To one side Alice noticed a familiar figure standing wit!.
h hands raised above his head, his arms turned upward in prayer. It was the medicine man by the name of Yellow Bird. He stood facing the east, right by the fire pit which was now covered with dirt. He was praying and crying. He was saying to the spotted eagles that he wanted to die instead of his people. He must have sense that something was going to happen. He picked up some dirt from the fire place and threw it up in the air and said, "This is the way I want to go, back to dust." Seventh Cavalry interpreter Phillip F. Wells, whose knowledge of the Lakota language was poor, later told military investigators that a man named Yellow Bird stood up at Wounded Knee and deliberately incited the Lakota to fight. Colonel Forsyth gave a bizarre order: each soldier was told to aim his unloaded gun at an Indians forehead and to pull the trigger. After Wells translated the demeaning order to the astonished Lakota, they could not comprehend this foolishness. Looking at each other, their faces grew "wild with fear." Alice then saw two or three sergeants grab a deaf man named Black Coyote who had yet to be disarmed. His friends had been so busy talking that they had left him uniformed. The soldiers tore off his blanket, roughly twirling him around. He raised his rifle above his head to keep it away from them. In the midst of yelling, jerking, and twisting, the struggle ended unexpectedly when the rifle pointed toward the east end discharged in the crisp morning air. Lieutenant James Mann screamed, "Fire! Fire on them!" On command the troops opened fire in an explosive volley, enclosing both attackers and victims in a dark curtain of pungent smoke. That day over three hundred elderly men, women, and children, all disarmed were brutally murdered. After the genocidal procedure occurred, a blizzard hit, and it was on the forth day that search parties were sent out to bury the dead.