Of the West's original inhabitants, several hundred thousand aborigines were scattered about on millions of acres of land-reservations-to which they adapted themselves as best they could.

There was one final Indian tragedy to be enacted. Word spread in 1889 among the Plains tribes, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, Shoshone, and dozens of other tribes- of an Indian messiah.

Among the Paiute of the Nevada desert was a young Indian named Wovoka, called Jack Wilson by the rancher in Mason Valley for whom he worked. James Mooney, the anthropologist who visited Wovoka, has given us the best account of the nature of what came to be called the Ghost Dance religion.

The Indian messiah, an avowed Christian, declared that he had been taken up into heaven and had there received a revelation from God or the Great Spirit, informing him of an imminent renewal of the world, a millennial event in which most whites would be destroyed in a great flood, dead Indians would be resurrected, game would be replenished, and all tribes that followed the prescribed practices of the Ghost Dance would become immortal. As word spread of the messiah, representatives of various tribes made the long, arduous trek to Mason Valley to receive his blessing and instructions. In the Cheyenne version, Wovoka told the emissaries of that tribe:

"When you get home you have to make dance. You must dance four nights and one day time. You will take a bath in the morning before you go to your homes....I will give you a good cloud and give you a chance to make you feel good. I give you a good spirit, and give you all good paint." When Christ returned, "they were never die never cry, nor hurt anybody, do any harm for it, not to fight. Be a good behave always. It will give satisfaction in your life....Do not tell the white people about this, Jesus is on the ground, he just like cloud. Everybody is live again. I don't know when he will be here, may be it will be this fall or in spring....There will be no sickness and return to young again. Do not refuse to work for white man or not make any trouble with them..."

The injunction "Do no harm to anyone" appears in all versions of the messiah's message. There was to be no warfare between the tribes and no acts of hostility against whites. Those who practiced the Ghost Dance would become invulnerable to the white man's bullets.

The millennial expectation was clearly borrowed from Christianity in an apocalyptic vision similar to that in the Revelation of St. John. Reports circulated that Wovoka was himself Christ, that he had declared that he had died for the white man (here displaying the marks of nails in his hands), that the white man had proved faithless, and that he had now returned to bring immortal life to the Indians. The Sioux in the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Wounded Knee reservations made their own more militant gloss on Wovoka's doctrines. They fashioned shirts of rough cloth which they assured converts to the new faith would repel soldiers' bullets.

As word of the dance, with its extreme emotionalism spread among Indian agents and settlers, whites became increasingly alarmed. The dance was forbidden on most reservations, but the ban made the Indians only the more determined to practice it. Sitting Bull, back from exile in Canada, emerged once more as leader of the Teton Sioux. The Sioux had a host of practical grievances against the Federal government, the most serious being a sharp reduction in the food supplies guaranteed them by treaty.

An effort by the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull as a dangerous agitator resulted in a fight in which six policemen and eight Siou, including Siting Bull and his seventeen-year-old son, Crow Foot, were killed. General Miles, who knew him well as an adversary (Sitting Bull, like Chief Joseph, was not a chief but a medicine man), wrote of him:

"His tragic fate was but the ending of a tragic life. Since the days of Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Red Jacket, no Indian has had the power of drawing to him so large a following of his race and molding and wielding it against the authority of the United States, or of inspiring it with greater animosity against the white race and civilization."

The death of Sitting Bull threw the Sioux into turmoil. Fearing an attack by U.S. troops, they fled the reservation pursued by several thousand soldiers. Surrounded at Wounded Knee, they were ordered to surrender all weapons. When they were reluctant to do so, a fight broke out. It quickly turned into a massacre as more than 300 Sioux, the majority of them women and children, were cut down.

Within two weeks the sporadic fighting that followed - Wounded Knee was over, and the Sioux were back on their reservation, reassured by General Miles's restrained and tactful actions; but Wounded Knee was one more tragedy of misunderstanding to add to the long roll of such incidents. It was never shown that the followers of the Ghost Dance religion intended to attack whites. On the contrary, Wovoka had urged peace with the whites in anticipation of the millennium. The anger of the Sioux over short rations had combined with the Ghost Dance rituals to produce a highly volatile situation in which Sitting Bull's death set off a chain reaction that resulted in the massacre.

Elements of the Ghost Dance religion survived to merge, in many instances, with traditional millennial Christianity from which it had clearly been derived. During its lifetime it served to draw formerly hostile tribes together in a fashion never before achieved and thus might be said to have left a positive legacy.