The Wounded Knee Massacre Trivia Quiz

Answer: South Dakota

Wounded Knee is the name of a creek in southwest South Dakota, near Nebraska. It is in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Answer: Sioux

Involved in the Wounded Knee battle were bands of Miniconjou Lakota, Hunkpapa Lakota and Oglala Lakota, all part of the Sioux nation.

Answer: 7th Cavalry

The soldiers were from the 7th Cavalry regiment, formed in 1866 at Fort Riley, Kansas to protect settlers moving west. It was involved in the Battle of the Little Bighorn with Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Washita (later called the Washita Massacre). In American movies about the Wild West made from the 1940s through the 1960s, when the cavalry came to the rescue it was often the 7th Cavalry.

Answer: Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance religion was spread by a Northern Paiute visionary, Wovoka (Jack Wilson). It entailed beliefs that Jesus Christ would reappear as a Native American, white people would disappear, and the ghosts of Indian ancestors would return to earth. In the Sioux version, it was also said that those wearing a special shirt while performing the Ghost Dance would be immune to bullets.

Answer: Sitting Bull

As the Ghost Dance religion spread across the midsection of the U.S., white settlers thought the performance of the dance might be a prelude to war. An Indian agent, James McLaughlin, sent tribal policemen to take Sitting Bull and other chiefs into protective custody. Sitting Bull didn't want to go, a shot was fired leading to a gun battle and Sitting Bull and 14 others were killed.

Answer: Red Cloud

Red Cloud was the war leader of the Oglala Sioux. Leadership of the various bands of the Sioux was not as regimented as that of white people, so he was one of many. Red Cloud was respected among the Sioux for "Red Cloud's War", a fight over control of the Powder River country in Wyoming and Montana. He was instrumental in convincing many of the Oglalas to live on reservations.

Answer: no one is sure

As the 500 U.S. Cavalry soldiers attempted to disarm the 350 Sioux indians, a shot was fired. Some say a shot rang out when the soldiers tried to take a rifle away from Black Coyote, a deaf man. Turning Hawk, a Lakota, said he saw "a young man of very bad influence" fire the first shot. Once a shot had been fired, both sides opened fire.

The soldiers killed men, women and children, sometimes chasing them for two miles before shooting them. Some soldiers were killed by fire from their own regiment, so intense was the shooting.

When it was over, more than 150 Indians and 25 troopers were dead.

Answer: Black Elk

Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota and second cousin of Crazy Horse. He was a survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee and was considered a medicine man, or holy man, of his people. He, in the presence of his son. Ben Black Elk, told his life story to writer John Neihardt, who made the notes into a book, "Black Elk Speaks", in 1932.

Answer: L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum, who would later write "The Wizard of Oz", wrote in the "Aberdeen (South Dakota) Saturday Pioneer" on January 3, 1891 that since white men had so wronged the Indians the only way to protect white civilization was to commit one more wrong and exterminate the rest of the tribes.

Answer: none

There were no court-martials convened as a result of the Wounded Knee Massacre. An inquiry exonerated Colonel James W. Forsyth, commander of the 7th Cavalry and in fact, twenty of the 500 soldiers participating in the battle received the Medal of Honor. Historian Will G. Robinson noted that by contrast, of the 64,000 South Dakotans who served in the U.S. military during World War II, only three received the Medal of Honor.