119 years ago a peaceful village of Lakota hunkered down in their tipis against the bitter cold of the Plains winter. Most of the people were on alert for the sound of the approaching US cavalry, as they had suffered bloody attacks earlier in the season. Although no one knew it then, this day marked the end of the Indian Wars that had plagued the continent for almost two decades.

The people camped at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, were desperate followers of a new religious cult called Ghost Dance. A man called Wovoka claimed he had received visions that people who practiced it would be impervious to the wasichu (white man) bullets, and Tatanka (buffalo) would return to the homelands. They were terribly wrong.

After Custer's embarrassing defeat earlier that year at the Battle of Big Horn, the US government was eager to squelch the last of the free native people. According to some reports, troops were ordered to disarm and apprehend the Hunkpapa Sioux, and bring them into compliance. Instead, 146 men women and children were shot. Anyone surviving the gunfire froze to death as they lay in the snowdrifts. By the time the clean-up crew arrived days later to bury the dead, the corpses had frozen solid in their death throes and the ground had to be chopped away to form the mass grave.

A very sad day in history, the end of the free tribes of North America, and a grim victory for the tyrannical forces of Empire.