September 26, 2025

Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that twenty men who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy over them. The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin, had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.” Hegseth today called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”

It’s fitting that Hegseth, a political appointee whose tenure has been marked by incompetence, would defend the awarding of those particular Medals of Honor, because they were awarded to cover up the incompetence of political appointees that led to the deaths of at least 230 peaceful Lakotas, as well as about twenty-five soldiers who were caught in their own crossfire.

The road to Wounded Knee started in 1884, when voters angry that the Republicans had sold out to big business elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency. The first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War, he promised to lower the tariffs that squeezed ordinary Americans in order to protect big business. Horrified at the growing opposition to a government that worked for those industrialists who would soon be called “robber barons,” Republicans began to circulate pamphlets as soon as Cleveland was elected, claiming that lowering the tariff would destroy the economy and warning that voters must return Republicans to power or face economic ruin.

In 1888, Cleveland nonetheless won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but after an extraordinarily corrupt campaign, Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison won in the Electoral College. This is “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” the editors of a pro-Harrison newspaper boasted. They predicted that “business men will be thoroughly well content with it.”

Knowing that the popular mood had turned against tariffs and the party that protected them, Harrison Republicans looked for ways to cement their control over the government.

Adding to the Union new states they believed would vote Republican would give them two more seats per state in the Senate, as well as a seat per state in the House of Representatives, and thus three more electors in the Electoral College, for each state has a number of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives combined. Between November 1889 and July 1890 the Republicans added five new states to the Union. They added Washington, Idaho, and Montana. They also divided the huge Dakota Territory in two, creating North Dakota and South Dakota. The new states should give the Republicans ten new seats in the Senate, Harrison’s men noted happily.

But the western half of what was supposed to become South Dakota belonged to the Lakotas. In 1889 the government forced the Lakotas to sign treaties agreeing to sell about half of their land and to move closer to six agencies on smaller reservations in what would soon be a new state. The government promised rations, health, care, education, and help with transitioning to a farming economy in exchange for the land, but that plan ran afoul of politics almost immediately.

The War Department and the Department of the Interior had fought over management of the Indigenous peoples in the U.S. for decades. Reservations were overseen by an “Indian agent,” who was in sole charge of spending the tens of thousands of dollars Congress appropriated to fund the various treaties the government had negotiated with different tribes. From that money, the agent was supposed to contract for food, clothing, tools, and supplies, as well as for the building of schools, mills, warehouses, and so on. Until 1883 this had been a plum political position, awarded to a political loyalist with the expectation that providing promised rations to Indigenous Americans was the least of his concerns: he was expected to spread that money to political allies to shore up their support.

The Army hated this system. If political appointees mismanaged their work, it was Army officers and their men who had the dangerous job of fighting angry warriors. Politicians noted that the Army all too often killed indiscriminately, and they refused to give up their power. But military men resented that political mistakes could cost soldiers their lives.

In 1883, after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress had passed the Civil Service Act that was supposed to do away with awarding government jobs based on political patronage. Cleveland had taken that charge seriously and had installed agents instructed to fulfill their job description. Harrison’s men, though, knew they needed western votes to hold control of the newly admitted states, and they spun the system back to one based on patronage.

Their most unfortunate appointment was that of Daniel Royer to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Royer was a staunch Republican, but he was also a failed medical man with a budding drug addiction and little knowledge of Lakotas. After he arrived in October 1890, the Lakotas named him “Young-Man-Afraid-of-Indians.”

Since being corralled on the six smaller reservations the previous year, the Lakotas had endured a deadly influenza epidemic that swept the U.S. and much of Europe and killed a number of Lakotas who were already weak from respiratory viruses. Then, hot winds in summer 1890 had burned dry first the Lakotas’ vegetable gardens, then their crops, and finally, the native hay crop.

White settlers suffering in the same drought abandoned their new homesteads and went back east. Hungry and desolate, Lakotas had to stay. Then a new census count came in lower than expected, and government officials cut their rations. Destitute and in real danger of starvation, some Lakotas turned to a new religious movement, the Ghost Dance, that promised to bring back the world of game and plenty that had been theirs before the coming of easterners.

The Ghost Dancers never hurt their non-Indigenous neighbors or threatened their property, and few settlers paid them much attention. But Royer interpreted the religious enthusiasm as a sign of an approaching war. Less than a week after arriving at Pine Ridge, Royer warned his superiors in the Interior Department in Washington, D.C., that he might need troops to keep order.

General Nelson Miles of the U.S. Army, who commanded the Division of the Missouri that included Pine Ridge, went to the reservation, where the Lakotas explained their crushing circumstances and suggested that neither Royer nor his predecessor had been much help. Miles brushed off Royer’s panic and told the Lakotas they could dance as they wished. When Royer told the Lakotas the next day that they must stop participating in the Ghost Dance, they laughed at him.

Back East, President Harrison and his men were focused on the 1890 midterms. Despite popular demand for a lower tariff, in a raucous session in October, Republicans in Congress actually raised tariff rates, promising voters that the higher rates of the McKinley Tariff would finally make the country boom.

A month later, angry voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed the Democrats a majority of more than two to one. Republicans hung onto power only through their lock on the Senate. There, the admission of the new states made up for losses elsewhere, and the Republicans had four more senators than their opponents did.

But of those four, three had voted against the McKinley Tariff. So the survival of the tariff hung on just one vote: that of a senator from South Dakota. In the nineteenth century, senators were chosen by the state legislature, and it looked at first as if the Republicans had won South Dakota’s. But then news broke that ballot boxes had been tampered with. Suddenly, the legislature was in play for all parties. Whoever won would control South Dakota’s Senate seat and the fate of the McKinley Tariff.

The Ghost Dance had continued to spread across the South Dakota reservations, and Royer was growing increasingly frightened. Some of the other agents were also agitated, sending back to their superiors letters full of exaggerated rumors. But Miles and officers stationed at the forts in South Dakota, all of whom had first-hand experience with the Lakotas, denied that the Lakotas were planning a war. Instead, the officers blamed the Lakotas’ anger on the mismanagement of food and supplies by the political appointees at the Interior Department. As soon as the agents addressed the Lakotas’ very real suffering, they said, the Ghost Dance movement would fade.

But with control of the South Dakota legislature hanging in the balance, Harrison was leaning toward sending in troops. Settlers liked the military, which brought contracts and government money into the chronically poor West. On November 20, 1890, troops marched into Pine Ridge.

Alarmed, Ghost Dancers rushed to the Badlands, where they could defend themselves.

For the next month, Army officers worked to bring them back to Pine Ridge. Then, on December 15, just as it seemed they had convinced them to return, a police officer murdered the famous leader Sitting Bull at Standing Rock Reservation on the northern edge of the state, and his panicked kinfolk fled south to Pine Ridge to take shelter with the renowned negotiator Red Cloud. Army officers were afraid the band would take news of Sitting Bull’s death to the Lakotas in the Badlands, derailing the negotiations, and set out to intercept them.

On December 28, on the southern side of the state, two members of the Lakota band overtook two Army scouts watering their horses and told the scouts they were on their way to Pine Ridge. The scouts informed their commander, who intercepted the Lakotas with guns and demanded an unconditional surrender. After the Lakotas agreed, the troops and the tired and hungry Lakotas set off for Pine Ridge. That night, they camped inside the reservation at Wounded Knee Creek.

During the night, a new commander, James Forsyth, took over. Dead set on a show of force, he insisted on disarming the Lakotas before they set off for the agency. Many of the young men refused to give up their guns, which were the only way they could feed their families through the winter. As soldiers tried to wrench a gun from a man’s hands, it went off into the sky. “Fire! Fire on them!” Forsyth screamed.

The soldiers did. The first volley brought down the men who were being disarmed, as well as about twenty-five of the soldiers themselves, who had moved into a circle around the Lakota men and boys during the course of the morning. In the haze from the gun smoke, Lakota men grabbed weapons from nearby soldiers and dove for the dry creek bed that ran behind the camp, hoping to hike along it and escape. The women and children had been separated from the Indian men during the morning. When the firing began, women ran for the wagons and horses.

But they could not escape. Over the next two hours, frenzied soldiers hunted down and killed every Lakota they could find. Soldiers trained artillery on the fleeing wagons as troops on horseback combed the hills for fugitives. Some of the escaping women were ridden down three miles from the encampment. When the wagons stopped moving, the soldiers moved the guns to the creek bed and shot everyone who moved. Within a few hours, at least 230 Lakotas, mostly women and children, were dead.

The outcry against this butchery started in the Army itself. Miles was incensed that the simple surrender of a peaceful band of Lakotas had become what he called a “criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children.” He demanded an inquiry into Forsyth’s actions. Miles’s report was so damning his own secretary asked him to soften it.

But President Harrison’s administration was in terrible electoral trouble, and his men wanted no part of an attack on soldiers that would imply that Harrison’s agents had first created a war and then mismanaged it. They dismissed Miles’s report with their own, which blamed the Lakotas for the massacre and concluded that the soldiers had acted the part of heroes. In spring 1891, President Harrison awarded the first of twenty Medals of Honor that would go to soldiers for their actions at Wounded Knee.

In the end, though, all of the political maneuvering by Harrison’s men came to naught. After weeks of squabbling, the South Dakota legislature rejected the Republican candidate and named an Independent senator who caucused with the Democrats. And in 1892, Harrison lost the presidency to Grover Cleveland, who promised lower tariffs and a return to civil service reform.

—

Notes:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/pete-hegseth-wounded-knee-massacre-medals-of-honor