that. Custer tried to restrain, at the Washita massacre, he tried to restrain his men from killing women and children. In this case, there's clearly a sort of tacit encouragement. Exterminate all the brutes. Correct. We must now eliminate everybody. I mean, it's a terrible story, actually. So some of the privates are shocked. As in any massacre, there are some people who are appalled. And this private, as the firing is dying down, next to a pile of bodies of women and children, he finds two babies.

And they are still alive. And he picks them up and he starts to carry them off to a kind of hospital tent that had been set up overnight for the refugees. And a sergeant meets him and he says, what the hell are you doing? He says, smash their brains out against a tree because otherwise someday they'll be fighting us. And the private is horrified and he says to his sergeant, I would rather smash you than smash these children. But...

Most people there didn't think like that. So are they spared? Those two kids are spared, yeah. But they're a minority because of the 350-odd people who were there, about 300 of them are killed. And their bodies, the soldiers hack a kind of a trench into the frozen ground, and then they throw all the bodies in in a mass grave. And that is the massacre of Wounded Knee. And...

When word got back that this had happened, so obviously word travels almost immediately, General Miles, who is, we said before, a very ambitious man, decisive, ruthless, a hard man. He was married, as we said before, to Sherman's niece, General Sherman's niece. And he wrote to his wife and said it was the most abominable criminal military blunder, a horrible massacre of women and children. He is absolutely appalled by it.

And Miles, to his credit, says, we must have a big inquiry. You know, as it were, heads must roll. This is totally unacceptable. You know, he's horrified by it.

But it's actually too late because the first press reports have already gone back. There were journalists, you see, with the soldiers. As there always had been. And all of this time, the journalists have been ramping up the whole ghost dance hysteria. And Dominic, you said that lots of the Braves, well, they're not Braves anymore, are they? The men were wearing...

Ghost Dance shirts. Yes. Which supposedly can stop bullets and they didn't. We now have definitive proof that the Ghost Dance did not work. Sorry for those people who were hoping that they might have worked. It didn't.

So one of the first journalists, William Kelly, who was with the Lincoln State Journal, he said, oh, the Indians shot first. The Indians attacked us. Before night, I doubt if either a buck or a square out of all Bigfoot's band will be left to tell the tale of this day's treachery. The members of the 7th Cavalry have once more shown themselves to be heroes in deeds of daring. I mean, a terrible thing to write about what was obviously just such a horrific massacre. But most Americans wanted to believe that at the time. They'd be conditioned to believe it.

But also they're itching for payback, right? It's the 7th Cavalry, Custer's regiment. But it's only payback if they're facing dangerous hostiles. Of course. And so that's what they have to be told. But people say, well, it starts to get out, there's a lot of women and children. But the New York Tribune, a Sioux squaw is as bad an enemy as a man. And the little boys can shoot quite as well as their fathers. In other words, yeah, sure, they're women and children, but they're still fair game. Kill them all. So they held an inquiry. Colonel Forsyth was cleared. Miles was acquitted.

furious at this. I mean, it's striking how it is actually the high command in the army

who are much more alert to the squalid nature of what the army has been up to than the civilians. The civilians throughout this whole story, the politicians by and large, disgrace themselves. I mean, a perfect example, the Secretary of War, Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of War guy called Redfield Proctor. Classic. Two surnames instead of one first name and a name. Always a bad sign. Always a bad sign.

He said, the conduct of both officers and men throughout the whole affair demonstrates an exceedingly satisfactory state of discipline in the 7th Cavalry. Their behavior was characterized by skill, coolness, discretion, forbearance, and reflects the highest possible credit upon their regiment. I mean, incredible. Absolutely incredible.

So there were no consequences from the massacre at Wounded Knee. The ghost dance business basically fizzled out immediately thereafter. General Miles' combination, which was the combination that the army had used successfully since the 1870s of carrot and stick.

He tightens the cordon around the reservations, rounds up any stragglers. But he says, if you go back to the reservation, if you abandon this ghost dance nonsense, we will be lenient. We will give you food. We will even give you gifts. We will give you perks and things. And Dominic, isn't there also a further option that they can go into show business? Yeah, of course. Of course they can go into show business. Miles had 27 ghost dancers arrested.

And 23 of them chose to sign up with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. And they had their sentences commuted as recompense for doing that.

And I mean this, I find this just an absolutely mind-boggling story. These included Kicking Bear and Short Bull, who were the two guys who had gone on that kind of big pilgrimage to bring the word of the ghost dance to the Lakota. They said, fine, it's all done, Dusty. It's all over. It's all gone. We'll sign up with Buffalo Bill. They were allowed out of jail to join Buffalo Bill's show and go on a tour of Europe.

So off they go to Europe. We have the adverts from the London newspapers. Buffalo Bill said, I will be exhibiting the prisoners taken in the heroic battle at Wounded Knee. The Battle of Wounded Knee, not the massacre. Yeah, exactly. 50 of the worst Indians engaged in the Wounded Knee fight. These guys weren't even there.

I mean, that's the incredible thing. There's a stage show, you'd see it in London or in Paris or whatever, and they would re-enact the battle and these guys would play the villains, the defeated villains. So they come on and there are boos and hisses and- Exactly. And there's a terrible detail. I can't remember which book I read this in, but it's unforgettable. The very last date of the tour was in Glasgow in Scotland.

And when the show was over and they were leaving, Kicking Bear insisted on staying on the stage. He didn't leave the stage with the other performers. And he started speaking to the audience. What he was actually doing, people think, was telling them what had really happened. Putting right what had unfolded in the last two hours. But he was speaking in Lakota. No one could understand him. Nobody knew what he meant and nobody knows what he said. Isn't that sad? Yeah. A couple of years later, 1893...

Frederick Jackson Turner, a very famous American historian, wrote an article called The Significance of the Frontier in American History, one of the most famous things ever written about American history. And he said, the US has been living this extraordinary historic movement. This has been a specific moment in world history.

where the conquest of the West, what the Mediterranean was to the Greeks, the frontier has been to the United States and directly into Europe, more indirectly. And now he says four centuries from the discovery of America, I suppose discovery of America isn't a phrase you'd use now, discovery of America at the end of 100 years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone and with its going has closed the first period of American history. So the frontier is gone.

Every last Native American has been rounded up and basically incarcerated on a reservation. White settlement has spread across all the Great Plains, all the intervening states between the two coasts. And most people think this is the end. This is the end of Native Americans. They will wither and they will either die out or they will become... Be assimilated. Totally assimilated, which actually doesn't happen. I mean, that's one of the things that they got wrong because there are still...

almost 4 million people in the United States who identify in the census as belonging to one specific tribe. And there are about 6 million people who are mixed. So they might be half Cherokee or half Lakota or whatever.

So that gives you a total of almost 10 million people, which is about 3% of the total. And as we all know, they tend to be by far the poorest, the least likely to have jobs, the least likely to live to a ripe old age in good health. And they live in places where

blighted by unemployment, alcoholism, opioid addiction, all of these kinds of things, and have done for decades. But Dominic, just on the history, the way the history of this story is understood. Yeah. I mean, there is a case for saying, I think more than a case, I think it's clearly true that today the Native American understanding of what happened has a salience that is inconceivably greater than it was at the time when the massacre of Wounded Knee was being presented as a glorious victory.

that in a way, the Native American perspective has triumphed. Yeah, I think you're right in terms of the historiography. So since Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. But I wonder, even before that, somebody sent me, I hadn't seen it, a song by Johnny Cash called Custer.

Now I will tell you, Buster, that I ain't a fan of Custer, which he wrote in, I think, 1964. And it was part of an album of tracks about Native Americans. And he was kind of claiming to have Cherokee ancestry. Oh, really? And in fact, he didn't at all. I mean, he was completely kind of British Irish ancestry. So he sang it with Buffy St. Marie, a very famous kind of activist.

claiming indigenous Canadian ancestry. But again, wasn't at all. And there is a sense, I think, that there are certainly descendants of the settlers who now want to identify with the people who were

Tom, I can feel you gearing up to explain that this is a consequence of their Christianity, that they empathise with the underdog and with the victim, because in suffering lies virtue. I think that is absolutely a part of it. I think that, I mean, there's no question that the Lakota did not celebrate the people whose lands they'd taken. They were not saying, oh, the poor crow, were they? No, no, they'd never have done that, would they?

No, they were not into that. And basically what is being commemorated is not the whole cutting off testicles stuff. No. It's not that. It is the sense of the cruelty and the horror of what happened to them. Yeah. But I guess also it's a bit what the reading that we began with, that even the most genocidal white people...

do recognise the heroic quality of the Lakota and kind of mourn it. I think so. So I think there is a kind of Christian reflex, the identification with the victim. Yeah. The sense that the victim ultimately triumphs over the victor. I mean, morally, but obviously not in terms of possession of land or anything or wealth. But I think there is also a response to the Homeric quality

that we've been talking about throughout the series. Totally there is. It's the coexistence of the Homeric with industrial civilization that makes this story so remarkable. I think that's absolutely true. I was really struck in the Museum of the American Indian in Washington. They have a very powerful little exhibition, which is basically depictions of Native Americans throughout American culture and history. And it's just basically endless redskins and scores and people with tomahawks hacking off heads and stuff.

And the way in which they've been used to sell everything, you know, from butter. Yeah, the Washington Redskins American football team who were renamed in 2020 and ended up becoming the Washington Commanders. The sense that it's not just the fact of the defeat, but it's also the indignities piled upon them afterwards. Yeah. But actually the Washington Redskins is a really interesting example because they dropped the name after the George Floyd murder, basically in response to Black Lives Matter. Yeah.

And I think there is still an element of...

Sure, you're never going to make a Western now in which the Plains Indians are the baddies. I mean, that's inconceivable. Well, you say that. I mean, I think the film is being made of Blood Meridian in which everyone is the baddie. Yeah, that's fine. You could do that, I think, but I don't think you could do a John Wayne type film, right? No, no, no. But I do think the issue, frankly, is not seen as glamorous, as morally virtuous or as salient as the issue, for example, of slavery.

So that project that we talked about when we did the American Revolution episodes, the 1619 project run by the New York Times, which was an attempt to basically recalibrate all American history on very woke lines and make it all about slavery and all about the sufferings of African Americans. They do that with African Americans, but they wouldn't do it. It wouldn't be as sexy if they did it with Native Americans. There's a sense I always think

that this is an under-discussed, a massively under-discussed area

of American history. But it must kind of shadow Thanksgiving. Of course it doesn't. How many of those films have you seen where like Will Ferrell is travelling and he has to make it back to Thanksgiving and, you know, there's no... No, I know. But I think it is to a degree now. I think every time Thanksgiving comes around, people say, well, who gives us the food? I think the only people that say that are academics on social media. Yeah, maybe. But I think against that, there is a sense of the kind of the power. I mean, it's almost like a kind of a desire to rewild society.

the Great Plains. Yeah, of course. You know, see the buffalo back, see the wolf back, but also see the cultures that existed there come back. But the tragedy of that, right, is that those cultures are now trapped in aspic and people want them to be trapped in aspic. So I talked in a previous episode about how I'd been on holiday to the American Southwest and been to Monument Valley, which is actually run by Navajo. And there, yeah,

Basically, the communities make their money by playing themselves. Yeah, by cosplaying. Yeah, by playing their own ancestors. And I find it... I mean, I wasn't that unsettled by it because I still went, but it was on my mind the whole time. I mean, this is Buffalo Bill. It's basically Buffalo Bill's show. It is Buffalo Bill. It absolutely is Buffalo Bill. It's woke Buffalo Bill. I completely agree. But the...

But the thing that I think is striking about this, and another reason why it is so powerful and yet so tragic, is that far from embodying, you know, we've said this before, but a kind of timeless culture, it's a brief moment in the sun that the Lakota are predatory expansionists in exactly the way that the settlers are. It's just that the settlers come in such overwhelming numbers that ultimately the Lakota have no chance of withstanding them. But they do have this fleeting moment of

And the power of their culture is such that it has triumphed over the victors. I think people do feel its power. They do feel a kind of regret for it. I think they do. But I think it's going too far to say it's triumphed over the victors though, Tom. I mean, what's the balance of sympathy been with in this series? I would say with the Lakota, not with the 7th Cavalry. Yeah. I mean, I kind of respect the courage of members of the 7th Cavalry who rode...

with Custer. I mean, I really do. But I would say the balance of sympathy is with those who end up losing. Sure. But I think that's not the victory you'd want to win, right? I'm not saying it isn't. Of course. I mean, they've lost everything. Yeah. But I don't think that the narrative that says the brave boys of the 7th Cavalry behaved with perfect discipline, which is what Sherman is writing about Custer's performance

performance at Washita and then, you know, performance of the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee. I don't think that that is the perspective anymore. No, it isn't. You're right. I think within the Academy, indeed in popular history and in popular renditions of this story. But I think popular culture as well. Popular culture. Yeah, of course. In Hollywood and everything. Of course. I mean, I agree that is small compensation. Yeah. But it's better than nothing. I guess the other interesting question is how could it have been different? So...

I think it's actually really hard to imagine how it could have played out differently. I was thinking about the contrast with the other story we did, which is a bit like this, which is Mexico. The difference in Mexico is that the indigenous people are sedentary. They have cities. They're not blown away by the arrival of European civilization because they're already there. And actually what happens is there's quite quickly a fusion between European arrivals and the existing peoples of kind of Mexico, Mesoamerica.

Here, that wasn't possible because they're not sedentary. They don't have cities. They don't have towns. They're moving, and their entire way of life is predicated, actually,

on an ecosystem that would be destroyed by the arrival of mass migration from across the sea. But I do think the blaze of their destruction does kind of linger in a way that the destruction of other peoples in America hasn't. Of course. The image of the Lakota warrior with the war paint and the feathers particularly is the image of the Native American in the world. Yeah, it is. To that extent, I think that is tribute to the power

of this story and the tragedy of it. It is. Tom, you're very keen to find that silver lining, aren't you? Well, I mean, it's such a downer. Anyway, listen, this has been an epic sweep, so we should come to a close. And it's been a long series, our longest yet. Yeah, to give people a sense. For this, uniquely, we've recorded this episode at 7.30 in the morning.

because we ran out of time. We had literally no hours to record because we'd recorded so many episodes. We keep putting in the schedule, finish this series. Oh, we've got three more we need to do. Anyway, thank you all, those of you who have accompanied us this far to the bitter end. Thank you very much for listening. And we'll be back soon with something I suspect a little shorter. Shorter and very different. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.