From a neighboring ranchman, who knew Wovoka well and sometimes employed him in the working season, I obtained a statement which seems to explain the whole matter. It appears that a short time before the prophet began to preach he was stricken down by a severe fever, during which illness the ranchman frequently visited and ministered to him. While he was still sick there occurred an eclipse of the sun, a phenomenon which always excites great alarm among primitive peoples. In their system the sun is a living being, of great power and beneficence, and the temporary darkness is caused by an attack on him by some supernatural monster which endeavors to devour him, and will succeed, and thus plunge the world into eternal night unless driven off by incantations and loud noises. On this occasion the Paiute were frantic with excitement and the air was filled with the noise of shouts and wailings and the firing of guns, for the purpose of frightening off the monster that threatened the life of their god. It was now, as Wovoka stated, “when the sun died,” that he went to sleep in the daytime and was taken up to heaven. This means simply that the excitement and alarm produced by the eclipse, acting on a mind and body already enfeebled by sickness, resulted in delirium, in which he imagined himself to enter the portals of the spirit world. Constant dwelling on the subject in thought by day and in dreams by night would effect and perpetuate the exalted mental condition in which visions of the imagination would have all the seeming reality of actual occurrences. To those acquainted with the spiritual nature of Indians and their implicit faith in dreams all this is perfectly intelligible. His frequent trances would indicate also that, like so many other religious ecstatics, he is subject to cataleptic attacks.
I have not been able to settle satisfactorily the date of this eclipse. From inquiry at the Nautical Almanac office I learn that solar eclipses visible in Nevada and the adjacent territory from 1884 to 1890 occurred as follows: 1884, October 18, partial; 1885, March 16, partial; 1886, March 5, partial; 1887, none; 1888, none; 1889, January 1, total or partial; 1890, none. The total eclipse of January 1, 1889, agrees best with his statement to me on New Year’s night, 1892, that it was about two years since he had gone up to heaven when the sun died. It must be noted that Indians generally count years by winters instead of by series of twelve calendar months, a difference which sometimes makes an apparent discrepancy of nearly a year.
In subsequent conversations he added a few minor details in regard to his vision and his doctrine. He asked many questions in regard to the eastern tribes whose delegates had visited him, and was pleased to learn that the delegates from several of these tribes were my friends. He spoke particularly of the large delegation—about twelve in number—from the Cheyenne and Arapaho, who had visited him the preceding summer and taken part in the dance with his people. Nearly all the members of this party were personally known to me, and the leader, Black Coyote, whose picture I had with me and showed to him, had been my principal instructor in the Ghost dance among the Arapaho. While this fact put me on a more confidential footing with Wovoka, it also proved of great assistance in my further investigation on my return to the prairie tribes, as, when they were satisfied from my statements and the specimens which I had brought back that I had indeed seen and talked with the messiah, they were convinced that I was earnestly desirous of understanding their religion aright, and from that time spoke freely and without reserve.
I had my camera and was anxious to get Wovoka’s picture. When the subject was mentioned, he replied that his picture had never been made; that a white man had offered him five dollars for permission to take his photograph, but that he had refused. However, as I had been sent from Washington especially to learn and tell the whites all about him and his doctrine, and as he was satisfied from my acquaintance with his friends in the other tribes that I must be a good man, he would allow me to take his picture. As usual in dealing with Indians, he wanted to make the most of his bargain, and demanded two dollars and a half for the privilege of taking his picture and a like sum for each one of his family. I was prepared for this, however, and refused to pay any such charges, but agreed to give him my regular price per day for his services as informant and to send him a copy of the picture when finished. After some demur he consented and got ready for the operation by knotting a handkerchief about his neck, fastening an eagle feather at his right elbow, and taking a wide brim sombrero upon his knee. I afterward learned that the feather and sombrero were important parts of his spiritual stock in trade. After taking his picture I obtained from him, as souvenirs to bring back and show to my Indian friends in Indian Territory, a blanket of rabbit skins, some piñon nuts, some tail feathers of the magpie, highly prized by the Paiute for ornamentation, and some of the sacred red paint, endowed with most miraculous powers, which plays so important a part in the ritual of the Ghost-dance religion. Then, with mutual expressions of good will, we parted, his uncle going back to the reservation, while I took the train for Indian Territory.
As soon as the news of my arrival went abroad among the Cheyenne and Arapaho on my return, my friends of both tribes came in, eager to hear all the details of my visit to the messiah and to get my own impressions of the man. In comparing notes with some of the recent delegates I discovered something of Wovoka’s hypnotic methods, and incidentally learned how much of miracle depends on the mental receptivity of the observer.
The Cheyenne and Arapaho, although for generations associated in the most intimate manner, are of very different characters. In religious matters it may be said briefly that the Arapaho are devotees and prophets, continually seeing signs and wonders, while the Cheyenne are more skeptical. In talking with Tall Bull, one of the Cheyenne delegates and then captain of the Indian police, he said that before leaving they had asked Wovoka to give them some proof of his supernatural powers. Accordingly he had ranged them in front of him, seated on the ground, he sitting facing them, with his sombrero between and his eagle feathers in his hand. Then with a quick movement he had put his hand into the empty hat and drawn out from it “something black.” Tall Bull would not admit that anything more had happened, and did not seem to be very profoundly impressed by the occurrence, saying that he thought there were medicine-men of equal capacity among the Cheyenne. In talking soon afterward with Black Coyote, one of the Arapaho delegates and also a police officer, the same incident came up, but with a very different sequel. Black Coyote told how they had seated themselves on the ground in front of Wovoka, as described by Tall Bull, and went on to tell how the messiah had waved his feathers over his hat, and then, when he withdrew his hand, Black Coyote looked into the hat and there “saw the whole world.” The explanation is simple. Tall Bull, who has since been stricken with paralysis, was a jovial, light-hearted fellow, fond of joking and playing tricks on his associates, but withal a man of good hard sense and disposed to be doubtful in regard to all medicine-men outside of his own tribe. Black Coyote, on the contrary, is a man of contemplative disposition, much given to speculation on the unseen world. His body and arms are covered with the scars of wounds which he has inflicted on himself in obedience to commands received in dreams. When the first news of the new religion came to the southern tribes, he had made a long journey, at his own expense, to his kindred in Wyoming, to learn the doctrine and the songs, and since his return had been drilling his people day and night in both. Now, on his visit to the fountain head of inspiration, he was prepared for great things, and when the messiah performed his hypnotic passes with the eagle feather, as I have so often witnessed in the Ghost dance, Black Coyote saw the whole spirit world where Tall Bull saw only an empty hat. From my knowledge of the men, I believe both were honest in their statements.
As a result of the confidence established between the Indians and myself in consequence of my visit to the messiah, one of the Cheyenne delegates named Black Sharp Nose, a prominent man in his tribe, soon after voluntarily brought down to me the written statement of the doctrine obtained from the messiah himself, and requested me to take it back and show it to Washington, to convince the white people that there was nothing bad or hostile in the new religion. The paper had been written by a young Arapaho of the same delegation who had learned some English at the Carlisle Indian school, and it had been taken down on the spot from the dictation of the messiah as his message to be carried to the prairie tribes. On the reverse page of the paper the daughter of Black Sharp Nose, a young woman who had also some school education, had written out the same thing in somewhat better English from her father’s dictation on his return. No white man had any part, directly or indirectly, in its production, nor was it originally intended to be seen by white men. In fact, in one part the messiah himself expressly warns the delegates to tell no white man.
Chapter X
THE DOCTRINE OF THE GHOST DANCE
You must not fight. Do no harm to anyone. Do right always.—Wovoka.
The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery. On this foundation each tribe has built a structure from its own mythology, and each apostle and believer has filled in the details according to his own mental capacity or ideas of happiness, with such additions as come to him from the trance. Some changes, also, have undoubtedly resulted from the transmission of the doctrine through the imperfect medium of the sign language. The differences of interpretation are precisely such as we find in Christianity, with its hundreds of sects and innumerable shades of individual opinion. The white race, being alien and secondary and hardly real, has no part in this scheme of aboriginal regeneration, and will be left behind with the other things of earth that have served their temporary purpose, or else will cease entirely to exist.