Tasunke-Ota
N 43° 32.772 W 096° 43.618
14T E 683624 N 4823982
On January 5, 1891 Lt. Edward W. Casey was shot and killed by a camp guard of Taunke-Ota (Plenty Horse) while trying to reconnoiter a Ghost Dance Camp.
Waymark Code: WMC7F
Location: South Dakota, United States
Date Posted: 05/08/2006
Views: 38
On January 8, 1891, newspapers throughout the United States headlined a tragic event in the Indian troubles rocking the Sioux reservations of South Dakota. A talented and popular army officer attempting to enter a hostile encampment to talk peace had been treacherously slain by a young Sioux warrior. The death of Lieutenant Edward W. Casey shocked and saddened his legions of friends and admirers. For Plenty Horses, his killer, it was part of an ordeal that personalizes in one tragic figure the cultural disaster that befell the American Indians after dwindling land and game forced them to submit to the grim life of the reservation.
The killing of Lieutenant Casey took place as the last important Indian conflict in American history drew to an unhappy close. The Sioux had suffered a decade of cultural disintegration under the impact of reservation programs aimed at “civilizing” them. Old customs and institutions had been perverted or destroyed and no satisfactory new ones substituted. A massive land grab, a succession of broken promises, and hunger and sickness completed the plunge into despair. In desperation many of the people turned to the Ghost Dance religion, which held forth the bright promise of a return to the old way of life—the white people would be swept away, the buffalo would once again blacken the plains, and generations of ancestors would come back to life to dwell with the faithful in paradise.
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