When a gunman killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on 12 June 2016, many news outlets and politicians called it the worst mass shooting in American history. Measured as an attack by a single shooter in a public place, that was accurate at the time. Measured simply as the number of unarmed people shot dead in one place on one day, it was not. On 29 December 1890, soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry killed somewhere between 250 and 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.
This article explains both events, why the phrase "worst mass shooting" depends on how you define it, and why so many readers felt that leaving Wounded Knee out of the conversation erased a part of the country's history.
The short answer: it depends on the definition
Researchers who track mass shootings usually mean a specific kind of crime: one attacker, or a small group, opening fire in a public place, not as part of a robbery, gang conflict or war. Under that definition, Pulse was the deadliest in modern US history until 1 October 2017, when a gunman in Las Vegas killed about 60 people at a country music festival.
Wounded Knee falls outside that category because the killers were soldiers acting under military command. Yet for the people who died, the difference is academic. They were mostly disarmed or unarmed, many were women and children, and they were shot in large numbers in a matter of minutes. Episodes such as the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre raise the same question about what counts.
After readers objected, NPR explained its wording and narrowed its own phrase to "deadliest mass public shooting in modern U.S. history." The criminologist it consulted, Grant Duwe, also cautioned that the historical record on mass killings is still imperfect. That more careful wording is a good model: precise, and honest about what it leaves out.
Background: the Lakota and the Ghost Dance
Lakota tipi camp near Pine Ridge, South Dakota, around 1890.
By 1890 the Lakota had lost most of their land through broken treaties, war and the destruction of the buffalo herds, and were confined to reservations in the Dakotas. Rations were cut, crops failed, and hunger was widespread.
Into that despair came the Ghost Dance, a religious movement founded by the Paiute prophet Wovoka. Followers believed that dancing and prayer would bring back the dead, renew the land and restore the old way of life, while the settlers would be swept away. It was, at heart, a peaceful ritual of hope. Some Lakota believed that special "ghost shirts" would protect them from bullets, and government agents and settlers came to see the movement as the start of an uprising.
Ghost Dance circle on the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation in Oklahoma, painting by Mary Irvin Wright, 1893.
Alarmed agents called in the army. On 15 December 1890, reservation police sent to arrest the Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull at his home killed him in the confrontation that followed. Fearing more violence, the Miniconjou chief Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot, led his band toward the Pine Ridge agency to seek safety.
What happened at Wounded Knee Creek
On 28 December, cavalry intercepted Spotted Elk's band, and escorted it to Wounded Knee Creek. Spotted Elk was seriously ill with pneumonia. Overnight, more troops arrived under Colonel James W. Forsyth, bringing the force to roughly 500 soldiers around a camp of about 350 Lakota, most of them women and children. Four Hotchkiss mountain guns were set on a rise overlooking the camp.
The next morning soldiers began to search for and confiscate weapons. Accounts agree that a deaf man named Black Coyote was reluctant to give up his rifle, probably because he did not understand the order, and that it went off as soldiers seized him. Exactly what happened in those seconds is still disputed. What followed is not: troops opened fire at close range, the Hotchkiss guns raked the camp, and soldiers pursued people who fled along the ravine, in some cases for miles.
Lakota scouts and US soldiers pose with a Hotchkiss gun on the Pine Ridge Reservation, 1891.
Estimates of the Lakota dead range from about 250 to 300, many of them women and children; dozens more were wounded. Spotted Elk was among the dead. Twenty-five soldiers were killed and about 39 wounded, and historians believe some were hit by their own side's crossfire. Days later, after a blizzard, a burial party gathered the frozen bodies and buried them in a mass grave on the hill where the guns had stood.
The body of the Miniconjou Lakota chief Spotted Elk (Big Foot) lies in the snow at Wounded Knee, photographed after the massacre in early January 1891.
The frozen body of a Lakota medicine man at Wounded Knee Creek, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, photographed on 3 January 1891.
Soldiers and civilians stand over the mass grave as the Lakota dead are buried at Wounded Knee, January 1891. (Photo: Northwestern Photographic Co., Chadron, Nebraska)
How the two events differ, and why both matter
Comparing a nineteenth-century military massacre with a twenty-first-century terrorist attack is not about ranking suffering. The two are very different. Pulse was the act of one man, who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during the attack, and it targeted a gay nightclub on a Latin night, which made it one of the deadliest attacks on LGBTQ people in US history. Wounded Knee was carried out by government troops against a people the government was supposed to be protecting under treaty, at a time when the wars on the Plains were largely over.
What links them is the question of memory. A headline that calls one event the worst ever quietly decides which earlier killings count. Many Native Americans, historians and readers argued in 2016 that leaving Wounded Knee off the list continues a long habit of treating violence against Indigenous people as something other than real American history.
The Big Think essay this article draws on also pointed to an uncomfortable twist for the gun debate: Wounded Knee began as an attempt by the government to disarm a population. Some gun-rights advocates cite it for that reason. The other side of that argument is just as plain: the Lakota rifles could not match artillery, and armed resistance against a modern state usually ends worst for civilians.
After Orlando: vigils across the country
People at a vigil in New York on 12 June 2016 after the Orlando nightclub shooting. (Photo: Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images)
In the days after Pulse, vigils filled squares from New York to London. Outside the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement, a man laid down 50 roses in tribute to the victims.
A man lays roses outside the Stonewall Inn, New York, on 12 June 2016. (Photo: Monika Graff/Getty Images)
The City of Orlando later announced plans to buy the nightclub site and turn it into a permanent memorial. The attack ended after a three-hour standoff, when police broke through the building wall and killed the gunman.
How Wounded Knee is remembered today
Wounded Knee did not fade from Lakota memory. In 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the town for 71 days to protest broken treaties and conditions on the reservation, putting the name back in the national news. The mass grave is marked by a memorial, and the site is a National Historic Landmark.
The medals remain the sharpest dispute. About 20 soldiers received the Medal of Honor for their part in the killing. A Pentagon panel began reviewing those awards in 2024, and on 26 September 2025 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the medals would not be rescinded, calling the decision final. Lakota advocates and some members of Congress, who have backed bills to revoke the medals, say the fight is not over.
A fuller account of history does not shrink the horror of Orlando. It simply asks that when we talk about the worst days of American gun violence, we remember that the list began long before 2016, and that many of its victims were Native Americans.
Sources: Wikipedia: Wounded Knee Massacre; Wikipedia: Pulse nightclub shooting; NPR, 13 June 2016; Missouri Independent / States Newsroom, 26 September 2025; original essay by Paul Ratner at Big Think.
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