CHAPTER 9 TIN STARS AND HOLY POWER

DIVISIONS BETWEEN THE INDIAN POLICE AND THE HOLY men and traditional chiefs long preceded the Ghost Dance and made police efforts to suppress the religion all the more difficult. The scene at the Brule council meeting in the fall of 1889, when Short Bull received his mission to seek the prophet, gives us a hint of the unrest. The wind was blowing and dust was in the air, and the mysterious letter telling of a messiah in the West had not yet been read aloud. As they awaited the joyous news of a religion of peace, Short Bull later recalled, every man in the council house was carrying a gun because earlier that evening a son of a chief named Two Strike “had choked one of the Indian Police, and a fight was going on outside.”¹

What kind of fight was it? His memoir does not say. Perhaps there were angry words, with fists. Perhaps knives or clubs. Maybe guns were drawn. Whatever happened that night, Short Bull’s narrative suggests that his mission to Nevada took place against a backdrop of continuing troubles with the police. The day he accepted the mission and announced he would go, he also requested that, in his absence, council members uphold the peaceful promise of the new religion. “My brothers, you are all sitting here with your guns, this is not what the messiah wants us to do, and when I leave here I ask you to drop your arms, follow my trail, watch my movements and have no trouble with the whites or police.”²

In the Lakota camps, the Indian police was less the arm of the law than of the agents. The people who took up the Ghost Dance (and many who did not) were engaged before 1890 in an ongoing series of contests over the meaning and limits of police power, which was a new force in Lakota life. These confrontations had not only divided Indians from Americans but divided Indians from other Indians. In particular, Indian police carried the authority of agents in trying to marginalize the chiefs. Although Lakota chiefs had scarcely more authority than Paiute talkers, officials believed that they were autocrats whose dictatorial powers kept their people in bondage and that together with holy men they were the primary forces of “nonprogressivism” and savagery. Agents hoped that diminishing the power of these traditional leaders would enhance their own authority—even if they accomplished this by essentially elevating new chiefs to replace the old ones. They challenged the authority of the chiefs through a host of measures, from distributing rations solely to heads of nuclear families (rather than following the customary practice of awarding goods to chiefs for conveyance to followers) to appointing policemen answerable solely to themselves.³

As part of the reform movement that removed Indian reservations from the control of the army, the Indian police were created in the late 1870s, primarily as a tool that agents could use to enforce their will without having to rely on troops. With power to arrest white people as well as Indians, the constables promised a new degree of order within reservation boundaries, where unscrupulous settlers often stole Indian livestock and sold whiskey in violation of the law. Just as importantly, agents hoped that selecting men from among the tribes to serve as officers would put an Indian face on US law, making it more acceptable to other Indians and swaying at least some Indian loyalties toward the agent. The blue-uniformed, tin star–wearing, revolver-packing Indian constables, whom Lakotas called the ceska maza, or “metal breasts,” would carry the authority of the agent into Indian camps and cabins and prove a force—it was hoped—for assimilation.

FIGURE 9.1. Indian Police, Rosebud Reservation, ca. 1890. The reservation police force was a new institution that strained the tribal political order to the breaking point during the Ghost Dance revival. Nebraska State Historical Society, RG2969–02–051.

Lakotas were hardly the only Indian people to have a new police force thrust upon them. In other places, older tribal institutions helped the constables adapt to Indian needs at least enough to ameliorate the worst frictions. In some tribes, police appear to have successfully brokered some conflicts between Indians and the government. Some even retained their authority as the agent’s enforcers while becoming leaders of the Ghost Dance. There seems to have been little tension surrounding the police at Walker River Reservation, where the chief of police, Josephus, became a leading apostle of Wovoka. In Oklahoma, Black Coyote, a leading Ghost Dance evangelist and ritual leader among Southern Arapahos, was also chief of the reservation police force. He and several other police officers were senior lodge men, and their police work benefited from the continuing strength of the lodge system, which preserved a high degree of consensus among senior men and allowed for considerable behind-the-scenes negotiation to smooth over controversies. In addition to being police chief, Black Coyote was also a ranking member in the Lime Crazy Lodge, whose members bore responsibility for controlling community behavior through spiritual means.⁴

The police on Oklahoma reservations remained open, even committed, to customary religion, for police work and traditional spirit obligations were both viewed as ways to protect people from harm. This attitude helps to explain why the government’s ban on dances and other ceremonies in 1882 was enforced less consistently among Arapahos, and with less intimidation, than among Lakotas. The documentary record also shows that Black Coyote and other police routinely consulted with tribal leaders before agreeing to the agent’s commands (a practice that seems to have worked for all parties, despite the agent’s irritation).⁵

By contrast, among Lakotas, whatever order the police achieved came with an equal amount of friction and resentment, partly because the police exacerbated preexisting divisions among Lakotas. Oglala society, as we have seen, was organized into tiyospaye, and the numbers of these bands rose and fell with the fortunes of leaders and their followers. In 1879 there were seven bands: Kiyuksa, Payabsa, Itesica, Waglukhe, Tapisleca, Oyukhpe, and Wazhazha (not the same as the Brule band of the same name, who were Short Bull’s people). Feuds and disputes between these bands could arise when their chiefs competed for influence at the annual summer gatherings. There was no formal office of “head chief,” but some gained much more power through their wealth and the number of their followers. Although Lakota civil conventions forbade killing other Lakotas, with enough friction, bonds of kinship and alliance could fray. Disputes among the tiyospaye could have violent, sometimes fatal, results. In 1841 a furious brawl erupted between followers of rival chiefs in an Oglala camp, culminating with the killing of Bull Bear, the chief of the Kiyuksas who had emerged as the most powerful member of the Oglala council of chiefs, allegedly by Red Cloud, an Itesica, who subsequently claimed Bull Bear’s position of influence. Red Cloud’s primacy never sat well with some other chiefs, including Little Wound, who was Bull Bear’s son. Little Wound became head of the Kiyuksa band after his father’s death and eventually moved with his followers to Pine Ridge—the reservation where Red Cloud continued to act as head chief of all Oglalas. Little Wound himself never relinquished his claim to this position: “I am the head chief of the Oglalas and my father was the head chief.”⁶

In the old days, when Oglalas dispersed into separate river valleys during the winter and there was space enough to put between jealous rivals, passions cooled more easily and peace was more easily maintained. Now, on the reservations, any number of chiefs and aspiring chiefs with competing agendas had been jumbled together. Agents’ elevation of some men as new chiefs and willingness to bestow on them extra rations, farm equipment, property, and other perquisites drove tensions even higher. Having Indian police forces upped the ante in these struggles: the agencies now appointed friends and relatives of their favored “progressives” to the Indian police, who were seen as partisan enforcers not only for the agent but also sometimes for other chiefs.⁷

The idea of a police force was not completely alien to Lakotas. In the large summer camps of the pre-reservation era, order was maintained by camp marshals called akicita (pronounced ah-KI-chi-ta), who were selected through a complex process originating with the council of chiefs; they were drawn from the ranks of celebrated warriors, and often from one of the men’s societies. Their power was temporary; they held the office only until the summer communal gathering disbanded and the people dispersed to the river valleys for the winter. But during the summer encampment their authority was great, and they resorted to intimidation and physical force without hesitation, even against tribal leaders. At the height of his powers in the mid-1860s, Red Cloud himself would submit to an akicita whipping for refusing to break camp at the appointed hour.⁸

Red Cloud carried his respect for the office of akicita onto the reservation, where he opposed the creation of the police force and insisted that the traditional marshals (answerable to himself and other chiefs) could enforce the law. Only two of Red Cloud’s Itesica men joined the new force. Little Wound, on the other hand, seems to have endorsed the police force by 1879, perhaps to gain influence with the agent and strengthen his hand against Red Cloud. Eighteen of Little Wound’s Kiyuksas soon wore the metal star—the largest contingent of Oglalas serving on the force. A half-century of feuding between Red Cloud and Little Wound had now become institutionalized in the police force.⁹

The large number of Little Wound’s followers serving on the Indian police force would become a problem, however, not just for Red Cloud but for all chiefs, including Little Wound himself. For the long-term effect of the police force was to undermine the authority of every traditional chief. Whereas akicita were appointed to a temporary office by a council of chiefs, Indian police served at the pleasure of a white agent, potentially for life, and carried out his orders. Those orders often involved confronting the chiefs in ways that violated Lakota tradition and were seen by other Lakotas as profoundly disrespectful. This was often the purpose of agents’ orders: to strip authority away from chiefs and empower the agents. In joining the police force, the new officers created or deepened divisions between themselves and the chiefs and could even use their new position to exert authority over chiefs with whom they were feuding.¹⁰

The agent’s orders often compelled officers to countermand the authority of the chiefs, even when the police thought it unwise. Little Wound would become a Ghost Dance leader, and the Indian police who would soon descend on his camp to shut down the ritual presumably included some of the men he had encouraged to join the force in the first place. The Indian police walked a fine line between pleasing their agents and courting ostracism by other Lakotas, including their own kin, for violating norms of deference to chiefs. Many refused to serve on the force for this reason, and the agencies often had trouble recruiting men who were widely respected. Pine Ridge agent Valentine McGillycuddy achieved perhaps the greatest success in this regard when he appointed George Sword, who was not only a renowned warrior and holy man–turned–Episcopal deacon but the son of a chief and a nephew of Red Cloud. Sword’s dedication to the police, however, earned him the enduring enmity of his uncle.

Despite Sword’s presence in their ranks, the police generally were held in low regard. “The police are looked upon as a common foe, and the multitude are bitterly opposed to them,” remarked one frustrated agent. Another observed frankly in 1890 that “many of the best Indians will not serve.” The upheaval of the late 1880s seems to have further lowered popular regard for the police, until the fabric of the force began to tear. By October 1890, only five of the original fifty officers recruited at Pine Ridge in 1879 were still on the payroll. Most of the others had quit and been replaced by less experienced officers. Although some blamed the lack of better recruits on the low salary of $5 per month for privates and $8 per month for officers, the friction caused by the intrusion of this force into Lakota life probably discouraged just as many.¹¹

These were the men to whom agents first turned to suppress the Ghost Dance.

DESPITE THE UNPOPULARITY OF THE POLICE, AT LEAST FOR A TIME after his arrest Short Bull appears to have kept his word to them and abstained from dancing. During that spring of 1890, enthusiasm for the religion seems to have been contained. Kicking Bear attempted to hold a dance at Cheyenne River, but few joined in. He went back to Wind River for the summer to stay with the Northern Arapahos. Other dances took place over the summer, but agents either did not hear about them or paid little attention.¹²

Kicking Bear returned in late summer. Whether through him or some other influence, the Ghost Dance began to grow at Pine Ridge in August, at Rosebud and Cheyenne River in September, and at Standing Rock in October.¹³

In September at the Rosebud Agency, hundreds of Brules moved to the camp of White Horse (who had resisted the census the previous year) and began Ghost Dancing. Others moved to Pass Creek and the Wazhazha camps, where Short Bull led the devotions. Agent J. George Wright reported that, “although no violence of any kind was contemplated nor arms carried” in the dance, he told the Indians that “it must be abolished, causing as it did, excitement and physical prostration and attracting the Indians from other camps, abandoning their stock and homes, taking their children from school and having a demoralizing effect generally.” He barred participants from receiving rations, and the dances declined in number.¹⁴

Short Bull was leading dances again by October, however, with dancers who supported themselves by breaking another agency regulation. In an effort to encourage animal husbandry and plowing, the Office of Indian Affairs had distributed cattle “breeding stock” and draft oxen to Lakota men. Although prohibited from slaughtering these animals, the dancers felt that the agent’s refusal to provide rations left them no choice. Illegal cattle killing began to accompany Ghost Dances and quickly emerged as a sign of the new religion almost on a par with the dance itself. It also provided primary proof—in the eyes of agents and much of the public—that the dancers were nonprogressive and uncontrollable. Lakotas drawn to the Ghost Dance saw it differently: asserting property rights to the animals, they demanded the same right that white farmers had to kill the cattle they owned. Famished seekers who joined the circle found immediate gratification of their hunger, as if the promise of the teachings was already starting to come true. At the same time, the popular appeal of the feasts presented a major challenge to those chiefs who allied with the agencies. The near-starving conditions of agency life tempted their followers to join the joyous feasting of Ghost Dancers, undermining the followings that these agency chiefs needed to maintain their own authority. American Horse, a self-identified “progressive” chief, explained the political calculus of Ghost Dance leaders to his own agent: “The non-progressives started the ghost dance to draw [followers] from us.”¹⁵

FIGURE 9.2. Lakota men butchering a steer, Rosebud Reservation, 1891. During the Ghost Dance revival, officials viewed the mundane act of butchering Indian cattle as a sign of antigovernment hostility. Nebraska State Historical Society, RG2969–02–073.

In the middle of September, dancing also took on greater enthusiasm at Cheyenne River. It carried on through much of the fall as some 400 Minneconjous attended the dances under the leadership of Hump, a leading Minneconjou chief. Refusing orders to cease their devotions, Ghost Dancers earned the label of “hostiles” in the correspondence of the new agent, Perain Palmer, who warned that “there is no doubt now that the Hostile Indians at all the dancing camps are preparing to defy the authority of the Department.”¹⁶

At Standing Rock, Agent James McLaughlin kept a close watch on the venerated Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull and refused to let him leave the reservation. So instead, the chief and holy man invited Kicking Bear to visit. After the evangelist arrived at Grand River on October 9, he initiated large and enthusiastic Ghost Dances of some 450 people. The agent sent the Indian police to stop the dances and escort Kicking Bear off the reservation. After some discussion, Kicking Bear went peacefully, but the dances continued. Here as elsewhere, the new ritual appeared to threaten the program of assimilation. Attendance at the agency school dropped from forty students to fewer than ten in the space of two months. Although leaving school contradicted Wovoka’s teachings, it appears that the excitement about the coming millennium persuaded many parents to follow another of the prophet’s commandments by bringing their children to the dances: when the schoolteacher, John Carignan, remonstrated with parents, they explained that the children had to leave school to attend “church” every day.¹⁷

Nevertheless, McLaughlin remained calm. By mid-November, he was reporting that the “excitement” among the dancers had subsided, and he warned against military intervention. “I feel quite confident the interference of the military at this time will result in resistance and probably precipitate a fight and consequent bloodshed.” Instead, McLaughlin hoped to use the Ghost Dance excitement to achieve a personal ambition: the arrest of Sitting Bull and his removal from the reservation, a goal toward which he worked for several more weeks.¹⁸

Meanwhile, the worst confrontations involving the Ghost Dance erupted at Pine Ridge, in part because of the incompetence and volatility of the new agent. Daniel Royer was a minor functionary in the Republican Party of South Dakota who wrangled himself a job as superintendent of the Pine Ridge Reservation at the very moment in October when the Ghost Dance took on renewed strength. Within four days of assuming his new duties, he warned superiors that troops would be required to suppress the Ghost Dance. In subsequent weeks, he ordered all dances to cease and all Indians to move to agency headquarters. But his mix of pleading and threats failed to quell the new religion. By the first week of November, Ghost Dancers had assembled in four large camps on White Clay Creek, Wounded Knee Creek, Porcupine Creek, and Medicine Root Creek. Prominent among them were chiefs like Big Road, Torn Belly, and Little Wound, as well as close relatives of other chiefs, such as Jack Red Cloud. Some 1,500 Lakotas turned the sacred circle at Pine Ridge. All refused to come into the agency. All subsisted by butchering agency cattle.¹⁹

The wave of Ghost Dancing would have been hard enough for officials to accept had it only swept up those Indians known as habitual troublemakers—the “nonprogressives” who often resisted agency initiatives. But between the lines of agency reports one discerns a rapidly eroding sense of order, not least because many Indians who had been reliable advocates of farms, churches, and schools were suddenly becoming Ghost Dancers.

Among the most prominent of these was Little Wound, chief of the Kiyuksas. A Christian who led a farm settlement of Episcopalian converts, many of whom worshiped at their own Saint Barnabas Episcopal Chapel (built and equipped with funds from the estate of Mrs. John Jacob Astor), Little Wound had been a prized “progressive” in the eyes of the former agent, Valentine McGillycuddy. But events of the prior year had opened the chief’s heart to the Ghost Dance. He had held the line and refused to sign on to the land cession in 1889. Then, in 1890, his young daughter died, her illness aggravated by hunger, for which he understandably blamed the government.

Early in the fall, Porcupine visited from Montana, preaching about his vision of the Messiah, whose return was imminent. Little Wound’s approach to the religion seems always to have been tentative. “Now whether Porcupine really saw the Messiah, or only had a pleasant dream, I do not know,” Little Wound confessed to his former agent. But nonetheless, he gathered his followers. “My friends, if this is a good thing we should have it,” he announced, “if it is not it will fall to the earth itself. So you better learn this dance, so if the Messiah does come he will not pass us by, but will help us to get back our hunting grounds and buffalo.” By the fall of 1890, Little Wound had become the leading chief among Ghost Dancers at Pine Ridge. Confronted by the fact that even reliable Christian farmers like Little Wound had turned to the new religion, Royer frothed in panic. “The only remedy for this matter,” he warned, “is the use of the military.”²⁰

Ghost Dancers were indeed refusing agency commands to stop dancing. While numerous commentators saw this as a sign of impending “outbreak,” the documentary record makes clear that, until well after the army arrived, no Ghost Dancer or any other Lakota drew a weapon against any official, or indeed against any white person. Even in the thick of the crisis, until the army arrived, white observers reported being well received and even welcomed in the dancing camps.

But if the presence of white observers did not incite Ghost Dancers to violence, the Indian police did. In every incident in which dancers pulled guns, the presence of Indian police was the precipitating factor and the constables were the object of their anger. In early September, for example, Agent Gallagher ordered twenty-five Indian police to accompany him to a Ghost Dance on Pine Ridge Reservation, in the camp of the band chief Torn Belly. They were intercepted by eleven armed dance defenders who told them that they would fight rather than allow the police to interfere. Gallagher wisely withdrew.²¹

That the police were the target of their hostility is clear, for Ghost Dancers seem to have had no hesitation about dancing in the presence of government observers—so long as they came without police. Several weeks later, Special Agent E. B. Reynolds approached the same dance circle. He brought employees from his office, but no Indian police. His party was gladly received and accepted an invitation to watch the dance. They stayed for hours.²²

By October, the band of the Minneconjou chief Bigfoot, which would be decimated by the Seventh Cavalry in December, was “becoming very much excited about the coming of a Messiah,” according to Agent Perain Palmer. Palmer knew this because his police had told him so. He sent them to stop the dances, but the dancers persisted. “These Indians are becoming very hostile to the police,” reported Palmer. “Some of the police have resigned.”²³

At Pine Ridge, confrontations with police reached crisis levels. On November 11, a ration day, Royer ordered the Indian police to apprehend a man called Little, whose alleged offense was cattle killing. When confronted by the officers, Little pulled a weapon (appropriately, a butcher knife). Royer reported that at this point a “mob of the Ghost Dance[r]s” some 200 strong surrounded the police and refused to let them take Little away. Witnessing the scene was the reservation physician Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux who had been educated in Boston and who understood Lakota. Years later he recounted that at least one person in the crowd was brandishing a tomahawk over the heads of the police, threatening their lives. Some were shouting for blood. At this point American Horse stepped out from a council meeting in the agency offices and called to the crowd “in a clear, steady, almost sarcastic voice”:

Stop! Think! What are you going to do? Kill these men of our own race? Then what? Kill all these helpless white men, women, and children? And what then? What will these brave words, brave deeds lead to in the end? How long can you hold out? Your country is surrounded with a network of railroads; thousands of white soldiers will be here within three days. What ammunition have you? What provisions? What will become of your families? Think, think, my brothers! This is a child’s madness.

Eastman recalled that the words of American Horse “had almost magic power,” and the crowd quieted. At this point, Jack Red Cloud, the son of Red Cloud, stepped up to American Horse. Leveling a cocked revolver in the face of the chief, he shouted, “It is you and your kind who have brought us to this pass!” Illustrating the traditional self-restraint of a Lakota leader, American Horse said nothing. In silence, he turned his back on Jack Red Cloud and his angry people and slowly climbed the stairs to the council room.

The crowd dispersed, taking Little with them and, according to Royer, “making all kinds of fun over the attempted arrest and the inefficiency of the police force.”²⁴

This incident helped precipitate Royer’s notorious telegram sent several days later—“The Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy”—and initiate the tragic events culminating at Wounded Knee. But in an important sense, these events were only tangentially related to the Ghost Dance. Little’s defiance had less to do with dancing and more to do with the attempt to arrest him for killing cattle. This confrontation can be viewed as a fight over the absence of rations, the right of Lakotas to feed themselves from beeves that were issued to them, and the treachery of the police for trying to stop them.

But what of Jack Red Cloud’s denunciation of American Horse? It could have meant many things. The most judicious interpretation of his claim that “it is you and your kind who have brought us to this pass!” is that he had in mind, not the Ghost Dance, but the Sioux Act of 1889 and the subsequent decline in rations, for which American Horse and the other treaty chiefs (“your kind”) were by this time being roundly blamed. Although the excitable Royer wrote that Little was surrounded by a mob of “Ghost Dancers,” the agent routinely conflated Ghost Dancing with any kind of resistance to his wishes. There is no evidence that Little’s supporters were exclusively Ghost Dancers. The crowd that surrounded Little was primarily challenging the authority of the Indian police to arrest an Oglala for feeding his people from Indian cattle, and all available evidence suggests that the question of dancing remained in the background.²⁵

And yet, the way in which the Ghost Dance hovers over this confrontation suggests that dancing had become not only a religious ritual but a political act. By this time, as already discussed, killing cattle in defiance of the government was practically synonymous with Ghost Dancing. Jack Red Cloud, who had presided over dances at his camp and who opposed the land cession, confronted American Horse, who condemned Ghost Dancing and signed the land cession. If on one level the confrontation had little to do with the Ghost Dance, on another level the dance had come to represent the right of Lakotas to land and food—rights that the police routinely tried to deny.

FOR THE POLICE, THE STRENGTH OF THE GHOST DANCE WAS astonishing because it marked a dramatic reversal. For the better part of a decade, they had suppressed the old religion, targeting holy men with violence and intimidation. Now the waxing of the Ghost Dance had restored the holy men to influence.

When Short Bull returned from Nevada with the new teachings, he and other holy men who took up the new religion were able to make themselves its leaders and define its practice, shaping it to fit Lakota culture and traditional ceremony. There had been little time for leaders outside the fraternity of the wicasa wakan to emerge, and apparently there were no prospective challenges to their authority as there were with Numu doctors and leaders of Southern Arapaho medicine lodges. Thus, in the hands of the holy men, the new ritual in South Dakota developed a strong resemblance to the Lakota Sun Dance.²⁶

As in the Sun Dance, the Ghost Dance circle turned around a central tree that had been felled and re-erected, its trunk bristling with lengths of ribbon, plugs of tobacco, bits of calico, and other property sacrifices, the limbs festooned with banners of red, white, and blue (or the American flag, which neatly combined all three sacred colors). Holy men painted the dancers and attended them in the sweat lodge and in the dance, much as in the Sun Dance. We may interpret the Lakotas’ enthusiasm for the new religion, and their willingness to defend it, partly as a response to the crushing of the Sun Dance, a ritual destruction that had impoverished their spiritual lives. Similarities between the two ceremonies were so strong that despite the absence of piercing in the new religion, Mary Collins, a Congregationalist missionary at Sitting Bull’s settlement, proclaimed that the Ghost Dance was “nothing more than the old Sun Dance revived.”²⁷

To a degree, the Ghost Dance reassured with its familiarity. It arrived as the reservation was reeling not just from economic collapse and political conflict but from physical and ritual hunger and a longing for communal gathering and a way to appeal to spirits. Feasting on cattle eased the hunger of believers, and the sense of Indian identity expressed in the Ghost Dance circle restored a powerful sense of belonging.

And yet, despite its familiarity, there were unfamiliar parts of the Ghost Dance ritual that urgently required adaptation. In the old religion, visions were mostly private. In the Sun Dance, for example, pledgers did not seek visions, and though they turned to holy men for help with interpreting the signs they received from spirits, pledgers did not announce those visions publicly. Normally, visions were sought only through a solitary vision quest. The Ghost Dance made visionary experience much more public and revelatory. The crowds massed, the circle turned, and dozens of people might collapse into trances as they met their ancestors, their recently deceased children, God, Jesus, Crow, or Eagle. The behavior of those in the grip of a vision—high-stepping, pawing at the air, shaking, prostrating themselves, pounding and kicking the ground, and fainting—might well have alarmed the holy men at first, suggesting that some vast power had indeed manifested itself in the bodies of believers. But the visionaries were so energized and voluble about their experience that family, friends, and neighbors were often persuaded to join the circle to seek visions of their own.²⁸

Besides its ability to generate crowds of visionaries, the Ghost Dance also turned visions into a community resource. As dancers collapsed and then awoke from their trances, they explained what they had seen to the wicasa wakan who waited in the middle of the dance circle. These men then related the visions to the crowd. Unlike the traditional rituals, the new ritual, in publicly revealing individual visions, provided a dramatic, inclusive means of expanding visionary elation and thus creating community out of shared spiritual experience. At Sitting Bull’s camp in November, a woman who fainted was carried to his lodge. As she lay unconscious on the ground, Sitting Bull “interpreted” for the crowd her experience with deceased family members in the afterworld.²⁹

While it made visions into subjects of discussion that inspired and reassured believers, the Ghost Dance also vastly increased visionary ranks. The Sun Dance drew pledgers only from men who could afford its stiff economic obligations. The economic costs of participating in the Ghost Dance were lower, and participants came from a much wider swath of Lakota society. With the circle open to all, including any number of children and women as well as men, visions came thick and fast.³⁰

Other attributes of the ritual gave everyday Lakotas, even the poor, a path to status in the community of believers. Visionaries gained prestige for their spiritual authenticity, journeys to the afterworld, and conversations with the deceased or with God or the Messiah. Such visionaries might join the holy men at the center of the Ghost Dance circle. There was no need for expensive regalia: no metal- or beadwork was permitted in the dance, and even the so-called ghost shirts and ghost dresses were optional. Not seen among Lakotas until October, ghost shirts were made for particular dancers by holy men (including Black Elk and Short Bull) and by women visionaries. It seems likely that the presentation of a ghost shirt obliged the recipient to reciprocate with a gift; if so, this would be one reason why only a minority seem to have worn them.³¹

Thus, the Ghost Dance emerged as a more democratic, less hierarchical ritual, and one that required less economic outlay from aspiring visionaries. Compared to the Sun Dance, the Ghost Dance was a ceremony for a people not only spiritually yearning but radically impoverished.

In the summer and fall of 1890, the Ghost Dance inspired dramatic, visceral, and often overwhelming elation among an unusually large group of participants; as women and children as well as men, and everyone from the poorest to the most well to do, were swept up in the visionary wave, the visionary base of Lakota ceremony dramatically expanded. Lakotas’ excitement about Ghost Dance visions registers in their song lyrics, as does a new spiritual presence, referred to as “the father.” Athough the Sun and other spirit presences were sometimes called “father” in specific ritual contexts, the Ghost Dance marked a new use of the term as a gesture to a singular creator spirit who had sent the new teachings—thus the ubiquitous refrain, “the father says so.”³²

Besides the references to “the father,” many Lakota songs tell of longing to see departed children and parents:

Who think you comes there?
Who think you comes there?
Is it someone looking for his mother?
Is it someone looking for his mother?
Says the father
Says the father

Others saw the future, with Lakotas united, their dead restored to life, and all returned to their former wealth and power on a new earth:

My child, come this way,

You will take home with you a good country,

Says the father, says the father.³³

As one missionary reported from a Ghost Dance on White River, the ecstasy of the dancers was visible and palpable. The visionaries “staggered either into the circle or outside of the circle, flailing their arms around, falling to the ground, rolling in the dust, scraping the ground, raising themselves again, falling back down, now on their backs, then on their faces, until they remained lying down dead tired and completely exhausted.”³⁴

In the face of such passions, the police were understandably hesitant to attack the Ghost Dance circles with the same brazen force they deployed against the Sun Dance. They were also afraid. Holy men on the Plains, like doctors in the Great Basin, could veer into witchcraft. “The wakan man is feared by all the people,” said George Sword, himself a wakan man. The first time James McLaughlin sent thirteen Indian policemen to arrest Kicking Bear at Sitting Bull’s camp, they returned without him. The two officers in charge were “in a ‘dazed’ condition,” reported McLaughlin, “and fearing the powers of Kicking Bear’s medicine.”³⁵

Now the formidable powers of the wicasa wakan were all the more intimidating for being augmented by the spirit that gripped the dancers. The crowds were big, and dancers were in the throes of some spiritual power; whether one believed in the new religion or not, something was happening to these people. When the dance circle was threatened, Ghost Dancers—ecstatic, numerous, and devoted—made it very clear that they would meet violence from the police with violence of their own.