Arriving in Nebraska a few days after saying farewell to the Wild West, Sitting Bull was greeted not as a returning hero in the local paper or even just a celebrity, for all of his travails and triumphs. In fact, it was as if the reporter had not only never been to a performance of the show, but had no awareness of the chief’s stature elsewhere in the country, and around the world. Or perhaps he knew it well, and was overcome with jealousy and resentment. “Sitting Bull and His Band of Dusky Stars Return from a Summer’s Engagement,” announced the Bismarck Tribune on October 16, 1885. “Sitting Bull and his band of dingy dudes who have been swelling among the giddygawks of the orient during the summer months in connection with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West monstrosity, returned to the city yesterday and will leave this morning for their home at the Standing Rock agency,” the newspaper said in on page three. “Sitting Bull, the chief of the bloodstained savages, and the greatest attraction because he has the most horrible record in the butchery of the innocent whites, never appeared more imposing and never sent the cigarette smoke swirling from his nostrils of his expansive nose with greater satisfaction.” This was what Sitting Bull faced in the world of the wasichu when he returned to the Great Plains. It was nothing new, and home was where he had been called.
A year later, the Wild West would transform into another version of itself, the international one in which a panorama of American history was presented, scene by scene, from the primeval Ice Age when mammoth and saber-toothed tiger roamed the land, to Lewis and Clark and their meeting with Sacajawea and how she guided them into uncharted territory, where they encountered buffalo and badgers and natural wonders and came face-to-face with the red man and returned to tell others of their adventure, and finally to Custer and trappers and miners and farms and ranches and the end of the dream. The Wild West became a theatrical manifestation of all the great players in our story and how they moved and clashed across our purple mountains and redrock canyons and mesas and prairie that led to the Milky Way and its oceans of stars to which we were all tethered, whether or not we knew it, but we did know it because we all had the yearnings and the desire. And on the Cowboy Band played, soundtrack of longing and delight, music that accompanied the American conquest, which bears the national sin and triumph.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In Which There Comes a Ghost Dance, or, a Horse from Buffalo Bill Responds to the Assassination of Sitting Bull, and Other Instances of the Last Days of the Wild West
It started, you could say, in Nevada, land of the perpetual mirage, once-and-future repository of all-or-nothing bets, supplier of gold and silver and other shiny metals to anyone who comes and gets it. It was passed on from the sands to a man whose birthplace was right there on them, baked into him in such a way that it all seemed so natural, so true. He was an obscure Paiute Indian named Wovoka. He was a prophet perhaps, a shaman to those he had healed or witnessed as he opened the clouds. He was Steve Wynn before casinos, he was Jesus Christ incarnate (and he had the scars to prove it), or maybe he was just some guy in a gulch with a sign. Many followed his words—and only one would escape the hail of bullets that came after, wearing a shirt that Wovoka said would protect him.
Now Wovoka had his good points and his bad, and he was a product of his time, as we all are, and he was a product of all time, as we all are too. But something happened on New Year’s Day of 1889, and it was a thing that elevated him above his brothers, a thing that reverberated across the land and across many tribes, a thing that would lead to the assassination of Sitting Bull and thereafter the death throes of the great peoples of the northern plains. You see, on that day Wovoka “died” and had a vision. In it, God came to him and decreed that he was the messenger among Indians. If the Indians danced a dance that God taught him, a miracle would soon follow. A great cloud kicked up from the stomping of the earth would cover the earth, burying the white man forever and restoring the Indian to his former glory. Dead friends and relatives would return, along with the buffalo and all the other animals that had been killed by the white man. The present would vanish and be remembered only as a passing nightmare. But before that time came, the white man would try to quell this dance. To stop the bullets that would come from his guns, those who danced the dance must wear medicine—or ghost—shirts. “Paint the shirts with thunderbirds, morning stars, and other sacred symbols,” God told Wovoka, and that was what he told those who sought his counsel. “Take this message to my red-skinned children and tell it to them as I say it.”
The message contained other details, instructions about how to arrange the dance, when to have it, the nature of the resurrection and how lovely it would be for those who beheld and brought it to bear. It was all so alluring and full of hope, and the details rendered it palpable, a path that could be broken down and followed step by step, and, like all codes that come our way during times of darkness, it passed through the afflicted, moving some of them to ecstasy and trance, to don the protective shirts festooned with sacred symbols and dance the dance of ghosts.
They swayed and wailed by the thousands, and authorities took notice. They were alarmed, fearing that a dance such as the one being performed could incite who knows what, and they wanted to squelch it, just as the prophecy said. Some among them knew that conditions for Wovoka’s children were dire, so urgent that they did not see any other path, and even one of the conquerors, a prominent wasichu, spoke of these conditions for the record, a rare victor who signed off on a truth that has long since been forgotten. The statement came from General Nelson A. Miles, commander of army troops in Dakota, whose winter campaign following the Battle of the Little Bighorn had forced the surrender of many Indians, including Crazy Horse and his followers. He presented this statement to the secretary of war in 1891, shortly before the cataclysm at Wounded Knee, which occurred under his command and effectively marked the end of the Lakota era on the Great Plains. As he himself said, the statement was an agreed-upon narrative involving countless witnesses who, in the repellent language of bureaucracy, had “opportunities of knowing.” What they knew was that the Indians were trapped in a cage and starving, and this is how he said it:
The causes that led to the serious disturbance of the peace in the northwest last autumn and winter were so remarkable that an explanation of them is necessary in order to comprehend the seriousness of the situation. The Indians assuming the most threatening attitude of hostility were the Cheyennes and Sioux. Their condition may be stated as follows: For several years following their subjugation in 1877, 1878 and 1879, the most dangerous element of the Cheyennes and the Sioux were under military control. Many of them were disarmed and dismounted; their war ponies were sold and the proceeds returned to them in domestic stock, farming utensils, wagons, etc. Many of the Cheyennes, under the charge of military officers, were located on land in accordance with the laws of Congress, but after they were turned over to civil agents and the vast herds of buffalo and large game had been destroyed their supplies were insufficient, and they were forced to kill cattle belonging to white people to sustain life.
The fact that they had not received sufficient food is admitted by the agents and the officers of the government who have had opportunities of knowing. . . .
The unfortunate failure of the crops in the plains country during the years of 1889 and 1890 added to the distress and suffering of the Indians, and it was possible for them to raise but very little from the ground for self-support. . . .
The Indians could not migrate from one part of the United States to another; neither could they obtain employment as readily as white people, either upon or beyond the Indian reservations. They must remain in comparative idleness and accept the results of the drought—an insufficient supply of food. This created a feeling of discontent even among the loyal and well disposed and added to the feeling of hostility of the element opposed to every process of civilization. . . .
They signed away a valuable portion of their reservation, and it is now occupied by white people, for which they have
received nothing. They understood that ample provision would be made for their support; instead, their supplies have been reduced and much of the time they have been living on half and two-thirds rations. . . . The disaffection is widespread, especially among the Sioux, while the Cheyennes have been on the verge of starvation and were forced to commit depredations to sustain life. These facts are beyond question, and the evidence is positive and sustained by thousands of witnesses.
It was amid these conditions that Wovoka’s message was cast and it spread eastward through the deserts of Nevada and then to the south, up and down mountains and arroyos, perhaps carried by the winds and the sands and all manner of tributaries, picked up by the chattering creatures of the land and the air, who passed it on to the two-leggeds, who soon answered the call, traveling in caravans to seek an audience with the messiah. What was going on? they wondered. Was this fellow on the level or just another gimmick put forth by the wasichu? They had to find out for themselves, for they were now grasping at straws, and after all, there was always the chance that salvation was at hand. First to arrive was a delegation from the northern Arapaho and the Shoshone in nearby Wyoming. Along with a member of the Gros Ventre tribe in Montana, they visited the messiah in May of 1889, and returned to their tribes with the good news. Soon, it spread to the Cheyenne in Montana and the Sioux in the Dakotas, and in the fall of that year, Porcupine, representing the Cheyenne, and Short Bull and Kicking Bear, representing the Sioux and both having participated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, among other clashes with the wasichu, traveled with other members of their tribes to Nevada for an interview with Wovoka. It was a frontier echo of the three wise men journeying through the desert for Bethlehem two thousand years earlier, searching for a man who later proclaimed himself a savior.
When it was all over, the famous cowboy Tim McCoy, star of early Hollywood westerns and his own Wild West show, traveled to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to visit a friend. This was not unusual; many cowboy actors had made close acquaintance with Indian actors who were then appearing along with them in the new wave of movies emanating from Tinseltown and celebrating the West, a way to make a living as Buffalo Bill’s shows succumbed to the movies. At his friend’s log cabin, McCoy was introduced to two guests, a pair of elderly Sioux warriors. As he told his son years later in the book Tim McCoy Remembers the West, they were dressed in white man’s clothing, along with reservation-style hats and moccasins. The men were Short Bull and Kicking Bear, and McCoy knew that they had battled Custer and met Wovoka. As a longtime student of the frontier, he wanted to hear their stories. They “drank coffee and smoked from Short Bull’s pipe,” he said, “a fine piece with a well-chiseled catlinite bowl and a stem richly decorated with intricately arranged orange, yellow, red, and green-dyed porcupine quills.”
“You went to see the great Paiute Medicine Man,” McCoy then said to Short Bull, who puffed on his pipe and caught his eye. “What did he say?”
Short Bull explained that he and his compadres had visited with the Arapahoes Yellow Calf and Sage at Wind River in Wyoming before journeying on to meet the prophet himself. They knew more than the Sioux, and filled them in about the Ghost Dance. “But we wanted to know more,” Short Bull said, so they rode west.
“What happened on your journey?” McCoy asked Kicking Bear.
At first suspicious, and then encouraged by his friend whose cabin he was visiting, he began to tell his story, with some hesitation.
“The Messiah had scars on his hands and feet,” Kicking Bear said, “and told us he was the same man who had come down to see the white man a long, long time ago. But the white man stuck him on a tree. Those scars were the places where they had nailed him to that tree. Wovoka said he had died and gone back to his father, but now he was here on earth to help his children, the Indians.”
“And what else did he say?” McCoy asked.
“He told us to live in peace, that the white man would be gone after one more year and a spring”—April or May of 1891—and then he told the delegation of Cheyenne and Sioux inquisitors about the necessity of the dance and the shirts that were to be worn and how all would be well in the end. This was the message that Kicking Bear and Short Bull brought back to their people, and when it was all over there was a dispute as to who exactly said the shirts would repel bullets. Had Kicking Bear embellished Wovoka’s instructions because he was the more bellicose? Why was Wovoka claiming that he never said anything about the shirts? The queries mattered not: there was the promise of a return to the old ways, a restoration of all that was good and pure, and when the delegation of Cheyennes and Sioux returned to Standing Rock, the dancing began.
Now it so happened that in 1889 Sitting Bull had been living at Standing Rock since his departure from the Wild West show four years earlier. Specifically, he had made his home at Grand River, apart from the main cluster of homes on the reservation. He had taken up the ways of the white man, learning to till and farm the land, living in one of the square houses—a shape that was anathema, not round like a tipi, one more representation of the wasichu’s disconnected approach to being on and with the land—that was required of all reservation residents, and encouraging his many children and grandchildren to become educated in the manner of the conquerors. He had expressed the desire for his descendants to flourish in the changing world when he turned himself in at Fort Buford in 1881 and throughout his four months on the road with Buffalo Bill. By this time, he was an icon, both to his people and the white man, months away from reaching the status of an immortal due to forces that were about to converge at his doorstep. Since his engagement in the Wild West, he had acquired even more fans around the country, and reporters in his region or from major New York periodicals filed dispatches about life on the reservation, chronicling his response and the response of other tribal members to the unfolding developments regarding federal policy toward the recently vanquished tribes.
Back east, there was a burgeoning Native American rights movement, some of whose members had verbally accosted him in Philadelphia with Buffalo Bill. This campaign was organized by abolitionists from the Civil War, society matrons, and religious folk who were appalled by the treatment of Indians as treaty after treaty had been ignored and the original residents were now living in squalor on what was until very recently their own land. These concerned citizens came together in various groups, lobbying in Washington, D.C., for fair treatment of Indians, taking up collections, and spreading the word. One of the most significant groups was the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA), which published a widely read periodical called Council Fire. Members of the organization included not just white people, but prominent Indians such as Red Cloud, Circling Bear, Black Shield, and Thunder Hawk as well, and their voices were heard through the newsletter.
Some NIDA members dedicated their lives to trying to right the wrongs that had been mounted on the Indians, such as Alfred Meacham, a lawyer and advocate for temperance from Iowa. With a keen sense of justice, he traveled to California in the 1870s, taking up the cause of the Modoc Indians during their final days, ultimately nearly dying after being scalped in an altercation in the lava beds of Alturas—now a national park—where the Modocs were making a last stand against the army.
When Meacham was found, he thought he was dead; his wounds were dressed, and, he later wrote, the surgeons told him he might survive because he was a teetotaler. Upon his recovery, he accompanied Captain Jack, a Modoc chief involved in the fight and convicted of murder, on his final walk to the gallows. With the Great Spirit as his witness, Meacham promised the chief that “with malice toward none, and charity for all,” he would continue to battle for Indians. He resumed his travels around the country, advocating for Native Americans, often asked by the federal government to act as an intermediary with the tribes. “My right to tell ‘the other side,’ ” he said before each talk, “is certified to by Modoc bullets in my maimed hands and mutilated face.” When asked how he could speak on their behal
f after what had happened, he said he was not pleading for the Indian, but for humanity.
On January 1, 1878, Meacham published the first issue of Council Fire in Philadelphia. “After years of repeated importunities by the friends of the Indian,” he wrote, “I have consented to establish a journal devoted to his interest, assured that my own race are willing to do right whenever convinced of the right, and that the other stands to bury the tomahawk and scalping knife forever, whenever justice is guaranteed to them. . . . [And so] we light THE COUNCIL FIRE:
May it burn until every Indian on the continent of America has been recognized as a man . . . until he has been admitted to citizenship . . . and until the last savage council fire in America shall have died out forever.
As the last of the prominent Plains Indians to have surrendered—or returned—Sitting Bull continued to have gravitas in the outside world, even as some in his own community had grown increasingly jealous of his stature. His situation was not unlike that of certain celebrities today, around whom swirl acolytes, detractors, hangers-on, and all manner of individuals who seek a piece of the adored figure. Such a condition is appealing and a prison, as someone like Sitting Bull well knew. The product of a warrior culture in which feats of daring were enshrined, he was familiar with being admired. Yet as we know, he was a humble man who did not draw attention to himself. Quite simply, it came with the territory. In his later years, he was drawing ever inward, weary of all the battles—and still, a force to be reckoned with, even if because of what others projected his way. His position as an American superstar following his time in the Wild West only added to the growing animosity between him and Major James McLaughlin, the government agent in charge of Standing Rock.
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