"Go and Tell All the Tribes"

By 1889, years of intertribal interaction, the exchanging of ideas, the adaptations to new concepts, and the understanding that others were facing the same circumstances had all eased intertribal relationships and strengthened the sense of commonality and solidarity among Native Americans. This set the stage for the Ghost Dance to sweep across the West in 1889 and 1890. The speed and scope of the religious movement’s spread was unprecedented in Native American history, demonstrating the effectiveness of the intertribal networks established in the 1870s and 1880s. The Ghost Dance introduced new religious ideas, but there was nothing novel about how those ideas were transmitted. Natives sent letters to inform those living on other reservations that a man in the far West could change their world. Some traveled to distant reserves to spread the news of his message and the instructions for his dance. In turn, Natives investigated the claims that had come through letters and visitors by organizing delegations tasked with finding the source of the dance. With the help of railroads, many reached Wovoka at the Walker River Reservation in western Nevada. Information was thus sought, gathered, and relayed across a network that spanned the continent. Tracing the spread of the Ghost Dance movement reveals the extent of these networks, which grew despite colonial efforts to contest the information that flowed through them. Native Americans across the continent were able to inform themselves and others about an important set of ideas that whites deemed anticolonial.

The Point of Origin

Wovoka (also known as Jack Wilson), the intellectual source of the Ghost Dance, was a Northern Paiute born sometime in the late 1850s or early 1860s and lived near the Walker River Reservation in western Nevada. Like his father, a medicine man named Numu-tibo’o (or Tavibo) who had been a follower of the 1870 Ghost Dance prophet Wodziwob, Wovoka had a reputation as a spiritual man. He became known for his control of the weather after successfully predicting (and producing) rainfall, and by 1887, he gained renown after reportedly performing several miracles. He occasionally experienced visions. Sometime in 1888 or early 1889, Wovoka was filled with an optimistic belief that God intended to renew the world, to “have it made over again.” Wovoka fell into a deep trance while cutting wood in the Pine Grove Mountains and “was taken up to the other world,” where he “saw God, with all the people who had died long ago.” It was the first of “many times” that God visited to tell him what to do. A non-Native anthropologist named James Mooney who interviewed Wovoka in 1892 reported that Wovoka believed God had told him to “go back and tell his people they must be good and love one another, have no quarreling, and live in peace with the whites; that they must work, and not lie or steal; that they must put away all the old practices that savored of war; that if they faithfully obeyed his instructions they would at last be reunited with their friends in this other world, where there would be no more death or sickness or old age.” God gave him instructions to perform a dance “at intervals, for five consecutive days each time, [and] they would secure this happiness to themselves and hasten the event.” It would be Wovoka’s mission to teach his people the dance, a modification of the Paiute Round Dance.

Early Spread

For many, the dance itself would become a way to communicate with God and with one’s dead relatives. News along local networks drove many surrounding Indians to attend the events, and Wovoka’s influence spread throughout the Great Basin. Some believed he was a new Messiah, although Wovoka would later deny his divinity to white investigators. Western Shoshones in Nevada and California, Utes in Utah and southwestern Colorado, Hualapais in Arizona, and Bannocks and Shoshones from the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho quickly learned about the dance. It seems that some Paiutes acted as emissaries for Wovoka. The swift circulation of Wovoka’s beliefs in the Intermountain region in early 1889 was reminiscent of the 1870 Ghost Dance movement, which had also originated around Walker River and become popular with groups throughout Nevada, Utah, eastern California, Idaho, and Oregon. The 1870 dance was contained to areas west of the Rockies, but Wovoka’s dance and the ideas attached to it were carried across the Continental Divide. Intermountain and Plains Indians were not well connected during the 1870 Ghost Dance, but by 1889, there were long-established relationships among Paiutes, Shoshones, Bannocks, Arapahos, Utes, Cheyennes, Lakotas, and others on both sides of the mountains.

Out of the Basin and Into the Plains

News of Wovoka had spread as far as Montana in a few months, bringing Plains Indians to Walker River as early as the summer of 1889. Most Plains Indians who visited Nevada to learn more about Wovoka traveled by rail through the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho. Because train travel was already an important component of intertribal visitation and communication, moving western Native men and women for years by 1889, news about the dance naturally flowed along the railroads. The Carson & Colorado Railroad passed right through Wovoka’s Walker River Reservation, and it was the line hundreds of Natives took to visit him.

The first report of Wovoka to make it out of the Great Basin and onto the Great Plains might have been carried in 1888 by a Northern Arapaho man who was returning home from Nevada, through the Fort Hall Reservation, to Wind River, the closest Plains reservation to Fort Hall. This origin point for the Ghost Dance in the Great Plains was not mentioned by James Mooney in his study, but he did report that a Fort Hall Bannock brought information to the Northern Arapahos and Shoshones at Wind River in “early” 1889. While visiting Paiutes, that unnamed Bannock was told to “go and tell all the tribes” that “the dead people were coming back.” According to Dick Washakie, the son of Wind River Shoshone chief Washakie, three Shoshones (named Pawasanga, Warasi, and Waagi) and a Bannock from Fort Hall traveled by rail to Wind River to spread the news and to instruct the people how to dance. “Next year, after having the dance,” they said, “the dead will come back, and all the white people will be gone.”

Sage and Yellow Calf at Wind River

Northern Arapahos and Shoshones at Wind River received firsthand knowledge from Wovoka, perhaps for the first time, in the “early spring” of 1889. Sage (Nakash) and Yellow Calf, both Arapahos, and several Shoshones including Täbinshi met Wovoka after a journey, largely by rail, to the Mason Valley in Nevada. The men, who came to believe that Wovoka was a new Messiah, brought home some of the original Paiute Ghost Dance songs. Sage believed that if they danced, a “Great Cloud will come and on it will be all the Indians who ever lived, mounted on their war ponies, and all the buffalo, elk, antelope and deer. This Great Cloud will cover over the white man and then everything will be as it always had been.” But Wovoka also instructed the men to be peaceful with white men, “not to be too hard” on them, because “he was going to send them to some other place.” After Sage and Yellow Calf returned home, they, along with Northern Shoshone headmen Munhavi and Tawunasia, became “promulgators” of the dance at Wind River. Sage eventually sent his knowledge of Wovoka’s movement, the dance, and its songs down to the Southern Arapahos in Indian Territory.

Into Indian Territory

Out of western Nevada, through Fort Hall, and onto the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming Territory, information about the Ghost Dance spilled onto the Great Plains in 1889. From Wind River, the already-established networks of written correspondence spread that vision faster and farther. Sometime in 1889, Southern Arapaho chief Left Hand (the younger) received letters about a “second Jesus” from Wind River. Other Indians at the reservation, including Southern Cheyennes, began receiving similar correspondence in the summer of 1889 from Northern Arapahos at Wind River and from Northern Cheyennes at the Tongue River Reservation in Montana. Interested in the reports from his northern contacts, Left Hand and other headmen chose two men to travel and investigate the reports. In the meantime, Southern Arapahos and
Southern Cheyennes continued the investigation by sending out letters of inquiry. One of the interpreters at the agency, possibly Paul Boynton (Red Feather), a former student of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, wrote to the Northern Cheyennes at the Tongue River Agency in Montana. He wrote in part (in English), “Cheyennes and Arapahoes here are greatly excited about a Christ coming among some of the Northern tribes of Indians. The Arapahoes have been getting letters from Northern Arapahoes in regard to it. My friends here wish me to ask what there is about it, and what do you know about it?” The interpreter at Tongue River replied in part (also in English), “The Indians say Christ is in the mountains, and that he wants all the Indians to come to him.”

Investigating Reports

Throughout 1889 and 1890, the dance affected not only the Kiowas, the Southern and Northern divisions of the Cheyennes and Arapahos, and the Paiutes who inaugurated the first dances but also members of more than thirty other tribes including Shoshones, Bannocks, Utes, Mojaves, Hualapais, most bands of the Lakotas, Assiniboines, Gros Ventres, Arikaras, Mandans, Caddos, Wichitas, Comanches, Apaches, Poncas, Pawnees, Otoes, Osages, Kickapoos, and others. Many went to great lengths to find and evaluate evidence about the Ghost Dance movement, which was an important part of the Ghost Dance’s dissemination. Once news arrived about Wovoka, Natives compiled information through established networks, discerned the legitimacy of reports, and spent money on travel for fact-finding delegations. While incomplete and inaccurate information was undoubtedly transmitted from tribe to tribe, Natives received tangible information about Wovoka from the beginning, and most of the Natives who traveled to Nevada had enough information to be able to find him in the sparsely settled, far-off Mason Valley within days of leaving their reservations.

It is important to understand that some Natives openly criticized the movement, and most who learned about Wovoka never danced. Consequently, the story of the Ghost Dance should not be told simply as peoples’ acceptance of a new set of religious beliefs but rather as a complex truth-finding process reliant on communication among diverse nations.

Into the Dakotas: “A New Religion Came by Letters”

In 1889, Oglala Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes at the Pine Ridge Reservation began to receive messages about Wovoka in letters from Shoshones and Arapahos at Wind River. Other letters came from their recently established connection with Utes in Utah and other “distant agencies,” which relayed information “about the advent” of a “new Messiah.” In her history of her people, Josephine Waggoner wrote that “a new religion came by letters” to the Oglalas at Pine Ridge, who passed it along to other Lakotas. Waggoner, a then nineteen-year-old former Hampton student at Standing Rock, remembered reading “many letters” coming from both Pine Ridge and Walker River regarding the Ghost Dance. She translated correspondence for Sitting Bull (the Hunkpapa leader), among others, including letters about the new movement. William Selwyn, a literate Yankton employed at the time as postmaster at Pine Ridge, also read some of the letters for the Oglalas and Cheyennes there. According to Selwyn, there had been “some talk . . . about the New Messiah” in the fall of 1888 during visits from groups of Utes, Shoshones, Crows, and Arapahos, but the influx of letters from the western tribes in 1889 created “much attention” and convinced the Lakotas at Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River to form a delegation to Walker River to investigate the claims.

The Intertribal Gathering at Walker River

The huge gathering at the Walker River Reservation in February and March 1890 was the product of all the information about the movement that was circulating across the West. Members of at least 39 tribal nations met at a place designated by Wovoka. At the height of the gathering, the Indian police at Walker River estimated 1,600 people were there to wait for Wovoka’s next appearance. The next day, Porcupine, a 41-year-old of both Lakota and Cheyenne descent who “had heard Christ had been crucified, noticed scars on Wovoka’s wrist and face, leading him to believe that Wovoka was the man they had heard about. The next morning, Wovoka assembled the people and sat down. Porcupine recounted how Wovoka told them that violence was the wrong approach, that it would be unnecessary because “the earth was to be all good hereafter, and we must all be friends with one another” and “that the whites and the Indians were to be all one people.” Porcupine said that Wovoka prophesized that in the fall of 1890, “the youth of all good people would be renewed, so that nobody would be more than 40 years old, and that if they behaved themselves well after this the youth of everyone would be renewed in the spring.” If “we were all good,” Porcupine recalled, Wovoka “would send people among us who could heal all our wounds and sickness by mere touch, and that we would live forever.”

Interpreting the Movement

The hundreds that gathered at Walker River in March 1890 listened to Wovoka for five days straight. On the fifth day, Short Bull, a Lakota from the Rosebud Reservation, shook hands with Wovoka, who only told him that “soon there would be no world, after the end of the world those who went to church would see all their relatives that had died. This will be the same all over the world even across the big waters.” Notably absent in the common current of the delegates’ interpretation were any violent ideas. Wovoka always emphasized peace and even taught that some features of the white world were fruitful. He told the people to “educate your children, send them to schools.” He relayed to the Lakotas, “Have your people work the ground . . . get farms.” Importantly, it may have been typical for a Paiute to have these opinions in the years before the Ghost Dance. According to a newspaper reporting on a Paiute Round Dance gathering in 1888, Paiute elders advised the young “to become farmers; to be truthful, honest, and industrious and sober.”

The Ghost Dance movement may have originated in the mind of one man, but his ideas were not canonized. There was no Ghost Dance guidebook. Wovoka presented his ideas within his own cultural perspective. There was no unifying “Native religion” that each tribe understood in the same way.

As the movement spread from group to group, individual to individual, it could become what the adoptee wanted it to become. It is difficult, then, to generalize how the movement was received by so many different people from so many different cultures. Fundamentally, when relating all the firsthand interpretations presented in this study and others, there is no question that the Ghost Dance was rooted in the belief that you could, with the help of God or a Great Spirit, make the world better by bettering yourself and your people. Southern Arapaho headman Row of Lodges described this optimistic “religion” as asking “God to make our hearts so that they can be good,” asking “Him to make our brains good so that we can think good thoughts,” asking “Him to make our breath good, so that we can breathe good words.” If Indians were “friends with all people, no matter what race, so that good will be done by the Indians,” this would “cause others to think of the Father who made all men.”

For many believers, Wovoka’s promises would also decolonize Native life, meaning that the world would be remade in a way that would restore Indigenous autonomy. Although whites might not disappear from the world, colonial control would end, which was not an idea that the US government wanted on reservations.

Opposition from US Government Agents Begins

The first Lakota delegation did send letters home during their journey to keep their people informed. Written in the Dakota language, they asked “all the people to stand firm, to keep praying and dancing, for the Messiah would soon be here.”

On their return home from Walker River, the Lakota delegates did not receive a warm welcome from their agents, but word of their experiences spread. Leaders at Pine Ridge scheduled a council “to organize the new religion,” but the agent at Pine Ridge instructed the Indian police to disperse the growing crowd. Gallagher was concerned that the gathering would disrupt the early-spring farmwork. The “promoters of the enterprise” (Good Thunder and two others) were “given a good lecture upon the mischief they were doing” and thrown in the guardhouse for two days. Gallagher then met the leaders in council and explained “the silliness of what had been told them.” He also put a clamp on visiting, a strategy that would be attempted by other agents in the months to come.

Links of Correspondence

Written exchanges of news between relatives and friends, a common mode of communication by 1890, enabled the remarkable spread of the Ghost Dance movement. This map visualizes the known links of correspondence between reservations regarding the Ghost Dance (demonstrated by surviving documentation). These links represent one or more specific “Ghost Dance letters” that were sent during the peak years of the movement, 1889 through 1894. Perhaps the only connection represented on the map that did not exist before the Ghost Dance is the link of correspondence between the Walker River and Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservations. That new link would persist after 1894.

It became clear to US officials that Native Americans had command of lines of communication that spanned the continent, which was a dangerous prospect for the government. In June 1890, a brigadier general noticed that knowledge of the Messiah “had quite a wide diffusion and excited much interest amongst a number of tribes.” Even those tribes that never danced, like the Pottawatomies, learned about it through the mail. The Pottawatomies received a letter “from the Sioux to adopt their dance.” News of the dance reached as far as Hampton, Virginia, by summer of 1890. By November 1890, Native-authored letters about the dance had crossed the Atlantic. Several Native men working in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Europe received letters from their friends at Pine Ridge that spoke of the movement.