moosey] THE WOUNDED KNEE BATTLE 869 



unavailing against the sacred "ghost shirts," which uearly everyone 

 of the Indians wore. As be spoke in the Sioux language, the officers 

 did not at once realize the dangerous drift of his talk, and the climax 

 came too quickly for them to interfere. It is said one of the searchers 

 now attempted to raise the blanket of a warrior. .Suddenly Fellow 

 Bird stooped down and threw a handful of dust into the air. when, as 

 if this were the signal, a young Indian, .said to have been Black Fox 

 from Cheyenne river, drew a rille from under his blanket and fired at 

 the soldiers, who instantly replied u ith a volley directly into the crowd 

 of warriors and so near that their guns were almost touching. From 

 the number of sticks set up by the Indians to mark where the dead 

 fell, as seen by the author a year later, this one volley must have killed 

 nearly half the warriors (plate xcix). The survivors sprang to their feet, 

 throwing their blankets from their shoulders as they rose, ami for a few 

 minutes there was a terrible hand to hand struggle, where every man's 

 thought was to kill. Although many of the warriors had no guns, nearly 

 all had revolvers and knives in their belts under their blankets, together 

 with some of the murderous warclubs still carried by the Sioux. The 

 very lack of guns made the right more bloody, as it brought the com 

 batants to closer quarters. 



At the first volley the Hotcbkiss guns trained on the camp opened 

 tire and sent a storm of shells and bullets among the women and chil- 

 dren, who had gathered in front of the tipis to watch the unusual spec- 

 tacle of military display. The guns poured in 2-pound explosive shells 

 at the rate of nearly fifty per minute, mowing down everything alive. 

 The terrible effect may be judged from the fact that one woman sur 

 vivor, Blue Whirlwind, with whom the author conversed, received four- 

 teen wounds, while each of her two little boys was also wounded by 

 her side. In a few minutes 200 Indian men, women, and children, with 

 fit* soldiers, were lying dead and wounded on the ground, the tipis had. 

 been torn down by the shells and some of them were burning above 

 the helpless wounded, and the surviving handful of Indians were fly- 

 ing in wild panic to the shelter of the ravine, pursued by hundreds of 

 maddeued soldiers and followed up by a raking lire from the Hotcbkiss 

 guns, which had been moved into position to sweep the ravine. 



There can be no question that the pursuit was simply a massacre, 

 where fleeing women, with infants in their arms, were shot down after 

 resistance had ceased and when almost every warrior was stretched 

 dead or dying on the ground. On this point such a careful writer as 

 Herbert Welsh says: ''From the fact that so many women and chil- 

 dren were killed, and that their bodies were found far from the scene 

 of action, and as though they were shot down while flying, it would 

 look as though blind rage had been at work, in striking contrast to the 

 moderation of the Indian police at the Sitting Bull fight when they 

 were assailed by women.'' (Welsh, 3.) The testimony of American 

 Horse and other friendlies is strong in the same direction. (See page 



