Boys' Book of Indian Warriors and Heroic Indian Women

by Edwin L. Sabin

This spring Good Thunder, Short Bull, Cloud Horse and Yellow Knife journeyed to see the Messiah again.

When they came back they reported that he had appeared to them out of some smoke. He welcomed them, and showed them a land that bridged the ocean, and upon the land all the Indians of all nations were on their way home again.

They saw lodges, of buffalo hides, in which the dead were living. They talked with dead Sioux whom they had known.

The Messiah had given them red and white paint, that would ward off sickness, renew youth, and cause visions. He had told them to have the Sioux send their children to school, and to attend to farming. There was to be no fighting with the white people. But the whites were to be destroyed, by a great landslide that would cover the world with new earth. Upon the new earth would roam the buffalo and deer, as of old. The Indians who obeyed the Messiah would be lifted up, above the landslide, and gently dropped back again, there to live forever with all their friends and relatives who had come with it from spirit land.

This reunion was to occur the next spring, of 1891, when the grass was knee high.

The Good Thunder party brought what they said was a piece of buffalo meat. The Messiah had told them that if on their way home they killed any buffalo, they were to leave the hoofs and tail and head on the prairie, and the buffalo would spring up, whole, when they turned their backs.

All the buffalo would act this way, in the happy time to come.

The day of buffalo herds on the plains was past; but the party asserted that they did find a herd, and killed one buffalo—and he sprang up, from the hoofs and tail and head, just as the Messiah had promised.

The Cheyennes, the Shoshonis, the Arapahos, the Kiowas, the Utes, the Pai-Utes, were dancing the Ghost Dance. The Sioux now danced.

The Ghost Dancers danced in a circle, holding hands and chanting, until they fell over and went to spirit land. From the spirits they brought back signs, such as buffalo tails, buffalo meat, and other things of an Indian country.