On the bitterly cold morning of December 29, 1890, Alice Ghost Horse rode her sunka wakan, the horse she had raised from a yearling, through the U.S. Army camp at Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The thirteen-year old Lakota girl was looking for her father, one of the Indian men who had been rounded up earlier that day.

A sudden shout in English riveted Alice's attention to the center of camp and she stood up in her stirrups, stretching as far as she could, trying to see what was going on. That yell meant only one thing to Alice: Someone was about to be assaulted...

Less than fifty yards away she could see her father sitting on the ground with other disarmed men from Chief Big Foot's band, surrounded by more than 500 heavily armed soldiers of the Seventh Calvary....She looked north up the hill where four "guns on wheels" pointed in her direction. Mounted troopers watched silently on each side of the Hotchkiss battery.

Moving among the tipis, soldiers lifted women's dresses and touched their private parts, ripping from them essential cooking and sewing utensils...The men sitting in the council heard the angry shrieks of their wives and mothers.

Several Lakota, offended by the abusive arrogance of the cavalry, stubbornly waited to have their weapons taken from them. It was a show of honor in front of their elders, for few of them were old enough to have fought in the "Indian wars" fifteen years before.

To one side Alice noticed a familiar figure standing with hands raised above his head, his palms turned upward in prayer. She later recalled:

"A medicine man by the name of Yellow Bird...stood facing the east, right by the fire pit which was now covered up with fresh dirt. He was praying and crying. He was saying to the spotted eagles that he wanted to die instead of his people. He must sense that something was going to happen. He picked up some dirt from the fireplace and threw it up in the air and said, 'This is the way I want to go back-to dust.'"

The Ghost Horse family knew this Holy Man. Alice's translation of his eagle prayer refutes historians who have relied solely upon the translation of Sun Gi ("The Fox"), Seventh Cavalry interpreter Philip F. Wells, whose knowledge of the Lakota language was poor. Wells later told military investigators that a man named Yellow Bird stood up at Wounded Knee and deliberately incited the Lakota to fight.

Colonel Forsyth gave a bizarre order: Each soldier was told to aim his unloaded gun at an Indian's forehead and to pull the trigger. After Wells translated the demeaning (or drunken) order to the astonished Lakota, Iron Hail, later known as Dewey Beard, "...could not comprehend this foolishness." Looking from one to another he saw the faces of his companions grow "wild with fear."

Dewey Beard saw "two or three sergeants" grab a deaf man named Black Coyote who had yet to be disarmed. His friends had been so busy talking they had left him uninformed. The soldiers tore off his blanket, roughly twirling him around. He raised the rifle above his head to keep it away from them. In the midst of yelling, jerking, and twisting, the struggle ended unexpectedly when the rifle pointed upward toward the east and discharged into the crisp morning air.

Lieutenant James Mann screamed, "Fire! Fire on them!" On command Troops K and B opened fire in an explosive volley, enclosing both attackers and victims in a curtain of dark, pungent smoke.

Years later....Alice Ghost Horse related her Wounded Knee experience, punctuated with expressively eloquent hand gestures, movements that brought her story vividly alive to grandchildren listening beside her. On one such night....her son, John War Bonnet, penciled her Hohwoju words on ledgerbook paper. The night before the massacre Alice remembered:

"By sundown we were completely surrounded by foot soldiers, all with rifles. My mother and I went down to the creek to pick up some wood and to go to the bathroom, but two soldiers followed us...so we hurried and came back with some sticks.

"At this time everyone went to bed we were all tired out from this hard trip. Some of the young men were up all night to watch the soldiers. Some of the soldiers were drunk, saying bad things about the Lakota women."

That night James Asay, a Pine Ridge trader and whiskey runner, brought a ten-gallon keg of whiskey to Seventh Cavalry officers the night before the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Many of the (Indian) men had been kept up all night by the Cavalry where the soldiers kept asking them how old they were. The soldiers were hoping to discover which of the men had been at the Battle of the Little Bighorn where Custer was killed.

That day over three hundred elderly, men, women, and children, all disarmed, were brutally murdered. After the massacre occurred, a blizzard hit, and it was on the fourth day that search parties were sent out to bury the dead.

Alice and what was left of her family were safe, but other women and children running to escape the massacre did not fare as well. Days later, the bodies of a woman and her children, who had been hunted and slaughtered like quail, were found three miles from Wounded Knee Creek.

A newspaper reporter accompanying the burial party described the first body they found as that of a male about twelve years old. The boy had been shot:

"beneath the right eye, tearing open the cheek and leaving a bloody hole as large as a silver dollar. There must have been at least a few seconds of agony before death came, for the right arm was thrown up to and across the forehead and the fingers of the left hand stiffened in death while clutching the long, jet-black hair near the powder-burned orifice in his skull.

"And the mother. Gentle hands loosened the frosty bands which bound her to the soil and fingers which tingled with the hot flow of blood from indignant hearts tenderly removed from her flattened and distorted face the twigs and leaves and dirt. Her strong arms were bare and her feet were drawn up as the natural consequences of a wound which commenced at the right shoulder and ended in the lower abdominal region. From the wounded shoulder a sanguinary flood had poured until her worn and dirty garments were crimson dyed; the breasts from which her little ones had drawn their earliest sustenance were discolored with the gory stream. It was an awful sight..."

Many of the wounded survivors later died or were secretly carried away in the night by Lakota from other bands. The dead were buried in hidden locations, carefully concealed from federal officials who later underestimated the death toll at 146, over two hundred less than the actual number who were butchered on their own land.

The frozen bodies of Big Foot's band were taken to the top of the hill overlooking the valley where they had died. Grave diggers carved a gaping hole from the earth, six feet deep, ten wide, sixty long. When the order was given to bury the first load, Starr, Peano, and McWilliams jumped into the grave and each corpse was thrown down to them one at a time. They stripped them of all salable articles from the bodies as if they were skinning rabbits.

Without a prayer services of any kind, the Lakota dead were 'layered in the mass grave, first one naked row across the bottom of the trench, and old army blankets were placed over them, then another layer of bodies lengthwise. And so they continued until the dead were nearly level with the ground,' and the dirt was shoveled on...