The day after the shooting a blizzard swept the creek, and the Lakota dead lay where they fell for three days. On New Year's Day 1891 a burial party of civilians, paid by the body, dug a long trench on the hill where the army's Hotchkiss guns had stood and laid the frozen dead in it together. Searchers found a baby girl alive in the snow beside her dead mother; she was taken away and raised by a Nebraska militia general's family as Zintkala Nuni, Lost Bird, and died young, far from Pine Ridge, until her remains were brought back to lie here in 1991.
In 1903 survivors and relatives raised a stone monument over the grave, carved with names of the dead, and the small cemetery around it has gone on receiving burials since. Down by the road a large historical sign tells the story; for years the word Massacre has been fixed over the older word beneath it on a separate patch. The army awarded twenty Medals of Honor for the day, and Lakota people have long asked that they be taken back.
The site became a National Historic Landmark in 1965, but most of the land stayed in private hands. In 2022 the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, whose ancestors were among the dead, together bought the forty acres around the grave to keep them as a sacred site, free of development. There is no visitor center. Visitors are asked to walk quietly and to leave offerings where they lie.
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