CHAPTER 4
THE GHOST DANCE ARRIVES
IT WAS IN THE LATE 1860S AND EARLY 1870S, SOON AFTER Wovoka entered his midteens, that a new ritual emerged—a simple ceremony based on the Paiute Round Dance, motivated by prophecy, and accompanied by all-night preaching and singing. What became known as the 1870 Ghost Dance swept through Indian communities seeking to accommodate themselves to the transformation of their homelands into hinterlands—zones of resource extraction for city markets. Its origins are customarily traced to Walker River where it made a dramatic appearance in 1869 with the prophecies of a Northern Paiute in Mason Valley named Wodziwob, also known as Fish Lake Joe.
We know precious little about the Ghost Dance prophecies of Wodziwob, which began amid the poor trout migration and disease outbreaks of the late 1860s. Sources report that he foretold the return of the Indian dead on a train from the east and the imminent disappearance of white people, who, he said, would be swallowed up by the earth. This is not much to go on; nonetheless, two striking features of these prophecies compel our attention.1
First, they appealed to a widely disparate Paiute community as a gesture of unity and healing. Paiutes were a famously local people, with strong kinship networks that wove them into communities oriented to particular river valleys or, more often, sections of river valleys. They recognized no authority higher than the local “talker,” or headman (whose power was usually limited to announcing seasonal migrations and exhorting good behavior), and the sense of being related or obligated to their neighbors was perhaps the strongest community bond among them. But the migrations of Paiutes for work and food had dislocated many of the old outfits. Along Walker River, Wodziwob was known as “Fish Lake Joe” precisely because he hailed not from the riverbanks but from the small Paiute community at Fish Lake, Nevada, some 100 miles to the south. In moving to the Walker River sometime before 1870, he joined thousands of other Paiutes of that time who were relocating to places where work and food could be had. To a large degree, the Ghost Dance movement served the needs of Indian communities that had been radically reshuffled and become both more cosmopolitan and often more internally conflicted as strangers arrived from afar in search of work, money, and Indian company. In addition to bringing on the millennium, the Ghost Dance everywhere promised well-being and protection against sickness for those who entered the circle—a ceremonial form that could address the daily challenges of casual laborers who were thrown among strangers.2
The second notable feature of these prophecies is how enmeshed they were with the rapidly changing materiality of Paiute life—specifically the arrival of industrialism, as signified by the train carrying Indians back to life in Wodziwob’s visions. A train was indeed arriving from the east—the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and trains thus arrived in Nevada from that direction for the first time that year. Moreover, thousands of white people were “disappearing” into the earth every day—working in the mines at Virginia City and elsewhere. These real-world resonances may make the prophecies seem naive, but these fragments of the original visions that come down to us through the record may have had a symbolic meaning: Indians would be saved (the resurrected dead signifying the restored health of Indian community and culture) by engaging modern industry (riding the train), just as so many were attempting to do.
Whatever the prophecies meant, the record is clear that urban life and industrial-era wage work in Nevada were met with a wave of millenarianism that flowed into the Ghost Dance. In 1871 the new Indian agent at Pyramid Lake Reservation arrived to find a large Ghost Dance getting under way. In Virginia City, the all-night millenarian sermons of Paiutes attracted the occasional attention of outsiders. “They have preachers,” a Virginia City journalist explained, “who preach very good Methodist doctrine. They sometimes begin preaching early in the evening and preach all night, telling the Indians that if they lie, steal, and murder, they are sure to… [end] up in the great desert… when they die.” The ironic allusion to Methodism was in fact appropriate: Methodism, like Ghost Dancing, flourished in the wake of the advent of wage work and industrial capitalism. Preaching accompanied the central Ghost Dance rite: men, women, and children moving in a clockwise circle, with fingers interlocked. All awaited the transformation of the world into “the fertility and beauty of Eden,” as another eyewitness put it.3
Paiute enthusiasm for the teachings was evident in a vast gathering in Virginia City in 1871. According to a journalist on the scene, a large number of Paiutes formed themselves into a large circle and with the first notes of the prayers they sang with great solemnity began to revolve “as a solid mass”; “like a huge laboring water wheel,” the circle of dancers crept “slowly around for hours.” After 1870, Virginia City seems to have become a hub for this kind of ritual expression. Resident Indians set signal fires on hilltops to call dancers from Walker River, Pyramid Lake, Carson Valley, and other communities. The Ghost Dance accompanied—or perhaps heralded—the development of the large urban festivals that came to characterize Paiute life in the 1870s and 1880s. In these periodic congregations in central locations where the most Indians could easily gather, Paiutes sought to compensate for their dispersal by the demands of wage work. For these special occasions, smaller family groups made their way into town from remote ranches and work sites. Thus, at Belmont, Virginia City, and other locations where many Paiutes lived close by, seasonal festivals like the fall pine nut thanksgiving became much larger than they had been in the days before white conquest, and the Paiute hosts of these festivals acquired a great deal of prestige. Over the two decades, then, Paiute dance and religion grew out of this vibrant urban center and the surrounding countryside of resource extraction, especially around the Walker River, where cash markets and wage labor had supplanted hunting and gathering in the short space of a decade.4
As a teenager at the time when the 1870 Ghost Dance arose, Wovoka knew Wodziwob. They lived in the same Numu community at Mason Valley. Wovoka’s father Numu Taivo was by this time a powerful shaman and a man of great booha who would have known about the movement. (Whether he supported it or not is unclear.) The wave of feeling generated by the ritual no doubt influenced the boy. Although enthusiasm soon diminished among Walker River Paiutes, the 1870 Ghost Dance captivated far-flung Indian communities that similarly depended on wage labor, and the religion thrived not just in Virginia City but in Oregon and in California. It also spread eastward, inspiring Bannocks and Shoshones at Fort Hall, Idaho, where dances to fulfill Wodziwob’s vision continued through the 1870s.5
WITH ITS BELIEF IN APOCALYPSE, WORLD RENEWAL, AND THE imminent salvation of the virtuous by a benevolent creator, it was easy enough for contemporaries like Nelson Miles and even James Mooney—and some scholars since—to credit some or all of the Ghost Dance religion to missionary teachings, especially those of evangelical Christians and Mormons.6
Because they were nearby and because Ghost Dance prophecies in some ways resembled Mormon prophecies, Mormons in particular became prime suspects. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was founded in 1830 by a young Joseph Smith in western New York (a region so prone to religious revival as to be called “the burned-over district”). Smith turned against the sectarian discontent of his upbringing to proffer a new gospel that maintained, among other things, that Christ had once walked the Americas and that Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel who had fallen away from the true faith. Smith gathered thousands of followers. Seeking new lands to the west, where they could build a new Zion, and fleeing murderous persecution, Mormons undertook a series of migrations that culminated with their emigration to Salt Lake in the Great Basin in 1847. There Mormon missionaries set about converting Indians, whom they saw as their fallen brethren—upon acceptance of the Book of Mormon, Indian skin would become “white and delightsome”—as they simultaneously made war on them and seized their land.7
Mormons probably influenced Paiute cosmology, but evidence for their influence on Wodziwob or Wovoka is slight at best (the accusations of Nelson Miles and others notwithstanding). Salt Lake is 400 sandy miles from Walker River, and the Mormon presence in northern Nevada was limited to a trading post on the Carson River that they founded in 1851 and abandoned in 1857, the year Wovoka was born. To be sure, Mormon ideas may have circulated among the many apostates in the state. Meanwhile, distant church missionary efforts among Indians in Utah did shape Paiute ideas of the spirit world; Paiutes and other Great Basin Indians, including Utes, Shoshones, and Bannocks, became Mormon believers in these years. But there is little evidence that Mormons or their theology had a significant impact along the Walker River until well after 1890.8
Aside from Mormons, other Christian missionaries also were thin on the ground in Nevada. While some followers of Wovoka’s teachings in 1890 might have interpreted the Ghost Dance as Christian, it seems most likely that both Wodziwob and Wovoka drew at least as much from Numu religious traditions as from Christian ones. A millennial strain had long characterized belief among Paiutes and other Great Basin Indians, all of them peoples “less concerned with how it all began,” in the words of one scholar, “than with how it might end.”9
An imminent apocalypse along with the need to hasten it through dancing had long been characteristic of the so-called Prophet Dance revivals of the Columbia Plateau, the volcanic upland north of the Great Basin. Plateau Indian religions generally featured a remote Creator—often known as Chief, the supreme spirit who created the world and made it perfect—and a subordinate spirit whose relations with people were more intimate. The latter is often cast as Coyote, the trickster who introduced the world’s imperfections and thereby made it possible for humans to live in it. Sometimes Chief and Coyote were replaced with spirits, known as Big Brother and Little Brother, that were somewhat like people. The Prophet Dance invoked an end-time in which Little Brother was coming to redeem humanity. Paiutes on the southern fringes of the Columbia Plateau were neighbors to the Walker River and Virginia City Paiutes; it was probably through them that the age-old Prophet Dance tradition echoed in the Ghost Dance promise of prophecy and world renewal.10
Thus, even though Mormons and other Christians undoubtedly influenced Ghost Dancers, these relative latecomers were not so much instigators as fellow participants in a confluence of prophecies in the Great Basin through which Ghost Dancers, Mormons, and others exchanged teachings and mutually influenced each other. In Utah and Idaho, the 1870 Ghost Dance prophecies apparently motivated some Shoshones, Bannocks, and Paiutes to seek out Mormons for discussions about sacred matters, and sometimes for baptism. Mormons, meanwhile, extolled such outreach as confirmation of their own beliefs and sometimes incorporated Ghost Dance teachings into their sermons to attract Indian converts.11
Mormons and other Christian evangelists, many of them émigrés from the “burned-over district,” thus exchanged prophecies with Indians of the Basin-Plateau region, an Indian “burned-over district” that matched any other for its waves of religious upheaval and prophetic visions. Spiritual symbols and ideas moved back and forth, and distinctive new prophecies were woven together among Indians, Protestant missionaries, and Mormons in northern Nevada and along the trail to California—the track of religion, commerce, and emigration bisecting the Northern Paiute world.12
Thus, the 1870 Ghost Dance and perhaps the Prophet Dance became key influences on Jack Wilson as he fashioned the next great religious revival to sweep out of the Walker River region—the Ghost Dance of 1890. The new movement was strongly rooted in Numu tradition; Christian influence on Wovoka had been minimal through his young adulthood, and missionary activity in the area had been inconsistent since 1870. Baptists opened a boarding school at Pyramid Lake Reservation in 1882 but, unable to attract any converts, closed the school by the early 1890s. Other denominations fared even worse.13
The absence of Christian missionaries among the Indians partly reflected the weakness of Nevada’s churches: in 1890 a lower proportion of the state’s population attended churches than in any other state. Lacking enough congregants to raise their own churches, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others routinely borrowed one another’s church buildings, a practice that created a spirit of Christian ecumenism among them. In this religious environment, believers appear to have had access to multiple strains of Christian thinking and to have adopted those teachings that most suited their needs.14
But for all its institutional weakness, Christianity may indeed have had some influence on Wovoka. Although Methodists numbered only a few hundred in Nevada, they drew small congregations along the Walker River (with a church at Yerington in 1875) and especially along the Carson River, which some have called the state’s “cradle of Methodism.” Still closer to home, David Wilson read Bible verses daily at the breakfast table, where young Jack Wilson sat with the rancher’s Scottish Presbyterian family nearly every day of his boyhood. There were occasional revival meetings along the Walker River among Presbyterians and Methodists; these “concerts of prayer,” led by circuit riders (one of whom married a Wilson daughter), could last for several days. According to one of the Wilson brothers, Jack attended these services and was “impressed” by them, being moved at one point to claim that only he “could save Indians from hellfire.”15
Jack Wilson was thus mindful of these and perhaps other influences as he worked up a response to a looming crisis in the 1880s. In these years when he was becoming an adult and beginning to prophesy, the sudden onset of economic depression and severe drought threatened to make the refashioned livelihoods of Paiutes impossible. Anthropologists and ethnohistorians have rightly hailed Paiute success in transitioning to the modern workplace; their ability to switch between gathering wild mustard and pine nuts and gathering dollars constitutes a remarkable cultural adaptation. But the boom-and-bust cycles of business in the Gilded Age made wage work an especially precarious way to live. Soon after Paiutes looked away from their decimated landscape and embraced the new economy of wage labor, the Silver State fell on hard times. By 1889, the year Jack Wilson’s prophecies began to propagate from the Walker River Valley, few places were more in need of a redeemer.16
THE FIRST HARBINGER OF THE DOWNTURN APPEARED ON THE Comstock Lode in the late 1870s. Although the bankruptcy of the lode would not be certain for some time, diminishing returns led to corporate contraction and unemployment. By the early 1880s, former miners huddled in caves and camps in the mountains around Virginia City, hoping for a return to fortune. Eventually most of these men left the state, accompanied by assayers, mill workers, hat makers, shop owners, and other business men and women. While the decade between 1880 and 1890 saw 25 percent growth in populations across the United States, Nevada saw its population fall more than 25 percent. By 1890, it was the most poorly inhabited state in the union, with 44,000 residents scattered in small settlements across 110,000 square miles of sagebrush and creosote. San Francisco had more people. “A dying state,” the New York Times called it in 1889. As a Silver State newspaper editor observed, “Nevada is poor and steadily growing worse year by year.”17
In other places and times, declining population might imply scarce labor and higher pay. But Nevada wages, which had been among the nation’s highest prior to 1880, plummeted as the Comstock went quiet. Although there are few good data for Paiute wages over time, generally speaking we can say that there was strong downward pressure on both jobs and wages in the decade leading up to Jack Wilson’s visions.18
Even as the Ghost Dance expressed customary Paiute preoccupations with the apocalypse, it also found external affirmation in the millennial anxieties of the conquerors. Nevada’s spiraling decline called into question America’s perennial optimism about western settlement. From Carson City to the halls of Congress, settler abandonment fueled debates about whether Nevada should even remain a state.19
The only economic sector that was improving in Nevada was ranching, an industry most Americans considered so backward as to be practically feudal; it also employed fewer people than ever after a wave of consolidation in the 1880s. Some Paiute men became cowboys, or pakeada’a. (The Paiute word is derived from the Spanish vaquero.) But prior to 1889, ranching was mostly an open-range enterprise with few fences and few labor needs. Ranchers who expanded their livestock holdings raised at least as many animals as prior settlers had, and probably more, thus decreasing even further Paiute access to traditional bunchgrasses.20
To Indians, of course, American “civilization” was not as benevolent as represented in popular culture. But by this time Paiutes depended on American industry to survive. Thus, paradoxically, both the advance of the mining economy through the 1870s and its retreat from 1880 onward had profound and threatening ramifications for them. Paiutes found themselves not only dependent on declining wages but ever less able to supplement them with hunting and gathering. To no small degree, Paiutes had bought into the dream of Progress, because laboring on its ranches and roads and in its mining camps was all that was keeping them alive. The river of money had so supplanted the old rivers that, without wages, Paiutes would perish.
Wage dependency was a frequent topic of Paiute conversation. Jack Wilson himself testified to the necessity of cash for survival, complaining in a rare interview at the height of the Ghost Dance enthusiasm that Nevada settlers would not give Indians “anything to eat unless they pay for it.” Another Paiute leader explained how his people made their living in 1891: “We work for the white people and with the money buy our flour, tea, coffee, sugar, and clothing.” Such sensibilities had been current for at least a decade. In 1881 a Virginia City settler informed one “Paiute Sam” that the town would soon be abandoned and the Indians could occupy all the buildings for free. According to the Territorial Enterprise, Paiute Sam “looked serious” for a time. “S’pose white men all go ’way,” he asked. “What Injuns gon’ to do?”21
In 1882, Sarah Winnemucca, daughter of Chief Winnemucca of the Pyramid Lake Paiutes and a prominent Paiute advocate in the American press, summarized her people’s new crisis. They had lost wild game, wild grass, and many of their piñon groves. Now the riches of the Comstock Lode were gone as well. Rumors abounded that settlers would soon abandon the state. “If the white people leave us, to go over the mountains to California,” she lamented, “we must go over the mountains with them too, or else starve.”22
These Paiute testimonies convey a powerful sense of something broken that cannot be put back, of an old world shattered, of a people with no hope but to live in a strange new world and anticipate a new age ahead. From just such sensibilities was the new religion born.
Even as a teenager, the boy stood out. He was first photographed in 1875, when he was about nineteen years old. He is standing on a sidewalk in the town of Mason. To his right a white man sits on a horse, and at his left is a row of white women and men. The photo is grainy, and Wilson appears blurry. Perhaps he moved as the shutter snapped, because we cannot make out his face. But already he wears the broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat that would become a Wovoka trademark. Another lifelong talisman, an eagle feather, appears to dangle from the hat. His appearance is strikingly different from the stolid figures to either side of him, and not just because of the hat, the feather, and his dark skin. His hands in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed, he is jaunty, almost dapper. In a way unusual for an adolescent among adults, and especially for a Paiute teenager among white women and men in 1875, he appears confident and possessed of something like a sense of his own bearing—hints, perhaps, of the charisma for which he would become legendary.23
FIGURE 4.1. The teenage Wovoka, second from left, ca. 1875. Courtesy Mary Ann Cardinal/Nevada Historical Society.
Ten years later that charisma was in full bloom. Wovoka had grown into a tall man, with broad shoulders, piercing eyes, and a deep, resonant voice. He did not speak often, but when he did it was with a solemnity that commanded attention. Wilson never learned to write. He left no personal reflections, and we can piece together only the barest outline of his thoughts or emotions in this period. Like many other Paiute workers, he understood English (although he spoke it reluctantly), and he could not have escaped the sense of political and economic decline in the air. These were years of failing mines, falling population, and anxious talk in settler streets, fields, and kitchens about Nevada’s future.24
Northern Paiute tradition teaches that spirit power runs in families. Jack Wilson’s father was a noted shaman, and the son’s own extraordinary gifts appeared when, in the mid or late 1880s, he “began to dream,” in the words of one of his white employers. He would fall into trances, his body stiff, insensate. To the Paiutes, these spells suggested communion with the spirits and elevated him as a man of power. Even among whites who dismissed “Indian superstition,” the trances inspired something approaching awe. “He wasn’t shamming,” recalled Ed Dyer, the storekeeper who occasionally translated at Wovoka’s meetings with government investigators in the early 1890s. “His body was rigid as a board. His mouth could not be pried open.… The whole matter is one to which I still confess considerable puzzlement.” Initially friends tried—and failed—to revive him, and some feared he was dead. But in time they became accustomed to his trances. Awakening after a full day or even two, Wilson would describe entering heaven through the Milky Way, wrapped in a blanket. It was a strange story but hard to dismiss, for when he awoke he had ice in his hand.25
Accounts of his first full vision diverge on its circumstances. An area rancher reported that Wilson had a vision after falling sick, which Wilson later explained as having died and gone to heaven. A Paiute contemporary put the event near the headwaters of the Walker River, in the Pine Grove Hills, where Wilson was cutting wood. He heard “a great noise which appeared to be above him on the mountain.” Laying down his ax, he began to climb toward the sound when he dropped dead. Then God swept down and carried him to heaven.26
On this and a subsequent visit, Wovoka saw in heaven “the most beautiful country you could imagine,” full of game and fish and populated by Indians and whites who had died but now were all young again. They danced and gamboled. They played ball and “all kinds of sports.” During these visitations, God gave him a dance that would make the earth into the heaven he had seen and told him that his people must “meet often and dance five nights in succession and then stop for three months.”27
These two reports agree that the year of his first vision was 1887, but James Mooney, the only anthropologist ever to interview Wovoka, concluded from additional details provided by the prophet that it must have occurred in 1889. Whenever it was, many more visions followed. Wilson himself would later tell an army scout that God had visited him “many times” since his first vision. By 1889, he had distilled from his heavenly visits a series of key teachings for bringing about the renewal of the earth that God had promised. His people, he said, “must not fight, there must be peace all over the world; the people must not steal from one another, but be good to each other, for they [are] all brothers.” In addition, he conveyed the message to the Indians “that they must work all the time and not lie down in idleness.”28
The prophecies and the instructions for their fulfillment reached Paiute believers at the large Ghost Dances that Wilson began to convene in the late 1880s. In key respects, the Ghost Dance was identical to the traditional, and fairly common, Round Dance of the Northern Paiutes. White observers began to notice an increase in the frequency and size of Round Dances in the late 1880s. As early as December 1888, a local newspaper remarked, “The Mason Valley Piutes [sic] are having big dances every night now.” These apparently were the first of Wovoka’s nighttime Ghost Dances, with the people standing shoulder to shoulder as the circle turned. Unlike Round Dances, these gatherings featured no drum or other instruments, only the beating of thousands of feet upon the valley floor. Over that rhythm rose voices in holy song:
Fog! Fog!
Lightning! Lightning!
Whirlwind! Whirlwind!
The whirlwind! The whirlwind!
The snowy earth comes gliding, the snowy earth comes gliding.29
In the lyrics of the songs (probably composed by Wovoka himself), we see the presence of spirits manifested in the weather. At the same time that he began to convene these dances, Wovoka asserted his power to control the weather, claiming that during his visit to heaven he had been given “control over the elements so that he could make it rain or snow or be dry at will.” It was these powers that promised salvation from a new climatic peril: the terrible drought that began in 1888.30
Although Nevada rain is always scarce, the state’s plants and animals have evolved to survive on the rain and snow that cross the Sierra Nevada, especially in the winter. Already tapering off, that precipitation nearly ceased in 1888–1889, just as the Ghost Dance enthusiasm began to mount. The wild foods that remained were practically obliterated, and the Walker River ceased to flow halfway along its course, withering Paiutes’ hay and barley fields at the reservation.31
Ghost Dancing addressed this crisis, summoning the redeemer and promising the renewal of the earth. But it also called upon the power of the prophet, the booha he displayed, typically through feats of magic. During the 1880s, the period when he began to go into trances, Jack Wilson gave several public demonstrations of his remarkable spirit power. Of these, white settlers were most preoccupied by the power that may have been most common among Paiutes and, to them at least, less convincing than others: his imperviousness to bullets. Many Northern Paiutes had claimed such power, including Wovoka’s father. According to various accounts, after announcing this power to an assembled crowd, Wovoka loaded a shotgun with dust and sand and handed it to his brother. Then he walked away several paces and spread a blanket on the ground. Turning to face his brother, he stepped onto the blanket. Then he ordered his brother to shoot him.32
The gun roared. Wilson shook himself. The crowd surged forward. His shirt was riddled with small holes. Balls of shot rolled around his feet. But the man was unhurt.33
For all the centrality of magic to Numu life, it was another popular pastime, practical jokes, that may have contributed to Paiutes’ pervasive skepticism about claims of extraordinary booha. In the 1880s, emotions were still raw over the trickery of the Ghost Dance prophet Wodziwob, who had been undone (according to some accounts) after being caught using dynamite to create a “magical” explosion.34
Wilson, too, had his doubters, and the audacity of his shotgun performance—which suggested that not only was he bulletproof, but he could turn dust and sand into gunpowder and shot—heightened suspicions of trickery. Wilson was not a shaman (as discussed later), but shamans often performed sleight-of-hand tricks as a means of reinforcing the community’s sense of their powers. Perhaps, as some alleged, he had blasted an empty shirt full of holes, put it on, loaded the gun with a blank cartridge, and then pretended to load it with dust and sand before handing it to his brother. Then, perhaps, as the gun belched smoke and noise, he dropped a handful of loose shot onto the blanket.35
Whites were fascinated by this story (although only Indians appear to have witnessed the event). Eventually officials came to wonder whether the display was an effort to incite an uprising. In the run-up to Wounded Knee, as some of Wilson’s followers in South Dakota and Oklahoma donned the allegedly bulletproof ghost shirts, a government agent tracked Wilson down and demanded to know: had the seer staged a demonstration of his own imperviousness to gunfire? “That was a joke,” shrugged the visionary.36
Regardless of Wilson’s intent, the shotgun episode was just one (and perhaps the least impressive) of what came to be known collectively as “Jack Wilson’s miracles”—demonstrations that have inspired debate and dissension in the region for over 100 years, and not only among Paiutes. An elderly white informant bemused a local historian in the early 1900s, when Jack Wilson was still alive, by telling the story of a Paiute girl who died in Hawthorn in the 1880s. Some 200 people attended her cremation, went the tale, and watched in awe as Jack Wilson kept a promise to raise her body from the flames up to heaven.37
Wilson was even more renowned, however, for another miracle during these same parched, depressed 1880s. On a hot July day, a crowd gathered on the banks of the Walker River, where the big man spread a blanket on the ground and waited. Suddenly a block of ice weighing “25 or 30 pounds” dropped into the center of the blanket. Again there were allegations of trickery. The storekeeper Ed Dyer witnessed this event and later claimed that Wilson had situated the blanket beneath a cottonwood tree “whose dense foliage would serve to hide the object until it sufficiently had melted to release it from whatever ingenious fastening Jack had fashioned to hold it.”38
There were also Numu among the doubters; indeed, Wilson’s displays of booha may have inspired the most contentious argument among his own people. And yet, for our purposes, how he conjured is less important than what he conjured. Whether the ice was miraculous or not, this story and its variations tell us something important about the man and the moment in Mason Valley. In one version, after the ice appeared, somebody produced a washtub and lifted the ice into it. As it melted, the people drank. Afterward the Numus bathed in the river. Recalled Ed Dyer, “It might have been sacramental wine judging from the solemnity.”39
In another account of the same event, Wilson placed a willow basket under a tree, and into it fell water and ice, which the people drank before praying. In still another report, the ice fell into his hands. And some recalled not ice falling from the sky on that midsummer day, but ice floating down the river.40
The most striking feature of these stories is the recurrence of ice—the ice in Jack Wilson’s hand after his trance and return from the Milky Way, the ice in the river in the middle of summer. Ice in his hand was a sign of his booha and proof that in his trance he had been to its very source; as such, it reinforced his claim that he could return the rain to this parched land. Making ice appear also hinted at his prodigious weather power (a power that his father and other Numu before him had also possessed). Wilson’s booha is said to have come from several spirits, among them Wolf and Eagle. He was a rarity in drawing booha from the elements as well, including two kinds of clouds. “One was a straight high cloud. This was for snow,” recalled a contemporary. “The other cloud was dark and close to the ground. It was for rain.”41
Certain peripheral elements of many Jack Wilson stories resonate with both Paiute and biblical traditions. For example, white horses appear in Numu myths of the spirit who brings rain, called the Man Who Became Thunder, and also in the Old Testament prophecies of the apocalypse. Jack Wilson not only “flew” a white horse but regularly rode white horses, and some said these, too, were a source of his booha.42
The white horse becomes even more significant in a famous story of a dance near his home, upriver from Yerington. At the gathering—which was attended by “thousands and thousands” of Indians, according to a witness—Wilson prophesied the arrival of a white horse. On the fifth day the animal appeared on a nearby mountaintop. “It was beautiful,” recalled the witness. “It was the color of snow.” As he reassured the anxious people, Wilson beckoned the horse down. Slowly, the animal descended, now and then stopping to neigh and whinny. Its hooves seemed to never touch the earth. When it finally arrived on the dance ground, the horse whirled in place and thick dust rose into the air. A “heavy cloud” then appeared (dark and close to the ground, one of Wilson’s sources of booha) and “started to move towards” the awestruck crowd. “It came right on top of the horse.” And with the cloud came rain, “for all the people to drink from the cup.” The horse departed, trotting up the mountain, water dripping from its sides. Then it vanished. The ground shook.43
The bracketing of the entire story with clouds suggests the centrality of the cloud spirit for Ghost Dance acolytes. Like the snow-bearing cloud, the white horse appears on a mountaintop. And like snowmelt, it descends the mountain slowly, floating above the ground (figuratively, flowing). Like a whirlwind—a ghost—the animal spins and raises a cloud of dust, and over its back appears the water-bearing cloud to quench the people’s thirst. The centrality of clouds is suggested in another version of the story in which the people do not receive water but take hold of the cloud and eat it, like snow—or manna.44
In his own eyes, Jack Wilson’s success as a ritual leader stemmed in part from being a cloud-bringer. In 1890 an army scout asked him how he had become so renowned in Nevada. By bringing rain, the ranch hand explained, almost casually, after “I caused a small cloud to appear in the heavens.”45
The connection between these displays of weather-making booha and the earthly renewal promised by the Ghost Dance is perhaps most obvious in the ice and snow that appear in the Paiute songs of the religion, presumably because snow signals that water will come as the land warms. “The snowy earth comes gliding,” proclaim the joyful lyrics, as if the new world being born was mantled in white. Walker River Ghost Dancers were particularly fond of another song whose lyrics connected the snowy mountain peaks to the Milky Way—the road of the dead along which Jack Wilson had carried the good news on his return from heaven:
The Milky Way lies there46
Snow and ice figured prominently in Wilson’s displays of power because booha is immanent in frozen water, which promises redemption from thirst; melting ice signifies not only the benevolent spirits of the high mountain peaks but the emergence from winter and the beginnings of earthly renewal. Wilson thus appealed to customary Paiute spiritualism—the booha of the weather maker, harnessed to the power of water—but also to those who drank from the well of Christian symbolism, in particular holy water and baptism.
The promise of the dance and its moral code became clear in that dismal Nevada season of 1889 with Wilson’s most miraculous demonstration of all—the one that garnered him renown near and far and seems to have validated him not only as a weather maker but as a prophet.
The sinking fortunes of industry and the declining population were inscribed in the very earth in the valley of the Walker River. The booha that flowed with water in the riverbed was gone. By late summer, as the river approached the Walker River Reservation, it slowed to a trickle and then vanished completely. John Josephus, captain of the Indian police at the reservation, had dismissed Jack Wilson’s powers and his prophecy ever since he first heard about them. Josephus was no fool. He wanted his people to prosper, and he had aspirations of his own. He dreamed of building a wooden house, with glass windows, a shingled roof, and a good iron stove to keep it warm in the winter. But now, with the baking heat and the withering fields, the policeman was filled with foreboding. If the ranches and farms failed, where would the Numu work? If their own crops perished, what would they eat?47
Putting aside his skepticism, Josephus saddled his horse and rode a dusty twenty-five miles to the prophet’s home. Arriving in the evening, he implored the weather maker to bring rain lest the people suffer any further. Wovoka sat with his head bowed and never spoke a word. Eventually, he rose and went to bed.
Early the next morning, he told his visitor, “You can go home and on the morning of the third day you and all the people will have plenty of water.”
Back at the reservation, the two white employees of the farm office remembered that, upon his return, Josephus announced the promise of rain in three days’ time. Two nights later, a storm swept over the Sierra Nevada. On the morning of the third day, Josephus and the other residents of the reservation awoke to find the banks of the Walker River flooded and the irrigation ditches full.48
Wovoka was not done. Heavier storms followed through the month of October, and in December seven consecutive days of blizzard conditions heralded the arrival of Nevada’s legendary “white winter,” a season of epic cold and snow. By New Year’s Day, the snow in some places was “belly deep to a horse,” in the words of one eyewitness, and tracks on the railroad were so blocked with snow that cattle shipments stalled.49
Reports of Jack Wilson’s weather making rocked Indian communities, enhancing the reputation of the charismatic young man across the region. In February 1890, hundreds of Paiutes turned out to hear him preach at Walker River Reservation—in the face of a driving snowstorm. “He claims that he alone is responsible for the storms of this season and they all firmly believe it,” wrote agency farmer J. O. Gregory.50
Long into the twentieth century, stories circulated about Wovoka’s weather magic, leaving little doubt as to the mysteries he embodied. He walked through the rain without getting wet. He lit his pipe with the sun. Without burning his flesh, he grasped a hot coal, and when he blew on it, the wind rose.51
He protected people from storms. Torrential rains descended on a band of Numu during the annual pine nut harvest in the mountains outside Pine Grove. The rain soaked through tents and drenched firewood. People appealed to Wilson for relief. He ordered them to stack their wet wood, then asked for an eagle feather. He approached the woodpile—“a big, tall man in all that rain,” a witness recalled—then raised the eagle feather a full arm’s length over his head, directly over the woodpile, and released it into the howling wind.
The feather hovered in place; Wilson knelt, wrapped in sheets of rain.
Suddenly a spark flashed. Then flames roared up through the damp wood, and all began to burn. All but the feather, which turned “the most beautiful color.”
Wilson rose and faced the band. “Take from this fire to your tent.… Build your fires. The rain will go on but your food will get dry, and everything will be all right.”52
THE RANCH HAND’S EXTRAORDINARY BOOHA GREW TO SUCH AN extent that white people could not avoid hearing about it. Most scoffed. But in the typescripts of old, unpublished memoirs by Nevada pioneers, in the sheaf or two of scribbled notes from long-ago interviews conducted by diligent historians, and in some surviving voice recordings, in voices barely audible over the hiss of reel-to-reel tape, there hovers something else: a pause in the condescension, a waver in the scorn. As one settler put it, Jack Wilson might have been “an awful fake,” but he “wouldn’t want to go on record” saying as much.53
There remained something about Jack Wilson that the ranchers of Mason Valley, however cocksure in their white superiority, could never quite figure out. Part of it was his charisma. Decades later, long after he died, even those who dismissed his reputed powers remarked not only on his sense of humor, his work ethic, and his kindness but on how he stood out in a crowd. Everyone seemed acutely aware of how much respect he commanded from other Indians. And there was something curious, wasn’t there, about Jack and the weather?54
As mentioned earlier, some settlers resolved the matter by conceding his ability to forecast the weather—to be a “weathervane”—but not to make it. Others may have tried to buy whatever power the prophet had. Wilson himself claimed that “both the Indians and the whites” had approached him “and asked for rain to make their crops grow.” The story has the ring of truth. Whites generally associated Indians with nature and primal forces, and ambivalence about Indian rainmaking cropped up in surprising places. Thus, as late as 1938, one correspondent advised a Kansas newspaper editor to break a drought by consulting Indians, as they were “very close to the forces that govern the natural events of the planets.”55
Jack Wilson’s assertion that whites asked him for rain is supported by at least one story that circulated among settlers. When the rainmaker approached a rancher named Dan Simpson with an offer to make it rain in return for three cattle, the story goes, Simpson refused. Then his cattle began to keel over. Simpson sought out Wilson and struck a deal. One beef steer—if Wilson could make it rain. The relentless downpour that followed allegedly made Simpson a convert. Years later he was still giving Wilson an annual gift of beef.56
Perhaps it was the openness of Nevada settlers to Wovoka’s rainmaking and their appeals to him for help that inspired Wovoka to make his boldest move yet after he broke the drought of 1889. Flush with his storm-brewing success, Jack Wilson began to articulate a political program. Although it never advanced beyond the most rudimentary proposal, it spelled out the earthly fulfillment of his visions and revealed him to be both in the tradition of Walker River political leaders and a spiritual rebel with much grander designs than predecessors like Wodziwob. With reservation farmer J. O. Gregory as his secretary, Wilson dictated a letter to US President Benjamin Harrison in which he offered a deal. In return for a small monthly stipend and political authority over the West, as well as a plot to farm on the reservation, he could promise regular rain and weekly news from heaven. As he later explained his vision to the ethnologist James Mooney, when God gave him power as a weather maker, he also “appointed him his deputy to take charge of affairs in the west, while ‘Governor Harrison’ would attend to matters in the east, and he, God, would look after the world above.”57
White acquaintances laughed at Wovoka’s pretensions. Gregory forwarded the letter to his superior, the Indian agent at Pyramid Lake Reservation. “You will doubtless be amazed at the letter you will have received from Jack Wilson the prophet,” he warned. The proposal—money in return for rainmaking and preaching—seemed to prove the naïveté of the simple primitives.
But the settlers themselves remained ambivalent toward Wilson’s claims, owing in part to their limited options for managing Nevada’s chaotic climate. Some whites felt that his demands for rain payment were clear proof that he was exploiting “superstition” to bilk his people. But in wrestling with questions of rain and climate, American settlers and officials often veered into magic and religion themselves in efforts to make the rain fall in these final decades of the nineteenth century. The Ghost Dance was not an isolated event, but one that emerged from a context of vigorous efforts not only by Indians but by white people to renew the desert West.