THE LAST OF THE INDIAN FIGHTS

The forty-sixth anniversary of the battle of Wounded Knee, the last important conflict of the Indian wars, was celebrated by accounts in the press of the reminiscences of Ed Jones, army scout and pioneer rancher, and of Peter One Skunk of the Cheyenne River reservation. Their stories, for some reason, did not disagree, probably because they were talking about entirely separate phases of the Messiah or Ghost Dance excitement.

On the same day, the Sioux of Pine Ridge reservation, as is their custom, presumably strewed with crudely homemade paper flowers the graves of Big Foot and the other victims of the slaughter who rest beside the monument that records on enduring stone the Indians' story of the perfidy of the soldiers. Veterans of the army side of the conflict, some of whom live in Chicago, recall it as a bitter battle against Indian treachery, fought after terrible hardships during long winter marches.

What actually happened? Big Foot and his village had hoped to bring back the good old buffalo days by holding a Ghost Dance. In the fear that violence, as well as dancing, might be tried to accomplish this result, orders had been issued for the disarming of the Indians. While the troops were attempting this a shot was fired, some say by a half-crazed Indian boy. Firing immediately became general and the troops had some difficulty in withdrawing from the village. In the return fire a number of Indian women and children were killed.

At one time Wounded Knee was glorified by reproduction in Buffalo Bill's wild west show, although Buffalo Bill himself had no more to do with it than to have prevented, by a strategic social engagement, from attempting the arrest of Sitting Bull during the height of the trouble.

In more recent years Wounded Knee has been the terrible example - along with Sand Creek and Camp Grant - for those who seem to think the Indian was heart a pacifist. It has been called a massacre and an atrocity. Photographs - post-card reproductions of them are still on sale at the Wounded Knee trading post on the battle site - seem to bear out these charges, or at all events charges that war is horrible.

But the fact that these disputes go on and on, with no one at all excited about them, proves not the horror of war, which know already, but rather its futility. Troopers of the Seventh Cavalry can ride side by side with Indians at the anniversary of the fight on the Little Big Horn while Ed Jones and One Skunk can talk over Wounded Knee without resorting to rifle or tomahawk. And perhaps both could say, as was said of a much more famous victory:

"But what they fought each other for I could not well make out."

Whether the Ghost Dance was merely a religion, as the Indians maintain, or was a rebellion, as official authority declared, cannot be proved. It resulted in a battle in which the troops were threatened with extinction, and which Indian women and children were killed.

-- Chicago Daily News