Soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Lakota Sioux near Wounded Knee Creek to disarm them. A struggle over a rifle triggered a massacre in which troops with rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns killed between 250 and 300 Lakota, many of them women and children fleeing across the snow. The event marked the last major armed conflict between the US Army and Native Americans.
The Lakota under Chief Spotted Elk (also known as Big Foot) had been fleeing toward the Pine Ridge Agency, hoping for protection, when the 7th Cavalry intercepted them. The soldiers, some of them survivors of Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn fourteen years earlier, ordered the band to surrender their weapons. During the search a deaf Lakota man named Black Coyote refused to give up his rifle, and in the ensuing scuffle it discharged.
What followed was less a battle than a slaughter. Troops opened fire with carbines and four Hotchkiss mountain guns capable of firing nearly a round per second, cutting down people as they scattered across the frozen prairie. Bodies were later found up to two miles from the camp. Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for their actions that day, a fact that remains a point of bitter controversy and ongoing petitions for revocation. Big Foot himself was found frozen in the snow, his body twisted mid-motion. The massacre effectively ended armed Native resistance on the Plains and became a lasting symbol of the violence of American westward expansion.