Drexel Mission Fight

The 'Bloody Pocket'; location of the Drexel Mission Fight

The Drexel Mission Fight was an armed confrontation between Lakota warriors and the United States Army that took place on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on December 30, 1890, the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre. The fight occurred on White Clay Creek approximately 15 miles north of Pine Ridge where Lakota fleeing from the massacre at Wounded Knee set up camp.

Company-K of the Seventh Cavalry under the command of Col. James W. Forsyth was sent to force their return to the areas they were assigned on their respective reservations, some of the so-called 'hostiles' were Brulé Lakota from the Rosebud Indian Reservation. The Seventh Cavalry was pinned down in a valley by the combined Lakota forces and had to be rescued by the Ninth Cavalry, an African American regiment nicknamed the Buffalo Soldiers.^[1]

Among the Lakota warriors was a young Brule from Rosebud named Plenty Horses who had recently returned from five years at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. A week after this fight Plenty Horses would shoot and kill Army Lieutenant Edward W. Casey,^[2]commandant of the Cheyenne Scouts (designated Troop L, Eighth Cavalry). The testimony introduced at the trial of Plenty Horses and his subsequent aquittal also helped abrogate the legal culpability of the U.S. Army for the killings at the Wounded Knee Massacre.^[3]

References

1. ^ Jeffrey Ostler: The Plains Sioux and U.S. colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee pgs. 357-358, Cambridge University Press (2004) ISBN 0521605903
2. ^ Congressional edition By United States. Congress p.132[1]
3. ^ Roger L. Di Silvestro: In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars p.198, Walker & Company (2007) ISBN 0802715141