You make it sound like someone woke up that morning and said...’It’s such a nice day lets go out and kill some Indians!”
It began many years before with a vision of Wavoka the Piute in Nevada. (We could get into a religious discussion but that is for a later time).
It spread to all the Indian tribes only being rejected by the Navajos because of their fear of GHOSTS.
It foretold of the disappearance of the White man and a return of the buffalo, and dead ancestors.
They were told to make bullet proof “ghost shirts” and do the “Ghost Dance”, and attack the whites. Fear caused the white settlers to demand army protection.
The army surrounded this particular band of Indians, calling for them to give up their guns. The Indians brought out some junk guns (like current buy backs), the Army began to search and find hidden guns in the lodgings.
Then according to OTHER SOURCES, a medicine man gave the signal and the Indians began to shoot. The Ghost Shirts didn’t work and they were shot down.
Frederic Remington did a series of paintings on this. His friend, an officer was later arrowed to death.
So there is always an alternate version that no one likes to hear which must be taken into account.
Thank you for the clarification, it does cast things in a different light. However, the presence of 4 Hotchkiss guns suggests that the Federal forces were not there to play "patty cake" either. Their ordinance is indicative of a more modern approach and SWAT like behavior. "Overwhelming force" and "any means necessary" come to mind. The officers may have had a legitimate mission at the start but seem to have lost control when it turned into a melee, killing nearly all the Sioux and a goodly number of their own troops.
I see the "Ghost Dance" and the subsequent preparations from a different perspective. The Indians of the day were nomadic hunter gatherers. Forcing them on to "reservations" limited their hunting territory. Sending in Federal troops to disarm them would take away their only modern technology and put the hunters back in the stone age. It put their backs to the wall where their only choices were fight or starve. In retrospect that was not an accidental condition but rather the strategic plan of the "Great White Father"in Washington. The tactical plan was overwhelming force. The result was a near brush with genocide. It was not our finest hour.
The scariest thing is that the current Federal push for rigid "gun control" is going to put law abiding citizens in the same position. Can't run, can't hide, back to the wall, tons of ammo and guns on both sides. What's next? The last hope is the people that took an oath to "protect and defend the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic", do they really mean what the words say?
Regards,
GtG