CHAPTER 7 PLAINS PASSAGE

HIS QUEST TO FIND THE PROPHET TURNED SHORT BULL INTO one of the most influential Ghost Dance evangelists. Determined to see the prophecy through to fulfillment, he was widely blamed later for much of what went wrong. In the fall of 1890, after he returned from Nevada, the enthusiasm of his many Lakota followers helped to attract the baleful gaze of officials. Efforts to crush the new faith would culminate with an army invasion, the killing of dozens of Minneconjou and Hunkpapa Sioux believers, and a shooting war. How did the teachings of Wovoka, as relayed by Short Bull and others, provoke such a hostile response from the United States? How could the prophet’s exhortations to work and make peace have set in motion the chain of events that led to the ravine at Wounded Knee and the tangled, shattered bodies of so many Ghost Dancers?

Two explanations have predominated. The first was deployed by army officers as troops began to march. “At first, the teaching of the new religion was one of peace, “related General Nelson Miles, but “false prophets, medicine men, and disaffected leaders” had altered it to inspire the “savage spirits” of their followers. The only remedy was to put the Sioux “entirely under military control, and at once.”¹

Ever since then, the militancy of Short Bull and a few other Lakota leaders has offered many people a seemingly simple explanation for the complex and confusing developments in South Dakota in 1890. How else to reconcile Wovoka’s teachings with the renowned bulletproof “ghost shirts” worn by the Lakota faithful? How else to explain the deadly shoot-out that erupted during the government’s attempted arrest of Sitting Bull, a defender of the new religion? What else could account for the inexplicable refusal of Indians to stop dancing when the army arrived? It was Short Bull, after all, who led hundreds of Ghost Dancers onto a defensive high plateau in the Badlands known as “the Stronghold.” Successive Lakota delegations enjoined him and his holdouts to come into the agency. His defiant speeches ring out from the history books. “We prefer to stay here and die, if necessary, to loss of liberty,” he reportedly thundered to Sioux diplomats in January 1891. “We are free now and have plenty of beef, can dance all the time in obedience to the command of Great Wakantanka. We tell you to return to your agent and say to him that the Dakotas in the Bad Lands are not going to come in.” Some followers actually fired shots over the heads of the peace envoys. How could any religion that urged Indians to “work for the white man” become entangled in such violence unless Short Bull and other leaders had somehow twisted it into a siren song of militancy? Long after 1890, scholars continued to follow the lead of General Miles and, without quite blaming the victims of Wounded Knee for their own destruction, attributed the violence to secret Lakota plans for an uprising.²

But even the specter of Lakota militancy is subordinate to the second, often implicit explanation for the religion’s failure. Once historians and others embraced the narrative of the Ghost Dance as a religion that sought to restore the old ways, it became almost impossible to imagine it having a future, whether its believers were violent or not. How could people so naive as to expect a return to a primordial past of buffalo and a fully restored earth possibly escape a reckoning with the modern world? The question is no longer how a faith trying to throw off the shackles of history could have ended in tragedy, but how it could have ended otherwise. The religion’s failure, in this telling, was inevitable. Naïveté had to give way to modernity.

Make no mistake: something did go wrong after the Ghost Dance reached Pine Ridge and Rosebud. But the Ghost Dance, as received on the Plains, was oriented not solely to the past but also toward Indian survival in both the reservation era and the future. Many millenarian religions, including Christianity and Islam, seek restoration of a prelapsarian earth while offering believers a path through the challenges confronting them. They encourage the faithful to advance the end of history by upholding a code for living that allows adherents to succeed, or at least survive, in the present. So it was with the Ghost Dance.

Appreciating the pragmatic appeal of Ghost Dance teachings sheds new light on how Lakotas understood them and on Short Bull’s role in the trouble that arose. To be sure, Lakotas changed Wovoka’s religion to suit their own traditions and help them address their own unique challenges. Even so, the original Nevada teachings had a great deal of relevance and appeal for South Dakota Indians, and in eschewing war and authorizing Indians to take up life beside the river of money, the Paiute and Lakota Ghost Dances were more similar than different. The cause for war, as we shall see, came from other quarters.

Our new understanding of the Ghost Dance on the Plains starts with Short Bull on his westward quest. The story of his journey to Nevada and the teachings he brought back illuminate facets of the religion’s appeal that have long eluded scholars and, taken in context, can unravel the mystery of how a religion of peace that attracted so many Indians of widely varying backgrounds could meet with such violence at Pine Ridge. Despite his image as a provocateur and a militant, the real story of Short Bull suggests a complex, thoughtful man whose goals have been largely misunderstood for over a century—just like his religion.

BEFORE THE RESERVATION ERA, SHORT BULL FOUGHT MANY skirmishes and battles, but he was no war leader. Among Lakotas, a holy man did not generally assume the role of chief. Moreover, when news of Wovoka’s prophecy first reached him in 1889, he was about forty-two—too old for war parties, which were in any case a thing of the past. Indeed, the man was so nonconfrontational that his stature in the Ghost Dance movement perplexed the official who knew him best. “Short Bull is not an aggressive Indian and has not in any way been considered a Chief or leading man and is but slightly known,” the puzzled agent J. George Wright wrote to superiors in Washington. Long after the Ghost Dance troubles passed, others described Short Bull as a mild-mannered, thoughtful man. A decade after Wounded Knee, he assisted the physician James R. Walker in his research on Lakota medicine at Pine Ridge. Not long after that, he helped a visiting judge, Eli Ricker, in his research into the Wounded Knee massacre. Ricker found Short Bull to be “an open, generous and kind-hearted man… gentle and benevolent,” and always wearing a smile.³

Short Bull is central to our story, not only because he became the unlikely alleged leader of the “hostile” faction at Pine Ridge and Rosebud, but also because he was the only Lakota emissary to leave a detailed account of his pilgrimage to Nevada and its aftermath. The scarcity of such documents has compelled Ghost Dance scholars to rely mostly on the testimony of nonbelievers. Few Ghost Dancers produced written accounts; most could not write, and the crushing of the religion at Pine Ridge effectively silenced them. Thus, James Mooney’s foundational study of the Ghost Dance, The Ghost Dance Religion and Sioux Outbreak of 1890, is still widely regarded as the authoritative text on Lakotas’ experience of the religion—despite its lack of testimony by Sioux Ghost Dancers, apart from a sample of their songs. By the time Mooney arrived at Pine Ridge, most leaders of the new religion, including Short Bull, had been sent away. Those who remained refused to speak to him. When he visited Short Bull and other evangelists at the military fort where they were confined, they apparently did not trust him and told him little. Consequently, Mooney’s sources were mostly self-proclaimed nonbelievers who had denounced the religion as false and some who even helped to suppress it.⁴

For decades after Wounded Knee, Lakota believers continued their public silence on the subject of the Ghost Dance, and no memoir of a Lakota Ghost Dancer appeared in print. It was not until 1931 that Black Elk, the Oglala holy man who became a Ghost Dance leader (and eventually a Catholic catechist), recounted his experience to John Niehardt, the poet laureate of Nebraska. Although the book Black Elk Speaks, published in 1932, was written from memory many years after the events in question, it remains the most comprehensive account of the religion from the perspective of a contemporary believer.⁵

All of which makes Short Bull even more critical to our investigation, because not long after Wounded Knee, with the help of an amanuensis, he produced a memoir of the Ghost Dance. The document slipped past government investigators, including James Mooney, and remained almost unknown for the next century. Only in recent decades has it been rediscovered. When the sheaf of handwritten pages labeled “As Narrated by Short Bull” finally emerged in the 1990s, it showed no author, date, or any record of provenance. It was found in the archives of the Buffalo Bill Museum in Golden, Colorado, where it had been filed away and forgotten decades before. The fact that it turned up in a museum devoted to a great show business entrepreneur and entertainer only seemed to detract from its credibility.⁶

But in fact, the location is the first clue to the authenticity of the manuscript. Along with two dozen other supposed militants, Short Bull was detained by the US Army in early 1891. Initially imprisoned at Fort Sheridan near Chicago, he and most of the other prisoners were invited to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show for a season in Europe. Short Bull and the others who joined toured with the company for several years. Noticing the connection around the year 2000, Sam Maddra, then a graduate student at the University of Glasgow, pointed out that the handwriting of the document appears to match that of George Craeger, the Lakota translator with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the early 1890s—precisely the time when Short Bull was with the company.⁷

As with any source, we must beware of accepting the narrative uncritically. But along with its provenance, its style and content help to establish its credibility. The memoir lacks the romantic trappings that would betray a white author masquerading as Short Bull. Many of its claims can be corroborated from other sources, and it bristles with details only Short Bull could have known.

In the end, Short Bull’s memoir opens a window into how Wovoka’s teachings were received by Plains seekers, including not only Lakotas but also the Northern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho emissaries who accompanied the holy man on his journey. But most of all, the account gives us key insights into the meaning of the religion for its primary evangelist—and the man who also became known as the leader of the “hostiles” in South Dakota.

Establishing Short Bull as the real author of the document only enhances the mystery surrounding it. For it tells a peculiar story, one that stands sharply at odds with the conventional history of the Ghost Dance. Indeed, for those who explain Wounded Knee via the well-beaten path of Lakota militancy, Short Bull’s narrative is perplexing and profoundly troubling.

BY 1889, WITH BUFFALO HUNTING AND OTHER OLD WAYS LONG faded away, Short Bull had become a wage-earning teamster, driving freight wagons between Valentine, Nebraska, and the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. In the fall of that year, during a stop in Valentine, a messenger handed him a letter and said, “Take it to the council house.” Short Bull carried this message back to the reservation and left it at Rosebud’s council circle, where a crowd had gathered to celebrate ration day with vigorous, social “Omaha” dancing.⁸

When he returned that evening, he was abruptly confronted by two men who stripped him of his blanket and walked him to the center of the council circle. The council presented him with a new blanket and new leggings and told him that he had been selected for “a great mission,” on which he would be accompanied by Scatter, an age-mate and friend. “We have a letter from the West saying the Father has come and we want you to go and see him.… You must try and get there, see him, recognize him, and tell us what he says and we will do it. Be there with a big heart. Do not fail.”⁹

Why Short Bull was selected is not clear, but we do know that Sioux leaders usually appointed trusted individuals with wide respect in the community for critical missions. For his part, Short Bull found himself confused and doubtful that night. The next morning he returned to the council house for further instructions, joining a crowd of people inside. The wind that day was filling the council house with dust, but “as soon as the reading of the letter began” after it was unfolded, “the wind ceased.” Short Bull felt his spirits lift. The letter—which Short Bull would later discover was written by an Indian—announced a great gathering of Indians from all over the United States, in the distant west, to hear the good news brought by the Father. As Short Bull later recalled, “I had no belief in it before but now my mind was made up.” He rose. “If I have to stay two years,” he announced, “I will try and see him myself and bring you his words.”¹⁰

As a former “hostile” who had fought at Little Big Horn and a holy man who defended the old religion, Short Bull was always a figure of suspicion in agency circles. So were many of the men who accompanied him to Nevada. Scatter and Short Bull were Brule Sioux, from the Wazhazha band, who closely identified with Oglalas. The others were all Oglalas and veterans of Little Big Horn or other fights against the Americans in the 1870s: also setting out for Nevada were He Dog, Flat Iron, Yellow Knife, Brave Bear, Twist Back, Yellow Breast, and Broken Arm. They were joined by Kicking Bear, who lived on the Minneconjou Reservation at Cheyenne River but was born Oglala. Both Kicking Bear and He Dog had ridden beside Crazy Horse in the horseback charge that shattered the US Seventh Cavalry line in 1876; after Crazy Horse surrendered, Kicking Bear had gone with Sitting Bull to Canada.

All of these men were relative newcomers to the reservations, having arrived only in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Authorities regarded such “wild Indians” with suspicion and contrasted their renowned hostility to reservation life—their “nonprogressivism”—with the more accommodating “progressivism” of chiefs like American Horse and Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses (the son of Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, who had succeeded his father as chief). Their people had come to the reservation in the early 1870s and were generally more amenable to assimilation projects like schools and farming.¹¹

But for all his “nonprogressive” reputation, Short Bull’s journey was as modern as any taken by his white contemporaries. He and Scatter drove a borrowed buggy to Wyoming. With the other Lakotas, they caught a Union Pacific train, probably at Rawlins, and rode it to the Wind River Reservation of the Eastern Shoshones and Northern Arapahos. Here the Lakotas were joined by Porcupine of the Northern Cheyenne and a number of Northern and Southern Arapahos, including Sage, the emissary who had visited with Wovoka earlier that year, and the Arapaho Sitting Bull. This growing band of seekers pressed on to Fort Hall, Idaho, the home of the Northern Shoshone and Bannock tribes, who welcomed them and told them more about the messiah. The excitement was contagious, and the delegation continued to grow. By the time Short Bull and the others left Idaho for Nevada, probably in early 1890, their party numbered around 100.

Upon reaching the Northern Paiute reservation near the main rail line at Pyramid Lake, Short Bull and the others encountered an Indian community that seemed to have found a footing in the reservation era. Short Bull remarked on how self-sufficient these Paiutes were. The women “were dressed like white women.” The villagers barely needed their small rations because they were not poor like Lakotas. “They are rich—they fish continually and sell it.” If the Paiute people were so well-to-do, surely the teachings of the Paiute prophet must be powerful.¹²

The fellowship shrank over this final leg of the route, but many persisted on the journey. In addition to Porcupine, Sage, and the Arapaho Sitting Bull, some thirty other Indians from this party made it to Walker River Reservation. This group camped in a vast circle that included Western Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Gros Ventres, Paiutes, Bannocks, and others Short Bull did not know, “with every train bringing more and more people.” The crowd grew to some 1,600 Indians, who subsisted on pine nuts and fish for several days, until word came that the Messiah was approaching. A wagon appeared, driven by an Indian “in white man’s clothing” and carrying one passenger, a man wearing a striped blanket and “a broad brimmed brown hat with two eagle feathers in it”—Jack Wilson himself.¹³

The prophet entered a small lodge that had been erected for him, with the covering rolled up so he could be seen. He turned to face the south. He took off his hat and laid it on the ground upside down, so that the crown opened to the sky. Two old men, his interpreters, seated themselves on the ground, cross-legged, one before and one behind the prophet, with their hands extended to grasp their knees.

Short Bull was sitting directly in front of Jack Wilson “and looked him all over from head to foot.” Wilson began to speak. The interpreter in front of the prophet translated into English; Singing Grass, the Northern Arapaho who understood English, signed the words to Short Bull and the other plainsmen. Wovoka’s words so moved the holy man and teamster that even two years later, when recounting this moment, he fell into a trance.

“I have sent for you and you came to see me,” said the prophet. “I will talk with you tomorrow. Today I will talk with these people who have been here so long.” He then turned to the west, and the whole crowd turned with him. He began to pray. Immediately after the prayers, the dance began, and the prophet joined Short Bull and all the men and women, who were singing and dancing “with hands joined in a peculiar way, knuckle to knuckle going round and round, keeping it up for a long time.” The next morning a crier called an assembly, and all gathered to sit in a vast circle.¹⁴

As we have already seen, in the newspaper panic over the Ghost Dance, Short Bull was depicted as a combative recalcitrant, and sometimes he was depicted as a warmongering menace. In one account, when the mixed-blood Louis Shangreau approached the holy man’s Ghost Dance camp in the Badlands with a peace offering from officials, Short Bull allegedly denounced Shangreau as an instigator of Sioux destruction. “I know he is a traitor. Kill him! Kill him!”¹⁵

These representations make Short Bull’s account of Jack Wilson’s sermon even more remarkable. As the holy man told it in 1891, Wovoka had never told him or anyone to fight. Rather, he instructed them to take up a new way of life: “Have your people work the ground so they do not get idle, help your agents, and get farms to live on.” Just as important, “educate your children. Send them to schools.” And in keeping with the ecumenical spirit of the Ghost Dance and Nevada Christianity, he told them to go to church, but to avoid denominational disputes. “When you get back, go to church. All these churches are mine.” He warned them to keep the peace: “I want no more fighting,” he said, “and whenever you do anything that is bad something will happen to you. I mean fights between Indians and whites.” Before very long, Wovoka promised, “all nations will talk one tongue,” and until then “all over the world one should be like the other and no distinction made.”¹⁶

But what of the end-times prophecy? What about the vision of destruction raining down on white people? According to Short Bull, it was only later, on the fifth day, that the prophet spoke of the world to come. Even then, Short Bull did not receive this teaching until he was shaking hands with the prophet to say good-bye. “Soon there would be no world,” the memoir records the prophet saying to Short Bull, almost as a personal aside. “After the end of the world those who went to church would see all of their relatives that had died.” The judgment would be global—all people would face it. “This will be the same all over the world even across the big water.”¹⁷

The gospel according to Short Bull was so peaceful that when he repeated parts of it later, some critics accused him of making it up to exonerate himself from his Badlands militancy. And in truth, the gospel appears to address contemporary Lakota concerns so directly that it is hard not to speculate that Short Bull misheard or misconstrued it. Farms, churches, and schools seemed more appropriate to the circumstances of Lakotas and other Plains peoples—who were urged to accept allotments for cultivation, pressured to choose between Catholic, Episcopal, and other missions, and forced to send their children to boarding schools and reservation day schools—than those of Walker River Paiutes, who had little arable land, almost no missionaries, and, prior to 1890, only one reservation day school.¹⁸

The evidence for the authenticity of these teachings, however, weighs heavily in Short Bull’s favor. For one thing, the key exhortations of his version of the teachings—to farm, go to church, send their children to school, remain at peace, and love one another—closely approximate what we already know Jack Wilson preached. If the injunction to work seems to have been absorbed as “work the ground” and “get yourself farms to live on,” it may be that Wovoka actually did include farming as a category of virtuous work. The sermon Short Bull heard took place, after all, at Walker River Reservation, where Wovoka’s audience included the very Northern Paiutes who had excavated eight miles of irrigation ditch and turned themselves into commercial farmers. So, too, would his call to education have resonated among Paiutes: a boarding school in Carson City had been authorized since 1888; after it opened in 1890, Wovoka sent his own children there and urged others to do the same.¹⁹

All this points to the likelihood that the prophet himself, not Short Bull or some other evangelist, introduced these teachings, perhaps in part to address the needs of his Plains followers. His religious movement had become pan-Indian, and by 1890 Wovoka was overtly seeking power as a political leader beyond the Numu community. Only weeks before his sermon at Walker River he had dictated his letter to President Harrison in which he offered regular rain and weekly news from heaven in return for a stipend, some farm land, and political authority over the West. It is hardly surprising that a man of such ambition would meet with Plains seekers to hear their challenges and fears, and it seems likely that he tailored his teachings to address the needs of both Paiutes and Lakotas, as well as others.²⁰

However the teachings came about, in the spring of 1890 Short Bull and the others took away from Nevada a set of instructions that addressed head on the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing Lakotas and other Plains peoples. But even assuming that Short Bull knew the true message of Jack Wilson, when he returned to Pine Ridge, did he twist and pervert Wovoka’s teachings into a warrior creed? Arguments that he did generally rely on a sermon he allegedly delivered at the end of October 1890. By that time, Indian police were constantly intruding on the camps with orders from agents to stop the dancing. The account of the sermon—the only one attributed to Short Bull—comes to us via the Chicago Tribune and is said to have originated in a telegram from an army officer to General Miles. “I will soon start this thing in running order,” Short Bull is reported to have announced. Because “the whites are interfering so much,” he told the assembled crowd, “I will advance the time” and bring an end to the world sooner than previously promised. Calling for the dances to continue, he advised his followers:

If the soldiers surround you four deep, three of you, on whom I have put holy shirts, will sing a song, which I have taught you, around them, when some of them will drop dead. Then the rest will start to run, but their horses will sink into the earth. The riders will jump from their horses, but they will sink into the earth also. Then you can do as you desire with them.²¹

This sermon makes no mention of farming, education, or Christian churchgoing. On the contrary, “do as you desire with them” evokes a chilling, take-no-prisoners militancy that was so useful for making the case about Lakota violence that it was reprinted in military documents and in books about Wounded Knee ever after.²²

And yet, we can be almost certain that Short Bull never said many of the things alleged by the Chicago Tribune. A few lines farther on he is reported to have announced that “men must take off all their clothing and the women must do the same,” instructions that, in radically violating Lakota notions of ritual propriety, would have subverted his authority as a holy man. (In any case, they appear never to have been followed: there were no naked dances.) The inclusion of these fictional instructions in the so-called sermon casts doubt on its authenticity and raises the question of its source, which has never been discovered. The archive of official communications regarding the Ghost Dance is comprehensive. Letters and telegrams in the fall of 1890 were copied and forwarded to multiple officials, so that originals and copies proliferate throughout. And yet, neither the original telegram nor any copy of Short Bull’s sermon has ever materialized in the official record. Whoever first related this story about a sermon by Short Bull—most likely a paid interpreter or a policeman currying favor—seems to have been telling the Tribune reporter what he wanted to hear. And even though it was probably fictional, the account provided cover to officials for suppressing the religion by invoking the ultimate specter of savagery: Indians dancing naked with blood in their eyes.²³

Of course, if there was any part of this sermon allegedly delivered by Short Bull that he did in fact deliver, it might have been the vision of the millennium coming early. The evangelist might even have told his people that soldiers would sink defenseless into the earth. As we shall see, when peace unraveled and the army began to shoot Indians in December, Short Bull did threaten to take up arms.

But whatever he did or did not say at that gathering in October, there is much more compelling evidence that war was not on Short Bull’s mind, nor on the minds, for that matter, of the other ritual leaders who were enjoining Lakotas to take up farming, churchgoing, and education, as Wovoka instructed. In late January 1891, a month after the Wounded Knee Massacre and only two weeks after Short Bull and his followers had ceased to dance and returned home from the Badlands, an Oglala named Big Road explained the teachings to a newspaper reporter. Big Road was no novice. He had been a war leader in the troubles of 1876, and in 1890 he was a camp chief, a holy man, and a leader of the Ghost Dances at Wounded Knee Creek. In the fall of that year he is alleged to have told his followers that he “intended to keep up the dance all winter, or fight.”²⁴

In his talk with the reporter, Big Road proved a vigorous advocate for the new religion. Short Bull was not present, but Big Road’s exposition so impressed other Ghost Dancers in the room that they could not help saying how truthful it was. Little Wound—according to his agent the “high priest over all the ghost dances” and “the most stubborn, headstrong, self-willed, unruly Indian on the reservation”—prefaced his own remarks to the journalist: “I want to say that Big Road has talked straight about the dance.” According to Crow Dog, a Brule and another Stronghold militant, “Big Road told the truth about the dance.… Big Road talked straight.”²⁵

And what did Big Road say? His account of the teachings in that January of 1891 is as astonishing as Short Bull’s, and too similar to the evangelist’s to leave any doubt about what was taught in the Badlands and across the Lakota reservations:

I want to say something about the ghost dance. Many people do not understand it because the truth has not been told them. Most of the Indians here belong to the [Christian] church; we have many church houses. This dance was like religion; it was religion. Those who brought the dance here from the west said that to dance was the same as going to church. White people pray because they want to go to heaven. Indians want to go to heaven, too, so they prayed, and they also prayed for food enough to keep them out of heaven until it was time to go.… We danced and prayed that we might live forever; that everything we planted might grow up to give us plenty and happiness. There was no harm in the dance. The Messiah told us to send our children to school, to work on our farms all the time and to do the best we could. He also told us not to drop our church. We and our children could dance and go to church, too; that would be like going to two churches. I never heard that the Messiah had promised that the Indians should be supreme or that the white men should be destroyed. We never prayed for anything but happiness. We did not pray that all white people should be killed. The shirts we wore were made for us to go to heaven. The dance was not a war dance, for none who went in it was allowed to have one scrap of metal on his body.²⁶

If this remarkable testimony is not enough, there is further evidence that such teachings circulated among the emissaries who made the journey to Nevada with Short Bull. According to an account by George Sword, chief of the Indian police at Pine Ridge, the prophet told the emissary Good Thunder, “My grandchildren, when you get home, go to farming and send all your children to school.”²⁷

The Lakotas were not the only Plains people receiving such messages. Porcupine, who gave the army an account of his journey to the prophet in June 1890, met with another army officer a little more than a month before Wounded Knee, on November 19, 1890. Porcupine spoke in support of Cheyenne efforts to build fences and homes along the Tongue River. Then, in explaining the Ghost Dance, he mentioned Cheyenne gardens—an uncharacteristic reference for a traditionally nomadic people, and seemingly an allusion to Wovoka’s instructions to begin farming.

If we dance, our gardens will grow nice and we will never get sick or crazy. We must not quarrel or scold each other. We must not hate each other. Must love each other. We must love all the world.… I must not tell lies.… We must work; if the white man asks us to work we must say yes and not no.… [We] must not quarrel with the whites or kill them. We must dance. If we don’t dance we will get crazy and poor.²⁸

It seems impossible that Big Road, Porcupine, and other evangelists could have urged believers to farm, send their children to government schools, and attend church while also exhorting them to go to war with the government. To be sure, some Ghost Dancers would take up arms after the army cracked down on the religion and began killing believers late in the fall. But the evidence seems clear that when Short Bull and the other emissaries left Nevada in the early spring of 1890, they bore a message that extolled hard work, farming, education, humility, and hope. The question is not: how did Lakotas twist the religion? Rather, the question is this: why did officials construe it as hostile from the beginning?

Part of the answer lies in officials’ preconceptions about the dancers. In the run-up to Wounded Knee, it was a widely held assumption by Indian agents, the press, and the public that the Ghost Dance appealed primarily to “nonprogressive” Indians—those who rejected assimilation and clung tenaciously to the old ways—and that so-called progressives—those who went to school, learned English, and took up farming and Christianity—rejected Wovoka’s prophecy. Observers routinely made these assumptions everywhere the Ghost Dance appeared, and particularly in South Dakota.

But Short Bull’s memoir and the evidence that corroborates it suggest that the Ghost Dance was not oriented only to the past, but rather looked ahead to the future and back to the past at the same time. The religion urged believers to engage in wage work, education, and farming while instructing them to maintain customs of dance and ceremony and to pray for the restoration of the earth and Indian autonomy. In other words, the religion was both “nonprogressive” and “progressive.”

Indeed, the meaning of the religion becomes clear only when we cease to evaluate it on that mythical spectrum of human advancement holding that all Indians could be found in either the nonprogressive or progressive camp. The categories themselves assumed the disappearance of Indians: nonprogressives, in abjectly refusing all change, were purportedly destined to be swept aside, and progressives willing to assimilate to the American order would “progress” toward whiteness. In reality, Indians regularly confounded these expectations by combining old and new in novel formulations and mapping out alternative strategies to remain Indians while accomplishing other goals—and nowhere more so than in the Ghost Dance.²⁹

Grasping the complexity of Indian responses to the reservation era is key to seeing the troubles in South Dakota for what they were. If we turn away from the Northern Plains and follow the Ghost Dance south to Oklahoma, we can see how believers there combined old and new, tradition and innovation, and averted crisis. In the Dakotas, officials regarded the religion as a bastion of nonprogressivism. In Oklahoma, too, the religion took on many “nonprogressive” characteristics, including huge dances, ecstatic visions of the old life restored, belief in an Indian redeemer and the imminent arrival of the millennium, and the reprisal of older dances and ceremonies. At the same time, the prominence among the Oklahoma ritual leadership of educated, literate, English-speaking Indians, including some who were government employees, suggests that the religion was powerfully appealing to the very people whom agents most valued for their “progressivism.” As a result, some officials held back from condemning the religion outright.

Seeing the dance unfold on the Southern Plains helps us to appreciate how wide its appeal and effect might have been on the Northern Plains had it not been so brutally suppressed. With its simultaneous invocation of the Indian past and promise of an Indian future, the Ghost Dance attracted believers from a wide swath of reservation society. The documentary record of teachings on the Southern Plains is woefully slight. Thus, we cannot know if Indians there heard all the teachings as articulated in Short Bull’s memoir, but something very much like them seems to have guided Oklahoma believers. On the Southern Plains the Ghost Dance met a different fate than at Wounded Knee, growing into a religious movement that lasted decades.

THE GHOST DANCE IN OKLAHOMA GREW PRIMARILY FROM THE efforts of two Southern Arapahos, Sitting Bull and Black Coyote. Sitting Bull was the emissary who accompanied Short Bull to Nevada. A soft-spoken, humble man with a winning smile, Sitting Bull had considerable influence on the Southern Plains, leading one observer to compare him to John the Baptist. He was born about 1854 in Wyoming. Although his family was Southern Arapaho, he grew up on the Northern Arapaho reservation at Wind River in Wyoming and lived there until the fall of 1890.³⁰

Thus, Sitting Bull partook of the excitement about the Ghost Dance that seized Wind River early in 1889 when Sage and Yellow Calf, the Northern Arapaho elders who had visited with Wovoka, brought the teachings to their people and the Eastern Shoshones. Through word of mouth and letters written by school graduates, Wind River became a central point of diffusion for the rumors of prophecy that swirled thick on the Plains that fall, and this was presumably one reason that Short Bull and his company stopped there on their westward quest. When the Lakotas left Wind River to journey on to Nevada, Sitting Bull, determined to seek the prophet himself, went with them.

While they were away, Black Coyote, also a Southern Arapaho, arrived at Wind River to consult relatives and investigate rumors of the new religion. An ambitious, gregarious man in his thirties, Black Coyote was chief of police at the Southern Cheyenne–Southern Arapaho reservation. He joined in the welcome for Short Bull, Sitting Bull, and the other emissaries when they returned from Nevada. He danced in the Ghost Dances that followed and learned the songs and the prophecy. In April 1890, Black Coyote became the first Southern Arapaho to carry the teachings to Oklahoma.³¹

FIGURE 7.1. Sitting Bull, Southern Arapaho evangelist of the Ghost Dance, 1891. Photo by James Mooney, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 91–20209.

In keys ways, both Sitting Bull and Black Coyote were keepers of old ways for Southern Arapahos. Neither man was educated, and at the time neither was Christian. Both were senior members of medicine lodges, with responsibility for upholding ceremonial tradition. But at the same time, neither one could realistically be considered “nonprogressive.” In fact, Sitting Bull had scouted for the US Army in the Sioux War of 1876. As police chief at Darlington, Black Coyote occupied a position that was created by the government to undermine the tribal elders who normally kept the peace. He held the post at the pleasure of the agent, who consistently praised him for his work on the government’s behalf.

After Black Coyote arrived from the north and began to teach the Ghost Dance, it swept western Oklahoma like a prairie fire. It went first from the Southern Arapaho to the Southern Cheyenne. Both tribes held Ghost Dances several times a week, beginning at dusk and continuing until dawn. Soon the circle began to turn among the Kiowa, Wichita, Caddo, and Pawnee. In September 1890, following in Black Coyote’s wake, Sitting Bull returned with his family to the Southern Arapaho and began to teach. His preaching, at least some of it in Plains sign language, at which he excelled (he spoke no English), inspired an intertribal ferment of religious feeling. That month some 3,000 Indians—Arapahos, Cheyennes, Caddos, Wichitas, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches—gathered at a great camp on the South Canadian River and danced until dawn every night for two weeks straight.³²

The dancers’ enthusiasm reached even greater heights when Sitting Bull announced, several days into the revival, that he would perform a “great wonder.” The next day practically every Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho was present; there may have been 800 people in the dance circle alone. After they had danced for several hours in anticipation of Sitting Bull’s miracle, the apostle stepped into the circle, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a single eagle feather (much like Jack Wilson himself). He approached a young Arapaho woman. Before her eyes, he began to pass the eagle feather back and forth. Within moments, she fainted.

Sitting Bull repeated this procedure again and again, until nearly 100 Ghost Dancers had fallen prostrate within the circle. The evangelist calmed the astonished crowd, reassuring them that the sleeping people were visiting the spirits. At the next dance, those who had been unconscious recounted stunning visions of their time in the spirit land, where they met and spoke with old friends and played old games. With Sitting Bull’s encouragement, they worked these visions into songs that rose from the Plains like spirit itself. Thus were born a raft of new Ghost Dance devotionals and a host of new seers and prophets on the Plains.³³

The new songs and accounts of Southern Arapaho visions naturalized the Ghost Dance on the Southern Plains, lighting a fire that sent sparks of religious excitement across a vast region. The wide appeal of the dance had several sources. The most obvious was the return to dance itself—to the ceremonial circle that had been suppressed by agents and missionaries over the previous decade. Although there had been other dances during that time, joining hands and turning the circle to the rhythm of song restored a sense of community and reinforced Indian identity while fulfilling the ritual instructions of the prophet.

The songs, too, suggest the expressive appeal of the new ceremony. Many of the most poignant Southern Arapaho songs evoke a profound sense of despair and the alienation of reservation life amid the convergence of drought, emotional desolation, and poverty as the people grappled with US demands for ever more land.

Father have pity on me,

I am crying for thirst,

All is gone—I have nothing to eat,

All is gone—I have nothing to eat.³⁴

Just as appealing were the trances, which marked a transformation of the Ghost Dance on the Plains. Back in Nevada, Wovoka fell into trances, but dancers apparently did not. On the Plains, visions became a common experience for everyone—spectacularly so among Lakotas. While thousands of Western Sioux joined the circle on various reservations, dozens of people at a time not only fell into trances but had ecstatic fits. North and south, then, visions became key to the ritual’s appeal. Many joined the circle hoping to meet with the spirits or visit heaven, which appeared as the earth restored to paradisiacal beauty. Most dramatically, perhaps, they hoped to meet their kin, especially departed children. Children died in large numbers from starvation and sickness in the early reservation era, and the religion’s promise of resurrection and trance meetings with them was central to its enthusiastic embrace by bereaved parents, especially mothers.³⁵

After receiving the teachings of Black Coyote and Sitting Bull, those with the most compelling and consistent trance experiences often emerged as ritual leaders of the Ghost Dance. So it was for Moki, or “Little Woman,” a Southern Cheyenne woman whose story illustrates how the Ghost Dance offered trance experience, visionary achievement, and ritual authority all at once—a combination that may have been particularly attractive to Indian women.

Moki was married to Grant Left Hand, the son of Left Hand, a leading chief of the Southern Arapahos. By 1890, she had borne two children. Her first child died as an infant, and Moki’s grief nearly overwhelmed her. But before too long she was pregnant again, and the sky seemed to lift when she brought a boy into the world. He grew into a bright and energetic toddler, and Grant and Moki orbited him like adoring planets. But when he was four years old, he awoke one night, ailing. Almost before his mother and father could reach his side, he died.

The desolation of his parents was nearly total. When time did nothing to assuage Moki’s grief, her husband and family and all her friends grew concerned, for none seemed able to reach her in the unending night of her sorrow.

Then came the Ghost Dance. Grant Left Hand dismissed the teachings at first. But Moki, hearing the promises of loved ones returned to life, went to the circle. Falling into a trance, she reunited with her children and played with her little boy.

When she told her husband, he at first could not believe what he was hearing. But he was soon persuaded to try. Announcing, “I want to see my little boy,” he, too, went to the dance. As he explained long after to all who would listen, he fell into a trance. When he awoke, he found himself astride a horse, with his departed son. Together the father and son rode across the green prairies of heaven.

Drawing on her visions for inspiration, Moki composed some of the most moving Ghost Dance songs. Among Arapahos and other Plains peoples, the spirit of the crow was both the Creator itself and a messenger to the heavens. Thus, her songs, like many others, featured the crow as a benevolent spirit.

The crow

I saw him when he flew down,

To the earth, to the earth.

He has renewed our life,

He has renewed our life.

He has taken pity on us,

He has taken pity on us.

Inspired by his own visions, Grant Left Hand created the Crow Dance, a separate ritual that accompanied the Ghost Dance among the Southern Arapaho and eventually among other tribes as well. Together Grant Left Hand and Moki became leading evangelists for the Ghost Dance movement.³⁶

Just as it did for Moki, the Ghost Dance provided other women with the means to envision their restored children and reunited families. Thus, one Lakota woman memorialized her trance meeting with her deceased child in a two-line song, all the more poignant for its brevity:

It is my own child!

It is my own child!³⁷

Other Lakota mothers made gifts for the spirits of lost children they saw in visions. So many people carried traditional toys, games, or children’s clothing into the Ghost Dance circle as gifts for the children they embraced in trances that the dance came to resemble, in Mooney’s words, “an exhibition of Indian curios on a small scale.”³⁸

Visionaries saw not only children but deceased parents, and their songs convey a sense of longing for family reunion across the divide that separated the worlds of the living and the dead, the present and the past. A young woman of the Western Sioux recounted seeing the spirit of her departed mother and imploring her to return to the living and assuage the grief of her little brother:

Mother, come home; Mother, come home,

My little brother goes about always crying,

Mother, come home; Mother, come home.³⁹

The frequency of visions like these kept the promise of restored family at the heart of Ghost Dance devotions and gave women a central place, with new ritual status, in the Ghost Dance movement. Women were present in the circle along with men among the Lakotas of the Northern Plains, and on the Southern Plains women became ritual leaders and teachers of the new religion among the Southern Cheyenne, the Kiowa, the Pawnee, and others. Galvanized by women like Moki, Plains women assumed a stature that customarily had been reserved for men.⁴⁰

AS MUCH AS PROSPECTS FOR FAMILY REUNION DREW DANCERS TO the circle, so, too, did the restoration of old-time ceremonies and rituals that long preceded the Ghost Dance. In the circle, visionaries encountered not only immediate family but spirits of old friends and ancestors, many of them joyfully engaged in customary dances and rituals that had been suppressed on the reservation. Some encountered ceremonial leaders who had died years before. Returning to consciousness, they announced that spirits had given them instructions to revive old customs, including long-vanished religious rites. Thus, the Ghost Dance revival restored other, older dances—key attributes of Indian practice and history—to the community.⁴¹

The past, then, was a powerful presence in the Ghost Dance circle, but so, too, was the present. In addition to reunion with lost loved ones, the Ghost Dance also spoke to the desire for good health among the living, for keeping their souls in this world until they were old. The dance was always, even in its most millennial moment, a prayer for the health and well-being desperately sought by Plains Indians in the face of the high mortality rates of the early reservation era. From the Great Basin to the Plains, the ailments of Ghost Dancers were said to vanish as they joined the circle and opened their hearts.⁴²

Thus, Ghost Dance songs express visions of numerous, happy, and eternally youthful Indians as well as the resurrection of ancestors who, in returning to life, will restore customs and ceremonies now forgotten. Often the songs call to mind abundant food, particularly buffalo meat. In the words of a Lakota song:

The whole world is coming

A nation is coming, a nation is coming.

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.⁴³

The vast gatherings of Black Coyote and Sitting Bull initiated a dramatic wave of Ghost Dance enthusiasm that not only carried on through the Wounded Knee Massacre but deepened and broadened in the aftermath. The Ghost Dance called to the past and to tradition, but its widespread adoption also called into being new ritual forms and new ritual leadership in a new era—the age of the reservation.

Among other tribes, the Arapahos had a reputation as particularly religious people. Other peoples often asked for their assistance in spiritual matters, and now they turned to Arapaho evangelists for instruction in the new religion. Southern Cheyennes, Wichitas, Caddos, and others learned the dance from Southern Arapahos and borrowed Southern Arapaho songs. With so many people from different tribes experiencing trance visions under his guidance, Sitting Bull’s status as a priest of the new religion was bolstered, and he was given authority to appoint ritual leaders not only among his own people but among neighboring tribes as well. During the fall of 1890 and winter of 1891, he visited the Caddo and Kiowa and appointed seven ritual priests for each tribe to become its Ghost Dance leaders. In “giving the feather” (the tail feather of an eagle), he conferred on these priests the talisman they would wear as a kind of badge during the dances. After these ritual appointments, each tribe began to compose its own Ghost Dance songs.⁴⁴

Within Southern Arapaho society, young ritual leaders would soon emerge to support—and at times supplant—the leadership of Sitting Bull and Black Coyote. Leaders like Grant Left Hand, Caspar Edson, and Paul Boynton would take charge of devotions across the reservation and beyond. Many of the new leaders had been educated in government boarding schools, and many held jobs at the agency or the reservation store. So prevalent were educated Arapahos among the ritual leadership that the conclusion is unavoidable that something in the new religion held special appeal for them.

Indeed, part of the attraction of the Ghost Dance was its amelioration of a growing institutional crisis. Reservation poverty and the end of war parties had severely constricted the passage of young men and women through the medicine lodges—the system of ceremonial organizations that undergirded the entire social order. In offering a profound way of closing the chasm opened between younger and older generations by the decline of the lodges, the rise of the Ghost Dance was so timely that many could not help but see it as providential.

Traditionally, Arapahos tracked their progression from infancy to old age through the sequence of medicine lodges. An Arapaho boy could hope to move alongside his age-mates from the Kit Fox Lodge as a young boy to the Star Lodge as a teenager, and then usually by his twenties to the first of the sacred lodges—the Tomahawk or Clubboard Lodge—signifying that he had become a mature man. Thereafter, if he lived to old age, and if he prospered enough to make the requisite offerings of property to his ceremonial sponsors, he might proceed through the Spear Lodge, the Lime Crazy Lodge (named for Lime-Crazy, a cultural hero who acted in contrary ways, a feature of ceremony in this lodge), the Dog Lodge, and the lodge known simply as Old Men. If he was very accomplished, wise, and a ceremonial leader, he might become one of the Seven Old Men, the priests who presided over all ceremonial life.⁴⁵

In signifying the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom from older generations and spirits, lodge advancement provided a key identity within Arapaho society. Each adult lodge had governmental functions. For men who advanced, as well as for the women who married them, the lodges marked the ideal progression of a well-lived life. Wives’ work and generosity were essential to their husbands’ progress through the lodge system. Just as the Seven Old Men watched over men, the Seven Old Women guided all Arapaho women in their ceremonial obligations and duties, including quillwork, lodge ornamentation, and cradleboard making, all of which required adherence to ritual conventions to gain the assistance of spirits.⁴⁶

Key to the entire system were the gifts, in the form of property sacrifices, that were required of anyone seeking advancement. Dozens of horses, bundles of arrows, large quantities of meat, and vast amounts of high-quality quillwork, moccasins, and expensive goods of all kinds regularly made their way from junior men to the senior lodge members who guided the younger acolytes into successive lodges. Senior lodge members reciprocated: as ceremonial “grandfathers,” they presented gifts to their protégés and to the junior lodges. At a material level, the lodge system wove Arapahos together into a social fabric.⁴⁷

The social and economic changes of the reservation era taxed the lodge system. Endemic poverty curtailed property sacrifices, and peace made it impossible for young men to perform war deeds, which had to be recited in lodge ceremonies to animate ceremonial regalia. Young men, especially those who were born on the reservation or came there as children, found it increasingly impossible to rise through the system.⁴⁸

Although both Sitting Bull and Black Coyote had war experience and lodge standing before the Ghost Dance arrived, one of the most striking characteristics of the new religion among Southern Arapahos was the lack of wealth and war experience and the low rank in the lodge system of its most ardent disciples and leaders. These younger men (and sometimes women) were the cohort of Grant Left Hand and Moki, born in the 1850s and 1860s. In addition to its many spiritual benefits, the Ghost Dance allowed these young evangelists to garner status and wealth. As neighboring Cheyennes, Caddos, Wichitas, Kiowas, Plains Apaches, and Pawnees sought out the new religion, they welcomed Arapaho evangelists with gifts. One army officer who watched Sitting Bull “give the feather” to the Caddos reported that the evangelist received in turn “12 horses, a bunch of cattle, a pile of blankets, 2 good saddles, 2 good rifles, and an unknown sum of money.”⁴⁹

It takes nothing away from the sincerity of Grant Left Hand’s trance reunion with his son to point out that he had met with much frustration in the older lodge system, but the new religion seemed to reward him. In 1890, the year he first turned Wovoka’s circle, he was already in his early thirties but in the ceremonial lodge system he was only a Star—that is, not yet advanced to the Tomahawk Lodge and not properly a man. In the Ghost Dance, however, he would be admired and honored as a visionary and as the creator of the Crow Dance, a key auxiliary ritual to the Ghost Dance that eventually took on a life and popularity of its own.⁵⁰

So it was with other young leaders of the new religion. By the late 1890s, some evangelists, distinguished by the authenticity of their visions and by their safe return from long journeys to see the prophet, had qualified for the ceremonial duties of piercing the ears of children and cutting their hair, duties normally carried out by senior lodge men with war exploits. Rendering such service brought the young evangelists, now men of reckoning, property sacrifices from the children’s parents.⁵¹

Still another attribute of this generation of ritual leaders, though even more counterintuitive than their youth, might explain some of the religion’s hold on them. Grant Left Hand was typical of a subset of leaders in having attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He could read and write.⁵²

Although Wovoka was a great supporter of education, the record is unclear on whether or not the Arapahos knew that. Nevertheless, something about the new religion attracted educated men and women, who proved instrumental in its propagation and were particularly well represented among ceremonial leaders. Caspar Edson and Arnold Woolworth, both Carlisle graduates and literate English speakers, translated newspaper coverage of the Ghost Dance to followers. Joining them was Red Feather, a Cheyenne/Arapaho who also attended the Carlisle school, where he acquired the name Paul Boynton. After finishing school, he served as interpreter at the agency. Boynton led Ghost Dances and became a noted composer of Ghost Dance songs after being drawn to the ritual out of longing for reunion with his departed brother. Some older, uneducated Arapahos seem to have depended on educated assistants; for instance, the Arapaho Sitting Bull had no schooling, but Smith Curley, his primary assistant, reportedly did. James Mooney concluded, after several years of interviewing believers, that “the Ghost dance could never have become so widespread, and would probably have died out within a year of its inception, had it not been for the efficient aid it received from the returned pupils of various eastern government schools.” These graduates “conducted the sacred correspondence for their friends at the different agencies, acted as interpreters for the delegates to the messiah, and in various ways assumed the leadership and conduct of the dance.”⁵³

Wovoka’s insistence on the importance of education might have helped recruit these leaders by sanctioning their sacrifice—their years of loneliness and alienation in faraway schools—as spiritually significant. The religion certainly seems to have salved the profound disenchantment that troubled so many on their return. Grant Left Hand, for example, trained at school as a cobbler, but back home could find no work in the trade. Since 1882, he had clerked in the traders’ store at Darlington. At least he had a job. Many others found none, despite their literacy, fluency in English, and vocational training in carpentry, sewing, and other “civilized” pursuits.⁵⁴

On top of its economic failings, education often imposed a social burden by separating graduates from the mostly uneducated “camp” Indians and making them objects of concern, suspicion, or even contempt. A prime source of this alienation was skepticism about their new skills. To the non-schooled Indians, educated kin and neighbors seemed peculiar in their ignorance of old ways and knowledge of trades like baking and harness making. Were these new ways even properly Indian? Consequently, many graduates were left with no way to make a living, little prestige, and weakened bonds to neighbors and kin, and they were often ignorant about tribal customs and traditional ceremonies. Ultimately, they faced the challenge of proving their Indian identities.⁵⁵

In this regard, the Ghost Dance validated graduates by extolling the wage work and farming in which they had been trained. A white observer of Sitting Bull’s Ghost Dance in the fall of 1890 reported that the evangelist urged his followers “to work and plant corn and to live at peace with the white man because Jesus wants it—these things are generally believed and continually talked about together with the coming of the buffalo.” As we have seen, Black Short Nose, the Southern Cheyenne elder, returned from meeting Wovoka in 1891 with the instruction to believers, “Do not refuse to work for the white man.” Similarly, Caspar Edson, a Southern Arapaho Carlisle graduate who accompanied Black Short Nose, instructed Ghost Dancers to “work for white men.” The prophet’s exhortations to labor seemed to sanctify and naturalize all of the modern occupations in which students at Carlisle and other schools were educated, but which lacked any traditional status among Indian peoples.⁵⁶

Although the new religion required no particular skills of its believers, propagating it did require linguistic talent and literacy in English, which, along with Plains sign language, would become its lingua franca. Starting with the letters from boarding school students that first brought word of the teachings to Southern Arapahos, and including Jack Wilson’s own letters to followers (a method of communication that might explain his enthusiasm for education), the boarding school graduates were key to the new religion and empowered by it. To be sure, not all educated Indians on the Plains endorsed the new teachings. Luther Standing Bear, a Brule Lakota of the Rosebud Agency who attended Carlisle, eschewed the Ghost Dance, as did Yellow Eagle, a Northern Arapaho graduate from Wind River Reservation. But other school graduates on their reservations took up the religion, including Circle Elk, a nephew of Short Bull, who joined the Lakota circle.⁵⁷

At the same time, Arapaho elders also endorsed the Ghost Dance, apparently seeing it not as a threat to the lodge system but as confirmation of its power. Senior lodge members Sage and Yellow Calf, the Northern Arapahos who traveled to Mason Valley early in 1889, would later be said to have foreseen the arrival of new teachings in visions and then gone to seek them out. In other words, the Ghost Dance prophecy came to men of standing in the old lodge system and was therefore an expression of it. Perhaps the rise of younger, often educated Arapahos to ritual leadership seemed foreordained as well.⁵⁸

The spread of the Ghost Dance in some ways mimicked the propagation of the Peyote Religion, which also took hold among young and educated people on Indian reservations and would be labeled “demoralizing” and antiprogressive by officials. The eruption of the peyote ritual immediately preceded the Ghost Dance among the Southern Arapaho and served, as we have seen, as a vital context for the propagation of Jack Wilson’s teachings. There were key differences between the two religions. Because the effects of peyote superficially mimicked drunkenness, some Arapahos who supported the Ghost Dance, particularly elders, condemned peyote as degeneracy (as Jack Wilson himself would do in Nevada some years later).⁵⁹

But like the Ghost Dance, the Peyote Religion not only helped heal a generational divide but gave rise to a new body of young ritual leaders: Young Bear, Heap of Crows, Cleaver Warden, and Paul Boynton each led either Ghost Dances or peyote ceremonies, and Boynton led both. All of these leaders were young, and Warden and Boynton, like many other Peyotists, were school graduates. In fact, over 100 Peyotists are known to have attended Carlisle, whose students constituted a vital network for dispersing the Peyote Religion across the nation, just as Carlisle students did for the Ghost Dance. Most of these young men who led peyote devotions and the Ghost Dance continued to participate in the old medicine lodge system, but peyote and Ghost Dancing were central to their lives. The ceremonial lodges would continue into the twentieth century, but within two decades they had atrophied for lack of advancement by younger people. The Peyote Religion and the Ghost Dance, meanwhile, had grown, if anything, more vibrant.⁶⁰

WHEREAS THE GHOST DANCE WOULD MEET BRUTAL SUPPRESSION on the Northern Plains, Southern Plains officials were more temperate in their response, perhaps in part because so many trusted agency employees had become Ghost Dancers. Black Coyote’s dual roles as chief of police and movement evangelist may help explain how the agency remained calm as the new religion gathered enthusiasm. The fact that many educated Ghost Dance leaders were employed as translators and clerks probably helped as well. In contrast to the full-blown white panic that met the emergence of the Ghost Dance among Lakotas, authorities observed its advent at the Southern Cheyenne–Southern Arapaho reservation with comparative calm. Agent Charles Ashley adopted a wait-and-see approach. After Black Coyote returned from the north with the new religion, Ashley allowed the large and fervent gatherings to continue and did not intervene. He was disconcerted that the Arapahos seemed to stop tending their fields during the dances, and in the summer of 1890 he warned against a rumored mass departure in quest of Christ. But even after Sitting Bull returned and the revival entered its new, more enthusiastic phase, Ashley maintained his composure. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan himself visited the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation in late November. Meanwhile, in lurid, largely fictional accounts, newspapers in the north were already reporting that the enthusiastic reception for the new religion on Lakota reservations signaled an imminent “outbreak” by the Sioux. Despite similarly hysterical press reports from Oklahoma, Morgan reassured his office that he had had a “good meeting” with tribal leaders and had received “no indication of trouble at Darlington.”⁶¹

For all the focus here on the educated leaders and aspiring wage workers and farmers drawn to the Ghost Dance, it would be wrong to characterize the religion as specifically and exclusively for them. Had that been the case, it could never have achieved popularity in Oklahoma, where most Indians did not go to boarding schools and many struggled to reconcile jobs and farming with traditional Arapaho culture and with Indianness more generally. It seems more correct to describe the Ghost Dance as a religion that could reconcile those Indians who were more hopeful about the new economy and saw their future in innovating new ways with those who were less hopeful and sought to preserve more of the old life. Not all Indians joined the Ghost Dance, of course. Some did not experience elation or have visions, and so decided it was not for them. But those who did join were drawn in part to its unifying spirit, which brought together those who had found their way to the river of cash and those who had been less able or more reluctant to approach that riverbank.

And finally, the Ghost Dance also offered a bridge between believers in the old religion and believers in Christ. Indeed, people from both groups claimed the Ghost Dance as their own. Heinrich R. Voth, a Mennonite missionary at Darlington who worked closely with Arapaho students and studied the dance intently in 1890 and 1891, commented that it represented a “compound” of Indian and Christian belief. He hoped that it would lead believers to a more refined Christianity, but in the meantime, he observed, it served as a meeting place between traditional believers and those more inclined toward Christianity. Among the Southern Arapaho and Cheyenne, Voth noted, many Indians made “the accusation that they have given up too much” of the old ways. Others maintained that if they wanted to keep young people invested in tribal affairs, “they have to make concessions to civilization and Christianity, which has more or less gained an influence over the rising generation.” In Voth’s view, this divide was not so much expressed by the Ghost Dance as resolved by it; “hence the desperate effort in the ghost dances, on the one side, to revive many old customs, and on the other side to give due consideration to the ways of the whites and mix into the old religious customs as much as possible some of the customs of the whites and even of the truths and methods of the Christian religion.”⁶²

FROM ITS ORIGINS IN THE REVIVAL OF 1890, WHEN IT HELPED to bridge the religious, economic, and cultural fissures that coursed through Indian communities, the Ghost Dance went on to exert a long-term influence on the Southern Plains. For years to come, it rejuvenated customary rituals and renewed devotion to Indian dance and ceremony.

The peaceful reception of the Ghost Dance in Oklahoma stands in stark contrast to the cataclysm that erupted in the Dakotas. And yet, the religion that spread onto the Northern Plains with Short Bull and other Lakota emissaries to Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock, and Cheyenne River was the same religion, with the same strengths and broad appeal, that had spread on the Southern Plains. For such a disaster to descend on a peaceful, unifying religion, another set of interests and influences had to be at play.

Short Bull’s party returned to South Dakota, the holy man later recalled, “by the same route [on which] we came, only one accident occurring, the train was overturned and fell over an embankment but no one was hurt.” In the months ahead, the tragedy they avoided in that train wreck would be multiplied many times over, and the casualties would include not only members of Short Bull’s own family but, for a time at least, the joyful promise of redemption itself.⁶³