How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [112]
Wovoka, a Paiute Indian and self-proclaimed messiah who spread the salvation of the Ghost Dance.
Unfortunately for the Native Americans, Indian delegates from the other nations were not the only ones aware of the Ghost Dance. White settlers grew wary, concerned about what the dance might do to stir up trouble, stimulating officials in government to look into the matter. Wovoka’s peaceful dance of renewal began to escalate into a war dance when his disciples (as most disciples are wont to do) added their own components to the religion. By the spring of 1890 the Lakota Sioux leader Kicking Bear, not content to give his fate over to the gods, introduced special clothing into the ceremony, declaring “the bullets will not go through these shirts and dresses, so they all have these dresses for war.” Wovoka never said anything about war—just the opposite—but Kicking Bear was not about to go peacefully into the closing of the American West.
Someone on the Pine Ridge Reservation told a local resident named Charles L. Hyde about this new development, and on May 29 he wrote to the Secretary of the Interior that he heard the Sioux were plotting a rebellion. Hyde’s letter was passed along to the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who in turn sent copies to the agents of the various Sioux reservations. They were to check it out and report back to Washington. Talk of bulletproof vests and the disappearance of whites did not sound like peaceful absorption to white bureaucrats.
Ghost dancers (photographed by anthropologist James Mooney).
Arguably the most famous Indian of the time was Sitting Bull, associated with the massacre of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and later a star in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The government asked Sitting Bull (through an agent named James McLaughlin) to persuade his people to stop the Ghost Dance. He agreed to try if McLaughlin would accompany him to see Wovoka first to determine if there was really anything to fear. McLaughlin declined to go, and on top of that on November 19 he asked permission to withhold all food rations from Indians in Sitting Bull’s village. Tensions were mounting. Virtually all activities on the Sioux reservations ceased with the exception of the Ghost Dance. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota the newly appointed (and now frightened) agent sent a telegram of alarm to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, dated October 30:
Your Department has been informed of the damage resulting from these dances and of the danger attending them of the crazy Indians doing serious damage to others … . The only remedy for this matter is the use of military and until this is done you need not expect any progress from these people on the other hand you will be made to realize that they are tearing down more in a day than the Government can build in a month.
Two weeks later President Harrison ordered the Secretary of War to suppress “any threatened outbreak.” Word spread around the country that the Indians were planning one final apocalyptic war against the whites. On October 28, the Chicago Tribune ran this headline:
TO WIPE OUT THE WHITES
WHAT THE INDIANS EXPECT OF THE COMING MESSIAH
FEARS OF AN OUTBREAK
OLD SITTING BULL STIRRING UP THE EXCITED REDSKINS
The Chicago Herald, Harper’s Weekly, and the Illustrated American all sent correspondents to cover the event. The renowned painter of the West, Frederic Remington, was sent to provide images. When facts were lacking, rumors filled the journalists’ columns. General Nelson Miles, for example, reported to the Washington press corp that “it is a more comprehensive plot than anything ever inspired by Tecumseh, or even Pontiac.” By December thousands of army troops moved onto the Sioux Reservation, including a new Seventh Cavalry. Between the starving, messiah-seeking