7G6 THE GHOST-DANCE RELIGION [eth.amn.14 



tin- same valley in Wovoka's boyhood. Possibly the discrepancy might 

 be explained by an unwillingness on the part of the messiah to share 

 hi> spiritual honors. 



In proportion as Wovoka and his doctrines have become subjects of 

 widespread curiosity, so have they become subjects of ignorant misrep- 

 resentation and deliberate falsification. Different writers have made 

 him a Paiute, a half-blood, and a Mormon white man. Numberless 

 stories have been told of the origin and character of his mission and 

 the day predicted for its final accomplishment. The most mischievous 

 and persistent of these stories has been that which represents him as 

 preaching a bloody campaign against the whites, whereas his doctrine 

 is one of peace, and he himself is a mild tempered member of a weak 

 and unwarlike tribe. His own good name lias been filched from him 

 and he has been made to appear under a dozen different cognomens, 

 including that of his bitterest enemy, Johnson Sides. He has been 

 denounced as an impostor, ridiculed as a lunatic, and laughed at as a 

 pretended Christ, while by the Indians he is revered as a direct 

 messenger from the Other World, and among many of the remote tribes 

 he is believed to be omniscient, to speak all languages, and to be invis- 

 ible to a white man. We shall give his own story as told by himself, 

 with such additional information as seems to come from authentic 

 sources. 



Notwithstanding all that had been said and written by newspaper 

 correspondents about the messiah, not one of them had undertaken to 

 find the man himself and to learn from his own lips what he really 

 taught. It is almost equally certain that none of them had even seen 

 a Ghost dance at close quarters — certainly none of them understood 

 its meaning. The messiah was regarded almost as a myth, something 

 intangible, to be talked about but not to be seen. The first reliable 

 information as to his personality was communicated by the scout, 

 Arthur Chapman, who, under instructions from the War Department, 

 visited the Paiute country in December, 1890, and spent four days at 

 Walker lake and Mason valley, and in the course of an interview with 

 Wovoka obtained from him a detailed statement similar in all essen- 

 tials to that which I obtained later on. [Sec. War, 3.) 



After having spent seven months in the tield. investigating the new 

 religion among the prairie tribes, particularly the Arapaho, and after 

 having examined all the documents bearing on the subject in the files 

 of the Indian Office and War Department, the author left Washington 

 in November, 1891, to find and talk with the messiah and to gather 

 additional material concerning the Ghost dance. Before starting, I 

 had written to the agent in charge of the reservation to which he was 

 attached tor information in regard to the messiah (.lack Wilson) and 

 the dance, and learned in reply, with some surprise, that the agent had 

 never seen him. The surprise grew into wonder when 1 was further 

 informed that there were "neither Ghost songs, dances, nor cereiuo- 



