Not Manifest Destiny

Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre

Heather Cox Richardson, 2010

In his blurb for Richardson’s third book in six years, her UMass Amherst colleague Leonard Richards praised a “mastery that brings even her bit players to life.” It’s a great subject, and Richardson told us a lot of things we didn’t know. The 1890 South Dakota campaign was “the largest military mobilization of the U. S. Army since the Civil War,” for example. Not so surprising, then, how it ended up. But the best thing, I thought, was the way she brought the story to life. The introduction summarized the massacre in fairly graphic terms. The rest of the book told the story leading up to the event. Then it was narrated again, completely, in close, graphic detail. But unlike many of the older histories I’ve been reading recently, Richardson wasn’t making these details up. Nearly every paragraph closes with a citation number; even the one in which she speculated about how noisy it must have been. But she was not really even guessing about that. Richardson had transcripts of eye-witness interviews to set the scene with “hooves hitting hard-packed earth, men calling to each other in both English and Lakota, wagons creaking, horses snorting, spurs rattling, people coughing”

The storm that buried the bodies of the Indian dead (the soldiers removed their own casualties immediately) the night after the massacre “quickly blew east...to Washington...[where] the social season was in full swing” This was an effective way to connect these two narratives. The story was as much about national party politics as it was about the Dakota territory. Richardson explained how “the Sioux...became crucial figures in the 1890 election” But even when it was a nearly straight-up political history, Wounded Knee never completely lost sight of people. As a result, the Sherman brothers were as interesting as Sitting Bull; especially at moments like the one when Richardson showed the aging General congratulating himself that in helping clear the frontier for white settlement “I have done more good for our country and for the human race than I did in the Civil War”.

Richardson provided background readers needed to understand the political stakes, without slowing the pace. The section on economic policy was one of the clearest short descriptions I’ve seen. It could be (note to self) excerpted for an undergrad class: “trusts could not survive without tariffs”. And in the midst of what might have been a dry and impersonal political background, Richardson inserted a description of someone’s physical appearance or a quirk of character to remind the reader that these were people we were reading about, not abstract historical forces.

There was a lot of contingency in Wounded Knee but there was also a lot of venality, incompetence, and malice on both sides. But regardless of mistakes or poor judgments the Indians may have made, this was a massacre. Women and children were murdered for no reason and Richardson was not afraid to say so. The one possible downside of the story’s pace was that it was difficult to understand when characters changed and what motivated them. General Miles’ change of heart about the danger the Indians posed and his tendency to respond with annoyance, anger, and then rage, was one of those moments. One of the most interesting aspects of the story was its aftermath. The way cover-up gave way to revisionism, where the Seventh Cavalry was lauded for another heroic victory, was not only interesting and ironic in it’s time. It’s still happening. Not just in the sense of new crises being manufactured to justify or camouflage political machinations in Washington. But in the sense that these old, fake stories are still believed by many people in the western states where it all happened. Does this suggest that out current crop of manufactured crises may become similarly enduring myths of America?

It might be interesting at some point to study the legacy of the Indian Wars in the upper plains states. I've been to Wounded Knee. Big metal sign on empty land, peppered with buckshot. But, closer to home, what do the people of Mankato, Minnesota know, for example, about the execution that happened on the site of their public library? There’s a big statue of a bison next to the building, and a sign declaring that a few square feet across the street are a “reconciliation park.” You can see it most clearly from the bay windows of the children’s section. “See the pretty buffalo!” you can hear them say to their toddlers -- but do any of the parents know what it is?