Career
He was a twenty-year-old private in Company K, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry during the Wounded Knee Massacre, where he was wounded twice. When he died he was the last survivor of the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee.
McGinnis wrote an extensive account of his experiences at Wounded Knee which was published in Real West Magazine in January 1966:
The screams of mothers as machine gun bullets tore their bodies apart.
The curses of the Indian warriors, fighting machine guns and cannons with old muskets, knives and tomahawks, being cut down in rows by demon-crazed white soldiers. The seventy-four years have never completely erased the ghastly horror of that scene and I still awake at night from nightmarish dreams of that massacre.
