In 1890, Senators were still chosen by state legislatures, and at first South Dakota Republicans claimed to have won the election. But almost immediately, that became doubtful: ballot boxes had been broken open and results altered. The Republicans had to make their case for South Dakota legislators to choose a Republican Senator between November and January, when the legislature met.
Right then, on November 13, with control of Congress hanging on South Dakota’s senatorial seat, President Harrison ordered 9,000 troops to South Dakota—the largest mobilization of the army since the Civil War—to protect settlers against an Indian “uprising,” an uprising that Harrison and his advisors knew had claimed no lives and no property. Army officers scoffed at the deployment, telling the president to feed the starving Lakota instead.
As the troops moved into South Dakota, the story of the election was eclipsed by what was happening on the ground. When panicked Lakota fled their reservations, army officers used both negotiations and troop movements to try and corral them back toward the government agencies at the heart of each reservation, where the army could keep an eye on them. But those negotiations went bad on the Standing Rock Reservation in the northern part of the new state when Indian police tried to bring Lakota leader Sitting Bull to the agency and ended up murdering him and much of his band. Wounded survivors ran south to take shelter with famous negotiator Sitanka at the Cheyenne River Reservation. But their arrival panicked Sitanka’s band and the entire group headed south across the middle of the state toward the Pine Ridge Reservation, to hole up with another Lakota leader on good terms with the army, the elderly Red Cloud.
It was several days before the troops cornered Sitanka’s people on the evening of December 28. Cold and tired, their leader sick with pneumonia, the band surrendered and moved, as ordered, to Wounded Knee Creek on Pine Ridge Reservation, where they were headed anyway. As night fell, the soldiers placed rapid-fire guns on the hills surrounding the camp. During the night, Colonel James Forsyth, a senior commander far more experienced with paperwork than with western fighting, took over the troops, and the following day he ordered the Indians disarmed.