THE REMARKABLE WELCOME THE GHOST DANCE RECEIVED IN Indian Territory was mirrored in at least one way in South Dakota: soon after Short Bull and the others returned, they ministered to growing crowds of rapt and devoted believers, buoyed by a current of exhilaration and joy.
But there were also critical differences. In South Dakota, the Ghost Dance was given a much more hostile reception by officials than had occurred in Oklahoma. The agent at the Southern Arapaho–Southern Cheyenne reservation seems to have been unaware of the new religion until after it arrived, at which point, as we have seen, he reacted with caution. In contrast, authorities on the Sioux reservations were militantly opposed to the Ghost Dance, as Short Bull quickly discovered.
The day after he returned to Rosebud, the holy man set out for the council house, eager to “tell them all about what I had seen and heard” in Nevada. He never made it: on his way he was apprehended by the Indian police, who took him to the agent J. George Wright. The evangelist told the agent about his meeting with the prophet, and he would later recall Wright’s warning: if he conveyed his story to the Indians, “I would be a dead man.” For the moment, Short Bull was intimidated into silence. He might have expected the agent’s hostility. Over at Pine Ridge, Good Thunder and two other emissaries also had been arrested and detained by the Indian police immediately upon their return from Nevada. Under orders from the agent Hugh Gallagher, they had remained in custody until they promised to not even discuss the Ghost Dance in a council.1
Of course, these crude attempts to suppress the Ghost Dance gospel would fail once the good news began to spread by word of mouth across the reservations. Ghost Dances began in out-of-the-way locations and might have seemed too small to attract official attention, but they grew in size and prominence as the summer of 1890 faded. As the new faith advanced, so did official alarm. By the fall, officials and the press were trafficking in stories of “Indian trouble”—a dark power looming on the border of the settlements involving a fanatic, a conspiracy, and a bloodletting to come, either in the next season or at the next moon.
Why were authorities in South Dakota waiting for the emissaries to return? And why did they so quickly order them arrested? Rumors of “outbreaks” had swirled often among white settlers and officials near Indian reservations. Agency reports from virtually every Indian reservation mentioned such rumors periodically, and Oklahoma was rife with them in 1890. But agents usually dismissed them as the product of ignorant fantasy (which they almost always were). There was plenty of incompetence and ungrounded fear among reservation superintendents in South Dakota, and some of the Ghost Dance trouble can be attributed to it. But Gallagher and Wright were seasoned agents with years of experience. Why would both men succumb to the powerful sense of foreboding around South Dakota reservations that was mostly absent from other reservations where the Ghost Dance appeared? Although initially these two agents claimed to have the new religion under control, as summer gave way to fall they, too, joined the chorus of voices clamoring for action. What changed their minds?2
The clues to this mystery are embedded in the broader context, like telltale footprints in the sandy reservation soil. In a season of political upheaval, many feared that the government was losing control; specifically, the two agents and many others grew concerned about the rising power of the “nonprogressive element”—those Lakotas who refused (or were said to refuse) assimilation. Partly because of the identity of Ghost Dance evangelists and many followers as former “hostiles” who had fought the United States in the war of 1876, and partly because the new religion promised a return of Indian autonomy and the old ways, officials interpreted it as a rejection of the government’s civilization program. Like wearing “Indian” clothes, practicing plural marriage, and showing hostility to schooling, farming, land sales, and allotment (breaking up the reservation to assign separate lots of land to individuals), the Ghost Dance became associated with nonprogressive Indians. Agent Daniel F. Royer at Pine Ridge, for instance, reported in November 1890 that the dancers were exclusively nonprogressives “who refused to sign the late Sioux Bill and have in the past fought every measure that tended towards the civilization of Indians.”3
With some notable exceptions in recent years, historians have often followed the lead of officials and labeled Ghost Dancers as “nonprogressive” and their Indian opponents as “progressive.” But just as we saw among Northern Paiutes and Southern Arapahos, these labels do little to explain the religion’s appeal and development, or the violence that ultimately engulfed it.4
For one thing, it proved impossible to predict who would join the Ghost Dance based on individuals’ supposed inclination to assimilate or not. Red Cloud, reviled by the agents as a bitter nonprogressive, defended the right of other Lakotas to join Ghost Dances but remained throughout a doubter and a critic, predicting at the height of the movement that “the enthusiasm of the men in it will melt away like a spring snow.” On the other hand, Agent Royer considered Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses to be a stalwart progressive and was therefore perturbed when the chief joined the dancing at Pine Ridge. By October, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses was “persuaded to give the dance up,” according to the agent, but others were much harder to convince. Agent James McLaughlin wrote in mid-October that at Standing Rock the religion “now includes some of the Indians who were formerly numbered with the progressive and more intelligent,” and that instead of denouncing the faith, “many of our very best Indians appear ‘dazed’ and undecided when talking of it.” At Pine Ridge, farmers who owned modern machinery joined the Ghost Dance, and “some of our best Indians are nearly crazy over it,” marveled Philip Wells, the mixed-blood interpreter working for the government. Another observer would lament the “converted and educated Indians who have become infected with the craze, and have been swept by it back into pristine barbarism.”5
In fact, the Ghost Dance did not sort progressives from nonprogressives so much as it threatened to dissolve the boundaries between them, drawing them into alliances around a religious revival that authorities interpreted as atavistic savagery. There may be few moments more dangerous to a colonial order than the collapse of a system for classifying the loyalties of subject peoples. Categorizing Indians into camps that were “for” or “against” the government’s civilization program was the key instrument by which authorities understood, managed, and manipulated Indians; they used this system to decide who would receive rations and perquisites like farm equipment and employment, and who would be shunned and deprived of administrative favors. Through it they identified those Indians who needed to be compelled to follow the road to assimilation and those who could be counted on to serve as (and rewarded for being) models of “right behavior.” The new religion was terrifying to officials—and troubling to not a few Lakotas—precisely because it confounded labels that had become an important tool for administering reservations and simplifying the complex politics of Lakota people.
The disintegration of these categories explains their increasingly reckless use by agents and officials during the Ghost Dance crisis. Authorities frequently labeled the same individuals one way and then the other, as conditions on the ground shifted. In reality, almost no Lakota was, or ever could be, wholly in favor of assimilation, and at the same time, few if any could reject all the practices identified with it. Real life required mixing old and new, often in surprising ways: many Indians who went to school rejected farming because it proved impossible in the arid ravines of western South Dakota, and those who took up work as clerks or teamsters often longed for at least some traditional dances and rituals. But by 1890, the badge of “nonprogressive” could at any moment be hung on any Lakota who disagreed with the agent and the federal government. Once agents made known their opposition, they perceived Indians who abstained from the Ghost Dance—for whatever reason—as progressive. Dancers, on the other hand, showed themselves as nonprogressive simply for defying their agents. Some began dancing, showing their nonprogressive colors, and then stopped, becoming progressive, only to become nonprogressive and take it up again as the crisis worsened. The categories became circular and practically useless for understanding the appeal or meaning of the religion.
Even at its height, the Ghost Dance was a minority religion; at most, about one in three Lakotas joined the circle in 1890. The problem was less the size of the dances than the way they congregated Indians whom authorities hoped to divide. Among the minority who believed were both Indians who farmed and Indians who did not, both avid supporters of the new government schools and their harshest critics. The Ghost Dance offered simultaneously a route to the past of buffalo and horses and a near-term future of wage work, farming, and churchgoing (although white authorities in South Dakota remained blind to these instructions to accommodate reservation life). In this sense, the religion offered a potential bridge between Lakota rivals, just as it did among Southern Arapahos: Indians who had clashed with one another over divergent responses to US policy prior to 1890 might join hands in the Ghost Dance circle.6
Tragically, the American response to the Ghost Dance only aggravated preexisting divides, in some cases turning the religion into a wedge between the very groups that many Lakotas had hoped to reconcile. One result was the weakening of the authority of Indian agents and other officials, and that in turn made administration of the reservations even more contentious. When they became frustrated enough, these officials would turn to the army to enforce their will.
IF HOSTILITY TO FARMING AND OTHER ASPECTS OF THE assimilation program cannot explain why some Lakotas took up the religion, what does? There is no single solution to this puzzle, but believers’ devotion was often affected by events that were less about the Ghost Dance than about other issues to which the ritual became attached. The uproar that accompanied the spread of the Ghost Dance among the Western Sioux had many causes, each with a long history of its own, but the foremost of these concerned land and subsistence, especially rations. The forced cession of lands and breakup of the Great Sioux Reservation had occurred over much of the previous decade, reaching an awful climax in 1889. With Lakotas pulled into disputes with the government and with one another before the Ghost Dance even arrived, the new religion’s call for peace and Indian unity was all the more appealing.
Hoping to wrest more land from the Sioux, the government tried, and failed, to break apart the reservation as early as 1882. Lakota opposition proved insurmountable. The government tried again in 1888, when Congress sent Captain Richard Henry Pratt, director of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, to negotiate a land purchase that would shatter the reservation. Prior treaties had stipulated that three-quarters of all Lakota men had to sign any agreement for it to be valid. But in 1888, opposition was so entrenched that at some agencies no effort was even made to gather signatures. Pratt left a failure.7
In 1889, Congress approved statehood for North and South Dakota. Determined to pry more land away from Indians in the mistaken conviction that South Dakota settlers would soon flock westward and needed a railroad, Congress sent General George Crook, as the head of a new commission, to negotiate with Lakotas. Crook demanded that they sell 9 million acres—almost half the Great Sioux Reservation, including much of the most arable land. The Indians would be left with six smaller reservations on which they were expected to take up individual parcels of 320 acres each.8
Toward this end, Crook called Lakotas to the agencies. Few declined the invitation. When negotiations began, nearly all expressed outright opposition to the land sale. Smiling, Crook nodded. He lifted the ban on dancing for the duration of the negotiations, and his commission bought large amounts of food for the Indians encamped about the agencies. Festivities commenced, but still the men refused to sign.
So Crook applied pressure. When any of the men requested permission to return home to tend to their farms, Crook said no. In essence, the government took Indians hostage until they signed away their reservation.9
Captivity is an intimidating condition, and Crook was an intimidating man. Opposing him was no child’s game. To the Indians, he was a known quantity: a three-star general (thus his Lakota name, Three Stars), Crook had done battle against them, and they had surrendered to him in 1876. To Lakotas, he was the US Army, and they knew well what the army had done to them. Knowing that he could call down an invasion at any moment, many quailed when he loudly questioned the “loyalty” of Lakotas who refused to sign. They needed no one to tell them that “disloyal” Indians were “hostiles.”
Congress had awarded the Crook Commission an enormous (for its day) budget to buy off opponents among the Sioux. Negotiations dragged on for weeks as the commission browbeat and bribed opponents, one by one, man by man. Even then, there were not enough signatures. To reach the necessary three-quarter threshold, the commission had to include the signatures of white husbands of Lakota women and mixed-bloods. The commission also had to leave the papers, along with a large amount of money to pay out more bribes, with the agencies, which would forward the expanded lists of signatures to Washington later. And finally, when the commission still failed to get enough signatures, it undercounted Lakotas so that it could claim that three-quarters of the adult men had signed. Congress threw the ceded lands open to settlement even before ratifying the agreement. By then, Lakotas knew that they had been defrauded. This was no agreement. It was theft.10
The initial result was a series of deep fissures between those who had signed and those who had not. At Pine Ridge, leaders who endorsed the agreement, notably American Horse, were promptly reviled by those who had not, such as Red Cloud and Little Wound. But feuding soon broke out even between leaders who shared opposition to the land sale (and especially between Red Cloud and Little Wound).