Hand in hand they would go, faster and faster, wilder and wilder, until one or many would fall in a trance, when the crazed circling would cease for a time, that they might hear the medicine man interpret the visions their ecstasy had created and promise them the fulfillment of their hopes, the doom of the white man and the restoration of the Indian to his own. It was before such an assemblage s this that Sitting Bull broke the peace-pipe-the pipe which he had smoked on his surrender in and had kept sacredly during the nine years between.
It was a dramatic and telling bit of action, and had wide effect upon his credulous followers. It was a profession of willingness to die for their new religion. Other causes of trouble were at work at the same time.
The Indians were not the only people who were subject to hallucinations, exaggerated fears and anticipations. Rumors of coming uprisings began to terrorize the white population; the newspapers took up the hue and cry with fervor. There had indeed been some evidence of secret communications from one disaffected group to another, and the attitude of the ghost dancers had undoubtedly been belligerent at the different Sioux agencies; but the number of malcontents was a very small proportion of the people as a who.
A spark of dissension was kindling a remarkably large blaze of sensation and alarm. At some of the agencies the need for protection for the employees was felt.
This led to intervention by the military, and the appearance of soldiers fanned the fire into a consuming flame. At Standing Rock the commanding officer decreed the arrest of Sitting Bull, as the source of disaffection.
In the Bad Lands there was gathered a considerable mass of Indians, eighteen hundred having stampeded from their homes when General Brook arrived at Pine Ridge with five companies of infantry and three troops of cavalry. Big Foot and his band escaped after arrest by the military on the Cheyenne River reservation. Obviously it would not do to allow so cunning and malignant a leader as Sitting Bull to put himself at the head of these frightened or desperate people.
Sitting Bull had made preparations for departure to join the group in the Bad Lands when on the morning of December 14th, a number of Indian police entered the log house where he sat with his two wives and his seventeen year old son, Crow Foot.
They told him that he was under arrest and must report to the agency, forty miles away. Sitting Bull made no demur, but was most leisurely in his preparations for departure, dressing with extreme care and calling for his best horse. While he made ready, a hundred and sixty of his ghost dancers crowded around the house in great excitement, far outnumbering the group of Indian police, thirty-nine regulars and four specials.
It was Crow Foot who set the match to the fuel piled about them. The older man was stung to response. He screamed out the order to attack, and on the instant two of his adherents shot and mortally wounded the two leaders of the police party.
But as he fell, Bull Head wheeled about and shot Sitting Bull. Three bodies went down at the same moment, and Sitting Bull would never again make medicine for his band. During the hot two hours that followed, the little group of blue-coated Indians fought off their assailants, prevented their seizure of the horses that had been gathered in the corral to take the dancers away to the Bad Lands and held their position until the cavalry arrived on the scene.
Nor is the sequel one that the white man can read without shame. They acted to the full on the military adage that there is no good Indian but a dead Indian. They were reluctant, however, to give up their weapons, and a search was begun. Most of the men, including Big Foot, were killed around his tent where he lay sick. Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Lakota, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets.
Dancers could not die. They were holy. It would be dead wrong to assume that that particular belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic. The Ghost Dance swept though Native nations because it offered divine solutions immediate to problems most Native people could not help but feel were insurmountable.
They were coming to the end of their entire way of life. Their only comfort was faith because faith, as the Bible says, is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Nothing else could or would. They are, to be sure, true believers. Their faith is in Trump. They believe him with the sheer force of nothing less than pure faith in "the evidence of things not seen.
At Wounded Knee, some of the slain died because they believed the bullets of the 7th Cavalry wouldn't touch them. They were wrong. Throughout the west, the Ghost Dance died because no matter how hard the people danced and prayed, the promises were never fulfilled. What exactly does the future hold here in our land? Only those who believe in Donald J. Trump know, but they think they know only because they so strongly believe.
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