438 GAMES OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS  [etH. any. 24 
a Yanktonai Dakota at a grass dance at Fort Peck, Montana, in the 
summer of 1890. Mr James Mooney also relates several instances 
in his account of the Ghost dance among the Sioux. 
At a Ghost dance at No Water’s camp, near Pine Ridge . . . four arrows, 
headed with bone in the olden fashion, were shot up into the air from the center 
of the circle and afterward gathered up and hung upon the tree, together with 
the bow, a gaming wheel and sticks [figure 573], and a staff of peculiar shape. 
Fig. 574. Arapaho Sun Dance altar with wheel, Oklahoma; from Dorsey. 
Elsewhere ” he says: 
In the Ghost dance at Rosebud and Pine Ridge, as usually performed, a young 
woman stood in the center of the circle, holding out a pipe toward the messiah 
in the west, and remained thus throughout the dance. Another young woman 
usually stood beside her holding out a biiqati wheel . . . in the same way. 
This feature of the dance is said to have been introduced by Short Bull. 
Mr Mooney ¢ states further : 
It is said that the medicine man of Big Foot’s band carried such a hoop 
with him in their flight from the north, and displayed it at every dance held 
by the band until the fatal day of Wounded Knee. . . . To the Indian it 
symbolizes the revival of the old-time games. 
The ring, or wheel, plays a very considerable part in the ceremony 
of the Sun dance among the Plains tribes. Dr George A. Dorsey 7 
@The Ghost-dance Religion. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, p. 
915, 1896. 
>Tbid., p. 1064. ¢Tbid., p. 1075. “The Arapaho Sun Dance, p. 12, Chicago, 1903. 
