CHAPTER 12

THE ROAD FROM WOUNDED KNEE

WHAT WAS THE FATE OF THE GHOST DANCE AFTER THE Wounded Knee Massacre? Practically from the moment gunfire erupted that day, faith in Jack Wilson’s teachings was said to have evaporated, helping to turn 1890 into what seemed a providential year for American conquest. Just as the census results that year led analysts to conclude that the frontier was closed and the West was finally settled, so, too, the massacre of Ghost Dancers seemed to ring down a curtain on the Old West. With its ending came many others: the end of free land, the end of some purported “American innocence,” and the end of Indian spirituality.

Supporting this narrative was the rise of a story that back in Nevada the mass killing of his followers brought upon the prophet an insurmountable crisis of faith. Early in 1891, Wilson received a visit from a Kiowa seeker, Wooden Lance, or Apiatan, who had journeyed from Indian Territory in hopes of a vision. As Apiatan later recounted, he found Wilson lying on his back, singing to himself, with a blanket over his face. The prophet stirred, removed the blanket, and asked the seeker what he wanted. Apiatan asked that he be allowed to see his departed young child. Wovoka replied that this was impossible, because “there were no spirits there to be seen.”

Apiatan was devastated. Noting that Wilson had no scars, he questioned aloud whether he was the messiah about whom the Kiowa had heard. Wilson told him he need go no further. There was no other messiah. He was the one who had preached to the others. But the Sioux, Apiatan reported Wilson as saying, “had twisted things and made trouble, and now Apiatan had better go home and tell his people to quit the whole business.” Disgusted and demoralized, Apiatan left. Soon after, Apiatan returned to the Southern Plains and, before an assembly of Kiowas and other Indians, denounced Wovoka as a fraud.¹

At this point, however morally contemptible the massacre was, it seemed to have accomplished what many Americans desired: it terminated the Ghost Dance.²

But events in Nevada suggest something amiss in Apiatan’s story. The prophet, in fact, continued to teach the new religion after Apiatan departed. Seekers still trekked to his door. “Many Indians from distant tribes have been here and are now visiting him,” reported agent C. C. Warner late in 1891, “and from eighty to a hundred have been to see him during the past six months.” If the Ghost Dance died at Wounded Knee Creek, how was it that the earnest devotions of these far-flung pilgrims continued so long after Apiatan’s visit?³

For that matter, if Jack Wilson lost his faith after Wounded Knee, how was it that a delegation of Caddos ventured out from their Indian Territory reservation to Nevada in the fall of 1891 and returned with their belief so renewed that they danced for at least the next two years?⁴

When Short Bull and Kicking Bear went to Nevada in 1890, among the Lakotas accompanying them was a man known as Cloud Horse. If Jack Wilson blamed Lakotas like these for destroying his teachings, why did he meet with Kicking Bear again when he made a return visit to Nevada in 1902? And why did he meet with Cloud Horse and two other Lakotas, Chasing Hawk and Bear Comes Out, when they came back to Mason Valley in 1906? He was still exchanging letters with Cloud Horse, advising him about matters of spirit and health, as late as 1911. Would he have so counseled those he blamed for destroying his movement?⁵

Mass murder is a powerful force, but there is great power, too, in stories. They can reveal the truth, or they can seduce us into convenient falsehoods. Sometimes they do both. And there are few better examples of the dark side of the narrative art than this hoary tale of a new religion murdered in its cradle. The story of Wounded Knee, that tangled knot of narrative seductions and bloody verities, has proved so useful to writers and filmmakers seeking a poetic ending to an era that it has come to stand for the entire history of the Ghost Dance. In doing so, these storytellers have inadvertently closed off a great deal of inquiry into the meaning of the religion, its appeal for Indians, and its larger place in American history. Thus, for over 100 years, this telling of the Ghost Dance’s end has maintained its grip on scholars and the public alike, transfixing us with the horror of the killing ground, compelling us to mourn the Indians, their primitive religion, and the frontier as part of a vanished past, and constraining us from looking too closely at the facts that point to a dramatically different outcome. Lifting our eyes from the bloody ravine, we can see that, across the land, the good news yet traveled in 1890. Indians still danced, from Nevada to Utah, across the Southern Plains; by 1897, they were dancing north, into Canada.⁶

If we follow the Ghost Dance on its journey, we can begin to appreciate the religion’s strength and deeper meaning. Key developments in the ritual in the aftermath of Wounded Knee allowed it to flourish so well, in fact, that in some places it became a tribal institution. As such, it was a force not only for cultural and ethnic persistence but also for a broader democratization of Indian religion that expanded the corps of believers, reformed older shamanistic and priestly hierarchies, and opened up new paths to spirit and feeling for Indians in the post-conquest world.

As we follow the real story of the Ghost Dance on the Plains, we will learn why so much has remained hidden from all but a handful of scholars (and many more Indians, who have known all along). This is a story, not of a religion’s demise, but of spiritual articulation and persistence, of believers working with spirits to craft new forms of ritual observance to suit their needs, and of a new religion that thrived for decades, often hidden from public view in the shadows of Wounded Knee.

In most places—perhaps everywhere—the persistence of the Ghost Dance was a contested development, and there were many Indian dissenters. Among these was Apiatan. Whatever his actual experience in Nevada, his story about the false messiah served his personal ambitions, as we shall see. But even among his people, who carefully listened to his warnings, the Ghost Dance would not die.

Paradoxically, the Ghost Dance religion after Wounded Knee owed its continuance and further development in part to the exertions of the social scientist who appears to have believed it would soon vanish. About the time Short Bull and his followers were negotiating their final surrender at Pine Ridge, James Mooney arrived in Darlington, Oklahoma. In venturing to the Plains to study the Ghost Dance in the immediate aftermath of Wounded Knee, Mooney became not only a scholar of the religion but a participant, at times unwittingly, in the shaping of its future.

Its enduring influence notwithstanding, Mooney’s study, The Ghost Dance Religion and Sioux Outbreak of 1890, has its interpretive shortcomings. Among them is one seeming contradiction in the narrative. Deep in the text, Mooney asserts that the Ghost Dance movement was “already extinct” among most of the tribes where it had taken hold, having been killed by the army among Lakotas and died “a natural death” elsewhere. But he seems to distinguish between the early, ecstatic phase of the religion’s development, which he calls the “movement,” and the religion itself. As if hastily rewriting the introduction and overlooking the later claim, he announces on the first page of the book that the Ghost Dance “still exists” and “is developing new features at every performance.” This inconsistency has only reinforced the long-standing desire of writers and other storytellers to overlook the survival and development of the religion in favor of a story about its tragic demise.⁷

The internal contradiction in Mooney’s Ghost Dance writing may reflect his intellectual struggle as he broke with dominant theories of religion and its development: he was writing a report on the Ghost Dance that attacked the foundations of the very religious intolerance that had given rise to official panic in the first place. Indeed, and ironically, in articulating the beginnings of an intellectual shift in American religious and social thought, James Mooney, scholar and skeptic, came to the aid of Indians in search of a new religion and ultimately served the cause of the prophet. In ways that he never acknowledged but that could not have avoided his notice entirely, he became a force in the development and expansion of the religion in the communities where he worked.

As we follow the religion on its journey through the heartland beyond South Dakota, it becomes hard to disagree with Ghost Dancers who testified to its power. Despite formidable opposition, it seemed unstoppable, its propagation abetted in ways both intentional and not, by a broad range of people, including a great many Indians, a few benign officials, and even the rebel social scientist who sought to write its postmortem.

IN MID-JANUARY 1891, LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER THE MASSACRE at Wounded Knee, James Mooney, not quite thirty years old, stood on the edge of a dance circle on the Southern Plains, transfixed by the enthusiasm of Cheyenne and Arapaho who were “dancing the ghost dance day and night.” As some Indians donned old regalia for the dance, he scribbled urgent requests to Washington for photographic glass plates so he could take pictures.⁸

Mooney was astonished by the commitment of the Arapaho and Cheyenne to the new faith. The dancers included, in his words, “all the older ones, all the middle-aged, down to the boys and girls, even little children who were not much more than able to stand upon their feet.”⁹

To some readers, Mooney’s account related a typical Victorian adventure. Like the explorer Richard Burton, who disguised himself as a Muslim and became the most famous non-Muslim European to enter Mecca, Mooney’s book tells a gripping tale of a lone white man penetrating a closed community of dark-skinned believers to unearth the mysteries of an exotic religion. Although the Indians banned white gawkers, they took to Mooney. “I am so far in with the medicine men that they have invited me to take part in the dance,” he bragged to his superiors at the Bureau of Ethnology, at the time the world’s leading institution for the study of ethnology, or cultural anthropology.¹⁰

Like other ethnologists in the bureau, Mooney spent much of his time in far-flung corners of the United States, investigating Indian languages, religion, and material culture in an effort to record as much as possible before the old ways of native peoples disappeared. Beginning in 1887 and proceeding for the next three years, he lived for months at a time among the Eastern Cherokee in Appalachia, working closely with Cherokee consultants and interpreters to gather and translate key texts in Cherokee medicine and healing. He had made the important discovery of sacred—and secret—medicine books compiled by Cherokee healers. After persuading them that their influence would be honored by preserving their writings, he was able to trade with them for the books, which he spent long hours translating before he archived them in Washington.¹¹

The Eastern Cherokees were a remnant community of the much larger Cherokee people. After most Cherokees were forced west on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, those who became known as Eastern Cherokees had remained near their old homelands by hiding in the mountains. Mooney wondered if the Cherokees who went to Oklahoma had changed their healing practices and began to plan a journey west to find out. While preparing for that journey, he read the newspaper coverage of the Ghost Dance on the Plains. Deciding to research both Cherokee medicine and the new religion, Mooney embarked on a study of Wovoka’s teachings that would dominate the next four years of his life.¹²

For all Mooney’s energy, initiative, curiosity, and intelligence, his revelations about the Ghost Dance testified to the openness and initiative of Ghost Dancers themselves. If he had not been welcomed by ritual leaders, his participation in the religion, and the analysis that flowed from it, would have been impossible. Not only would the study Mooney finally produced convey his own insights about the Ghost Dance, but it would also reflect the contributions and some of the ambitions of these believers, who created the context for his study and shaped its message. The ethnologist blazed a path into the dance circle, but its members made it possible by reaching out to him, for reasons of their own, and bringing him inside.

The task before them was an urgent one. Oklahoma newspapers were “full of stories,” as Lieutenant Hugh L. Scott observed that month, about frantic settlers arming themselves against an impending Indian “outbreak.” These same stories were “read by the Eastern graduates” of the boarding schools, who “do not know what to expect.” The Ghost Dance carried on under the dark cloud of threatened attacks by mobs of settlers or the US Army.¹³

While the suppression of the faith ramped up the fears of believers, it also hardened the devotion of some. As we have seen already, Oklahoma Indians remonstrated with the commander of the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Sill, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Carlton, pointing out to him that there had to be some truth to the religion; otherwise, why would the Americans be attempting to crush it? If it was false, wouldn’t the Americans just ignore it? According to Hugh Scott, the massacre in the north at Wounded Knee “caused the excitement in the South to be greatly intensified.”¹⁴

It was in this moment, amid the fervent anxiety that followed on the massacre, that Mooney stepped off the train in Oklahoma. With the dreadful news from South Dakota still so fresh, he might have been met with a great deal of suspicion. Instead, believers turned him into an important federal ally and protector.

Two groups of Arapahos seem to have taken a particular interest in Mooney because of his connection to the federal government and to have worked together to assist him and steer his interpretations. The first of these groups was the Indian police. As we have seen, policing at the Southern Arapaho–Southern Cheyenne reservation had created fewer of the tensions so prevalent on Lakota reservations, in part because policemen like Black Coyote interpreted law enforcement in ceremonial terms. Lodge members and police made joint decisions in law enforcement matters because everyone saw policing as part of the ritual obligation of lodge members.

Just as important was Black Coyote’s view of himself as an agent of the national government; as Mooney put it, “the Arapaho police considered themselves a part of Washington.” This self-perception explains why Black Coyote and several other policemen approached the ethnologist from Washington and “invited me to their tipis at night where they would explain the religion and give me the songs.”¹⁵

The success of these meetings depended on the participation of the second group—the boarding school graduates. Cleaver Warden, Paul Boynton, Robert Burns, and Grant Left Hand all served as interpreters for Mooney, and Boynton and Left Hand (and perhaps Warden and Burns) were avid believers in the new religion. Aware that hostile public perceptions could lead to disaster in Oklahoma just as at Pine Ridge, these believers approached Mooney upon his arrival “very anxious to explain conditions,” as he put it, “so that Washington might know why they were dancing and that they were not going to hurt anybody.” As Mooney later recounted, “I did not have to ask them. They said, ‘We will help you. We are glad you are interested and we want the white people to understand.’” When Mooney offered to pay the police for their work, the constables demurred. “They said they did not want anything, that they were glad Washington had sent somebody out there to go back and tell the truth about their dance.”¹⁶

Thus, Mooney’s book took the shape it did in part because young Arapahos found it to their advantage to provide the man from Washington with information and to offer him housing, food, and companionship in hopes of educating Washington authorities about the religion and shaping Indian policy. As the anthropologist reinterpreted the dance for Americans, then, Indians sought to shape that interpretation to suit their own needs. Admittedly, because Mooney’s police sources could not read his account and it is not clear if the boarding school graduates ever did, his Indian consultants were forced to trust him. But because they did, The Ghost Dance Religion became a kind of intellectual collaboration between Indians and their interlocutor. This partnership was asymmetrical and unequal, to be sure, but the Indians’ role in it was still powerful.¹⁷

From the beginning, Mooney’s work in Oklahoma was arduous. Learning the Ghost Dance songs took weeks, but there was no rush. Deep snow covered the ground upon his arrival, and until it melted there could be no dances. While they waited, Black Coyote convened rehearsals of Ghost Dance songs in his tipi, where Mooney would join up to twelve believers at a time around the fire. Passing a pipe, each participant would make offerings to the cardinal directions, and Black Coyote would stand, facing the northwest, eyes closed and arms outstretched. While the others bowed their heads, Black Coyote would offer “a fervent prayer for help and prosperity to his tribe, closing with an earnest petition to the messiah to hasten his coming.” Then, after choosing a song to begin, Black Coyote would start “in a clear musical bass,” and the others would join in. Mooney meticulously wrote down every word. “They invited me to call for whatever songs I wished to hear, and these songs were repeated over and over again to give me the opportunity to write them down.” So it went for three hours every night. After the singing ended, the work continued: Black Coyote and the others would explain the meaning of lyrics and answer Mooney’s probing questions.¹⁸

When the snow had melted enough for dances to begin again, rehearsals ended and Black Coyote and the others invited Mooney to join the ritual. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the other dancers, turning clockwise with well over 100 believers, and singing the songs he had learned by heart, Mooney partook of the new spirit. Twice he felt the telltale twitch in the hands of the dancers beside him and watched as they and dozens of other women and men broke from the circle and fell into the center in spasms, collapsing into unconsciousness. The ethnologist was awed by the “maniac frenzy” of the dance, its explosive power, and the strength of the trances it induced. “They lie where they fall, like dead men, sometimes for an hour or longer, while the dance goes on.”¹⁹

FIGURE 12.1. Southern Arapaho Ghost Dance, 1891. Photo by James Mooney, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, GN-00044d.

Mooney took photographs only in the daylight because he worried that the flash would alarm the Indians, who were already fearful of an army attack. The photos show Arapahos stretched out unconscious, or standing with eyes closed and holding hands to the sky, or in prayer with two hands stretched out to the northwest. The circles of dancers in Mooney’s photos, hands clasped together, moving shoulder to shoulder, are reminiscent of the Virginia City gatherings two decades before of Nevada Paiutes—the “solid mass” of dancers that “like a huge laboring water wheel” crept “slowly around for hours.”²⁰

In early February, Mooney moved to Anadarko, Oklahoma, and the Kiowa Agency, where he embarked on gathering materials for an exhibit of Plains Indian life at the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He continued his research into the Ghost Dance, which was soon in turmoil because of the denunciations of Apiatan. A well-regarded man of about thirty who had recently lost his son, Apiatan later said that his interest in finding the prophet was driven by a desire to see his child again. In spite of this heartfelt motivation, something seems to have raised doubts in him. He proposed taking a journey in search of the Messiah, in hopes of advising his people regarding the truthfulness of the religion. With money raised by Kiowa leaders for the purpose, and with blessings by holy men and a send-off by practically the entire tribe, Apiatan set out in September 1890.²¹

After Sitting Bull, the Arapaho evangelist, arrived among the Kiowa the following month, the Ghost Dance flourished in Apiatan’s absence. The first intimation of disillusionment came in February, when a letter arrived from Apiatan, who was then at the Northern Arapaho reservation in Wyoming. Mooney was at the Kiowa Agency by this time, and he heard the letter (which may have been a telegram) read aloud by Apiatan’s sister, a Carlisle graduate named Laura Dunmoi. Apiatan briefly related that he had seen the messiah, and that he was a fraud.²²

On February 19, Apiatan himself returned to Anadarko and appeared before a large intertribal gathering, with James Mooney and Agent Charles Adams among them. The Arapaho Sitting Bull arrived with many followers to hear the Kiowa’s challenge.

Apiatan rose and described his meeting with Wovoka, how he found the prophet singing with a blanket over his face, how saddened he was to learn that Wovoka was not omniscient but an ordinary man, how he instructed Apiatan to go back and tell his people to “quit the whole business,” and how, “discouraged and sick at heart,” he had left Nevada and journeyed home. The crowd of listeners was large and diverse, with members from many neighboring tribes. Every word Apiatan spoke was translated not only into English but also into Comanche, Caddo, Wichita, and Arapaho, with frequent repetitions. The meeting took an entire day. Apiatan took questions from Adams and Indian leaders, and then Sitting Bull was asked to respond.

“The scene was dramatic in the highest degree,” wrote Mooney. In a sense, Sitting Bull himself was on trial, but there was more than that at stake. Hanging in the balance were the ecstatic visions, the social standing of believers and visionaries, and the new religion’s promise of deliverance from the poverty and social erosion of reservation life.

Sitting Bull rose. He “insisted on the truth of his own representations.” He reminded his listeners that he had visited Jack Wilson the year before and explained again what the Messiah had said. But Apiatan did not back down. Kiowas had shown gratitude for the teachings; they had made Sitting Bull generous gifts of money and horses. Now Apiatan accused the evangelist of “deceiving the Indians in order to obtain their property.” Sitting Bull remained calm. Speaking “in a low musical voice,” the evangelist pointed out that he had never asked anyone for ponies, and he announced that those who “did not believe what he had told them… could come and take their ponies again.” Apiatan replied that that was “not the Kiowa road; what had once been given was not taken back.” Sitting Bull did not relent. At the conclusion of the meeting, he rose, drew his blanket around his shoulders, and crossed the river to the camp of the Caddos, where the dances continued. His Arapaho followers went with him.²³

Kiowas were persuaded to follow Apiatan—for a time. But others were not, and their continuing enthusiasm may have drawn strength from whispered rumors about the Kiowa doubter. Some said his wife’s dedication to the Ghost Dance made him jealous of either the religion or its leaders; another story circulated that he had never actually visited Wovoka but “had been hired by white men to lie to the Indians.”²⁴

In addition to the Caddos, the neighboring Wichita soon took up the dance as well. Indeed, Sitting Bull “gave the feather”—appointed ritual leaders—among both Caddos and Wichitas that same month. “From this time [almost two months after Wounded Knee] all these tribes went into the dance heart and soul, on some occasions dancing for days and nights together from the middle of the afternoon until the sun was well up in the morning,” reported Mooney. Expectation of earthly renewal was pervasive and profound, with all anticipating “that the great change would occur in the spring.” Winter cold failed to diminish their devotions, wrote Mooney, “the trance subjects sometimes lying unconscious in the snow for half an hour at a time.”²⁵

Mooney watched as devotion to the religion expanded throughout the first half of 1891, despite the Wounded Knee massacre and Apiatan’s denunciation. He noted that in February, around the time of Apiatan’s return, the Southern Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne sent another delegation to Wovoka; its members included Caspar Edson and Tall Bull, the captain of the Cheyenne police. They stayed for months, danced near Mason Valley, and met the prophet, from whom they received sacred red paint, which they duly carried back to the devotions in Oklahoma.²⁶

When the prophecy was not fulfilled that spring, devotions nevertheless continued. In August 1891, more Arapahos and Cheyennes traveled to Nevada; one senses a desire to reconnect with the prophet about when the end might come. The travelers included Mooney’s closest consultants, Black Coyote, Grant Left Hand, and Caspar Edson, as well as the Arapahos Little Raven and Red Wolf and the Cheyennes Black Short Nose and Standing Bull. Left Hand and Edson served as interpreters, and they also wrote down Jack Wilson’s teachings in a message that became known as “the Messiah Letter,” which they carried back to Oklahoma.²⁷

Not until several months later would Mooney see this letter for himself. Meanwhile, its teachings reshaped Ghost Dance practice and made a profound impression on believers around him. The text of the Messiah Letter indeed suggests that Wovoka adapted his teachings to address new realities in the aftermath of Wounded Knee, and it illuminates the ways in which believers were changing the ritual as Mooney watched.

Implicit in the prophet’s new instructions was one key for minimizing confrontation with authorities. Wovoka opened the letter with new rules governing the form of the dance. No longer would there be dancing for days on end, as on the Plains; now he imposed a limit. “When you get home you must make a dance to continue five days.” Dance four nights in a row, he instructed, then dance into the morning of the fifth day, “when all must bathe in the river and then disperse to their homes.” This sequence was to be repeated once every six weeks, and there was to be no departure from it: “You must all do in the same way.”²⁸

This was the same form that Wovoka had taught in Nevada from the beginning, but now he reiterated it with urgency, as suggested by its placement at the opening of the letter. In his meetings with visitors, he was equally firm about the six-week cycle of the ritual. At about the same time that Black Coyote and the others left for Nevada, Mooney noted, a combined delegation of Caddos, Wichitas, and Delawares also set out. They returned with the same instructions and quickly put them into effect: They danced for five consecutive days, into the next morning on the last day. Then all bathed in the river before dispersing to their homes to wait for six weeks before dancing again. Southern Arapahos even inscribed the instructions into their Ghost Dance songs. “Five and you must stop,” says the closing song of the ritual. Says another, “Once you have done it five times you must stop, our Father says to us.”²⁹

Why Wovoka felt compelled to impose a strict schedule for the dance is impossible to know, but one of its effects was to head off further conflict with the US government. As we have seen, Ghost Dancing in Nevada tended to cease anytime authorities moved against it, in part because Wovoka and his followers had learned to suspend dances and rotate them to remote locations to avoid causing alarm. Whatever the inspiration for the prophet’s instructions, they seem to have diminished the weeks-long dances that riled authorities and inflamed the press in Oklahoma. In allowing Indians only five days for dancing followed by a six-week pause, the schedule provided ample time for anxious white officials and observers to calm themselves and for rumors of “Indian outbreaks” to subside.

The Messiah Letter included not only instructions in dance form but promises of rain and renewal. Immediately after the dance instructions that opened the letter, the prophet thanked believers for their gifts and assured them of his affection—“I, Jack Wilson, love you all”—and sent them rain. “When you get home I shall give you a good cloud.… There will be a good deal of snow this year and some rain. In the fall there will be such a rain as I have never given you before.”³⁰

He then issued instructions governing behavior. When loved ones died, “you must not cry,” he informed his believers, an injunction against the mourning rituals in which people generally destroyed their own property. They “must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always.” There was to be no lying. “Do not refuse to work for the whites and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them,” he warned.³¹

Then he gave them even more good news: “Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud.” The letter is the only instance in the documentary record in which he invoked the name of Jesus, and it came with general resurrection. The dead were all alive again. “I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring.” He closed by reiterating the form of the dance: every six weeks, to be conducted with feasting and concluded with bathing. He asked the emissaries who carried the letter to return in three months’ time.³²

The promise of the letter was echoed in the songs of the dancers. On the Southern Plains, the prophecy of rain and renewal was as powerful as it had been in Nevada.

There is our Father

The ground is all damp,

Whenever he makes me dance,

Because that is what I have been given by our Father.³³

As with so many messianic movements, believers tempered their zeal when the Messiah did not appear at the expected hour. In Mooney’s words, when the Messiah failed to arrive in the spring, “the wild excitement gradually cooled and crystallized into a fixed but tranquil expectation of ultimate happiness under the old conditions in another world.”³⁴

BY SUMMER’S END IN 1891, MOONEY HAD RETURNED TO Washington to spend days poring over the voluminous correspondence about the Ghost Dance in government files.

Mooney’s work often displayed a reporter’s flair for investigation and story. In fact, he had been a newspaperman. His first job, starting at the age of twelve, had been as copyboy at the Richmond Daily Palladium, and as he grew older he occasionally reported for the paper, honing his craft as a storyteller. He left journalism after he finished high school, but as an ethnologist, he continued to pay attention to newspapers. Newspaper stories about the Ghost Dance had led him to Oklahoma, and on at least one occasion he would report on his own research in the Daily Palladium. At this point in his investigation, he became almost a kind of foreign correspondent, reporting from Indian country. In the fall of 1891, he once again set out from Washington, this time in a focused search for the Ghost Dance and its origins.

He disembarked first in Nebraska, at the Omaha and Winnebago reservation, primarily because it was on his route and he wanted to see if the Ghost Dance had had an impact there. Indeed, he reported, several Lakota Sioux from Pine Ridge had visited the reservation in April 1890 to share the teachings of the prophet. Another group of Dakota visitors from the Yankton Agency had relayed the same teachings. The Omaha and Winnebago, however, “put no faith in the story,” Mooney reported.³⁵

Aboard the train again, he journeyed northwest to Pine Ridge, intent on understanding the meaning of the religion among Lakotas. He had little luck. “I found the Sioux very difficult to approach on the subject,” Mooney wrote. Where Southern Arapahos had reached out to the federal man in hopes of inscribing their understanding of the religion into the official record, Lakota believers had neither the ability nor the desire to speak with him.

Although the religion still had Lakota followers and secret Ghost Dances continued into 1892, Mooney could not discover the activity because no one dared speak about it. The army was still camped at Pine Ridge, the massacre was only a year old, and most of the religion’s leaders—Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and twenty-one other Lakotas—remained in effective exile. Having been sent to an army fort after Wounded Knee as “hostages,” most of them had now journeyed to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The Indian police were newly entrenched and supported by federal troops ringing the agency, and public talk about the religion remained taboo. For all anyone knew, the young man from Washington might be laying a trap for those foolish enough to answer his questions.³⁶

Mooney characterized the most common response: “The dance was our religion, but the government sent soldiers to kill us on account of it. We will not talk any more about it.” He told one Lakota believer that Arapahos had shared information and even invited him to join the dance. “Then don’t you find that the religion of the Ghost dance is better than the religion of the churches?” rejoined the Ghost Dancer. When Mooney hesitated, the believer shut him down: “Well, then, if you have not learned that you have not learned anything about it.” He refused to speak any longer.³⁷

Those few Lakotas who agreed to talk with him had motivations that were the opposite of the Arapahos’: most of them were opponents of the religion, and some presumably were eager to justify their role in suppressing it. American Horse was helpful, as was Ellis Standing Bear, a Brule Lakota who had been at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Others were attached to either the Indian police or the army. One of Mooney’s primary sources was George Sword, the police captain at Pine Ridge. His interpreters there included mixed-bloods Louis Menard, from the agency at Rosebud, and Philip Wells, the notorious translator for the army at Wounded Knee. Others included Santee Dakotas, who “looked with contempt on the beliefs and customs of their more primitive western brethren, between whom and themselves there was in consequence but little friendly feeling.” The absence of testimony from actual Lakota Ghost Dancers would force Mooney to rely on these and other, even more problematic, sources in writing his book.³⁸

Meanwhile, the silence at Pine Ridge was a wall that his inquiries could not surmount. With so few willing to speak with him, Mooney took photos at Wounded Knee—of the killing field and the mass grave with its four corner posts smeared in red paint.³⁹

Mooney had noticed already a curious gap in the public narrative of the Ghost Dance troubles: for all the hysterical press coverage, not a single journalist had tracked down Wovoka, to whom he now referred—as Plains believers did—as the messiah. As Mooney later recalled, “The messiah was regarded as a myth, something intangible, to be talked about but not to be seen.” It was time to find the prophet.⁴⁰

Mooney had already written to C. C. Warner, the agent in charge of the main Paiute reservation at Pyramid Lake, to ask if he could photograph Wovoka. Warner discouraged him. He preferred to ignore the prophet for fear of lending him credibility, Warner wrote, and had in fact never seen the man. “I do not know as it will be possible to get a photo of him,” the agent advised. Furthermore, he warned, there were no “ghost dances, songs, nor ceremonials” on any of the reservations he supervised. Warner’s willful ignorance infuriated Mooney, who promptly made plans to go to Nevada.⁴¹

Another days-long, rattling transcontinental rail journey brought Mooney to Walker River Reservation, where officials informed him that Wovoka lived forty miles away in the settlement of Mason Valley. But the prophet’s uncle, Charley Sheep, lived nearby. “He spoke tolerable—or rather intolerable—English,” Mooney later recalled, so they did without a translator. But Sheep was suspicious. What was Mooney doing in Nevada? Keeping his Ghost Dance assignment quiet for the moment, Mooney explained that he was “sent out by the government to the various tribes to learn their stories and songs.” He had gathered much from other tribes, and “now wanted to learn some songs and stories of the Paiute, in order to write them down so that white people could read them.”⁴²

Then he showed Sheep some photographs of “my Indian friends from across the mountains”—Black Coyote and other Arapahos and Cheyenne he had worked with in Oklahoma. Some of these men, Mooney knew, had recently visited Wovoka as disciples. Examining the photographs and recognizing the men, Sheep was quickly put at ease. For the next week, Mooney stayed in Sheep’s lodge at Walker River. He and Sheep sang Paiute songs, Mooney collected Paiute stories, and they talked while the household bustled with the preparation of pine nut mush, the tending of children, and a visit from a Numu doctor who tended an ailing child.⁴³

After a few days, Mooney cautiously broached the subject of the Ghost Dance. Sheep readily offered several songs and a description of the ritual. Mooney explained that as a Ghost Dancer himself, he hoped to meet the Messiah “and get from him some medicine-paint to bring back to his friends” among the Arapaho and Cheyenne. Sheep happily agreed to take him to see Wovoka.⁴⁴

IT WAS ON A BRIGHT NEW YEAR’S DAY IN 1892 THAT MOONEY and Charley Sheep took the train and coach upriver to Mason Valley. In Greenfield (soon to be renamed Yerington), they met with storekeeper Ed Dyer, who knew Jack Wilson and who also spoke fluent Paiute. Dyer informed them that they could find Wovoka twelve miles away, near the mining town of Pine Grove, and agreed to go with them.⁴⁵

After hiring a team and a buggy, Mooney headed into the Pine Grove Hills with Dyer and Sheep. The road was almost empty. Deep snow covered the ground (proof of the weather maker’s magic, claimed Sheep from the driver’s seat). The desert stretched around them vast and white and silent. Not long after setting out, they drove past a dance ground, the brush shelters heaped with new-fallen snow. After several miles, they saw a man off to one side of the road, standing with a gun over his shoulder. “I believe that’s Jack now!” exclaimed Dyer. Sheep reined up and shouted to the man in Paiute. The man shouted back. It was Wovoka, hunting jackrabbits.⁴⁶

As Wovoka approached, Mooney saw a young man with his hair trimmed square on a line below his ears. He was dark-skinned and “compactly built,” but nearly six feet tall. He was also well dressed, wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat with a beaded ribbon under his chin and a good pair of boots. His face was open, dignified. “With a strong, hearty grasp,” the prophet took the scientist’s hand and asked what they needed.

Sheep explained Mooney’s visit: He was sent by the government. He knew the Arapaho and Cheyenne disciples and would be seeing them again soon. He wanted an interview.

The prophet weighed the matter. He was loath to speak to non-Indians about the religion, but Mooney’s standing as a federal agent appears to have given him pause. He spoke thoughtfully. He did not like to talk to the whites. Some of them had lied about him. At the same time, some of the Indians had disobeyed his instructions, “and trouble had come of it.” Still, “as I was sent by Washington and was a friend of his friends, he would talk with me,” Mooney later related. Just now, however, Wovoka was hunting. Mooney’s party agreed to find the prophet at his camp that evening.

After shaking hands all around, the prophet returned to the chase. The party drove on to a nearby ranch, arriving at dusk. They ate a meal, then started through the dark desert, beneath a moonless sky, for Wovoka’s camp.

A proud social scientist, Mooney was driven throughout his career by rational thinking and empirical evidence. He retained a high degree of respect for the beliefs of others, however, even when he found them naive or preposterous. He may not have believed in the religions of Indians, but he recognized in them a deep longing and a universal human pursuit of ancient mysteries. He was an ethnologist out to gather data, but he was also searching for an eminence—a mysterious person who had inspired the devotions of thousands of people. Thus, during his travels Mooney sometimes looked more like a disciple seeking the prophet than an objective social scientist in search of an interview.⁴⁷

At no time did the journey seem more mysterious than that evening. After leaving the ranch house, the ethnologist and his party rattled through the sagebrush for an hour before Charley Sheep confessed that he was lost. With only a single lantern and the pale reflection from the mantle of snow, they had little hope of finding their way back to the ranch in the vast darkness. Unable to find the Indian trails amid the cattle tracks that crisscrossed the snow, they circled and doubled back again and again. Numerous times they thought they spotted lodges only to discover that they were snow-covered clumps of sagebrush, which loomed as big as houses in the night. The cold was bitter, and those in the party were approaching the limits of their endurance. They shouted repeatedly, and in the silence they listened in vain for an answering cry.⁴⁸

Fending off panic, they formulated a new plan. Leaving Charley Sheep with the wagon, Dyer and Mooney fanned out along the cattle trails, shouting frequently to keep in touch with one another and avoid becoming lost. After traveling far enough to know that neither had hit the right trail, they returned to the wagon, moved it forward a short distance, and repeated the effort.

After some time, Sheep called out and the party regrouped in front of the wagon. Sheep said that he had heard something ahead of them. The party waited in silent suspense, peering into the darkness. A burst of sparks flew up into the starry sky. They had found the prophet.⁴⁹

They entered the low doorway of Wovoka’s lodge. This small home—ten feet wide and about eight feet high—was made from bundles of tules laid over a wooden frame, with the top open to the stars. In the center blazed a fire of sagebrush, and every now and then somebody threw a fresh piece of sage onto the fire and a shower of sparks rushed upward into the sky.

About half a dozen people sat or lay around the fire, including Wovoka, his wife, a boy who seemed to be about four—and of whom Wovoka seemed very fond—and a baby. Except for a few baskets, there was no furniture. All the Paiutes wore Western dress, but there were no pots or pans, nor any other sign that outside the lodge was a rapidly industrializing nation.

Mooney had only one night with Wovoka and had not had time to familiarize himself with the history of Paiute wage labor, or with their struggles amid drought and the collapse of the Nevada economy. Thus, he fitted them into a narrative of Indian decline. He described the tule lodge and its absence of modern implements as a sign of Paiutes “accept[ing] the inevitable while resisting innovation”—an interpretation that ran counter to the history of Numus generally and the Ghost Dance in particular. The “lodge” or kana was a temporary accommodation for the family while Wovoka worked and hunted nearby ranches. In reality, as we have seen, Paiutes were innovative and ambitious, and so especially was Wovoka, who would be one of the first in his community to move into a wooden frame house.⁵⁰

Wovoka was friendly and asked Mooney again why he wanted an interview. Charley Sheep answered, but the conversation took a long while; Wovoka repeated everything his uncle said before answering, as if making sure he understood everything correctly. Knowing that this man was from the government, Wovoka knew that he had to choose his words carefully. The wrong communication could cause trouble. It helped, no doubt, that the prophet could trust his translator. Mooney observed that Wovoka and Dyer “seemed to be on intimate terms,” and in fact the prophet and the storekeeper had known each other for years. Dyer had attended the miracle of the ice and many of Wovoka’s gatherings, including at least one Ghost Dance. For Wovoka, if the right words, translated into English, found their way into print, actually preserving something of the gospel, the government might stop harassing him, his people, and his many believers.⁵¹

Prompted by Mooney, Wovoka recounted briefly the story of his life, and then they began to discuss his prophecy. Wovoka made it clear that he had had more than one revelation. The dance had appeared to him four years before, in 1887, and the visit to heaven came in 1889.

The prophet was adamant about what he had and had not seen in his trances. He was not responsible for the ghost shirts of the Sioux. When his people danced, they did not fall into trances, as Plains dancers did. And the prophet “earnestly repudiated any idea of hostility toward the whites, asserting that his religion was one of universal peace.” In fact, he urged his people to “follow the white man’s road and adopt the habits of civilization.”⁵²

And no, he was not Christ, no matter what any of his followers may have believed. Yes, he was a prophet who had received a divine revelation. He had been with God, a claim he made “as though the statement no more admitted of controversy than the proposition that 2 and 2 are 4.” And indeed, God had given him complete control over the elements.⁵³

At Mooney’s prompting, Wovoka recounted his visit to heaven “when the sun died,” which Mooney later fixed as the eclipse of January 1, 1889. The prophet asked after his disciples on the Plains, “particularly of the large delegation—about twelve in number—from the Cheyenne and Arapaho, who had visited him the preceding summer and taken part in the dance with his people.” When Mooney pulled out his photographs of the disciples, Wovoka relaxed considerably.⁵⁴

Gesturing to his camera, Mooney requested a photograph of Wovoka. The prophet hesitated. No one had taken his picture before, he said, and he had even turned down an offer of $5 to allow himself to be photographed. (Perhaps he did not recall being photographed when he was a teenager.) But, he continued, he could see that Mooney was different. He came all the way from Washington to learn about the religion. Mooney’s friendship with Ghost Dancers to the east satisfied Wovoka that he was a good man. He would sit for a picture—in return for $2.50 for himself and a like amount for each member of his family.

Wilson’s eagerness to earn money from his image suggests just how modern and innovative he was, even if it did not change the ethnologist’s view of the Paiutes as people who “accepted the inevitable while resisting innovation.” Mooney balked at the price, offering Wovoka instead his standard per diem, “for his services as informant,” and promising to send him a copy of the picture when it was finished. The prophet agreed.⁵⁵

Mooney later claimed to have spent only part of that evening at the lodge, and then to have departed. But Ed Dyer later recalled multiple interviews over “many all day sessions, “and the party must have remained at least one night in or near Wovoka’s lodge, because the photograph shows a daylight scene. In the back stands Charley Sheep, in a winter coat and a broad hat. Wovoka sits in the foreground, on a wooden chair of a kind that might have been found in a comfortable dining room (and seems to have come from the nearby Morgan ranch). He dressed carefully for his portrait, as if trying to send a message through the photograph. An eagle feather is lashed to his right upper arm with a bandana, and his right hand rests on his knee; with his left hand, he holds a broad-brimmed hat, also perched on his knee. (Mooney learned later that “the feather and the sombrero were important parts of his spiritual stock in trade.”) Although they are outdoors, with snow piled around their feet, Wovoka wears what appears to be a good suit of clothes, but without the jacket. His white shirt is covered only with a vest, and on his lower arms he wears calico sleeve covers, of the kind worn by workmen in his time. He sits at an oblique angle to the camera, staring straight ahead, into the distance. Except for the eagle feather inserted into his armband, he looks less like a dreamy prophet than an ambitious laborer, perhaps a store clerk just finished with his prayers, about to rise and go to work.⁵⁶

FIGURE 12.2. Jack Wilson (seated) and Charley Sheep, January 2, 1892. Photo by James Mooney, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, GN-01659a.

After taking the photograph, Mooney prepared to leave. Wovoka gave him articles to show to his followers in Oklahoma: a rabbit-skin blanket, pine nuts, magpie tail feathers, and “some of the sacred red paint, endowed with the most miraculous powers, which plays so important a part in the ritual of the Ghost-dance religion.” Then, “with mutual expressions of good will,” the men parted ways. Charley Sheep went back to his reservation, and Mooney boarded the train for Indian Territory.⁵⁷

MOONEY WAS UNPREPARED FOR WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. ON arriving back in Oklahoma, he was greeted as an emissary from the prophet. Cheyenne and Arapaho believers sought him out, “anxious to hear the report of my journey and see the sacred things that I had brought back from the messiah.” Reports of his meeting with Jack Wilson circulated quickly. In groups and alone, men and women came to the ethnologist. One at a time, they took him by his right hand—the hand that had touched the prophet’s hand—and intoned long prayers. Sometimes with lips moving silently and sometimes aloud, they implored the father to bring the new world soon, “with a petition that, as the speaker himself was unable to make the long journey, he might, by grasping the hand of one who had seen and talked with the messiah face to face, be enabled in his trance visions to catch a glimpse of the coming glory.”⁵⁸

They trembled while they prayed, and some wept. Often, before finishing, wrote Mooney, “the condition of the devotee bordered on the hysterical, very little less than in the Ghost Dance itself.” All the while, others waited in quiet reverence for their turn. Standing amid small crowds of devoted Indians and at the front of a long line of supplicants, each waiting to grasp his hand and pray in hushed tones, Mooney soon became embarrassed. But as he put it, “until the story had been told over and over again there was no way of escape without wounding their feelings.”⁵⁹

To the faithful, the objects that Wovoka gave Mooney were also of special interest, and they asked to see them, especially the sacred red paint. The paint was in fact clay that Wovoka collected from Pine Grove. Grinding it and mixing it with water, Paiutes made it into elliptical cakes about six inches long. Paiute Ghost Dancers wore it in the ritual, and Wovoka gave it to all the disciples who visited. They in turn carried it back to their home reservations, where they mixed it with red paints of their own before sharing it with the dancers, for whom it facilitated health, long life, and better visions during the trance.⁶⁰

For these reasons, Mooney was inundated with requests for small amounts of the paint, but he wanted to keep it for scientific sampling, so he was parsimonious. Eventually, however, his rationing failed. “My friends were very anxious to touch it,” and each man who did rubbed it on his palms, “afterward smearing this dust on the faces of himself and his family.” Mooney put the paint away.⁶¹

Even though the pine nuts he carried with him from Nevada were “not esteemed so sacred” as the red paint, they had a similar attraction. One evening the ethnologist visited the lodge of the Arapaho chief Left Hand to speak about “the Messiah and his country.” In the circle around the tipi hearth, each of the adults took Mooney’s hand and prayed. Afterward, Mooney gave them nuts, explaining that these were food among the Paiutes in Nevada. Left Hand shared his small portion of pine nuts with his wife, and the couple stood. Stretching out their hands to the northwest, “the country of the Messiah,” they prayed long and earnestly to Hesunanin, “Our Father,” asking that he bless them and their children through the “sacred food.” They asked him to send the Messiah soon. The other men and women bowed their heads and listened, breaking in occasionally with appeals of their own to Hesunanin. Afterward, they divided the pine nuts and shared them among all present, even babies, “that all might taste of what to them was the veritable bread of life.”⁶²

Mooney had become more than a scientist or an interested white observer. He was now a powerful intermediary between the prophet and the faithful, with standing in some ways similar to that of a priest. Indeed, when he visited among the Northern Arapaho at Wind River the following year, many believers responded to him just as their Southern Arapaho kin had done. One man, enacting a ritual meant to bring on a trance immediately, approached with hands held out, “with short exclamations of hu!hu!hu!hu! as is sometimes done by the devotees about a priest in the Ghost Dance.”⁶³

Of course, Mooney was not a priest. He did not lead devotions. Still, if he was not a teacher of Wovoka’s lessons, he discussed the prophet’s words and their meaning with his Arapaho and Cheyenne friends, conveying a residue of the holiness with which Wovoka and his teachings were imbued. To the faithful, Mooney had shown himself to be at least as much a seeker as a scientist. By dancing with them, he had shared in their quest for renewal. But more than that, he had contributed to it. He had borne gifts from Wovoka himself.

In a sense, he had become an avatar of the prophet, and his very presence brought on shows of greater devotion and faith. Other delegates who returned from meetings with Jack Wilson may have met similar receptions, but in key ways the reaction to Mooney was different. He was an emissary not only to Wovoka but from Washington; it seems possible, even likely, that his status as a government man made his gifts from Wovoka all the more powerful. The Ghost Dance religion expanded as rapidly as it did in the aftermath of Wounded Knee in part because of the presence of a government agent who, at least as far as other believers could tell, embraced it. If a man from Washington could be so bold as to Ghost Dance in the aftermath of Wounded Knee, then perhaps they could feel safe in doing the same.

In the end, Mooney’s dual standing as co-religionist and government agent led Indian believers to make him a kind of delegate for the religion in Washington. Soon after his return to Oklahoma from Nevada, he received a visit from several men who had gone out to meet Jack Wilson the previous summer. Black Short Nose, a Cheyenne evangelist, explained that the Cheyenne and Arapaho “were now convinced that I would tell the truth about their religion, and as they loved their religion and were anxious to have the whites know that it was all good and contained nothing bad or hostile they would now give me the message which the messiah himself had given to them, that I might take it back to show to Washington.” Black Short Nose then drew “from a beaded pouch” the Messiah Letter, written in English by Caspar Edson, containing the message from Jack Wilson. On the back of the letter was another account of the same message, dictated after Edson’s return by Black Short Nose to his daughter, a student at one of the government schools. When he returned to Washington that fall, Mooney took the letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas Morgan, who thereby learned the words of the prophet from the Arapaho and Cheyenne evangelists: that Indians must not lie or steal, must keep the peace, and must work; that rain would come, and that Jesus was on earth. He presented Morgan with a copy, had another copy made for himself, and returned the original to Black Short Nose.⁶⁴

Mooney journeyed to Oklahoma one last time before completing The Ghost Dance Religion in the fall of 1893. This time he brought with him a graphophone, a recording device, for the collection of Ghost Dance songs. The Caddos were still dancing.⁶⁵