The Rest Is History - 455. Fall of the Sioux: The Ghost Dance (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Following the tragic death of Crazy Horse and the ruthless cessation of the Sioux way of life, the last of the great Native American leaders were gradually picked off or repressed by the U.S. Government. Few though had so pitiful a fate as the once mighty Lakota War Chieftain, Sitting Bull. Having fled to Canada in search of peace from the relentless harrowing of his people, Sitting Bull finally returned and arrived at the Standing Rock Reservation in 1883. He was unprepared, however, for the changes wrought upon his people. With the explosion of railroads and the decimation of the already flailing buffalo populations, the Great Plains had been transformed into a desolate, barbed wasteland. While, the Native Americans within the reservations were increasingly coerced into Christianity by missionaries, or controlled by Federal agents. Then, news reached Sitting Bull and his people of a messianic figure from beyond the Rocky Mountains, who would come to liberate them from their plight. With him he brought the answer to their troubles: the Ghost Dance. Would it see the drums of war sound once more?  Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the life of Sitting Bull in the years following his victory at the Little Bighorn: the destruction of the Plains, his time with the infamous Buffalo Bill, and the birth of the mystical, incendiary Ghost Dance.  EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat, the snakeskin titles of mining claims, the plumed war bonnet of medicine hat, Tucson and Deadwood and lost mule flat. I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse, I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. You may bury my body in Sussex grass. You may bury my tongue at Champmedie. I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. So that was a poem written in 1927 by Stephen Vincent, who was from an army family, Dominic.

It was. I assume had been to France and England, maybe with the Great War. Help me out here. I'm reading your notes. I don't know. It's this great celebration of American place names, isn't it? And saying, you know, you can shove your European place names. I don't know if he'd been to Montparnasse and Sussex.

Or Winchelsea. I mean, it's not an obvious no anyway listen this is by the by of course the reason why we have read that is that bury my heart at wounded knee yeah has given its name to perhaps the best known work of history on native americans and it foregrounds its ending it does because the massacre at wounded knee is generally seen as providing the terrible coda to the tragic history of Native Americans over the course of their encounter with European settlers. Yeah. And this is going to be the climax of our story too. It is indeed. It's extraordinary that he chose to end that way because, you know, today we think of Wounded Knee and we think of Dee Brown's book, which was published in 1970,

and then the occupation of the site a few years later by Native American activists protesting against their kind of, what they saw as their mistreatment by the federal government. But I'm guessing maybe in 1927, Wounded Knee didn't have that resonance. It just seemed like a very American name. And so he ends his poem with those words. Well, it's right in the middle, isn't it? It's in the middle of America.

Yeah. So we'll come to the Wounded Knee Massacre, which, as you say, is an extraordinary story, and we'll explore it in some detail, because it's all about this kind of religious movement called the Ghost Dance, which is itself absolutely fascinating. Dominic, you know I love a religious movement. absolutely fascinating dominic you know i love a religious movement i know but listeners who are still with us after 63 episodes of this mighty series will know that of course custer was killed at uh the battle of the little big horn in 1876 but afterwards the lakota dispersed and were basically rounded up and picked off by uh crook and miles and these other very ruthless American, very effective US Army officers. Crazy Horse was killed.

We described that last time. Terrible, kind of pitiable end that he came to. Lying on the ground, as you described, Tom. Not on a cot, because he was still kind of at one with the earth. Sitting Bull had fled to Canada, then come back, being incarcerated in Fort Randall. And finally, in May 1883, he had arrived at the Standing Rock Reservation. And he hopes, I think at that point, that that's the end of it. You know, he can get on with his life and he will be left alone, which is what Crazy Horse wanted.

But what he realizes when he arrives in Standing Rock is that everything has changed while he's been away. Those processes of change have now worked themselves out. And what was once Indian country has been completely transformed. So the railroad, after the US economy recovered, after the panic of 1873, there is an explosion of railroad building, 2,000 miles of track across South Dakota alone between 1878 and 1887, bringing in the settlers and food and supplies and all that stuff. And also, of course, Dominic, buffalo hunters. And buffalo hunters, yeah.

And finishing off the process of destruction that Sitting Bull was already all too well aware of in the aftermath of the Little Bighorn because they can't find any game then. That's right. And this is the theme of kind of the terrible ending of Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy's great novel. So he has this awful description of what the planes look like, and it's too long to read, but it's just a little excerpt. The flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves

half crazed and wallowing in the carrion and then when the carrion is gone nothing but the bones and then when the bones have been shipped off just emptiness yeah that's exactly right so as late as 1876 there was still two million buffalo bison technically in wyoming and montana six years later a rancher was traveling across the plains and he said in all that time i was never out of sight of a dead buffalo and i never was in sight of a live one. There are actually now more cattle, far more cattle that have been brought in. Right. And so this is when the cowboys turn up. So the cowboys are not fighting Indians. No. The cowboys come when the Indians have been cleared off and they're bringing barbed wire, aren't they? And then legislators in Washington in the 1880s start

parceling up what had been Indian land and handing it out to farmers. And the process of Western civilization kicks in. Yeah. Barbed wire is a really big thing. It's also bad luck, I suppose, for those people who want to preserve the old way of life. In the late 1870s, very early 1880s, you have a wet weather cycle. So a lot of rain, the soil is unusually fertile. The railroad companies are advertising this and they say, wow, this is incredible. You know, this is the promised land of America. You can come here and start a farm and you'll be growing all these amazing things.

And so in 20 years or so, six towns in South Dakota become more than 300 towns. There were fewer than 2,000 farms in 1860 or so. Now there are 50,000. There are people flooding in. And that topsoil is not going to stay there for long, is it? No, no, exactly. And actually, they're being sold a lie as well. A lie, because actually, it's not terribly fertile land,

and it's not going to prove incredibly productive. So, I mean, it's eerie to cross the Great Plains because it's haunted by the ghosts of the buffalo. It's haunted by the ghosts of the Native American communities that lived there, the peoples that lived there. But it's also haunted by the kind of the relics of that very brief boom period that follows in the wake of the ending of the Indian Wars. Yeah. The disappointed hopes of the people who moved to the Great Plains and ended up joining the populist movement at the end of the 20th century. And then later on, of course, they've got the Great Depression to come. I mean, that would all happen in one lifetime. Anyway, so Sitting Bull arrives at the agency

and what does he find? There are now about 17,000 Lakota left, only 17,000. They are corralled in this tract in what is now South Dakota of about 35,000 miles. One historian describes it as six seas of misery, each swirling around a single agency island. So the different kind of Lakota tribes have been allotted different agencies. So Pine Ridge, the Rosebud, Standing Rock, the Cheyenne River, and so on. And each of those has an agent who looks after it, who gives out rations and so on. And there'll be a sort of a little encampment and whatnot. And there'll be a school and these kinds of things. The historian Peter Cousins, who wrote a really detailed book about the Indian wars, he says what had happened

to the Great Sioux Reservation is that it had become a sealed laboratory for social engineering. So we talked before about how there was this sort of Christianizing mission in the 1870s and 1880s. People who saw themselves as reformers and kind-hearted progressives who wanted to lead the Indian, as they would have called the native population, to lead the Indian into as they would have called the native population, to lead the Indian into the new dawn of civilization. Well, the whole thing of taking children and educating them, which has been a topic of immense controversy recently in Canada and Australia, hasn't it? Yes. I mean, it's happening in the Great Plains as well. We talked about in the last episode how Sitting Bull said that he wanted his children to be raised as Americans. It's kind of interesting. The very last war party is actually five boys who break

out of a boarding school. Really? Kind of Indian boys who break out of a boarding school, go on the rampage. Crikey. So what happens is, I mean, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs said, to domesticate wild Indians is a noble work, the crown of glory to any nation we're not going to allow them to drag along in their old superstition laziness and filth we can elevate them in the scale of humanity but also it breaks down the what we would call the tribes totally they want to break down the tribes the ambition is to make them americans individuals stamp out what they call demoralizing and barbarous customs they want to remove the sun dance so no more Sundances. Violent, barbaric, bloody. Why would we want this to continue? And as you said, putting kids into boarding schools. So the first boarding schools were opened in Pennsylvania in 1879. The kids

arrived, they have their hair forcibly cut, they are baptized as Christians without their parents' consent. All this stuff, which as you say, prefigures what would happen in the 20th century in the US, in Canada, in Australia, and so on. No bear grease. No bear grease in a crow's hair. Yeah. And the tragedy, of course, is that the natives cannot resist because they are now totally dependent on the government dole, on rations, on the agents, the agent's goodwill, because they can't just say, no, I don't fancy this. I'd like to carry on my own life, my old way of life. I'm going off.

They're not allowed to do that. Well, they can't because they'd starve, wouldn't they? They would. There's nothing to hunt. There's no bison out there. So they're totally in the power of the agents. So when Sitting Bull arrives at Standing Rock, he is totally in the power of the agents so when sitting bull arrives at standing rock he is totally in the power now of a man called major james mcclaughlin mcclaughlin was a former

blacksmith his wife was a court of santee and she spoke the kota language fluently so she was the interpreter mcclaughlin is a sort of, he has an enormous moustache. Bigger than Wild Bill Hickox? Probably similar. Wow. Times have changed, Tom. The beard has been consigned to history, a very bad sign. This is the age of the moustache.

A more ruthless, pragmatic moustache has entered. Yeah. I mean, he's not an evil man, is he? No. He's a man of high principle. He's a devout Catholic. He thinks that to essentially eradicate what he sees as evil customs is the best course. But reading about how he treats Sitting Bull,

there is something of Hudson Lowe, the British jailer on St. Helena, and the way that he deals with Napoleon. Yeah. His autobiography was called My Friend the Indian, but Sitting Bull would not have approved of that title. He is very pragmatic, very ruthless about dividing and ruling among the Indians. So he recruits a man who we encountered earlier in the podcast, one of Sitting Bull's old lieutenants, a man called Gore. I mean, he really is the flashman of the Lakota because he was in trouble for bullying, wasn't he? He was, but as a young man, I think as a slightly older man, he's seen as almost placid. And he explains his behavior at the Battle of Little Bighorn, where he is the guy really

who leads the charge that overwhelms the first stronghold of the 7th Cavalry because he had lost two of his wives and three of his children. That's right. Yeah. I always think of him as somebody who had made the journey from being captain of the rugby 15 or a sort of disputatious boy, the sort of bounder of the class school. He's now the chapel prefect, isn't he? He's the goody two shoes of the Standing Rock agency for Adrian McLaughlin. Well, you say that. He's a very fine figure of a man. And Elizabeth Custer, of all people, meets with him five years after the battle and says, painful as it is for me to look upon the pictured face of an Indian, I never in my life dreamed there could be in all the tribes so fine a specimen of warrior as Gaw.

Wow. Is that how she spoke? And compares his bearing to that of a gladiator. Crikey. And he's much photographed. Yeah. compares his bearing to that of a gladiator. And he's much photographed. And the guy who takes the photograph of him says that he's worried that his lens will burst trying to contain the image. Wow.

He has a tragic story. I mean, just to kind of preempt it. So as you say, he basically, I mean, he kind of switches sides. He wears European clothing. He becomes a big fan of Mendelssohn, rather improbably. He loves the wedding march and he ends up very fat because, I mean, he does profit from the amount of food on the reservation. He's not being starved and he worries about this. And so he asks, you know, is there anything that could help me get thin again? And he gets given a tonic, but he gets told very strictly, do not have more than, you know, a couple of sips a week because otherwise it'll kill you. And so he has a couple of sips, doesn't seem to have any impact. So he necks the entire bottle and it kills him. Oh my God. What was in the tonic? What kind of diet thing is that? I don't know. I mean, Evan Connell reports it and he says, if true, it sounds like a Chekhov story.

So it may not be true. It's a great story, but that if true is a bit, there's a lot hanging on that, isn't it? Yeah, it's very sad. But anyway, Gould, he's an example of many people who actually, they can't go off having fun on the plane. You talked in, I think, our third or fourth episode about how fun, how exhilarating the plane's life could be, the fighting, the hunting and so on. And for those people who can't do that anymore all you can really do is to join this sort of agency police you join this police force they call the metal breasts because of their badges and that's how you you know that's your new status and your prestige that's what gall and lots of other people do now sitting bull doesn't fit into that world

his appeal his leadership is based on... The old ways. Conservatism, I suppose, on tradition. Yeah. Well, but also his powers of vision. Exactly. You know, hooking up his chest to hooks and things. Yeah, to poles.

Yeah. And there's none of that going on now. No. McLaughlin is very down on that. And actually, when Sitting Bull arrives, McLaughlin effectively says to him, you're not going to be the big man around here. Times have changed. Yeah.

And so he's always doing him down, isn't he? He hates Sitting Bull. He says Sitting Bull was a man of very mediocre ability, rather dull and much inferior of Gaul and others of his lieutenants in intelligence. He's pompous, vain and boastful and considers himself a very important personage. Sitting Bull knows this and he's very miserable about it.

You know when we talked about how miserable Crazy Horse was? Sitting Bull is, if anything, even more miserable because he just can't understand why he's being belittled but it's more than that isn't it it's not just that it's that everything that had sustained him has gone totally yeah i mean the entire way of understanding the world has gone. Wherever this happens, wherever Europeans intrude on a society and the impact of modernity and industrialization just destroys that society, people seem left utterly disoriented by it. Which remember, Tom, when we started this series, I said I always thought of the story of Custer as the bridge between the story of first Columbus and then the Aztecs on the one hand, and then Titanic on the other. Yeah.

And if you think back to that Columbus series, when Columbus landed on Hispaniola and then the Spaniards started arriving, the Tainos, the indigenous people, were just totally wiped out through disease, but also through the cruelty of the Spaniards. But also because there were descriptions of them as just sitting down, staring into space, baffled that everything they'd taken for granted, the rhythm of their life, their faith, their sense of what the world was and what the human condition was, had just been utterly destroyed. And I think there must be something similar going on for Sitting Bull here.

I think so. Well, I mean, I don't want to go all Foucault. Yeah. But the idea of industrial society as putting a premium on the prison house, on blocking people in within walls, people in Europe find that tough to deal with. Yeah. But for someone like Sitting Bull, who physically has been used to roaming the plains and spiritually consorting with the spirits, being granted visions that open up the heavens. It must just be torture to be stuck in this. Yeah, in the reservation.

He's got his little cabin that he's built himself. He says, can I be any lower than I am? Once I was a man, but now I am a pitiful wretch. And actually what I think makes it worse is that he is now treated like a performing bear. So MacLachlan decides he wants to make some money out of Sitting Bull, and he decides he does a deal with our old friends, the Northern Pacific Railroad. They're going to supply passes,

and they're going to sort out hotels and all that stuff. It's basically Sitting Bull will perform in St. Paul, Minnesota. He will do his act. He will do an act, And they will organize dinners, and there will be bigwigs, and people will come and get his autograph. They put them up at the merchant's hotel. Thousands of people come to see him. Sitting Bull is given tours of the schools, of the fire department, of the post office, all of this sort of stuff. He's made to use a telephone. His nephew, Juan bull, is in the

next room and they have a telephone conversation. Sitting Bull does say, well, that was pretty remarkable. But there's a terrible poignancy to this whole thing that he's been treated as a relic and as a walking gimmick. And so that's in 1884. And then in 1885, I think even worse because two terrible shysters get their claws into him. Oh, yes. So he gets approached by an agent called John Burke, who is known variously as Major John Burke, despite the fact that he's not a major. And Arizona John, despite the fact that he never went to Arizona. And he is acting as the agent for Buffalo Bill Cody. Oh, yeah. Who I think we've already met.

Bill Cody has got his name Buffalo Bill from the sheer number of buffalo that he's wiped out. So he has acted as a scout for the army. And at one point, actually, in the wake of Little Bighorn, he is serving with the army. And he has this absolute cock and bull story. He's with the Fifth Cavalry. He rides out because there are just a few warriors out there. And he's dressed up exactly like Custer has in all his kind of glad rags. So not in a kind of uniform. And he kills and scalps supposedly this Cheyenne warrior who he calls Yellow Hand, who he says had killed Custer. And this becomes a big story and it kind of spreads across America. And this is what then

makes Buffalo Bill a kind of big name. And he stages this show the following year in which he, you know, he kind of restages it and he pulls off this scalp and it's supposed to be yellow hand scalp and he waves it in the air and he says, the first scalp for Custer. And so this gives him the idea, well, I can make money from this, from restaging scenes of the West. And he ends up restaging the Battle of Little Bighorn. And for that, he wants Sitting Bull and Sitting Bull agrees. And he goes off on this tour and Sitting Bull comes out and he's riding around the arena and all the crowd are booing him. I mean, they're showing him no respect at all because it's been built up that he's the villain. And I just think it's terrible.

And actually, Gould, to give him credit, he said, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to be a performing animal. But Sitting Bull does it. And you wonder, why does he do it? To get out? But it's awful. It's really awful. It is awful.

I was going to say, it sounds a little bit like the Restless History Live shows, Tom. It does. Going around America, being humiliated. But it is terrible. I do think it's terrible. I've thought about this a lot. I was in Monument Valley a year ago, and there are Navajo there, Dine, as they prefer to be called who organize rides you know you get on a horse and you go and you have your photo taken by the rock and they sort of stand beside you and look fearsome there's

John Wayne's points there's all of this stuff and I often have thought to myself since then how different is that really you know we're all partaking yeah they have little shacks selling tomahawks stuff like that that spirit of the reenactment for, frankly, wealthy white audiences, that has never quite gone away. And there is something dreadful about contemplating that scene of Sitting Bull. And also, he's clearly left overwhelmed by what he sees in the West. And he comes back and says, they're all terrible. It's awful.

But I think he's gazed into the abyss of what the future will be. And it's a future in which everything that he is, there is no place. And so he does kind of try and knuckle down, doesn't he, to kind of become a farmer. But I mean, it's not sitting bull. And then Dominic, amid his depression, amid the tedium and flatness of his existence, news reaches him of something extraordinary, doesn't he? Something utterly convulsive. Exactly, yeah. Rumors are coming into the reservation of something going on out there beyond the mountains

to the west. Is it a cult? Is it a new religion? But whatever it is, it seems to offer salvation for Sitting Bull and for his people. And this is something called the Ghost Dance. Tom, should we come back after the break to find out what it is? I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. So Dominic, just before the break, poor old sitting bull. He's been having a terrible time. He's out to become a farmer. He's been exploited by Buffalo Bill. It's all terrible. But then news of this extraordinary development, the ghost dance. So what is the ghost dance? What is going

on with this? Right. We need to explain where the ghost dance came from. So a little bit of politics. So he hears that there is a cult or a religion or a movement, call it what you will, that offers at last a change in the narrative and salvation for the native people but this hasn't come out of nowhere it doesn't sweep as it does through the reservations out of nowhere and actually the politics is really important so sydney bull probably hears about this this movement in the very end of the 1880s in march 1889 america had a new president ben Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, who was very pro-business, civil war general. He'd been very narrowly elected in November 1888. He'd lost the popular vote, but he'd won the electoral college. He's facing a tricky re-election in 1892. Because they're going to admit a lot of Western states want to come in, and you want to win them for your party. And Harrison and his backers believe that they will be Republican states, that they will be full of Protestant farmers who will vote the Republican ticket. And their priority is to bring those states in as quickly as possible.

It will give them the balance of power in Congress, and it will change the makeup of the Electoral College. And what they want to do is they think, they look at the Dakota Territory, where Sitting Bull's agency is, Standing Rock Agency, and all the Lakotas, and they say, we want to bring that in as two states, not one. We'll have a North Dakota and a South Dakota. But the problem is, much of South Dakota is the Great Sioux Reservation, so it's not really viable as a state. So ideally, they want to break up the reservation into six smaller reservations and encourage lots of white settlement. Now, people have been talking about this for quite a while. There was something called the Dawes Act a few years earlier. But Harrison really wants to accelerate it.

And in 1889, Congress approves that they're going to break up the Great Sioux Reservation, and they send General Crook. Remember General Crook from the previous episodes? Yeah. They sent him. They said, the Indians know him. He's an old hand. He'll know how to handle them.

And actually they're right. Crook goes to meet the chiefs and he says, look, you don't like it. I understand that. But you're in the position of somebody whose stuff is belongings. They're in a dry stream and there's a flood coming. And you can either stand there and moan and groan that the flood is coming or you can move your belongings. And that, I'm afraid, is what you're going to have to do. It is what it is, babes.

Correct. And that's what they do. That's a very unexpected remark there, Tom, but I enjoyed it. You know, sums it up really. I got the reference. Now, 99.9% of the listeners won't if they haven't read the rest of this history book, which I heartily recommend. So this decision, which is basically done so that the Republicans can get these two states in,

is a total and utter unmitigated disaster for the Lakota. They lose half of their land overnight. What little hunting they had left is completely obliterated. They are now totally the prisoners of the agents on the reservations. And what is more, this coincides with Congress deciding that it'd actually like to make some economies. So they slashed their rations, even though Crook promised that they wouldn't. So in the winter of 1889, 1890, they starve, terrible hunger, disease, measles, whooping cough, influenza. They sweep through the reservations. Some people may remember that when we did the Battle of the Little Bighorn, there was

a character called Black Elk. Remember Black Elk, Tom? Yes, the little boy. He was a teenager, yeah, who scal Remember Black Elk, Tom? Yes. The little boy. He was a teenager. Yeah. Who scalped a trooper. Dreadful scene. Hunted him like a rabbit in a bush. That's right. He later gave, there's a book called Black Elk Speaks, one of the great kind of classics of writing about Native Americans. Black Elk says of that winter, the people seemed heavy to me, heavy and dark. So heavy it seemed they couldn't be lifted. So dark

they couldn't be made to see anymore. Hunger was us now there were many lies but we could not eat them i mean that is that's a terrible sentence isn't it yeah it is and it's in that context that the lakota hear a rumor that far away beyond the rocky mountains a messiah has come who will liberate them they send a little party and the two most prominent people a guy called kicking bear who is a cousin of crazy horse and a medicine man from the brulee called short bull off these guys go obviously it's a long way away so they've gone for ages and they come back in march 1890 and they say, unbelievable news. The Messiah is there. The son of the Holy Spirit, of the great spirits rather. Well, I mean, that's a kind of telling step, isn't it? Because I mean,

this is what's so fascinating is that it's a conflation of traditional beliefs with Christianity. Yeah. And he has come to basically liberate us. So wonderful news, liberation is at hand. And it's going to happen actually next spring, spring of 1891. Brilliant. And this bloke, this Messiah, his name was Wawoka, or his white friends knew him as Jack Wilson, which is a little bit less inspirational his 30s and he was a medicine man with the Paiute, but he was very westernized as it were, sort of Christianized, I suppose. He dressed like the white man's clothing. He worked for a rancher. He spoke English and he had clearly learned about Christianity from this rancher out there in Nevada. And the story goes that it was during a solar eclipse in 1889 that he had fallen very badly ill and he had had a vision and he had ascended into heaven and God had given him the good news and said, Jesus is on his way, fantastic scenes,

and he's actually coming to help the native people. But it's unclear, isn't it, whether he is actually Jesus because doesn't native people but it's unclear isn't it whether he is actually jesus because doesn't he have stigmata yes he does the kind of the wounds of the nails in his hands and feet he does indeed and the trouble is the accounts we have of him are very garbled and slightly contradictory and what is clear as well is that the lakota emissaries who returned so kicking bear and short bull distorted his message in some way yeah so it's very unclear but what is clear is that he says good times are ahead for the plains indians but what you absolutely must do he said is you must be peaceful you must remain at peace you mustn't take up arms you must show love

and above all you must dance the dance is really. So the dance will be a big thing where you dance around a pole, a little bit like a sun dance. The more you dance, as you dance, you break down the barriers between this world and the next. So you'll be able to see and feel, I guess, your dead family and friends, hence the name the ghost dance. You dress in these white robes or shirts, which are decorated with moons and stars and things.

And they're kind of proof against bullets, aren't they? They're proof against bullets. Although it's not clear whether that's a detail that was added later, whether he said they were proof against bullets. And it's communal. So it's a different kind of dance from the sun dance. Because in the sun dance... Yeah, it's competitive, isn't it?

Obviously, the sun dance is kind of... There's loads of people there. But in the Sundance, you personally commune with the spirits. And it's very much a private experience for you. But also, if you fail at it, then you fail as an individual. Yeah, you do. Whereas in the Ghost Dance, you're all holding hands, which the Sioux didn't used to do when they danced.

So it's very much everybody together. And as soon as you've had a vision, you must share it with your friends and swap the good news and all this kind of stuff. So very kind of Quaker-ish. Yeah. Assembly, the spirit coming on you, talking, having visions, Pentecost list, speaking in tongues. I think what is obvious and what lots of people have said is

this is quite obviously a fusion of Christianity and elements of native, I know you say religion is the wrong word, native spirituality. I mean, let's say, because it is becoming a religion. Yeah, being codified. Because the native peoples of America are being Americanized. So it's a fusion of those things, but also it's happening out West. And there was a lot of Mormonism in there almost certainly as well. So all of those things, but also it's happening out West. And there was a lot of Mormonism in there, almost certainly as well. So all of these things are mixed up.

No one doubts that this guy, by the way, Wovoka, he's not a con man. He's not a demagogue or anything like that. There's no reason to doubt his sincerity. Well, it's often said that what happens in the kind of colonial peripheries in the long run will blow back and hit the metropoles of the West. And it kind of reminds me of spiritualism in the wake of the First World War. Oh, yeah. The desperate yearning of people to be in touch with those that they've loved.

And these visions in eclipses, I mean, this is what happens, the visions of Fatima, these extraordinary visions, supposedly of the Virgin Mary. Something very similar, this sense of in the wake of an unbelievable catastrophe, the yearning for communion with what you have lost. And ultimately this is what it's like. And it seems like a kind of foreshadowing of what will happen in Europe a few decades later. Yeah. I think that belief in, I want to commune with the dead. I guess because the dead, it's not just because the dead in themselves, it's because of

what they represent, which is that old world. Right. Because also, I mean, in a way, the most moving thing of all is that they say the buffalo will come back. Yeah. I mean, it's so painful. Anyway, this starts to spread and, you know, people are excited about it, but actually it probably wouldn't really have caught on if it hadn't been for the fact that in the summer of 1890 as if they haven't suffered enough there is a terrible drought there are days and days of like baking hot skies and burning winds and all the crops on the reservations of south dakota wither and die the hay turns brown as peter cousins puts it in his book on the indian South Dakota wither and die. The hay turns brown. As Peter Cousins puts it in his book on the Indian Wars,

the baked soil became fertile ground for the new faith and hunger nourished its growth. And I mean, one of the agents, an agent called Valentine McGillicuddy, he said, the dance and its ceremonies was like the voice of a feast to a starving man. Those people had been well fed. The ghost dance would never have been heard of actually if congress had not cut their rations by so much the ghost dance would probably

never have taken root in the way that it did so what happened is that by that summer a version of the ghost dance craze has come to the reservations but it's been twisted it's much more militant so definitely now we have the stuff about the white shirts will protect you from bullets. So conflict is kind of expected and it's much more aggressively anti-white settler, as in they will be eliminated. That they will go. They will go. And as the weeks pass, I mean, people are very hungry, of course. The baking summer turns very quickly to freezing autumn and winter, and the dances continue and they become ever more fervent. People are

collapsing and sort of, as you said, sort of speaking in tongues, screaming, foaming at the mouth. There is this sort of incredible, incredible excitement. Now, all of this might have been very unsettling and incendiary to kind of their new white neighbours. Of course, they do have white neighbours now, farmers in the Dakotas, who are bound to be a little bit perturbed by this. Although, to be honest, settlers in the West, I mean, they're used to weird expressions of religious faith. That's true. People speaking in tongues and babbling, aren't they? So it's not totally weird to them, I guess. But what actually really turbocharges it is how the agent at one particular place,

Pine Ridge, handles it. And here again, we go back to the politics. Because we said before, the Republican Party is desperate to attract Western voters. Elections at this period are really tightly contested. And Benjamin Harrison only beat in Grover Cleveland in the electoral college, not in the popular vote. Everything matters. And politics in this era is all about patronage. And so they want to put Republicans into political appointments. And the job of being an Indian agent was a really valuable one. It's kind of plum. You control thousands of dollars of contracts to feed the people on the reservation

and to build mills and schools and things. And the South Dakota Republican Party give the job at Pine Ridge that year, 1890, to somebody who could not be more useless. He's called Daniel F. Royer. I mean, he's 36, but in that time, he had been a doctor, a newspaperman, a banker, a territorial delegate, a drugstore guy, and says one person who writes about him, and quite possibly a narcotics addict.

So he's just a serial failure. But he's got connections. They give him the job. He pitches up on the reservation, and he totally loses it. He panics completely. Because he sees them dancing, and he goes out, and he says, oh, you should stop this business. And they all laugh at him, the Lakota. And then he panics and says, you've got to send troops. These people are laughing at me. This is dreadful. And then he starts telling the press, these people are dancing. They're planning an uprising. Blood will flow.

We need to strike first, All of this kind of stuff. And Dominic, the background for this is what Buffalo Bill represents, which is the dramatisation of the Indian wars as entertainment. So it's as vivid in people's minds as ever. And the association of Indians with tomahawks and scalpings and mutilations is completely uppermost in people's mind and not the sufferings that they're going through. No. Remember, we're in 1889, 1890. So if you're 20 or so, or 25, 30 now, you've grown up with the kind of dime novel stories of the battles on the plains in the 1860s, the massacres, all of that stuff. So that is in

people's imaginations. Absolutely. And it's playing on that. Now, actually, in Washington, when people hear these reports about the ghost dance, as so often, the senior military officers say, oh, this is absolute balderdash. They're just having a dance. Let them crack on with it. It's just a craze. It will pass. I mean, they're totally right on that, by the way. But President Harrison wants to look strong and decisive. South Dakota is actually about to send a new senator to the US Senate. He wants that to be a Republican because that will hold the balance of power in Congress. He wants to impress the voters of South Dakota and the state legislature. And he knows that actually if the army were sent in, the army bring money with them because

there's all the contracts to supply them and there's all that. And in an area that is suffering from drought and depression, brilliant. It's a win-win situation for him. He looks strong and the voters like him. Yeah. He reinflicts the economy. Exactly. So he sends Nelson A. Miles, the guy who had basically beaten the natives

in the aftermath of Little Bighorn. So General Miles, he's quite sympathetic to the Indians. He says they've been very badly treated. I don't think this ghost dance is a big deal. But another sort of bizarre political element to this, this is an age when all the talk in Washington is about the Navy. The future will belong to world's great navies. That's what power is. So Congress is giving loads of funds to the Navy and not to the army. And Miles thinks, hold on, if we'd make a bit of a

show of things up there in South Dakota, people will see that the army is very important after all. We'll get lots of money and we'll get what i've always wanted what the army have always wanted we want to run indian policy ourselves we don't want the civilians making a mess of it so miles says fine i'll mobilize the army he mobilizes a quarter of the entire fighting strength of the u.s army 5 000 men it's not a very big army the american army at this point almost Almost as small as the British army. Yeah, exactly. They're rushed in by railroad. The largest army mobilization since the Civil War.

Just for a load of blokes in white shirts dancing around a pole. Having a dance. And actually, Miles handles it really well. He cordons off the reservations. His men say to the Lakota leaders, guys, pipe down. Chill out. Calm down. Yeah, exactly. his men say to the lakota leaders guys you know pipe down chill out calm down yeah exactly and those people who so some of them have started sort of roaming around and leaving the reservations they are persuaded to go back everything's calmed down but the terrible irony by sending the troops

the administration and miles have actually ignited a press feeding frenzy because loads of reporters have piled in South Dakota. There's no story because there's no fighting. So they invent a story and they say, you know, any moment now the massacres will begin. You know, it goes back to what you were saying, Tom, about the Buffalo Bill show. They're playing with the stories that people are familiar with. The Tomahawks are being sharpened as we speak, all this kind of thing. The tom-toms of war are sounding.

I mean, the storm clouds of war, Tom, have never been darker than at this point. And of course, the man they blame, the man they point the finger at, they need a supervillain and they pick the one Indian that everybody has heard of who has appeared in shows is Sitting Bull. And who is conveniently on location. He's on location. They call him the high priest of the Indian messiah craze. And so General Miles reads all this stuff in the newspapers and he says very wearily, kind of, fine, you know, we'll round up Sitting Bull.

We'll put him in custody or whatever. Agent McLaughlin, who hates Sitting Bull, he's all over it. He says, brilliant, I'll handle this. There is talk, isn't there, of bringing in Buffalo Bill? Well, Buffalo Bill wants to do it. He says, I know Sitting Bull. I've worked with Sitting Bull. I'll persuade Sitting Bull. General Miles says, yeah, good plan. Gets Buffalo Bill to do it. And McLaughlin, the agent, says, no, I want to handle this myself. I'm going to do it. With disastrous consequences. Tragic consequences. The final act in this extraordinary story that we've been saying, and we will finish the episode there. Originally, this was meant to be four episodes,

then eight, then 10. It is now going to be 11. I'll take some of the blame, but not all of it. I'm not taking all of the blame for this. Dominic, you are like General Custer, roaming all over the place, refusing to stay where you should, or indeed like Crazy Horse. You're not going to be penned in, are you? No, no. You just want to get out there, be free.

Is there anybody involved with this podcast who rings the other presenter up 10 minutes before they're due to record and says,'ve got loads of extra notes let's do the extra notes i know well i also want to break free we're both very much to blame for this so anyway this is now going to absolutely be our longer series we're going to have one more episode and in that we are going to look at the fate of sitting bull and what happens to the Ghost Dancers. And we will finally get to Wounded Knee. If you would like to hear that immediately, therestishistory.com. You can sign up there. If not, we'll be back with it very soon. Thank you for sticking with us, if you have. Well, if you haven't, you're not listening.

And if you haven't, I don't care because you've gone. Exactly. It's on that bombshell of indifference. Goodbye. Exactly. On that bombshell of indifference. Goodbye. Goodbye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly

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