Letters from an American - December 28, 2025

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

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December 28th, 2025. On the clear cold morning of December 29th, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised. He had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated weapons for themselves.

As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky. Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers and their fists. As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day's travel, tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turn rapid fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours,

troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotovs. as they could find, about 250 men, women, and children. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29th that haunts me. What haunts me is the night of December 28th. On December 28th, there was still time to avert the massacre. In the early afternoon, Lakota leader Satanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Satanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation

in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Satanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation. For the soldiers, the surrender of Satanka's band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the ghost dance religion

to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, Army officers and negotiators had convinced those ghost dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest. Sitanka's people were not part of the Badlands Group, and for the most part were not ghost dancers. They had fled from their own Northern Reservation two weeks before, when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader's Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Satanka's missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would

spook the ghost dancers and send them flying back to the badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet. But South Dakota is a big state. and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28th that the soldiers finally made contact with Satanka's band. The encounter didn't go quite as the officers planned. A group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go

and the men promptly reported to their officers who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Satanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did. By this time, Satanka was so ill he couldn't sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance, an old wagon, for the trip to the wounded knee camp. His rag-tag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who

wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp, and the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now with the Lakota's surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Satanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again. In came the seventh cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.

For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome, and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all the, along, why were there so many soldiers with so many guns? On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakota's either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen. one of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters no matter how much we might wish to the past has its own terrible inevitability but it is never

too late to change the future you know every year on this date i post the story of the wounded knee massacre my book about that event was so hard to write i had to take a long break in the middle of it. When you write a book, you get to know your characters as if they were family. Sometimes you love them and sometimes you don't, but they become a part of you. As the massacre drew inexorably closer, I wrote about the scenery, plant life, and animals of the planes as a distraction from what I knew was coming. But it came anyway. Even after all these years, I still have a hard time on the date of the massacre. In an interview this year, someone asked me, why I write as if I am running out of time.

And it hit me that I write these letters because no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop the Wounded Knee Massacre. But maybe I can help to stop the next one. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.