Anyone who claims that the Ghost Dance movement had nothing to do with Wounded Knee and that the dance was merely a harmless religious ceremony either doesn’t know what they’re talking about or is knowingly trying to mislead their readers.
The Ghost Dance was the reason that the Army was called into the region in the first place. The Ghost Dance was the core reason that the Army ordered the interception and relocation of Big Foot’s band. The Ghost Dance was the reason that officials ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull, and ghost dancers directly caused Sitting Bull’s death; otherwise, he would have merely been arrested and detained temporarily. The Ghost Dance myth of the bullet-proof ghost shirt was at least one of the reasons that the hot-heated younger warriors at Wounded Knee opened fire on the soldiers after Black Coyote fired his rifle into the air, even though they knew that any of their missed shots would go straight toward their women and children barely 100 yards away, and even though they could see that they were heavily outnumbered.
The Indians in the region surrounding Wounded Knee, i.e., at the three agencies in the region, performed the Ghost Dance to facilitate the alleged coming of the new age in which whites would be killed by God/the Great Spirit and/or their messiah. The Ghost Dance prophecy stated that in the near future God would kill all whites by some catastrophic natural event in preparation for the new age. The leaders of the Ghost Dance movement said they were told in visions that the Indians were to perform the Ghost Dance in order to bring about this non-white new age.
Let us start with Dee Brown, perhaps the leading modern advocate of the view that Wounded Knee was a massacre from start to finish and was not a battle in any way, shape, or form. I quote from his famous book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:
[Quoting Wovoka, the founder of the Ghost Dance movement] All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, then all the Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can’t hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that, water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. . . .
Indians who don’t dance, who don’t believe in this word, will grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and be burned in fire. — WOVOKA, THE PAIUTE MESSIAH (Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 2007, reprint of 1971 original, pp. 415-416).
Brown also acknowledged Kicking Bear’s promise that the ghost shirt would stop bullets:
Kicking Bear replied that if the Indians wore the sacred garments of the Messiah—Ghost Shirts painted with magic symbols—no harm could come to them. Not even the bullets of the Bluecoats’ guns could penetrate a Ghost Shirt. (Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, p. 433)
Dr. Robert Utley, one of the deans of Old West and Native American scholarship, on the violent, racist nature of the Ghost Dance prophecy:
The Sioux proclaimed that the Messiah, as punishment for three centuries of oppressing the red race, would wipe the white race from the earth. The whites “have treated the Indians very bad all the way through,” ran the Sioux story, and the Messiah is “going to exterminate the whites by some phenomenon in the spring of 1891.” Thus the whites were not to be gently pushed aside, but violently and vengefully destroyed. And a time, the spring of 1891, had been set. From this idea, it was for some only a short mental leap to the belief that force would help prepare for the day of deliverance. William T. Selwyn, mixed-blood postmaster at Pine Ridge, asked a Ghost Dancer “if their father advises them to cause trouble on the whites by next spring.” “That was the orders they had from their father,” was the reply, “but [the orders] will be kept secret.” (Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, Second Edition, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 73-74)
Utley next quoted extensively from Little Horse, one of the apostles of the Ghost Dance movement:
Two holy eagles transported me [Little Horse] to the Happy Hunting Grounds. They showed me the Great Messiah there, and as I looked upon his fair countenance I wept. . . . He insisted that we continue the dance, and promised me that no whites should enter his city nor partake of the good things he had prepared for the Indians. The earth, he said, was now worn out and it should be repeopled.
After seeing the valley, we returned to the city, the Great Spirit speaking meanwhile. . . . He further instructed me to return to my people, the Sioux, and say to them that if they would be constant in the dance and pay no attention to the whites he would shortly come to their aid. If the high priests would make for the dancers medicine shirts and pray over them, no harm could come to the wearer; that the bullets of any whites that desired to stop the Messiah Dance would fall to the ground without doing any one harm, and the person firing such shots would drop dead. He said that he had prepared a hole in the ground filled with hot water and fire for the reception of all white men and non-believers. (The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, pp. 90-91)
So not only would whites be burned up in this hole of hot water and fire, but “non-believers,” i.e., Indians who rejected the Ghost Dance, would be wiped out as well.
Rex Alan Smith, a widely acclaimed historian on the Old West, on the problems being caused by the Ghost Dance movement among Big Foot’s people, partly because of Yellow Bird (the same fanatic who egged on the militant warriors to fight the soldiers at Wounded Knee and who promised them that their ghost shirts would stop bullets):
Big Foot—as his father, Lone Horn, had also been—was a diplomat, a peacemaker, and a friend of the whites. Nevertheless, even before the Ghost Dance excitement began, his band had become so unruly that since the past April the army had felt it advisable to maintain a camp of two hundred soldiers at the mouth of the Belle Fourche River, a few miles to Big Foot’s west, in order to make sure his people didn’t molest the settlers west of the reservation.
If the army’s reason for establishing its watchdog outpost (called Camp Cheyenne) was sound, and there actually was an ominous attitude among Big Foot’s people, it was due at least partly to the work of the medicine man, Yellow Bird. Yellow Bird was not only one of the most anti-white and one of the most dedicated-to-the-old-ways of all the Lakotah, but he was also a skilled agitator. So when the Messiah faith came along, Yellow Bird was provided with a religion that exactly suited both his feelings and his talents. Consequently, he kept Big Foot’s people so worked up over it that they danced, as an observer from Camp Cheyenne put it, “both day and night, so long as they are able to move and to keep awake.” (Rex Alan Smith, Moon of Popping Trees, University of Nebraska Press, Kindle Edition, locs. 1703-1709. A “loc” in a Kindle book can equal about one-fourth to one-half of a regular page, depending on the line spacing)
Smith on why officials had valid reasons to be concerned about the Ghost Dance movement and to try to stop the ghost dancing:
As the hot summer wore on, more and more Indians left their homes and farms to go live in the dance camps. Meanwhile, the agents at Pine Ridge and Rosebud and then at Cheyenne River pondered the problem and finally concluded they had no choice but to try to put an end to the dancing. There were some who criticized them for their decision at the time, and there have been many who have roundly condemned them for it since.
The critics at that time, for instance, argued that the agents actually had no problem. They maintained that if the agents would permit the dancing to continue without interference, the Indians would eventually realize the new world was not coming after all and the craze would die of its own failure. The more recent critics have continued to support that argument, but the basis of their most bitter denunciation of the agents has been the argument that the Ghost Dance was purely a religious rite and that the agents had no business interfering with religion.
Unlike their critics, however, the agents and their superiors did not have the advantage of historical hindsight. Furthermore, since they were the ones who actually had to cope with the situation, they were in no position to engage in detached ethical philosophizing. They were directly responsible for the welfare of the Sioux Indians on their reservations, and the Ghost Dance was giving them two very real problems.
The main one was the Indians’ food supply. Their rations had already been reduced to the point that even with such of the Indians’ farm and garden crops as had survived the drought, plus the fairly substantial number of meat animals the Indians were raising, they faced a winter of semi-starvation. But if the Indians continued to remain in the dance camps, and their crops and livestock continued to be unharvested and untended, the winter’s hunger could become catastrophic.
Their second problem was that law and order on Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations and to some extent at Cheyenne River was beginning to be undermined by the few (so far) Indians who were inclined to take advantage of the supposed invulnerability in their ghost shirts and do what they pleased, when they pleased, and to whomever they pleased without fear of consequences. Until now there were only a few Indians with that attitude, but even a few were trouble enough on the reservation; and if they should wander off it, they could easily get both themselves and other people killed.
In addition to these very real problems, the agents also had other concerns which were real to them, but which no one can say even today were justified or not. The agents understood that the Ghost Dance religion had sprung up as just that—a religion. Their concern, however, was that it would become twisted into something more. They recognized in the dance a sort of mass hysteria that could easily produce highly emotional mobs which a skilled leader could influence to his own purpose, even if that purpose were war.
Furthermore, since the true believers were firmly convinced that the new world was to be created in the following spring (at which time all the dead Indians would be resurrected to live in it), the agents worried that a true believer would not fear dying in war. In fact, he might see it as a desirable thing if it would allow him to sleep peacefully through what would be a hungry winter and then awaken in the new Indian paradise.
Finally, there was the matter of the ghost shirts. The agents wondered why the Indians were being told they were bulletproof unless someone were planning for the Indians to face bullets. So it was that the concrete problems of the food shortage and the maintenance of reservation order, together with the possibility of the Ghost Dance’s becoming the foundation for a bloody uprising, caused the agents to decide to stop it. . . . The agents were by no means unjustified or unreasonable at the time in deciding to put an end to it. (Moon of Popping Trees, locs. 1709-1739)
