Wounded Knee Quotes

We have been south and suffered a great deal down there. Many have died of diseases which we have no name for. Our hearts looked and longed for this country where we were born. There are only a few of us left, and we only wanted a little ground, where we could live. We left our lodges standing, and ran away in the night. The troops followed us. I rode out and told the troops we did not want to fight; we only wanted to go north, and if they would let us alone we would kill no one. The only reply we got was a volley. After that we had to fight our way, but we killed none who did not fire at us first. My brother, Dull Knife, took one-half of the band and surrendered near Fort Robinson…They gave up their guns, and then the whites killed them all.

– Little Wolf

Chief of the Northern Cheyennes responds to Lt. William P. Clark, who asked him and his followers to give up their horses and guns. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

All we ask is to be allowed to live, and live in peace…We bowed to the will of the Great Father and went south. There we found a Cheyenne cannot live. So we came home. Better it was, we thought, to die fighting than to perish of sickness…You may kill me here; but you cannot make me go back. We will not go. The only way to get us there is to come in here with clubs and knock us on the head, and drag us out and take us down there dead.

– Dull Knife

Chief of the Northern Cheyennes. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more…My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land. I wish to be an old man here…I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father. Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land…When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us…My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed.

– Standing Bear

Chief of the Poncas. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

The soldiers came to the borders of the village and forced us across the Niobrara to the other side, just as one would drive a herd of ponies; and the soldiers pushed us on until we came to the Platte River. They drove us on in advance just as if we were a herd of ponies, and I said, ‘If I have to go, I’ll go to that land. Let the soldiers go away, our women are afraid of them.’ And so I reached the Warm Land [Indian Territory]. We found the land there was bad and we were dying one after another, and we said, ‘What man will take pity on us?’ And our animals died. Oh, it was very hot. ‘This land is truly sickly, and we’ll be apt to die here, and we hope the Great Father will take us back again.’ That is what we said. There were one hundred of us died there.

– White Eagle

Chief of the Poncas, speaking at the Ponca Commission meeting, which was headed on the U.S. side by General George Crook. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

There was no hope on earth, and God seemed to have forgotten us. Some said they saw the Son of God; others did not see Him. If He had come, He would do some great things as He had done before. We doubted it because we had seen neither Him nor His works.

The people did not know; they did not care. They snatched at the hope. They screamed like crazy men to Him for mercy. They caught at the promise they heard He had made.

The white men were frightened and called for soldiers. We had begged for life, and the white men thought we wanted theirs. We heard that soldiers were coming. We did not fear. We hoped that we could tell them our troubles and get help. A white man said the soldiers meant to kill us. We did not believe it, but some were frightened and ran away to the Badlands.

– Red Cloud

Oglala Sioux chief, in speech after the Massacre of Wounded Knee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

This war did not spring up here in our land; this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land from us without price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things…This war has come from robbery – from the stealing of our land.

– Spotted Tail

Chief of the Brule Sioux accuses the government and its commissioners of betraying the Indians, of broken promises and false words. This was during a speech when government commissioners came to Nebraska to negotiate with Sioux agencies for the Black Hills, where gold had been found. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.

And so the general announced that he would pay a reward for Delshay’s head. In July, 1874, two mercenary Apaches reported separately to Crooks headquarters. Each presented a severed head, identified as Delshay’s. Being satisfied that both parties were earnest in their beliefs, Crook said, and the bringing in of an extra head was not amiss, I paid both parties.

– Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Chief Delshay was leader of the Tonto Apaches and the general referred to is U.S. Army General George Crook.

Living in a paradise of magnificent meadows and forests abundant with wild game, berries, and nuts, the Utes were self-supporting and could have existed entirely without the provisions doled out to them by their agents at Los Pinos and White River. In 1875 agent F. F. Bond at Los Pinos replied to a request for a census of his Utes: A count is quite impossible. You might as well try to count a swarm of bees when on the wing. They travel all over the country like the deer which they hunt. Agent E. H. Danforth at White River estimated that about nine hundred Utes used his agency as a headquarters, but he admitted that he had no luck in inducing them to settle down in the valley around the agency. At both places, the Utes humoured their agents by keeping small beef herds and planting a few rows of corn, potatoes, and turnips, but there was no real need for any of these pursuits.

The beginning of the end of freedom upon their own reservation came in the spring of 1878, when a new agent reported for duty at White River. The agents name was Nathan C. Meeker, former poet, novelist, newspaper correspondent, and organizer of cooperative agrarian colonies. Most of Meekers ventures failed, and although he sought the agency position because he needed the money, he was possessed of a missionary fervor and sincerely believed that it was his duty as a member of a superior race to ‘elevate and enlighten’ the Utes. As he phrased it, he was determined to bring them out of savagery through the pastoral stage to the barbaric, and finally to ‘the enlightened, scientific, and religious stage.’ Meeker was confident he could accomplish all this in five, ten, or twenty years.

In his humourless and overbearing way, Meeker set out systematically to destroy everything the Utes cherished, to make them over into his image, as he believed he had been made in Gods image.

– Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Before these laws could be put into effect, a new wave of white settlers swept westward and formed the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa. This made it necessary for the policy makers in Washington to shift the permanent Indian frontier from the Mississippi River to the 95th meridian. (This line ran from Lake of the Woods on what is now the Minnesota-Canada border, slicing southward through what are now the states of Minnesota and Iowa, and then along the western borders of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, to Galveston Bay, Texas.) To keep the Indians beyond the 95th meridian and to prevent unauthorized white men from crossing it, soldiers were garrisoned in a series of military posts that ran southward from Fort Snelling on the Mississippi River to forts Atkinson and Leavenworth on the Missouri, forts Gibson and Smith on the Arkansas, Fort Towson on the Red, and Fort Jesup in Louisiana.

– Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. The laws referred to were the Act passed by U.S. Congress on June 30, 1844 An Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes, and to Preserve Peace on the Frontiers.

Although this country was once wholly inhabited by Indians, the tribes, and many of them once powerful, who occupied the countries now constituting the states east of the Mississippi, have, one by one, been exterminated in their abortive attempts to stem the western march of civilization…If any tribe remonstrated against the violation of their natural and treaty rights, members of the tribe were inhumanly shot down and the whole treated as mere dogs…It is presumed that humanity dictated the original policy of the removal and concentration of the Indians in the West to save them from threatened extinction. But today, by reason of the immense augmentation of the American population, and the extension of their settlements throughout the entire West, covering both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian races are more seriously threatened with a speedy extermination.

– Ely Parker

Seneca Indian, and first Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown – Chapter 8.
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