Wounded Knee Massacre

• Wounded Knee Massacre
• This source goes into great detail about the events leading up to the massacre and then talks about the casualties of the massacre. It can be used because it mainly explains what caused the Wounded Knee Massacre rather than going into detail about the massacre itself.
• Wounded Knee
• This source goes into more detail about the cause of the massacre at the scene (Wounded Knee Creek). It talks about what could have caused the massacre to break out rather than the events that took place leading up to the massacre, which makes it useful. 

The Wounded Knee Massacre was an event that took place at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. One of the main contributors to the Wounded Knee Massacre was the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement that taught Indians that they had been defeated and forced to go to reservations because they angered the gods. The Lakota Sioux used the Ghost Dance as a way to discuss that the white man and his rule needed to be overthrown. The Sioux believed that a shirt known as the sacred ghost shirt would protect them from bullets during war. Sitting Bull was believed to be a Ghost Dancer. The whites tried to arrest him but killed him in the process, which caused the tensions between the whites and Indians at their reservation to increase. Another Sioux chief, Big Foot, and his band of Ghost Dancers (100 men, 200 women and children) were surrounded by 500 soldiers near Wounded Knee Creek. They were ordered to surrender their weapons, but they refused. As a result, fighting between the Ghost Dancers and the soldiers broke out. 150 Sioux, including Big Foot, were killed and another 50 were wounded. Only 25 soldiers died and 40 were wounded. The event is referred to as a battle but, in reality, it was an unnecessary massacre that could have easily been avoided.

Wounded Knee Massacre (link directly to picture)

Ghost Dance (link directly to picture)