Illustrators Burying the Truth at Wounded Knee

Karen A. Bearor

Lurid accounts of the millennialist “Messiah Craze” and the religious “frenzy” of the Sioux appeared in newspapers and weeklies from the last months of 1890 through early 1891, leading up to and then offering a postmortem on the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. Even popular book-length accounts of the Ghost Dance phenomenon, rushed to presses within weeks of Wounded Knee to capitalize on public interest, condemned journalists for their excesses. Nevertheless, these books’ publishers lured consumers with such sensationalistic titles as Indian Horrors, Or Massacres By the Red Men and reproductions of the same scaremongering images that had complemented the earlier journalists’ accounts in newspapers and illustrated weeklies.

Many have written about the circumstances leading up to the Wounded Knee massacre, but few have said anything about the imagery. For the most part, authors of scholarly and popular texts mention illustrations only in passing, without reproducing them, and dismiss them as merely stereotypical. Exploiting the horrors of the massacre itself, with the often-seen photographs of Big Foot’s frozen body or the mass burial of the Sioux dead, seems more important than any deliberations about the imagery contributing to the hysteria in the first place. When an illustration is included, it is often Frederic Remington’s rendering of the Ghost Dance from Harper’s Weekly. While the most accurate, Remington’s representation of the ceremony is also the least sensationalistic. Thus, not only is the general character of this imagery inaccessible to modern readers, who should understand better how public opinion was manipulated in 1890, but how the illustrations functioned within the pages of their respective publications is lost.

This paper looks at selected representations of the Ghost Dance to demonstrate how and why they were used. I will argue that, apart from their utility in selling papers, certain features of these images were intended to convey the pro-military sympathies of papers at the peak of the bitter feud over whether military or civilian control of Indian affairs was most efficacious. Liberated from their placement within the newspapers and illustrated weeklies, however, the illustrations quickly became fodder for those who sought only to dehumanize the Sioux, and mere stereotypes to be dismissed by modern historians.