In honor of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, I am keeping my eyes open for clues about America’s gun cultures as Sandy and I travel from our home in North Carolina to Yellowstone National Park and back. My inaugural post on this series can be found here.

From Cody, Wyoming, Sandy and I had a long drive to Custer, South Dakota for days 17 and 18 of our trip. We were in the area to visit Wind Cave National Park. No major gun cultures seen at this stop, but on day 19 we made our way to Badlands National Park via the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Although not the most direct route between Custer and Interior, South Dakota, we went this way to check out the Red Cloud Indian Art Show at the Maȟpíya Lútaand Heritage Center also witness the brutal poverty on the reservation for ourselves. Both were incredible.

But most importantly, we wanted to visit the site of the December 29, 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

Following the Uvalde massacre in 2022, I was interviewed by CNN’s John Avlon for his show “Reality Check.” The episode was on guns and gun control in America. As I discussed on my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel, Avlon asked me a question if there were examples of large-scale civilian disarmament by the U.S. government. I answered truthfully, “I don’t know.”

Some people suggested to me as an example the massacre at Wounded Knee, because the shooting took place while the U.S. Army’s 7th Calvary was in the process of disarming the Lakota people they had detained.

For example, the website ammo.com published an article (and related podcast) on “The Wounded Knee Massacre: The Forgotten History of the Native American Gun Confiscation.” The author says, “When we look at the issues surrounding gun confiscation, Wounded Knee gives us an example of the devastation that an unarmed people can experience at the hands of their own government.”

Although it is an interesting retelling of the events from the perspective of gun rights, I don’t think it quite fits the case of civilian disarmament by the U.S. government, because the Lakota did not have standing as U.S. citizens. The U.S. government was not “their own government.” To the contrary, Wounded Knee is best understood as part of the ongoing “Indian Wars” in which the Lakota were seen as foreign enemy combatants.

An interesting treatment of the complex events leading up to and following the massacre is William S.E. Coleman’s Voices of Wounded Knee, which I bought at the Badlands National Park Visitor Center store. Coleman strings together various first-person accounts of the events into a single narrative in a surprisingly readable (and troubling) volume.

Another gun culture take on the Massacre at Wounded Knee is by Karl Kasarda on his InRangeTV channel. He characterizes the event as “The Worst Mass Shooting Event in U.S. History.”

Again, the fact that the massacre was perpetrated by the U.S. government in the context of what was essentially a war being fought against the Lakota people makes the categorization of the event as a “mass shooting” a bit off for me, given our contemporary understandings of mass shootings.

But there can be no doubt that the number killed by U.S. Army soldiers using four 42mm M1875 Hotchkiss mountain guns and other firearms was large and included women and children, some of whom were found miles from the original encampment. Estimates vary, but I feel safe saying 250 to 300 or more, especially if U.S. Army casualties from friendly fire are included.

After chatting with a Lakota grandmother and her grandson about life on the reservation today, I did not have the heart to walk up to the mass grave site up the hill from the Massacre at Wounded Knee sign (but Phil Konstantin (Cherokee Phil) did on his Travels With Phil YouTube channel).

There are certainly lessons about the role of guns in American history to be learned from Wounded Knee, but I don’t think civilian disarmament or mass shootings are the best lessons.

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