“Delegations went to Wowoka, and in the summer of 1890 the
Sioux began dancing. The slow, shuffling circle dance was foreign to them, but
they made it more dramatic by placing a dead cottonwood tree in the center to
be hung with offerings. The cottonwood, the only tall tree of the Plains, was a
symbol of life, ever renewed. Then one of their number began making ghost dance
shirts—long garments of white sheeting decorated with symbols and in red and
with eagle feathers at the elbows. Wowoka had a garment of that sort, which he
had said would turn away any bullet, though he averred that no fighting would
be necessary. Still, more and more men and women wore the white garment. And
more and more fell unconscious during the dance, which might last five days and
nights without stopping. The dreamers recovered to tell how they met the
approaching dead and all sang:
The whole world of the dead is
returning, returning
Our nation is coming, is coming.
The spotted eagle brought us the
message
Bearing the Father’s word-
The word and the wish of the
Father.
Over the glad new earth they are
coming,
Our dead come driving the elk
and the deer.
See them hurrying the herds of
bullalo!
This the Father has promised,
Thus the Father has given.
There were, of course, groups that did not join in the
movement. And there were leaders like old Sitting Bull, medicine man and
rainmaker of the Hunkpapa, who remained undecided even when their followers had
joined. The white agents could not follow such distinctions. They were nervous
and therefore the Indians were nervous. Bands kept moving from place to place
and holding councils. More soldiers came. Newspaper men arrived as they had
never been able to do with earlier prophecies, and the whole country read lurid
reports. One careful investigator avers that the tragedy which developed was “a
newspaper man’s war.” It seems likely that, with better-trained officials and
with the knowledge of social conditions that we have today, there need have
been no tragedy.
But tragedy there was.
…Indians were being searched for weapons and a gun went off.
Then began the massacre, for it was nothing less. Most Indians had been
disarmed long ago and the search produced only a few guns, beside knives and
hatchets used as tools. Without defense, all Big Foot’s people could do is run—toward
the tents or toward a ravine in the distance.
Soldiers and canons were ranged on three sides of them, and some of
these soldiers were survivors from the Custer fight. They rushed among the
fleeing men, women, and children with the battle cry, “Remember Custer!” Some
three hundred Indians were killed or died later of injuries. The whites lost
twenty-nine men, mostly from their own crossfire since the Indians had no weapons…
The Ghost Dance ceased, and with it ceased all hope that the
whites would be conquered or disappear. But contemporaneous with those whom I
have called the “hostile prophets” was the series of visionaries who preached a
new religion of the Indians’ own. It would not destroy the whites but would
reach the Red Men to live in the same world with them, accepting such of their
products, as seemed useful(of course not the enemy alcohol) but receiving
supernatural power through their own visions for their own comfort.
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