continuing the Movement

Ghost Dancing continued across the West long after the Wounded Knee Massacre. Between eighty and one hundred Indians are known to have visited Wovoka during the first half of 1891 alone, sustaining the connections that linked the Plains to the Great Basin. Despite the threats from settlers, Native Americans kept seeking information, and many kept dancing, but agents ramped up their efforts to stop the transmission of information among groups, believing that their interactions were a threat to US government authority. Agents were more determined to eliminate the movement, using different and sometimes tougher tactics to limit visiting and letter writing regarding the dance. There were also Native American critics of the Ghost Dance who thought the movement was not a significant one or that Wovoka was a fraud. Some Natives even believed that the dance was dangerous, and others urged the US government to do more to stop it. Nevertheless, the Ghost Dance persisted into the 1890s because of intertribal interaction and because of the many who challenged US colonial authority by refusing to give up their freedoms of speech, religion, and mobility.

"Strictest Surveillance"

The amount of movement among tribes had been obvious before the Wounded Knee Massacre. After Wounded Knee, a reporter criticized the Lakota agencies for not creating a “system of the strictest surveillance” that would have prevented the “hostile spies” from “constantly” visiting those who had not been affected by the dance. It “should have been inaugurated weeks ago,” the reporter wrote. Lakota agents failed in that regard before Wounded Knee, but they claimed to be even more concerned about the information that visiting Indians might bring to their reserves in early 1891. “The importance of stopping visits at this time has been fully appreciated,” the Rosebud agent assured the commissioner, “and every means in my power has and is being used to effectually stop such.” Agents thought that a network between the nonprogressive elements had enabled their coordination during the previous winter, and they knew that visitors and letters were the primary conduits of communication. But intertribal corresponding could not be reined in, and it was vital in the Ghost Dance’s persistence. An example comes from Many Eagles (or Plenty Eagles), an Oglala living at Pine Ridge, who wrote to his sister on March 5, 1891, advising her to believe in the dance: “I would like to inform you of something. It is in regard to the dance which created a commotion up there. It is the truth and will surely come to pass.”

Dancing Despite Suppression

On several reservations, the Ghost Dance actually peaked in 1891 and 1892. One thousand dancers were reported among Wichitas, Caddos, Delawares, and Kichais at one gathering in Indian Territory in February 1891. At the Ponca, Pawnee, and Otoe Reservation, large dances were held in November 1891 through January 1892 and endured in some form for years. A Pawnee named Frank White had become a disciple of Sitting Bull (the Northern Arapaho) while participating in a Ghost Dance at the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Agency with Wichitas, Caddos, and three hundred Pawnees in the late summer of 1891. White convinced Pawnee leadership that the dance was compatible with their traditions and instructed Pawnees in the dance and its songs. Pawnees and Poncas were able to organize at least three large dances led by White without their agent’s knowledge, something the secretary of the interior thought “unpardonable.” Stacy Matlock, a young Pawnee man and a Carlisle graduate, wrote in 1892 that when he returned to the Pawnee Reservation, he attended “great and surprising . . . gatherings every day.” Ghost Dancing friends told him “that it was not very long when the time will come when we will see our old relatives who died many years ago.” Even though Matlock paid no mind, the Ghost Dance persisted at the Pawnee Reservation well into the twentieth century. Pawnees practiced secrecy to avoid trouble with the agent. Dances were held in remote areas, sometimes in deep snow. The dancing was done quietly; they softened their voices, and as one Pawnee remembered, they “began to hide around to do it.”

Agents' Tactics

White suspicion, which lasted for months and even years after Wounded Knee, lived on because the Ghost Dance did not die the natural death that many expected. Agents throughout the West continued to chase down rumors of Ghost Dancing. They assumed that communication between tribes, secret or otherwise, could carry plans for dancing. Capt. Penny at Pine Ridge believed that some Oglalas wanted to resume their Ghost Dancing and were “privately and among themselves in secret councils” preparing for war in the spring. Much of Penny’s intelligence on the matter came from the seized personal letters written and received by the hostile Lakota “prisoners of war.” Penny also arrested illicit visitors like William Red Deer and two other Brulés, for “going about the country . . . spreading rumors and gossip not consistent with peace and good order.” Red Deer was held at the agency guardhouse in late May, five months after Wounded Knee, because of the information he carried. Incredibly, Penny was also allowed the spend no less than fifty dollars a month on a “secret service fund” that would allow him “to ascertain definitely, and secretly, exactly what is going on all over the reservation.” He paid for the information spread by Lakotas.

Native Critics of the Movement

Investigations went on, and a variety of conclusions about Wovoka were reached, including the opinion that the man was a fraud. There were also nonbelievers who tried to distance themselves from the dancers throughout 1891. Some Indian leaders, in an effort to retain good relations, wrote to federal officials after Wounded Knee to make it clear that they were not dancing. The Shoshone chief Washakie at Wind River assured the president and Commissioner Morgan that he did “not know why” Lakotas were “so foolish as to want to fight with the people.” The most effective Native critic of Wovoka was a Kiowa man named Apiatan (Wooden Lance). Because of his investigation and testimony, many Kiowas rejected the dance in February 1891. sometime in the first half of January 1891.57 He had expected Wovoka to be all the things that were said about him, a man with powerful medicine. The meeting took place in the days after the Wounded Knee Massacre, and Wovoka, probably devastated about the events in South Dakota, told Apiatan that Lakotas had distorted the things he had told them. Wovoka told Apiatan that he had better go home and tell his people to quit the dancing before they also got into trouble. Hundreds of Indians attended a scheduled council on February 19 in which Apiatan recounted his journey and confronted Sitting Bull, the Northern Arapaho who had spent weeks propagating the movement in Indian Territory. Sitting Bull also claimed to have met Wovoka in 1890, and his story was much different from Apiatan’s. It proved to be a monumental debate and an important event in Kiowa history. Apiatan accused Sitting Bull of deceiving Indian Territory for economic gain. Sitting Bull defended himself by saying that he never asked for anything and would return everything if asked. Some who attended the council remembered it as one of the worst days in Kiowa history. Many more Kiowas were persuaded by Apiatan’s arguments. Although most (but not all) Kiowas accepted Apiatan’s version, Caddos and Wichitas continued to dance at the reservation. And in the years that followed, particularly 1894 and 1895, Kiowas did experience periodic revivals of the Ghost Dance and its songs, even into the twentieth century.

Another Investigation from the Southern Plains

Casper Edson, a former Carlisle student, joined two other Southern Arapahos, Little Raven and Red Wolf, on their own self-funded investigative mission similar to Apiatan’s. They left with permission, but under the guise of visiting friends and relatives at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, not telling their agent the true purpose of the trip. Their agent, Charles Ashley, was glad to allow Edson the opportunity; after all, he was employed at the Arapaho Agency school and was considered “one of the brightest and best of the returned students.” The delegation made their way to Nevada and listed to Wovoka’s thoughts. Casper Edson and Grant Left Hand interpreted and, on the spot, wrote down in English what Wovoka told them. Edson brought that written message home to the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation (transcript on the right), confirming the truth of the movement while relaying Wovoka’s instructions east. Anthropologist James Mooney was eventually able to read this message—he called it the “Messiah Letter”—even though Wovoka explicitly told the men not to show his words to a white man. Historians can only wonder what other letters were kept secret, but Edson’s transcript remains. Following the delivery of the Wovoka’s message, Southern Cheyennes and Southern Arapahos tried to convince the authorities that the Ghost Dance was harmless so that it could continue. In December 1891, Southern Arapaho headman Row of Lodges told Agent Charles Ashley that their ceremony was a prayer to the Great Spirit “to make them a better people and teach them the ways of the white man, they might grow to be a prosperous, happy and powerful people; that the songs they sang were similar, in sentiment, to those sung by the Indian children in school” (referring to church hymns). Suspicious of Row of Lodges’s claim, Ashley asked “the educated young Indians of the tribe” if that was the purpose of their Ghost Dancing. They said that it was.

"You must dance four nights and one day time. You will take bath in the morning before you go to yours homes, for every body, and give you all the same as this. Jackson Wilson likes you all, he is glad to get good many things. His heart satting fully of gladness, after you get home, I will give you a good cloud and give you chance to make you feel good. I give you a good spirit, and give you all good paint, I want you people to come here again, want them in three months any tribe of you from there...Grandfather, said, when they were die never cry, no hurt any body, do any harm for it, not to fight. Be a good behave always. I will give a satisfaction in your life. This young man is a good father and mother. Do not tell the white people about this, Juses is on the ground, he just like cloud. Every body is a live again. I don’t know when he will be here, may be will be this fall or in spring. When it happen it may be this. There will be no sickness and return to young again. Do not refuse to work for white man or do not make any trouble with them until you leave them. When the earth shakes do not be afraid it will not hurt you. I want you to make dance for six weeks. Eat and wash good clean yourselves."

Educated Believers

Casper Edson, by all accounts a standout at Carlisle, used written English to encourage belief in Wovoka’s message. Native Americans used so-called modern means to acquire and disseminate ideas about the Ghost Dance, but most white Americans saw nothing modern, or civilized, in the movement. There was a long-held misconception that the Ghost Dance movement was opposed to all elements of American modernity, which masked the innovative ways in which the dance was spread. Casper Edson used what he learned in a school that existed to eradicate Indianness to propagate religious ideas that embodied Indianness. Belief or doubt in the Ghost Dance movement did not always hinge on an Indian’s level of white education. Apiatan, the Kiowa who denounced the movement, was not educated like Edson was. Some educated Indians who were deemed to be civilized by white observers became Ghost Dancers nonetheless. Paul Boynton, a Southern Arapaho, who was described as a “proficient” typesetter and a “good penman,” was a clerk at the Cheyenne-Arapaho Agency in 1890 and 1891. He had attended Carlisle off and on from 1880 to 1889.

A white missionary named John Seger saw Boynton at the agency in December 1890 or January 1891 and reflected on how much Boynton had changed while at Carlisle. He had once been a boy with long hair, dressed in “Indian costume”; now he sat with pen in hand at his own desk in the agency office. Seger saw that Boynton’s “knowledge of the English language” made him a good fit to be a clerk. Seger’s observations led him to believe that Boynton and the other students there were “trying to exterminate the Indians within themselves by leading industrious lives.” But Seger did not know that Boynton and some other boarding school returnees were actively involved in the Ghost Dance on the reservation. In fact, Boynton, as a member of a Presbyterian church, had joined a Comanche peyote society in 1884 and was an active peyotist for years to come. He experienced the Ghost Dance like many others; he once fell into a trance and talked with his dead brother. Boynton, like most Indian students, never met white expectations for education. Indian students gathered knowledge and learned how to read and write, but they never intended to “exterminate the Indians within themselves.” Educators’ rhetoric never became reality. While students negotiated their changing worlds in ways whites deemed “civilized,” many still envisioned their futures through the lens of Indigenous spirituality.

A Cover-up

By 1890, there were thousands of educated Natives living on western reservations, but officials were concerned that students of the US government’s most prominent Indian schools, Carlisle and Hampton in particular, might be using their education to help promote the Ghost Dance. A government inquiry was made, spurred by an American public concerned with the effectiveness of those tax-funded schools. In the midst of the Ghost Dance troubles in the fall of 1890, Congress was preparing to give attention to a new Indian appropriation bill, and the commissioner of Indian affairs, Thomas Morgan, hoped to determine where additional funds should be directed. There was a successful effort by educators and the US government to cover up the fact that some Ghost Dancers decided to use their education to broadcast Wovoka’s message to Native and white audiences across the continent. Some, like Casper Edson and Grant Left Hand, are known to have played critical roles in the dissemination of the movement. Smith Curley, a Southern Arapaho who was said to be a “Carlisle boy” (although no record of his attendance, or much of his life, exists), was called Sitting Bull’s (the Arapaho’s) “lieutenant.” Another former Carlisle student, Raymond Stewart (White Bull), a Rosebud Brulé, played the important role as Short Bull’s “private secretary” while Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and their followers were dancing in the Badlands in late November and December 1890. Although agents knew that educated Indians were among the Ghost Dancers, Indian educators, especially Pratt, tried to deny their former students’ involvement. Commissioner Morgan had called education “the medium through which the rising generation of Indians are to be brought into fraternal and harmonious relationship with their white fellow-citizens,” but it seemed that education was being used to generate dissent against white authority.

Lines of Communication Well Established

Because of the results of the so-called Messiah craze at Pine Ridge, whites continued to fear the dissension that Native communication might create on western reservations. In February 1893, the Associated Press reported troubles at Pine Ridge after the murder of three white men at a beef contractor’s camp on the reserve. The article suggested that further trouble might be imminent, perhaps even an outbreak, and former agent Valentine McGillycuddy told a reporter that talk of the Messiah was still common at Pine Ridge, as if those two developments were connected. But “the most significant” sign of trouble, according to the Associated Press, was “the fact that there has been communication between the various Indian tribes all during the past year of a secret and apparently important nature.” There was even a “line of communication well established and constantly used between Indian Territory and British America.” Because of this network, “the Indians all along the line understand that the other bands are kept posted.” Nothing violent came out of these reports, of course, but they demonstrate the suspicion whites held about any associations among the tribes of the West. Intertribal networks only grew in the 1890s, and the message of the Ghost Dance persisted through those connections, which worried Indian Affairs.

Wovoka

Wovoka, in the years following his revelation, received letters from distant Indian groups in “considerable numbers.” Ed A. Dyer, who operated a general store in Mason Valley, frequently translated and answered these letters. Dyer stated that many were from Grant Left Hand and postmarked Darlington, Oklahoma, home of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Agency. Left Hand seemed to be a “scribe for most of the Indian Nations” as he invariably sought invitations for others to see Wovoka. He also requested multiple sacred items from Wovoka, who made a habit of sending visiting delegates back with balls of red ochre, magpie feathers, rabbit furs, and other religious tokens. This led others to want balls of red ochre of their own, and Wovoka obliged, sending and usually selling the paint balls, magpie feathers, and items of his worn clothing, particularly shirts and hats. Just as Sears Roebuck was ramping up its mail order business, Wovoka was selling a great many “Texas Plaza Hats” for twenty dollars apiece and shipping them 1,500 miles through the United States Postal Service. The “Father,” as the letters addressed him, received all kinds of gifts of “Indian finery”: moccasins, vests, gloves, shirts, pants, and headdresses, particularly from Bannocks in Idaho. Wovoka, with the aid of Dyer, would reply with gratitude and most likely a word or two about his dance. However, Wovoka, for a time, responded to these letters with unusual secrecy. He would sneak into Dyer’s grocery store at night, have the letters read to him, and have Dyer prepare the proper packages in response. In the fall of 1892, Agent C. C. Warner at the Nevada Agency grew concerned with claims from the press that Wovoka was having “an evil influence” on the Indians who visited him. The Silver State reported that Wovoka had sent “emissaries” to Fort Hall, “urging them to inaugurate ghost dances and prepare for war this spring.” Wovoka knew the negative attention his activities were drawing.

The Ghost Dance continued to be practiced by believers, investigated by the uncertain, and disputed by critics. Belief persisted into the 1900s, even spreading farther into Canada along intertribal connections. Indian agents were given the task of policing the beliefs of colonized people, which was impossible. Not only did agents not understand Native American beliefs, they could do little to prevent Indians from thinking about and discussing those ideas collectively. What does this say about the relationship of power between the US government and the tribal nations of the West in the late nineteenth century? Despite colonization, it is clear that Native Americans were not powerless, in part because they were able to control their avenues of exchange. Strong connections were created among distant nations, even among once–bitter enemies, and those nations shared information that they thought could be mutually beneficial. If the designs of the US government’s reservation system had worked, groups like the Crows and Oglalas or the Kiowas and Southern Cheyennes would not have been able to communicate such things. But Native men and women remained mobile and exchanged ideas and information, giving them additional control over their own lives.

Intertribal Connections Continue

Intertribal connections continued to grow in the 1890s. Intertribal relationships continued to be nurtured through a common opposition to the colonial policies of the Office of Indian Affairs. The Ghost Dance, deemed to be anticolonial by many US authorities, continued to be a common cause among tribes years after it began. In 1894, two Shoshone leaders at Fort Hall, James Bollard and Joe Wheeler, wrote to Kicking Bear, the Lakota Ghost Dance proponent, to maintain a connection with the Lakotas who had recently visited their reservation and to urge their friends to continue to fight for their way of life. The Pine Ridge agent obtained the letter and forwarded it to the commissioner of Indian affairs because he “had no doubt” that “its real meaning” was to “revive the Ghost Dancing” at Pine Ridge. The leaders reminded the Lakotas what Shoshones had accomplished at Fort Hall and urged Lakotas to try to keep their “customs of worship and dances” from being abolished. James Bollard and Joe Wheeler, who cared about the experiences of other tribes, hoped Lakotas would challenge government authority and convince their agents that there was “no evil” in their religion. Whether the Shoshone leaders were promoting the Ghost Dance or not, it was a letter of activism with an optimistic certainty that relationships among tribes could benefit all Native peoples.