BY THE SPRING, THE RUMORS HAD REACHED THE CITIES AND the daily papers had begun to report something strange out west among the Cheyenne Indians of Montana, who, it was said, were “greatly excited over the expected appearance of a Savior.” Christ was in the mountains, claimed the Cheyenne, and he wanted all the Indians to come to him, so that he could put them behind him and then roll the earth over on the white people and destroy them. Some Indians even claimed to have visited Christ and to have seen scars on his hands and feet and a spear wound in his side.1
The story may have struck many as “strange and interesting,” in the words of one correspondent, but it inspired little concern. Americans were busy. They read the odd newspaper accounts as they rode electric trolleys to work in Cleveland or St. Louis, or sitting under the glow of new electric lighting in their homes in Chicago and New York. On the prairies of Iowa and Kansas, they surveyed the tender shoots turning their fields bright green and wondered if that year’s crop would pay for a new stove or some ready-made clothing from the Sears Roebuck catalog, whose goods arrived so conveniently on the new railroads. Others were learning the new technology of the typewriter in secretarial colleges or tending shop in small towns. In the cities, vast ranks of immigrant workers churned out textiles, laid down pavement, or hammered together new buildings, new machines, and new lives. This age of prodigious industrial growth daily announced new wonders, among them technologies like the sewing machine, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, and even a newly discovered metal, aluminium, which some dreamers said might be light enough to craft into a flying machine. Society papers were transfixed by a new class of millionaires whose consumption was so conspicuous (hosting formal dinners at tables big enough to have ponds in the middle—with live swans) that Mark Twain would christen the era “the Gilded Age.” The West and its Indians seemed far away.2
Caught up in the churning present and absorbed by the prospects for their presumed future, Americans were accustomed to thinking of Indians as history even before the Indian Wars were over. To most, those conflicts appeared to have ended. After General George Armstrong Custer’s fall at Little Big Horn in 1876, the US Army had forced Crazy Horse to surrender and then killed him. They harried Sitting Bull into Canada. The old warrior had returned in 1881, but for years now he had been living quietly at Standing Rock Reservation, on an isolated patch of South Dakota prairie. Americans still killed Indians here and there, and there were always rumors of bigger trouble, but the last chance for a real fight seemed to have vanished when Geronimo turned himself in. By 1890, the scourge of the Sierra Madre was confined to military barracks at Mount Vernon, Alabama, and from there he would soon be on his way to farming melons under the watchful eye of troops at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.3
A month later, in May 1890, came a report that further encouraged the public to ignore the strange news from the West. An Indian delegation sent to meet the Messiah had returned without him. Indians sank into despondency, and officials breathed a collective sigh of relief. The Indians had been “restless” for some time, “holding dances and religious pow-wows,” explained the Chicago Daily Tribune. Now perhaps they would prove “tractable.”4
But those hopes soon were disappointed. Before the eyes of the government agents and military officers in Indian country—if beyond the sight of most of the nation’s public, including most of its journalists—the messiah rumors continued to circulate as spring gave way to summer. On May 29, a businessman in South Dakota warned the government that something peculiar was happening among the Sioux. Three missionaries at the Sisseton Sioux Reservation had complained about a recent spike in Indian dances. In back-channel correspondence, an official acknowledged “some little excitement” at the Cheyenne River Reservation “over the coming of the Indian messiah.”5
By June 1890, the US Army had begun to scan Indian country for the source of the messiah prophecy. Not long after, Lieutenant S. C. Robertson of the US First Cavalry in Montana submitted a startling report, kicking off a sequence of events that would turn the odd tales of whirling Indians into a prologue for bloody tragedy.
At the Tongue River Agency among the Northern Cheyenne, Lieutenant Robertson had tracked down a Cheyenne man called Porcupine, who had recently completed a mysterious journey in the West. Ever since his return, he had been preaching fervently to the Indians, extolling a new messiah and exhorting his listeners to dance a new world into being.
When confronted, Porcupine happily agreed to describe his travels. He spoke before a rapt audience: a translator, a secretary, the lieutenant, and a group of Cheyenne men in broad-brimmed hats. The secretary was meticulous in his transcription, and Robertson sent every word of the Cheyenne’s haunting testimony to his superiors in Washington.6
As Porcupine told it, he had gone traveling the previous November, in 1889, more for recreation than anything else, “to meet other Indians and see other countries.” He had known nothing of any messiah and was most concerned with the logistics of traveling. It was illegal to leave the reservation without an official pass from the federal agent who supervised it. But passes were hard to get, and like many others in that time, Porcupine had decided to leave without one.
With two friends, Porcupine had left Montana and headed for Rawlins, Wyoming, where he boarded a Union Pacific train for an all-day journey to Fort Bridger, Utah. After changing trains at that point, he headed northwest to Fort Hall, Idaho. He and his two companions disembarked there and spent the next ten days at the Bannock and Shoshone Reservation, making new friends among their former enemies, talking about the need “to be friends with whites and live at peace with them and with each other.” When the Indian agent at Fort Hall discovered that Porcupine was traveling without permission, he gave passes to the Cheyenne and his companions and then provided more for some of their new Shoshone and Bannock friends.
Together the group boarded the train and headed south, “to a town on a big lake”—probably Salt Lake City—where they changed trains and headed west to Nevada. Over the next two days, they saw various “Indian towns” and white settlements, stopping to eat and visit occasionally before arriving in the evening of the second day among “the Fish Eaters”—Paiutes who lived on the shores of Pyramid Lake.
Here, in a desolate and harsh terrain seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Porcupine’s journey grew truly strange. Even before he arrived, these Paiutes seemed to have had a plan for him and his companions. Providing Porcupine’s party with four wagons and teams of horses, the Paiutes led them south, away from the main railroad line and into a vast desert. “We traveled all day, and then came to another railroad”—another railroad spur line that was probably in Wabuska, Nevada. Here they left their wagons and boarded the train, “the Fish-eaters telling us there were some more Indians along the railroad who wanted to see us.”7
By this point, Porcupine’s story had already raised troubling questions. How did these Paiutes know he was coming? What were they planning? Perhaps a clue dangled in his almost offhand remark that during much of the journey from Fort Hall to the place of the prophet, “all the Indians… danced this dance.” Lieutenant Robertson wondered what the dance meant. Was it announcing a war? Was there a conspiracy among Indians to rise up?
Porcupine reminded the officer that he had not gone in search of this dance. “I knew nothing about this dance before going. I happened to run across it, that is all.” Sensing that he was still concerned, Porcupine announced, “I will tell you about it.”
In one motion, the Cheyenne listening to Porcupine then removed their hats. The preacher was about to speak holy words.
“There is no harm in what I am about to say to anyone,” he reassured the army officer. “It is a wonder you people never heard this before.” And patiently, like the teacher he had become, he explained the new gospel.
THUS FAR THE CHEYENNE’S QUEST MIGHT HAVE SEEMED PECULIAR, but perhaps nothing could have prepared Robertson for what was next revealed. The train journey had ended at an Indian reservation even deeper in the desert, where Porcupine waited with hundreds of other Indians from fifteen or sixteen tribes. “There were more different languages than I ever heard before, and I didn’t understand any of them,” recounted the preacher.
Why had so many gathered there?
Because Christ had summoned them, not from heaven but from earth, for he had returned and “eleven of his children were coming from a far land.”
At first Porcupine did not realize that Christ had called him to this place. But after several days waiting at this even more remote setting, a man appeared whom Porcupine called the “White Father.” Porcupine could not tell if he was a white man or an Indian, but he was “a good looking man” who preached to them before falling into a trance. “I have sent for you and am glad to see you,” the man announced to the crowd. He told them to dance, and then he sang—and sang and sang—until late in the evening, as Porcupine and his new friends and hundreds of strange Indians danced in a great circle in the desert beneath the wheeling stars.
The White Father returned to them the following day. He revealed that he had been sent by God to earth once before, but “the people were afraid of me and treated me badly”—here he showed his scars. So he had gone back to heaven, promising to return “in many hundred years.” Now he had come. “My father told me the earth was getting old and worn out, and the people getting bad, and that I was to renew everything as it used to be, and make it better.”
A better earth, with more people to love, for all the Indian dead were to be resurrected. Since the earth was too small for both the living and the newly risen, God would “do away with heaven and make the earth itself large enough to contain us all.”
To ensure this outcome, all Indians were to live by new rules. Fighting was evil and was to be avoided. All people were to be friends. The whites and the Indians were to be one people, a sentiment that Porcupine found truly marvelous. “Where I went there were lots of white people, but I never had one of them say an unkind word to me.”
Since his return, Porcupine reassured Robertson, he had preached only peace among the Cheyenne. “I knew my people were bad and had heard nothing of all this, so I got them together and told them of it and warned them to listen to it for their own good.” He had preached for days and nights, warning them against evil deeds and urging dance and celebration of this joyful gospel.
Now, back in Montana, Porcupine still saw the Christ in his dreams. “You can see this man in your sleep any time you want after you have seen him and shaken hands with him. Through him you can go to heaven and meet your friends. “
Robertson left the interview thinking we know not what. But soon after, an army typist at Camp Crook recorded the story on paper. The strange words of Porcupine and his news of a messiah in the wilderness were then carried in a mail satchel that made its way from Montana to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and then east on the railroad to Chicago, and then to Washington, DC.8
Porcupine, for his part, went traveling again, taking the gospel to the Crow Reservation. There he preached not only to his former enemies among the Crows but also to an audience of “officers and ladies of the post” at Fort Custer. We can detect a glimmer of his passion in the brief account of an eyewitness: “The apostle stood with outstretched hands in silence for several minutes before he began speaking, and then broke forth like one inspired.”9
Astonishing as it was, the gospel of Porcupine met with silence from the nation’s capital. Perhaps the humid heat of summer was forcing the wheels of government to turn more slowly even than usual. Or maybe officials, however well versed in language and policy, could find no words to respond.
THE NEWSPAPERS BARELY MENTIONED ANY OF THESE EVENTS, and even when they did, almost nobody paid attention, captivated as they were by seemingly more relevant stories about railroad rates, industrial accidents, local politics, crime, and scandal. If they focused on the West at all, journalists conjured rich mines and ranches and thriving cities with universities and opera houses in the largely empty new states of Montana, North and South Dakota, Idaho, and Wyoming, all admitted to the union during the previous year. In Chicago, organizers were scurrying to prepare for the World’s Fair, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Nationwide, pulses rose over the political debates of the day—whether to raise tariffs to protect American manufacturing from foreign competition or lower them, and whether to abandon the gold standard. Even the impending decennial census was more exciting than Indians dancing strangely in the West.
Indeed, the census, which enumerated the nation’s rapidly growing disparities and distinctions, provides what might be the best window on the growing anxieties of the age. Examining the public’s preoccupation with the census in 1890 sheds light on why the citizens of such a rich and powerful country, who at first ignored the hopes for redemption among a few poor Indians, would soon resort to terrible violence to crush them.
Modern readers might find it hard to imagine so much public interest in an event as banal as the government’s regular count of its people. But Americans were preoccupied with the census because they fully expected it to confirm their power and success. They knew their country was growing, and they wanted to know how much it had grown, and how fast. Would New York remain the only city with a million people? Would Chicago displace Philadelphia as the nation’s second-largest city? How many villages of yesteryear had grown into cities of 100,000 or more? In 1880 the geographic center of the American population was Cincinnati. How far west had the center of the country moved?10
Such questions might have energized the population count in any year, but Americans of 1890 found them particularly compelling. A full century had passed since the first census, in 1790, the year after the US Constitution sealed the young republic and sent it forth into the community of nations. The growth in US power and treasure had been prodigious since then. Surely the results would be cause for celebration. “Our males of arms-bearing age will make every civilized nation bear to us a pigmy relation,” predicted one patriot.11
And if the precise contours of the American dynamo remained uncertain, signs of American greatness abounded, not the least of them being the technology of the census itself. “It is likely,” a breathless New York Press contributor predicted, that “the next census will be tabulated by electricity.”12
Indeed, although enumerators would go door to door with pencil and paper, much as they always had, the numbers on the forms they submitted to headquarters in Washington would be processed very differently. Information about each individual would be transferred to cards, not in the form of ink but as a combination of holes created with a new device called a punch card machine. The brainchild of an engineer and former census worker named Herman Hollerith, the punch card machines would translate data to tens of millions of cards, one for each individual or family in the census, and to more cards for businesses and other entities.
But the cards themselves were mere auxiliaries to Hollerith’s greatest invention, the mechanical wonder that would read the cards: the Hollerith Electrical Tabulating Machine. Standing at this contraption, which resembled an upright piano, a census worker inserted each card—the exact size of a dollar bill—into a press. As the worker lowered the top of the press onto the card, a set of 240 steel pins slid onto the stiff card paper. Those pins that encountered holes (rather than the card) slid through and into a pool of mercury in a basin beneath. The contact of the pin with mercury completed an electrical circuit, causing a counter on the machine, in whichever category the hole enumerated, to increase by one: race, age, national origin, mortgage debt, health, marital status, family size, and many more. Each time a pin touched mercury and closed a circuit, a single bell rang.
In this way, not only would the electrical tabulating machine clamorously total the details of American population and industry across dozens of categories for a population far bigger than had ever been measured in the United States, but it also promised to produce new orders of statistical data at a much higher rate. The 1880 census had taken almost ten years to tabulate. The 1890 census would take only four and a half, despite counting millions more people across far more metrics. “The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods,” wrote an enthusiastic commentator, “but beats them hollow as to speed.”13
And indeed it seemed to work like a heavenly machine. By late June, about the time Lieutenant Robertson was transmitting the gospel of Porcupine to his superiors, the census operation on the third floor of the Inter-Ocean Building in Washington, DC, resembled “a very tidy and airy machine shop,” as one visitor put it, “where nice-looking girls in cool white dresses are at work at the long rows of counting machines.” The flurry of hands, the punching of keys, and the ringing of bells inspired one Michigan reporter to dubious verse:
Indeed it was a “world of work.” With its ranks of wage labor attending an information assembly line, the census resembled the industrial factories of the day. But while the census machinery was an expression of the ongoing Industrial Revolution, the census effort represented something more. That “tidy and airy machine shop” twenty feet above street level in downtown Washington that summer of 1890 was the birthing chamber for something radically new in human experience: the mass production of data.15
The implications of that development were hardly visible to the workers, to their supervisors, or even to Herman Hollerith. But they are to us, in the story of Hollerith’s business. The electrical tabulating machine made Hollerith wealthy, and it became the foundation of his successful new enterprise, the Tabulating Machine Company. In years to come, this outfit produced reams of data for governments, railroads, and insurance companies. Hollerith sold the company in 1911, and the new owners ultimately changed its name to International Business Machines. We call it IBM.16
Americans in 1890, like Americans today, were prone to separating their technological wonders and modern problems from the rustic past, including the primitive gyrations of exotic people like Indians. Thus, little news was reported in the summer of 1890 about Indians, who were not just poor and remote but were also, as far as most Americans were concerned, people of the past and much diminished in numbers. (The census would record a total of not quite a quarter-million Indians in 1890.) Practically everybody assumed that the teeming mass of Americans (252 times as numerous) would any day now engulf Indian villages and usher the native peoples, finally, into oblivion.
THAT SEPTEMBER THE TABULATING MACHINES BEGAN TO PRODUCE their results, and by 1895, when the US Government Printing Office released the last of the census bulletins, Americans had learned that the nation’s wealth and industry had indeed grown at impressive rates. The same railroad network that took Porcupine to the Messiah and back spanned some 163,000 miles of American earth in 1890—almost double the trackage of 1880 and more than triple that of 1870. American industry produced goods valued at almost $9.4 billion in 1890—almost 70 percent more than in 1880—and iron and steel production rose by more than 150 percent in the previous decade alone. And so it went: the census stacked up statistics like bullion in acres tilled, goods produced, and skyrocketing dollar values.17
But by the time most of the facts were known, the slumping American economy had dispirited the public almost beyond any ability to be inspired by such happy news. Even before that, in that summer of 1890, the shiny promise of the census had faded almost as quickly as newspapers published its initial findings. New Yorkers, residents of the biggest city, were certain that they had been undercounted by perhaps 100,000 people and soon demanded a recount. Philadelphians, Chicagoans, and other metropolitan residents made similar demands.18
The spat had wide ramifications. The census was the key yardstick for apportioning congressional representatives, and it was also the work of a temporary bureau staffed by political appointees. Census jobs went to acolytes of the ruling party, in this case Republican followers of President Benjamin Harrison. Democratic New York cried foul, and allegations of crass partisanship tarnished the gleaming image of the “light and airy machine shop.”
Worse was still to come. In December, with the announcement of the nation’s total population, charges of partisan bias gave way to cries of incompetence. Hollerith’s machines counted just under 63 million Americans, dramatically fewer than authorities had predicted. As one wry observer remarked, the new number “sent into spasms of indignation a great many people who had made up their minds that the dignity of the Republic could only be supported on a total of 75 million.”19
Although the populace had continued to expand—at a rate of 25 percent over the previous decade—Americans were accustomed to still faster growth. In tallies before the Civil War, populations had advanced by 33 percent or more. The new results suggested a slowdown so precipitous as to strain credulity. How could the population be growing at a slower pace than at any time since the bloody decade of Shiloh and Gettysburg? Americans had become more numerous than ever, they lived longer than their ancestors, they amassed more wealth, and they produced so much more. How could they be reproducing less?20
MEANWHILE, IN THE WEST, DROUGHT HAD BAKED THE EARTH bare. Indian reservations occupied poor land that had little game and few wild plants of any use. In the withering heat, what grass was left by cattle and sheep (most of them owned by white ranchers) quickly shriveled. Scarce game vanished. By 1885, many Indians had turned their hand to farming, but in 1890 their crops wilted. Starvation, that old monster, circled the camps. It was thus not surprising that some Indians had turned to a new faith, the savior announced by Porcupine and others across the Indian reservations of the interior West. In doing so, Indian believers unwittingly launched upon a collision course with the anxious American public.
What swept the West that summer was an evangelical revival that synthesized ancient Indian beliefs with new millenarian teaching. Strange stories made their way from neighbor to neighbor, from one people to the next, stories of distant laughter on the breeze, dead loved ones brought back to life, and an earth again made green and bountiful. The believers claimed remarkable providences. A small party started from Montana in search of the Messiah, heading first to the camp of the famed Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull in South Dakota. Along the way, one of their number—Yellow Hawk—announced that he would prove the resurrection prophecy. He committed suicide. When his friends arrived at Sitting Bull’s compound, there was Yellow Hawk, alive and happy. He had been carried to the compound, he said, by the Messiah.21
Talk of resurrection extended to the earth itself. Bison hunting had ceased by the early 1880s, for the animals were nearly extinct. The only survivors of the great herds were living in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, on a few private ranches far to the south or in Canada, and in zoos and traveling Wild West shows. But in 1890, in the midst of the drought, a few of the shaggy beasts appeared suddenly on one of the Sioux reservations in South Dakota. Had the spirits returned their favor? How else could one explain this miraculous event?22
Stories like these spread among friends and acquaintances, raising unanswerable questions and inspiring new faith. And all that fall, Indians danced. They danced from the deep Southwest to the Canadian border and into Alberta. They danced from the Sierra Nevada to eastern Oklahoma. They danced in southern Utah, and in Idaho. They danced in Arizona.
In Nevada, a thousand Shoshones danced all night, and as the eastern sky turned pale shouts rang out that the spirits of deceased loved ones were appearing among the faithful. A thousand voices shouted in unison, “Christ has come!,” and they fell to the ground, or perhaps to their knees, weeping and singing and utterly exhausted.23
Although many had dismissed the springtime talk of a messiah somewhere in the mountains of western Montana, the rumor seemed only to grow over time. From the Southwest to the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming and on into the plains of South Dakota, Indians spoke of a redeemer to the north—suspiciously close to where, back in the spring, the Cheyenne of Montana had placed him.24
By the fall of 1890, authorities who read the telegrams and heard the reports had become uneasy. Thirty Indian reservations were transfixed by the prophecies of the Messiah, but the teachings had a particularly enthusiastic following among the Lakota Sioux, also known as the Western Sioux. Because of the relatively recent history of US hostilities with these people—the notorious Sitting Bull was learning the new faith—it was there that government agents soon focused their attentions.
SIOUX DISCONTENT HAD MANY SOURCES—AND AN ODD connection to Hollerith’s device 1,500 miles away. In 1889 the government had forced a new treaty on the Sioux, a successor to the 1877 treaty (which had been foisted on them by means so foul that the Supreme Court would invalidate it a century later). Under the terms of this new purported agreement, the Sioux gave up a vast tract of land in exchange for paltry payments of beef, flour, coffee, and sugar. But even these rations proved ephemeral. Within weeks, Congress, in a fit of economy, slashed appropriations for Sioux subsistence by 10 percent. The beef ration at Rosebud Reservation plummeted by 2 million pounds, and at Pine Ridge by 1 million.25
At the same moment, authorities, in a push to index rations more tightly to population, initiated a special census of Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations in 1889. Being counted had never sat well with Sioux people, who resisted it from the days when the first bands began to submit themselves to US Army authority in 1872. They invariably saw the process for what it was: an attempt to better confine and control them. Resistance to this new census was bitter. At Rosebud, Chief White Horse flat out refused to let his people be counted. The agent threw him in jail and withheld beef from his followers until he relented. When it was over, White Horse and the other critics were proved right: enumerators counted 2,000 fewer Sioux among the Brule (one of the seven Lakota tribes) than had been on the rolls. In April 1890, the inevitable result became clear: rations would be permanently lowered.26
The special census of 1889 was not directly related to the 1890 general census, but in its precision and its purpose—gathering data to inform policymaking—it expressed the same faith in tabulation as a path to benevolent, moral governance. And one of its effects was to prevent Sioux families from escaping poverty and near (if not outright) starvation.
Ever since 1890, scholars of these events have debated how militant the Sioux dancers were. Did they actually plan a war? In fact, to the dancers and even some officials on the scene, it was eminently clear that, to believers, the dance was a prayer for peace. The new religion barred them from violence, which threatened only when authorities (or other Indians) tried to prevent believers from dancing in what they saw as a direct attempt to prevent the fulfillment of prophecy.
It is almost impossible to overstate how vehement officials and other Americans eventually became over the need to break up the dances. Writers and scholars have spilled oceans of ink (and with this book, I add my share) exploring what made the Indians dance. They have largely overlooked an equally large mystery: after initially ignoring the dance, why did Americans come to care so much about it?
Indeed, even for a famously determined people, Americans’ fixation on the dance seems peculiar. Few mistook it for a war dance. Indians were not massing for combat. Popular histories point to the special clothing that some dancers wore, the so-called ghost shirts. It is true that some of the Sioux believed these shirts to be bulletproof, and perhaps there were a few who fancied themselves redeemers-in-arms. But the ghost shirts appeared only among some dancers and only late in 1890, after the dance was already entrenched. Most followers of the new religion were apparently dressed in “Indian” clothing—leggings and moccasins for men and dresses for women—or, like other poor westerners, in faded dungarees or dresses and cotton shirts. They often painted their faces, but this practice was hardly unique to the Ghost Dance. To explain the discomfiture of officials we have to look elsewhere.27
Of all the features of the new ritual that garnered commentary, the physical excitement of the dancers received the most attention. The central feature of the Ghost Dance everywhere was a ring of people holding hands and turning in a clockwise direction—“men, women, and children; the strong and the robust, the weak consumptive, and those near to death’s door,” as one observer described them. Lakotas had grafted onto the Ghost Dance some symbols of their primary religious ritual, the Sun Dance. Thus, Sioux believers felled a tree, often a young cottonwood, and re-erected it at the center of their dance circle. On it they hung offerings to the spirits, including colored ribbons and sometimes an American flag. Near the tree stood the holy men, supervising the event and assembling the believers, who began by taking a seat in the circle around the tree. There was a prayer, and sometimes a sacred potion was passed for participants to drink. Then dancers might together utter “a sort of plaintive cry, which is pretty well calculated to arrest the ear of the sympathetic.” Once these preliminaries were completed, the dancers rose and started singing—unaccompanied, without drums or other instruments—and the circle began to turn.28
Although other tribes’ dancers rotated at a constant rate, among the Lakota and other Plains tribes they gradually picked up speed. “They would go as fast as they could, their hands moving from side to side, their bodies swaying, their arms, with hands gripped tightly in their neighbors’, swinging back and forth with all their might.” Those who stumbled were pulled upright by their neighbors.29
Before too long some individuals might collapse, often spectacularly. Some stumbled away from the circle, and some ran. Others high-stepped, pawing the air. An observer described a woman who burst out of the ring, her arms moving “wildly,” her hair falling over her face, “which was purple, looking as if the blood would burst through.” She “went down like a log,” on her back, motionless and apparently unconscious, “but with every muscle twitching and quivering.”30
The circling and singing continued for a time, sometimes until dozens of people had fallen unconscious in similar fashion. Then the singing stopped, and the dancers sat down in their circle and waited for the fallen to awaken. As they did, they were ushered to the center of the circle. There they related wondrous visions—of camps filled with long-gone family members feasting on fresh buffalo meat, of joyous reunions amid green hills and tumbling streams—and ceremonial leaders proclaimed these happy tidings to the assembled crowd.31
Astonished and disturbed by the enthusiasms of the ritual, some American witnesses were moved to dire warnings. One agent reported that the Indians favored “disobedience to all orders, and war if necessary to carry out their dance craze.” “The Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy,” hyperventilated the agent at Pine Ridge. Another denounced the actual dance as “exceedingly prejudicial” to the “physical welfare” of the Indians, who became exhausted by it. “I think, “the agent went on, “steps should be taken to stop it.” Fearful that unconscious women might be molested, one white witness at Pine Ridge claimed that women “fall senseless to the ground, throwing their clothes over their heads, and laying bare the most prominent part of their bodies, viz., ‘their butts’ and ‘things.’” Concluded still another, “The dance is indecent, demoralizing, and disgusting.” If there was a “messiah craze,” it was this unreasonable conviction that messiah dancing was a threat, and it was Americans, not the Sioux, who were afflicted.32
For these observers, the dance was a physical manifestation of irrationality, a refusal to be governed in body or in spirit by the codes of Victorian decorum handed down from missionaries. In one sense, at least, this view was substantially correct. For the Lakota and for other Indians, however, the Ghost Dance was both strikingly new—even radical—and reassuringly familiar. Ghost Dancers were searching for a new dispensation, seeking to restore an intimacy with the Creator that seemed to have vanished. And for followers, the religion’s key attractions included the chance to worship in a form that reconstituted Indians as a community and expressed their history, families, and identity—in a word, their Indianness. The Ghost Dance invited believers, as one Sioux evangelist put it, to “be Indians” again.33
In many ways, the Ghost Dance bore little resemblance to older Lakota rituals. Dances in the old days segregated women and men. This new circle of dancers, holding hands across generational and gender divides, reconstituted the entire community in a single ceremony. It may have borrowed from Christian traditions. Lakotas had become increasingly familiar with Catholics, Episcopalians, and others during the 1880s as the number of churches on the reservations rapidly increased. The influence of these Christians may help explain the development of the messiah idea. Traditional Western Sioux religion is populated by a panoply of spirits, including Grandfather Buffalo, Sun, Elk, Bear, Rock, North Wind, and many others. But only one of these, White Buffalo Calf Woman, is an anthropomorphic figure. In a startling shift, Ghost Dancers added to these spirits both Christ, or the Messiah, and the Father—spirit presences who appeared as people.34
But if it was innovative, even radical in its break with convention, this dance came also from the Indian heart. Its earnest hymns and prayers to an Indian redeemer were inflected with visions of animal spirits and long-vanished family:
You shall see your grandfather
The father says so
You shall see your kindred
The father says so
It is your father coming, it is your father coming
A spotted eagle is coming for you
A spotted eagle is coming for you
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe
The father says so, the father says so
Over the whole earth they are coming
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming
The Crow has brought the message to the tribe
The father says so, the father says so35
Why were Americans so frightened of singing and dancing? A vital clue lies in the invidious comparisons to which they subjected the Ghost Dance. One commentator, for example, thought it resembled a Methodist love feast; another called the ritual a “séance.” Anxieties about the Ghost Dance shared key features with the American response to other unconventional religious practices, from ecstatic camp meetings to Spiritualism.36
The appeal of unconventional religion for increasing numbers of Americans stemmed partly from its promise of individual, authentic experience of the miraculous and the providential in an age of stifling rationalism. Contemporary science had distanced God from everyday life, as Charles Darwin unmoored age-old faith with his postulate that species—including people—were not made perfect but rather were continually changing through natural selection. A popular, derivative theory known as social Darwinism extended these arguments to society as a whole, presenting economic inequities as “natural” features of a competitive society, impervious to reform, and consigning the poor to irredeemable misery. Industrial forces seemed also to alienate Americans from spiritual experience and leave them at the mercy of machines and their elite owners and managers. An expanding technocracy, the mechanization of work, the loss of individual control over production, and a new economy of consumption all played a role in the rise of the “holiness movement” and spiritualism.37
Thus, influential revivals of “holy rollers” and holiness believers, replete with unorthodox behaviors, were contemporaneous with the Ghost Dance, and it is likely that some Ghost Dancers, including those recently returned from government boarding schools, were exposed to them. Perhaps chief among the outpourings of holiness sentiment in this period were the “trance revivals” of Maria Woodworth. The Ghost Dance spread eastward in the first half of 1889–1890 as if synchronized with the westward-moving wave of Woodworth’s visionary faith healing that gripped the Midwest and California in the same period. A self-made, fire-and-brimstone revivalist preacher, Woodworth drew hundreds and even thousands of earnest seekers and curious passersby to her sermons. Many of these people fell into trances (which Woodworth said were manifestations of the Holy Ghost) for as long as several hours. Upon waking, they often related visions of heaven and hell in vivid color.38
These revivals, like many others, were not without controversy. Some critics expressed class suspicions of the overexcited “rabble,” but it was gender anxieties that seemed to rise to the surface more often. Trance revivals inspired fears that bodily excesses such as spasms and fainting by young girls would leave them vulnerable to moral outrages on their unconscious bodies—the same anxiety that troubled some white observers of insensate female Ghost Dancers. In Oakland in January 1890 at one of Maria Woodworth’s trance revival meetings—which drew upward of 8,000 people every night for months on end—a fourteen-year-old girl fell unconscious for at least four hours. When revivalists refused to allow her anxious uncle to carry her home, he returned with police and commandeered her still-somnolent body. Press accounts of the revivalists keeping a male relative from protecting the incapacitated body of a young girl enraged portions of the public. The next day crowds of antagonists who had assembled to denounce the “frauds” and “humbugs” flooded toward the tent. Believers (and the off-duty Oakland police hired by Woodworth to protect her flock) mounted a ferocious defense. The furious brawl ended only when a deputation of regular police arrived (having been summoned by the claxon of Oakland’s first-ever riot alarm). The events reminded revivalists (as if they needed a reminder) of the volatility surrounding any gathering at the intersections of gender, bodily comportment, and charismatic religion.39
If the appearance of young white girls in the grip of charismatic faith was provocative for authorities and many members of the public, the news that Indians were similarly possessed threatened to unhinge public sentiment. Religious unorthodoxy combined with race, and in particular with Indianness, has perhaps always been an explosive mix. But in 1890, America’s racial fears made public sentiment on such matters particularly volatile, owing at least as much to events in the East and Midwest as in the West. The most important was the radical diversification of American society, a trend that, already hard to miss, was made strikingly clear by the census. Back in 1881, as the United States was preparing to receive the Statue of Liberty from the people of France, a Russian-American poet named Emma Lazarus donated some new verse at an auction to raise funds for the monument’s pedestal. Although her words would not be inscribed at the foot of the statue until after 1900 (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), apparently the world had already complied. In 1890 census enumerators turned up astoundingly large numbers of foreign-born immigrants. Almost 5.3 million new arrivals—fully one-third of the total number of immigrants to the United States since 1820—had arrived since 1880.40
Most alarming perhaps was the shift in the identities of the newcomers. Although most immigrants were former peasants, their American homes were overwhelmingly urban. Their origins were different too. Sometime around 1880, the mostly northern European arrivals at America’s docks gave way to immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, including Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, and Russian Jews.
The conjunction of newspaper stories about recalcitrant Indians and the impossible-to-miss evidence of increasing numbers of immigrants left some white Americans convinced that their nation was being torn asunder. That very November, as newspaper reporters spun ever more lurid tales of whirling dances and conspiracies of red men, a book packed with forty photographs of New York’s tenement districts appeared in city bookshops. How the Other Half Lives by the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis advanced the case for better living conditions among the poor. But it also portrayed the dizzying complexity of the city and the alien, international society that occupied it. To Riis, the tenement districts constituted a frontier of savagery that rivaled the all-but-won West. For the Victorian middle-class public, the dark-skinned Italians, Jews, Chinese, and African Americans who stared out from the pages of Riis’s book looked less like pitiful objects of charity, in their stark poverty, than a barbaric horde, possibly even the vanguard of a workers’ revolution.41
Riis’s book only underscored the sense of emergency that accompanied the census figures. In the view of one prominent statistician, the invasions that toppled Rome “were no more than a series of excursion parties” compared to the “rising flood of immigration” that now threatened the United States.42
The kaleidoscope of peoples gathering on America’s shores might have been less worrying in a different context. The Civil War had sealed the union (again), but to many it seemed ready to split apart along lines of race and class. The rapid extension of industrial working conditions, the growing disparities between rich and poor, and repeated financial panics together would have made America a nation of widening social divisions and bitter labor unrest even without the surge in immigration that helped define the era. For a nation that still imagined itself to be a country of independent farmers, the last quarter of the nineteenth century brought an ugly confrontation with urban industrial working conditions. The aftershock of the financial panic of 1873 saw wage cuts and a spontaneous nationwide series of strikes by railroad workers in 1877. Thereafter, for three decades, tens of thousands of labor actions and company shutdowns would paralyze commerce, and pitched street battles between cudgel-swinging strikers and pistol-packing corporate guards would sometimes close whole city districts. In 1885, at a demonstration to support a strike at Cyrus McCormick’s plant in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, somebody threw a dynamite bomb into the ranks of police. Seven people died in the ensuing melee, and dozens were wounded.43
Growing radicalism, primarily in the form of the anarchist movement, swept up native-born and immigrant alike. Americans associated the most radical forces with foreigners in part because Irish, Germans, and other immigrants flocked to the nascent labor unions (although native-born Americans did too). In the wake of the Haymarket bombing, the national panic over foreign-born anarchists created America’s first “red scare” and its first terrorist panic. Business elites and their middle-class supporters organized militias and built armories in many of the nation’s cities.44
To a public convinced that organized laborers were exclusively foreign, the continuing flow of migrants was a terrifying specter. “Every steamship unloading upon our shores its motley horde of Germans, Bohemians, Hungarians, Poles, and Italians,” warned one observer in 1887, “prepares the way for… [an] attempt at revolution.”Another, bemoaning these “hordes of barbarians,” concluded, “We are undergoing changes similar to those which have been the ruin of ancient peoples.”45
American whites worried not only about changing immigrant populations but also about changes in themselves that might have left them unworthy of the task of subduing industrial labor. For instance, believing fervently in America’s rural majority as the bulwark of republican virtues, many American whites were worried by the results of the census of 1890, which showed that fully one-third of the nation was now urban. If the trend continued (which it did), in another generation or so Americans would become a majority-urban people (which they did). White men might manage or even own the new factories, but increasingly they complained that their office jobs and white collars had alienated them from nature and sapped the innate racial energy that—in their minds—had once empowered their forebears to conquer most of North America.
Fixated on their own decline, the middle and upper classes—the managerial classes—claimed to be afflicted with an array of debilitating disorders stemming from “overcivilization.” In 1868 the neurologist George Beard even diagnosed this condition: neurasthenia (literally, the lack of nerve strength) was a psychiatric malady whose symptoms included almost every imaginable anxiety: “fear of responsibility, of open places or closed places, fear of society, fear of being alone, fear of fears, fear of contamination, fear of everything.” By the 1880s, his textbook on the subject was widely read and middle-class Americans were conversant with the notion that their conquest of the primitives had succeeded all too well. In the words of the good doctor, “The prime cause of modern nervousness is modern civilization with all its accompaniments.”46
In Beard’s reckoning, the “lack of nerve force” that characterized neurasthenics left them unable to “go through the process of reproducing the species.” Neurasthenia was thus seen to have contributed to the declining American birth rate, and the 1890 census amplified the concern. If so many of the people counted in 1890 were new arrivals, that must mean that native-born Americans, the so-called old stock, were reproducing even more slowly than it seemed. Dire warnings about birth control as “race suicide” were not far behind.47
Although few recognized it at the time, such fears—along with the demographic trends that inspired them—were emerging elsewhere. All over the Western world, rates of population growth were slowing, to great consternation. Decrying the “systematic sterility” that seemed to have befallen “the French race,” a census official in Paris surmised that “we can only derive consolation from the fact that all other civilised nations appear to be tending in the same direction.” Defending himself against charges of manipulation and mismanagement, the director of the US census soberly observed that his counterparts in other countries had been likewise slandered. “The decades ending 1890–91 have been ominous ones for officials in charge of census work.”48
Thus, the “electric census” limned a smaller, more crowded earth. In America’s cities, the space between the world’s peoples collapsed. Bohemians took up residence beside Irish, just up the street from African Americans and Chinese. In the West, the vanishing frontier made Americans even more covetous of Indian land. Native peoples grew more vulnerable to white and immigrant neighbors, like the Germans and Scandinavians who populated the Northern Plains and the heavily Irish and Anglo-American settlements of the Southwest. Regulations confined many Indians to reservations, and when they managed to leave to find work, they had to compete with the Chinese, Mexican, Czech, Greek, and Basque laborers who migrated from one payroll to the next between Sinaloa and Seattle, Los Angeles and Ottawa.
Even before 1890, the uncomfortable sense of being cheek by jowl with so many aliens had stoked the public commitment to erasing the differences between all these peoples. Through the late nineteenth century, reform movements were infused with a fierce public devotion to imposing sameness, to recasting the polyglot nation and recapturing a mythical past of social uniformity. Countless pamphlets and polemics by reactionary and reformer alike expressed the dream of creating “one great, free, common nationality” of people obedient to the same god and conversant in the same English. Such a people, it was thought, would idealize as one the capitalist economy, from which they would retreat nightly together to the detached homes where they sheltered families composed of monogamous parents embodying the same notions of manliness and womanhood to their children. A nation of disparate origins would be rendered equally patriotic and equally deferential to law and Anglo-American custom.49
The name for this policy of imposed sameness was “assimilation,” and if it seems wrongheaded in retrospect, it is worth recalling that its advocates were seeking to guarantee the equal access of all peoples to the instruments of governance. In a democracy that threatened to split apart over racial and ethnic differences, erasing those differences seemed the only viable path to social harmony and greater equality of opportunity.50
But immigrants were only assimilation’s newest subjects; Indians had been its first. Americans had been promising to gather Indians under the umbrella of the republic as full citizens at least since the Revolution. They had failed. As Cherokees and others learned all too well in the 1830s, citizenship was restricted to white men, and even when Indians assumed vestments of white “civilization” like private landownership, black slavery, and a plantation economy, their land was forfeit.51
After the Civil War, reformers energized by their success with the cause of abolition took up the challenge of the nation’s persistent Indian conflicts. Offended by the violence of the Plains Indian Wars and scandalized by their bloody excesses, they settled on a series of radical reforms to bring Indians into the fold of civilization once and for all. The only way to do this, they calculated, was to make Indians just like white people. The reformers persuaded President Ulysses S. Grant to appoint Christian missionaries to administer Indian reservations. Through their representatives in Congress, they championed government policies to send Indian children away to boarding schools, end polygamous marriage, ban Indian ceremonies, and begin aggressively breaking up those same reservations on the grounds that communal property undermined the process of civilization. Before 1880, Indians owned 138 million acres of reservation land. By allotting parcels to make Indians into independent, freehold farmers and selling the remainder to settlers, the new policy would eventually strip away all but 48 million acres of the Indian estate.52
Indians were thus cast onto the anvil of assimilation, hammered by policies meant to make them free individuals in a laissez-faire economy, strip them of their customary beliefs, and break down their ties to land and one another.
THE REAL “MESSIAH CRAZE” OF 1890 WAS THE FIXATION OF Americans on Indian dancing and their relentless compulsion to stop it, and the root of that craze was this American passion for assimilation, which was, after all, every bit as millennial a notion as the Second Coming itself. What more utopian a dream could there be for a rapidly globalizing society riven by fractures of race, culture, and class than that a day would come when differences between people had simply disappeared?
So it was that, in a show of hostility to physical exaltation reminiscent of the Puritans, policymakers waged war on Indian dances. In 1882 US Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller issued new orders to suppress “heathenish dances, such as the sun dance, scalp dance, &c.,” in order to bring Indians into line with conventional Christian practice.53
In the assimilationists’ relentless quest for erasure of all social differences, Indian country had already become a kind of vast social science laboratory, a testing ground for their (thus far unsuccessful) attempts to scrub away racial and cultural distinctions. In 1887, Senator Henry L. Dawes puzzled over the public failure to resolve “the Indian question.” How could tens of millions of English-speaking Americans, “a civilization that was otherwise irresistible,” find themselves unable to answer the query, “What will you do with 300,000 Indians?” In 1890, finding an answer, given the increasing diversity of American society, seemed more urgent than ever.54
The situation was all the more frustrating because it should have been easy. Indians had practically no power. They held no citizenship and remained federal subjects unable to vote. With no political representatives, they depended on appointed officials—reservation supervisors known as “Indian agents”—for their very survival. Dawes and others believed that education, example, and compulsion could turn Indians into good citizens. If Congress would mandate (and Indians agents would follow) a stern policy of assimilation, surely it would “kill the Indian and save the man,” as one prominent assimilationist put it. Thus would Indians enter the fold of the civilized, pointing the way for millions of immigrants and African Americans and preparing the ground for that glorious day when all dark skins would somehow whiten and racial strife would vanish.55
For Americans, then, the challenge of assimilation was the great social question whirling at the center of the Ghost Dance of 1890. A millennial enthusiasm for assimilating others, as well as a deep anxiety that they might refuse to be assimilated, explains much of what made the Ghost Dance so troubling. To most white Americans, the dance itself was proof that assimilation had failed to dampen the savage impulse and that America’s irresistible conquest might prove resistible after all. In this light, the dances in South Dakota were more than just dances, and more than another Indian uprising. For Americans, something more, much more, was on the line.
The dazzling technology of the census could not banish these dark shadows and lingering questions, even as the returns streamed in and the abstract columns of data flowed out of the census building all that summer and into the autumn. All that mass-produced information created a composite reflection of a society that Americans realized they knew both more about than ever before and yet too little. And all that fall, Indians danced to renew the earth and resurrect their ancestors.
The Ghost Dance and the census may seem unrelated—the one primitive, spiritual, and tragic, the other modern, technological, and practical—but there was a profound and troubling correspondence that hung about them. Indians danced to restore their populations at the very moment when the census breathed fears of population decline into the American air. The Ghost Dance messiah promised a new, larger earth for the restored Indian multitudes at the very moment when officials throughout the Western world were wondering why their populations were growing so slowly (“Where did all the people go?”). And Americans, as we shall see, were looking to expand arable lands and restore the abundance of a vanished frontier.
STILL, WELL INTO THE FALL OF 1890, GHOST DANCES WERE nothing more than a curiosity, titillating fare for newspaper readers in distant cities. Although the dances had increased in intensity early in the fall, officials on the scene were mostly unconcerned. As late as the first week of November, only one Indian agent in South Dakota had requested military intervention; the others believed that the dance would die out of its own accord. Most local newspapers carried little to no news of the Ghost Dance.
But on November 13, President Harrison ordered the army into the Sioux reservations to shore up beleaguered officials and prevent “any outbreak that may put in peril the lives and homes of the settlers of the adjacent states.” Since only one agent had requested military help, why Harrison sent the army remains something of a mystery. But given that settlers in the region had remained mostly calm, Harrison’s concern probably stemmed in large part from the upheaval in national politics. Republican control of the US Senate hung by a thread. A South Dakota seat was being contested in an upcoming election, and its loss might tip the balance against the president’s agenda in Congress. Sending in the army would be popular with settlers because large numbers of soldiers meant profits for local merchants and military contractors.56
Executing the president’s order was the duty of General Nelson A. Miles, commander of the Division of the Missouri. Miles had made his name fighting Crazy Horse, the Lakota war leader who defeated Custer, and Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Perce in their last valiant effort to secure freedom in 1877. Now he was an ambitious officer in a post–Indian War world. Initially, he counseled peace, urging patience with the Ghost Dancers. But the smell of opportunity soon overpowered him. He was anxious, even desperate, to prove that the western army still had a purpose and, his critics would say, to gin up a war that might earn him a third star or even launch a presidential bid. He began battling bureaucratic inertia and leaning on superiors to send in the troops. In the end he won. It was a victory he would come to regret.57
Eager to present the military as an irresistible force, he dispatched more troops than had gone after the Sioux when they whipped Custer and were actually a formidable adversary. With one-third of the entire US Army descending on some of the most remote and impoverished communities in the United States, the “Ghost Dance War” quickly became the largest military campaign since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.58
The arrival of columns of soldiers panicked the Indians and, in conjuring the possibility of war, terrified many settlers, who until that moment had not felt threatened. After treating the Ghost Dance mostly as a curiosity, the press now sank to new lows, riveting a considerable portion of the nation’s 63 million people with stories about imminent “outbreaks” by bloodthirsty savages—never mind that fewer than a quarter of a million Indians remained in the United States, and only 18,000 of these were Lakota Sioux. Never mind that there were only about 4,200 Ghost Dancers, and that most of them were children, their mothers, and the very old. The New York Times quoted Miles’s estimates of 15,000 “fighting Sioux,” and others picked up rumors of an impending Sioux “outbreak.” Some even reported that thousands of armed Indians had surrounded the reservation and killed settlers and soldiers.59
In mid-December, James McLaughlin, the agent at Standing Rock Reservation (some 275 miles north of Wounded Knee), sent the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull, the most renowned Lakota chief still living. McLaughlin had long harbored a personal grudge against Sitting Bull. Now, since Sitting Bull had allowed Ghost Dances to take place at his camp, McLaughlin hoped to exploit the Ghost Dance tumult to have him removed from the reservation. When the detachment arrived at Sitting Bull’s home at dawn on December 15 and took him into custody, however, some of Sitting Bull’s enraged followers opened fire, and in the conflagration that followed the police shot the famed chief in the head and chest. The killing of Sitting Bull sent waves of panic and fear across the reservation, and when Lakota Indians there and at other reservations heard the news, they began to crisscross the countryside looking for refuge from the troops.60
So it was that on December 28 a starving band of Ghost Dancers who had fled their homes on Cheyenne River Reservation surrendered to Colonel James Forsyth’s Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek. The next morning troops upended Sioux lodges in a hunt for weapons. Two soldiers were attempting to seize a weapon from a Lakota man when it discharged. No one was hurt, but it did not matter. The ranks of soldiers opened fire. With four rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns on the edges of the ravine, Custer’s old regiment loosed an exploding shell nearly every second from each of the big guns—and a fusillade of rifle and pistol fire besides—into the mass of mostly unarmed villagers below. Indian men who were not instantly cut down did their best to fend off the troops with a few guns, some knives, rocks, and their bare hands as the ranks of women, children, and old people fled up the creek.
Among the Sioux men at Wounded Knee were a handful of the continent’s most experienced close-range fighters, and when the conflict was over, the army did not emerge unscathed. The Seventh left the field with dozens of wounded, and thirty troopers died. The army took thirty-eight wounded Indians with them but left the Indian dead and more of their wounded to the mercy of the Dakota sky.
As night fell winter descended in all its high-country fury. Temperatures dropped far below freezing, and a fierce blizzard howled in from the north. Corpses turned to ice. When soldiers and a burial party returned three days later, they found several wounded Lakotas yet clinging to life and some surviving infants in the arms of their dead mothers. All but one of these babies and most of the others soon succumbed.61
Soldiers heaped wagons with the Indian dead, who looked eerily like the haunting plaster casts of the Pompeii victims of Mount Vesuvius, some having frozen in the grotesque positions in which they had hit the ground. Others were curled up or horribly twisted, their hands clawing at the air and mouths agape, each a memorial to the agony of open wounds, smothering cold, and the relentless triumph of death. A photographer arrived to take pictures (which immediately became a popular line of postcards).62
The gravediggers lowered the bodies of eighty-four men, forty-four women, and eighteen children into the ground. More had died, but many had been taken by kin or managed to leave the field before dying, perhaps in another camp, or alone on the darkling plain. We can look at old photographs, read crumpled letters, and scan columns of crumbling newspaper, but death is final and pitiless, and its tracks soon vanish. We cannot account for all who were killed at Wounded Knee.63
AMERICANS RESPONDED TO THE MASSACRE WITH A CONVENIENT ambivalence, cheering the alleged heroism of their troops while decrying the violence. Eighteen soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor. The newspapers, predictably, turned against the slaughter that so many of them had helped to set in motion. The US Indian Service, a division of the Department of the Interior, gathered all the correspondence it could find to reconstruct the chain of events that had led up to the killings. General Miles, horrified that his showcase Indian war had gone wrong, ordered a court-martial of Colonel James Forsyth, the Wounded Knee commander. The army compiled more documents and testimony, including the eyewitness accounts of two Indians, before the court acquitted Forsyth. Miles ordered another court-martial, but Forsyth was soon returned to his command.64
Not quite a year after the calamity, another government agent arrived at Wounded Knee Creek to conduct another, quite different inquiry. He was a small man, only five-feet-four, with bright blue eyes and dark hair that flowed to his shoulders. He walked around the burial ground, which Lakota survivors had encircled with a simple post-and-wire fence. The corner posts were smeared with a dry red substance—sacred clay from the land of the prophet. When the Messiah returned to resurrect the dead, the victims of Wounded Knee would be first.65
A short distance away from the burial ground, the man carefully positioned a tripod and camera. Sighting through the viewer, he triggered the shutter.
Before finishing, he took another photograph of the killing field. Mourners or gravediggers had thrust stakes into the earth to mark each spot where a Sioux body fell, until the grassy bottomland bristled with markers of each life surrendered, like a field of spears.66
Pictures taken, the man packed up his camera and left.
His name was James Mooney, and he was an investigator from the US Bureau of Ethnology, a small office under the Department of the Interior, located at 1330 F Street in the nation’s capital. The work of the office was testament to the nation’s growing reliance on the social sciences, disciplines that, it was hoped, would allow the nation to grapple with many of the problems the census had revealed. The bureau, which had been in existence for only a little over ten years, employed a small group of anthropologists who sought to record and understand Indian societies, partly with the aim of better managing Indians and preventing conflict with and among them, and partly to better understand how to assimilate them into American society.
Unlike the other investigators who examined the violence at Wounded Knee, Mooney sought to explain the origins and meaning of the “messiah craze.” What he eventually had to say about the Wounded Knee massacre—good work takes time and his report would not appear until 1896, a year after the last census report rolled off the press—would change the way government officials and the general public thought about the killings and much else besides. His study would initiate not only a new way of seeing the Ghost Dance that led up to the killings but also new ways of understanding Indians and every other people who did not share western European origins. To an unusual and perhaps unprecedented degree for a government report, Mooney’s study would challenge assimilation policy. It would also mark a shift in the way Americans comprehended themselves and the place of religion in American life.
Mooney’s insight that the Ghost Dance was a religion, not a “craze,” opened up for him a world of Indian cosmology. After learning that the Ghost Dance had propagated on the Southern Plains alongside another new religion that involved the eating of peyote, he would begin a study of the Peyote Religion. The bold conclusions he reached about the need for religious freedom led him into confrontations with his superiors at the Bureau of Ethnology and with representatives in the halls of Congress. Mooney’s investigation also kicked off a vigorous tradition of Ghost Dance scholarship that continues to the present day. Most notably, he was the first Ghost Dance scholar to trace the prophecies to their source, the visions of a Paiute ranch hand from the nation’s most impoverished state.
For all the triumphalism of the census taker, for all the miles of railroad track and acres of wheat and mortgage debt, for all the frontier that was won, the American West of 1890 was hammered by drought and sagging under the failed dreams of its conquerors. The Ghost Dance prophet, as we shall see, stood not only at the center of an Indian community but at the heart of an American crisis. His religion was meant for Indians, but he also had something to offer Americans in general. Only when we understand the man who promulgated the prophecy and the broader crisis to which he spoke can we grasp what happened at Wounded Knee, how James Mooney and the nation responded to it, and what it meant for the dawn of the twentieth century.