James Mooney

“ Now comes a prophet as a messenger from God to forbid not only war, but all that savors of war—the war dance, the scalp dance, and even the bloody torture of the sun dance—and his teaching is accepted and his words obeyed by four-fifths of all the warlike predatory tribes of the mountains and the great plains. Only those who have known the deadly hatred that once animated Ute, Cheyenne, and Pawnee, one toward another, and are able to contrast it with their present spirit of mutual brotherly love, can know what the Ghost-dance religion has accomplished in bringing the savage into civilization. ”

“ Not until their most sacred things were trampled under foot, and the streets of the holy city itself ran red with the blood of their slaughtered princes, did they read aright the awful prophecy by the light of their blazing temples, and know that instead of the children of an incarnate god they had welcomed a horde of incarnate devils. “The light of civilization would be poured on their land. But it would be the light of a consuming fire, before which their barbaric glory, their institutions, their very existence and name as a nation, would wither and become extinct. ”

“ The history of this war, so eloquently told by Parkman, reads like some old knightly romance. The warning of the Indian girl; the concerted attack on the garrisons; the ball play at Mackinac on the king’s birthday, and the massacre that followed; the siege of Fort Pitt and the heroic defense of Detroit; the bloody battle of Bushy run, where the painted savage recoiled before the kilted Highlander, as brave and almost as wild; Bouquet’s march into the forests of the Ohio, and the submission of the vanquished tribes—all these things must be passed over here. ”

“ As springtime came and passed, and summer grew and waned, and autumn faded again into winter without the realization of their hopes and longings, the doctrine gradually assumed its present form—that some time in the unknown future the Indian will be united with his friends who have gone before, to be forever supremely happy, and that this happiness may be anticipated in dreams, if not actually hastened in reality, by earnest and frequent attendance on the sacred dance. ”

“ The human race is one in thought and action. The systems of our highest modern civilizations have their counterparts among all the nations, and their chain of parallels stretches backward link by link until we find their origin and interpretation in the customs and rites of our own barbarian ancestors, or of our still existing aboriginal tribes. There is nothing new under the sun.
The Indian messiah religion is the inspiration of a dream. Its ritual is the dance, the ecstasy, and the trance. ”

“ For were not we, too, born in Arcadia, and have we not—each one of us—in that May of life when the world was young, started out lightly and airily along the path that led through green meadows to the blue mountains on the distant horizon, beyond which lay the great world we were to conquer? ”

“ Black Coyote in full uniform, with official badge, a Harrison medal, and an immense police overcoat, which he procured in Washington, and riding with his three wives in his own double-seated coach, is a spectacle magnificent and impressive. Black Coyote in breechcloth, paint, and feathers, leading the Ghost dance, or sitting flat on the ground and beating the earth with his hand in excess of religious fervor, is equally impressive. ”

“ The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion, looking to some great miracle of nature for its culmination and accomplishment. The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesûnanin of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity. ”

“ He hated the whites as the destroyers of his race, but prisoners and the defenseless knew well that they could rely on his honor and humanity and were safe under his protection. When only a boy—for his military career began in childhood—he had witnessed the burning of a prisoner, and the spectacle was so abhorrent to his feelings that by an earnest and eloquent harangue he induced the party to give up the practice forever. In later years his name was accepted by helpless women and children as a guaranty of protection even in the midst of hostile Indians. ”

“ Men who work can not dream, and wisdom comes to us in dreams.... You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair?—Smohalla.
We hear little of Smohalla for several years after the Nez Percé war until the opening of the Northern Pacific railroad in 1883 once more brought to a focus the land grievances of the Indians in that section. ”

“ From that time both became devoted adherents and leaders of the Ghost dance; their trances have been frequent, and every dance is welcomed as another opportunity of reunion with departed friends. The young man was deeply affected as he spoke of his love for his children, the sudden death of the little boy, and their second meeting in the other world, and as his wife sat by his side looking up into our faces and listening intently to every word, although she understood but little English, it could not be doubted that their faith in the reality of the vision was real and earnest. ”

“ You must not fight. Do no harm to anyone. Do right always.—Wovoka.
The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery. On this foundation each tribe has built a structure from its own mythology, and each apostle and believer has filled in the details according to his own mental capacity or ideas of happiness, with such additions as come to him from the trance. ”

“ A new race had come upon them, and the Indians had thrown aside their primitive purity of life and adopted the innovations of the whites, which had now brought them to degradation and misery and threatened them with swift and entire destruction. To punish them for their disobedience and bring them to a sense of their duty, Manabozho had called the game from the forests and shut it up under the earth, so that the tribes were now on the verge of starvation and obliged to eat the flesh of filthy hogs. ”

“ We see it with our eyes and our hearts. We all hold it with our bodies and our souls. Right out here are my father and mother, and brothers and sisters and children, all buried. I am guarding their graves. My friend, this reservation, this small piece of land, we look upon it as our mother, as if she were raising us. ”

“ Among Indians the professions of medicine and religion are inseparable. The doctor is always a priest, and the priest is always a doctor. Hence, to the whites in the Indian country the Indian priest-doctor has come to be known as the “medicine-man,” and anything sacred, mysterious, or of wonderful power or efficacy in Indian life or belief is designated as “medicine,” this term being the nearest equivalent of the aboriginal expression in the various languages. To “make medicine” is to perform some sacred ceremony, from the curing of a sick child to the consecration of the sun-dance lodge. ”

“ The spirit world of our Indians is a place where death and old age are unknown, and where every one is happy in the simple happiness which he knew on earth—hunting, feasting, and playing the old-time games with former friends, but without war, for there all is peace. The ideal happiness is material, perhaps, but it is such happiness as the world might long for, with nothing in it gross or beyond reasonable probability. The Semitic ideal, from which our own is derived, is very different. ”

“ The familiar present is always natural and a matter of course. Beyond the narrow range of our horizon imagination creates a new world, but as we advance in any direction, or as we go back over forgotten paths, we find ever a continuity and a succession. ”

“ Old chiefs and medicine men were losing their power. Withal new ways were prevailing more and more which did not suit the older people. The old ways which they loved were passing away. In a word, all things were against them, and to add to the calamity, many Indians, especially the wilder element, had nothing to do but to brood over their misfortunes. While in this unhappy state, the story of a messiah coming, with its ghost dance and strange hallucinations, spread among the heathen part of the people.... ”

“ All classes of whites have made sport of their religion—the infidel, the profane man, the immoral one, the moral one, and the Christian—and they have been told that God and the Bible were against it, consequently they lost faith in it. But the Indian must have some religion. He can not do without one. They were not ready to accept the Bible in all its purity. They wanted more excitement. Like the Dakota Indians more recently, they saw that Christ was the great center of the most powerful religion of the most powerful, intelligent, successful, and wisest nations with whom they came in contact. ”

“ The Kiowa assembled on the Washita, at the mouth of Rainy Mountain creek, and here, at the largest Ghost dance ever held by the tribe, Sitting Bull consecrated seven men and women as leaders of the dance and teachers of the doctrine by giving to each one a sacred feather to be worn in the dance as the badge of priesthood. Until the Ghost dance came to the prairie tribes their women had never before been raised to such dignity as to be allowed to wear feathers in their hair. ”

“ The spirit captain of the dead is always represented under this shadowy semblance. The great change will be ushered in by a trembling of the earth, at which the faithful are exhorted to feel no alarm. The hope held out is the same that has inspired the Christian for nineteen centuries—a happy immortality in perpetual youth. As to fixing a date, the messiah is as cautious as his predecessor in prophecy, who declares that “no man knoweth the time, not even the angels of God.” ”

“ With a burst of passionate indignation he replied, “Indians! There are no Indians left now but me.” However misguided he may have been in thus continuing a losing fight against the inevitable, it is possible that from the Indian point of view he may have been their patriot as he was their high priest. He has been mercilessly denounced as a bad man and a liar; but there can be no doubt that he was honest in his hatred of the whites, and his breaking of the peace pipe, saying that he “wanted to fight and wanted to die,” showed that he was no coward. ”

“ By this time it was dark, and the Indians invited the interpreter and myself to come over to a tipi about half a mile away, where we could meet all the old men. We started, and had gone but a short distance when we heard from a neighboring hill the familiar measured cadence of the ghost songs. On turning with a questioning look to my interpreter—who was himself a half-blood—he quietly said: “Yes; they are dancing the Ghost dance. That’s something I have never reported, and I never will. It is their religion and they have a right to it.” ”

“ I have known the Shaker people now intimately, as their attorney, for more than a year, and out of the many drunken Indians I have seen in that time not one was a Shaker. Not one of their people has been arrested for crime in that time. They are good citizens, and are far more temperate and peaceable than those Indians belonging to the other churches. I feel that their church is a grand success in that it prevents idleness and vice, drunkenness and disorder, and tends to produce quiet, peaceable citizens, and good Christian people. ”

“ Their old men told of years when the buffalo was scarce or had gone a long way off, but never since the beginning of the world of a time when there was no buffalo. The buffalo still lived beyond their horizon or in caves under the earth, and with its return would come back prosperity and freedom. Before we wonder at their faith we must remember that the disappearance of these millions of buffalo in the space of a few years has no parallel in the annals of natural history. ”

“ My soul was told to remain on earth four weeks more. All my friends came, and every Saturday we worshiped God. In four weeks more my soul was told that I should live on earth four years if I did right and preached for God. All felt thankful, and people joined the church—about fifty people. I was promised more time if we worshiped God.”
“A bad man can’t reach heaven. I believe in God. I saw how bad I used to be. God sends us light to see. They know in heaven what we think. When people are sick, we pray to God to cure us. We pray that he take the evil away and leave the good. ”