Indian Ghost Dance and War, The

DESCRIPTION: "The Red Skins left their Agency, the Soldiers left their Post, All on the strength of an Indan tale about Messiah's ghost." The Indians think their Messiah can protect them from guns; it is not true. The soldiers defeat the Indians
AUTHOR: Words: W. H. Prather (source: Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest)
EARLIEST DATE: 1893 (14th annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, according to Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest)
KEYWORDS: Indians(Am.) soldier war dream
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, p. 261, "The Indian Ghost Dance and War" (1 text)
NOTES [142 words]: Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, p. 258, seems to say that this is about the Dakota war of 1890 led by Sitting Bull. I wonder, though, if the author wasn't either working from an earlier piece or confusing several stories. The idea that white man's guns couldn't pierce the properly pious Indians reminds me of the visions of Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa, "the prophet" that led to the Battle of Tippicanoe, and the bit about the Agency reminds me of another Dakota uprising, that in Minnesota in the 1860s, which came about because the United States government had forced the Dakota to be dependent on Indian Agency handouts -- and then hadn't shipped the handouts.
I should add that the general bigotry of the piece reminds me of... just about everything the Europeans have done to the first residents of the North American continent. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: LDC261

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