As the teller of this story puts it, "By dancing and singing the right songs, the Lakota people thought that they could bring back the good old buffalo-hunting days, the days before the whites came, the days before smallpox, reservations, and too little to eat. So they danced."
 

The ghost dance was peaceful, but the whites thought of it as the signal for a great Indian uprising. They asked the army for help, and in the end many unarmed ghost dancers, mostly women and children, were killed at Wounded Knee. We Indians think that the white people were afraid of the ghost dance because they had a bad conscience, having taken away half of the remaining Indian land just a few years before. People with bad consciences live in fear, and they hate most those whom they have wronged. Thus it was with the ghost dance.

At the time, Sitting Bull lived on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota with his Hunkpapa people. He was not, as some people think, the war leader who defeated Custer on the Little Big Horn. He was a holy man, the spiritual leader of the Sioux nation. He got along well with some whites, even had a few white friends, but he always said: "I want the white man beside me, not above me."

Sitting Bull, or Tatanka Iyotake, as he is called in Sioux, was a proud and dignified man, and nobody's slave.

Now, at some time before 1890, Sitting Bull had joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He had travelled all over the country. In New York he could often be seen sitting on a doorstep on Broadway, giving nickels to poor street urchins and saying that white folks did not know how to take care of their children. He also said that all children -- red, white, black, yellow -- were alike in their innocence, and that if grown-ups could remain children in their hearts, all would be well. Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill became friends. When the circus show was over, Buffalo Bill presented his friend Tatanka Iyotake with a fine sombrero, which the Indian holy man wore from then on. Buffalo Bill Cody also gave Sitting Bull his favorite circus horse. It was white and could do many tricks.

At that time, the Great White Father in Washington, and the white agents who ruled the reservations, thought that the solution to what they called the "Indian problem" was for Indians to behave like whites: to speak and dress like whites, to become Christians and worship like whites, to own property and work like whites, to marry whites, and to be swallowed up by white society. The "problem" would be solved by simply having no more Indians, by letting them disappear into the great American melting pot. Sitting Bull opposed this. He did not want the Indians to die out. He wanted them to remain true to their old ways, to go on worshipping the Great Spirit, to continue speaking their own language and singing their old Sioux songs. And because Sitting Bull was a Wichasha Wakan, a medicine man, the most respected one among the Lakota people, many Indians rallied around him.

Thus he became the center of the resistance to being swallowed up by the culture of the whites. And thus he also became the enemy of those who wanted to make the Indians into white men. They said that he stood in the path of progress, and the ghost dance trouble seemed a good opportunity to get rid of the old chief. He was accused of siding with the dancers and protecting them. The white reservation chief sent out the Indian police, forty-three of them, to arrest Sitting Bull. If he resisted and was killed, so much the better.

The police force was made up of what we now call "apples," men who are red outside and white inside. They were led by Lieutenants Shave Head and Bull Head. The police came to arrest the great leader before dawn on an icy winter morning. The ground was covered with snow. They burst into his one-room log cabin with their six-shooters drawn.

They dragged him naked from beneath his buffalo robe and pushed him outside; they would not even let him dress properly. They kept pushing at him as they put handcuffs on. The commotion awoke Sitting Bull's friends and relatives in the cabins nearby. Led by the old chief's friend and adopted brother Chase-the-Bear, they came boiling out of their huts and tipis. A woman's voice rose in a song: "Sitting Bull, You were a warrior once, What are you going to do now?" The old chief stopped abruptly. He pushed the policemen away, saying: "I won't go!" Immediately one of the police chiefs shot him through the body, and an all-out fight to the death began.

It is always said that a fight between Indians and whites is one thing, but when Sioux fights Sioux, watch out! The police tried to act like whites, but once the fight started, they became Indian warriors again. And among Sitting Bull's friends were some of the bravest warriors, who had fought in many famous battles. When it was over, fifteen people lay dead or dying in the snow, among them Sitting Bull, Chase-the-Bear, and the two police chiefs.

When the white horse heard the shooting, it thought it was back in the circus during the Wild West Show. It began dancing and prancing, sitting on it's haunches and raising up it's front legs, jumping around, bowing, curtsying, doing all the tricks it had been taught. In this way it honored its dead master in the only way it knew. All who saw it said that the horse was possessed, wakan, in the spirit way, because it was unhurt even though it had danced through a hail of bullets. The white horse kept dancing for a while after the fight was over and the bloody scene was silent.

Thus Tatanka Iyotake, the great Sitting Bull, and his favorite white horse became part of the legend of our people.
 
 

* Told by George Eagle Elk at Parmelee, Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota, 1969
 

In 1890 the messianic ghost dance religion swept the Plains tribes. Originating with a vision of the Paiute prophet Wovoka, and heralded by such signs as a frightening eclipse of the sun, the ghost dance was a religion of despair. It gave hope to a people deprived of their ancient hunting grounds and were starving on the reservations. Ghost dancers performed a special round dance, holding hands and singing ghost dance songs. Their shirts, painted with the images of stars, the moon and sun, and magpies, were supposed to make them bulletproof. Dancers swooned and fell down in a trance. Afterwards they declared that they had been in a beautiful land teeming with buffalo, and that they had met their long-dead relatives. The ghost dance, so Wovoka said, would change the world back into what it was before the white man came.