December 29 · This Day in America
On a cold morning beside Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry surround a band of Lakota — Big Foot's people, sick, hungry, already surrendered — and begin to disarm them. A shot is fired. Then the rifles and the rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns open on the camp. When it ends, between 250 and 300 Lakota are dead in the snow, most of them women and children, many cut down as they fled. The bodies are left in a coming blizzard and later buried in a single trench. This is told straight because it must be: it was not a battle. It was the end of armed Native resistance on the plains, and a wound the country carries still. The 250th year remembers this morning too. A nation that means its founding promise has to be able to look at this and not turn away.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1845
President James K. Polk signs the resolution, and the nine-year-old Republic of Texas — its own flag, its own president, its own debt — becomes a state. It is the only state to enter the Union by treaty as an independent nation. Annexation brings an enormous, contested frontier, the question of slavery's spread, and within months war with Mexico. The Lone Star stays on the flag, a republic that chose to become a state.
Source: history.state.gov
“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there.”Black Elk, recalling Wounded Knee in Black Elk Speaks, 1932