This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Ghost Dance, a religious movement founded by the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka teaching that its practice would restore the world Native peoples had known before colonization, reached the Lakota reservations of the Dakotas in 1890. Federal Indian agents, alarmed by the movement's scale, requested military intervention, and the Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull was killed on December 15, 1890, during a botched attempt to arrest him over his association with the movement. Roughly two hundred of his followers fled to join Spotted Elk's Miniconjou band, and it was this combined group, traveling toward a reservation agency under military escort, that soldiers of the United States Army's 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.
On December 29, 1890, after a disputed shot was fired during a disarmament search of the surrounded band, the 7th Cavalry opened fire with rifles and rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns, killing some two hundred fifty to three hundred Lakota men, women and children, most of them unarmed. The killing ended organized Lakota participation in the Ghost Dance and, with it, the last significant armed Native resistance to United States authority on the Northern Plains.