by Nancy Moses
9. Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 123.
10. Andrew Maykuth, “FBI Says Secretary Took Buck Typescript,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 28, 2007.
11. Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 148.
12. Dwight Garner “The Meteoric Rise, and Decline, of a Talented Young Writer,” The New York Times, June 8, 2010.
13. Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 357.
14. Patrick Lester, “Missing Pearl S. Buck Writings Turn Up Four Decades Later,” The Morning Call, June 28, 2008, http://articles.mcall.com/2007-06-28/news/3723754_1_manuscript-bucks-county-buck-s-son.
Chapter 3
Ghost Dancing at Wounded Knee
He lay dying in the snow in a small, desolate valley next to a creek called Wounded Knee.[1] Along with other Lakota braves, women, and children, he had followed his chief, Big Foot, 220 miles south from his home on the Cheyenne River Reservation to this lonely spot in South Dakota. After years of resistance, years of hunger bordering on starvation then going beyond, Big Foot and his followers had agreed to accept their fate and move onto the nearby reservation at Pine Ridge. Surrounded by the enemy, they knew they had one last layer of protection from the soldiers’ bullets: the Ghost Dance, which they had danced for days on end, and the ceremonial Ghost Dance Shirts they wore.
The Ghost Dance Shirt still covered the brave. But its magic power had failed to stop the two bullets that ripped through the sacred muslin and penetrated his now-dying body.
Two days of blizzards sealed the brave’s fate. On the third, a soldier or officer or Indian scout carefully pulled the garment off of him before throwing his frozen corpse into a wooden wagon, lugging it up a small hill, and dumping the naked body, together with those of some two hundred other men, women, and children, into a shallow grave.
Everything about Wounded Knee, this bloody massacre of the Lakota Sioux by the Seventh Cavalry of the U.S. Army, will break your heart. It broke the Lakotas’ spirit and drove them to a life of degradation on the reservation. It is one of our nation’s most searing, if little known, tragedies.
I didn’t know all this when I flew to South Dakota to see the Ghost Dance Shirt. I had found the story of the shirt[2] in Jeannette Greenberg’s The Return of Cultural Treasures. The garment had traveled from Wounded Knee to Europe, then to Scotland before returning more than one hundred years later to the South Dakota Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre, the capitol of South Dakota. I didn’t realize it symbolized a wound too deep to ever fully heal.
A Ghost Dance Shirt? What was “ghostly” about it, and how did the dance fit in? Why did it travel to Wounded Knee, Scotland, and back? And what was the story behind Wounded Knee? I remembered it as the place that was occupied by members of the radical American Indian Movement in 1973, but had a much fuzzier notion of the original significance that made them choose this spot. I decided to go to South Dakota and see the Ghost Dance Shirt for myself.
The South Dakota Cultural Heritage Center, with its museum and archival wings, is a sleek modern building carved into a hillside, both a tribute to the pioneer sod houses and a cost-efficient measure to achieve the consistent temperature and humidity that archival and museum collections need. A larger-than-life size sculpture of a pioneer woman stands at the entrance. On the day I visited, its bronze body was burning to the touch in the blazing July sun. It was ninety-six degrees, and South Dakota was in the middle of a wicked drought.
Dan Brosz, the museum’s curator of collections, met me in the center’s sun-filled lobby. He is a fit and friendly native South Dakotan who loves his state’s endless horizons and even its frigid winters, when the temperature routinely drops to twenty degrees below zero. Brosz first came to Pierre as a college intern at the South Dakota State Museum and later returned as its curator after securing a graduate degree.
“People from other places say people in South Dakota are so friendly,” he explained. “Friendliness is ingrained in us; we are so isolated that when you see someone, you spend the whole day talking. South Dakota is just one big town that happens to be seventy-five thousand square miles big.” Brosz and I had corresponded before my trip, and he had sent me his paper on the Ghost Dance Shirt.[3] “It’s my favorite artifact,” he wrote. He had prepared for my visit by assembling a pile of file folders fat with newspaper clippings, photographs, documents, and reports. I had prepared by reading the book he recommended, James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee,[4] a detailed account by a Smithsonian Institution ethnographer of his travels through South Dakota and other parts of the West in 1890 and 1891. For the next couple of days, Dan Brosz and James Mooney served as my guides.
I followed Brosz into the museum’s exhibit hall, where we stopped to admire the carved wooden horse in flight, red wounds on its side, which stands as the Center’s logo. We walked past dioramas of buffalo hunting and cattle rustling, a loaded gold mining car, a 1927 Dodge Coupe, displays of Native American artifacts, farm equipment—the flotsam and jetsam of South Dakota life—to a small, dimly lit gallery at the end. It was dedicated to the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the Ghost Dance Shirt from Scotland hung alone in an unlit glass case near the entrance. Across the room was another glass case housing another Ghost Dance Shirt, this one with the label “Picked up by Eisenberg, a private, confiscated by an officer,” along with a pair of beaded moccasins, a Winchester Model 1876 rifle, and a shell from a Hotchkiss rifled cannon that looks like a bullet shell on steroids. All of these had been taken from the killing field at Wounded Knee, and between the two cases were text and illustrations that told the story. “We keep the gallery dark to allow the public to reflect on the situation the Indians dealt with,” said Brosz. “It’s a contemplative space.”
We stood in front of the unlit case. I looked at Brosz. I looked at the Ghost Dance Shirt. It was big enough to fit a six-foot frame, made of muslin or unbleached cotton with a red-painted V-neck and long sleeves. Short red fringe surrounded the V-neck, top of the biceps, inside seam of the arms, cuffs, and straight-cut bottom. An eagle feather rested in the center of the V-neck, and another was attached to the inseam of the elbow area. There were two small round bullet holes in the shirt, one on a sleeve and the other on the back.
“The bullet that pierced the back of the shirt would have entered the brave’s body and could have killed him,”[5] he said, pointing to the hole. “But the brave might have been hit over the head by one of the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, or lanced and left to die. Artifacts can help us answer many questions, but also to ask so many more.”
I tried to imagine life in South Dakota in 1890s. It must have been precarious, very hard. I wondered why anyone would take the time to save such a simple, unadorned garment made of the cheapest possible material.
Brosz looked at me quizzically, a South Dakotan’s polite way of saying you’re asking the obvious. “Indian materials were very desirable, even in the 1890s. Shopkeepers would trade goods for them. Also there is a lot of lore around the Ghost Dance.”
It was 1890, and the great Lakota were in trouble. For one hundred years or more, they had been one of the largest and fiercest Native American tribes of them all, the vast buffalo herds supplying them with food, shelter, and clothing. The Lakota, called Sioux by the white men, are members of one of two main tribes: the Santee, made up of Yankton-Yanktonai and Teton, and the Dakota, both Nakota and Lakota. The most famous Lakota was Sitting Bull, the great spiritual and political leader who was widely credited as the architect of the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, when his tribe defeated the U.S. Seventh Cavalry and killed General George Custer. But even this decisive victory could not halt the press of the white man’s progress. By 1890, most Lakota were virtual prisoners on reservations where the barren land could not support crops, the cattle died of disease, and the women and children starved and froze in the harsh Dakota winters. A small remnant remained outside the reservations, those too proud to surrender.
These were wretched times not only for the Lakota but also for all Native people, who had been mo
ved and removed again from their ancient lands to make way for the white man. Out of these times emerged a spiritual leader named Wovoka, a Paiute Indian, who announced a revelation. During an eclipse of the sun, Wovoka fell into a fever and found himself transported to another world, where he saw God, the Great Spirit, and all of the people who had died long ago, engaged in their old-time sports, happy and forever young. God, in this revelation, told Wokova that if the Indians worked hard, lived morally, and kept peace with the white man, they would attain eternal happiness. God also gave Wovoka a dance to bring back to his people, saying that if the Indians performed this “ghost dance,” they would awaken the dead, and the white men would disappear forever.
“The times were ripe for a messianic movement,” explained Dan Brosz. “People were poor and desperate, and desperation makes you open to ideas that might alleviate it.” Indians are spiritual people, so they imagined a spiritual salvation to their problems. The Ghost Dance religion was so compelling that almost thirty tribes became believers, making it the first-ever Pan-Indian religious movement.
How could anyone believe such a bizarre myth? I wondered. Then I remembered my own tribe, the Jewish people, also a spiritual people with a history 5,800 years long, much of it filled with great suffering. When life became nearly unbearable, a Jewish prophet would appear as if out of nowhere with the promise of salvation.
When the Lakota heard about Wovoka and his prophesy, they, like many other tribes, sent representatives to investigate. Short Bull and Kicking Bear met Wovoka and became his strongest Lakota prophets, carrying the Ghost Dance back to their people and teaching the ceremony.
James Mooney’s book[6] brings us a white woman’s eyewitness account of the Ghost Dance. She described three hundred tents arranged in a circle with a large pine tree in the center covered with strips of cloth, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws—offerings to the Great Spirit. As the ceremony began, a high priest or master of ceremonies called out instructions. Three hundred to four hundred dancers formed a circle around the tree, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person next in line. As they circled the tree, the dancers cried out the names of their dead and called to the Great Spirit to allow them to see and hear their departed family and friends. Many danced to exhaustion in order to experience visions of the dead and of a Promised Land filled with game. For the ceremony, dancers replaced their usual, often Western clothing with special garments, Ghost Dance Shirts, made of buckskin or muslin, decorated with sacred emblems and hand-sewn by women.
All the tribes wore Ghost Dance clothing for the ceremony, but for the Lakota the garments took on special powers. The Lakota believed they made their wearers invincible, protecting them against the white man’s bullets and other weapons.
As the Ghost Dance movement swept through Indian country, white settlers trembled in fear and sought help from Washington. Soon the largest deployment of soldiers since the Civil War—almost half of the entire U.S. Army—moved west, charged with ending the ceremonies and moving the Indians onto reservations. The Seventh Cavalry was assigned to the Lakota Sioux, Sitting Bull’s tribe, the same tribe that had defeated them fourteen years earlier at Little Big Horn.
On December 5, 1890, Indian scouts hired by the U.S. Cavalry assassinated Chief Sitting Bull at his home in the Dakota Territory. Following the murder, there was a brief skirmish in the Black Hills close by, and ultimately Chief Big Foot of Cheyenne River agreed to bring his people to the Pine Ridge reservation to find safe haven with the other Sioux who were settled there. They packed their things, traveled to Wounded Knee Creek, and settled in the valley before making the final sixteen-mile trek to Pine Ridge. Many were women, children, and the elderly; all were starving. The Seventh Cavalry took up positions on the hills that surrounded the valley: 470 armed soldiers and officers and four Hotchkiss cannons.
Shortly after 8 o’clock on the morning of December 28, 1890, the soldiers ordered the braves to come out from the tipis and deliver their arms, which meant the end of hunting for the game their families so desperately needed. When the braves resisted, the soldiers were ordered to search the tipis; they overturned beds, smashed furniture, and drove out the protesting women and children. In this melee, Yellow Bird, a medicine man, walked through the campsite urging the warriors to fight back and reminding them they were wearing the magic Ghost Dance Shirts that would render the soldiers powerless, their bullets useless. Suddenly Yellow Bird threw a handful of dust into the air, and a young Indian named Black Fox drew his rifle and fired. The soldiers instantly replied with a volley of bullets that killed nearly half of the braves. At the first volley, the Hotchkiss guns opened fire, mowing down everything alive. Within a few minutes, some three hundred Indian men, women, and children lay dead, along with thirty soldiers killed by their own.
I imagine the valley strewn with bodies, the trashed tipis, the overturned cooking pots, the tiny dead infants still wearing their delicate embroidered slippers, the women racing into the empty creek bed and up the tree-lined hillsides as the soldiers hunted them down like dogs. The bodies lay where they fell for two days while fierce winds whipped snow across the plains, so much snow that no one could reach them. When the soldiers and their scouts finally returned, they gathered up the dead Indians, lifted the stiff, frozen corpses into a wagon, dragged the wagons up the tallest hill, and threw the bodies into a long, shallow mass grave. Many of the Indians were naked, stripped by their murderers of their ceremonial Ghost Dance Shirts—the garments they believed had magic protective powers.
“This would have happened after rigor mortis set in—and, as you can see, this shirt wasn’t even cut,” said Dan Brosz pointing to the Ghost Dance Shirt. “It must have been removed from a frozen body carefully, without cutting the garment.”
At least two photographs survive from that day. In one, a horse-drawn cart is filled with frozen corpses, their legs and arms askew. The other shows two men standing in a shallow ditch stacking bodies of Indian men, women, and children as a phalanx of white men looks on.
So, the story of the Ghost Dance Shirt was unfolding. A Lakota woman from the Cheyenne River Reservation made it for a brave, and he wore it as he danced his final Ghost Dance and later on the day he died at Wounded Knee. Now, I wondered, how did it get to the Kelvingrove Museum in Scotland?
I found the answer in one of the files Brosz pulled for me, in a brochure from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Scotland’s largest museum, which is owned by the city of Glasgow. The brochure featured a group photograph taken on the Pine Ridge reservation two weeks after the massacre with a couple of Lakota, the internationally renowned showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and George C. Crager, a white man who often served as an Indian interpreter. Cody had come to Wounded Knee to recruit authentic Indians for his Wild West show. Crager had come as the special correspondent for The New York World—the massacre was big news. While there, Crager acquired the Ghost Dance Shirt and a number of other items. He also secured a position as the interpreter for Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and other Lakota who joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
That struck me as odd. Why would Indians whose friends and families had been massacred by the white man want to sign up for a job in a white man’s show?
“The government gave the Lakota a choice: join the show or go to jail,” Brosz said. “Buffalo Bill needed real Indians to chase the stagecoaches, so he got the government to help him out.” How ironic, I thought. The braves who brought the Ghost Dance to their people and survived the final resistance ended up performing in a Western-themed extravaganza.
In the summer of 1891, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show toured Europe, then settled into winter quarters in Glasgow, Scotland. That December, George Crager wrote a letter to the curator of the Kelvingrove Museum:
Dear Sirs, Hearing that you are empowered to purchase relics for your museum I would respectfully inform you that I have a collection of Indian Relics (North American) which I will dispose of before we set sail for America.
Should You wish any of these after Inspection I would be pleased to have you call at my room at the East End Exhibition Building.
Under his signature Crager wrote: “in charge of the Indians.”
The following month, Crager turned over twenty-four objects to the museum,[7] four of which he said he had secured at Wounded Knee, including the Ghost Dance Shirt. The accession register records the donation as:
“Ghost Shirt” of cotton cloth with feather ornament, blessed by “Short Bull” the High Priest to the Messiah, and supposed to render the wearer invulnerable. Taken from a Sioux Warrior killed at the battle (sic) of Wounded Knee, 30th December (sic), 1890.
We can never know whether Crager’s shirt was actually removed from the body of a brave at Wounded Knee. Crager was known to stretch the truth, and there was an active trade in fake Ghost Dance Shirts. The marking, manufacture, and materials of the garment verify its Lakota origins, but beyond that we must go on faith.
“So Dan, we’ve followed the Ghost Dance Shirt from Cheyenne River, South Dakota territory to Wounded Knee, then around Europe and to Scotland, where it landed at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum. Now, how did it get back to South Dakota?”
“Well, it’s quite a story, he replied. “I suggest you ask Marcella LeBeau. She lives on the Cheyenne River reservation; I think she was the key.”
The next day, I drove the ninety minutes from Pierre to Cheyenne River to visit Marcella LeBeau. As I passed oversized flatbed trucks carrying rolls of hay, the road shimmered with puddles of water mirages. A partridge skittered across the highway in front of my car. The outside thermometer read one hundred degrees.
Marcella LeBeau lives in a rose-colored stucco house on a quiet street with cows grazing across the way. Knowing she was over ninety years old, I expected to find an infirm old woman but instead was met by a small, elegant lady with bright eyes and silver hair caught up in a chignon topped by a silvered flower. She asked me to wait while she took a long-distance conference call about some piece of tribal business and sat me at the dining room table, which she had stacked with files documenting the repatriation of the Ghost Dance Shirt. When she was finished with the call, she began plowing through the files, handing me duplicates of some of the news clippings.