Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he was cancelling the Pentagon’s review of the Medals of Honor given to cavalry soldiers who participated in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, where over 300 Lakota men, women, and children were gunned down. The slaughter came shortly after the assassination of Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader, in 1889 outside his cabin at Standing Rock, the Sioux reservation in what was then the Dakota territory.
The killing occurred for various reasons. In 1876, the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other allied tribes won a great victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Civil War hero Lt. Colonel. George Armstrong Custer was felled in what became famous as “Custer’s Last Stand,” an incident which has spawned countless books and theories, all still hotly debated in social media forums. Although Sitting Bull did not kill Custer, he was blamed for it, and newspapers nationwide demanded his capture. He had become Public Enemy Number One.
He fled with his people to Canada, where he stayed for six years before returning in 1882. At that time, buffalo populations “across the Medicine Line,” as Native Americans called it, had diminished, and the U.S. government was pressuring Canada to deport Sitting Bull. As Native Americans lost their land and way of life, a phenomenon called “ghost dancing” emerged. It was promoted by a Paiute prophet (or a con man, depending on your view) named Wovoka, who spoke of restoring the old ways before white settlers arrived and bringing back the buffalo if people implored the Creator in ceremonies. Ghost Dances spread across reservations on the Great Plains, and the army saw them as a threat. The dancing was especially intense at Standing Rock, where Sitting Bull lived. Once again, he was blamed for the situation, with officials now viewing the dancing as a way to get rid of Sitting Bull—and exact revenge for the Lakota victory at the Little Bighorn, which was a huge embarrassment for the cavalry, particularly since it occurred just before the July 4 celebrations.
The Medal of Honor review began during Joe Biden’s administration at the behest of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In July, 2024, Austin “directed the Defense Department to review the Medals of Honor awarded to approximately 20 soldiers for their actions during the December 1890 engagement at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, to ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor,” according to the Department of Defense. Native Americans—and many white allies—have sought the rescission for years. In response, in 1990, Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret”—not an apology—for the incident, which even General Nelson Miles, prominent Civil War hero and leading figure of the Indian wars, called “an abomination” at the time of the massacre. In 2016, a further reconciliation with Native Americans was made when President Barack Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act, making the buffalo the national mammal, finally, after it had been wiped out by hunters in the 19th century and served as the symbol of the Department of the Interior for years. The Medals of Honor review was underway at the time of the 2024 election, but no decision had been reached, and Austin left office in January 2025 following Biden’s loss.
Although the panel never made a recommendation, had Biden been re-elected and the medals rescinded, it would have been another landmark in federal policy towards Native Americans, along with the ground-breaking report on Native American boarding schools presented by Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
The famed American soldier, hunter, and showman William Fredrick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, was one of the first and most illustrious figures who tried to make amends for the massacre. He did so by producing a film about it in 1913, a signature re-enactment, using Lakota actors whose relatives had been slain there. Bill, one of the most celebrated men in the world, was known for his touring spectacle, “The Wild West Show,” which featured cowboys and Indians re-creating frontier battles and displaying equestrian feats to the delight of packed arenas across America and abroad. The show included Sitting Bull for four months in 1885. I wrote about the unexpected showbiz alliance of these two towering figures in my book Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship Between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.
I consulted Chief Arvol Looking-Horse, Lakota elder and 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, to write this book. I wanted to know about the legendary “dancing horse” that was outside Sitting Bull’s cabin at the time of his assassination, said to have danced as the shots were fired, trained to do so at the sound of gunfire in the Wild West Show. The image led me to write this book; I could not stop thinking about it since I read it while working on a previous book called Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. What I learned from Chief Looking-Horse opened up a portal into a story whose parameters were already deep and wide. He told me it was the horse taking the bullets for Sitting Bull—not literally, but in spirit.
This was the horse that Buffalo Bill had given to Sitting Bull upon the chief’s departure from the Wild West Show. He had joined the cavalcade to see what changes were occurring across the land and to serve as an ambassador for Lakota culture, the highest-paid member of Cody’s cast. After four months, he decided that he had accomplished his mission. He had encountered many fans and foes during his tour and he had witnessed the technological advances that were underway in American cities. But he was disturbed by many things, including the fact that young wastrels were wandering the streets in many of these locations, and he couldn’t understand how such a wealthy country permitted this to happen. Often, he gave his salary to these destitute kids. Although Cody hoped to remain with the show, he longed to return home to Standing Rock, having witnessed the end of his way of life and seen enough of what had disrupted it. After his death, the dancing horse landed in another Wild West spectacle in Germany; when Buffalo Bill found out, he purchased it outright, and the last anyone knows, as I write in my book, “the horse made another appearance, in 1893, during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was draped with an American flag and ridden in a parade by Buffalo Bill or someone else, the record is unclear, a silent tribute to his friend.”
Unlike his hugely popular traveling circus, Buffalo Bill’s film about Sitting Bull was a flop. However, a very short segment endures at the eponymous Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, one of five museums at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. History is nuanced: Here we have a story of a failed attempt from a legendary American icon to make things right—and now it’s being shut down again. In this excerpt from Blood Brothers, I explain what happened.
With the film industry beginning to flourish in the late 19th and early 20th century, most surviving frontier characters—those of note and lesser-known working cowboys—converged in Hollywood. Trapped in their personas, they had nothing to do except get paid to be some version of themselves. Like the others, Buffalo Bill turned to the new mythmaking machinery for the last phase of his life. But he was not content with his accomplishments and wanted to be more than “Buffalo Bill.” “I grow very tired of this sort of sham hero-worship sometimes,” he told a friend in 1897. He wanted to present the real story of the West, which is to say, not the myth at all. Thomas Edison had already filmed Cody’s show in 1894, and in 1910 and 1911, Buffalo Bill had filmed parts of it as well. He understood the power of film, and it was time to set the record straight. In 1913, he decided to produce a movie called The Last Indian Battles from the War Path to the Peace Pipe. Among other things, it featured General Miles, the cavalry acting out the massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, and participants, including Native Americans, playing themselves. Some of the cast members had not only survived Wounded Knee but had served on one side or the other in the Battle of the Little Bighorn as well. The film had the blessing of the Departments of War and Interior, with Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane asking the Pine Ridge Agency superintendent to make sure that it “included pictures of the children in school working and on the farm, and otherwise industrially engaged. The whole presenting an historical event of the progress of the Indians for the last twenty years,” according to the Rapid City Daily Journal on October 22, 1913. The military was hoping that the film would present the army in a positive light, portraying its role in paving the way for settlers and protecting them in their westward journeys.
Yet there was disagreement as to how to depict Wounded Knee. One military advisor asked Cody to hold back footage of the incident unless the War Department approved it. Cody agreed. General Miles did not want Wounded Knee included at all. He blamed subordinates for the massacre, stating in his autobiography that “I have never felt that the action was judicious or justifiable, and have always believed that it could have been avoided.” But Cody did go ahead and film the event; after all, re-enactments were what he was known for—and this one was to be placed in a context that was not sensational like his shows, but an accounting that pulled no punches and portrayed exactly what happened. Yet this time, women and children were not part of the re-created story; General Miles had ordered that they not be included. Miles remained at the Pine Ridge Agency, away from the action, while the Wounded Knee segment was filmed. It was a complicated enterprise. To make this part of the movie, Cody reconstructed the Lakota village along the creek where Big Foot’s band had assembled. (The Minneconjou tribal elder and Lakota ally was the leader of those who had fled to the creek to hide from further repercussions.) “Painted canvas teepees sheltered extended families,” reported American History magazine, “few of which did not grieve for an absent loved one.” There were wails and sobs, and hundreds of soldiers were cleaning their rifles and wheeling in Hotchkiss guns. “Some Sioux wondered if the coming morning’s battle would really be pretend. Or were they to be slaughtered like their ancestors? Painted stick markers shuddered above the sacred grave as the increasing wind filled it with snow. Younger braves thought perhaps the time had come for vengeance. Some talked of loading their rifles with live rounds instead of blanks. Soon, death songs shrilled above thudding drums.”
From the bluffs above, Cody watched the action, along with his wife, Louisa, who had recently rejoined him after their estrangement. Some of the Indians who had traveled with Cody warned him of the threats; a council was quickly arranged in the mess tent, and Cody assured the young men that they were indeed making a movie, and no one was to be killed. On the morning of October 13, 1913, the cameras rolled. “The air erupted with gun smoke, shrieks, and howls. Rifles crackled and ponies whirled,” reported American History. “With the camp aflame, people fled down into the ravine and the artillery lobbed shells into their midst. It was a tragic, bloody business.” In the following days, other aspects of the final days of the Lakota were filmed: the Sioux in starving conditions, Ghost Dances, Sitting Bull’s arrest and death. Even the final siege of the Lakota in the Badlands was filmed, after an arduous 55-mile trek for fifty Sioux families, and a company of troops and heavy wagons loaded with hay, grain, and provisions. Finally, day-to-day life on the reservation was filmed, featuring children in school and farmers harvesting crops. On October 30, Cody hosted a grand celebration to mark the end of production. Fifty-three of the Native American actors had been stranded in Denver when his show had gone bankrupt earlier, and he had not yet paid them. “You have been my friends and I am going to be yours,” he said, and then he wrote a check for $1,313 in back salaries. Later, he headed south in his new seven-passenger Ford touring car. In February 1914, Cody went to Washington, D.C., to screen his films for members of President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, congressmen, and reporters. “Cody was still straight as the arrows that have whizzed around his noble head,” one reporter said. The audience of one thousand was spellbound. “It has been my object and my desire,” Cody said, “to preserve history by the aid of the camera, with the living participants who took an active part in the Indian wars of America.”
On March 8, he was back in Denver, introducing the films to a packed house for a weekly run, twice daily, at the Tabor Grand Opera House. “Nothing like this has ever been done before,” said the Denver Post. “It is War, itself, grim, unpitying, and terrible, and it holds your heart still as you watch it and leaves you in the end, amazed at the courage and the folly of mankind.” On March 28, Cody’s publicist, self-dubbed “Major” John M. Burke, announced that once again Cody had a fortune in sight and “the world by the ears.” But that did not happen. The film fared poorly, possibly because it was too realistic or too intense, criticized by Indians for excluding women and children from the massacre, and not appreciated by whites, who were unimpressed by the anticlimactic ending where Indians were assimilated and went to school, instead of going on the warpath. The movie was cut down into a shorter version called The Adventures of Buffalo Bill. The entire documentary was supposedly donated to archives at the War and Interior Departments, but there is no record that it was ever received. However, a two-minute segment was viewed nearly 20 years ago at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody (now the Buffalo Bill Center for the West) by Andrea I. Paul, reporting for Nebraska History Magazine in the winter 1990 edition. While the clip does not include the incident at Wounded Knee, it does include footage of the Wounded Knee period. The rest of the film portrays scouting and cavalry maneuvers at the Battle of Warbonnet Creek, and a scene of Cody en route to Sitting Bull’s cabin, intercepted by Indian police before he can intervene for his friend to head off a likely assassination. Yet to this day, remnants of the film are rumored to exist elsewhere—a disintegrating and mysterious relic, a side of Buffalo Bill that may be lost to the ages.
Related
