While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
The manifestations of a new religious idea
always have about them something of the mysterious. We who
have noted the sudden waves of religious fervor which spread
over our own race only to subside as quickly as they come,
need not wonder at the rapid growth of the Messiah craze of
1890 among the Sioux Indians.
After their
five lean years in the Canadian forests,
Sitting Bull and his people chose surrender
to starvation, and returned to the United
States where rations awaited them. Held as
prisoners of war for a year and a half at
Fort Randall, Dakota, they were in May,
1883, released from the jurisdiction of the
army and sent to the Standing Rock agency.
Here they found many of their former fellows
in hostility, together with a large body of
Sioux who had remained friendly throughout
the agitations of the Seventies.
Chief Gall was here, settling down to
the life and state of a farmer, and many a
late hostile was learning to "walk the white
man's road." This was little to the taste of
Sitting Bull, for down in his unreconciled
heart be carried a burden of grievances. He
was astute enough, however, to give apparent
acquiescence to the new scheme of things and
bide his time.
The Messianic
movement, arising among a people "who lived
beyond the Yellow Faces to the west of the
Ute," or, in other words, among the
Paiutes of western Nevada, spread rapidly
over the Indian country in 1888 and 1889.
the prophets of this movement reported
visions of the world of spirits from which
they brought back golden promise for the
world of red men. In this realm of ghosts
they had learned the songs and steps of the
"ghost dance." Six days and nights the
believing Indians should dance, at each new
moon; and when by their continued dancing
they had made the way ready for the
fulfillment of prophecy, the Great Spirit
would reward them. The race of white men
would be blotted out-given over to the will
of the Evil Spirit. New soil should cover
the face of the earth; the seas should be
filled up so that no longer might ships come
to bring intruders upon the country; the
buffalo, the elk and the deer should be
restored, and the Indians who had believed
and danced should live again the life of the
old days.
Sitting Bull sent
some of his young men to invite Kicking
Bear, the prophet of the Cheyenne River
reservation to the south, to bring the new
belief up to Standing Rock. The band of
recalcitrants was quick to adopt the faith.
Although they numbered no more than a tenth
of the Indians of this jurisdiction, they
indulged in the new ceremonials so madly,
and held such mysterious night sessions to
which only the firmest adherents of the cult
were admitted, that a feeling of portent
began to spread.
The regimen of the ghost dancer was a severe
one, and those who followed it piously grew
thinner from day to day. The morning began
with vapor baths in the sweat lodges that
had been built closely for the purpose, and
filled with steam produced by throwing water
upon heated stones. When the bather
succumbed to the steam he was dragged forth
to be anointed by the medicine man; then as
sufficient strength returned he joined in
the dance, which went on throughout the day.
Robed in the white garments they believed
impervious to bullets, stripped of the
beloved bead ornaments and other things of
white man origin, alternation a loud
monotonous chant with wild wails that called
upon the spirits of the dead to return to
them, they would circle around the
sacrificial pine tree covered with offerings
to the Great Spirit. 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
1881 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.
The agent at Standing Rock, Major
McLaughlin, telling the story twenty years
later, wrote:
"It was
becoming very certain that Sitting Bull was
going to attempt to leave the reservation,
and his escape had to be guarded against. 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, 1890 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. Angered at the sight of
his father making ready to mount his horse,
he shouted a taunt that Sitting Bull was a
coward to go quietly with the "Indians in
blue uniforms."
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. Lieutenant
Bull Head and Sergeant Shave Head. 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. Of the
white man's share in the event there is less
to be said in pride, for coming when the
fight was all over and the dancers fled and
in hiding, the sent shots in the direction
of the loyal police and were restrained only
by a messenger with a flag of truce.
Nor is the sequel one that the white man can
read without shame. A detachment of Custer's
old command made up a part of the troops
sent to the Pine Ridge jurisdiction, and the
slaughter on the Little big Horn fourteen
years before had been kept green in their
memories. They acted to the full on the
military adage that there is no good Indian
but a dead Indian.
Two weeks
after the fall of Sitting Bull, Big Foot's
band came out under a flag of truce from the
Bad Lands and being refused a parley,
surrendered unconditionally. They were
reluctant, however, to give up their
weapons, and a search was begun.
"According to the reports of military
officers, the Indians attacked the troops as
soon as disarmament commenced. The Indians
claim that "the first shot was fired by a
half crazy, irresponsible Indian." At any
rate, a short, sharp, indiscriminate fight
immediately followed, and, during the
fighting and the subsequent flight and
pursuit of the Indians, the troops lost
twenty-five killed and thirty-five wounded;
and of the Indians, eighty-four men and
boys, forty-four women and eighteen children
were killed and at least thirty-three were
wounded, many of them fatally. Most of the
men, including Big Foot, were killed around
his tent where he lay sick. The bodies of
women and children were scattered along a
distance of two miles from the scene of the
encounter."
Between the lines
of this report of the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs one reads the story of a hideous
revenge for the "Massacre" of fourteen years
before; a story of relentless brutality
which earns the designation of savage no
matter what race may perpetrate it.
Officially, Commissioner Morgan must
restrain his comment on this pursuit of
fleeing women and children for two miles in
order to slay them.
This site
includes some historical materials that may imply negative stereotypes
reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place. These
items are presented as part of the historical record and should not be
interpreted to mean that the WebMasters in any way endorse the stereotypes
implied .
