Chief Bigfoot's Band was intercepted by the 7th Calvary on this day in 1890

[hfojvt]

37. but isn't that really the point?

"Was every soldier at Wounded Knee a blood-thirsty monster?"

The point of this story, the way you tell it, seems to be to say "MANY of them were" and to point an accusing finger at the WHOLE United States of America.

It seems kind of odd, to read what Miles says, that apparently he feels that troops and warriors should have been arrayed differently. "The disposition of his troops was such that in firing upon the warriors they fired directly towards their own lines and also into the camp of the women and children."

And he calls that bad troop arrangement "reprehensible."

Yet the bad troop arrangement would have caused ZERO harm, if some of the Indians had not been stirred up by that medicine man and decided to start shooting. (at least in the accounting of Wells).

And if another post in this thread is to be believed, Miles himself caused quite a bit of death of women and children by his own deliberate orders (rather than by his incompetent troop arrangement).

You make an "obvious conclusion" that women and children were hunted down and killed. Yet other accounts say that most of the deaths happened in the first few minutes. Especially with the rapid firing of the Hotchkiss guns.

And Dewey Beard recounts that people were called from hiding places and then killed, but Wells account has him calling people from hiding (and he would have the language they understood, unlike most of the others there) and rescuing them.

And there is no way to really know, is there. If soldiers were hunting down those escaping in order to capture them, but the people fleeing, naturally being frightened, might not have allowed a capture without a fight. But we do know, for a fact, a fact that you conveniently left out of your OP, that 51 who did give up, or were unable to flee or fight, were captured and then taken care of - and NOT executed.