Jack Wilson and the Indian Service: The Response of the BIA to the Ghost Dance Prophet

Abstract

When historians have written about the Ghost Dance religion of 1890 they have often done so within their larger tribal histories, especially those that concern the western Sioux. Indeed, the greatest number of works that treat aspects of the movement deal with the Teton Lakota. Readers may have noticed in reading those books that include discussions of the Ghost Dance, that a subjective tendency on the part of their authors occurs when they describe the management of the Sioux reservations during the troubled fall and winter of 1890. Yet any apparent subjectivity is all but subdued by their objective appreciation for the difficulties inherent in a changing federal Indian policy during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. During that period the government abandoned the treaty system, adopted a policy of concentration of Indians on ever smaller reservations, and decreed, after much anguish and the many debates between various interests, that the Indian way of life, indentified by land tenure, would be transformed through the issuance of individual allotments under the provisions of the Dawes Act of 1887. Administrators at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (referred to as the bureau in this article), reservation agents, and personnel in various military commands all struggled seduously to carry out the programs for rapid assimilation of Native Americans. Within this scheme the Ghost Dance appears as a final, desperate attempt of western tribes, and not only the Sioux, to forestall the destruction of the vestiges of their culture. While there have been a few apologists for the governmental response to the Ghost Dance, primarily for the army's involvement in the tragedy at Wounded Knee, most historians have concluded that the religion was misunderstood at the bureau, its significance submerged in a sea of troubles then engulfing the Sioux.1 Undeniably, the leaders at the bureau premised