Spotted Elk

Spotted Elk was leading his people to what he hoped was safety when they were killed at Wounded Knee. He was a Miniconjou Lakota chief, a son of Lone Horn, and had a reputation as a negotiator rather than a war leader - other bands sent for him to settle quarrels. He had been at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and had come onto the reservation afterwards, where he took up farming and pressed for the schools the treaties promised. The Ghost Dance spread through the reservations in 1890, a movement of renewal that promised the return of the dead and the buffalo and involved no fighting at all. The agents read it as a rising and called for troops. Sitting Bull was killed on 15 December during an arrest at Standing Rock, and some of his people fled to Spotted Elk's band. He set out for Pine Ridge to seek the protection of Red Cloud, and had pneumonia badly enough on the way that he travelled in a wagon, coughing blood, with a white flag raised. The Seventh Cavalry intercepted the band and camped them at Wounded Knee Creek with Hotchkiss guns on the rise above. During disarming on the morning of 29 December a shot went off, and some 250 to 300 Lakota were killed, more than half of them women and children, many hunted down in a ravine. He was shot where he lay, and the photograph of his frozen body is the one that fixed the event.

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