most of them, on and off the reservation, continued their “pernicious” fandangos that irritated Agent Rinehart for so many years. But now the dance of communion, the traditional Round Dance, would usher in an Indian millennium in which all would be “peace,” and “good will” would prevail between men and women of all colors.98 The new era would be a return to the golden age of the past before their white brothers came to the Sierra. The Round Dance was known to outsiders as the Ghost Dance.
Afterthought: Desert Ghost Dancers
As has been noted, the Civil War years were a period of extreme colonialism and militarism in the history of the Greater Southwest. The Indian response, in the face of white encroachments that threatened their identity by destroying their subsistence economies, shrinking their populations because of warfare and disease, and assimilation programs that amounted to cultural genocide, was to adapt and survive by creating a kind of religious Indian nationalism. For many Indian groups the so-called Ghost Dance movement was a statement of identity and a worldview that continued from the early nineteenth century well into the twentieth century.
It was a pan-Indian, traditional religious belief system as well as a reaction to external conditions that deprived them of their distinctiveness. The Ghost Dance was in the tradition of the Round Dance, a ceremonial activity that would bring about regeneration and growth. This kind of doctrine could be used to develop a sense of Indian pride and social cohesion in the face of overwhelming white dominance, or it could become a message of defiance. In fact, it was both depending on the individual and his/her circumstance. Whether actively hostile to whites or passively accepting white dominance, the movement was a significant expression of Indian identity.99
Although the antecedents to the phenomenon of the Ghost Dance reach back to colonial times in US history, it is likely that the inspiration for the 1870 Ghost Dance vision of the Walker Lake Paiute Wodziwob (Grey Hair) was the Prophet Dance, the Dreamer religion of the Wanapum prophet Smohalla. The Prophet Dance movement spread from the Athapascans of British Columbia to the Paiutes in southern Oregon, and its teachings predicted that a great earthquake would eliminate the white man leaving the Indians to enjoy the fruits of the earth. Smohalla, who very likely was influenced by Mormon missionaries, traveled from Washington State to Mexico, Utah, and Nevada in the 1860s a few years before Wodziwob had his mystical trance and vision.100
In 1870, when Wodziwob came out of his trance he reported his trip to heaven and said that the spirits of the dead were returning to earth to usher in a “heaven on earth”—an earthly paradise. To understand Wodziwob his shamanism must be taken into account. He was a Paiute magician who could control supernatural forces, and he did this by ventriloquism, hypnosis, and sleight-of-hand tricks. He allegedly had the power to remove foreign bodies from the sick and force out the evil forces possessing a patient’s body. And like the shaman-warrior Geronimo, it was claimed that arrows and later bullets would bounce off his body.101
There were other precedents for Wodziwob, including the activities of Wazadzzobahago in 1860, who, as head medicine chief of the Mono Lake Paiutes, supposedly was killed and burned only to be resurrected in three days when he arose from the ashes. On that third day a whirlwind came and raised the ashes in the form of a pillar. Mention has already been made of Wahe, the brother of Old Winnemucca, who professed to be a spirit chief and as such was protected from the bullets of his enemies. Wahe, it will be remembered, led the Indian conspiracy against Fort Churchill in 1861.102 Later on, when the Paiutes were at the Malheur Reservation in 1875, Oytes, the Dreamer chief, planned to kill Agent Parrish, and told his followers that his shamanistic powers were so great that bullets could not touch him.103
Thus, dances, ceremonial practices, and religious beliefs similar to the Ghost Dance tradition were well established both before and after Wodziwob’s 1870 trance. Wodziwob’s disciples spread the doctrine beyond Walker Lake. In the Mason and Smith valleys of Nevada, areas west of Walker Lake on the Walker River, Numa-taivo, the father of Wovoka (Jack Wilson) not only taught the tricks and ideas of shamanism to his son, but carried the Ghost Dance message throughout the area. An equally enthusiastic disciple, Weneyuga, spread the religion to the Washoe people.104 Others who were some of the first to receive the message were the Modoc people of northeastern California and the Klamath River tribes. From these regions the Ghost Dance of the 1870s went southward through the Monos, the Tule River Indians, the Panamint of Death Valley, the Chemehuevi, and Mojave. All of these were groups that had experienced dislocation and cultural decay for 20 years since California had become a state in 1850.105
Although the Ghost Dance has a continuous history from 1870 to 1890, a second great wave would take place after 1889 when Wovoka announced his death and resurrection, and pronounced the coming of an Indian Messiah in 1890, a pronouncement that had believers in both Indian and non-Indian communities. Wovoka told his Mason Valley people that they could chant, do the Ghost Dance, fall into a trance, and visit the land of the dead. If they did as they were instructed, Numina the Messiah, would bring the Indian dead back to life and restore the world to the way it was prior to the white man.106
A peculiar coincidence was the date in which Wovoka stated that the Messiah would return. Wovoka’s prophecy indicated that the Messiah or Christ would return to the earth to restore America to the Indians in December 1890, the same date that the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith indicated that if he lived to be 85 he would see the face of Christ. Smith, born on December 23, 1805, although dead for many years would have been 85 on his birthday of December 23, 1890.107 The rumor of Christ’s coming was probably passed to Sioux Ghost Dance leaders by Bannock and Shoshone Mormons in Utah and Idaho. Although there is no evidence that Wovoka directly had contact with Mormon missionaries or converts, both Mormons and Paiutes shared many of the same ideals and practices.108
Mormons believed, as did many Paiutes, that God’s curse on the American Indian was to give them a dark skin. In the Mormon Sunday School the doctrine that God’s curse on the Indian (called descendants of Laman or Lamanites) took the form of an invasion by Gentiles (non-Mormons) who would conquer the Indian, but that the curse would eventually be lifted and the Lamanites would become “white and delightsome.” The curse would be lifted with the second coming of Christ, and 1890 was that year for many of those “Latter Day Saints.” Another notion that did not come from the Paiutes was the idea of sacred temple garments that the Saints wore that would protect them from evil influences. Although Paiute shamans like Wovoka talked about bullets bouncing off their chest, the power was a supernatural one and not a Ghost Shirt. That idea was likely developed again by Bannock Mormons who passed it on to their Sioux cousins.109
Just as the 1870s wave had spread the Ghost Dance ceremonies and doctrines throughout southern Oregon and California, the 1890s wave was spread eastward, first to Fort Hall in Idaho, and from there to the Great Plains, including the Dakotas and Oklahoma. The latter event was precipitated by the coming of the railroad. In 1868 the Central Pacific Railroad, following the Truckee River east from California, reached the Pyramid Lake Reservation town of Wadsworth. It eventually joined the Union Pacific near Ogden, Utah, creating a transcontinental link across the plains. By the 1890s Fort Hall was one of the crossroads of the West, a junction of the Oregon Short Line Railroads and the Utah Northern. Numerous parties of indigenous people passed through Fort Hall on their way east or west, and the Bannocks and Shoshones, who were among the first people to visit Wovoka, were anxious to spread the holy word. Ritualistic connections could now be made quickly by rail, and Fort Hall became a center of Ghost Dance activism.110
The tragedy of Wounded Knee took place on December 29, 1890. Although some of the warriors wore “bulletproof’ shirts—Ghost Shirts—they were mostly for defensive purposes. Ghost Shirts provided some of their wearers with the idea of invulnerability. That idea of being incapable of being hurt or wounded was not new to the Paiutes and their shamans. What was new, and was not part of Wovoka’s message and the Paiute way, was the Ghost Shirt.111 After the 7th Cavalry
