Ghost Dance Religion and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890

Introduction: The Ghost Dance and Its Origins

James Mooney writes in The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 that the essential part of the teaching of the Ghost Dance is the doctrine that the world is old and worn and the time is near for its renewal (Mooney 661). The Ghost Dance was an American Indian religious revivalist movement that spread through the Plains Indians and other ethnic groups during the 1890s and, due to a culmination of events, is forever linked to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 (Ghost pp).

In January 1889, Wovoka, a Paiute Indian, had a vision of renewal and restoration of the Indian way of life, in which Native peoples would be reunited with loved ones in the ghost world, the buffalo would roam freely again, and white people would be obliterated from the earth (Ghost pp). In other words, the Indian world would return to the way it was before the Europeans arrived. Wovoka's vision became the nucleus for the Ghost Dance and gained great popularity throughout the tribes, primarily due to its message of hope and justice (Ghost pp). Believing the dance would eliminate whites from this world and bring their ancestors back from the spirit world, Native American tribes across the Plains engaged in frenzied, trance-inducing dancing (Ghost pp). The Ghost Dance movement spread quickly, creating unity among various ethnic groups and causing fear among white settlers (Ghost pp).

The intense and immediate popularity of the Ghost Dance movement was essentially a desperate reaction to the total defeat of the Plains Indians by the United States Army and the removal of the tribes to confined reservations where they were dependent on the handouts of corrupt Indian agents appointed by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (Ghost pp). Moreover, their children were taken away to be educated as Christians in federal boarding schools, the bison herds that had once sustained their way of life had been hunted by white settlers to near extinction, and their millions of acres of land were now the property of the United States of America (Ghost pp). The Dawes Act of 1887 divided the remaining land of the Plains Indians into individual allotments in an effort to force them to become farmers rather than remain part of their tribal communities (Ghost pp). The Plains Indians' culture was being systematically destroyed, and there seemed little hope for the future of their peoples; thus the Ghost Dance offered a solution to desperate conditions and suffering (Ghost pp). The idea that the Great Spirit would come to their rescue and save them from the whites aligned with their cultural and spiritual beliefs (Ghost pp).

The Lakota, or Sioux, once a powerful and free-roaming tribe, lived in some of the most desperate conditions on their reservations in North and South Dakota, where they had been reduced essentially to prisoners of the United States (Ghost pp). In October 1890, the Ghost Dance movement reached Standing Rock, where Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa Sioux lived alongside the Oglala Sioux. Although Sitting Bull allowed his people to take part, he himself did not participate (Ghost pp). Driven by fear among white settlers, an Indian agent decided to arrest Sitting Bull, claiming he encouraged the Ghost Dance. The chief was killed by Red Tomahawk, a Sioux serving as a reservation police officer for the United States government (Ghost pp). Sitting Bull's death — officially attributed to resistance during arrest — caused Sioux tribes on other reservations involved in the movement to flee (Ghost pp). This panic led to the tragic events of December 29, 1890, when members of Chief Big Foot's Miniconjou Sioux and Sitting Bull's remaining Hunkpapa, attempting to reach the safety of Red Cloud's Pine Ridge Reservation, were killed at the Battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by U.S. 7th Cavalry soldiers (Ghost pp). Over two hundred Sioux were killed, including women and children, and the massacre was the last major military conflict between whites and Native Americans (American pp). The Ghost Dance represented to white Americans the backwardness and continuing threat posed by the Plains Indians, and it simply intensified their desire to destroy Plains Indian culture forever (Ghost pp).

Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is perhaps one of the most thorough accounts of the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre. Brown recounts in detail the events leading up to the birth of the Ghost Dance and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

A History of Broken Treaties and Forced Removal

There is a history spanning decades and generations of treaties and negotiations between Native American Indian tribes and the United States government. When Andrew Jackson took office as President in 1829, thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles were killed; yet these southern Indians, still numerous, clung to their tribal lands, which had been assigned to them by white men's treaties (Brown 5). Jackson recommended to Congress that all of these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi, to be guaranteed to the tribes as long as they occupied it (Brown 5). This measure was simply another in a long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians; however, Jackson convinced them that this was a promise that would never be broken, and on May 28, 1830, Jackson's recommendations became law (Brown 5).

On June 30, 1834, Congress passed "An Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes and to Preserve Peace on the Frontiers," which stated that all land west of the Mississippi — but not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana or the Territory of Arkansas — would be Indian country, and no white persons would be permitted to trade there without a license (Brown 6). Moreover, no white traders of bad character would be allowed to live in Indian country, no white persons would be permitted to settle there, and those who tried would be removed by military force (Brown 6). Before these laws could even be put into effect, a new wave of white settlers swept westward and formed the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa, making it necessary for policymakers in Washington to shift the "permanent Indian frontier" from the Mississippi River to the 95th meridian — a line running from the Minnesota-Canada border southward through Minnesota and Iowa, and then along the western borders of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana to Galveston Bay, Texas (Brown 6). To enforce the boundaries of the 95th meridian and prevent unauthorized white men from crossing it, soldiers were garrisoned in a series of military posts running southward from Fort Snelling on the Mississippi River to forts Atkinson and Leavenworth on the Missouri, forts Gibson and Smith on the Arkansas, Fort Towson on the Red River, and Fort Jesup in Louisiana (Brown 6).

During the following decade, the discovery of gold in the Appalachians led to the immediate removal of the Cherokees, whose great nation had survived more than a hundred years of the white man's wars, diseases, and whiskey (Brown 7). In the autumn of 1838, General Winfield Scott's soldiers rounded them up, concentrated them in camps, and started them westward to Indian Territory — a march known as the "Trail of Tears" (Brown 7). The Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles also gave up their homelands in the South, and in the North, survivors of the Shawnees, Miamis, Ottawas, Hurons, Delawares, and other once-mighty tribes walked or traveled by horseback and wagon beyond the Mississippi, carrying only a few personal belongings (Brown 8).

When the war with Mexico ended in 1847, the United States took possession of a vast expanse of territory spanning from Texas to California, all of it west of the permanent Indian frontier (Brown 8). A year later, gold was discovered in California, and within months thousands of whites were crossing Indian Territory, leading Washington to invoke Manifest Destiny in order to justify the breaches (Brown 8). Under this doctrine, Europeans and their descendants were ordained by destiny to rule all of America — including the Indians, along with their lands, forests, and mineral wealth (Brown 8). Less than twenty-five years after Jackson's trade act, white settlers had broken through both the north and south flanks of the 95th meridian line, and advance elements of white miners and traders had penetrated the center following the discovery of gold in the mountains of Colorado (Brown 9).

By 1860 there were approximately 300,000 Indians in the United States and its territories, most of them living west of the Mississippi, and their numbers had been reduced by more than two-thirds since the arrival of Europeans (Brown 9). The most numerous and powerful western tribe was the Sioux, separated into several subdivisions, including the Santee Sioux who lived in the woodlands of Minnesota and had been forced to retreat due to advancing white settlements (Brown 9). Farther west on the Great Plains were the Teton Sioux, among them the Oglalas, whose chief was Red Cloud, and among the Hunkpapas was Sitting Bull, who together with Crazy Horse of the Oglalas would make history in 1876 at Little Big Horn (Brown 10).

The Fort Laramie Treaty and the Collapse of Sioux Sovereignty

After years of broken promises, conflicts, and massacres, came the Treaty of Fort Laramie, said to be the most important document in the history of Indian-white relations on the Great Plains (Marrin 94). The treaty set aside a Great Sioux Reservation encompassing all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills, and barred all whites except government officials from the reservation and from a vast "unceded" territory lying between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains (Marrin 94). Under the treaty, these lands belonged to the Lakota "forever" unless three-quarters of the tribes' men agreed to part with them, and those who settled there would receive food and clothing while learning to support themselves by farming (Marrin 95). Those who did not wish to settle could hunt in the unceded territory while the buffalo lasted, and the government agreed to close and abandon its forts (Marrin 95). What the white interpreters did not explain was that the treaty did not close the gold mines, meaning prospectors would keep coming, and whites planned to exterminate the bison herds (Marrin 95).

By 1869, most Lakota bands — some 17,000 people — had moved onto the Great Sioux Reservation. In 1870, Red Cloud visited Washington, D.C., and returned a changed man (Marrin 95). After seeing the throngs of people in a single city, he realized that nothing could stop the whites from advancing into Indian lands (Marrin 96). Once a strong and mighty people, the Native tribes were now melting like snow on a hillside, while the whites were growing like spring grass (Marrin 96).

Sitting Bull did not sign the treaty, and Crazy Horse did not follow Red Cloud onto the reservation (Marrin 96). When crews began working to link the Central Pacific Railroad from the West and the Union Pacific Railroad from the East, more conflicts between the tribes and whites ensued (Marrin 102). The Fort Laramie Treaty had promised to end all war between the Indians and whites; however, over the next twenty years, the contents of some sixteen articles of that treaty were modified by Congress to such an extent that it was, in effect, an entirely different document (Brown 146). The Treaty of 1868 had promised that whites would be forbidden not only from settling or occupying any portion of the territory, but even from passing through without the consent of the Indians (Brown 273). Red Cloud had signed under the condition that Fort Laramie serve as the Teton Sioux trading post; however, the fort was placed on the Missouri side, leaving Red Cloud and his people forbidden to enter (Brown 177).

By 1890, the white population of the United States had reached 62,622,250, and Idaho and Wyoming had become the forty-third and forty-fourth states of the Union (Brown 415). Sitting Bull spent approximately four years in exile in Canada and, unable to convince the Canadians to grant his people a reservation and following a brutal winter, he and his followers made their way south, arriving at Fort Buford in 1881 (Brown 420). By 1889, the United States government had managed to break up the Great Sioux Reservation and obtain even more land through rather devious maneuvers (Brown 428).

The Ghost Dance Reaches the Sioux and the Death of Sitting Bull

About a year after the breaking up of the Great Sioux Reservation, in October 1890, Kicking Bear, a Minneconjou from the Cheyenne River Agency, came to visit Sitting Bull. He brought news of the Paiute Messiah, Wovoka, who had founded the religion of the Ghost Dance (Brown 431). Kicking Bear told how a voice had directed him to go forth and meet the ghosts of Indians who were to return and inhabit the earth, and so he traveled to the camp of the Paiutes (Brown 432). There he had met the Messiah — the Christ, who had appeared as an Indian — and was shown how to dance the Dance of the Ghosts. The Messiah promised to return again, restoring the earth to the way it was before the white man came (Brown 432). The Indians who danced the Ghost Dance would be taken up into the air and suspended there while a wave of new earth passed beneath them, then set down among the ghosts of their ancestors on the new earth, where only Indians would live (Brown 434). Sitting Bull had no objections to his people dancing the Ghost Dance; however, he had heard that agents at some reservations were bringing soldiers to stop the ceremonies and did not want soldiers shooting at his people (Brown 434). Kicking Bear said that if the Indians wore the sacred garments of the Messiah — Ghost Shirts painted with magic symbols — then no harm could come to them, and even bullets could not penetrate a Ghost Shirt (Brown 434).

Although skeptical of Kicking Bear's accounts, Sitting Bull invited him to teach his band of people at Standing Rock the Dance of the Ghosts (Brown 434). That autumn the Ghost Dance spread like a prairie fire across the reservations, as did agitation among the Indian Bureau inspectors and Army officers, who received official word to stop the Ghost Dancing (Brown 435). A week after Kicking Bear came to Standing Rock, he was led off the reservation by James McLaughlin, head of the Bureau at Standing Rock (Brown 435). What McLaughlin and others failed to recognize was that the Ghost Dance was entirely Christian in its framework, and except for a difference in rituals, its tenets were the same as those of any Christian church (Brown 435). McLaughlin pleaded with Sitting Bull to intervene and order his people to stop dancing, but Sitting Bull refused. The following day, McLaughlin notified the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that the real power behind the "pernicious system of religion" at Standing Rock was Sitting Bull, and recommended that the chief be arrested and confined to a military prison. Officials, however, decided that such action would create more trouble than it would prevent (Brown 435).

By mid-November, Ghost Dancing was so prevalent on the Sioux reservations that almost all other activities came to a halt: there were no pupils in the schoolhouses, trading stores were empty, and no work was being done on the farms (Brown 436). Agents sent word to Washington that the Indians were dancing in the snow and were out of control, and that something had to be done at once (Brown 436). Short Bull led some three thousand followers down the White River into the Badlands, and at Cheyenne River, Big Foot's band grew to six hundred, mostly widows. When the agent tried to interfere, Big Foot led the dancers off the reservation to a sacred place on Deep Creek (Brown 436). During the last week of November, when Washington demanded a list of those responsible for the Ghost Dance, Sitting Bull's name was among those cited as instigators (Brown 436).

On December 15, 1890, forty-three Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull's cabin and demanded his arrest (Brown 437). Sitting Bull dressed and was escorted outside, where a small band of dancers had gathered, among them Catch-the-Bear. When Sitting Bull held back, policemen Bull Head and Red Tomahawk were forced to push him toward his horse. Catch-the-Bear then fired a rifle hidden under his blanket, wounding Bull Head in the side; when Bull Head attempted to shoot his assailant, the bullet struck Sitting Bull instead (Brown 438). Almost simultaneously, Red Tomahawk shot Sitting Bull through the head, killing him (Brown 438).

The Sioux so believed in the power of the Ghost Dance religion that even in their grief and anger over Sitting Bull's assassination, they did not retaliate (Brown 439). However, hundreds of the now leaderless Hunkpapas fled from Standing Rock to seek refuge in one of the Ghost Dance camps or with the last of the great chiefs, Red Cloud, at Pine Ridge (Brown 439). On December 17th, about a hundred of these fleeing Hunkpapas reached Big Foot's Minneconjou camp near Cherry Creek. That same day the War Department issued orders for the arrest and imprisonment of Big Foot (Brown 440). Upon hearing of Sitting Bull's death, Big Foot had started moving his people toward Pine Ridge, hoping that Red Cloud could protect them. En route he fell ill with pneumonia, and when hemorrhaging began, he had to travel in a wagon (Brown 440).