At age fourteen Wovoka’s father died and the
young boy was taken in by David and Mary Wilson and given the name Jack Wilson,
which he used when dealing with white people. His foster parents were ranchers and Jack worked on the
ranch well into adulthood. The
Wilsons were devout Christians and they taught Jack their faith. He learned English, learned
theology and could recite many Bible stories.
No one knows for sure why Jack Wilson left the Wilson home. He returned to live among the Paiute
people where he gained a reputation as a powerful medicine man. He began to make prophecies similar to
the ones his father had made.
Wovoka asserted that he could control the
weather. People claimed he
could cause a block of ice to fall from the heavens, could end droughts with
rain or even snow, could light his pipe with the sun and could form icicles in
his hands. He demonstrated his
power by performing several seemingly impossible feats. One of them was being shot with a
shotgun and miraculously surviving.
Apparently no one questioned this even though magicians for many years
had performed the same trick.
The Paiutes considered Wovoka a messiah based on
a vision he had had during the solar eclipse of 1889. It was a prophecy of things to come. In it he saw the destruction of the whites,
a replenishing of wildlife, the Indian dead would be resurrected and reunited
with their families, suffering, starvation, pain and disease would disappear
completely. He taught that in
order to bring his vision to reality, all Indians would have to live
righteously and perform a traditional round dance. Because ancestors were going to be resurrected, the dance
became known as the ghost dance. He
told his followers that they must “not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always...Do not refuse to work
for the whites and do not make any trouble with them.” News of his vision and the ghost dance spread
like wild fire across the Rockies and onto the plains. The Lakota people, the largest tribal
group on the plains, adopted it with a fury and began performing the
dance. Wovoka’s teachings were
now known as the ghost dance religion.
 |
| a Lakota ghost shirt |
The year was 1890 and most
of the Indian tribes were now living on reservations under the control of the
US government. However settlers
on the plains began demanding the army do more to protect them and the army was
concerned that Sitting Bull, the great Lakota chief, would lead the ghost
dancers into battle again, so Sitting Bull was ordered to put a stop to the
ghost dance, but the dancing continued.
Sitting Bull was arrested and during the arrest shot and killed. A reorganized 3,000 member 7th
Cavalry, who fourteen years previous had been desimated in the battle at Little
Big Horn, was ordered to the Lakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. The Indians were told that they must
bring all their guns to a central location, which was located on the banks of
Wounded Knee Creek. During the
confiscation of guns, a deaf Lakota either refused to lay down his gun or
simply didn’t understand the order.
A struggle ensued and someone fired a shot. The calvary commander order his troops to open fire. The resulting gunfire was choatic and indescriminant
and at close range. There is
disagreement as to the number of casualties. Estimates as to the number of dead range as high as 300 Indians,
which included men, women and children.
Twenty-five troopers also died, while 39 were wounded (It’s believed
that many of the army’s casualties were from friendly fire). The tragedy became
known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.
It marked the end of an era of Indian wars. Just as quickly as the ghost religion had grown it died
there at Wounded Knee.
Soon after the massacre, Wovoka
all but vanished. Many years later
he turned up at sideshows in county fairs. He even become for a short time an extra in silent movies. Wovoka died in 1932 basically a
forgotten man. It wouldn’t be
until the 1970s that activitists would resurrect his memory and the memory of
what happened at Wounded Knee.
